Kit Reed, whose writing is bright and sharp as a razor, should be declared a national treasure. Over the years her stories have appeared in publications ranging from F&SF, The Yale Review, Omni, Asimov's SF magazine to The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. One of her short story collections is worth having for the title alone: Other Stories and The Giant Baby.
She's also the author of numerous novels, including Captain Grownup and ©expectations, her most recent.
Though "Captive Kong" is a Kit Reed story, we actually have someone else to thank for the ending. Kit writes, "Have you ever had a story you couldn't finish? I went nuts trying to find the ending for this one. Finally I threw up my hands and gave it to my friend Brian, who solved it in three pages—a first for me, and a happy collaboration."
\Happy, indeed.

Captive Kong
Kit Reed 
(with Brian Quinette)

Trevor is looking for backup. When he goes out he wants thirty guys at his back with gravity knives chinking, thirty guys swinging socks full of bolts to clear the way for him. Brass knuckles, maybe, that bulge that lets attackers know they are packing heat. Plus chains. There's nothing like the menacing chink of metal against leather-clad thighs to make your point for you. What Mr. Trevor means is . . .
In times like these you need extra muscle.
Times like these. It's not something you did. It's the way things are these days. You don't go out alone and expect to come back in one piece.
The skies are white all the time now; who's to say whether it's volcanic ash or human cremains or the glow of the unforeseeable? Streets liquefy and ruined cars tip into fresh crevasses. The water turns black as you wade into it; you marvel at the darting phosphorescence until your feet dissolve and you start screaming. Stars jolted out of their sockets dangle like blobs in a bad van Gogh painting, and a crazy can springs out of nowhere and rips off your face.
Loved ones vaporize, freeze, walk into the bleached sunset. Trevor lost his family to an Armageddon cult and his wife, Jane, to the leader; she tortures him with ecstatic e-mails. He lost his business to his brother Jake. If he'd had his thirty guys in place, he could have beaten Jake and hung on to the stuff marauders took out of his town house. He could have kept Jane—he knows it!
The water that comes out of the tap is a funny color.
Trevor's teeth have started lighting up at night, his hair's wild, and his underwear is sticking to him. Something big is coming. If I can get through it, he thinks, without knowing what it is, I'll come out the other side and be OK. The trick is getting through it.

He needs protection. Face it, he can't afford thirty guys. The guys aren't that hard to come by—universal unemployment!—but maintenance is a bitch. The cost of food and whiskey. Fresh leather. Fuel for their hogs or choppers, drugs of choice. Plus, if they turn on you .. .
In the end he settles for a three-hundred-pound gorilla.
Even that is not what you think.
Trevor has targeted a body builder with six-pack abs and biceps that make Trevor's arms look like kosher franks hung on a coat rack. He needs to move fast because for no apparent reason society is imploding.

Winds scour the streets, blowing in from a long way off; a cosmic storm is coming. You may not see it yet, but you hear it, and by the light of burning martyrs, you can feel it. The world was never meant to end with a whimper; the cosmic slot machine turns up not lemons but goose eggs, you bet something big is coming.
Nobody thought it would come so soon.

Go for it, man. Get what you can take. Or take what you can get. You'll get through this. You are Trevor and you are special.
Face it, we all secretly believe we are born special.
Nothing Sam Trevor has done so far comes close to proving this, but deep inside, he knows it. Otherwise, why am I still here? Good answer. Jane writes: "Adam has put me in charge of registration, do join us." In your dreams, baby. Samuel A. (for Articulate) Trevor is special, and the end is coming, and, yes—he is arming himself. If he can get her in the truck.
Right, her. The guys at the gym are all too big for him. His three-hundred-pound gorilla is a woman.

Her name is Roxy.
He finds her pressing 350. The woman is offensively buff, great cords of sinew lace the flesh between her breasts. Her quads are tremendous. Mental note: Keep her in shape. Top-of-the-line gym equipment. Climbing wall. Universal trainer.
He waits until she's at full extension. "Lady, I admire your form."
Roxy gentles the weights into the cradle and looks up. "What do you want from me?" Her face is surprisingly young. Nineteen, he thinks. Not pretty, not so's you'd notice, but in times like these even a gorilla looks good to you.
"I need you is all."
"Perv?" Her pupils are ringed in white. "If you are, I'll smash your face in."
"Whatever you're thinking, no. No." He tries a smile. "To be perfectly frank, I need your help. God knows everybody needs a little help these days. A little something extra." He clears his throat, to weight the next words. Ahem. This is significant. Portentous. "In times like these."
She presses 360. "You've got to be one sick fuck," she says while in the fully extended position.
"You're looking a little shaky," he says. "Let me spot you. So. Ma'am, have you noticed the sky lately? Have you heard the wind? Something big is coming."
"Nobody ever called me ma'am before."
"The dirt has started to glow. Aren't you scared?"
"Leave me alone."
"We have to do something."
"What do you mean we, white man?"
He whispers, so she will pay attention. "Ticktickticktick. Time is running out. Together, we might make it."
"Stop that." Walleyed glare. "I'm working up to four hundred."
At her signal, he adds two ten-pound weights. "Come on, Roxy. You can't play like nothing's happening."
"How do you know my name?"
Diamond nose stud. Likes jewelry. Noted. "Roxy, Roxy. We need each other."
She is testing the weights. "Why would I do anything for you?
"Because you're in my power?"
"Not so's you'd notice." Rings, too. Note: Really likes jewelry.
She is focused on the lift to come. Great veins bulge. "Spot me?"
"Now?"
"Now."
"Fine," he says helpfully. Trevor pretends to spot her when what he is really spotting is the right vein. He drives the needle in. It's a wonderful drug. It paralyzes the mind but keeps the body mobile. How else would he get a woman this size out of the gym and into the back of the van he rented to take his gorilla in? She went from granite to pliant in seconds; he got past the desk by putting a gym bag over her head. Whispers, "What do you have to go home to anyway? The world is ending." He feels only a little guilty.
It's scary out, but he isn't going to have to face it alone. Just having her in the back of the truck makes him feel better.

That the sky is a bizarre new shade of violet is only slightly unnerving. Red fingers creep over the skyline—lava, surging out of the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel? Naw, Trevor thinks, and drives on even though he hears a sizzle, as of fish frying in the drained harbor. In the back of the van his new gorilla alternately thrashes and dozes. Listen, it's not as if she has a life out there.

The house Trevor has fixed up for the captive gorilla looks just like all the others in that block: a brick Baltimore row house in a depressed neighborhood—white shutters, depressingly white front stoop with urban litter washing up against it like trash in a flood. It's just what he wanted. A neighborhood where people like him don't come. End house, which means ingress from the alley, cellar door, which he needs to unload, no neighbors. He has backed the truck up to the cellar. He rolls her down the steps and into the lion cage he salvaged from a ruined circus. For a long time, she doesn't stir. Then she does. Howling, she hurls herself at the bars; her anger shakes the house. "What. What? What!"
Trevor hands her a Coke. "Drink this. You'll feel better." At a safe distance, he extends tongs with his offering.
"Where are we?" She eyes the tongs. The object dangling from them glitters. "What are those?"
"Place I fixed for you. These are my mother's diamonds."
"You can't keep me locked up like this." She stops thrashing and says matter-of-factly, "Look at you, five seven. You can't keep me at all."
Couldn't keep Jane or the kids. He gulps. "I got you here."
"So what am I supposed to do, fuck you? Beat up on people?"
Then the weight of all the years that have been and the years that may never come staggers Trevor, and he cries, "You're supposed to help me."
"Help you what? Get women? Money? Food? If I kill whoever for you, will you let me go?"
Kill Jane? Never. Cult leader Adam? Maybe. Jake? He'd like that, but right now this is a holding action because he has no idea what is coming. "You never know what you need until you need it," Trevor says. The marvel is that he's come this far on instinct, and the rest? Wing it. "Too soon to tell what I need."
"This isn't the old Adam and Eve thing, I hope."
Hair in greased coils. That massive skull, the corded body. Think Hercules carved in lard, but a woman. "I don't think so."
Roxy gauges her situation: the room, the cage—no bending those bars even if you do press four hundred. She settles on her pumped haunches. "I'll need equipment."
He thrusts the tongs into the cage, proffering. It's his late mother's diamond choker. "Everything you need is on order."
Scowling, she fastens it around her bicep. "I've seen better." It is an uneasy accommodation, but it is an accommodation. From here on out it won't matter that Jane is gone or that the corporation has collapsed and the fabric of civilization is shredding. Just let them try to break in and take his money, food, vandalize his secret thoughts or steal the silver. Nobody gets past Roxy. I have a gorilla, OK?

"I miss you," Jane writes. "Adam is seeing somebody new." What do I care? I have a gorilla.

They get through the days, however. Nights are harder. In times like these television is interrupted, so there's no telling whether it's ten or eleven or closer to two A.M. The numbers on all your digital products are clicking backwards. Everything demagnetized while you weren't looking. You're on your own, the wind says. Alone, fust the way you were at the beginning. Not Trevor. He has his gorilla. Perhaps because of the riots and mass murders outside, she's quit trying to kill him. She gets into the captivity thing. Sits with him for public access TV but slouches downstairs to sleep in the cage. For protection, she says. Protection against him? Has he kidnapped a three-hundred-pound virgin? Hard to know. Athena has nothing on Roxy. Step aside, Amazon queen. Take a backseat, Wonder Woman. Now that she has his mother's opera-length pearls twined around her neck and now that his grandmother's diamond earrings hang like dollhouse chandeliers from her wide nostrils, she's in his power, right? He buys her clothes. He cooks wonderful meals for her out of the supermarket stockpile in the subcellar. Keeps her happy until he needs her.
Jane writes, Who needs you, anyway?
One day Roxy smiles. "Meat loaf. Again. My favorite."
In times like these, the silliest things make you feel better.
Still, there is the look he catches when Roxy doesn't know he's watching; the whites of her eyes gleam in the half light from the TV, and Trevor can't know. Is his gorilla fixing to die for him, or does she want to kill him?
How did it get so important to make her like him?
That's one motive for taking her outside. Trial run. Make her happy because in times like these, even a gorilla starts looking good to you.
The other? It's time to show her to the people. Trevor feels safer with Roxy thudding behind, regardless of her motives. Hard to know if it's a good or a bad thing that the streets are deserted. Every player wants an audience. Not clear if that's blood running in the gutters or the product of his hyped imagination. Roxy pads on, sniffing the air. "Talk about creepy. Hold up." She spins him around.
"Stop that! Ow! Where are we going?"
"The gym," she says, dragging him. "They need me at the gym."
It is in ruins. Leached skeletons lie upturned in the ashes like the. rib cages of cattle in Death Valley. So much for Roxy's colleagues, those humongous guys.
"Too late." She grieves. "I came too late."
There is no talking about what happened. "It's OK," he tells her. "It is. Nobody could have helped them." He isn't feeling too good himself. It's unnerving, watching your gorilla cry.
A sob rips her throat. "I shoulda been here for them."
He grips her hand. Mental note: Aunt Patricia's garnets, as soon as we get home. He is running out of jewelry. "You hadda be here for me. It's how we are now. Everything we care about is gone."
("Don't bother coming back," he wrote Jane last night. "Even if you want to.")
"Yeah shit," Roxy says, leaving him to wonder if this excursion has been a mistake: the sound of her teeth, clipping off the words.

She is put to the test in the least likely place. At Trevor's front door. An ugly mob is massing in the street.
Somebody he knows. "You," he says. (Jane wrote last night: "You might as well know, it isn't Adam I left you for. It's Jake I love.") "Jake, what are you doing here?"
Jake scowls. "Like you were trying to forget you ever had a brother?"
"What happened, did you lose the business?"
"Everybody is losing everything," Jake snarls. There is a chink, chink. Thirty guys stand at Jake's back, slapping chains against their leather-covered thighs.
Oh, shit. "You stole my idea," Trevor says. Just like everything else I ever had. "What do you want now?"
"Whatever you have left," Jake says. "Who's the bitch?"
At Trevor's back, Roxy bristles.
"No! You don't get Roxy!"
"If she wasn't the only one left, I wouldn't touch her with a stick." Behind Jake, his thirty guys drool and rumble with lust. "But she is. C'mere, baby."
Roxy snaps Jake's neck and, like a terrier who never gets tired of killing rats, starts after the others. Twenty of the thirty guys head for safety- The last ten don't make it.
She rolls the twenty-ninth guy off of Trevor and gets him inside. He looks up into eyes that are neither white nor silver. "If you want my great-grandmother's emeralds, they're yours."
"Whatever," she says coldly, but—is her expression two degrees softer?
Emeralds. It's a cinch Jane won't want them. Interesting, when you get what you want it's never what you thought. What you really want is for your gorilla to like you.

The next challenge is mechanized. A savage inventor unleashes a new machine on Trevor's street. The thing cracks open houses and its master strips them of food and valuables. Some wit designed the robot monster to look like a combination of Rodan and Godzilla.
Roxy gets hurt in the encounter, but she trashes the thing. Microchips land in her hair like glits. Bolts roll everywhere.
"If I had anything left to give, I'd give it to you," Trevor tells her, and she almost smiles. (He did, in fact, send his great-grandmother's diamond clip to Jane with a note: "Sorry about your bereavement.") "If it makes any difference at all, I'm in love with you."
"Whatever," Roxy says, and goes in her cage and locks the door against him.

Meanwhile, every clock has frozen. The white skies are shredded by nonstop lightning. It should be comforting to know that the streets are empty now, but it isn't. Stay in, cover your head, and wait for it to be over, right? Wrong. No matter how well prepared you are, sooner or later, things break down: generator, alternate fuel supply. Personal arrangements. Computer. There is no mail coming in and no mailing out. Not anymore, so God only knows what Jane is up to or what will become of you. Even you, who overstocked, will run out of food. Sooner or later.

For the first time since Trevor brought her home, his captive gorilla speaks first. "We're running out of stuff." "I know."
"We gotta go out there." 
"Would you do that for me?" 
"Damn straight."
He shudders and falls in step behind her. There's nothing left in the gutted supermarkets, the empty houses. They follow ancient signs to a forgotten treasure trove: prehistoric fallout shelter. Things to eat, not anything you'd want to put in your mouth, but edible.
And coming out, they run into an ordinary guy. A lot like Trevor. Timid, can't make it alone. Studying them, the stranger sizes up the situation. Their food, heaped in Trevor's ex-kid's wagon. "Swap you," the stranger says. Calls over his shoulder. "Come on out, baby."
Broken tiles shickle down as a gorgeous woman emerges. Amazing, how she can look the way she does in times like these. Slim and elegant. Beautiful. She gives Trevor a sultry smile. "Well?"
"A swap." Trevor asks cautiously, "As in, your girlfriend for my gorilla?"
Behind him, Roxy shudders.
The stranger cracks up laughing. "Hell, no—my girlfriend for that food you got!"
Beautiful. She is beautiful. Blindly, Trevor forgets that these aren't ordinary times. "Maybe we can work out a trade."
At his back Roxy snarls, but Trevor is too distracted to notice. The thing about bait is, it's got to look good to the fish you're after. Of course, the guy wasn't bona fide. In the end, he tries to stab Trevor, and Roxy has to kill both him and the woman, never mind that she was gorgeous.
Trevor tries to thank her, but his concentration is broken. He's hung up on the distance between what he should have had and what he has here. Then he sees Roxy's face. "I would never trade you off," he says. "You're irreplaceable."
"Fuck you." Another minute, and she'll yank his ears off.
"Can you ever forgive me?" He waits for an answer, but Roxy is done talking to him.

After that, nothing happens. It happens for a long time. It is terrible, waiting to hear from Jane. Roxy is sulking and won't talk to him. Nothing comes, no e-mails, no postcards. The carrier pigeons have all died, and Trevor suspects that one of them has a message for him tied to its dead claw. He searches the bodies of the pigeons he can find, but their bones have been picked clean by the starving, and they are carrying only magazine subscriptions and credit card offers.

It is terrible, watching Roxy pine. She quits working out.
He tries to motivate her. "What if someone comes?"
She is wearing all his family jewelry at once. "Not my problem."
"Come on, Rox, we were put here for a purpose. We survived for a reason." He can't stop trying. "What do you think it is?"
"That's for me to know and you to find out," she says grimly. The diamond necklace slips off her scrawny arm and falls into the straw. She kicks it out of the cage.
He winces. "What do you want from me?"
But she won't talk to him.
Awful, this is awful, but when all else fails, Trevor, at least, is ready. Gorilla in place, food stockpiled. He's OK, but he's not so sure about the gorilla.

For a while, phenomena abound. It's only a matter of time before the Four Horsemen come charging out of the sky unless he looks up one morning and sees the four evangelists with their heads blazing in the morning fog. Right now nothing is happening. Boredom is worse than the plague or fires and floods—when there's a riot, at least you have stuff to do. He sits in the dark watching tapes because the last television station belched snow onto his TV screen and blinked out of existence.
Then nothing happens. Nothing keeps happening. Every day is like every other day, with no promise that whatever Sam Trevor has prepared for so carefully—he captured someone!—is actually coming. Still, it's not as if they can go outside and resume normal life. Whatever that was. For no reason you can point to, the city's in ruins.
In her cage, Roxy crashes on her bunk and turns her face to the wall. Trevor takes over the exercise equipment. Works out on the Universal gym. He is busy all the time now. Excited and scared. He bangs away on the weights, blowing air like an industrial vacuum cleaner.
"That's not going to help you," Roxy says.
It's the first time she has spoken first.
Trevor thinks for a minute that she's taken to him, but her back is still turned, so there's no knowing. "It couldn't hurt." Hopeful, he chirps. "Spot me?"
There's a long silence, as if she's thinking about it. Then Trevor hears her snoring.

On Monday his hair starts to thin. It isn't falling out, it's just vanish-ing. By Friday he's bald. He's not alone in this. Everyone else is bald, too. For the few people still out lurching around, hats have come back into fashion. The hats last for only a few hours, since everyone has for-gotten how to make them. He thinks about working out on the weights hut then thinks, Screw it.
He is so depressed that he orders pizza. Inexplicably, you can still get pizza delivered to your door, even though everything else has gone to hell. After he pays he opens the box and sees that he can't recognize even one of the toppings. Shuddering, he offers it to Roxy.
She eats half of it before asking, "Want any?"
"No thanks. Hey, you have hair!"
"I've always had hair." She finishes the pizza.

He prays. It's hard to do when you don't know what you want and you can't see the face of the entity you're talking to. Deep in the basement, Roxy groans.
"Dammit," he yells, "if you're in love with me, why don't you just say so?"
He creeps down and looks in on her.
Where she was tough and fit when he got her, Roxy has gotten a little stringy. It's as though her muscles have lengthened, like a runner's. He wonders at the change. Roxy is either sick with love, he decides, or sick with waiting. It would help to know.
Trevor picks love.
He coughs, and she raises herself on one elbow to look at him.
"What's wrong with you?"
"Gorilla troubles. You wouldn't understand."

Daylight is now twenty-four hours long, but to compensate, nighttime also takes twenty-four hours. Sunrises take so long that everyone loses interest. The telephone cuts out in the middle of a solicitation, someone trying to get Trevor to change his long-distance phone company even though the last phone company is defunct. There will be no e-mails from Jane.
He sometimes checks anyway.
During one cloudless day, the windows melt.

Trevor can barely breathe. He doesn't know where all the air has gone, but it isn't where he needs it. Near his mouth. He crawls to the basement.
What's happening? He gasps. "Do you know what—what's happening?"
"Nope," Roxy says.
"The whole thing's gone to shit. What's happening to us?" Trevor is interrupted by horrible high-pitched screeching outside. Fire ants the size of sport utility vehicles are roaming the street, eating anything that isn't made of metal. Trevor unlocks the cage, / have a gorilla, thank God.
Roxy kills the entire hive in the time it takes him to make a milkshake. She returns to the cage and takes a nap. Later that night, in bed, he remembers that he forgot to lock the cage. He decides to screw it. He thinks, there's always the chance that she'll decide to come to me; when I least expect it she'll sneak upstairs . . .

Because things like disease and Armageddon happen to other people, never to us (for we are special), what really happens always comes as a surprise. A freak accident. A mistake!
Therefore Trevor wakes up one day with fear rising in his throat, the suffocating thought that this is his last day on earth.
He says, the way you do when you know it can't possibly be true, "This is my last day on earth." He's right.
He staggers to the front door and grapples it open. He looks outside and sees nothing.
No city. No streets. No newspaper on his front step. There is nothing to see except the dry wasteland that stretches in all directions. The dust at the end of the world? He doesn't know. When you are special, even at the end of the world you carry on. It's What One Does. Business as usual. Carry on, and destiny won't notice you. Hold your breath and clamp your elbows to your sides. Small gestures. Nothing to attract attention. Wait, and the fates will pass you by
Roxy joins him in the living room, where he's eating, for all he knows, the last frozen lasagna on the sere, blasted planet.
"Roxy, thank God!"
"I'm hungry."
"Can you save me?" he asks.
"Not at this point."
"Why?"
"You're too weak. You think too much."
"I think too much?" Staggered, he considers it from all sides. "What does that mean? What do I think too much about?"
"Everything."
"Does thinking make me weak?"
She polishes off the lasagna. "See?"
"It doesn't make sense!"
She licks the lasagna wrapper. "My point," Roxy says.
Bemused, he looks at her. The open cage. The hook latch on the cellar door. "Why didn't you escape?" She stayed because she loves me. She does!
"This place was as good as any other."
"Don't you love me? "
He dies before she has to answer.
Roxy packs up food and water from the kitchen, a couple of steak knives, a plastic bucket, a blanket, and a string of pearls. She sets off toward the horizon, in no particular direction.

Whatever else happens, in this new world, the gorilla always survives