Here's the first, a short little story about a new type of deadl-ydorable assassin. Enjoy!
The Assassin
Silently and slowly, the it emerged from the shadows. Its
eyes were red and it wore a hooded
cloak. A creature of anonymity. No one saw the being enter the room and no one
saw it leave. The evidence of its visit lay scattered on the floor, enveloped
in warm red blood. No one had time to scream.
The lights flickered on and the horrified observers gave a
collective murmur of approval. The organisers of the demonstration sauntered
into the glass-walled observation room. They were an unlikely couple; a
bespectacled man fidgeting somewhat in the shadow of his companion. The shadow
proved not an insignificant one to fidget in, being cast as it was by a giant gorilla
of a man squeezed into a bulging Army uniform. Standing behind him, the
scientist thought how he looked like too much meat packed into a sausage skin.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the gorilla began, “imagine that you
have just witnessed a murder in a London
street, rather than the death of an alsation in a zoo laboratory. The police
turn to you as the only witnesses. What in God’s name, they want to know, could
kill like that? Tell me, what did you see?”
The silence was marred only by the sound of six people
watching their own feet shuffling.
“Come now, I know the lights were dim, but you were all
watching closely. Did you see nothing?”
“It looked like… a child in a cloak. But no child could do
that. Not skin a dog like that.”
“And those glowing red eyes! It was evil, pure evil.” Cried
a lady from the back.
The Army colonel laughed, “not terribly helpful for the
policeman. He can’t put out an APB for a child with burning red eyes, can he?
And there will be no fingerprints, no incriminating hairs.”
“What was it?”
“What you just witnessed was the end result of Operation Tux
Terror. Everybody loves penguins, right? Well, who would ever have suspected
that deep inside Pingu’s brain is the capacity for – as the lady so cleverly
put it – pure evil?”
“A penguin?” They
all gasped as one. The scientist stepped forward.
“You’ve heard how humans use only one tenth of their brain
capacity and that if we could harness the other ninety percent our enhanced
intelligence would be phenomenal? Some time back, scientists discovered that
penguins exhibit a similar brain latency, which led to years of tests, to see
if we could “switch on” the lazy part of their brain. Recently we had a
breakthrough - penguins using a hundred percent. But we soon realised the whole
thing was a failure. Penguin brains are, obviously, very different from
humans’, but we had hoped that the “switching on” process would be roughly
comparable. It wasn’t. Nothing we could take from the experiments helped. The
research was abandoned, which pleased a number of scientists who were disturbed
by the penguins. You see, we’d assumed that with more brain power we would
become more intelligent, more able to control our own bodies. Yet all the
penguin enhancement resulted in was a capacity for…” he was loathe to use the
word they’d all been bandying about, but it seemed appropriate as he stood
facing an eviscerated dog “for great evil.”
The colonel stepped forward again, eager to continue the
story. “This is where the Army got involved. I’ve seen soldiers willing to do
whatever it takes. But I have never seen anything like these penguins. They
clearly enjoy killing. Our problem
was that they aren’t properly equipped. When the early prototypes were pitted
against dogs their desire for bloodshed was marred only by their lack of
weapons. Penguins are all smooth edges and flippers. Their beaks proved
vicious, but no match for the dogs. So we genetically engineered the perfect
killing machine. These penguins have thousands of needle sharp teeth on their
flippers and beaks. A penguin need only touch your arm and the hooked teeth
anchor deep into it, ripping the skin off with a flick of their flipper.
We knew that they would be useless if we couldn’t control
them, so each penguin comes equipped with a remote controlled shocker, so we
can send them out onto the streets without fear that they will skin every
innocent bystander.”
The scientist took over, “the very idea of penguin assassins
may seem crazy. But that is the advantage. Those smooth oval bodies slip easily
from grasping hands. Their tiny footsteps are silent. And with their
countershaded bodies, especially when hidden under a cloak they slip amongst
the shadows. The very fact that they seem so ill-suited is what makes them
paradoxically perfect for the task.”
The questions answered, the scientist left. He didn’t care
to think about the conversations that would be going on between a half-crazed
Army colonel and six of the richest, most influential figures of the country.
Officially they were being shown the research and given the chance to donate to
it. Unofficially…
The whole thing left a bad taste in his mouth.
___________
What’s black and white
and red all over? The zookeeper used to ask children as he approached the
zebras.
A penguin dripping with gore.
He fumbled with the tranquiliser gun. It slipped from his
hand, or rather what was left of it. A hand degloved of skin.
No one knew why the zookeeper had entered the laboratories.
Only he could answer that and at the moment he was hardly thinking straight.
The dart, badly aimed, went through the flipper. The injured
penguin advanced ferociously, his eyes sparkling. He had the man cornered in
the observation room, stumbling on the slippery remains of his own proffered
hand. In desperation he threw the gun at the looming shape.
“Die, godammit! Die, you monochrome bastard!” But the
penguin had no intention of dying.
The man’s last thoughts were of sunburned nuns and of God’s
sick humour.
Oh cool! I remember this from ages ago shortly after I first met you, it's still really good.
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