The Caged Rhinoceros
A rhinoceros with superpowers is trapped in a secret government facility.
The Caged Rhinoceros
A short story by Felix Croc
The rhinoceros sat on a cheap metal chair. He stretched his legs out in the stark cage, made entirely of bulletproof plexiglass, the kind they use as floors in tall tourist towers. A handful of small holes were drilled into the front of the glass for fresh air. He felt like a lizard in a terrarium, or an ancient artifact in a museum. An item on display, something alone and left to gather dust.
The only other objects inside the room were a blanketless cot, a prison toilet, and a reinforced, extremely strong door with a microphone and speaker embedded into it. On the other side of the door was a stepladder which led to the ground from the suspended cube of glass, held up by eight guy wires as strong as bridge cables. He could jump and slightly jiggle the cage, the only enjoyment he could find in this bleak prison.
The dim lights within the room holding the cage suddenly flicked on to full power, and the rhino immediately paid attention, looking forwards through the glass at the door at the far end of the room. It opened and two humans entered: a white man and an Asian woman. He didn’t recognize either of them; but he did know their uniforms: FAAD. Federal Anthropomorph Analysis Division. It was the only clothing that he had seen in the past four days, apart from his own orange jumpsuit.
The rhinoceros stood up and crossed his arms as the pair approached. They sat down in chairs identical to his.
“Sit down, Rodrigo,” the male said. The rhino did not respond.
“I said, sit down.” Still no response.
The woman chimed in, saying calmly, “Please sit down, Crash,” in Cantonese. The rhinoceros obeyed.
“We know you speak English, Rodrigo,” the male said in English. “Don’t play stupid.”
“But that’s not as fun,” Crash replied, also in perfect English.
“This is serious business, Crash,” the woman said. “My name is Major Katherine Wu; this is Lieutenant Norman Galway. We’re— “
“Yeah, yeah, FAAD. I know who you are. Only people I’ve seen since you brought me here.”
“Please, Crash. We need you to cooperate…”
“Or what? Keep me in this fuckin’ zoo exhibit you got me in?”
“Or we’ll give you a syringe in your arm,” Galway said.
“I don’t do drugs,” Crash said with a smirk. “I kill dealers.”
“Yeah, among others. Mr. Desoto was an innocent bystander, who is now lying beneath fourteen tons of concrete and steel on 4th Avenue.”
Crash leaned in. “Innocent my ass. He was a dealer. That’s what the contract said, plain as day. I just do what they ask.”
“Who was it that hired you?” Wu asked.
“I ain’t selling out my client. They’re a good customer.”
“Rodrigo, you are not leaving this cage until you say who hired you,” Norman said, standing up and moving towards the cage. “And then we’ll crack the mystery of your magic bullshit.”
“Your breath stinks,” Crash said.
“Like your soul,” Galway replied.
“Norm, I have a clean conscience. I do what I am paid to do. I don’t kidnap every anthro I see and put them into bunkers in who-the-fuck-knows-where.” Norman seemed to back away at that.
“Rodrigo, please,” Wu interrupted. “We don’t want any more trouble.”
“Bah, trouble? You’re the ones who stormed my junkyard with like fifty guys. I didn’t want to kill any of ‘em but you forced my hands.”
“Seventeen men lost their lives that day because of you. Plus Mr. Desoto from earlier. We can’t even give them a good funeral after what you did. Eighteen souls on your conscience, is that what you want?” Norman piped up.
“It’s a lot less than the government has on its conscience. If you have one.”
“Look, Rodrigo…” Wu said softly. “We just want—”
“Nope, fuck that and fuck you. I’m not giving you feds a single thing you want.” He folded his arms in defiance. “Never have, never will.”
“Alright, Crash,” said Norman in a mocking tone, “Guess you wouldn’t mind if all your clients learned about Diego…”
“You wouldn’t fucking dare,” Crash said, his bravado suddenly shattered.
“Oh, I dare.” Norman took three Polaroid pictures from his breast pocket and waved them sassily in front of Crash. They depicted the rhinoceros lovingly kissing and having sex with his boyfriend, a tegu named Diego Estevez.
“How the fuck did you get that?!” His hands pounded on the glass.
“We’re the United States Government. We get whatever we want.” Crash kept pounding his fists on the glass. His metal gloves had been confiscated and were presumably somewhere else in this compound. He still had strength but it was not what he was used to.
“You’re cornered, Rodrigo. We’ve got your little magic gloves and boots under lock and key. And that mace-thing you like to whip around is ours now too. You’re trapped. You’re not getting out. You’re staying here indefinitely.”
“Like hell I am!” Crash smashed his shoulder into the glass, and there he saw it: a tiny, tiny crack. He grinned. Wu spoke into her walkie-talkie, “Code Red, subject is extremely irate. Assistance needed!” She pulled a lever on the wall and a siren began to blare.
Crash backed up to the back of the cage and charged forwards, feet smashing into the metal below. He smashed his sharp, metal-tipped horn into the crack before pulling it out and dislodging a small chip of the glass. He followed suit with a grin and a destructive kick with his bare hoof that shattered a hole big enough to put his fist through. A squadron of five armed guardsmen in full tactical gear funnelled into the room as Norman and Wu fled behind them. Rubber bullets pelted Crash, doing little to stop his rage. In his bare fists and hooves, he charged full speed at the group of guards like a bowling ball into pins, tossing them to the sides of the room.
His horn gored the fireteam leader directly in the neck, up through the skull. Crash unsheathed his horn like a sword, and the dead man fell back. As this happened, the other soldiers beat Crash with electrified batons, but he shrugged the pain off like it was a mild tickle. Crash grinned as he grabbed one of the batons and broke it over the soldier’s helmet, which also crumbled like dust.
Crash body slammed the guards as he forced his way towards the exit. They fell like dead trees, tossed aside by one hand of the furious rhinoceros. The two interrogators stood back beside the door, cowering in fear at the horror that had just unleashed itself. Wu’s shaky hand grabbed the door, and she ducked out.
The rhino picked Norman up by his neck, and then threw him to the concrete ground, head first. He stomped on the man’s face with his bare feet, instantly breaking his nose with the first smash and then breaking the jaw bone and teeth with the next. Even as the gunmen tried to subdue him, he shook them off easily. Crash kicked the man’s body through the open door, hitting a technician who screamed and ran away.
“Collateral damage…” Crash thought to himself. “But she’s just as complicit in all of this.” Regardless, he let her flee. Wu was also nowhere to be seen. But in their place were six more soldiers coming to back up the guards already there. They aimed their high-powered rifles at Crash.
But Crash didn’t give in, even as he stared down the half-dozen rifle barrels in his face. He harnessed his superpower of earthquake summoning, and the ground began to rumble. The soldiers ran for their lives, but Crash stayed put. He knew exactly how powerful this quake would be: enough to scare people but not enough to collapse the building. He capitalized on this, grabbing the last fleeing soldier and bashing the poor sap’s gun into his own face. He stumbled backwards, his nose bleeding. Crash finished the job by breaking the man’s nose and throwing him to the ground, then the coup de grace, a stomp to the face. He was livid and was not going to stop.
Crash kicked open the door to the room across the hallway. The room was filled with chalkboards and bulky computers, with wiring stretching from end to end like spider webs. The room also held two large glass cases, connected to the giant computers by vacuum tubes. In one of them was Crash’s gloves; the other, his boots. The four scientists in the room had taken copious notes on the chalkboards and in papers about the makeup of his enchanted metal gear. Crash steamed with anger. He punched his bare fists through the glass cases, retrieving his belongings while sustaining only superficial cuts on his thick rhinoceros skin. The four scientists in the room attempted to flee as Crash rampaged and retrieved his equipment, but like with the soldiers, Crash managed to catch the last one before he could exit, by tripping him with his leg. The scientist fell to the ground with a thud and broke his glasses.
Crash put on his gloves and boots and smirked. The scientist squirmed around on the floor, looking for his glasses in the blurry chaos. Crash put him out of his misery with a stomp to the skull.
Before Crash exited the room, curiosity got the best of him and he looked at what was written on the blackboards and in the scientists’ logbooks. “Project Hercules” was written at the top of the blackboard, with various diagrams and charts that Crash could not make heads nor tails of. Many of the words in the books were also beyond his comprehension, but the things he was able to understand were shocking. _ _
He grabbed some of the books and rushed out of the room. By this time, another group of heavily-armed guards had arrived just outside the room and fired at Crash immediately. But with his gear, Crash was now prepared.
Crash knocked his gloves together, like a boxer preparing for a match. Then he smashed his right fist into the wall, releasing a colossal amount of energy into the concrete and plaster framework. The entire structure rumbled and knocked the soldiers off balance. A few of them fired their guns by mistake.
Taking advantage of the chaos, Crash ripped a large chunk of the damaged wall out, collapsing the doorframe and exposing piping and the subfloor above. He hurled the concrete at the group of soldiers. It broke the visors of the ones in front, after which Crash tugged on one of the water pipes in the wall and hurled it at the other soldiers. Freezing cold water gushed out of the broken pipe. Crash finished off the wet, freezing guards with a stomp of his boot that turned their bodies into little more than a soup of wet paste and bones. He left damp footprints of flesh on the linoleum as he advanced down the hallway. He was unsure where he was in this building, but he felt like he was underground.
But escaping would have to wait as he needed to grab one more thing: his weapon. He kicked in another door, leading to the room adjacent to that lab. This was another lab, but it was empty. Crash growled. The scientists inside were sheltering beneath their desks and cowering at the sight of the furious rhinoceros. He stomped up to one of them and picked him up by the scruff of the neck. “Where is my meteor hammer?” he demanded, spitting the consonants into the man’s face.
“Room 046!” he eked out, before Crash threw him to the floor with force. He likely shattered several bones but Crash did not care. Instead, Crash immediately turned around and headed for Room 046. It was down another corridor nearby, which had three guards in it. They fired their rifles at Crash, though the bullets did almost no damage to the rhino’s thick skin. He stormed towards two of them and smashed their heads together, knocking them out instantly despite their helmets. The third one attempted to bash Crash with the butt of his rifle, but Crash grabbed the rifle from him and swung it like a bat at the soldier’s unprotected cheek. He fell just like the other two soldiers. The water level was rising now, enough to drown the downed soldiers if they remained on the ground. Crash was okay with that.
Crash kicked open the door to Room 046 and spotted his weapon. The ancient heirloom meteor hammer was in some sort of scanning machine, rotating around as a laser examined the composition and power within. Crash roared and threw the sole scientist in the room into the machine’s console, breaking the poor human’s back on the keyboard and abruptly halting whatever scan was going on. Crash broke the glass with his fist and retrieved the meteor hammer. He examined it, making sure that it was still just as he had known it. The weapon was an heirloom that had been passed through his family for several generations, and it was the key to harnessing the full strength of this powers. He was not going to let human scientists take it from him.
He swirled the meteor hammer like it was an extension of his hand, and the weapon began to glow. He smashed it down onto the scientist’s back, which severed the man in two and turned him into little more than a scattered cacophony of bones and viscera that coated the room in a macabre crimson stain. The computer and all of its data were part of this mess, bits and pieces of metal and plastic akin to confetti.
Crash grinned. The weapon worked just as well as it always did.
With his weapon in hand, Crash felt a surge of energy as he stormed out of Room 046 and re-entered the hallway. A squadron of five soldiers had convened on his location. Crash swung his meteor hammer on the ground in front of them. It cracked the floor and burst another water pipe, showering the soldiers with a scalding spray. Crash charged through the water and beat his assailants into little more than a warm paste that could be dissolved into the now-blood red water flooding the floor.
He reached a stairwell and kicked in the door. He started climbing upwards, his metal boots clanging against the steps. A shotgun blast from behind grazed his left boot, causing him to roar out in pain and fall down. There was one guard left behind him, who pumped the gun again and aimed at Crash’s head which lay on the floor. But before he could fire, Crash gripped the side rails of the staircase and the earth began to rumble once again. A crack opened up in the floor. The guard fell to his knees before he could get the second shot off. Debris from the landing above crashed onto his head, crushing it like a small bug. Crash grinned.
He slowly got to his feet and limped up the metal stairs which were still intact. He stepped over the hole in the floor and climbed up another floor. A big red letter M painted on the wall made him smile. He was right.
Before kicking open the door, Crash peered through the window. The building was in lockdown now, and he could see that the doors on this floor were all locked tight, every one of them. He would have to climb higher.
Crash gritted his teeth and bore the pain as he climbed up another story. The stairwell to the basement floors had collapsed completely by this point, no one had followed him. He had at least some time, although he knew it wasn’t a lot.
He reached the second floor and looked into the window. This floor was also in lockdown. As was the third. He glanced up at the rest of the stairwell. There were at least five or six more floors, and he could not climb that far in this condition. He’d have to settle for this third floor.
He bashed the door open with his hand and instantly knocked down a guard standing behind it. He remorselessly stomped on the guard’s face with his good leg before he could react.
But as Crash looked around, he saw he was trapped. The doors on either side of him were shut, locked with biometrics. And the guard he had just murdered was in no state to open them.
He thrashed against one of the doors with his shoulder. It was dented but not broken. Crash growled. He smashed at it again. All the guards in the building were now being summoned to the third floor to deal with the unruly rhino. He saw them gather on the other side of the door, which still did not break. He was surrounded, he was trapped.
The door on the other side of the hallway also had dozens of guards behind it. There was only one thing Crash could do now.
He smashed his fists together and pounded them on the floor. A massive crack formed and spread like a bolt of lightning. It spread to the walls and up into the ceiling. The panels of the false ceiling collapsed and fell. The real ceiling itself also split down the middle, exposing the floor above; also under lockdown, as expected. Crash lifted his fists and smashed again. The door that was now protecting him from the soldiers began to split. The floor started to completely crumble, and the building itself shook. Crash grinned.
He smashed the meteor hammer into the ground adjacent to the crevasse, creating another break that moved perpendicular to the existing one. This inched towards the door and eventually started to split it in two. The soldiers beyond shot at Crash, and he picked up a slab of the floor to use as a shield. The cracks spread and spread throughout the building like a fungus, as Crash kicked and stomped more and more. As the slab he held broke from the bullets, Crash threw it at him and knocked him down. He followed up with another smash of his boots into the floor, which turned the floor into a powder. He stepped back from his handiwork and grinned as the building itself started to crumble.
The soldiers, who kept firing, lost their footing and started to collapse into the rubble. Crash did as well, though for him it was akin to jumping into a pool to swim. He smiled as the pile of rubble grew larger and the screams of soldiers and other government goons grew louder. He easily slid to the bottom of the pile of rubble and saw the outside world for the first time since his capture. He was in the middle of a seemingly endless desert with nothing but sand on all sides of him. All the cars in the parking lot had either been crushed, or were too small for him to fit into. He had to walk back to civilization, following this one lonely highway. But before he left, he turned around and smiled at what he had accomplished. This ominous government building was now a slag heap with hundreds of bodies entombed within, and likely no hope for them. He didn’t care. He wasn’t in an altruistic mood, and anyone he helped would probably still try to persecute him.
Two guards by the sole checkpoint were the only ones still alive and free. One of them shot at Crash, the other stood there, terrified. Crash hurled a piece of rubble at the shooter and killed him instantly. The other man remained still. Crash gave him a glare like Medusa, turning the man as stiff as a statue.
“Give me your ID,” Crash ordered. The trembling man did so, reaching into his pocket to grab his wallet. He slowly took out his government ID and put it in Crash’s gloved hand.
“Martin Wall…” Crash slowly read off the name. He crushed the ID card like a cracker in his glove. “Say nothing.” Crash demanded. Martin stood there, scared and confused. He slowly retreated into his guardhouse as Crash watched. He crouched underneath the window and started to sob.
The sobs and the moans of dying feds were overshadowed by the rumble of two arriving attack helicopters, come to survey the damage and put down the escapee. Crash growled as the saw the two approach. He waited for them to approach before picking up a large piece of debris and using it to temporarily shield himself. It fired its guns, breaking shards off the mass of rebar and concrete. Crash grunted as some of the bullets and shards pierced into him. Nevertheless, he hurled the patch of debris like a discus, expertly shattering the windshield of the helicopter’s cockpit and squashing the pilot against the back wall. The helicopter immediately started to tumble to the ground and crashed next to an APC full of soldiers that was racing down the desert highway towards the facility. The force and shrapnel pushed the vehicle onto its side.
Crash had to capitalize on this. He rushed over, his metal boots clanking against the hot asphalt. He tore the back door off the APC and charged the stunned soldiers. Their body armour couldn’t help them against the rampaging rhinoceros, and they were sitting ducks, even as they tried to shoot at him.
Crash then pounded through the bulkhead and gored the APC’s driver right in the face. He fell dead, instantly. The rhino was too big to turn around in the cramped vehicle, instead he kicked the cracked windshield and forced himself through that.
Crash turned around from the trashed APC and calmly walked out into the desert, following the highway. He didn’t look back at the base at all. It eventually faded beyond the desert horizon, as did the hundreds of bodies and the secrets they contained within their files and their brains. It was all one large slag heap soon to be consumed by the shifting sands and oppressive heat, in contrast to the free rhinoceros who had taken his vengeance.
***
Crash entered Los Angeles in a stolen police car, barely big enough to fit his colossal frame. He had taken it from a state trooper who saw him walking down the I-15. The cop had pulled him over, which began an altercation that ended with the cop’s head in a saguaro and his body in a prickly pear.
The car weaved through traffic with haste, the sirens blaring. He kept his head as low as he could while hunched over in the car. He smiled as he blew through red lights and cut people off with impunity. With the sirens blaring, he could do anything he wanted.
And what he wanted was the visit the barrios of East LA. As the clock turned over to midnight of the next day, he turned off the I-5. He shifted his body in the car as he looked behind him for any cops or other feds, and when the coast was clear he turned off the sirens.
Crash cruised silently around the neighbourhood. Almost all of the lights were out as people went to sleep on this quiet Wednesday night, now turning into Thursday. Crash’s destination was one certain house, a small stucco building surrounded by a brick fence. The orange tiles on the roof were hard to see under the dim moonlight and burnt-out streetlamps, but Crash knew the route to this place by heart. He ditched the cop car nearby, in an alley between a gas station and a payday loan place. He was barely able to get his gigantic frame out of the door, squished up against a brick wall covered in graffiti of gangs he had both battled and aided in the past.
He left the car in the alley, shrouded by darkness, and walked out to the street. His destination was just three houses away down the block. The side light in this one-storey building was the only one lit. Crash sauntered up, his small rhino tail wagging, and quietly knocked on the door.
After a few moments, the front hall light turned on and the door unlocked. It was opened by a black and white tegu, about the same height as Crash and almost as bulky. His sweaty scales were covered by a grey tank top bearing the Rams logo, and a pair of boxer shorts.
“Oh my god…” the tegu said, his eyes widening. “Crash, I thought you were dead!”
“So did I, Diego.” Crash responded with a chuckle. The big rhino hugged his boyfriend tightly, and the tegu responded in turn. The tegu lightly pulled Crash inside and nudged the door shut with his foot. Diego turned off the light as they passionately kissed.