„This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Sleep had clogged my mouth, making me taste bitter and - for the umpteenth time - swear I'd never put another drink in my mouth. As usual, I'll forget about these vows as soon as I get to the club with the guys.
I sat up and suddenly realized I wasn't in my own bed. I reached out my hand and encountered a coarse hair. Before opening my eyes wide, I wondered how drunk I could have been last night to climb into bed with such a woman. I stretched and wanted to turn my back: maybe if I pretended to sleep on, she would have the good sense to leave without me having to see her again. Fat chance: women, the coarser their hair, the more insensitive they are - I found myself formulating one of the maxims I'd forget once I'd gotten over a hangover.
A kick in the ribs made me suddenly open my eyes to an unbelievable scene: I was lying half on top of the bushy mane of a lion snoring softly, and a little further away a lioness was visible. My hand was resting on the lion's mane, that was the coarse hair I felt, and - over all the absurdity of the situation - I breathed a sigh of relief: no matter how drunk I am, I'm not going to get into bed with a woman with such wiry hair! Beneath me - as under the lion, for that matter - was golden sand, and when I looked up, a few meters away from us I saw the blue water of a lake from which a crocodile was sleepily poking its head. Or an alligator - for I never really knew them very well. What I didn't like about the whole thing was that, sleepy as he was, his gaze was fixed with undisguised interest on me.
"A zoo," I said to myself. "That's the explanation! Someone - and I'm going to find out who - took advantage of my terrible drunkenness last night, gave me a sleeping pill or a drug, and put me in here among these beasts." I was just thinking that in no zoo in the world are lions and crocodiles put in the same place, when I got another kick in the ribs:
"Are you ever going to wake up?"
I looked toward the possessor of the voice. A well-built woman, as out of the commercials that beckon you to the South Seas, naked-glutted, was insistently nudging me with her foot somewhere between the second and third rib. With her hands she tried without much success to cover either her sex or her overly large breasts. My attempt to close my eyes and treat the whole thing as a natural extension of last night's drunken bender only drew another foot into my ribs.
"Hey, hold on," I snapped at my gorgeous dream.
"Wake up!" she growled hissed, in a voice that seemed to hover on the heights of exasperation.
As my only reaction was to lie down better, she continued:
"Wake up yourself, before the lion under you wakes up!"
I took a closer look at the lion. He was already breathing more rapidly and slowly seemed to be starting to wake up.
At one point he blinked and his eyes locked on me. Deciding that the dream was already beginning to be a little too realistic for my tastes, I stood up slowly, followed by his somewhat curious gaze. For now only curious - though I had no idea when that curiosity would take a slightly more aggressive form.
"Oh, God, you're awake!" the woman next to me said angrily. I thought he would wake up before you.
I looked puzzled. I was as naked as she was. We were standing on the shore of a lake with clear, blue waters, and on the beach around it were a host of sleeping animals. Some were beginning to fall asleep, others were already moving and trying to get to their feet. I stepped lightly over the lion, grabbed the woman by the hand and pulled her forward, then asked:
"Will you tell me what the hell is going on?"
"I'll tell you, but let's take a few more steps... That's why I woke you up... There's not much time... soon all the animals will be awake."
I took a few steps away from the animals on the beach.
"Now say it!" I urged.
She looked around indecisively, as if searching for a bench to sit on. There was nothing of the sort in sight nearby, so she began to speak:
"I think I woke up ten minutes before you did, she said irritably. You should have woken up too, to hear..."
"Hear what?" I asked, puzzled. "Was there an announcement or something?"
"Not exactly an announcement," she made, confused, "but I had just woken up when I suddenly felt like this, like a kind of buzzing in my head. Then a voice - or a thought - began to rumble somewhere inside me. It said something along the lines that nature often doesn't know - through its random genetic mutations - how to choose the true masters of a planet. And that they - but I don't know who they are - are going to fix that. They're going to take one animal of each species and they're going to put us all in this... I think he used the word.... or, well, the concept of an arena. Which they won't open until only the deserving species is left... The species destined to be the ruler of the planet..."
I looked around more closely, the last remnants of sleep banished. Somewhere off in the distance, something like a translucent wall loomed around where we stood. It looked like a circle, three or four kilometers in diameter, on the surface of which almost every animal on earth had been crammed. Like a monstrous Noah's Ark. With the slight difference that I was not Noah, the helmsman of the Ark, but a mere animal. Or at least that's what the people who had locked us in here thought. I got a better look at the woman. Pretty, a little sassy, the sort I would no doubt have chosen to color an ordinary evening - but by no means a partner worthy of facing lions. Then again, maybe that's how I seemed to her...
"Have you had time to look around more closely?" I asked her concerned. "Does a shelter or something like that where we can take refuge exist around here? Otherwise, we don't stand much of a chance against lions... Or crocodiles," I added when I saw the eye of the reptile in the lake staring at me from a distance, with a fixity I didn't like at all, straight ahead.
"I don't know, I didn't get a chance to look," she said helplessly. As soon as I woke up I started looking for people. Then, when I found you, the announcement came on and I tried to wake you up... Do you think we'll make it?" She asked in a whimpering tone, and all her aplomb seemed to suddenly melt away.
"We have to make it," I tried to smile at her. Otherwise the whole world will end up populated only by lions.... or crocodiles."
I took her hand and we headed toward the translucent wall in the distance. Animals stumbled past us. From the looks of it, the small ones had recovered first from the effects of the drug - or whatever it was that was going to work on us. In any case, most of them still looked stunned and were shaking their heads as if trying to shake the dizziness away.
We reached the wall. It was like a milky screen, letting light through, but no image. I pushed it with my hand. It had the consistency of hard rubber and seemed completely unresponsive to my attempts to scratch or pierce it with a branch. I tried to dig at its base, but encountered the same hard material everywhere. Anyway, I had no tools to dig. And no time. At least not until the big carnivores woke up. Or until they got hungry.
"What do we do?" the worried woman asked.
"For now, we're looking for a place to take shelter and be safe," I replied and started along the wall. "We need to find something... a shelter to stay in until we decide what to do."
A clump of trees was visible in the distance. I walked hopefully toward it. Although it didn't seem like a solution to perch in the trees until the animals ate each other, at least it offered a temporary refuge. Suddenly, from behind the trees, we saw two huge cylindrical shapes emerge. They looked like reservoirs or something - but they were the first objects to break the monotony of our landscape. Yes, our captors had thought of everything. There were two huge tanks, and when we got closer we saw that water was flowing from one of them. After pooling in a sort of trough, it spilled over its edges into the lake on whose shore I had awakened. In the other there was a sort of yellowish porridge also emptying into a trough, the shape of which reminded me unpleasantly of a trough. I hurried to taste it: it was sweet, quite pleasant, and next to me a rather large monkey was bending down to taste it, whose curious look did not please me at all. He didn't have the ferocity of a gorilla, but if the food in the trough ever ran low, I'd rather not have to fight him. And yet, that was not now the urgent problem, but lions. And tigers, and crocodiles, which, for some reason, I was not at all convinced would be satisfied with the yellowish mush in the troughs, even though it probably contained all the nutrients I needed. First, the problem of shelter had to be solved...
"We could try to build a hut and...," the woman said timidly, then, looking at the lion who had meanwhile risen and was looking around sulkily, she abandoned the idea.
With what we had to hand, no hut could be built that could withstand a hungry lion, of that she seemed convinced.
Nor a raft to retreat to the middle of the lake. Guns? A sturdier branch I'd found earlier on the ground under the trees. Good enough for a dog - but not for a lion or the Siberian tiger that was already sniffing along the lakeshore, snorting in displeasure.
"An idea! I've got to come up with an idea or we're lost!" I kept repeating to myself, and then my eyes fell on the two reservoirs. They were almost side by side and there was a gap of a few centimeters between them. As I passed through the trees I saw a slightly thicker tree trunk. I rushed back, hoping that I was not too late to find the lion crouched over it. I took him on my shoulders and, bending under his weight, leaned him against the two tanks. From his end to the top edge of the tanks was less than three feet. I signaled to the woman to climb in first, and then I climbed in too, pulling the torso after us on the tank.
The platform on the tanks was about twenty feet in diameter, and at a guess could serve us well enough as shelter for a while.
I held out my hand to the woman:
"Now we can finally meet. My name is Paul..."
"Me, Laura," she said.
She looked at me circumspectly, then added:
"And I'd also like to tell you that I didn't like the way you groped me when you pushed me on the tank cap. In spite of the conditions we find ourselves in, I want us to maintain a civilized attitude... I would like to tell you that I have a very good friend, whom I am going to marry soon and to whom I want to remain faithful no matter what..."
I was stunned. With the lion snarling at our feet, only her and her - otherwise quite appetizing - curves didn't burn me anymore.
"Believe me, this is not the time to think about such a thing..."
"That's what you men say, 'it's not the time', but you're always thinking about such a thing," she added sulkily and jumped onto the next basin, the one that provided water.
"Tonight I'll sleep here so I'll be safer," she also decreed, and began to break branches from the tree that stretched its leaves up to above the pools, trying to make a bed.
I shrugged and began to look at the landscape below me. It seemed that all the animals, without exception, had woken up. I don't know how they had gotten the message to fight for supremacy over the planet, but there was still no sign of a scuffle. I was neither a zoologist nor a biologist, but I had no doubt that such a mass of animals in only a few square kilometers would soon - with or without warlike exhortations - lead to a real massacre. The lion on which I had rested my head was strolling listlessly under the pools. Although the water trickled from the trough into the lake, there was no doubt that the place under the pools would soon be crowded, for the lake had rather steep banks, and where I had woken up - and where it was more accessible - the crocodile was seen to be lurking.
Nothing more happened till dark, and we went to bed in a rather tense atmosphere, each to his own basin. I slept - a restless sleep, from which I was awakened by Laura's high-pitched screams. It was barely a little light, but I could see the pool of water on which she had slept quite clearly.
A little monkey - and it looked like the very one who had been watching us at the food trough for a long time - was trying to rape the girl. At least it looked that way from where I was standing.
"Help! Help me, damn it, get this horrible thing off me!" screamed Laura desperately, and she punched the monkey thirstily.
I picked up a branch and, using it as a club, hit the monkey on the temple. It staggered up and tried to rush towards me, but tripped over one of the slats Laura had stretched out for a bed and fell heavily over the edge of the pool. There was a dry thud, and when we rushed over to see what was going on, he only flailed his legs a few more times, then stiffly remained between the gutters.
"Why didn't you come sooner?" Laura shouted in offense. "You stood there and watched that beast mistreat me..."
"I was hoping you'd persuade him to leave you alone if you told him you wanted to remain faithful to your friend," I replied bitingly. "You should've asked him to be civil, too..."
Although the monkey was the first casualty in this strange war, it also seemed to be a kind of signal to start the slaughter. If the lion had kept himself in regal expectation, the Siberian tiger seemed to kill only for his own pleasure. As if he had listened to the urging of the voice Laura said he heard. As if it wanted to remain the sole master of the planet. After five days, it seemed only the big carnivores were left alive. And the crocodile, waiting patiently in the lake for the outcome. I descended more and more slowly for the water and the yellowish muck, and then I cautiously dragged the tree trunk behind me. Sometimes I thought that without the pools, we would have fallen prey to the big carnivores long ago. Meanwhile, my relationship with Laura became more normal, and she even got used to the idea that if we survived this ordeal, we would probably be the parents of the new world. Sort of a modern day Adam and Eve, assuming we're allowed to remake the myth...
More than two weeks went by, and of the multitude of animals that once crowded the shores of the lake, only three were now visible: the lion, the Siberian tiger and the crocodile. They were stalking each other and delaying the outcome for as long as possible, as if realizing that they were the last representatives of the animal kingdom on Earth.
The end came somewhat abruptly and stunned us both. The tiger, always hungry, always in search of food, after trying in vain to gorge itself on the half-decomposed corpse of a coyote, passed somewhat closer than usual to the crocodile's territory. The latter, with a slow movement, much slowed by long fasting, rushed at the tiger. It grabbed him by a front paw and tried to drag him into the lake. Only the great Siberian tiger was not quite one of the deer the crocodile had been used to. In grief, the tiger tore itself from the crocodile's mouth, and a fierce battle broke out on the lakeshore. Attracted by the noise, the lion approached, but kept a cautious distance. The scent of blood stirred him, and eventually he joined the fray, but from the distance it was hard to see who was tearing whom to pieces. Alliances were made and broken quickly, but the only one who could leave the lakeshore was the Siberian tiger. However, he too died in the course of the afternoon... and, from first glance, we were the only survivors of the arena.
"Do you think we should go down into the arena and kill the little crustaceans too - or whatever else is still alive on the ground?" asked Laura the next day, seeing that our victory was still not being taken into account by anyone.
"Or maybe we should shout so the referees can hear..."
That night, victorious and holding her in my arms, I remembered how the announcement had sounded, "Till only the deserving species will remain alive."
What else did our guardians expect from us? A terrible thought suddenly struck me: what if they are asexual? What if they know nothing about sexual dimorphism? Wouldn't they consider Laura and me to be different species - waiting to kill each other?
I told Laura about my hypothesis, and I saw that she was stumped.
"So what do you think we're left to do then?" she asked after a while.
"Only one thing we can do!" I replied sure though I suspected how she would react to my proposal.
"What is your proposal? I hope it's not an indecent one!" she said.
"I think you'll find it indecent but it's the only reasonable one: in order to convince the people who organized this show that we are one species we'll have to have sex!"
Laura snorted contemptuously:
"I thought for sure that's what you'd be thinking!"
"If you have another solution, I'll gladly accept it!" I said and a heavy silence fell between us.
After a while, sniffling, she said:
"Okay, fine, let's have sex! But remember, only as an experiment and only once and only to save the world!"
This formal agreement was enough for me, so after a short foreplay I penetrated her with relish, because I had been waiting for the opportunity for many days.
When she finally climaxed she let out a scream so piercing that I'm sure even the aliens who organized the show heard it.
We sat wearily side by side and waited in silence to see if our message was properly received.
"I don't think they were paying attention to us," Laura said at a later time, "so we should repeat the experiment!"
We repeated that it was only to save the world but the aliens either didn't get it or they didn't care about us anymore so we had sex more and more while waiting for the dome around us to disappear.