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Tue, 20 Aug 2024 00:43:09 GMT

The Corpse Flower

When Joshua Maness saw the naked person in the middle of the garden, he immediately raised his rifle at them.

“HANDS UP! DON’T MOVE!” He shouted at them in the angriest tone he had, muffled by the mask he wore.

Josh crept closer to the unresponsive intruder, thumbing a dial on his weapon that focused his torch directly at his target, the beam narrowed to a blinding intensity.

“I SAID HANDS UP! YOU ARE TRESPASSING ON PRIVATE PROPERTY AND I WILL SHOOT YOU!” Josh was close enough to see that the trespasser had their head tilted directly back, staring straight up at the night sky, at an unsettling angle. Josh decided that this behavior, combined with the fact that he could not see their hands, was cause enough for him to take action.

He pulled the trigger repeatedly, aiming for the head and center of mass to quickly neutralize the potentially lethal threat presented by this criminal.

After a six round burst Josh nearly released his firing grip on the gun as he realized the perp was still standing, somehow, so he fired again, the muzzle flashes strobing, flickering glimpses of the darkened maze of lush vegetation surrounding him.

“What the fuck…” Josh gasped, now holding his gun loosely and staring not through the sights, just gawking at the work he had done.

The body, he could see now, had at least 6 holes, grouped mostly in the middle of the torso, and the holes were oozing. Not bleeding, but slowly dripping an oily fluid, staining the pale color of the skin as it trickled down the naked, hairless person that had barely flinched with each hit, no real reaction at all besides the shudder of kinetic force dissipated as the bullets slipped cleanly through with almost no resistance at all.

An LED blinking urgently on his radio snapped him back into focus and he raised his rifle again, quickly scanning the surrounding area, snapping the torch back to wider illumination. Reaching down he fiddled with the radio and his earpiece crackled.

“Maness. Maness, come in Maness, what is your sitrep and why the fuck isn’t your radio on?”

“Intruders. I don’t know how many, drugged up and probably armed.”

“What, fuck you man, that’s not possible.”

“Listen, whoever you are, I just found some kind of fucked up statue those rioters must have smuggled in here and set up.”

“...You shot a fucking statue? Holy shit man, are you… You fucking dumbass.”

Josh reached down and turned off the radio, swearing under his breath as he continued securing the perimeter. Eventually he returned to the statue, approaching it cautiously. The “skin” had a waxy texture and the features, while realistic enough to fool Josh at first, were vague and uncanny, like something generated by an AI. Proportions were wrong in subtle ways, the eyes were closed and Josh could not look into the mouth because of the angle of the head and the height of the statue. It was convincing enough but Josh had no doubt that most of it was 3D printed, assembled and then whatever the waxy exterior “flesh” was had been molded onto the skeleton. But as he closed in on it he froze, a sound catching his ears and causing him to quickly stumble away from the statue towards a nearby tree, taking cover behind it.

The low, subaudible hum he had heard, he now realized as he swept his light over the wounds, was not some kind of electronic device inside that posed a threat. It was flying insects, dozens of them, dark and unidentifiable in their erratic dance around the statue, swooping towards its open mouth and disappearing into the bullet holes so fast that he only glimpsed long legs and barbed abdomens being swallowed up.

Josh was suddenly sick, his mask no longer an empowering gift of anonymity and protection but suffocating him as the mid-August evening, at first a blissful respite from the blazingly hot day, had become a heat-heavy weight, the notorious Saint Louis humidity ignoring the expensive, moisture wicking fabric of his tactical uniform, drowning him in sweat. He desperately needed to get out of this place, to return to the air-conditioned comfort of the guard station, to never see or hear these insects again. But he also knew that he was now part of the ensuing investigation this incident would result in and that report would read that he had left this scene unsecured, allowing the criminals who’d broken into the facility to erase evidence of their presence. Hoping to ambush anyone who came back for the statue, Josh turned off his torch then reluctantly turned his radio back on.

“Send someone to Trophic Nursery South now, stay alert, get Utley here as soon as possible. They put some kind of syrup in this thing and it’s attracting insects, probably not good for the testing…”

“Hello?”

The sweat in the small of his back went ice cold as fear froze him in place. The channel was open and a radio was on, but no one was speaking, just breathing shallowly, raspy, and there was a familiar hum in the background, but deeper and lower, unified, increasing in volume like it was approaching…

He frantically shut off the radio. There was silence.

He slowly looked up at the statue. Something large was perched on top of it. The buzzing had stopped. All the other insects were gone. In the darkness, he heard a wet sliding sound coming from the statue, and then the sound of the remaining fluid being extracted from inside the statue by the thing with its long, spindly legs lifting it. Its massive wings began to vibrate as its abdomen pulsed, slowly expanding.

The synapses had just fired and sent impulses to his nervous system telling his muscles to lift the gun in his hands when the giant insect leapt directly at him, drilling its diamond hard proboscis straight through the visor of his mask, puncturing the superior orbital fissure behind his right eye and plunging directly into his brain.

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 00:42:51 GMT