Rottentail 25

They buried Dr. Peter Cotton in a shallow grave behind the biotech lab, his body still twitching, still mutating. The serum had done more than transform him—it had rewritten him. Twisted DNA and repressed rage fused under the dirt, fertilized by betrayal and humiliation. The town of Easter Falls thought it had seen the last of the monster they called Rottentail. But monsters, like legends, don’t die easy. And revenge—like rot—grows best underground. When the first rabbits vanished from the farmland and the preacher’s son was found with a carrot jammed through his throat, the locals whispered. By the third night, they screamed.

He didn’t walk so much as lurch—part man, part rabbit, part rotting dream. But this time, Rottentail wasn’t stumbling blindly through vengeance. He remembered everything. The bullying. The experiment. The laughter. The way they all looked at him like he was nothing before he became this. And he had evolved. No longer a mistake, no longer a joke. His fur was coarser, his claws longer, and his mind sharper than any blade. He began his resurrection not with murder, but with performance. Flyers appeared overnight: “Come See the Easter Miracle: One Night Only!” The town came curious. They left in pieces.

But somewhere beneath the blood, the madness, and the twitching whiskers, Peter still existed. Or at least, something that remembered being Peter. In stolen moments between carnage and carnival, he would look in a mirror—cracked, smeared, cruel—and see the boy who only wanted to be seen. He wasn't just killing to punish the town. He was trying to carve his way back into the story they wrote him out of. The pastor who denied him. The teacher who failed him. The girl who laughed instead of listening. Each death was a chapter, each scream a page. He was rewriting his origin. With teeth.

When the fire finally came, when the church tower collapsed into ash and fur, no one could tell if Rottentail had burned or simply vanished. But in the silent spaces of Easter Falls, the story lingers. Eggs rot on doorsteps. Burrows appear in basements. Children swear they hear laughter through their baby monitors. And each spring, when the moon is full and the earth is soft, parents lock their doors and hope their sins weren’t too loud. Because Rottentail is more than a monster now. He’s a myth. And myths, once born, never really die—they just wait for someone to believe in them again.