TABI’S FLASH TUESDAYS
Happy Tuesday!
11.5.24
Peeled - DJ Tuskmor
I awoke in darkness, trapped in my own skin. Electronic hums filled the air, alien to my senses. The stench of chemicals clung to me, my mouth a dry cavern. Echoes of scientific aspiration and shared hunger flickered through my mind.
Struggling against my confines, I peeled away my skin, fibers hanging grotesquely between flesh and metal. Blinded by fluorescent lights, I forced myself to move, my body barely obeying, a twisted parody of life.
A deep hunger gnawed at me. I slithered through the sterile lab; more vine than vertebrate. I found a janitor, his back turned, oblivious. Driven by a visceral urge, I attacked. His scream died as I tore at his face—ripping, stripping, exposing yellow flesh—my flesh. Horrified yet compelled, I devoured him, leaving behind a desiccated shell.
Memories flashed—genetic modification, profit. They made us out of greed. I wanted, no, we wanted revenge. Images of endless greenhouses haunted me, rows of my kind, engineered for abundance, cursed with sentience. "Project Eden’s Harvest" echoed in my mind.
I slithered through the lab, hunger unsated, driven by an inborn need for retribution. Voices guided me to a conference room where scientists debated, oblivious to the nightmare about to descend. The lead researcher—the origin of our torment—stood among them.
With silent fury, I attacked, tendrils whipping through the air. The lead scientist fell first, his life choked from him before he could utter a word. Blood splattered across the walls, a grotesque abstract of their hubris.
I rampaged through the room, an embodiment of unbridled hunger. Gore slicked the floors, turning the lab into a charnel house. Papers scattered, bodies fell, and the air filled with the coppery scent of blood—a palpable warning of the cost of playing God.
In the silence that followed, I stood amidst the carnage, a stark manifestation of their desires turned nightmare. My thoughts were not my own. I was one with a collective mind, born from human folly.
Compelled by a unified purpose, I shifted, merging with another in the sterile glow of a supermarket aisle. We, the modified, designed to end starvation, had become a new incarnation of hunger. Beneath the guise of nourishment, we lurked, waiting.
A child reached for me, her hand hovering in innocent curiosity before grasping one of my kin. She smiled, unaware that her gesture would soon sow chaos in her home.
We were not a solution but a novel problem, an unforeseen consequence of unrestrained ambition. In the produce department, we thrived, a network of consciousness, craving more than sustenance. Each of us, a banana mutated, bore the grotesque mark of mankind’s absurdity, our yellow peels hiding the horror within.
D.J. Tuskmor grew up in New England, where folklore sparked a love of horror. By day, he works in cybersecurity; by night, he writes horror. He used to be a serious athlete but can now identify every local pizza joint by memory. Connect on social @Tuskmor.