No one knew the Oconee Nuclear Station had been running a secret lab for nearly eight years, morphing two different species of animals together. Then six months ago, someone found out, and instead of alerting the world and letting the authorities take their course, they freed these organic abominations. So there in the woods of Oconee County, South Carolina, these creatures were free to feed and fuck.

People would find a mix of a dog and a house cat in their yard or dead at the side of the road. There were mixtures of rabbits and goats. Horses and cows. Nothing dangerous, except for bears and coyotes.

The mayor assigned a special task force to round up the Things, as they had been termed, but there were so many of them and Oconee County had an exuberant amount of forest land.

I was on my boat one day with my wife, on Lake Keowee. We became super hot after fishing for about an hour, catching nothing, so we dove into the lake to cool off. As we cuddled in the water, I felt a sharp pain in my calf, then saw a small fin off to my left.

“What the fuck?” I yelled.

We both bolted to the boat, clamored on, then checked the wound on my leg. There was a chunk of flesh missing from the back of my calf.

I looked out at the water, saw the small fin again.

I rigged up my harpoon gun, waited for the fin to emerge again, waited, waited, waited. There it was. I took aim, fired, nailed it, reeled it in, brought that sucker to the deck. It was the ugliest damn fish I had ever seen, looked to be a cross between a sheepshead and a shark.

Then it dawned on me…

No one bothered to check the water for any of the Things.

I looked at the wound on my leg. The edges of it began to bubble.

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Laura Shell has been published in NUNUM, Maudlin House, X-RAY, Vestal Review, and Killer Nashville, among other publications. Her first anthology of paranormal stories, The Canine Collection, was released in 2024. She has another collection of short stories, titled So Far, So Good, So What? coming out on September 8, 2026. Laura is a prolific writer and submitter of flash fiction and the editor of the Flash Phantoms horror fiction site—www.flashphantoms.net. You can find more of her work at https://laurashellhorror.wordpress.com.