Unspeakable Horror!

"The Apes" originally appeared in The Harrow: Original Works of Fantasy and Horror. 

In the distant dystopian future, after the nuclear attacks and the revolution, three middle-aged men sit in the day-room of the minimum-security acculturation center.

Mark, Ricky and Bernard receive injections three times a day to cure their homosexuality.

Each man had a different story about how they arrived at the facility.

Mark: arrested for sodomy in a parked car.

Ricky: turned in by his wife when she found illicit homosexual pictures in the closet.

Bernard: turned in by a former lover who had been successfully rehabilitated.  

The state scientists worked diligently to abolish homosexuality from society, developing a series of hormonal and psychotropic injections based on their research with the apes.  Genetically, the apes are a mishmash of gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee (only the top level scientists on the project knew about the human DNA in the ape subjects).  

Each patient had an ape donor that provided the biological material necessary to cultivate the anti-homosexuality serum.  

The three apes, monstrous creatures with bright orange hair and black skin, sit together in their cage.  They make love together in the darkness at night, unaware of the night-vision surveillance of the scientists who record the footage for the database.

Mark, Ricky, and Bernard all three dream about the sex between the apes.  As the injections progress, a psychic connection between the men and the apes grows.  

They must do something before their identities are obliterated.  

The security is too tight to escape, Mark whispers while pretending to knit in the day-room.

But not too tight for them, Ricky says, meaning their ape doubles.  

Have you ever read that crazy story by Poe? Bernard asks.

The one with the ape?  Mark says.

The one with the ape and straight razor, Bernard says.  

At the animal testing center, the young research student tends the apes.  Darkness and stillness in the cage at the end of the row.   Did the light bulb go out?  The student steps up to the cage to examine the chart.  Massive hands break his neck and crack his head open on the bars.  The keys are around the student's neck.

At the acculturation center, the apes easily breach the security perimeter.  The security cameras register fast shadows moving up and over the fence -- the guard turns away only for a moment.   A moment later, his throat slashed, almost decapitated by the powerful ape with the straight razor.

The three apes find the vulnerable windows selected by Mark, Ricky, and Bernard who telepathically instruct every movement of the apes.  They gain access where no human could climb.  

The bloodbath commences: every orderly who insulted them, every nurse who pricked them with needles, every doctor who masterminded their "treatment" meets the vengeance of the apes with the razors.  

When the apes breach the cell that holds Mark, Ricky, and Bernard, the apes find a terrible surprise.  The three men are dead -- slumped in their chairs, waiting with their eyes open.  In the excitement of the raid, they transferred their entire minds and souls into the apes who now wept over their human bodies.

The apes felt the rage rise up again.  They escape into the night and the furious current of their rampage.