MONDAY NIGHT MAYHEM

This is my Friday Fright for this week in DarkMediaCity. I think this fits the theme of household appliances gone crazy. What do you think? 



Monday Night Mayhem



     “C’mon, John, we need some beers over here.”

     “Geesh,” John thought, “the least these bozos could do would be to grab their own beer. I’m buying it for them.”

     “Do I look like a barmaid?” he asked. “Get your own beers. You know where they’re at.”

     The guys grumbled, not wanting to miss any of the action on the big screen, but they went to the huge fridge set up in the downstairs den and grabbed their share of cold ones. John was quite the host. The only thing in the ice-box was beer: bottles of anything  the boys could ask for. He knew what they liked and stocked it for them. Monday Night football demanded beer, and plenty of it. Chips, pretzels, and nuts completed the package. Every so often, one of the guys would spring for pizza, but those times were few and far between.

     The gang was not too happy on this night: the Broncos were getting their asses kicked. So much for the new quarterback being God’s gift to Denver.

     “Shit!” Harry shouted as he grabbed a bottle out of the big, red refrigerator and slammed the door shut. When it opened back up, he kicked at it but missed. Being three sheets to the wind, he fell down in one unceremonious heap.

     All the guys laughed, enjoying the show. Why not? The one on the big screen was lacking in action. Harry was the big attraction now.

     No matter what Harry did, he could not manage to strike back at the big red machine. Through his foggy eyes, it appeared to be waltzing across the linoleum floor, moving first one way, then another, staying out of his reach. The other guys weren’t exactly poster children for sobriety either, but something . . . something weird was happening.
 
     Their laughter stopped, and all of them except John rushed it, slamming the door shut and kicking away at it as Harry had intended.

     “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” John said. “You might be sorry.”

     “Fuck you, John!” Harry said, his slurred words adding credence to his inability to think or perform proper body movements with any finesse.

     “You guys will not destroy my fridge. Leave now. All of you.”

     In response to Johns words, his so-called friends unleashed more kicks and pounding on the giant cooler, one of them even taking a hammer he found on the counter and smashing it against its sides. John leaped into the middle of the gang, but the hammer-wielding guy caught him flush on the temple and he dropped to the floor.

     They merely looked at John for a second, inflamed for some reason, caught up in a vendetta against Big Red, not caring if their friend was alive or dead.

     Animals. They were mere animals now. The huge box filled with their favorite beverages was their enemy: something needing to be destroyed.

     But the big red machine thought otherwise. Inflamed by the blood on the floor, the life giving fluid of his owner spreading towards the carpet, he went berserk. Rapidly slamming first one way and then another, he jammed two men up against the wall and pressed hard enough to squeeze their intestines out through their mouths. As the others watched in horror, the two tried to clear their throats, pulling on the guts, only making the problem worse when huge amounts of blood shot up and out of the now cleared oral openings. Hands went to their throats in an effort to clear the blood away so they could breathe, but it was too late. They drowned in their own blood, the dying duo flopping about like stranded fish caught on land before they gulped a last breath.

     The remaining four, frozen in place for a while after observing the annihilation of their friends, sobered in a hurry and rushed for the stairs. But their entry was blocked. The monstrous red machine was there ahead of them.

     Harry grabbed the banister and tried to pull himself up and get behind the appliance, but it was not to be. The door slammed open and knocked him down before he even got halfway. As he rose from the floor, the electrical cord from the fridge wrapped itself around his neck and pulled tighter and tighter until Harry’s eyes grew huge and almost popped from their sockets. All the veins in his head did the snake waltz beneath the skin before exploding out in a spasmodic dance of red horror.

     The cord loosened, and Harry joined his two buddies on the floor. Three down; three to go.

     John stirred, coming back to a conscious state slowly. The ceiling twirled around before his eyes, telling him to remain on the floor, but his senses told him something was not right in the room. Yet, what could he do? Shit! Trying to determine up from down was difficult at this point.

     The others were still uncertain of what move to make, the red machine becoming ever more belligerent with each passing second. Advancing towards them, its racks formed into hands and grabbed the bottles, first tossing them at the trio, and then smashing the bottles open, attacking the men with the jagged glass weapons.

     Sam, the one who had foolishly used the hammer on the fridge and John, was the first to go, his throat cut through so deeply that his head rolled off on to the floor, his mouth still gasping for air, and his eyes filled with the terror of the moment.

     The red wonder grabbed the hammer from the floor and cracked Sam’s skull open, not stopping with his assault until all movement ended and the man’s head was unrecognizable.

     “John! John!” Henry shouted. “Get up! You have to stop this madness!”

     Not really. How does one stop the anger of a machine, a piece of metal designed for one function only, but all at once capable of achieving human-like functions, perhaps even being superior to humans in some ways. At this moment, it was the higher intelligence.

     The pleadings were unanswered as Big Red slammed a jagged bottle in to Henry’s back and gave it a huge twist. Ah, the man was no fun at all: he dropped and died before the cooler had a chance to enjoy watching him suffer.

     But there was still Phil. The weakest of the group, he was the last one left standing. He didn’t even attempt to get help from John. Escape was his only answer.

     The distance between the demonic appliance and the stairs was substantial, but Phil took advantage of things with his long legs. As fate would have it, he slipped on the last step and wound up in the clutches of the big beer cooler. Big Red pulled him down the stairs, in no hurry to wreak justice on him, slashing away at him methodically, first his legs and then his midsection. Blood poured out of him and ran in the form of many streams, converging in to a raging torrent of a river, and creating a fast filling lake on the bottom landing.

     Two jagged bottles of Budweiser loomed over Phil’s eyes for a few seconds, the monster waiting for the fallen man to realize how his demise was coming. And then . . .and then he slammed them home. Phil fought hard to the end, but no man could have survived  that. His eyes could be seen bobbing around inside the beer bottles, catching the light from the colored glass.

     John walked over to the stairs and shook his head. “You’ve done it again, Big Red. What is it you do to get my friends upset like that?”

     Big Red didn’t say a word. He never did.

     Opening the door of the fridge, John grabbed a beer, gently closed the door, sat down on the chair closest to the television, and took a couple of pulls on it. The game was over. Bad night for the Broncos.

     “Yeah,” he thought. “Bad night for me, too.”

     Big Red rolled over to the wall and plugged himself back in again. It wouldn’t do for the beer to get warm.

     John turned off the television and surveyed the damage. Shaking his head, he said, “Guess I need to find some new friends to watch the games with.”



Blaze McRob