ECOPOCALYPSE CH.6 - "C.D.C, A.S.A.P."

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.6 - "C.D.C., A.S.A.P." 
by James McShane

Your trip to the Centre for Disease Control Headquarters allows you time to calm yourself down and indulge in a little family bonding with your sister. You and Madge never saw eye-to-eye on many things over the years, but when she brought back her first girlfriend and introduced Suzi Ching to Mom, you stormed out of the house and wouldn’t come back until they’d both left. This incident made Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays a hornets’ nest for the next fifteen years. It’s not your fault you’re a bigot; society made you that way. You wish you could turn back time and make things right again, a-la Sam Beckett and Quantum Leap. But going by your recent experience with inventions, any time machine you built would probably result in the Nazis winning World War II and the San Francisco 49ers winning Superbowl from now until Doomsday. Neither of these possible events sit well with you. You are who you are – now deal with it.

You turn to Madge and say, “Hey, sis, remember that time you and Suzi…”

“Shut the fuck up!” Madge replies into her headphone. “I’ve not yet forgiven you for that,” she continues. “However, if you can in any way make this"—she points down below at the shit- and blood-stained streets—"better, maybe this Christmas I’ll buy you something nice.”

“I always wanted a pony,” you say wistfully.

“I was thinking more of a one-way trip to fucking Jupiter.” She turns to you. “I hear it’s nice this time of year.”

Madge has mellowed over the years, you surmise.

“Are we there yet?” you ask, changing the subject. You’re the pilot, and you know how long the journey takes, but you really want to move on from all this bitterness.

“Two minutes,” Madge replies. “I rang ahead. The president’s guy at the CDC is expecting us. You better know what you’re doing.”

“It’s like we said earlier, Madge. Whoever’s lost is gone forever. The only way I can fix this is so it never happens again. I hope this joker listens to me.”

“Who else is he going to listen to? The Ayatollah?”

You grunt in mock agreement. The sooner this finishes, the better civilisation can get going again. You will make this right.

You hope.

As you bring the helicopter down on the roof of CDCHQ, you experience a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach. There must be at least twenty CDC goons as your welcoming party. They have guns. Lots of guns. As you and Madge step out, a goon in a hazmat grabs you by the arm and throws you to the ground.

“So you’re the fucker who’s responsible for this eco-Apocalypse?”

You raise your hand and introduce yourself. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” you add. He slaps you across your face with a gloved palm. “I didn’t think I was this popular,” you mumble.

A voice from behind your assailant calls out. “Easy, Ernie. Let’s not give the CEO too hard a time. After all, amends must be made. Bring them down to the lab.” The new guy, who you assume must be the president’s eyes and ears in CDC, points to Madge, who is carrying the new and improved Environaut from the helicopter. He pulls you up and offers his hand.

 “Jack Sneedon, President’s Liaison, CDC.”

You both shake. “I take it you’re aware of what we have here?” you say. “With the improvements I made to the original design…”

“Yeah, I know,” he says as his colleagues move Madge and the devise into the roof elevator. “Your sister filled me in over the phone. Some shit about co-coolants. I don’t get it.” He fixes you with a steely glare. “But I’m hoping you do.”

Once more, you hope.

Down in the lab, you unpack all your equipment and prepare for a demonstration of the Environaut. You look around and see that the place is spotless. No blood. No shit. “You’ve been cooped up here all this time?” you ask. “No breaches of security? No Shithead Zombies?”

Sneedon shrugs. “One or two got through the main gate, but that’s all. Our guys are clean and good to go. What about you?”

Your head drops. “I lost my Mom and my best friend.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Sneedon replies curtly, “but we’ve no time for sentimentality. We can grieve our dead later – provided we don’t become one of them. Set her up and let’s see what she can do.”

The demonstration works like a charm. After thirty minutes of further testing, Sneedon and his cohorts are less agitated than they were when they met you on the roof. It didn’t stop Hazmat Man from slapping you once more, this time with feeling.

Sneedon takes out his phone. “Wake up the president!” he barks. “Tell him I have good news.” His face loses several shades of natural colour. “What the fuck?” he roars. “When the hell did that happen?” He finds a nearby chair and just about manages to flop into it. He rubs his hand over the top of his head. He appears to be sobbing. “Artie’s in charge? Holy sweet fuck!” He ends the call and looks at you.

You feel a hand at your shoulder. It’s Madge, getting all sisterly like. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“Turn on the TV,” is Sneedon’s response.

On the big screen there is a shot of the White House. The ticker at the bottom of the screen reads: “President and Vice-President invoke 25^th Amendment. Speaker of the House, Arthur Gantly becomes President of the United States. News conference to follow shortly.”

You look at Sneedon. “They must have fallen foul of…the foulness.” Now you sound like a badly written twelve volume fantasy epic.

“You got that right,” Sneedon says. “Artie is out baying for blood. Your blood.”

“What do you mean?” Madge asks before you can even formulate the question yourself.

“My man at the West Wing says China, Russia and the entire Arab nation wants your head on a platter. They’re having their own problems and the only way they can placate their citizens is to ask for your public execution.”

You gulp.
Now that your life is on the , do you:

A. Offer to turn yourself over to the bloodthirsty masses, hoping your self-sacrificial gesture will change Artie's mind?
B. Appeal to Artie directly and show him your new and improved Environaut? He's not that much of a nut, is he?
C. Do what every self-respecting person would do in a situation like this - run?

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.5 - SHIT STORM

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.5 - SHIT STORM 
By Annie Evett

You grab Madge’s hand, realising that she was always the strong one in the family. She had been the one to teach you to ride a bike, pick you up, and put a band-aid on your scraped knee.  She’d beaten up the bullies in the school yard. Hell, her best friend had been your first conquest. You’d always suspected she had been behind that and, looking in to her eyes, you are now sure that she is the one who has been behind everything good in your life.

“Madge , You go. Get the unit over to the CDC. You’re the best one for the job. I belong here. I should never have been the president of this dumb company. You should have.  You would never have gotten us into all this.”

“Shit.” she smiled.  “No I wouldn't have, but them’s the breaks, huh?”

You fiddle with the unit and make some unnecessary adjustments, unsure of what to say. Sharing emotions had never been one of the family’s strong points. 

“Well?” Madge taps the table next to the control box of the unit. “You coming or what?”

“I’ll stay. The unit is good to go, as good as I can get it right now. I’ll keep making adjustments and try and work out how to speed up the process. Something. I dunno. You better go. The President is waiting for us. For you. Go and save what's left of humanity, huh?”  You flick on the security camera system and pan around the hallway.

“Looks like any of the zombies that were here have moved on,” you snigger, attempting to stifle your own bad joke, but then break down into fits of hysterical laughter.

Madge slaps you across the face—except it's an oversized mitt thumping your fishbowl face helmet.

 “Oh, grow up. What is it about shit and farts that boys never grow out of?”

You collapse with more laughter, gasping for air in your hazmat suit.

“Later. Keep your hazmat suit on. The place is contaminated. Lord knows when or if the cleanup will start. Keep on geeking.”

You knock ham sized fists together, repeating your childhood motto.

She saunters out of the lab door. You watch her till the suit disappears up the hallway. The silence buzzes in your ears as the light in the corner of the room continues to blink. You see her helicopter make its way across the sky. 

The hazmat suit is cumbersome as you attempt to perch on the lab stool. Your oversized fingers are clumsy, and it's not long before you consider taking the whole lot off so you can start to pull one of the Environauts apart and explore every component. You have no idea what else to do. Here seems as safe a place to hang out and wait until the shit storm  blows over. 

A buzzer sounds as the corner light slows its blink. You stare at it and as moments pass; the blink eventually fades to a continual beam. The buzzer stops and a door unlatches. You stand and go over to the door, not remembering having seen it before. As you approach you realise that it had been concealed within the texture of the wall, and only as it opens that the outline reveals its position. 

You flush with anger and indignation. This was your lab, damn it. Who the hell had hidden doors leading off into the unknown in your own lab?  You turn the door handle. The space behind it is lit with floor lights and appears to be a large storage room. As you step inside, general lighting is automatically turned on to reveal rows of cages of now deceased, rotting animals. You are glad you hadn’t taken the hazmat suit off, but gag at the thought of what the smell might be like.

Dogs, cats, rats and squirrels slump inside their cages. Most are surrounded by puke and shit. Your heart squeezes at the sight of these helpless creatures, who have obviously died in a great amount of pain and suffering.  Your head spins, wondering where in the process animal testing had a place in your facility. You sadly realise you have been disconnected from the research unit for over a year, and anything could have been passed by you to sign and you’d not really taken any notice—another reason Madge should have been the CEO and not you. She would never have allowed animal testing.

A rattle in the corner shakes you from your depression. Your heart skips. Something is still alive. Perhaps you can do some sort of good today.

Crouched in one of the larger cages sits an emaciated orangutan. Its orange hair sticks out at right angles from its bony body. It looks up at you with its intelligent, pleading eyes. He gingerly puts out his hand through the bars. You hold back a tear and reach over to touch it, entranced by the gentle moment of trust. 

The ape quickly grasps your wrist and pulls you toward the cage. Its other limbs thrust out of the cage and grab hold of your suit. Your feet scrap against the metal flooring, sliding and finding no purchase as you are pulled in.

The ape grins and peels your helmet off. You try to hold your breath, but are at last forced to take a deep breath, gagging at the putrid smell of death and feces. The orangutan's lips pucker towards you as a dribble of brown trickles down its face. Your struggle renews as you realise that it is dying from the same virus affecting all the zombies. It bares its teeth. You scream, “But you’re a vegetarian! Everyone knows that.” 

The orangutan's mouth covers your scream. A mixture of vomit and shit warmed by the body gushes from the ape's mouth into yours. You feel its arms and legs tighten around you and your are slowly crushed against the bars of the cage. You feel your organs bursting as blood pours from your ears and eyes. You die screaming, clutched in the strong arms of a giant orange ape.

Oops...return to Chapter 5

ECOPOCALPYSE CH.3 - ROOKIE BLUE POOP THUNDER

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.3 - ROOKIE BLUE POOP THUNDER By James McShane

On any other day, flying your helicopter over the vast metropolis would be a thrill akin to becoming the world’s first triple Nobel Prize winner—of course, seeing that you are unable to make change of a ten, write a poem worth reading, or even know what a goddamn quark is, Nobel is no-dice—but this is not just any other day. Mankind is smothering under the weight of its own shit, and it’s all your fault.

         “Mexico will have to wait,” you shout over the sound of the chopper as it veers first one way, then another.

 “So where to?” Milo screams back. You suddenly remember to turn on communications. No use wearing headphones if you can’t hear for shit, right?

Shit. That word again. If you make it out of this alive, you’re going to petition Webster to remove it from the dictionary. The guys over there owe you—big time. It was you who asked them to include iPoop as a new word.

You still have to answer Milo’s question. You hover over the city for a while, taking in the disaster below. You look around and see the police station. As you fly closer you see that the cops are performing their civic duty as only they know how: They’re shooting at anything that moves. Political correctness be damned!

“We’re going to need guns,” you say into your mouthpiece.

“Lots of guns,” Milo says.

You've always wanted to use that line and are pissed off with Milo for stealing it from you. “Yeah,” you mutter. “A fuck-load of guns?”

“Is that bigger than a shed-load?” Milo winks from behind his visor. Okay, you can’t see him actually wink, but as sure as eggs is eggs, the twerp is winking.

“Let’s go and see if the boys in blue have any spare weaponry. See if we can shoot our way out of this.”

“Would be better if we just flew our way out of this,” Milo whines. “I don’t see how we can help them.”

You ponder this as you look for a place to land, then nod in agreement. “Okay, they’re on their own, but we will still need to defend ourselves one way or another. We’ll stop here, on the roof, bail downstairs, grab some guns and ammo, then fly the fuck back to the lab.”

“The lab?” Milo is agog. “Why the fuck would you want to go back there?”

“I started this,” you say as you expertly land on the roof of the police station. “And I’m going to finish it. Properly.”

Milo opens his side of the chopper and jumps out. “This is where I bail, boss,” he says. “I’m sorry it had to come to this, but you’re on your own.” He runs in the direction of the door at the far end of the roof. You shake your head. All these years, having my back, and he has to bail now, when I need him the most. You’ve given Milo enough room in your thoughts. Now it’s time to do what needs to be done. You follow him, head through the door, and run down the stairs. There is an elevator, but you’re over elevators now. Stairs are the only way to go.

The further you go down, the louder the commotion becomes. You hope you’re not running straight into a Cop vs. iPooper free-for-all—that shouldn’t be the case, because as you flew over, you saw the cops shooting out of rather than back into the station. You gamble that the station is free of iPoopers.

No, the commotion is something else entirely. The cops are fighting amongst themselves, and at the heart of it all is Milo. He points up at you and shouts to one of the cops nearby. All of a sudden you’re the centre of attention, like at a Playboy party when all that the guests want is a piece of you. These cops want a piece of you all right—but not to play with. There is vengeance in their eyes. They wish to call down the wrath of the Maker and smite you from where you stand.

“Smite this, motherfuckers,” you rant, grabbing a service revolver from a nearby cop. (There are a lot of nearby cops, by the way. Well, there would be; it is a police station, after all.) You shoot in the air. “This is your last warning, gentlemen. I need some guns so I can put things right again.”

Milo stands near the front of the vengeful policemen. “See what I mean, guys? My ex-CEO wants to cure the world once more! My former employer wants to return to the scene of the crime and bring more madness upon us. I say it stops. I say it stops now! What say you all?”

The shot that hits your thigh is answer to Miles’ question. Maybe coming here was a bad idea after all. Back to the chopper! You beat a hasty retreat back up the stairs. You thank the Maker for all those hours you put in the gym, but the pain in your wounded thigh isn’t getting any better. The higher you climb, the fuzzier your head gets. You can’t slow down. Milo and his Keystone friends are hot on your tail.

You make it up to the roof and into the chopper before you just about pass out from blood loss. You start the motor running and slowly ascend into the sky. You feel a weight from underneath the helicopter. You look out and see Milo and some cops hanging on the landing blades. There are enough of them to keep you from climbing too high, but not enough that you can’t move away from the roof. Your awareness of what’s happening around you begins to fade. You wish you had more time to stem the loss of blood. There are things you must do to make this right again. You have to atone for your own misjudgements and the actions of your motherfucking Board. They are too dead to answer for their own crimes.

But you can’t atone now. You are powerless to do anything except glide the chopper along the roof. In a moment you’re over the city, with Milo and Company keeping you company. Your demise is imminent, you know. Perhaps you can take a few fucking iPoopers with you. You barely have enough strength left in you to position the chopper over a hoard of shit-stained, shit-smelling, shit-excreting maniacs. You switch off your motor.

You plunge.

You sit back and enjoy the ride.

YEEHAW!!

Oops...return to Chapter 3

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.1 - JUST DRIVE!

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.1 - JUST DRIVE! By Wayne DePriest

You slip into the seat and crank the engine. Your DeLorean is one of the ‘AXI’ models, so you’re sitting on the right. You thought it was cool when you bought the car. One of the advantages of this model is it doesn’t have all the crap forced on it by the government for sale in the US, so it’s gonna be fast—just what you need at a time like this. The engine catches, you hit another button on the remote, and another garage door opens behind you, revealing a well-lit tunnel.

“What the hell?” Milo exclaims.

One more click and the car starts to rotate.

“Holy shit!” Milo is wide-eyed. “This is too cool! You never told me about this!”

“It was my little secret. My version of the Batcave.”

“Where does it go?” Milo asks as the car stops rotating, now pointed straight at the mouth of the tunnel.

“I don’t know,” you say as you drop the tranny into first and hit the gas. “I’ve never used it.”

The car leaps forward and shoots into the tunnel. You double clutch and hit second. Then third. The lights are a blur as you and Milo barrel down the tunnel. You shift into fourth and see the tunnel curve to the right ahead of you. Around the corner you see the end of the tunnel. The opening is obscured by some kind of brush. You figure the builder put it there to camouflage the entrance because he’d seen your Batman collection. The brush can’t be too dense, certainly not enough to stop a DeLorean. Milo grabs the seat belt, slams the buckle home and presses his feet against the floorboards.

“Are we doing 88 yet?” Milo’s laugh is just a bit hysterical.

“Close,” you say, glancing down at the speedometer.

“Be the shits to bust through into 1985 or something.”

Just before the DeLorean hits the brush, the obstruction drops away. You realize there’s a pressure switch under the floor of the tunnel, like at a busy intersection for a left turn. The car shoots out of the tunnel and rockets onto a weed grown two lane track through a stand of trees. You back off of the gas as the car jounces over the uneven ground.

Milo’s whooping and hollering like a kid on a thrill ride at the state fair. You’re trying to keep the damn car on the road so you don’t slam into one of the trees. Up ahead you see some blue sky, fewer trees. You’re breathing a bit easier as the car slips between the last trunks. Your foot stomps on the gas pedal and the car leaps forward the last few yards to the top of the hill.

And over.

Only there isn’t any over. There isn’t any anything. Except a long Thelma and Louise drop into the jumble of heavy equipment eighty feet below where they’re constructing another Environaut. The front end of the DeLorean crashes into the bucket on a front loader. The stainless steel folds like an unpaired poker hand. You and Milo are thrown forward as the engines pushes through the firewall, crushing both of your legs against the seat. Milo’s seatbelt snaps from the strain. Your head bounces off the steering wheel while Milo’s bursts through the windshield. A broken nose for you, to go with the mangled legs. Milo’s nose breaks, too, but not until his head rolls off the crumpled hood, bounces off a tire of the loader and lands face first in the dirt. Blood is running out of your nose, but not as much as is pumping out of Milo’s neck stump and you frantically pull at the seatbelt, thumb jabbing the button to release it. The pain in your legs and nose is making you dizzy as you struggle with the door. It won’t open. You start to puke from the smell and sight of Milo’s headless corpse. Knowing a human body voids waste when it dies is not the same as being trapped in a car with the body doing the voiding. The vomit splashes against the window when you turn your head. Physics being what it is, some of the nasty bounces back into your mouth, which sets off another round of ralphing. Somehow you manage to crank down the vomit-covered window and pry your useless legs free. The smell of smoke kicks a burst of adrenaline into your bloodstream.  You pull yourself through the window and tumble to the ground eight feet below, landing on your left shoulder and snapping the collar bone. A scream escapes your lips as the bone breaks and your mutilated legs flop into the dirt. A loud whump! makes you look up at the car teetering in the bucket above you. The gas tank has exploded, upsetting the delicate balance of the car. Bits of flaming debris hit you, scorching your clothes, your face, your arms. But it’s nothing compared to sight of the flaming DeLorean tipping backwards and slipping off the bucket. The last thing you see is the vanity plate.

Up close.

SHT HPNS

Oops...Return To Chapter 1

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.1 - TAKE BACK YOUR HOUSE

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.1 - TAKE BACK YOUR HOUSE

By Steven Novak

Milo slams his hand against the passenger door of your car. “Come on! Move your ass! Let's get the hell out of here!”

For the briefest of moments you consider doing exactly that. You have the keys to a relatively functional DeLorean in your hands and there’s a rabid horde of poop-soaked lunatics stomping through your mansion upstairs. Running makes perfect sense. Heck, flooring it all the way to Mexico, changing your name to Paco Sanchez, and living off the money you’ve stashed in your multiple offshore accounts makes even more sense.

Milo is leaning out of the car now. He looks really confused and equally pissed. He’s pounding his closed fist against the car’s metallic exterior and screaming at the top of his lungs. “Come on, moron! Stop dragging ass! What the hell are you waiting for?”

You don’t want to move to Mexico. Sure, the Tequila is great and the senoritas are spicy, but you don’t want to move to Mexico. You certainly don’t want to change your name to Paco.

You don’t look anything like a Paco.

Those freaky-damn shit monsters are tearing apart your place. They’re destroying every inch of it in a desperate attempt to find you. You can hear glass breaking and wood shattering. Not only are they making a mockery of your stuff, but they’re lathering it in what seemed to be mostly human feces. They’re mashing the disgusting awfulness into your carpet and rubbing it onto your cabinets and spraying it onto your bed. You worked hard for your carpet and your cabinets and your bed.

Well, actually, you didn’t.

You love your carpet and your cabinets and your bed.

Well, maybe, you don’t.

Still, that’s your damn carpet, not theirs! Those are your beshitted cabinets! That’s your motherfucking bed!

You know what you have to do.

You toss the keys in Milo’s direction. “Take the car.” They land almost three feet short, forcing Milo to crawl across the concrete to retrieve them, and admittedly, sort of ruining the impact of the moment.

He looks up at you from his hands and knees. “You’re not coming with?”

“This is my house, Milo. That’s my carpet. Those are my cabinets. That’s my bed those shit-covered assholes are rolling around in! Those are my sheets and my slippers! I can’t just let them destroy everything I’ve worked so hard for! I can’t! I won’t! I won’t let them destroy everyth–”

The tires of the DeLorean squeal and the car peels out of your underground garage.

Milo was always sort of a douchebag.

You spend the next ten minutes digging through your underground lair looking for anything remotely resembling a weapon while keeping an ear on the carnage above. It’s a warzone up there – a squishy, sloppy, slippery warzone. What sounded like mostly human voices when the PooCrew originally burst through your window has transformed into something else entirely. The screams have turned animalistic, guttural and moist, from throats clogged with the diarrhea of half-digested pasta and bargain basement soy sauce-heavy Chinese food.

After ten minutes of searching you manage to find yourself an axe and a crowbar. It’s not much, but it’ll have to do. You slide yourself into some old catchers gear from your college baseball days and head for the doorway leading into the house.

Those shit-slappy assholes are going to pay. You’re not sure exactly how you’re going to make them pay, but you’re going to make them pay. You don’t really have a plan. Who cares?

Fuck plans.

Those dung-drenched dillweeds are probably stomping across the rug President Widmer-Schlumpf gave you when you visited Zurich last summer. One of those turd turkeys is more than likely wearing your Nobel Peace Prize right now. They might’ve even discovered your collection of Playboy magazines from the 60’s. Christa Speck’s boobs are probably smeared with corny bits of fecal matter.

No, the time for plans has long since passed.

The time for ass kicking has arrived.

The instant you burst through the doorway and into the house you’re greeted by the somewhat surprised faces of no less than fifteen shit-soaked wackos. They instantly halt their mindless rampaging.

The room goes silent.

There’s a pool of lumpy brown liquid at least an inch high on the floor. It’s up to your ankles. The god awful liquid is dripping from their bodies like the devil’s sweat. Awkward chunks of human nastiness cling to the few bits of exposed flesh of their otherwise coated faces. A river of chocolate terror dribbles from the chin of a wide-eyed, shit-slick-haired lothario in the back of the room who immediately sucks it back into his mouth like he’s sipping from a frosty milkshake. A woman with bright red eyes and a freakishly long rope of dookie dangling from her neck takes a single step in your direction and tilts her head to the side like a dog. A still steaming tube of toot-butter slips from beneath her dress and splashes to the drink. When she smiles she flashes you a set of chompers so stained with Cleveland fudge they look like a package of Slugworth’s chocolate covered raisins.

A log of Lincoln’s finest smacks you right between the eyes.

You drop your weapons and vomit.

Hands slippery with still-warm mush latch onto your limbs. The growling mass of brown and greenish-brown flesh hoists you into the air and carries your flailing body into the hallway. You’re weightless when one of their pooey digits worms its way into your mouth and partially down your throat. There’s an ever-so-subtle hint of burrito hidden beneath the gooey brown nastiness suddenly coating the interior of your mouth.

Paco’s not such a bad name. Mexico’s a pretty nice place.

You probably should have changed your name to Paco.

The crowd of shit-crazed freaks reaches the bathroom and deposits you into the melted puddle of buttnugget juice slathered across your obscenely expensive tile. Slippery fingers grab a handful of your hair and drag you to the toilet. Your eyes are burning. Your nose is filled with the scent of excrement and dingle berries and the combined, partially recycled scat of a million ample-waisted Americans. With the bowel explosions of an entire nation still pouring from the bowl of the toilet like cocoa lava from some butt-Vesuvius, the mob of fudge fiends shoves your face into what remains of the once porcelain-white bowl with a splash.

Chunky sewer sauce slips into your nose. It seeps into your ears. It sneaks past your lips and worms through the spaces in your teeth. When you try to breathe it fills your throat and finds its way into your lungs. You’re dying. You’re dying face down in a pool of the most awful of awful. When you open your eyes you see only an unending torrent of speckled brown.

This isn’t how it was supposed to end. Not like this. Not face down in the juicy rear end muck of the very same people who enabled you to buy the carpet and the cabinets and the bed you foolishly decided to fight for.

It’s difficult to tell, but you think you might have crapped your britches.

Not that it matters.

Miles away, Westbound on the 405, Milo turns off the radio and pops in a CD of The Human League’s greatest hits. In less than three hours he reaches the border of Mexico. In less than three days he’s changed his name to Eduardo Rodriguez. In less than five he’s being pushed back onto a soft bed as a particularly sultry Mexican girl pulls off her sundress and prepares to take him to heaven and back.

Eduardo is a much cooler name than Paco.

Oops...Return to Chapter 1

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?