The jostling from the truck traveling over a poor excuse for a road brought Richard back to consciousness.
His large form rested face down on the metal bed of the truck. Lower on his body, his monster cock and large balls were squashed against the same truck bed. He tried to stretch and felt the constraints on his arms and legs.
“What the hell?” The words never left his mouth, thanks to the inserted ball gag, making them sound like “WufthaEll?”
The 22-year-old student of history, formerly a deodorant-wearing, latte-sipping progeny of well-heeled parents, raised himself using one elbow to prop himself off the bed of the truck. The over-educated and sublimely civilized young intellectual had arrived in Africa with enthusiasm for research that he hoped would get him booked on television talk shows and referenced in both academic journals and popular magazines.
Now, when he shook his head to see if he could dislodge the ball gag, Richard Winchester sent spittle flying. Instead of conducting his research into the origins of a much-heralded genuine “jungle man,” the arrogant but naive young man had been magically transformed into a carbon copy of the uncivilized intended focus of his research.
With an African sun beating down on his unclothed body, Richard felt copious streams of sweat running from his forehead and armpits to mix with the dirt and litter that accumulated in the thick dark hair that covered most of his large and muscular body. His skin crawled as he imagined all the insects that called that hairy forest home as they stewed in the humid, dank conditions.
Tears collected in the corner of each eye as the transformed man pondered the possibility that he might be permanently stuck in this brutish form.
Brakes squealed and Richard face-planted on the hard metal truck bed. Now the tears stemmed from the pain from impact with the truck bed as he rubbed his bearded jaw.
The next few moments involved a couple of men almost as large as Richard’s jungle man body as they bundled him from the truck and ushered him toward a squalid, sprawling building made of concrete. Two other men, rifles at the ready, escorted Richard and the soldiers supporting his trussed form into the building.
Thoughts of invoking his British citizenship and demanding to speak to the British embassy met the reality of the ball gag that remained deeply inserted into Richard’s mouth. The armed escort, plus jungle man, arrived in a small, windowless room with a desk, a single chair, and filing cabinets. Seated behind the desk, a small man in a white shirt looked up from a stack of papers. For an instant, he looked stunned as the men on either side of the naked man-beast tried to force their prisoner onto the chair in front of the desk.
Richard's face turned red, but his shame was mostly concealed by his thick beard. He felt humiliated. He stood, completely naked, his hands and feet bound, before the little man who peered at him from behind a pair of eyeglasses. The little man's nose wrinkled, and Richard knew with even more mortification that the irritation behind the twitch was the powerful odor from his sweaty, unwashed body.
Richard looked down in distrust at the unreliably small chair, wondering if it would even support the weight of his new body. Heavy hands on his shoulders forced the issue, pushing him onto the seat of the chair. The rickety chair creaked but held.
The man pushed aside a stack of papers and erased his expression of surprise.
The little man spoke.
Richard listened.
The words amounted to gibberish as the little man behind the desk spoke to the soldiers in their native language that Richard had never bothered to learn before arriving in their country. Even Tim had managed to gain some rudimentary knowledge of the language.
Richard didn’t need to understand the words to pick up on the little man’s irritation. With a roll of his eyes, the little man opened a drawer and produced a clipboard with some sheets of paper attached to it.
The little man asked an obvious question and stared at Richard, pen at the ready.
“Ook,” Richard said around the ball gag, terribly embarrassed that of all the utterances, he had managed the one that most made him sound like some mutated ape.
The little man surprised Richard with a sharply uttered command. One of the guards reached behind Richard’s head and unfastened the ball gag’s restraints and then tugged the rubber ball from Richard’s sore jaws. A flood of pent-up saliva spilled from Richard’s mouth and soaked the front of his furry chest.
When he felt he could speak, Richard burst forth with a stream-of-consciousness narrative that left the man behind the desk and the soldiers in confused amazement.
“My name is Richard Winchester, and I’m a British citizen. You’ve got to help me. One of your native relics caused me to… to change. This is not me,” he said. He would have spread his arms in a gesture to encompass his unwashed hairy form, but he remained constrained.
The little bureaucrat behind the desk frowned at the soldiers. He moved his clipboard to the side and spoke.
The two escorts immediately jerked Richard back to his feet.
“Wait! Where are you taking me?”
A third guard, perhaps tired of hearing the gibberish from the jungle man’s mouth, popped the ball gag back into Richard’s mouth and fastened it into place.
They marched Richard through some long, desolate corridors until they came to a barred holding cell.
“I’m not going in there,” Richard tried to object. “I have rights. I’m a British citizen…”
One of the guards slammed the cell door closed in his face while Richard watched another man use a key to lock it.