The Snips

Jake and Annie were sat at the breakfast table fussing over the baby who was covered in nutella.

Grandad was sat there too. He'd been trimming bushes in the heat and was unusually quiet. Normally he would have at least cooe'd at the little one, but not this summer morning.

He had something else on his mind.

In front of him was his pair of garden secateurs.

He picked them up and stared at them.

What’s up Dad?

There was no response .

Suddenly he turned to the young family and shouted.

You’re all going to fucking die!

Taking the secateurs he placed his thumb between the blades and squeezed with all his might, the digit coming away with an audible crack, followed by a stream of hot blood spraying all over the family’s bewildered faces.

It was the baby who screamed first, then the two parents followed.

Grandad himself laughed like a hyena and sucked his wound, voraciously slurping his blood, as if it where fresh cold milk.

Over at the Maitland house across town, Gordy was sat on the stoop. It was already hot and he had shorts on. The five year old was a sullen soul and could usually be found skulking somewhere round the porch, shed or the garden with his sharp whittling knife.

His dad had already told him off about leaving sharpened branches everywhere, especially now they had a small pet puppy, which adored Gordy and was sat watching him whittle.

His parents where out back getting the bbq cleaned for a mixed grill that night. 

They’d both pulled a double shift at the AI particle factory, Ficials, that weekend and were desperate for some quality time. The older sister had babysat. Eighteen and quite capable, she could handle Gordy's moods better than them. Unusually she wasn't around and the parents concluded she must be sleeping in or having her nails done.

Suddenly they could hear the puppy barking loudly from the stoop, then growling and finally yelping in obvious pain.

Running round, their scrubbing brushes and buckets still in their hands, they stopped dead. 

Never in their lives had they seen such a scene of bloody carnage.

The puppy lay dead, it's small soft form impaled with a dozen sharpened sticks, two of them directly through its eyeballs.

Gordy looked up at his parents, his hands and knife smeared with red.

Look Mommy, look Daddy!

He smiled.

The boy had scraped away all the flesh from his left shin. Skin, muscle and ligaments, right down to the bone, which he was starting to shave off with precise strokes of his blade. 

The mother threw up violently and the father screamed till his lungs nearly burst.

They never saw the slick of blood coming from beneath the shed door, where the older sister had gone to with her nail scissors.

News of the incidents spread round the General Hospital, where the boy and the Grandfather were now both patients.

Somehow they seemed connected and when the third and fourth casualties, a pair of schoolchildren, turned up later that day, it seemed clear something strange was happening.

The schoolkids had been sat together in art cutting up coloured paper to make garlands for the upcoming Ficials factory fair. 

It was when another child screamed that the teacher was first alerted to what was going on. She walked over to the far table where the pair of kids had there backs to her. The screaming child was pointing at them and panting uncontrollably, hyperventilating.

The teacher came in front of her two students and instantly held her hand to her mouth and gasped. She could feel the bile rising up in her throat and tears form in her eyes.

The two schoolkids, laughing loudly and holding each other's hands, were happily snipping off each other's fingers in turn. 

The smaller ones had been severed and lay bleeding on the tabletop like fat leeches. 

The children where struggling with the thicker fingers, the school scissors simply not strong enough to bisect the middle, so they resorted to biting them off, the gruesome sound of teeth on bone being the last straw for the teacher, who turned white and fainted on the spot. The rest of the class ran out of the room screaming down the corridor, most stopping to vomit.

The doctors treating the cases concluded it was some form of mass hysteria brought on by the hot weather. 

The other patients knew better. There was something happening to the town. People were going nuts with scissors. They nick-named it The Snips.

The Snips took hold completely over the coming week and scores of emergencies rolled up at the Hospital with fingers, thumbs, ears, noses, lips and nipples all viciously self-severed. 

Some arms and legs were even missing in the case of two chainsawing lumberjacks. 

Some cases were much worse, with entire flesh masses hewn away. Like the poor butcher who had pared down all his limbs and neck to the low tendons using his own cleaver. It must have taken hours and the agony unimaginable. 

The most shocking patients were the triplets, who had found their way to the paper guillotine in the Kindergarten office. 

The three toddlers had systematically severed each of their hands, arms, feet, legs and finished by scalping each other and exposing their tender brains. 

The doctors had no idea how they had achieved this total degradation of their bodies or in what order they had done it.

What they did know was that there was something crawling over the top of their brain masses, something miniscule, sinister and incongruous. 

Before long the town came to a standstill and no-one turned up for work, either out of fear of what might happen or simply because they were lying in a pool of their own coagulating blood incapable of going anywhere.

At Ficials, the AI particle factory, Schnuff, the ageing CEO and greedy owner, sat in the penthouse office of his skyscraper HQ.

He was getting very worried. 

They had a deadline to meet with the Military that very afternoon. 

The General was coming and suddenly none of his workers had shown up. It was Ficials' biggest contract to date, making jungle-cutting AI nanoids and worth millions.

He couldn't afford to bodge it. 

Besides, his beautiful young buxom mistress was expecting a brand new state of the art helicopter of her own. He'd chosen it as his promised bonus on completion of the contract that very day!

He couldn't wait to finish the deal with the pompous General, who was delivering the chopper personally, so he could get home and deliver his own special bonus to his mistress! Boy oh boy, did she keep him young and supple.

The CEO's beleaguered assistant knocked.

Yes!

The General's on his way Sir.

Dammit! Where are the goddamn workers! I need that contract completing now you imbecile! 

I don't know Sir but we've another problem.

What for Christ's sake?

The single-house human trial we did last week involving the Grandfather and his bushes ...

Yes, what about if for fucks sake. Spit it out you complete idiot! 

The nanoids should have cut just his bushes but they've .. well, injured him ... and terribly.

What! How?

Turns out Sir, the AI we use is corrupted. It makes people cut themselves. There's even worse news though I'm afraid!

What could possibly be worse than that you cretin! How will I explain to the General that our nanoids cut human flesh and not jungle bush!

Well, I'm afraid the cutternoids, or at least a corrupt version of our product, have spread.

Spread? How can it have spread you fucking useless moron?

It's self-replicated Sir and the whole town is affected. The hospital is full of dismembered people and it's all because of our shit AI!

What did you say! Our shit AI! I'll have know.....

Let me show you Sir. Come over hear to the sink.

The furious boss stormed over, when suddenly his assistant grabbed his arm and shoved it forcefully down into the waste disposal unit at the side of the basin.

 Expensive cloth, gold cufflinks, Rolex watch and soft flesh all went in and the CEO screamed, as the whirring propeller minced and diced his entire limb to the shoulder, held down all the while by his howling worker. 

Schnuff staggered away from the unit, his open armpit gushing slews of hot blood all over his office. He shambled through the door to the exclusive rooftop, where the General was just started to descend with his promised bonus.

Oh, I forgot to tell you Sir, your mistress is already here on the helipad. 

The assistant then turned, pressed a button, forced open the lift shaft doors and sat on the edge, his feet dangling.

The rising elevator removed both his legs in one clean sweep. 

With bubbling crimson spewing from both his severed thighs, the assistant threw himself into the empty space screaming "Fucking useless AI!"

The CEO shuffled towards his girlfriend waving at him in the distance on the vast helipad. 

She hadn't seen the chopper, altogether state of the artificial and completely silent, hovering noiselessly high above her.

Shnuffi! Oh Schnuffi! When's it coming? When's it here?

The mistress was beside herself with excitement and for a fleeting moment the collapsing boss thought how beautiful she looked and that his corrupted nanoids had spared her.

Inside the cockpit, the General, himself now entirely crawling with cutterbots, took his army issue machete and sliced off both his own ears, his eyelids, his cheeks, nose and chin, flooding his hands with blood, which then poured onto the dash. The instruments all short-circuited with a bang and the helicopter instantly plunged downwards.

Schnuffi! Look! It's coming! It's coming!

The mistress had her arms up jumping for joy.

But Schnuffi was bleeding to death on the rooftop, mumbling just one thing over and over.

"Fucking useless AI!"

Within seconds the helicopter's rotors had dissected the girls hands, then her cranium, her brain and face, her head, her arms and shoulders, torso, waist, thighs and legs. 

Only her feet and shoes remained, stood perfectly still in a sea of scarlet, as the chopper collided with the helipad, exploded and took Schnuff's head clean off, his final thoughts still clear in his spiralling brain.

My fucking bonus!