Richard woke with a dull headache and a throbbing erection.
Groaning, he turned and got his back propped against the bars of the cage. He got an undeniable whiff of intense body odor when he took a deep breath. The rank smell crystallized his focus.
He remembered the butterfly relic, the snapped wings, and the subsequent transformation of his 22-year-old swimmer’s build body into a smelly, muscled, brutish barely human male.
Richard glanced down and felt his eyes widen at the sight of a monstrous cock of first-class length and girth. A pair of hefty, lemon-sized balls were suspended in his wrinkled sack with his cock resting above a thick, matted field of dark and tangled pubic hairs.
On the floor, he saw his Calvin Klein briefs in two pieces where the guards had cut them off him after dropping him with their tranquilizing darts.
“Why the hell did they do that?” Richard wondered.
For that matter, where were the guards? “Anyone there?” His voice sounded husky, rough, with distinctively masculine properties as he broke the eerie silence in the dimly lit room.
He felt an itch and scratched the dirty pelt of dense hair covering his chest. His filthy nails dislodged some pale insects that scurried among the thicket of hairs before they sank back into the tangled furry coat spread over his pecs.
“What the hell? Are those fleas?”
For the fastidious scion of an upper-crust family, the body he now inhabited horrified and repelled him. He suddenly imagined tiny pests crawling all over his body and its slab-like muscles. He scratched frantically and snarled.
He was thus engaged when a squad of men in uniforms and carrying guns burst into the room and took up defensive postures around the cage.
Richard froze and looked through the bars of the cage at the tense men with their rifles leveled at him. Something told him these men were not equipped with tranquilizer darts.
Richard raised his long, muscled arms to try to signal he would cooperate. He noticed several of the soldiers forgetting their duty long enough to stare at his still engorged monster cock. The looks on some of their faces clearly showed how impressed they were.
Richard experienced another surprise when Tim and one of the security guards entered. A man broke away from the surrounding warriors and met them.
The guard spoke on Tim’s behalf in the native language. When he listened to the response, his face quickly showed a scowl of disapproval.
He turned to Tim. “The colonel says they were sent here to seize the jungle man. They say he is native to the jungles and that we cannot export him without proper paperwork.”
The colonel barked some other statements. The guard translated for Tim. “They’ve heard about the attack on your friend,” he said. “He warns that their weapons are loaded with live ammo.”
“No guns!” Tim objected. He gestured toward the colonel, who had reached for a sidearm in a hip holster.
The guard stepped between the colonel and Tim. He made a hurried explanation. “They’re taking your jungle man,” the guard said. “But he gave me the name of an official that we can see about getting him back into our custody.”
Richard listened with mounting apprehension. Although embarrassed to have to reveal his mortifying transformation to his friend and the whole world, it seemed his only alternative.
He cleared thick phlegm from his throat and started to speak.
“Not Garok…” he managed to say before Tim gave an order to the guard to sedate the jungle man.
“He already had a double dose,” the guard warned.
“I know, but he’s too unpredictable and I don’t want these trigger-happy goons shooting him.”
The guard cocked the gun and aimed.
Richard would have voiced another objection, but the words seemed to freeze in his throat. By the time his momentary paralysis cleared, he heard the zing of the dart leaving the gun’s chamber. An instant later, he felt the sting and then the sinking feeling as he drifted off to a dark place.
The colonel poked at the prone jungle man with the toe of his boot. Satisfied that the beast was unconscious, he worked his fingers into the jungle man’s thick lips and looked with disapproval at the set of teeth in remarkably good condition. Not taking any chances, he reached into his pocket and produced a ball gag that he snapped into place in the beastly man's mouth while fastening the straps around the jungle man’s large skull.
Standing, the colonel snapped his fingers, a signal for a team of men to remove the jungle man and transport him to a waiting truck.
“You’ll be hearing from us,” Tim promised.
The security guard translated, which resulted in a dismissive laugh on the part of the colonel.
Tim watched helplessly as the militia trussed up the jungle man and left with him. He dreaded the moment when he would have to inform Richard of this bureaucratic obstacle to the start of his research.