He didn’t know why he agreed to this. Some kind of bravado in the moment, maybe he thought it was a joke. But then he had been picked up along with five other men. They had been driven to a warehouse. There were several dozen more men there. Not one hundred. Not yet. They were still being collected. There were cameras along the walls and ceiling. It was well lit. There were no weapons around. They would be fighting hand to fist.

He looked up and got an exact number on how many of them there were. It was a large digital counter. On one side, it said 76, the other it said 0. Eight more men were brought in and the number jumped to 84. After about an hour of waiting another 16 came in and the number was now 100.

The men were standing around, talking strategy. Psyching themselves up. They were getting ready. Some of them were stretching. A voice came over a loudspeaker.

“Attention, we have collected the 100 men. It is now time to introduce the gorilla.”

There were a pair of double doors and they swung open. The gorilla came running into the room. Loping on his enormous fists. He had seen pictures of gorillas but he had never known had big one could be. Its muscles moved under its skin and hair.

Many of the men no longer seemed confident in their abilities anymore. They moved around and shifted amongst themselves. One of them was shouting for them to rush the gorilla. That they could overwhelm him.

About twenty of them, not including the one that called for them to do so, charged. The gorilla beat his chest and roared. The first one got to the gorilla and he had his neck broken by the gorilla’s enormous fist. He fell to the ground, stricken and dead.

The rest of them didn’t make much difference. The gorilla fought them with fist, hand and fang. Soon there was so much blood that it came to his shoes. Shouts of triumph soon faded to screams of terror.

At one point, the gorilla was swinging one of the men into the others. He never tired. He never slowed. When they ran, he chased them. He looked up at the digital counter and watched as it went down to 20, then 15 and finally 1. He stood in the middle of the warehouse alone. The gorilla was punching a corpse in the corner.

When he was done, he walked towards him. The last man standing. The gorilla came with the speed of inevitability. There was no running from him. There was no fighting. They were fools to think that they could contain this force of nature. When the gorilla got to him, it clasped his head in its mighty paw.

“I’m sorry, I was a fool,” he said through his tears.

*squish*