Devolve

The green of the trees was only becoming eerier and more dense as we struggled with every step on the glazed rocks.

"I'm not going with you," the hairless monkey snapped. It's getting colder and I've had enough of this so-called trek." He mumbled angrily. His speech was only getting more unintelligible through the day, and sometimes he would screech in disagreement. I turned with a betrayed look on my face. Moving my head was becoming a pain now since the horns on my head were growing faster. I could now feel the weight of it every time I turned, so I would need to turn more gently now, else I would gravely injure someone walking around me. His colleague, now almost half wolf, agreed with him with a low growl and glared at me with a stare that surely did not mean well. Did he just grow another set of fangs there? I swallowed in fright and looked away as a shiver ran down my spine. I stretched my neck upwards towards the trees. The sun was nowhere in sight, it was cloudy and getting colder. All I heard was the stream nearby and the cribbing of the circus that we have morphed into. "Look, I saw a light in that hill ahead. It has to be someone's house, and not another shed. Can we try for that, before we are totally unable to communicate like humans?" The monkey sulked even more now. I could barely tell who he was in the original human form.

Twenty days back, our group of four had wandered off into a banned area called White Hill, which was cordoned off by a pharmaceutical company, for testing. How it got clearance in the mountains was news for a long time in the media. The public relations wing of this drug company later came out with a press release claiming to be an environment benefit crusader with a green vision, and got itself a stay order. We joked about the 'greens' it had to have that work for them. The factory was nested in the mountains beyond the national park where we were supposed to stay in.

The big metal and wood signs behind the barbed wires were clearly screaming danger, but could not hold back the wannabe, adventure-seeking Rambos we were. What started as a dare had now turned into a living nightmare for us. Much to our horror, we have transformed physically in the last ten days. I could only keep track of time with the scratches on my new grown hoof- a self-inflicted scar for every sunrise to keep track of the days. We had lost all our phones and gadgets, mainly because we were unable to hold them anymore, leave alone punch numbers into those keys which were too tiny for our hoofs and claws. The fruits and streams kept us alive, and transforming more. The natural conditions only seemed natural, but were not. Everything around us was laced with something that spiked more hormonal changes within us. In the maze like, never-ending forest, each of us was going through the growth stages that an animal would go through, and each of us was turning into a different animal. But the transformation seemed to have pickup up faster in the last 4 days. Our speech was turning incoherent and incomprehensible. We were responding to body language and smells more than the words we spoke. Our spines bent more towards the earth. We had been walking the mountains for nearly a week now, in one direction- east, and looking for any signs of hope.

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We were all completely human then. For a change, All four of us planned out our work related schedules and other priorities so we would go on a trek- maybe the last one. We were all getting older and the thought of walking with backpacks only exhausted us. It was time then, to do one last walk into the wild. City life has its dangers and wild sides too, but we were urban animals anyway. We wanted to climb a mountain, scramble up trees and rocks and be with the wilderness and the natural.
Little did we know, that it would be all we could be capable of.