RED PLANET STOWAWAY CH.3 RUSH THE DOOR

REDPLANET STOWAWAY CH.3 - RUSH THE DOOR WITH YOUR LASER PISTOL

By John Elrod III


Following your instincts, you point your new toy at the door and pull the trigger; nothing happens. You turn the laser pistol over in your hand several times, looking it over as if you had any idea of its inner workings. Throwing in a couple whacks and a few more trigger pulls, even one with the pistol precariously pointed at your face -- lucky for you, a small, unseen LCD screen on the pistol's grip reads, "Unrecognized DNA -- Pistol locked" -- you come to the frustrating conclusion that you will have to figure it out as you go.

"I will have to figure it out as I go,” you say aloud, to nobody in particular. You're acting peculiarly; first, almost lasering your face off, and now, speaking in narratives to the wind. Strange.

You rush to the door, damned pistol in hand, with an unexpected smile on your face. You flash back to summer days spent playing Cops and Robbers in the backyard with your little sister. She always got to be the Cops because your parents insisted you let her win. "She's a girl, and your sister," they said. Though you enjoyed being the bad guy, their condescension still infuriated you. In fact, it's the basis for your entire being, if you think about it -- which you do, quite often. "She's so smart,” they said. "She's class president."She's valedictorian.” "She's going to college." "She didn't wreck the family sedan." "Where did we go wrong with you?" These were all building blocks to the foundation of your current predicament, really. Her unwavering success is what drove you to take that night course in accounting -- why else would you? The constant comparison to her annoying perfection is why you applied so many years ago for the lousy temp job at NOSSA, that you knew you would never get. Who cares if they only hired you because nobody else applied and the last guy committed suicide by self-inflicted headblows from a calculator? That's all ether now. Look, where have you made it? That's right, Mars. I guess you showed them who the real moron is -- it's her -- even though the process has likely doomed you. Where's she, huh? Stuck back on Earth, in some dead-end job -- Assistant D.A.? Pssh -- and a loveless marriage with two little bast--

WAIT -- stop flashing back, you moron!

Shaking your jowls to the point of dizziness, you snap back to reality, or something like it, and realize you've somehow missed the door and are headed down a corridor, toward an electrical station. You struggle to halt your legs' motion, but they're unresponsive.

"What's happening to me?" you can barely think, as you glimpse a neon green, diamond-shaped sign.

"CAUTION: Methane gas. Gas mask required in this zone," it reads, but you're too bleary-eyed to make it out.

You're exhibiting the symptoms of methane gas poisoning. Slowly, the methane has deprived your brain of oxygen. Your cognitive faculties are all out of whack, your mind is having difficulties deciphering your environment, I'm pretty sure your hair wasn't on fire earlier, and worse yet, you're charging directly into thousands of volts of pain.

"Is that a dinosaur?" you can't help but ask yourself, "No, it isn't... well... this is Mars; so, maybe it could be. Stop! Focus on the matter at hand!" you whisper, as you've lost the ability to control your vocal volume.

Either the length of this corridor is uncanny, or you're not exactly moving nearly as fast as it feels. Nevertheless, you're desperate to stop. You spot a low-hanging chain and grab for it.

"Got it! -- shit, a snake!"

Powering through your delirium to realize a moment too late the absurdity of that thought, you're unable to grasp onto the chain once more. Your backwards momentum carries you, finally, through a thinly-paned sliding glass door and, forcefully, you crash into a wall of fuses, circuits, and a bunch of those little knobs that go "click-click-click" when they're turned too fast. An obscene amount of electricity coursing through your veins, you can think only of that dinosaur, or was it a sofa? A sofa? On Mars? Definitely a dinosaur. Definitely.

Meanwhile, a group of perplexed men in gas masks -- who moments before were doubled-over in laughter watching you slowly meander the ten foot corridor to your death -- are now dodging sporadic lasers from the overheated pistol still lodged in your crisping grip.

THE END

Oops...RETURN TO CHAPTER 3

RED PLANET STOWAWAY CH.3 STUFF (AND SHIT) HAPPENS

RED PLANET STOWAWAY CHAPTER 3: STUFF (AND SHIT) HAPPEN

By Richard "RJ" James

Hoping against hope to finally and irreversibly get the smell of Malloy’s soiled shorts out of your nose, you head left, slamming the door as the sound of footsteps creep down the corridor behind you.

It is soon apparent that maybe you made a mistake.

You can no longer smell Malloy’s sweaty junk, but you can now taste on the air the after-effects the galley’s chicken curry had on the crew. The other downside is that you can see said after-effects bubbling lazily in front of you in a giant pool.

Before you get a good look around the room you see a guard making his rounds. On his hip he is carrying a holster that is devoid of its weapon. The location of the weapon does not remain a mystery for long as the guard takes a long look down the sight of the laser pistol before squeezing off a shot. The red beam neatly dissects a long, brown bowel log that was floating on the surface of the cesspool.

The guard chuckles to himself and secures his laser back into its holster. While he has his back to you, you decide that your need is greater than his and move slowly forward.

You crouch down and use all of the stealthy skills you possess, namely crouching and sneaking. The metal grating is behaving itself under your weight as you move carefully forward. You slowly reach out your hand and place it on the butt of the laser pistol when another turd surfaces for air. In a heartbeat the guard grabs your hand and, mistaking it for a gun, aims it at the floating stool.
Squeezing your finger, the guard fires what he thinks is a shot and you oblige him by making a sound you think is approximate to that of his pistol, namely PEW!

When the turd doesn’t fall apart in a blast of red light, the jig is up. -- Or mayhap it was because a laser pistol actually doesn’t go PEW. Either way the guard is on to your game.

With some quick thinking on your part you pull your hand from out of his grasp and point it at him as if it’s a gun. Your adversary, caught off-guard, raises his hands.

“Right, take your pistol out of its holster and place it on the ground in front of you. I don’t want to have to use this thing,” you say, waving around your “gun.”

The shaky guard does just that. He realizes a moment later that you don’t actually have a gun, and that he has been held up with a finger and a very un-convincing PEW sound.

As he moves to pick up his pistol again you turn your “gun” back into a hand and shove him. The man staggers backwards before flailing his arms trying to regain his balance. The one thing that would be really useful at that moment would be reduced gravity, but sadly – for the guard anyway – that is the one thing he doesn’t have, and he falls into the soup, screaming curses that are both very imaginative and very insulting.

As you bend down and scoop up the laser pistol you hear footsteps close to the door you came through. Glancing around the room you see a service hatch hanging open from the ceiling with its ladder lowered.

You need to make a choice.

A. Rush the door with your newly acquired laser pistol?

B. Pretend to be the guard you've just dumped in the poop?

C. Use the ladder to enter the service hatch?