Zoo

You’re okay, buddy. You’re okay.

Don’t sweat it. They drug you before they put you in here. Makes you super groggy and it’s hard to remember stuff.

Damn, you’re really out of it, aren’t you? Don’t you worry, pup. You’re gonna be okay. I’ll take care of you. Just relax. You’re safe now.

You’ll be fine. At least you’ll have me here. Before you got here, I had nobody…

*

It made my headache worse trying to clear the blur from my vision and figure out what I was looking at. I took a deep breath, stretched my tingling body and realized I was staring at the ground, up close--nose touching it.

The ground looked like concrete but it smelled like metal. It was warm and spongy to the touch. The jumbled sensory input amplified my confusion. I rolled over and looked up at--the sky? It iridescent purple and seemed to flow. I felt like I was going to fall into it; my fingers failed to find a grip on the smooth surface beneath me. I sat up and immediately regretted it as a headrush sent my head lolling between my knees.

“Russ!” said a voice I didn’t recognize. I was still swooning too hard to look up. “Hey Russ, buddy, get up! Gym time!”

I felt a warm calloused hand touch my back. I flinched and tried to look up. I could smell him: muscles and sweat, like a locker room. No deodorant. His funk made me think of the sixth day of a camping trip.

“Russ, you okay buddy?” Strong hands grabbed my shoulders and I didn’t have it in me to fight. I was glad; I still couldn’t look up, but his chubby paws suggested he was a real brute. He started gently stroking my back and lightly caressing my face. He was a stranger but his touch was so comforting I just leaned into it…

A bell softly toned. “Look, Russ, buddy, that’s the alarm. We have to get to the gym now or they’ll start with the shocks or deprive us of a meal.” He grabbed my shoulders and easily hoisted me to my feet. “Upsee-daisy, bud.”

He was the brute I expected: at least 6’5”, stocky build with a broad but firm belly, all of his thick form lightly spattered with soft black hair. He was balding but had a moustache, maybe 40 years old? (Or an ultra-fit 50, perhaps…)

I saw a big dick swinging between his legs with every step. He was naked. I was naked! Fuck, I couldn’t believe I was naked in front of this guy, leading me around like I was drunk, and hadn’t even noticed.

We were in some sort of cage; one wall of glass, three of polished chrome. I saw two cushioned piles--beds?--and a speaker in the corner, from which the bell sound came again. A section of one of the chrome walls slid aside and he frog-walked me in.

The room on the other side of the wall looked like a gym but with every detail slightly off: the plates were all squares, while the dumbbells were two perfect cubes separated by a handle. Nothing held the benches up; they just floated in midair. Like the room we came from, one wall was glass, looking out onto some sort of hallway. My big protector just grabbed a set of dumbells and started curling while I lolled in place. “Still shaking off those drugs, hunh?” he said. He had turned his body to face the glass but kept his gaze focused on me. “Listen, Russ, if we don’t start working out they start getting creative, so do something.”

I slumped to the ground and did a weak pushup, then another. The blood-flow seemed to lessen my headache. My pulse raising, a light sweat rising on my body, I started to feel my mental haze lifting.

“That’s a good man,” he said. “We gotta work those drugs out of your system, just like yesterday.”

I didn’t have it in me to be tactful: “Who are you? How do you know my name?”

The hirsute fellow started doing air squats with the dumbbells in his hands. “Brody,” he chuckled. “It’s okay. The drugs they give you before you come in really mess you up. This is my third time introducing myself to you.”

I headed to a bench and grabbed the edge, crunching my abdomen as I lifted my legs. “How long have I been here?”

“3 days,” Brody said as he headed over to a squat rack. He grunted loud as he pressed himself up from his ass-to-the-ground base of each rep. I felt myself getting hotter just watching that big body flex and heave weight.

“Jesus,” I said. “So… why aren’t you freaking out?” Then I added, “Why am I not freaking out?”

“Just keeping working,” Brody said. “Work harder, get more food. I think they’re actually rating our workouts but I clearly can’t read their language. When we’re finished something pops up on that window over there.

I couldn’t keep up, of course, each question swallowed up by 20 more. Brody wasn’t panicked so I decided I wouldn’t either. After what seemed like two hours of vigorous exercise, I heard a buzzer tone. A doorway opened back to the room I woke up in. Brody put an arm around me as he walked me in. There was a transparent disc bearing a glowing brick on each of the beds. Brody walked over to the larger bed and bit into his red brick. It didn’t look edible--or soft enough to chew, even--but he smiled as he chomped it back.

“Fucking steak and potatoes,” he said with a grin. “Oh, shit, they put some gravy in there too.”

My brick was pink with green speckles. It tasted like strawberries and got sweeter and frothy as it dissolved in my mouth.

“What’s yours?” he asked.

“Protein shake, I think,” I said, sinking down to my bed. “It’s good.”

“Yesterday I think you just got veggies--peas and carrots,” Brody said as he strode over and sat down next to me. He put a beefy arm around my shoulder. I’d never felt so comfortable with a complete stranger before. “I feel like the harder you work, the heartier the meal you get, but I can’t tell. We always get different food for some reason.”

I inhaled deeply. His bushy armpits were all I could smell. The sour funk seemed to soothe me. I leaned toward it.

“Damn,” Brody said, tossing the last chunk of his nutrient brick in his mouth. “Barely done with dinner and it’s already time to perform.”

He hopped to his feet and headed to the glass wall. I didn’t want to be alone--not even for a moment, not even just across the room--so I followed. On the other side of the glass two “people” stood there. They were pink like bubblegum and moved like molten wax, featureless except a mass that seemed like a head, a torso and stringy appendages where arms and legs should be.

Brody puffed up his chest, threw his fists on his hips and stood proudly for the two beings. He raised one fist to his head and bounced his bicep, then turned and hit a side chest pose. “C’mon, bud, they want a show,” he urged me, so I did the same.

Two weeks ago I was promising my boyfriend I was through with bodybuilding; now there I was, hitting compulsories for two silly-putty people. For some reason, thinking of Ethan wasn’t upsetting at all, as if I’d reached “acceptance” in the grief process while I’d been drugged. It was nice that this big mountain of a man was treating me with more warmth and tenderness than Ethan ever had. Plus, while Ethan was nice and ripped, I outweighed him about about fifty pounds. He used to make me feel so huge and strong, but now, next to Brody, sitting at a nice 240 rock-solid pounds, I felt like a pipsqueak--and I liked it.

After our observers left, the air smelled different, like clean linen. I started to feel groggy.

“It’s okay,” Brody assured me as he kneaded my shoulder. “They just want us to go to sleep. Be prepared to flex for them tomorrow.”

“Brody, I have about a million questions,” I said as my eyes grew heavy. He put a hand behind my head and gently lowered me to the bed.

“It’s okay, buddy. Just sleep. That’s the only thing that actually seems normal here.”

I felt his big body pull away from me and I was out, like my brain activity had flat-lined.

*

The next day there were crowds of putty-people gathered for us, so we hit some poses. At one point, big Brody beckoned me over, then hoisted me over his shoulder and started squatting me. Then he slung me to his front, holding me like I was a barbell, and started curling me.

Some of the putty people raised their hands to the lavender sky. “That means they like it, I think,” Brody said.

In the gym later, Brody shared his story: 49 years old, retired marines, retired cop, retired bodybuilder. Lifelong bachelor, although he’d always dated women before he ended up here.

“Wait, does that mean you started dating men after you came here?” I asked. He shrugged his big shoulders and winked while doing his fortieth rep of lateral raises, his beefy delts pumped beyond belief.

I told him my story: grad student, college linebacker, amateur bodybuilder; last I remember was getting drunk after my boyfriend dumped me. Last I recalled was chugging from a plastic bottle of vodka in my car, then waking up to Brody carrying me into the gym.

“Grad student for what?” Brody said as putty-people gathered at the window to watch us workout.

“Business,” I said. “I want to open a gym.” The statement hung in the air as the putty people raised their limbs in approval of my hanging leg raises. What a stupid thing to say in the present tense.

“I don’t think that’s ‘them,’ to be honest,” Brody said as the putty people wobbled away. “I think those are proxies, put out there to represent what we might think of as people.” I just nodded and finished my set.

He smacked my ass on our way back to our ‘room.’ I smiled, then raised an eyebrow. “For someone who’s only into chicks, you’re pretty chill about all this closeness to a naked dude.”

Brody blushed as he chomped into his brick. “I dunno, I guess it’s just nice having someone here with me,” he said as he chewed. “I think I was here a whole month before you showed up. I spent a lot of nights freaking out, lonely as hell, getting shocked and tranquilized when I didn’t do what they wanted me to. Now, I just go with the flow, and it’s better. So much nicer now that you’re here. I don’t even care what they want me to do.”

He reached out and tickled my balls with his cigar-sized fingers, then ran his thumb around the edges of my lips.

“A whole month?” I said, his gentle contact shooting lightning up my spine.

“No way of knowing,” he said. “I used to scratch lines into my bed but they kept changing them, adding hash-marks, then cutting them in half.”

Some putty people showed up again. I wasn’t even creeped out by them anymore.

“What is this, some psychological thing?” I asked. I didn’t need to ask Brody that there was something in the air, or in the food, that was keeping me docile, making me horny, and was probably doing the same thing to him. “Are we lab rats?”

“No,” Brody said as he threw an arm behind his head, exposing a deep, hairy pit, and pulled my head into it. “I’m pretty sure it’s a zoo.”

*

I think it was day 5--technically day 8, if I counted the three days I didn’t remember--when we got back from the gym area to see one big bed in place of our two.

“Looks like they approve of us being together,” Brody said as he reached toward the two trays. One brick was large and orange, the size of an actual brick; the other grey and about the size of a smartphone. Soon as Brody’s hand touched the brick, the big man jumped. “Shit!” he said. “It shocked me!”

We stared at the two trays silently. I heard Brody’s belly grumble. I was starved too.

“This a Pavlov thing?” I said as Brody reached for the big brick again--and jumped as he was shocked again. A loud buzzer sounded through the speakers.

“Why give us food if we can’t eat it?” Brody said to the speaker, scratching his head. “I’m fucking starving.” He sneered. “Fuck, this is the worst I’ve felt since… since you showed up.”

I took a deep breath, then darted my hand forward--grabbing the larger brick. No shock. A soft bell sound came from the speaker. “Shit,” I said, confused but happy to have food.

Brody grabbed the smaller portion, then sighed as he realized he was safe. “What, am I getting to fat?” he said, jiggling his solid gut. My eyes lit up as I took in his whole body. Ethan used to call me Thor; if that was the case, Brody was my Hulk.

“You look perfect,” I said as I chomped back the orange brick. It tasted like candy circus peanuts, which was unsettling, but each bite seemed to expand in my stomach. “You remind me of this lineman I played with in college, guy was huge, with the biggest--”

Brody put a hand on my shoulder as he shot up from his crouching position. He lumbered to the glass, finishing his food in two bites. I followed him but didn’t see the expected audience.

Across the area the putty-people usually gathered was another “pen” just like ours. Staring back at us from the other side of his glass wall was a ridiculously muscular man, smooth and tanned, with shaggy jet black hair and deep blue eyes. He pounded his fists against the glass.

For a moment, we stared at the newcomer while he stared back. Then Brody spoke up: “It’s okay!” he shouted. “Everything’s going to be fine! I’m Brody! This is Russ!”

The Italian stallion looked like he’d spent his time on the other end of a steroid needle. He dwarfed me easily, not quite as big as Brody but shredded beyond belief like an inflated anatomy chart.

“I’m Tanner!” the newbie said back. “This is fucked up! Why am I not freaking out? I should be freaking out right about now.”

A crowd of putty-people arrived and Brody and I started flexing and playfully rough housing for their enjoyment. Tanner seemed to figure it out as well, dancing like a stripper as he gyrated his hips, flexed his ludicrously shredded abs and then swivelled his hips, gyrating his unbelievably huge glutes.

I’m not sure if Brody saw my eyes fixate on Tanner’s absurdly blown-up physique or his hypnotic movements or not, but he shocked me by pulling me into a close embrace, swallowing me up with his massive arms and pressing my face between his melon-sized pecs. I felt like I was drowning in his muscles--and I surrendered to the sensation--when Brody grabbed our dicks together in his bear paw. He jerked us slowly, grunting and licking my face as I nibbled on his nipples and tasted his sweaty pits.

Nearly two weeks in this place and I’d never cum once, nor had I worried about it. Every day we flexed, ate, lifted, flexed, ate, and passed out when our captors told us to (or when the drugs pumped into forced it on us) and only then, as I held onto two muscular arms so thick I couldn’t fit my hands fully around them, did I finally give into sexual urges I’d forgotten had ever existed. Brody jerked us off expertly, holding me on the cliff of my orgasm for an eternity before letting me plunge into it. My smaller dick shot all over his belly; his big hog covered me in cum.

Across the way, Tanner, fingering his own massive ass, shot his own load to our scene. The putty people, their arms in the air since we’d begun our show, started bending at the middle, then rising to full height again. I could only assume that meant they loved the show.

*

“I don’t even care,” Brody said as he stripped a plate from the bar.

“Don’t sweat it,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. It felt so much smaller in my hand. “Maybe we leave the weight on it and I just spot you a ton? We force out some reps, trigger some growth…”

Brody turned, his eyeline at the center of my chest. After nearly a month of ever-shrinking food portions, Brody’s body had responded in kind. I ran a hand over his chest, surprised at how fine the hairs felt. Every day, as the pounds evaporated from his body, he also felt less hairy. He let out a sigh and rested his face on my big pecs, now covered with a soft pelt I’d never been able to grow before.

“No,” he said, “I legitimately don’t care. It’s like… whatever happens, I’m fine with it. As long as I get to be here with you.”

We spent that day lightening weights for my lightening lover. Meanwhile, I pretended to struggle with weights that seemed pathetically easy. I think he could see through my ruse, but he never brought it up. After we were finished, I returned to a portion of food the size of a ream of paper. Brody tried to eat his stick-of-gum sized meal in three bites, just to make it last.

“I think you’re bigger than I was before,” Brody said, looking up at me with moist eyes. I worried he was going to cry, but as I held him a wide smiled spread across his face.

“We’re both changing,” I reassured him, “so I don’t think either of us as changed as much as it feels like we did.” But in all honesty, I think I may have been 6’6” tall. My body had a thickness it never had before, my muscle bellies rounder and fuller than ever. I know my size was driving Tanner crazy; I was way bigger than he was when he showed up.

If I were to go home tomorrow, I thought as putty people came out in droves to watch us perform, I would get Jay Cutler in a headlock and really show off how huge my biceps were. I tried to think of the biggest bodybuilder I could--Morgan Aste? Josh Lenartowicz? Big Ramy?--and imagined bumping my big chest against theirs, knocking them back. What was I, 300 pounds now? I’d grown a little bit every day, blowing up with absurd muscle faster than I’d ever gained on gear back home.

I couldn’t wholly enjoy it watching Brody dwindle away. He was by no means skinny, still well-built but getting ripped like an underwear model. In bed he liked to ask me to roll over on top of him, just as I used to when we first started sleeping together. I remembered liking the feeling of all that mass on top of me, pinning me down but making me feel so warm and safe. I hoped he felt the same, and didn’t tremble under my swelling bulk, thinking it used to be his, wondering if one of these days I was going to squash him in my sleep…

Tanner waddled up to the glass, easily two-hundred pounds heavier than the day he arrived. He maintained his huge musculature but it looked like someone had shoved an air hose in his ass. All of his cuts had gone smooth, all of his muscle groups blowing bigger while a beach-ball sized gut accumulated in front of him. “Look at that big fucking muscle pig,” I said, my cock starting to rise.

“You like him even better now,” Brody said. It wasn’t a question. “Curl me,” he said after a few moments of silence.

Since our sizes had shifted, I hadn’t done anything in our daily putty-people shows to display my strength or Brody’s loss of mass. He had to elbow me to get me to do it, but as I flexed my arm, he hopped on and wrapped his arms around it.

I lifted him effortlessly, watching the veins standing out on my arm. Fuck, he was so light! Fuck, he was getting off on this!

“Remember back when I was the big bear keeping my little cub safe?” he said. I missed his deeper voice, but the higher timbre of his voice made my dick hard. God, I was so huge, so powerful, and Brody was nothing now--I didn’t need him anymore. But the feeling of power I had over him made my balls throb.

“Fuck me,” he begged as I glanced over at big chunky Tanner, slapping his warm, squishy ass and making it jiggle for the crowds. He lifted a soft man-tit and licked the nipple, flexing the massive pec underneath. Putty people melted into pools of bubbling slime, then rose back into a humanoid shape. Of course they loved our new bodies; they’re the ones who forced them on us.

As I grabbed Brody by his narrow waist and lowered him down to my dick, I suddenly felt the urge to rein in my power. Brody was still fit but nothing compared to my superhuman musculature now. I had to be careful not to snap him in half. It made my dick jerk imagining him back when he was the big one taking the same extra care with me. I came inside him so quickly, my load spewing out of him as a little dollop of cum fired from his dick and landed on the wide mound of my delt. As I pulled him off my cock, I heard a gentle POP the moment I was out. He wobbled like a newborn calf, so I just held him against myself. I crouched down and he lapped at his own mess on my shoulder, cooing as I surrounded him with my mass. He was like my little teddy bear now; had I ever been his?

*

The morning Brody was gone, I lay in my bed listening to the gentle moans of the stranger in my pen. It took me a moment to roll myself up on my feet; all this mass (probably over 400 pounds, I surmised) made me struggle like a flipped turtle every morning.

Finally upright, I groaned, took a deep breath in my massive lungs, and looked at the newcomer. He was small, fit, blonde, with a huge dick. I grunted as I finally rose to my full height (I guessed 7 feet but I had no way of knowing) and looked down at him.

His eyes fluttered, no doubt fighting off our captors’ drugs. I couldn’t help but notice his size in comparison to my quad (about equal, to be honest). I reached out and gently poked him, careful not to smash him.

There was no panic about Brody’s absence, no heartbreak that my little pet was missing. I knew they kept me sedate with whatever they put in the air, plus I had suspected this was coming for awhile.

Weeks before I noticed that, across the way, Tanner’s dick had shriveled to a little button, swallowed up by his massive flab. The big Italian\ still made my dick hard as I watched him undulate, barely able to stand, almost perfectly round but still so confident.

The same day it became undeniable they were grooming Tanner to be a bottom, we noticed Brody’s dick getting bigger. It had grown for a full week, even after his size lost plateaued at 5 feet and one-hundred sixty pounds, and neither of us wanted to admit what we knew was going to happen.

My new pen-mate had a chiseled jaw, an ass that brought back fond memories of my college quarterback in tight white pants, and a dick just about as big as mine. I reached out with my veiny hand--it may have gotten thicker over night, I can’t even tell anymore--and nudge his face, trying to wake him.

The bell for the gym went off before he was awake. I’d at least gotten out of him that his name was Jameson. He said he was a model. Looked like it, too; I could see him stuffed into tiny briefs, flexing in high-contrast in a pre-workout advertisement.

He was so out of it that he barely noticed the size of the big beast leering down at him. I figured that was better than having to talk him through the shock of being in the zoo, plus being with the world’s most massive man. I struggled to remember my first day conscious, although it was foggy. I needed to be as good to Jameson as Brody was to me.

In the gym, I propped up Jameson on an exercise bike and he went through the motions, barely able to hold his head up. He perked up as he worked out, working the drugs out of his system. I was ready to try deadlifting fifteen-hundred pounds but my heart ached that Brody wasn’t there to see it.

I stared at the weight on the floor and realized that I actually didn’t want to lift. I looked down at my uselessly enormous body--traps so huge I couldn’t even turn to take it all in, pecs so massive I couldn’t see past them anyway--and for the first time since I’d shown up in the gym, I didn’t want to lift.

I lumbered over to the glass, the ground shaking with every thunderous footstep, and look across the way to the other pen. Tanner’s corpulent bulk waddled at a snail's pace on a treadmill while little Brody did light calisthenics next to him. He looked so tiny next to that enormous blob of a man. Tanner reached out with a ballooned-out mitt to pet at Brody’s little body every couple of steps. Brody shivered. I wanted to tell myself it’s in disgust but even I was turned on by Tanner in that moment, obesity and all.

Some of it was in the food, some of it in the air they pumped in, but the zookeepers wanted me to be a musclebound freak. They wanted Brody to be tiny, and they wanted both of us attracted to Tanner’s ever-expanding ass. We were helpless to the pheromones they’d doused us with since we showed up, keeping us peaceful and obedient, wanting to avoid punishment and please our viewers.

I just pressed my hand against the glass. Across the way, Brody did the same, looking back at me. I’d never seen him look so sad before. They’d never allowed it. Putty-people gathered. I should have been working out, I knew, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the gaze of the lover they took from me. Five minutes pass and I wait for the alarm, wait for a shock, but nothing happens. The putty-people raise their arms and bend at the waist.

I hadn’t felt heartache in months, since the night I disappeared, because they didn’t allow it. Now it was immobilizing me--and our audience seemed to love it.

“Hey dude?”

Jameson’s voice snapped me out of my trance. He was still slightly dazed but I could see the confusion on his face. That’s what I must have looked like my first day, I thought.

“Relax,” I told him. “We’re gonna be fine. Just work out and keep them happy. They’re watching out there, and I think they love the show.”

He never asked who “they” were. I would tell him later. We would have time for questions. After the tone sounded, signifying the end of gym-time, I reached out a giant hand and took Jameson’s--god, he was beautiful. His eyes went wide as my huge cock got hard at his touch. Just the feel of his skin against mine made my skin tingle. Because they wanted it, I knew, but it didn’t matter. I needed to take solace in his companionship.

Back in our pen, I glanced across the way and saw little Brody pouring a bucket of slop into Tanner’s greedy mouth, his jowls wobbling as he guzzled it back. I wondered how long I could avoid ever looking across the way. Maybe Jameson could distract me.

“Is this food?” Jameson asked, grabbing the large brick on the tray next to his bed.

“It sure is,” I said, shocked at my food brick. It was the size of a deck of playing cards.

“I don’t know why but I’m starving,” Jameson said, gnawing at his cinderblock-sized rations.