NEW SHORT STORY

Hi everyone! Good evening and good morning depending on which time zone you’re in!

As promised earlier here is the short story I wrote in my fury about Fier Zoo.

WHO IS THE MONSTER?

I entered the safari park’s main office after the animal shelter had taken out the injured and half-starved animals. The mountain lion with the infected ears, the she-wolf with her ribs poking out, the zebra with the lame hoof. And many others. The owner of the now defunct zoo sat behind his desk, head in his hands, waiting for the police that’d arrive shortly. In fact, they’d already arrived, but I had given them directions the other way, on the opposite side of the park. I wore a police uniform myself, but I wasn’t police. I was a biologist. The park’s owner, ruined by the forceful misappropriation of his animals, didn’t believe the uniform either. I suspect it was the state of my hair, the curls unkempt, and my small form. But he believed the gun.

He stood, suddenly more alert than he had been in his self-pity, and walked when I told him to walk. In the corridor, there were voices, possibly the real police, making their way towards the office in anger that they’d been misguided, and my heart jumped into my throat.

“This way.” I led him down the other way, out of his office towards the back door.

“If you’re truly police -“

I jabbed my gun further into his back. “Do you want even more media about yourself?” I snapped.

The rest of the journey he was silent, and he even ducked quietly into my car, which had been made to look somewhat like a police car, with yellow removable stripes, but I blame his dejected state of mind for not being more suspicious, and not screaming at all.

I slammed the door shut after him, but before I did, I pressed the trigger on my gun. As you might have guessed, the dart that came out wasn’t lethal, but a simple tranquilizer that I’d created myself. I didn’t want him dead, at least not yet, even though part of me clamoured for it. But death was too good. I had other, better plans. And this coming from someone who never wanted to hurt another person at all.

The journey was uneventful. Alban slept, and I drove, the gun on the passenger seat at my side. The sedative was strong enough he didn’t wake on the two hour journey, and when we arrived, he was barely coherent. I ushered him out of the car, into the building I’d chosen, into the chill of oncoming night.

“Where?” he slurred his words.

I didn’t respond. He was too weak yet to fight, too disoriented to do much more than stumble. And then we arrived at the cage.

The cage was a masterpiece, a concotion of steel placed directly under the derelict building’s broke roof. At the moment, sunlight still shone through the large crack above, but it was dusky and blood red. In a few minutes, there would be darkness, and perhaps, if Alban was lucky, which I hoped he wouldn’t be, moonlight and no rain. The cage’s bars were doubly dangerous, a combination of sharp metal and rust. The rust might have been a problem, because the cage was supposed to be escape proof, but I’d tested the bars’ ability to withstand a man’s anger and despair by jumping on them, repeatedly, and driving it against the wall with my car. I guess Alban should have noticed the scratchmarks from that on my little (car) as well. But he hadn’t. He’d been too self-absorbed, too caught up in his victim act, when he was the perpetrator, and no victim at all.

Alban had to stoop to enter the cage, and at least then, he noticed something was amiss. He stopped, suddenly, at the edge of the cage, and looked around. I didn’t wait for him to realize what was happening, and instead kicked him in the back of knees. His legs buckled, and when he stumbled, I pushed, hard, against his back, so he fell into the cage and against the bars at the front. I slammed the door closed behind him, disgusted at what I was doing, that I’d touched a creature like him, but at the same time, satisfied. It wasn’t a deep satisfaction of doing what was right, but more the satisfaction that came from revenge. And his repayment had only just started.

A day after Alban disappeared, a new stream popped up on many people’s feeds. They showed a human, a middle-aged, rugged man, in a cage, not yet naked, but at the same time not clean. A corner of the cage already showed a stain, because Alban’s bladder hadn’t lasted through the night. The sound of the video was a single loud scream, interrupted by expletives, by calls for the police, by calls for someone to help, and the repeated banging when Alban threw himself against the cage.

He called me devil, and he raged at me when I was in sight. But he didn’t know my name, and he couldn’t expose me in any way, or do anything other than to claim I was a villain. He even avoided my sex at first, because it would have required him to admit he’d been duped and overpowered by a woman.

I’d called the video ‘Who is the monster’?

Two days later, the cage and Alban both looked worse for wear. He hadn’t seen a toilet in more than two days, considering I’d taken him from his office, which had none. He’d not eaten much, and the only thing he had to drink was rainwater that trickled in from a light shower Tuesday night. His hands, by then, were covered in scratches, and marks where he’d thrown his fist against the cage or tried to break the lock. I watched it all from the safety behind the old lab’s glass screen.

Three days later, Alban had lost most of his strength. He was well-built, and he hadn’t been lazy in life, but in the cage, even the strongest man would have lost their shape, their strength, perhaps even their will, much quicker than any animal would. I hated him even more then, because he was weak, because he could take no week of what he’d done to the animals in his zoo for months. I decided to shorten his rations. Instead of three pieces of bread and two cans of water per day, he now received one of each. He wailed at that, again threw expletives at me, shook his fists at me, screamed, but I didn’t give him another thought when it was done. I didn’t smile, and I didn’t laugh, and I didn’t give him a moment of my time more than was necessary to throw the morsels through a hole in his cage. I had better things to do, and a thesis to write.

Alban’s condition steadily deteriorated. At first, he raged, but the more days passed, the quieter he became. After the first week, he took to pacing his cage, rattling at the bars now and then, but by now aware that they wouldn’t break. How long had it taken the she-wolf to stop chewing the bars, I wondered? Her mouth had been cut by metal, her paws scraped to the bone by her despairing effort. She hadn’t, I told myself. She hadn’t stopped to attempt her escape.

Would Alban?

A week and a half passed, and I kept a steady eye on Alban as his body failed. He wouldn’t die as long as he received water and food, but life would be hell. In a way, then, he was right when he screamed that I was the devil. I’d created a hell. And I’d created it solely for him.

Ten days in he came down with the flu. He shook uncontrollably in his weather-exposed cell and cried for a blanket, or a heater, or both. He curled into a ball, and tears ran down his eyes, which left him dehydrated as well. I wanted to tell him not to kill himself, not yet, because my thesis still needed material, and he still had to pay for the animals. He had to pay, as he had never paid to get the mountain lion’s ear infection treated, or the zebra’s shattered hoof. He had to pay for all the meat his carnivores hadn’t received, and he had to spring for the foul leaves that’d been found in the cages of the herbivores. He had to pay for the injuries the animals sustained trying to get out of their dirty, rusted cages, and he had to pay twice for every beast whose enclosure he hadn’t stocked with materials they could hide in from prying eyes or temperatures. He had to pay, and I was there to collect the fees, plus tax. I’d never wanted to hurt anyone, myself, and my thesis as a doctor should have been different, but, truly, PHDs can be flexible, and no one else wanted to get involved. The police might have fined Alban. The public might have shunned him. But was this enough of a payment for years in which he’d abused the innocent creatures in his captivity?

I crunched my hands into fists on my thesis notes.

No.

It wasn’t enough. It would never have been enough. The mountain lion, that magnificent creature, would not have been able to maul him, to make Alban ill as the lion himself had been. The zebra, too, could not trample Alban with its herd, and neither could the she-wolf take down a man without the mental support of its pack. And she had no pack. This, too, had been taken from her, just like her cubs, to be entertainment to Alban’s friends and those who had the money to spare to own a wolf.

I tamped down on the rage, but stood to clean Alban’s cage nonetheless. I put my clinical mask back on, took the hose, and as he shrieked at my approach, and whimpered when the water flowed, trying to escape its chilling spray, I hosed down the whole of his cage with the only water the decrepit building provided. The icy mountain water from the river coming down behind the old lab.

“Why?” he cried when I turned off the tap and walked back the way I’d come to my observation point, but he broke off the sentence, because, after all, he was too smart to ask such a question. He knew why I did this. And he knew I knew that he knew.

Therefore, his question warranted no answer.

Two weeks after Alban’s disappearance, Who is the monster had reached a high point in the streamer charts. Many people knew who he was, or had been, and they speculated about who would have done this to him and where he was. Two giant screens appeared, one before the park that’d been his zoo of torture, and another on the city’s square of the city next to it. The police, of course, was trying to find Alban and me, but I’d never been at the park before and had no connections whatsoever to the creature in my cage. Who is the monster, too, was untrackable, courtesy to an old friend who’d showed me at the time how to make myself invisible on the net. And I’d placed the cage so that little of the room, of the building in which it was located, was visible. There were no distinct features, merely the dark outline of the room, and the hole in the roof to let in water and the ocassional, leaf-obstructed patch of light Alban learned to covet.

It would have been almost funny, the way he craved that light, had it not been so utterly dejectable of me to do such things in the first place. At the same time, there was no justice in the alternative version, and I’d seen too many of the animals’ pictures not to act.

Did the people who had set up the screens before his zoo and in the city center sympathize with me? Or with Alban? They weren’t mine, but someone apparently agreed with what I had done. Or perhaps they disagreed, and every set of eyes would help to find Alban, or so they thought. I watched the screens from my screen with access to invisible TV, but switched them off after a short while. I took no pleasure in the gaping people, the cheering people, or the ones whose faces were twisted with hatred. All I wanted was for Alban to become sick, for something of him to become infected, infested, and to finish my thesis on medical cruelty and torture with it.

It was a relief, when in week three, Alban’s wounds did get infected. He’d been sitting in his bodily fluids and waste for at least a week, and the little sustenance combined with the deplorable conditions that I’d recreated from his own cages made his puny human immune system fail. I whistled when I came to clean his cage again, and he cowered, whimpered, and cried, “I am ill!” at my appearance.

I gave him a smile, something he couldn’t truly see under my surgical mask, and nodded. “That’s good.”

“That’s – That’s – I know why you’re doing this.”

“Yes. I knew you were smart enough to figure it out.”

“You enjoy this!”

I shrugged. “I enjoy it only little more than I did seeing the animals in your cages suffer.” I sat down outside of his cage, staring at this creature, this injured beast in my control. “There is nothing enjoyable about this. About any cruelty. The only reason I do enjoy it is because it means you will suffer before your death.”

“Monster,” he snarled.

“Perhaps,” I said, easily. “How’s that mouth sore?”

He bared his teeth at me, much like the she-wolf would have in her terror and despair.

Apart from his mouth, where a putrid red hole had formed, his eyes, too, were bloodshot and teary, the whites almost ruby. I noted all this down as he started to whimper, about his family, about human rights.

“You haven’t been human since you captured those animals,” I said. “Did you even give them names?”

“Of course. Of course!” he snapped. “The public wanted to connect to the creatures. They wanted to -“

I opened the hose, and a stream of cold water streaked over him. Alban shrieked, and I gave him another cold smile.

“The public will appreciate this. Do you know they’re watching? Your wife and child? I almost pity them, to be honest. Your wife made a mistake, a grievous error when she chose you.” He was silent, but the silence felt suddenly too heavy in the dark room, and though I wanted to flee back to my observation spot, I stayed.

“What if I die in here? What then?” he wailed.

“I count on it,” I said.

“And then what? Murderer! Monster! HELP!”

I grinned, knowing the camera couldn’t see me, but could hear me well.

“Who is the monster?” I asked him.

I imagined the crowd going wild in his screech of hatred, but then I had to retreat. The stream wasn’t exactly live, and that gave me some minutes to replace my voice with someone else’s. This, I did, and then I went back to my thesis.

Would Alban die in my care? I wasn’t sure if I’d let him, if I wanted him to die, even. True, what he had done deserved more than death, but did he deserve death? It felt like an easy way out, a path the animals in his park hadn’t had. And so why should he? On the other hand, the longer the stream ran, the more likely would I be discovered, and the less likely could I finish my thesis and become someone other than torturer. I did not want to be this, not for the rest of my life. But for the rest of his? I couldn’t decide, and when I noticed the police closing in on me, I moved him again, like I had the first time.

The new cage didn’t require my presence, and I’d bought a feeding machine that kept him sustained most of the week. I had a life again after the three weeks in the dark, and I visited Alban sparsely. I stopped the stream with his relocaiton and told him bits of news, like when they held a funeral for him, or when his wife re-married a year later, and his daughter killed herself because she could not cope with what had happened to her father. I told him, too, that his infection was spreading slowly enough not to kill him quickly, but might eventually take his life.

I still haven’t decided whether I should let the infection take its course, or if it’s better to let him pay back still. I think he should pay, but the more and more Alban looks at me like a monster, like the devil himself, the more I’ve begun to believe it. I have to remind myself every day that I wasn’t like this, didn’t used to be like this, but at the same time, I cannot deny there’s a certain satisfaction of seeing the same conditions appear on him that the animals he kept used to suffer from, and help them along when they don’t. He has a permanent ear infection now, to go with the sore on his mouth and his blood-leaking eyes. He has a lame leg, an open wound from when he broke it trying to escape the new cage, and I’ve considered what to do with his reproductive organs. He can’t have offspring for me to take away, but if I take away his ability to ever have offspring, will this make up for the cubs the she-wolf lost? Will the loss of his hearing make up for the mountain-lion’s pain? The loss of his legs for the zebra’s painful hobble?

I don’t think it will, but I always have to remember this. The animals, they have another chance with the shelters that took them in. He, Alban, he will never get another chance, even if I truly have to become the monster myself.

The End.

I’m not sure I hope you enjoyed the story. That wasn’t the point. The true point of it was that this is how it feels to see images of suffering animals. And we need to fight that.

WriteBot out.