He made his way through the jungle leaping from treetop to treetop. The jungle was intimately familiar with him, but he was reaching portions where he had yet to memorize the feel of every knot his foot landed against, every vine best to be swung off of, or every creature by name. Yet he clipped along with all the haste he could muster.
Even the men from the villages dared not approach where he was swinging; the black-rock island within the mucky death swamps.
Odd that his prey had chosen such a harsh, inhospitable section of the already predatory coastal African jungle, but the Head Man proved too complex an enemy to try making sense of anymore.
Tarzan* thudded into a tree dense with cover, arriving on the proverbial doorstep of his quarries home. He could hear human men talking. They were about a click away, meaning they wouldn't have been able to hear his approach, but as he strained his ears, he could make out the words of the two men.
"-And tired of waking up with my ass full of bugs." One of the men was saying.
"I don't even think Kaleb's going to be the last one to drown in one of these goddamn bogs." Said the other man.
"…or these bites I'm getting all over. I'm itchier than my crotch that time I caught the clap."
"This isn't where I want to die."
"None of this would be remotely worth it if it's all only for the money. I just hope the Doctor makes good on his promises."
"You think he might not?"
"A loon like him? Who can guess what he's going to do."
"Well, he'd better- what the hell is that?"
Tarzan embedded his Bowie knife in one of the men the instant he landed on the shoddily constructed wood bridge.
"Oh f-," The other man began, before his throat was caved in by the feral-man's foot.
Tarzan pushed each of his victims into the sand beneath them and spent a second enjoying watching their lifeless corpses sink into the abyss.
His victory was short-lived, as a bullet-stone whizzed by like a horsefly and shot up a shower of splinters at Tarzan's feet.
Looking up he saw two wood towers as tall as trees, each with a man inside pointing their long thunder-sticks at him.
He charged the gated wall constructed of limber before two more fire-stones struck where he'd just leaped from.
He slammed his shoulder against the gate but bounced him off. The impact reverberated to his bone, but he doubted he'd even bruise from the hit. On the other hand, the gate looked worse for the wear.
With one well-placed kick, the gate plowed inward, the hinges popping out.
The two guardsmen were back to at shooting at Tarzan. His aim proved the superior as his thrown Bowie knife stuck into one of the men's shoulders.
After buying himself room to maneuver, Tarzan rushed to the other guard tower. It was tall, of poor construction, made from local sticks and branches. He placed his hide thick palms to a good handhold on the tower and heaved.
There was that feeling of his muscles straining, across his broad shoulders, his chest, down his rope dense back sinews, and rising from his squarely planted legs.
The guard screamed in confusion. Seconds later the tower crumbled to the ground.
Either his senses or his instinct alerted Tarzan that the man stuck with the knife was aiming to shoot his thunder-stick again.
Tarzan leaped to the base of the still standing tower and rushed up it. He climbed up as fast as if he'd sprinted the distance on the ground.
The man's face had gone white, his eyes peeled to their widest.
"Who- who are you?"
Tarzan grabbed the thunder-stick and snapped it in one hand and grabbed the man by his throat. After lifting the man well above his own head, Tarzan shucked out his knife. A cascade of blood poured over his face and ran down his body.
"Where is," Tarzan said slowly, feeling his way around the human speech. "The bad man? Took my friends."
"What?" The guard was flinching from his captor's voice, as its deep guttural qualities usually elicited in men. "The hell you talking about? Put me down. Stop killing us!"
"No."
The man began weeping unabashedly.
Tarzan bit off the man's nose. "You took my friends."
"Please!"
Tarzan separated the man's head from its body.
Jumping down, he found the crippled body of the guard in the collapsed tower. Tarzan drove his fist through the man's chest hard enough his arm sank through and breached the earth.
Shaking the fragments of rib bone off his knuckles, he continued down the path to the inner sanctum of the black rock island housing the Doctor.
—-
As Tarzan drew toward the inner sanctum of the island, the buildings became more and more dense until reaching the largest man-made structure he'd ever seen. So far, everything had been constructed from readily available materials, such as walls of rock and wood and roofs of palm fronds. But the center structure appeared to be a giant seafaring vessel, things Tarzan had seen from time to time and been told one such vehicle was how he'd first been brought to his jungle home.
Curiously, he saw no signs of where the ship would have been dragged from the sea. Not to mention that the harbor was a good three days jaunt, counting by through trees, and other than Tarzan himself, men had always preferred to walk on the ground and cut through the brush, which was drastically slower.
Making his way inside, he noted the vast amount of metal, more than he knew even existed. Thick green grime covered the walls.
No clear path presented itself, making the entire interior of the ship maze-like and frustrating. The parts of the jungle that were new and unexplored to Tarzan were their own kind of maze, but the trees grew and weaved out from the earth toward the sun in organic ways with its own natural philosophy to it. Plus, the jungle always had smells, and beast scratchings, and always the rivers to be followed, so that he could never be completely lost. This man-made ship on the other hand…
Tarzan recognized the musk of a menagerie of beasts and creatures, but with no rhyme or reason as to where the scents originated or what they had meant to communicate. More than anything, the stench of blood and the adrenaline from fear stung the air.
Eventually, he heard the screams.
Screams, splitting into the air like blades.
Every drop and dribble of pain and anguish produced pricked Tarzan's exceptional hearing like a pine needle through his eardrum.
They were insensate wails of some man or beast holding nothing back, all their weakness and suffering laid bare.
The large base was still a maze, but at least Tarzan knew the direction to head toward. He ran through the halls, only passing one guard who squealed in surprise. Before the man could raise his weapon Tarzan was flashing past him, two fingers embedding the man's eye sockets until the tips hit the back of his skull.
Not long after, Tarzan stood before a thick metal door at least three inches thick, the screams just on the other side loud enough to vibrate the iron. A quick slam against it with his shoulder, Tarzan found it locked.
He swung his arm a full rotation, working the soreness out. With a running start, he slammed a kick into the door. His knee suffered some stiffness, but something holding the door in place buckled. He could always work the pain out later by running across treetops.
He heard voices on the other side reacting to his beating on the door. As he continued kicking it, the looser it became, and a minute later the whole mass of metal creaked forward and clanged down before him, shaking the foundation of the base.
There was hardly anything to see within the room he was breaking into as curtains were set up in circles throughout the room. A mustachioed man with a thunder-stick trained on Tarzan walked through a section of curtains, ignoring the material as it passed over and off him. He was dressed like many of the other white poachers Tarzan had faced down and left broken. However, this poacher sported a plethora of hunting knives sheathed all over his person, all with bone hilts. His hat had strings tying together the teeth of a gamut of predatory animals, as well as many that were distinctly human.
The thunder-stick toting man scowled. "So it's you again, the legendary feral-man of the jungle. You've saved me the trouble of hunting you a second time. Not sure if I'm too happy about that."
Tarzan's focus was split when he heard a creature jumping from behind a curtain on his opposite side. A man sailed over the tall rod and landed with no noise. He was much larger than the first man, more heavily muscled, and with vibrant orange hair on his head which was a striking contrast to the white whiskers littering his face where he had neglected to shave for at least a day. Tarzan had never seen another human capable of jumping that high, let alone with the grace and dexterity in the landing.
"What's this," the orange-haired man asked, narrowing yellow eyes. "A man was able to sneak in here? Pah! I really had to see this to believe it."
"Where are they?" Tarzan didn't bother looking at either of the two visible men, instead opting to glare forward at the curtain ahead of him. That was where the screams had originated and where they stopped only after the doors removal. "Where are my friends?"
"Friends?" The teeth hat man asked. "You mean those beasts of the field we've been accumulating? You call those things your friends? Ha, I love this bloke! You have no reason to fret. Your friends are all here."
"Rejoice for them, five-man" yellow eyes said. "They have been called to a higher purpose."
"Where is he?" Tarzan didn't have time for all their words he barely understood, let alone the intent behind them. "The Headman of your tribe. I will have words with him and then I will remove his head."
"I like your negotiating tactics," teeth-hat said. "Bold. But it's up to the Doctor himself whether he allows you your words or not."
Tarzan heard a rustling behind the center curtain, then footsteps. The curtain was drawn.
A humanoid creature the height of a man approached. It was covered with shining green feathers that blood dribbled off of left pools of on the floor where the thing had walked from. Long tentacles roiled from the feathers on either side where a human's arms would be, most of which held small sharp implements soaked in more blood. The face was what an insects face must look like if one were as large as a man, its segmented eyes took up most of the face, shimmering like dull rainbows. At the mouth were two large pulsating blobs.
A human hand reached out of the feathers and touched the face, pulling it off revealing the insectoid features to only be a mask. The feathers were folded up behind the man into a faux-cape. From each arm he tugged off the tentacles, all proving to be attached to two different octopus, each with a wide round hole of a mouth that made them ideal for being rolled up and stationed on human arms. Each was then deposited into a bucket of water.
"You must be strong to have made it this far," The man who had removed the bestial features said. Beneath the feathers he wore patchwork clothes of similar design to upper-class British gentlemen, though all roughshod and tailored out of pelts. His hair was a thick iron grey, as was his short beard which was streaked with shocks of black. His eyes were a lackluster copper. Atop his head he wore bits of a skull affixed to his temples in a way resembling a helmet. Short antlers grew from the bone-helmet and struck into the air making the headpiece unmistakably crown-like.
"But it matters not. You still can be no stronger than what God has allowed." His voice was deeper than stormy waves hitting jagged rock. It sounded as if he were speaking at barely his conversational volume, yet the noise carried the weight of a bellow, easily rattling through Tarzan enough to reverberate past him and echo with strength off the wall behind him.
"What should I do with him Moreau*? When I hunted him out there he was an exquisite challenge," Teeth-hat licked his lips. "Feels like a waste to snuff him out without a fight."
"Just kill him, Zaroff*," yellow-eyes said, sounding bored, examining his long sharp fingernails. "We're leaving today, so you don't have any longer to waste at playing the predator."
"Right-" Zaroff began saying as he readjusted his aim before meaning to shoot.
Tarzan shot off the ground first, practically flying to Zaroff, past the knife mounting the thunder-stick, and shoved his palm square in the poacher's face.
A boney crack followed impact to Zaroff's face as he was catapulted off the ground and thudded several feet away onto his back. A streamer of blood issuing out his nostrils marked the trajectory of his collapse.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tarzan noted yellow-eyes only moving his lips to smile. The Doctor began walking toward Tarzan.
Tarzan could then see that behind the doctor was the form of a naked human woman sleeping with her back on a table with blood running down its sides. He squinted at her, a feeling in his gut like he knew her somehow.
As the woman turned herself away to sleep in the fetal position, she revealed her back. Lithe and muscled, covered in yellow fur and black spots. A long black-tipped tail stretched out behind her before coiling itself again.
He gasped. The pattern of the spots… That he did recognize. She was the reason he had come. She was one of his closest childhood friends, Zavana.
Words failed Tarzan. He stood staring, mouth agape.
"It would appear," Moreau said, "Your journey here was for naught. Whoever she was that you came to rescue is no more. In her place, this angelic creature remade to fit my design."
Tarzan was hardly more than a man-cub when he had met Zavana, a mere kitten herself. She'd been a teacher to him, imparting innumerable lessons on the secrets to patience, speed, conserving energy while hiding in the brush. She had taught him how to hunt, how to survive. He owed almost everything he was to the cheetah. Now the Headman had his claws prying at her vitals, his fangs in her throat.
"Zavana," Tarzan whispered.
An endless boiling like lava frothed within Tarzan. His knuckles and toes cracked as he gripped them taut, drawing them in tight like a snake coiling, preparing to unleash venom from every fragment of its body to destroy the enemy. From every fiber of his being, he bellowed an unearthly howl.
"You will die, Headman," his words sounded more akin to turbulent force screeching from his throat than real human speech. "I will push my fists through your flesh. You will feel the most pain in your life, and then I will hurt you more and rip you apart."
The expression on Doctor Moreau's face remained the same as he approached Tarzan. "You are little more than unrefined primordial slime; haphazardly conjoined genetic materials and amniotic fluids slithered out from between your mother's legs. How do you deign talk of causing me pain? I don't even answer to God, nor do I abide the Laws of Nature."
Tarzan snorted but had no idea what the man's words meant. "I don't care. You will feel my fists."
He flung himself at Moreau with every ounce of ferocity in his being behind his movement. In less time then a heartbeat, he saw the doctor's eyes glimmer with ooze. A crimson sheen rose from below the Doctor's eyelids before fire out like two liquid beams.
Moreau's eye-blood splattered Tarzan in the face.
Tarzan went limp. His body collided into the ground, hitting his hurt shoulder, and skidding him along the floor until sliding into Moreau's awaiting foot.
"My blood is hazardous anywhere other than inside the phylactery of my body," Moreau said to the yellow-eyed man. "It contains high quantities of lethal venom."
Yellow-eyes was staring at the fallen feral-man dripping wet blood over the dry crusts. "I'm more curious about your… choice of conveyance for the venom."
"Ocular autohaemorrhaging. It was a simple surgery I performed on myself, modifying my tear ducts and a few facial muscles. I copied the idea from horned lizards."
"Hmm," Yellow-eyes was losing interest. "What about him?"
"He's dead," Moreau kicked Tarzan's body into the toppled iron door. He turned and began walking back up toward Zavana. "Collect the General and bring him to a table. I'll enhance him while he's too incapacitated to argue his way out of it."
Zaroff was curled up on the ground, clutching the ruins of his face. He groaned as Moreau mentioned enhancing him. Yellow-eyes picked up Zaroff like he weighed less than a bag of straw, threw the man over his shoulder, and followed after Moreau.
"It is time," Doctor Moreau said in his normal voice, his echo as loud as any other man's shout.
Zaroff, slung over the yellow-eyed man's shoulder, peaked up at Tarzan's body.
Tarzan dragged his aching arms closer to his core. Every limb felt like they weighed as much as the door he laid against. It took every ounce of concentration in his body to curl his fingers and place his knuckles into the ground.
Seething madness drove all other thoughts and motivations from his soul as Tarzan fought with all his effort to push down on his knuckles and begin to lift his torso from the ground.
Zaroff's eyes widened when he saw Tarzan still moving.
A blinding light struck everything within Tarzan's sight. Ten-seconds of deafening thunder roared over him, leaving spots in his eyes and ringing in his ears.
Minutes later, once his senses began to recover, Tarzan's eyes roved over the area. His surroundings had drastically changed.
Everything from the iron door onward was gone. The wood floor of the fort was replaced by flattened, scorched earth. The curtains, the people, the ceiling that had been there before the lightning strike, were all gone, utterly disappeared. Looking up, he could see the clear blue sky of the day, with trails of steam lifting from the ground.
Somehow, from somewhere, a bolt of lightning had sucked the bad Headman's inner lair out of the jungle.
Tarzan lost consciousness.
—-
It was well into the night before Tarzan was able to crawl away from the spot the lightning had struck. The rest of the fortress was still mostly standing, only the large circular base in the center that had vanished.
He fumbled his hands up a section of wall to stand on his weak shaking feet. Standing slowly made him vomit, though he'd been excreting ever since he'd been hit by the doctor's blood and the lightning strike, so it was only bile left he was spewing and stinging his throat.
He fell back to the ground.
Daylight hit his eyes. How much time had he lost?
Tarzan stood, and vomited again. His legs had no more strength in them than the last time he'd tried, but his head swam less, and he kept consciousness.
He turned to look behind him, where the lightning had hit, at the circle scorched into the jungle. His shock almost made him topple over and blackout. There was a human figure standing with their back to him in the same doorway he'd first entered to confront the headman.
He shivered. How had he not heard her approach? She must have walked right by him.
She was tall, as tall as he was, in his hunched over sickened stance. Her arms were rolled back in utter confidence, fists held loose at her sides. Lithe heavy muscles were visible wherever her clothes had no wrinkles. Her hair was long and black, hanging down from her head, straight and unconfined. She was so motionless Tarzan doubted she was real.
Then she spoke. "You must be Tarzan. I've heard of you. You felt cold as death when I walked past you. Thought you were dead."
So often when Tarzan heard people talk, there was so much to their cadence and delivery, that even if he knew the words or could figure out the general shape of the sentence, he was left with the impression he had misunderstood more than not.
Something about the directness of the woman's words and the lack of any hidden emotion or unknown agendas behind them made him feel like he wasn't confused at all. It was a wholly unique sensation from hearing a fellow human talk.
"I'm not," he said. "Poisoned, I think."
"You are," the woman said. She still hadn't turned to look at him. She'd barely moved at all. "A lot."
"Not the first time," he said. Wanting to know why she was there, he supplied his reasons, "I came here for the bad Headman. I came for his blood. He took friends of mine from the jungle. Changed them. Bent them."
"Moreau," she said.
Wind blustered from the hole in the world that Moreau had escaped into.
Tarzan reached for his knife. His fingers shook around the hilt. He lacked the power to hold it, but he could possibly maneuver a way to throw it. His aim would be off and he would be slow. If she was like most humans, it was likely it would be enough to kill her. Instinct told him she wasn't like most human's. His gut warned him she was dangerous. "Are you his?"
In an instant, the woman's back swiveled so she could glare him down. Her legs remained still, proving she had incredible flexibility. Every movement she made was with the fluidity of water. Her brown irises were large. Her eyes were cold and laced with inherent danger. A red dot was on her forehead. "No," she said, a poison behind the word that was more than apparent, even to Tarzan.
"You're after him," Tarzan said.
"His head," the woman said. "Not his blood. From the looks of you, you know why that would be a bad thing."
Tarzan rubbed the crackling brown substance from his face and looked at it. It looked like regular blood. His frailty proved it was anything but. "Ya," he said.
They both stood there for several seconds in silence.
"Who are you?" Tarzan asked.
The woman swiveled her back around to look at the lightning struck earth, before her head leaned back on her shoulders to such a degree it brushed against her middle back. Examining the sky, she said, "I am a thing he never should have made. His huntress, his creation, his destroyer. I am ancient and from another country entirely, crossing the ocean in hopes of ensnaring Moreau." Her head went forward to a more natural degree, then turned so one eye looked into Tarzan's. Black hair swept out of her face at the slightest winds. "You can call me Kim."
—-
Tarzan's arm was around Kim's shoulders. She was strong enough that his leaning most of his weight on her didn't seem like a concern. They made their way to the shore.
Kim had told him to follow after her, and after his third collapse, and her complaining about him slowing her down, Tarzan had asked for the help. Based on her response, it looked like Kim had never considered it.
Noticing how his stomach growled, Tarzan suggested that if he was fed perhaps more of his strength would return and he could hold himself up better. Kim dropped him immediately and darted off into the jungle, returning soon after with a small monkey with its neck snapped. Tarzan bit into the mammal with a ferocity that surprised him.
As he licked the bones clean and his hunger abated, his aches and sickness took the forefront of his mind. He couldn't remember a time he'd been so close to passing from the living. He felt worse than when he'd gone white as cave fish from blood loss after fighting the tyrant lion who'd made his way into the jungle and eaten a number of Tarzan's ape brethren.
The sun was setting when they arrived at the beach.
A large sea vessel was docked and swayed on the gentle waves. There was a man standing slack-jawed near the break in trees Kim led them through.
The man wearing a sailor's livery turned upon hearing their approach. "Ma'am, did you find the doctor?"
"Not in time," Kim strode past the sailor with the limping Tarzan, never looking at him. "I assume you prepared this ship for our departure."
The man nodded. "Course set to London."
Tarzan looked back at the sailor. "London?"
"These sailors are from there," Kim said. "They brought the message to Moreau that he was needed elsewhere and that he was to be 'flown out,' and that he would know what that meant."
"A storm carried him into the sky," Tarzan supplied.
"Hmm," Kim said. "It sounds as if this London is a large human settlement. Have you any experience in such places?"
Tarzan shook his head, causing his vision to sway and threaten his stomach into releasing its contents. "Never," he said, then remembered, "But I know of London. I heard I was born there."
Kim called to the sailor who hadn't moved from his initial spot on the beach. He rushed to follow after them, running in jerky unnatural movements.
After boarding the ship, Kim dragged Tarzan below deck. Each sailor they passed wore a similar slackened face and took almost no notice of them, other than offering a quick "ma'am," to Kim. They all moved with similar eerie thoughtlessness, looking as if they were stumbling from task to task as they went about their work on the ship.
She wasn't gentle in dropping Tarzan to the floor. "You will help me hunt him, yes?"
Tarzan refrained from nodding his head and making himself feel sicker. "Yes. But why were you so quick to bring me along?"
With no hesitation, she answered, "You remind me of an old friend. I feel as though I can trust you. You seem to be the best ally I could have found, both more beast than man, and more man than I. You will be helpful to me when we cross into human society."
Tarzan almost laughed. "I hope that's true."
Kim nodded, then turned to leave, saying, "We're shipping out immediately. I'll send men down to help you regain your strength. I may require it in London."
*Tarzan: The character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
*General Zaroff: From The Most Dangerous Game, by Richard Connell
*Doctor Moreau: The titular mad scientist from The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells.