allahu.cipher

Dr. Allen Jacobs sat in a street-side Trenton cafe in a salvaged old fur coat, a pair of cutoff shorts and a mickey mouse t-shirt watching the mayhem unfold.

It started innocently enough, a lone man running down the busy New Jersey thoroughfare, trumpeting through pursed lips and holding his stiff, open-palmed hand out before his nose to show his imaginary rhinoceros horn to the world.

But as the gases spread out in widening circles from the Grovers Mill laboratory where they were first unleashed, they caused the victims to take increasingly extreme measures. Social media filters were set to replace images of human flesh with scaly grey armor, and noses with boney, curved horns. More and more aspiring rhinoceri resorted to cosmetic surgery to look more pachyderm-like than their peers. Newly-formed clubs battled with one another in the streets, rampaging under the banner of their specialized crash: white rhinos, blue rhinos, Indian, Javan, and Sumatran rhinos.

As he sucked out the last few puffs of antidote from the plastic tube connected to a pouch slung over his back, two thoughts flashed across Jacobs’ mind. The first was, “This is all my fault.” And the second was, “It is a lovely shade of grey, isn’t it?”