HARDWOOD BLOOD CH.7 - THE NEW FASHIONED WAY

BLOOD ON THE CONCRETE HARDWOOD CH.7 - THE NEW FASHIONED WAY

By Rashelle Workman

It seems impossible, but your gut’s telling you the fancy-fingered globetrotters, those guys you were counting on to help you solve this case, are involved. Maybe even the crazy mofo’s who’ve been killing the girls and keeping their insides. Sick. Sick. Sick!

How’d I miss the signs, you wonder, smacking your forehead.

 Rage fills you. The idea of being duped and played like one of their basketballs rips through your brain, until you scream. “Aaaaaugh! It’s time for answers.” And you’ve got a plan.

Digging through Kareem’s tremendously large trunk of trinkets, you find a full body disguise. With a quick look around the alley, you strip and don a suit that looks remarkably like Clive, the Trotter’s old coach. Once you’re squished in, you search the trunk for a mirror. You’ve gotta check out your new face.

Amongst all the hairy wigs, dentures and masks, you notice, at the very bottom, a small red button. It seems to be screaming: “Push me! Push me!”

 So you do.

And suddenly the trunk and the ground underneath you begin to tremor. It looks like the whole place is shaking. “Holy earthquake, that button broke the Universe!” The words sound ridiculous floating away on the sour smelling wind, but you’re freaked.

There’s a twinkle and then the shaking stops. Relieved you turn to bolt and notice you aren’t in the alley anymore. Instead you seem to be inside a glorious, glamorous hallway.

The maroon carpet under your shoes feels plush, the walls have been wallpapered gold and maroon. Unable to help yourself, you place a hand against the wall. It’s soft, like crushed velvet. The ceiling is high above you and expensive chandeliers dangle every five feet. The hallway seems to go on forever. 

“Where in the world am I?”

Going for your gun, you reach into the holster. When your hand finds emptiness, you remember you aren’t wearing your clothes anymore. You’re wearing Clive.

Shuddering, you say, “On my own, just the way I like it.” The tremble of your bottom lip begs to differ. You’ve been in some crazy-assed situations in your life, but this wins—

“Hey, I thought it was my turn to feed her.”

You move toward the sound of the voice somewhere up ahead.

Part of you wants to shout for help. But experience has taught that announcing your arrival before you know where the hell you are, is a bad idea.

 Instead you listen, searching for the whereabouts of the voice. Snooping’s your job. Quickly you’re rewarded. There’s screaming, laughing and arguing. It sounds like a party. And the Trotters are hosting. Here . . . wherever here is.

On your left is a door. Placing your ear against it, you eavesdrop.

“Hang on. I’m going to go check on Kareem. He should’ve been here already.”

The door swings open and you fall into Curly, knocking him and you to the floor.

“What the hell? Clive?” Curly says, pushing you off.

The other Trotters come over and two of them help you to your feet.

“Cllliiivvvvve. Right,” Sweetwater says, punching you in the gut.

“Grab the Clive wannabe,” Curly says.

Two of the Trotters take one of your arms in their hands and drag you over to a wall full of water. Yeah, that’s right. It’s a fish tank the size of a wall! If you weren’t so freaked you’d think it was awesome. The damn thing is full of fish, dolphins and . . . Sharks?

“What the hell’s going on guys? What are you playing at?”

“Watch,” Sweetwater says.

Three girls appear in the tank, their hair floating around them. Pointed teeth exposed cruelly as they wave at you. One of them points a finger at you and then curls it, beckoning.

Your mind tries to reject what’s in front of you. Because the girls in the mermaid suits look a lot like the dead women with the missing insides.

The Trotters start to laugh.

“She wants you.”

“You should see your face.”

“Yeah, let’s see his face.” Curly rips off the mask.

You breathe a sigh of relief. Within the mask stank of cement glue.

“Again, what the hell guys? I thought we were supposed to be working together to solve murders. These girls . . . why aren’t they dead?”

Sweetwater scratches his chin. “Let’s just say they aren’t dead . . . anymore.”

“Huh?”

Twiggy continues, “Look friend. The tricks. The stunts we pull on the court. It takes a certain kind of . . . magic to do what we do.”

“Maybe we should demonstrate.”

Twiggy and Curly take you over to a door. Sweetwater pushes it open. Your socks are knocked off at the smell. The ocean. You swear you can even hear seagulls. The Trotters drag you up the stairs and stop at the top.

The mermaids are waiting for you.

“They’re gonna take you to meet our boss. Don’t struggle and you might get to come back. Got it?”

“Don’t do this. I can’t swim,” you whisper, a new kind of terror stealing through your veins.

“No worries.”

They toss you in. And before you even have a chance to fight, the mermaids have you in their clutches and are dragging you down. There’s another door and one of the girls knocks. It opens. The girl to your right smiles.

And then they shove you in.

The room smells damp, but it’s dry. Your body is on solid ground. A drip-dripping catches your attention, but it’s too dark to see anything.

Except two glowing yellow eyes.

“Welcome. I’ve been waiting for you,” a voice growls.

Something hard splits your chest, grabs your heart and tears it out. Strangely, you still feel it beating. 

“The boys will get five years of magic for you. Score!” The deep voice rumbles, like the Earth itself is laughing. “Let’s make the Trotters’ day and send you back as a crab.”

“Score,” you think as you’re tossed into the tank. One of your large pincher smacks you in the eye.

I’m hungry. Where’s the fish? 

 The End.

A NEW SPONSOR AND A NEW SEASON!

We promised that we'd be back and we like to keep our promises.

The crew will be returning for Season 3 in the near future!

Expect an official announcement in the coming weeks. Until then, feel free to check out our fully archived seasons HERE

RED PLANET STOWAWAY - CH.2 BETWEEN A CRAP AND A LOUD PLACE

RED PLANET STOWAWAY CHAPTER 2: BETWEEN A CRAP AND A LOUD PLACE

By MJ Heiser

Something about Malloy’s dangling bits fills you with rage. This is no way to live, you think to yourself as a red-hot surge of determination swells through you. I will not be victimized by this naked, grey-fuzz-covered ape.

These thoughts take next to no time to go through your head, but even so, it was time you really didn’t have. You’re past the decision point. You stagger over the soiled, filth-smeared underpants on the floor and heave your shoulder against the locker door.

Clang.

Oh, crap, you think to yourself.

“What the –“

You curse the throbbing mass of pain on your head and use the brain that surely still operates beneath it to locate the lock mechanism for the locker. You lift it, the door opens, and you stagger out into the relative brightness of the hallway-sized room beyond.

You don’t get much of a chance to appreciate your freedom from Malloy’s locker. Your windpipe is cinched shut, and you’re hoisted roughly into the air.

“Urk,” you say, with less dignity than you were hoping.

Through the pain in your head and the steadily tightening tube of your awareness, you see Malloy scrutinizing you. The bright red of his face is alarming in contrast to the white nakedness of the rest of him. His eyes narrow. You’re pretty sure of this. You don’t want to think yet that it’s only your consciousness narrowing.

“You,” he breathes. Spittle lands on your cheek.

“Hack,” you reply in a choking gasp. You want to flail. You want to do the thing that kids do, which is sag, make themselves extraordinarily heavy, and slip out of their parents’ grasp. You can barely move.

“What were you doing in my locker?”

You flop your head to the other side, hoping for some relief on your windpipe. No dice. Malloy apparently did really well in the Chokehold classes at NOSSA Academy.

“Answer me, maggot!” he barks.

If you had the energy and the breath to do so, you would roll your eyes at him, sigh, then say, “Uh, hello? I can’t breathe, and therefore can’t answer, duh!” You come as close as you can and roll your eyes up to the whites.

You’re dropped. You take a great gasp of air, and it burns in your lungs. You spend a couple of seconds curled on your side, whooping air into your body and trying to come up with some creative way to get out of this.

You make the mistake of looking up. You are now gazing directly into the underside of Malloy’s underparts. You almost gag.

“Maggot, you owe me an explanation,” Malloy starts –

But again his junk has inflamed you with rage. You don’t have to lay here and take this. He wants an explanation you can’t give him. Above and beyond all of that, you’re being forced to confront the sight of the most unattractive genitals in the human species.

You strike out with your booted feet and feel the satisfying impact – like kicking a rolled up pair of tube socks. You hear Malloy suck in a huge breath. You’re reasonably certain you know what happens next, and there’s no real need to stick around to verify your assumption. You’re on your feet and moving fast, slipping out of the narrow locker rooms before Malloy can regain his composure.

You emerge into a long, narrow corridor, lit above and below by glowing fluorescent lamps in the ceiling and floor. You don’t get anything as easy as signs pointing the way. All you get are sounds and smells. To the right is the smell of hot grease, as well as the source of that chugging machinery noise that drowned out most of the conversation you heard from the locker. To the left is the unmistakable stench of human waste – sewage processing, most likely. About twenty feet down the right corridor you spy a metal-rung ladder heading up into parts unknown.

Malloy’s voice bellows behind you. If he hasn’t figured out yet that you overheard some very delicate conversation between him and Richardson, he will soon.

You have to make your choice.

A. Search the rust bucket's machine room for a weapon?

B. Dig around in the giant crapper for a miracle?

C. Take the ladder to nowhere, counting on Malloy being too fat to climb it?

RED PLANET STOWAWAY - CH.1 HIDE UNDER MALLOY UNDERPANTS

RED PLANET STOWAWAY CH.1 - HIDE UNDER MALLOY'S UNDERPANTS

By JA Souders


You quickly bury yourself under the pile of gray-colored, nasty, smelly underpants and hold your breath. The sticky fabric crunches under your fingertips when you pull it over your head.

Each of the captain’s footfalls is in time to your heartbeat.

Please don’t come here. Please don’t come here, you beg, although you know it’s hopeless. Where else would he go to retrieve clothes?

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Your eyes water from the fumes drifting off the raunchy clothes, but you try not to move. If Malloy catches you now, it’s all over. Better to let the salty tears run down your cheeks than taste the rusty blood when he knocks every single one of your teeth out of your head for seeing him naked.

Malloy continues to grumble under his breath about “fucked up alliances” and “gray-skinned bastards whose only interest in camaraderie is eating our still beating hearts once they rip them from our chests.”

You wonder, vaguely, what the hell he’s talking about just as he wrenches open the door to the storage locker. Surprised by the abruptness of the move, you accidently gasp. The pile of clothes you are lying in tumbles out and across the captain’s bare feet.

Fortunately, the sticky substance on the grody briefs seems to have stuck the cloth to you and you remain concealed. You cover your mouth with your hands and pray he didn’t hear your slip.

Malloy’s mutterings fall silent. One. Two. Three heartbeats.

A tickle in your throat is causing you to swallow fast in an effort to control the cough brought on by inhaling the noxious gases pouring from his clothes.

What is this man doing with his clothes? Why do they reek so badly? Then you remember the sticky stuff and think it’s better if you don’t know.

Finally, Malloy mumbles about having the laundry bot maintenanced. He steps forward and his bare, gnarled foot, stinking so badly of moldy cheese that it overwhelms even the stench of clothes, collides with your stomach.

You try to control the wince, but it’s no good and the air whistles out of you as he kicks your stomach again, knocking the wind from you.

“Bloody gray-skinned bastards!” he yells and then slaps something along the side wall.

A siren blares. The call for General Quarters. You don’t have to look to know the red lights are flashing and crews all over the ship are scattering like ants to get to their battle stations. Not to mention that security is even now on their way to save the captain from the “enemy.” You.

Captain Malloy reaches up and pulls a white polycarbonate helmet—the kind they use for space walks--down from the top shelf of the locker as you struggle to sit up and explain. But even as you open your mouth, Malloy is swinging the hard plastic bubble at your head.

Stars explode in front of your eyes and you collapse into the toxic pile of clothes again. He continues to beat you until your vision hazes and you feel the floating sensation that is your consciousness as it leaves you.

Just as you black out, you see Malloy grinning down at you. “Thought you could get the best of me, didn’t ya? Going to report back to your Hive leaders what you heard here today? Going to let them know you saw me in all my glory?!”

You black out when he kicks you in the stomach again.

What feels like only seconds later, light floods over your body. You moan and wavering shadows swim into view. You can’t make out what these beings look like, but you can tell one is shorter than the other.

“It’s still alive. The captain said he’d killed it,” shadow one—the shorter of the two--says.

“Guess not. C’mon. We’ll have to finish the job,” the tall shadow says with a lisp. He sounds like a snake and you wonder if you were handed off to those “gray skinned bastards” the captain talked about. More clothes get peeled off your body and you moan as the light stabs into your eyes and a headache pounds behind them.

“Wait! That’s not an alien, that’s…” the tall shadow exclaims.

“Oh, shit! You’re right! What was the Cap’n thinking?”

“Does it matter? He thinks there was an alien here. It isn’t our job to prove him wrong. We need to get this…thing to the space lock like he said.”

“But it’s human?”

“Not according to the captain.”

You finally realize what’s happening and struggle to sit up, as the two shadows argue back and forth. When they see you sitting up right, they glance at each other. The smaller of the shadows takes your feet, while the other takes your head. They carry you down the hallway to a room with another smaller room at the end of it. The small room has a large circular door on one end with a window in it.

You see the red haze that signals that the red planet is circling below you.

You struggle harder, but it’s no use. They’re too strong. And they toss you into the tiny room. Then they leave, and the door locks behind them, echoing with finality.

You jump up as the warning lights and buzzers sound. They’re planning on tossing you into space without a suit!

You bang on the door, but the man standing at the window only smiles, waves, and points to the doors behind you as they slide open and pull you into airless vacuum of space.

Your last thought is how you can still smell the captain’s underpants.

THE END

Oops...RETURN TO CHAPTER 1

RED PLANET STOWAWAY - CH.1 CONFRONT MALLOY NAKED

RED PLANET STOWAWAY CH.1 - CONFRONT MALLOY NAKED

By Ryan ONeil


Malloy reaches out with his leathery paw of a hand and pulls open the locker door. The rush of fresh air is like a small piece of heaven. You breathe deeply and then deftly leap from within the confines of the locker surprising Malloy. Although he is old and the forces of simulated Earth gravity pull at his aging body, his tense muscles ripple like slabs of cut gray marble.

Hoisting your shirt up over your head, you swing it in frantic circles like a drunken football fan cheering on your favorite team. The knot on your head pounds worse than the worst hangover headache you've ever experienced.

“Where’s the party, Captain?” You sing out in your best Elvis Presley impersonation.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” Malloy shouts as his nakedness steps sternly in your direction.

His grizzled, bulbous nose is now only a few uncomfortable inches from yours. His breath smells much like his soiled undergarments, and it's a smell that will haunt your dreams for the rest of your life, however long – or short – that may be.

“Huh, funny story Captain,” you say, and audibly gulp.

Your hands fumble first with your belt and then with your zipper until you feel your pants loosen. With your hands at your sides you hook your thumbs inside of your underwear and push everything way south of your hips. Stepping out of your clothes you use your left foot to flick the pile behind you. You slowly begin to shake your hips to the rhythm of a long forgotten song that echoes in the vast chasm of your pounding head. “Dance with me Captain. Dance with me.”

“Oh, we’re gonna dance, sweet thing.” He replies. “We’re gonna dance.”

The last thing that you remember seeing is Captain Malloy’s gray sledgehammer-like fist as it smashes solidly into the bridge of your nose. “Boom, boom, boom and out go the lights.” Malloy sings.

Everything in your world goes black.

There is no sight.

There is no sound.

But weird, you can still smell those soiled undergarments…

THE END

Oops...RETURN TO CHAPTER 1

RED PLANET STOWAWAY - CH 1. MALLOY'S JUNK

CHAPTER 1: MALLOY'S JUNK

By Steven Novak

As you open your eyes you notice the air is stuffier than you last remembered it. It smells worse too – like old socks and cheese – an old sock sandwich. Your head is throbbing and when you reach up to rub the sorest area you discover a lump the size of a golf ball hidden underneath your hair.

What the hell happened? You can’t recall.

Your memory is currently hazier than your eyesight – which is pretty god damn hazy. While attempting to pull your coiled limbs into something resembling a natural sitting position, you notice three haphazardly hung spacesuits dangling just above your head. Scattered in a heap across from you are matching boots, dome-shaped glass helmets, and slightly soiled undergarments.

It’s a storage locker – you’re in a storage locker.

What the hell are you doing in storage locker?

You try to recall the circumstances leading to your waking up locked in a closet next to some flyboy’s dirty laundry, and again you fail. The knot on your head is throbbing painfully on your skull and pressing it against the squishy gray matter underneath. Using the wall behind you as a brace, you eventually manage to hoist yourself into a standing position with a breathy grunt. That’s when you notice the nametag on the breast pocket of the enamel colored spacesuit directly across from you – Capt. Harper Malloy.

Not Malloy - anyone but Malloy.

What the hell are you doing in Malloy’s closet?

Again you try to remember anything – anything at all before waking up. It’s not working. There’s a memory there – a frustrating, annoying snippet of information that you just can’t seem to grab onto. If it were a person you’d punch it in the face.

Unfortunately it’s just a memory and memories have no faces to punch.

“So what’s the plan Captain?”

The voice comes from somewhere outside of your darkened locker. It’s male and it sounds vaguely familiar.

Deep, and gravelly, and beefy in a way that conjures up images of the slimy floor of some unclean slaughterhouse, the voice that responds is undeniable. It belongs to Malloy. “Well, we sure as shit didn’t come here to make any friends, did we Richardson? Those sons of bitches in Washington want us to make nice with our new gray-skinned friends? Nuts to that. I’ve got all the friends I need. Fuck the president's orders…I don’t trust those bastards as far as I can toss 'em.”

Richardson? Lt. Jack Richardson of the Mars IV project?

What are Richardson and Malloy doing together? What are they talking about?

The welt on your head throbs angrily. Wincing in pain you reach up and press back at it in frustration. This succeeds only in causing you further pain.

There’s another voice coming from outside. It’s a bit softer, a bit more feminine. A servo or a gyro, or something mechanical whirs up from behind the wall you’re leaning against and you can no longer make out what Richardson, Malloy and the yet unidentified person outside are babbling about. After carefully maneuvering past the spacesuits and over Malloy’s underpants, you press your ear against the cold steel door. The damn whirring is still too loud. The voices are muffled and confusing, running together, and not making an ounce of sense.

You need some answers.

The knot underneath your hair is pulsing in tune with your quickening heartbeat – testing not only your pain threshold, but your patience as well.

You need to know what’s going on.

Gently you wrap your hand around the door handle in front of you and press downward. The clicking of the lock is louder than you anticipated and you curse yourself silently while hoping the whirring from behind is loud enough to muffle it. Dropping to one knee in the pile of Malloy’s unmentionables you peek through the newly formed crack just in time to see a dark skinned woman you’ve never met and someone that looks vaguely like mission specialist Peter Tan disappear through a doorway on far end of the narrow room. Though Richardson is nowhere to be found, you spot Malloy standing with his back to you watching them leave. Once they’ve gone, he pushes a button on the wall next to the open door and it slides shut with a hiss.

The “room” is barely a room at all – more like a hallway really – long and narrow with a ceiling just under eight feet high. Built into either side are rows of compartments – some closed, some open, each stuffed to the brim with various tubes, boxes, levers, and other such mechanical things of which you know nothing about. Though you’ve worked at the National Outer Space Studies Administration (NOSSA) for years, you’ve spent all of those years as a low-level button masher. Numbers are your game –specifically accounting. You don’t know the difference between a Hydraulic Actuator and Self-Locking Stem-Bolt, and you have no idea what either of them does. In fact, you can’t help but think both of them look remarkably similar to something you might find adorning the walls at an adult sex shop.

“Fucking Martians…” Malloy grumbles to himself from beneath his massively bushy tuft of gray facial hair. “Alliance indeed…think again, you bastards.”

With an annoyed sigh you watch as Malloy snags the thin fabric of his slightly stained t-shirt, lifts it up and over his head, then tosses it onto a small cushioned sitting area to his right. His body is a mass of deflated old-man muscles. His skin is leathery and wrinkled – covered in coarse gray hair so thick it almost looks like he’s wearing a jacket.

The man is a bear – an enormous, sweaty disgusting bear sporting a human bodysuit three sizes too small.

Your brain whispers the word “gross,” but gross hardly does Malloy any justice.

A moment later things get even grosser as Malloy reaches down and drops his pants.

Naked and droopy in ways that are bound to haunt your dreams for years to come, Malloy and his gray-haired genitals are now lumbering in your direction. He’s looking for a fresh change of clothes and he’s heading for the storage locker – the storage locker in which you’re currently hiding. He’s less then ten feet away. Within a matter of seconds ten becomes eight, and then quickly drops to six. A few more steps and he’ll find you.

A few more steps and you’re as good as dead.

What will you do?

A. Bury yourself beneath Malloy's underpants, hold your breath and hope for the best?

B. Shove the door open with all your might and slam it into Malloy -- When he wobbles, kick him in the junk and run as fast as you can?

C. Try your best to explain the situation to Malloy while stripping naked yourself, hoping it will make him feel less intimidated?