Rantza Of The Jungle

'The three Marah are dead?'

'The Marah are beings of such vast antiquity, from the time before there were people in the world. One of the three slept and never woke. The second was an insane voice droning eternal madness into the back of our minds. The third is now dead. They can no longer enslave us. I was a woman of intelligence in our city before we were ensnared. I now realise that we have lost decades of our lives to their monstrous brutality.'

'No person should be a slave. No sentient being has the right to enslave another' says Rantza simply.

'When I was strapped and attached, my head was filled with scenes of much mating' slurs Turok with a lazy grin.

Rantza punches him low in the stomach. 'When you think of mating, you must think only of my cunt!'

As they climb higher they reach long parapets wet with rain and slippery with bat guano. From its high elevation they can gaze out through the heat-dance over the vast rainforest land below, Rantza can even trace the path that they'd taken as far as the great lake. She was assailed by a poignant regret that stung her eyes with sudden tears. 'I was informed that I am not originally of this place, and I must seek my true home in the outer world. Yet I find myself conflicted.'

It seems the woman's previously drug-fuddled and mentally-controlled senses become sharper and more acute by the second. 'I remember now. Hearing how this crater-valley we inhabit was created at the dawn of time by impact from a super-compressed particle of black matter which means that trace-elements of contra-terrene material remain, causing curious temporal anomalies where eddies of past-time ripple and eddy around their future-echoes. This is why we remain undiscovered by the outer world, because our continuum has been shifted a degree out of phase with the rest of the planet. This phenomenon is what I was investigating when my team was snatched into slavery. For there are a few points where access between continuums is possible. The Marah city was originally constructed to guard and secure just such a secret portal.'

Ahead of them, across a brief space of ancient stonework, there's an archway leading into a well of inky blackness. The arch is more intricately carved than any they've seen before, although eroded and time-worn, with images of monstrous winged entities and beasts that they now recognise as more than merely mythical. The Marah have inhabited this cyclopean city since time began. They pause some paces from the threshold.

'Your man has a mighty lingam' Phutra says, pointing between his legs.

Rantza encircles it in her fingers in a proprietary way. 'It pleasures me, when I have need of it.'

'You did promise me its elixir. That is, if he's sufficiently recovered from his ordeal. With your permission, perhaps I could...' she makes covetous movements with her hands, anticipating contact.

'No. I will do it' says Rantza, crouching down to draw its fat arrow-shaped head into her mouth, as she had done many times before. Sucking greedily as she uses both hands around the length of shaft her mouth cannot encompass, moving the tight foreskin up and down. He smiles blissfully, and closes his eyes as his head slumps back. His stomach muscles flex as the escalating sensations radiate out from the intense suction being performed at his groin. He groans as the wet sound of her mouth on his cock is the only other sound. Phutra moves her head in closer, the better to enviously watch each detail of the fellatio.

Rantza knows his every reaction, senses the throbbing of his coming orgasm up against the back of her throat, and moves her mouth away at the last possible moment so that he ejaculates in a fountain of three great bursting pulses of long white spurts up his stomach, then dribbles and oozes more. Rantza draws back, allowing the other woman access. Wonderingly, Phutra extends her fingers to ripple through the milky white sap, lifts it and smoothes it across the skin of her chest, massaging it in. She scoops up more and rubs it across her forehead and cheeks, then warily sucks the messy fingers. She returns for more, wiping it vigorously between her own splayed legs, moaning low in her throat. Soon, he is wiped clean. 'Thank you' she breathes.

'May it serve you well' Rantza says, conjecturing if -- through the arcane science of some esoteric Marah ensorcellment, the semen really will have rejuvenating powers? 'What will you do now?'

'We slaves of Ishtar must find our own wrinkle in time. As you must find yours. Once you step through the portal into the outer world. I wish you well. But beware.'

Rantza and Turok nervously hold hands, and step into the blackness together. There's a moment of dizzying degravitation, as though they've become weightless, then they find themselves on the other side, their bare feet pacing the shingle floor of a shallow cave. They step towards the circle of light, and emerge between too ancient pillars that seem to grow organically from a gradual slope that rolls away down through copses of trees across the vast African veldt.

The sun is warming. The air is sweet. They saunter down the slope, as the horrors they'd experienced recede in their wake. They rest in the spreading shade of trees, make slow and beautiful love on the mossy banks of a crystal pool where water babbles down between white stones in leaping splashing cascades. She's amazed and grateful at the way his mighty veined penis rises again despite the abuse it's been subjected to, then they bathe together, and sleep wrapped tight in each other's arms as the blood-moon rises above them.

The following morning they continue to the more level area below where they encounter a poorly-maintained asphalt road. They've come across lots of strange phenomena in their crater-world realm, but nothing quite like this. They investigate and ponder what it means, then begin a meandering trek along its length. They've been walking little over an hour when there's a disturbance, a moving shape hurtling towards them at impossible speed. Rantza stands in the centre of the road to watch as the air-conditioned SUV accelerates. At the last moment Turok howls and leaps, snatching her aside as the vehicle speeds past them.

It screeches to a dusty halt in a spray of shingle a little further down the road, skewed at an angle. The door flips back and a tall man in khaki leaps out brandishing a rifle with telescopic sights. As Turok stands above the fallen girl the man raises the rifle, takes rapid aim, and fires. Turok shocks backward, crashing to the asphalt as the man lopes towards them. At the same moment, the driver side door of the SUV opens and a woman climbs out.

Rantza crouches over the fallen Turok. 'What have you done to my mate?' she spits angrily at the man, drawing her stone knife.

'Your mate? What?' He slopes his wide-brim hat back from his face in confusion. 'All I saw was this big hairy guy jumping a naked girl. I thought I was rescuing you...!'

The SUV woman crouches down beside the fallen Turok. 'He's wounded. You winged him in the shoulder, Paul. But it's not life-threatening. We must get him back to town where we can treat him.'

Rantza crouches brandishing her knife, her sharp white teeth bared, guarding her fallen mate, unsure how to react. The woman stands, puts hand on heart. 'We're sorry for this misunderstanding. But we can put it right. Trust us, please. Help us carry him into the car.'

The man -- Paul, runs back to the SUV and reverses closer. Rantza investigates its strangeness, running her hand over the smooth hot bodywork in a sense of wonder. Together, they haul the limp Turok into the backseat where Rantza sits beside him, a slur of his blood leaking onto her thigh. She tenses in fear as the couple climb inside in front of her, and pull away, slowly at first, but gathering speed.

The blonde woman leans over the seat at them, she smiles with her eyes as well as her mouth. She's lithe and shapely, but somehow unpoised and natural. 'Your mate is one hell of a big guy. I am Dr Louella Griffin, this is my trigger-happy husband Paul. These are distressing times, I can only apologise again. Where on Earth did you two spring from?'

'We came from the realm into this outer world' says Rantza warily, still unsure if she can trust these strangers, and feeling vaguely motion-sick.

The woman -- Louella, fumbles around beneath the seat, and tosses a jacket across to her. 'Here, put this on, you must feel self-conscious, and your nakedness is getting Paul all jittery.' Her laugh is light and reassuring. Rantza examines the unfamiliar material, and pulls it around her shoulders, surprised at its cool smoothness on her bare skin.

Soon, the SUV is curving down a long tree-lined slope towards a shanty town straggled around the wharf of a wide lazy river where a couple of steamboats are moored. The sign says 'Medlar Bend'. There are makeshift tents in hurried clusters around the single street of original wood-built habitations, a store, a couple of bars, a number of ramshackle stalls bartering fruit and other items. But the street is dirty with blowing litter, and lounging people who only reluctantly move aside to allow their passage. They pull in beside a crude clinic, as Turok begins to stir. Paul helps him inside as Louella busies herself setting up drips, removing the bullet and dressing the wound.

Rantza explores in a lazy way, curious about this strange world she finds herself in. The Marah were repellent, but at least she could understand them. At least they posed a tangible threat she could combat with her stone knife. She watches Paul slump down on a swivel-chair and key a screen into life. He's bespectacled now, rugged of face, without being handsome. For a man of forty-minus he has plenty of hair, with the hint of a wave, thick dark hair that droops solemnly over one eye. She reads his body-language, and senses stubbornness, rather than aggression in his movements and mannerisms, relaxed and generally unhurried. It's only when he passes his fingers through the slippage of hair, then cups his chin in concentration, then gnaws the back of his thumb, that she detects his uneasiness. There's jerky panicky action on the screen, frantic figures talking in words she fails to understand, despite the bright ruby talking-stone pendant around her neck. Individual words emerge, but in unfamiliar contexts that fail to make sense.

'Hey Paul' says Louella squinting at samples of Turok's blood on a microscope slide. 'This big ole boy is one-hundred percent Neanderthal. No doubt whatsoever.'

Paul glances across from the screen. 'That's fucking amazing. You know something, we'd be talking Nobel's, if the world hadn't gone to hell. We just lost Detroit. Manchester and Amsterdam are still online, but St Petersburg and Chennai have gone black. There are storm-fronts driving radiation belts across the American mid-West.' He leans back, head in hand. 'They said this could never happen. They said superpower thermonuclear exchange became obsolete with the end of the Cold War, yet all this extinction-level event blows up because of a few disputed Chinese islands.' Words of such import, spoken tonelessly.

Louella washes and sterilises. She pours Rantza a frozen beer from the chiller and gestures they should sit outside on the veranda where there's a table and wicker chairs. From there they can see down through the trees to the river's edge. There are refugee tents strung beneath the trees, the lower branches draped with dismal flags of drying laundry. Louella leans back and passes her hand over her forehead. 'Your man will be fine, given time. He has a strong constitution. Tell me about your home, and your Folk...'

Rantza stares as the aeration bubbles dancing in her beer, feels the faint sway of unfamiliar intoxication at the back of her mind, and does her best to explain the things that Phutra had told her about the crater valley being shifted a degree out of phase with the rest of the planet. At Louella's request she passes the ruby pendant across and she examines it carefully, holding it up to gleam in the African sun. 'I've long suspected that during the great glaciations, when Europe was covered in ice-sheets, there was some kind of primal progenitor mother-civilisation flourishing for thousands of years in this temperate African zone. That the Egyptian golden age was not only the beginning of a cycle of cultures, but also the end of what had preceded it. This artefact suggests a part-supernatural technology that we've long-since lost. Perhaps it was their cleverness that destroyed them, just as our cleverness is destroying us? You've seen the blood moon? It's caused by atmospheric fall-out from the four-hour war, the effects of which are crawling their way around the world right now to snuff us all out.'

As they watch a new tramp steamer approaches downstream, to tie up at the wharf. Even from their distance they can see its overcrowded deck thronged with people, many of them huddled in blankets. Louella stands, shoving the wicker chair back decisively. 'More leukaemia's we can't cure, more radiation-burns the clinic can barely treat. Best go and do what we can for the poor bastards.' Rantza drains the glass. Sits for a long moment as the intoxication roars through her body. Then she throws up violently over the rail into the tired plants below.

The night seems luminous with ochre moonglow, the sky lit in a radioactive aurora. The fan oscillates with a low whirr. The unwatched TV drones in the background about martial law declared in Cape Town, with indiscriminate shootings, and a mass cult suicide in Brazil. Louella brushes her hair in front of their bedroom mirror as Paul watches her. 'You've boon looking at Jungle Girl's tits, haven't you?' she accuses. 'You can't keep your eyes off them.'

'They are quite magnificent' he smiles weakly. 'And you've been quite unnecessarily attentive around Fred Flinstone's big Neolithic cock in a not-entirely medical manner. Better take it easy, Lou.'

'We've been taking it easy for much too long, Paul. Maybe it's time we should be a little more spontaneous? More primal? More animal?' An unfamiliar brightness illuminates her eyes.

He drops into a gorilla crouch, swaying his arms and grunting, his hands cupping into grasping breast-shaped claws.

'Oh Mr Caveman, are you going to ravish me with that big stone-age cock?' she pouts, her eyelids fluttering in feigned shock. 'I do hope so.' She reaches out to unbuckle the belt of his pants in frantic haste, delving inside to find the waiting firmness. They'd not been intimate for a long while. Events intervene, stress and fatigue always seem to get the better of intentions. Now he imagines his fingers spreading, barely capable of encompassing Rantza's heaving breasts as he folds her back onto the bed, burying his face between her splayed legs, slurping the delectable pussy-wine as his tongue laps teasingly at her clitoris. And she imagines Turok's blood-engorged cock forcing its way into her ravenously wet cunt, gasping as it sinks deep into her with a single-mindedness that refuses to be denied. They fuck savagely, clawing and biting, coming together in a sad desperate hunger for sensation.

The next day Turok sits outside. His recovery is proving remarkable. From details that Rantza has told her, Louella does an internet search, scrolling back through old files and news archives. She picks up a number of dubious traces that go nowhere. Then gives up and goes to attend to a few new visitors to the clinic. Eventually she returns with new initiatives, and turns up a report from sixteen years ago about a small private plane that disappeared without trace over the veldt. No wreckage was ever retrieved. But there's an old photo of a smiling couple posing in front of a hire-plane on a small private airstrip. An architect and a biologist. Frozen in time, the woman holds a child, a girl of maybe two-years-old. 'Edgar Rice Burroughs, you should be alive and well at this hour' she breathes. 'Rantza, your parents were called Greystokes, Anthony and Sarah. You are Janet Greystokes.'

Rantza rolls the odd sounds around her mouth. Tasting their unusual flavours. 'No. I am Rantza, of the Folk. That is who I am, that is who I always have been.'

'We all come from somewhere' Louella shrugs. 'A part of that somewhere always stays with us. Under normal conditions we could do a deeper search and perhaps turn up some living relatives. But I don't know. These are not normal conditions. I think that now Turok is recovered, it's perhaps a better idea if you return to your Folk.'

'I have come to the same decision. You and your mate Paul are good people. But I have found out what I came here to learn, and this outer world is a dangerously confusing place.'

The next day Rantza sits before Dr Griffin's mirror and smears the white stripes of the Folk down her cheeks and across her forehead. She smiles. It looks right. Then they go outside and get into the SUV, and Louella drives them back out along the asphalt road to the point where they'd first met. They draw in and halt. 'Your valley will protect you.'

'You could come with us?' says Rantza.

Louella shakes her head sadly. 'I fear that we carry dangerous radiation-levels already. We would contaminate your people. But think on this -- stay in your valley for ten, fifteen years. Then your people can emerge, and claim the world for yourselves. You can be our future.'

She slips Louella's jacket off, the better to feel the sun on her bare skin, and leaves it on the car-seat. Paul offers her his rifle with telescopic sights. She declines.

Then Rantza and Turok begin up the long slope towards the cave-mouth marked by the ancient pillars. They pause once, and look back down to where the SUV is swerving around and motoring away towards the distressed Medlar Bend.

Then they turn away and resume their climb. The blood moon is rising.

by TRISTAN TROTSKY