As a joke, the doctors trained one of the monkeys they had nursed back to health to raise the flag over their observation post at dawn and lower it at dusk.
That monkey taught the other monkeys to perform this trick, and pretty soon there were flags all over the research center, raised and lowered by monkeys.
When one of the scientists tried to lower the flag by himself, the monkey bit him.
That scientist is known as Patient Zero in the records.
Not that there’s anybody left to read the records.
The monkeys still raise and lower the flags.
Tag: horror
The Predator
The predator lay in a growing pool of his own blood, flowing over the photos and newspaper clippings he’d taken to remember his crimes.
I’d shot him in the hands, the feet, the legs, the arms.
He begged for mercy as I reloaded my gun.
I ignored his pleas and the growing sound of sirens.
He then found some courage. “Who are you to judge me?” he growled, “You have blood on your hands too.”
And, so I did.
“But it’s your blood,” I said. “Hardly innocent.”
And then I shot him in the chest, again and again.
Click. Click.
The Mechanical Arm
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The mugger tried to take the girl’s purse.
She fought back.
And lost, with a bullet in her heart.
Despite the fact that the girl in the street was dead, her mechanical arm was still running.
The AI routine was cycling through idle behaviors, drumming the fingers on the ground, opening and closing on its own.
She liked to wear gloves, so the lifelike sleeve with the tattoos ended up convincing the mugger that she was still alive, so he shot her a few more times.
The hand kept moving, twitching, and the mugger picked up her purse and ran.
The Dead Bird
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I’ve had this bird for years.
Used to be pretty with bright white feathers.
One morning, I lifted the cage’s cover and it was lying there on the bottom of the cage, ugly and dead.
I was about to open the cage when I saw it twitch.
I’d seen this in the news: zombie birds.
If it hadn’t have twitched, it would have bitten off a finger or two.
I padlocked the latch to keep it from escaping.
Now, it just claws and bites at the bars of the cage, getting scrawnier and uglier over the years.
Fifty bucks? Deal.
The Great Claw
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The Great Claw wobbles over our ravaged city.
Every now and then, it descends and grabs at a car or a building and yanks it up into the sky.
Invading the world wasn’t enough for the aliens, so they put it up there to torment us.
“The rest of the world is dead,” said the message. “But you’ll keep us amused while we extract the necessary isotopes for our next journey.”
Scientists at the university tried to come up with defenses, but The Great Claw ended those plans.
It rained bricks as the research center was hauled up… and up…
The Last Photograph
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The Conquest Museum on the Zagitz homeworld has many exhibits, but the most popular is the last remaining human DNA sample.
Drones guide their podlings to the guarded platform for a peek at the vial in magnetic suspension.
The thing is, that’s not the real sample. It’s just for display purposes.
Some claim that the real sample is in a research asteroid where the government is cooking up new batches of humans to stage fake invasions.
But the truth is, there’s no human DNA left. The humans were annihilated decades ago.
The conspiracy theory makes a good bedtime story, though.
Bystander
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Who names a child Innocent Bystander?
I look over the victim’s medical records and shake my head.
A car jumped the curb and mowed down a bunch of kids on the sidewalk.
They all suffered broken arms and legs except for one: little Innocent here, laying on the gurney.
His parents have asked for no autopsy. It’s obvious that the driver is to blame for the kid’s death, right?
Except that he’s not.
The kid was standing in the middle of the street, and the driver swerved to avoid him.
Afterwards, Innocent was beaten to death by an angry mob.
Food chain
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Several months after the oil spill, the government kept the real environmental impact assessments suppressed.
President Blaine grinned as he stood before a table piled high with steaming shrimp and crabs.
He rubbed his stomach, full of salad that he’d eaten on the Air Force One flight down to the photo op, and said “Delicious!”
The studies, on the other hand, screamed “Dangerous!”
Plankton contaminated.
Small filter-feeders contaminated.
Bigger fish contaminated.
Predator species contaminated.
All to lethal levels. Total breakdown.
Back in his New Orleans mansion, The Vampire Lord drummed his fingers, grumbling “Damn these humans and their suicidal stupidity.”
The Arch
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I watched as the Gateway Arch came to life.
It pulled at the anchor pads, legs straining and buckling from the effort.
People were streaming out of the emergency exits as one foot broke free and stamped at them.
A few people got crushed before the Arch pulled up its other leg from the ground.
Free at last, it roamed the city, crushing cars and buildings while news helicopters circled it.
The Arch couldn’t do much to them, being an arch without hands or laser-beam eyes.
So it rampaged on as the generals watched and said “It’s only St. Louis.”
Mister Invisible
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Mister Invisible is a member of our superhero team, but I’m not sure why.
He will only attend meetings when we use a sign-in sheet and lock the conference room doors.
It’s an insult, he says. We don’t make Mystic Seer demonstrate that he’s not astrally projecting away, right?
Right.
I checked the call logs and saw that he hasn’t been calling The League Of Evil as much as he used to.
So, I inspect his suite, and find the cell phone.
And the nuclear bomb.
“It’s armed,” he says, and hits me in the back of the head.
Blackness.