He held Akaki’s mangled body in his hands before him as he stared around his frightened tribe before he lifted the dead queen overhead and dashed her corpse upon the blood-drenched earth.
Snarling, he smelled Ooso’s death in the air, and he grimaced, spinning on his heel, to bare his fangs to the east. For in that direction did the bone-faced Bakwaniri live—and soon Omag would die a terrible death...
His reverie was interrupted as old Baho hurried into his path.
“What of the tribe of Goro?” Baho blurted.
“What of it?” the night ape answered menacingly.
“And Ooso’s daughter? Will Yulu go unprotected as you seek vengeance?” Baho grumbled.
“You protect her!” Gazda snapped.
“Please! Gazda, wait!” Baho winced as the flame in the night ape’s eyes blazed at him. “You must not leave us. Omag’s treachery has left your tribe without a king, and without protection. I am too old. Many loyal blackbacks have died or are injured and few are left to preserve what remains. You are young, the strongest ape in the tribe and the swiftest on the hunt. You have shown this, and none would dare question your leadership if you took it here at the Two Trees.”
The other apes had started creeping forward hesitantly, many injured, limping as they approached; their eyes imploring. Fear preyed upon them, and the little ones whimpered in terror. And yet the night ape’s burning gaze drew them with its promise of power.
“Gazda is king!” Baho said bowing, and the words were immediately echoed by the group.
“Gazda is king!” the other apes shouted.
Despite himself, Gazda swelled with pride.
He could feel Akaki’s and Oluza’s blood moving in his veins, and his heart hammered with its strength. How he wanted Omag—oh, to sink his fangs into that stinking flesh!
But his tribe, his mother’s tribe...Ooso’s tribe would go unprotected. Leaderless they would fail...
Yulu broke free of her grandmother then, and stopped at Gazda’s feet to bow.
Ooso! Great sadness gripped Gazda’s heart when Yulu looked up at him and he bent to brush her little tears away.
Rising to his full height, Gazda looked over the tribe of apes that huddled before him. They were injured and terrified. Their hollow eyes looked to him for hope.
“Do you doubt I am strongest?” he bellowed, swaying on wide-spaced legs. The closest wounded blackbacks shifted away from him, bowing and scraping at the earth with their foreheads. “Who would challenge Gazda the night ape to be king?”
“Gazda is King!” the apes chanted now, as they dropped down onto their knees and bellies, pressing the ground with their faces repeating, “Gazda is King of the Apes!”
Gazda was overcome by this show of respect and loyalty, and so he hardened his resolve by glaring into the east again. In that direction was the river and somewhere near it the bone-faced Bakwaniri lived.
A look came into his blazing eyes that promised death for Omag—and the Bakwaniri also. Had they not caused the death of his mother?
Eeda had raised him to be one of the apes, and she had died...
If her son took up this mantle, might her loss become a sacrifice?
Of his loyalty there was no doubt, and like the other bull apes in the tribe, Gazda was a blackback with ambition.
He would be King of the Apes.
The night ape set one bloodied foot upon Akaki’s broken corpse, and beating upon his powerful chest with his fists, he threw back his head and roared the terrifying challenge of the bull ape.
The tribe that lay on the ground before him, his tribe, trembled at the call, but not least of all did Baho, oldest, who had heard something different in this cry that came from Gazda—different from the call he had made before.
Never had such a roar come from an ape.
Indeed, nothing like that had been heard since before the dawn of time, when primordial forests locked the earth in a dark, unending band of green and shadow.
###
Dracula of the Apes
continues in
Book Three:
THE CURSE
by G. Wells Taylor
1 - The Castaways
A savage roar rose out of the dense jungle and charged toward the beach like a hungry carnivore after blood. Too terrified to do more than shudder, the seven castaways remained in place in the shadow of their stranded lifeboat, paralyzed by their fear.
As the last echo died, they returned to the task of unloading cargo and as a group stared wide-eyed into the dense foliage that edged the pale sand and gradually climbed east into the highlands. They had seen the distant mountains before they’d been put ashore.
A heartbeat later, another feral call sounded from a point much farther south, and all eyes turned to a member of their group, a man of some 50 years of age who was silently studying the treetops with keen scientific interest.
“What the devil was that?” someone asked in a high-pitched voice.
The scientist remained silent, his gaze focused on the high branches.
Beside him young Phillip Holmes hissed in frustration, his pale blue eyes desperately whipping back and forth as he searched the heavy jungle’s leading edge for whatever so captivated his older companion.
The clean-shaven Holmes was dressed in fashionable tweed Norfolk jacket, matching breeches and knee-high leather boots. A brown derby hat covered short hair of the same color.
An Englishman in his mid-20s, he had been aboard the S.S. Dunwich which was steaming from London to Cape Town and the captain of that ship had invited him to join him and the Quarrie family for dinner. Young Lilly Quarrie’s charms had kept Holmes near her ever since.
“It is an ape,” answered Dr. Joseph Van Resen finally, adding a curt nod that caused the thick iron gray curls atop his head to quiver. His rumpled green sack suit had tears in the left shoulder and along the seam of one arm. “Though, I have never heard such a variety of call—which was very strange, I’m sure you will
