Apeshit

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  NO MONKEYS IN MONKEYTOWN

  by DeAnna Knippling

  WELCOME TO MONKEYTOWN, WY

  POP. 267

  NO MONKEYS ALLOWED

  1. No Monkeys in Monkeytown

  The bartender at The Monkeytown Arms rubbed a shot glass over and over in his towel. Neither towel nor glass were clean. “We don’t serve your kind here.”

  Orion stood straighter, stretching his vest tighter across his broad chest. The only thing keeping him out of the Fort Sill Nature Preserve for Greater Apes was this job, and he had to bring back his target this time, or he’d be locked up and sent back. “I’m looking for a chimp.”

  “We don’t serve your kind here.”

  Orion peered into the dark until his eyes adjusted, revealing an empty bar except for an orang female in the corner. “What about her?”

  “Peaches?” the bartender asked. “She ain’t no monkey. She works here.”

  Orion snorted. “I need to talk to her.”

  “We don’t serve your kind here.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Dave,” the orang purred. Her fur was shaved off except on her head, where it was piled high and decorated with silk flowers. She wore a scarlet and black lace dress that had been stuffed in the front to display what looked like human teats. She slid something from her table into a velvet bag and tied it tight. “It’s a monkey thing.”

  “You be all right?” The bartender looked at Orion and didn’t see a runt, a hathscha who would never have his own troop. He saw a three-hundred-pound gorilla. Yet he reached under the bar regardless.

  The orang tapped her fingers along her cheeks, then crossed her hands past each other. “You’ll know if I have trouble.”

  The bartender looked away as the orang dragged her nails over the cloth of Orion’s shirt, digging them in lightly before removing her hand, a grooming gesture. “You have to pay.”

  Her touch made his skin crawl, and he bared his teeth at her. “I don’t want your filthy body. I only have questions.”

  She clutched the bag, flaring her nostrils. “I may have answers.” She swept past him, into a shadowed hallway and up the stairs. She smelled of fruit and flowers. “For a price.”

  Something up in the rafters followed them.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Mi Tao led the pretend-human up to her room and let Absalom, her marmoset protector, slip inside the room before she closed the door. A small table on a single turned-wood pedestal sat in one corner. “Do you know the monkey cards?”

  “I didn’t come here to have my fortune told,” he said. “I’m in a hurry.”

  “They all say that.”

  “I just want to find a chimp. General Regis. I know he’s here. He’s wanted for counterfeiting.”

  “Who do you work for, the Army?”

  “The Pinks.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Not much difference, anymore. Tell me, do you believe in magic?”

  “Just tell me where he is.”

  “Hell’s Canyon.”

  “Where is that?”

  She wagged a finger at him. “Come with me, and I will show you. But I warn you, you will see forbidden things. The government doesn’t want him because he’s counterfeiting. They want him because he can control the dead.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  She fluttered her hands toward her chest. “As you say.” She looked up at Absalom and whistled through her teeth. He dropped onto her shoulder, chittering at the hathscha, who stepped backward. She laughed. “You’re afraid of a little marmoset, are you? And you think capturing that chimp will be an easy matter.”

  “What’s that he’s carrying?” The hathscha pointed at Absalom’s wrists, which were tied with small, thin leather packets.

  “Poison needles,” Mi Tao said. “I always make sure assistance is near when I bring callers to my rooms. Are you certain you don’t want your fortunes read?”

  He pinched his fingers together twice.

  She stripped off her dress by pulling a leather tie down one side; it fell apart in two halves that opened like a clamshell. She scratched her fingernails into her sides, then hung the dress on a hook on the wall. Absalom climbed into her hair and started untangling the loops and throwing the flowers on the floor.

  “Do you know why it’s called Monkeytown? Because only a few years ago, it was filled with all kinds of apes. Hathscha. They were here to make better lives for themselves, working at the silver mine. To live free of both the laws of men and the laws of apes. It was a kind of paradise, as long as you were willing to work. The mines were owned by a chimp named General Maxim, and everything in Monkeytown belonged to the apes.

  “And then he died and left the mines to his so-called son, General Regis. Or so they say. Then the apes disappeared and disappeared, until there were no more monkeys in Monkeytown.”

  “What about you?”

  She didn’t answer him. “The wagons still roll up the trail, heavy with ore, and the few humans who live here grow rich. No one will speak of what happens in the mine.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t give a damn about those hathscha. We all have to prove ourselves. Justice is not my problem. Bringing back General Regis alive is my problem.”

  “And when you work for the humans, you have to prove and prove and prove, and you will never have any troop to show for it.”

  He bared his teeth at her.

  From inside a wardrobe, she removed a leather jacket covered in long, orange orang hair and put it on. It would have been better if he had let her read the cards. She would have hinted at the truth, then. She closed a series of hooks and tied the laces at the top and bottom, and then she looked like an orang again. She hated playing the whore. But she had no room for pride, in serving the ronnok.

  “Take them off,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Where we are going, you cannot wear clothes. You would be killed in a heartbeat. But the humans cannot tell us apart, when we do not play dress-up for them.”

  “No,” he said.

  She waved her hands toward her chest and led him down the back stairs, Absalom peering at him through her loosened hair.

  2. Hell’s Canyon

  Just past the gravel trail, rocks rose in painted, jagged teeth, row after row of them, like those of a shark. On the other side of the trail, a small creek ricocheted down a narrow crack to join a larger stream that smelled of cattle. The trail wound downward among the rock teeth, and pebbles skittled off the path to ricochet downstream.

  “What is this place?”

  “Hell’s Canyon,” the orang muttered.

  His horse’s ears twitched as a larger piece of rock bounced down at them, hit the path, and clattered away. A cave gaped a few hundred feet up in the rock above them.

  “What’s that?”

  Her weight shifted behind him as she looked up at it. “Their Hill of Bones is past a dropoff at the back of the cave. It hasn’t been used for years.”

  Orion shivered. Apes who lived in the traditional way piled their bones all together, the dead on top of the dead on top of the dead, until you couldn’t tell them apart. “Some of the human ways are better. To be buried separately, not all jumbled together.”

  She fluttered her hands on his back, snorting. “You’ll never get a troop, thinking like that. Who wants to be alone, in death?”

  The steep path followed the creek downward until they forded another small stream, the water only going up to the horse’s fetlocks.

  Just past the water, the orang murmured, “Stop.”

  Orion reined in, and she dangled off the horse’s side, dropped, and waved at him to stay. She knuckled quickly to the next turn in the path, hesitated, then went around a large rock. Orion shifted, patting the big horse, not quite ready to dismount.

  She backed into view until she was past the rock, then softly knuckled back to him. “Tie the horse here,
by the water. But don’t tie him too tight. If the dead ones find him, he should be able to run. And take off your clothes and walk normally, for ronnok’s sake.”

  He shook his head and followed her along the trail. But he walked gently, making little sound, and took off his hat before he peered around the corner.

  Around the turn, the landscape opened onto a hill made of gravel, topped with long, low wooden buildings made of weathered gray wood. Daylight shone through gaps in the walls, and some of the boards had fallen. The windows were open frames into darkness, the shutters fallen off on most of them. The creek poured loudly though a narrow pinch in the rock at the bottom of the hill, where a wood trough leading from a small gray building added what looked like a steady stream of blood to the water.

  On the far side of the hill, gorillas stood motionless, watching a couple of wagons come down a gully. He would have thought them statues, but he could see flies buzzing around them. One of the apes turned from the far side of the hill and circled back toward them. The orang tugged at his arm, but he couldn’t move: the front of the hathscha’s face had been torn away, leaving pale muscle. As it came closer he could see red tears running from where the hathscha’s eyes had been, now black holes tinted with red. It reached the other side of the hill and circled away.

  “Monkeytown Silver Mine,” the orang whispered. “Please. You have to stop acting human here. It will only get us killed.”

  “It was dead,” he said.

  She grunted. “Are you going or not?”

  He watched the gorillas until the wagons had reached the stream and forded it, then took off his clothes, folded them, and put them in the horse’s saddlebags. He tried to buckle his gunbelt back on.

  “That won’t do a thing to them,” she said. “You could burn them and scatter the ashes, and they would still have no rest. You will only reveal yourself if you wear those.”

  Hands shaking, he put the guns in the bags with his clothing.

  Damn this place. And damn that orang. She ran on all fours, her knuckles digging into the sharp gravel of the hill, toward a pile of rubble. He followed her, one eye on the gorillas helping unload the wagons, which looked to be full of rotten meat, trying to keep himself perfectly upright.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Mi Tao passed the dormitory quickly, hoping that any of the foremen who saw Orion would overlook him. But the low-lying areas of Hell’s Canyon turned quickly to dusk, even in the early afternoon, and they crossed the yard and reached the collar of the sump shaft without incident. She climbed the pile of rubble on the lee side, took one last look toward the dormitory—she felt eyes on her—and started climbing into the foul air of the mine.

  Some of the cracks in the shaft were natural; some had been augmented with railroad spikes. She climbed past the first level to the fourth and stopped at the drift, then climbed further down, just far enough that Orion could feel the dark hole of the drift opposite them. Air blew the hair from her vest into her mouth and she spat it out as she gripped three spikes and scratched the edge of her vest with her other leg.

  “Where are we?”

  “General Regis is that way,” she said. “You’ll come to another downward tunnel. Go around it and over an old fall. It’s tight, but you can make it. Go to what looks like the end of the tunnel. Search the back of the tunnel until you find a couple of wood supports that are loose. Push them out of the way. Behind it is another tunnel, very thin. If you can make it through the old fall, you can make it through the tunnel. It splits to the left and to the right; take the left-hand tunnel only. General Regis’s offices are down there. Take him if you can, but watch out for more of those guards. If I’m not back by full dark, leave me.”

  One hand moved toward his hip, then away. “What about you?”

  “I’m not here to collect your bounty for you, hathscha.”

  “Good.” Orion gathered himself and jumped overhead through the thin light of the tunnel, into the darkness. She heard a grunt and his paws scrabbling along the loose rock of the tunnel floor, then the padding of feet. She paused to listen: but no sounds of a fight followed.

  She climbed downwards. Absalom shivered in her hair, and she tucked him inside the top of her vest. The walls went from dry to damp in only a few feet, and soon enough her foot broke through a layer of dead leaves, shit, and other garbage floating on the surface of the sump water. She jerked her foot back and tried to shake the wet, clinging things off her, but the more she shook, the more the garbage intertwined around her feet.

  She reached—she had very long arms, even for an orang—until she found the next handhold, then let her lower body dangle as she tried to remember where the handhold after that would be. Something metal pinged against the shaft where she’d been a second ago. She groaned and dropped into the sump, then went limp, moving only enough to shift Absalom to her back and keep one ear free of the filth.

  Above her, something chuckled, then scrabbled and slid on the gravel of the drift, where Orion had gone.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  The tunnel was too short to walk upright in, yet when Orion settled onto his knuckles, he felt taller. The orang groaned and fell, splashed; he backed into the tunnel and waited. Someone chuckled, then gathered, inhaled, and leapt across the sump shaft. He waited. Its silhouette against the dim light of the shaft was small, agile, and the size and shape of a chimp as it slid across the look rock toward him.

  He grabbed it, spun it against the wall, and clutched it by the throat. “Move and I kill you.”

  “Orion?” the shaking voice asked. “That is you.”

  He leaned forward and sniffed. “Sirena.” Then dropped her and stepped back. He knew her too well to think of her as safe. But she only sank down to her haunches and coughed.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I work for the owner.”

  He smelled the lie more than heard it, but it wasn’t unexpected. “I’m here to bring him in.”

  “Bring him in? Bring him in?” She slapped her hand on the wall and stood. “Never mind about that. Just you and me, let’s get out of here while we still can. I want to find a place without humans or apes. Without any lies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Less talk. More climb.” She stumbled toward the entrance of the shaft, and he grabbed her arm. “Leggo. You aren’t mad about that monkey I killed down there, are you?”

  He bussed his lips. “No. I’m angry about Fort Sill. You betrayed me.”

  “Let’s not talk about Fort Sill.”

  “Why did you do it? I could have defended you from Merrill.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “I thought he killed you.”

  She tried to pull away again, and he dragged her further down the tunnel while her legs scrabbled against the tunnel floor. “Don’t, Orion. Can’t you smell it?”

  All he could smell was the foul water of the sump. He dragged her past the tunnel in the floor, which sucked down air with a low whistle, and to the rockfall. “You go first.”

  She snapped her teeth at him, and he snapped back. “I won’t go back down there for you. I don’t belong to you, Orion. I’m not in your troop.”

  He lowered her until he was breathing into her face, inhaling her breath. “Then it won’t matter what I do to you,” he said.

  She slapped him, just like a human girl. A real chimp would have bitten him.

  He grunted a laugh at her. “Merrill didn’t kill you and destroy your body. You left with him. You whore.”

  “It was for love.” She wrenched away from him, climbed the pile of rubble quickly, and disappeared into a crevice.

  “If you’re a female, either you’re part of the troop, or you’re a whore. Like that orang. It’s not love.”

  Her voice echoed back at him: “You don’t know anything about it.”

  He pulled himself into the rockfall with his hands. His head fit easily, but the rocks dragged against his shoulders, and he had to shove one ahead o
f the other in order to fit. He felt one sharp rock cut him open all down his side. The other end of the crevice was tighter, and he pushed against the sharp rock with all his might. He came free unexpectedly and rolled down the other side.

  When he had looked into the darkness of the sump shaft, he had thought it absolute blackness. And then in the tunnel, he had known that the sump shaft was brighter, and the tunnel contained the real darkness. Now he looked for the glint of Sirena’s eyes and wondered if he’d ever see light again.

  But even more than the darkness, it was the smell that made him hesitate. The sump and tunnel had smelled foul…but the smell on the other side of the rocks burned his lungs and made him sway on his feet.

  He had smelled death before, at the Hill of Bones on the Preserve, back when he was trying to live two lives. At the human school, the boys had laughed at him when he had asked what a mother was and admitted that his sire didn’t play catch with him. So he had stolen a ball from one of the boys and asked his nukka to play with him. She’d chewed the ball to bits, but they’d played with rocks after he’d made her understand. She had lost her voice in an accident with their silverback, and could only sign sorry, sorry. He’d brought her a yellow dress with shell buttons from the trash pits, and she’d worn it every day while they’d played.

  She had practiced with him for months, then thrown a rock at the silverback’s head, trying to kill him. He’d mauled her and left her for dead. When Orion had tried to drag her inside their hut, the ronnok had blocked his way, baring their teeth at him like animals.