Floyde thought the doughnuts tasted weird. Not like usual Krispy Krinkles. They tasted bitter...maybe a bit stale. But it was possible that Krispy Krinkle just got into a bad batch of dough. That didn't happen often, but it happened from time to time. And Mary had been nice enough to drench them in sugar. It made them worth the slightly bitter taste. In fact, there was enough on it to make the bitter taste an asset. It made them unforgettable.
He began feeling a funny tingle at the base of his spine...the same place that Mary felt it, and had she asked Peter, she would have been told it was the same place that Peter first felt it. Floyde kept eating doughnuts...one after another after another, the taste so delicious he didn't bother savoring it. He wanted to down as many of them as he could. Delicious. Absolutely delicious...
Then the tingling turned into a slight pain, and he looked down.
There was a lump in his pants.
Floyde reached down. No. It wasn't THAT. He could feel THAT. He felt...something else. Something that was HIS...he could feel his fingertips, distantly, through a cloud of not-yet-formed nerve endings and fabric...but it was in a place where nothing should be.
And it was growing. Fast. And it was growing faster with every second. It buldged painfully an instant before it tore his pants apart. A tail that might have been a lizard's, if one igored the blue skin and fish-scales growing out of it, was twisting away from his butt.
He felt the tingling in his hand and looked at it. It was twisting, skin running like melted carmel. His fingers were fusing together into two thick digets and one thin one, the tips getting hard, as if it couldn't decide to form nails or hooves. He looked at his other hand and saw the same thing. He felt pain in his feet. Only his feet were less slippery than Peter's had been, his shoes on tighter. His expensive leather shoes exploded, revealing one yellow bird's foot, one blue, scaled foot that ended in a cow-hoof. Or an ox-hoof.
His shirt tore, revealing heavily built sholders covered in blue skin, muscles rippling slowly under the slightly loose covering. Scales fanned out slowly.
Floyde began to scream.
His tail stopped growing, continued thickening, and the tip fanned out into a blue-green pair of fins. Fur erupted from the center, and a ridge of long, pale white feathers grew down the back.
He was attracting a crowd of people as they gathered around, courious at first, then frightened out of their minds. They raced for a phone, grabbed their own cell phones.
Floyde's eyes suddenly streached out of his face, folds of lizard-skin forming around them. They began spinning around, seperate, looking off into their own directions, a chamelion's eyes. His face melted into an ox's muzzle, his teeth became thick, a herbavore's teeth. Tears were running down his blue scaly skin. A mane of feathers and fur grew around two wide, thick, spreading horns, wickedly pointed and deadly. He imbedded one into the counter of the security check point.
A pair of large blue wings erupted out of his back, fanning wide and then flapping, booming like a pair of table-cloths being shaken out, booming like sails filling with wind. Papers scattered, and as people ran screaming, Floyde's voice deepened into a heavy bellow, like an ox, like a bull. Where once hansome Floyde Harper stood, there now screamed a beast unlike any from mythology.
Mary didn't see him. Not even when he ran from other security guards, from police brandishing guns at him. She was already upstairs, her mind on greater things than petty revenge on the once-gentle security guard.