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Shelly (ape woman)

Shelly is an ape woman whom Jan Martense found drugged in the van of a dead man with NSA identification and later used to breed the ape-men of the Dahlonega gold mines.
Type NPC (creature)
Aliases Shelly; the ape woman
Affiliation Held by Jan's Conspiracy
Status Unknown (as of Walkers 01)
First appearance Walkers 01 (described in an interview)

Shelly never appears on screen. Everything known about her comes from Jan's account to Kurt at Black Site Omaha in Walkers 01.

Description

Jan named her Shelly and thought of her as "a bright chimp". She was "just a primate", with nothing supernatural about her, but she was very strong, unusually good at voice mimicry, and aged unusually quickly. This held even more true of her offspring. Jan says they "went through a lot of monkey food" (Walkers 01).

History

About five years before the case, Jan hit and killed a man in a black suit who was crossing a Georgia highway at night (see Dead NSA Man in Black). In the man's van he found an ape woman strapped to a gurney and being fed drugs. He kept her, hoping to make money. She aged fast, so Jan tried every kind of ape semen, posing as a representative of a Saudi buyer, and when nothing worked he used his own through artificial insemination. The offspring aged even faster, only the males lived, and a lab told him the chromosome numbers did not line up. The ape-men were strong and could recognize gold, which led to the mining operation beneath the Spud Hut plant (see Spud Hut Georgia Regional Distribution Center) (Walkers 01).

The ape-men's rapid growth matches what the animal handler Clive said in Appalachia 09: when brought to him they looked about six and were full-grown in about two months (Appalachia 09).

What remains unknown

Jan says only Clive and he ever saw Shelly alive "while not trying to kill you", and he gives no account of what became of her. The episodes never explain what she really is or why an NSA-linked man was carrying her drugged in a van. Kurt remarks that this ties Jan's story to the other man in a black suit the team hit on the road in Radford, who carried a flashlight that burns things.

Trivia

  • "Shelly" is also the name of Shelly Wilmarth, the dead mother whose apparent return drives the next arc. The episodes do not say whether the shared name is deliberate.

Appearances