We Are the Virus: Burke Museum Mammoth Comes Back to Life, Takes Press Corps Hostage on Live Television

On Wednesday morning, security personnel at the Burke Museum were surprised to find the animated bones of a Columbian mammoth wandering the grounds of the University of Washington. The mammoth, who escaped his exhibit at the museum and introduced himself to campus police officers with a sequence of haunted, elephantine trumpetings, was escorted to City Hall for a press conference.

"It's a novel situation," commented the museum's chief paleontologist Balbus Diggs, who suggested the statewide COVID quarantine's reduction in carbon emissions may have contributed to the resurrection. "We're seeing it all over the world: birds returning to cities, coyotes pissing on fire hydrants. It's really beautiful." When asked whether an interview with the mammoth’s remains might help to shed light on missing links in the evolutionary record, Diggs’s eyes rolled back in his head and he whispered, “Evolution is a hoax,” citing the book of Genesis as evidence while scuttling backward from the room.

At City Hall, the mammoth took the podium around 1pm on Wednesday afternoon and held forth for several hours on live television, refusing to allow frightened journalists to return home to their families. "This is a hostage situation," the mammoth explained, before delivering an extortionate list of demands concerning US environmental policy.

The 3-D printed mammoth paced the stage and took rips from an acrylic bong while offering a deranged endorsement of Washington's stance on recreational marijuana, then expressed his disappointment at seeing institutional foot-dragging on issues like global warming. He punctuated his seriousness by curb-stomping a reporter from the Seattle Times. “Ice cap reduction is unacceptable,” he bellowed, adding that his cousins in Siberia were going to “pull up with the Glock when the tundra thaws.” When one correspondent from The Stranger attempted to escape, she was spotted and impaled against the wall by the mammoth's tusks in an explosion of gore. The bloodslaked elephantid took the opportunity to quip that marijuana is "the only greenhouse gas Daddy can get behind," and demanded an aide bring him a roach clip "or else the redhead gets it."

As of Wednesday evening, Seattle Police remained engaged in hostage negotiations, but worried their efforts would be stymied by the legal grey area: "It's not at all clear that it's illegal for a skeletal mammoth to kidnap journalists. There's just no precedent," said Washington’s Attorney General Samantha Scruple. "However," she added, "we're working closely with federal authorities as the situation develops. We might just be able to get him on federal drug charges."