"Dawn of the Dinosaur Escape"

I always thought nightmares faded with daylight. Turns out, sometimes dawn brings stranger horrors. Or maybe revelations. That line blurred the day I woke up with claws instead of hands.

The sterile light stabbed my eyes. I remembered flashes—masked faces, metallic tang, the muffled whir of machinery. The last thing I recalled was stumbling through the park with Eli and Jules, laughter echoing between oak trees, until a van screeched to a halt beside us. Then darkness.

I blinked. My arms were massive, ending in sickle claws. My skin stretched taut, a greenish, pebbled armor not quite human. I pushed myself upright, tail thumping heavily against the glass wall. My reflection stared back: narrow snout, rows of jagged teeth, a ridge soaring along my back and tail. Spinosaurus—a beast I’d loved as a child, thunderous and solitary. My name's Ray. Now, I was a nightmare given flesh.

“They did it,” came a tremulous voice from behind a glass partition.

I twisted, heart hammering. Eli stood shakily in the next cell, seven feet tall, draped in feathery blue-black scales and razor talons. Deinonychus, I realized—his favorite. And beyond him, Jules, a squat figure with three massive horns, her body plated, unmistakably a triceratops.

We stared at one another. If not for our voices, I’d never have known them. I pressed my muzzle to the glass. “You guys… okay?”

Jules blinked heavy-lidded yellow eyes. “I… I think?” She tested her new bulk, sending puffs of steam from her nostrils. “What the hell happened?”

Steps approached. We froze, reverting to primal terror. Doors slid open, and a scientist in a lab coat, flanked by tranquilizer-wielding guards, entered. He gazed at us like rare jewels.

“Congratulations,” he announced, scribbling on a pad. “You three are the biggest success we’ve had. Fully conscious, voluntary morphs, prehistoric DNA spliced without side-effects.” His eyes glittered. “If our government contracts pan out, you’ll be the future of bio-weapons.”

I launched at the glass, rage and instinct surging. The cell shuddered but held.

“Easy,” he crooned. “Try it again—voluntary transformation. Think human.”

I clenched my mind around memories: Eli’s bad puns, the way Jules used to twirl her hair—anything that screamed humanness. My body rippled. Pain. Claws curling back into fingers, scales peeling into flesh. The world contracted. When it stopped, I slumped, shivering, hands splayed against the cold glass.

Eli and Jules panted in their own cells, their transformations equally violent. But we stood, human again. Afraid. Angry.

The scientist nodded, satisfied. “Very good. Adaptability confirmed.” He snapped his fingers. Guards led him away. As the doors sealed, I peered at the lock, noting the panel, its sequence flashing.

“We have to get out,” I whispered.

“Before we’re weapons, not people,” Jules agreed. Her voice trembled with barely checked panic.

I paced the cell, testing muscle memory. Even as a dinosaur—something ancient in my veins craved the marsh, warm water, the kill. But my mind was mine. I wasn’t their monster.

The next day, two orderlies entered to move us—separate testing, they said. It was our chance.

“Now?” Eli mouthed, already shifting. His skin darkened, feathers bursting. He let loose a guttural shriek, launching himself at the nearest guard, talons first.

I let the spinosaurus take over. My snout lengthened, claws exploding from my hands. I bull rushed the second guard, sheer size bowling him over. Adrenaline camouflaged the horror as I pinned him, overwhelmed by primitive bloodlust—until I caught my reflection, sharp-toothed and alien.

“Ray!” Jules thundered, already a bulldozing triceratops, bucking the cell door off its hinges.

We stormed the halls, transformations flickering as necessary—fast and nimble, brute and armored. Alarms blared. Bullets ricocheted off Jules’s plates; Eli slashed anything in their path. I barreled through new doors, senses alive to every metallic smell, every trace of humid air from the lab’s climate-controlled environments.

The facility sprawled. Concrete tunnels, labs lined with observation booths and blinking monitors. We lost count of guards, of shots fired. But nothing could stop a pack of dinosaurs—cunning, angry, working together.

We finally burst through a service hatch, finding the night and a swampy forest beyond. I breathed deep, letting the night air fill my giant lungs. My mind struggled between human memories and the thrumming call of ancient blood.

We ran all night, not stopping until we collapsed beneath ferns older than civilization.

In the hush before dawn, we huddled close, flickering on the edge of humanity and something else.

Eli, blood drying on his talons, laughed a wild, relieved sound. “Tell me this isn’t the best escape story ever.”

Jules snorted, still giddy. “Let’s get to a phone first.”

And me? I realized I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be cured. There was a freedom in muscle and tooth, a power unimagined, a terrible new self coiled inside my DNA.

But for now, with friends at my side, I chose to be human. For now.

Tomorrow, we’d decide what to do with the monsters—and the heroes—we’d become.

This story was generated by user kade with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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