Rudolph's Slay Ride

A bit of a horror-comedy, short story to help ring in the festivities. Hope you all enjoy, and a Merry Christmas to you all 🎅

“Jesus, Phil! Did a reindeer crawl up your ass and fart itself to death up in there?”

   “No, Steve,” Phil’s voice sounded annoyed on the other side of the restroom stall. “I am enjoying a nice helping of your mother’s cooking behind here. Don’t you even recognize the lovely aroma of her delicious meatloaf surprise?”

   “Ha-Ha, very funny,” Steve mocked him while studying a blemish on his cheek in the bathroom mirror.  “Jokes on you, though. I know my mother can’t cook for shit! That’s why I have to eat your wife’s pussy every night to get the taste of it out of my mouth.”

   “You can’t see it now, but my middle finger is giving that joke of yours a standing ovation.” Phil responded before letting out a grunt, which was then followed by the sound of something wet hitting water with a couple of splashes. 

   Steve smirked as he scratched at the freckle he recently noticed had been forming on his otherwise unblemished features. Little do you know, dude. Steve chuckled and thought to himself.  Your wife loved it when I gave her a standing ovation from behind, while she was bent over the stove. “By the way, thanks for inviting me over for dinner last night, buddy. I had a great time.”

   “Whatever, man. It was Christmas Eve, and I knew you had nothing else going on.” The sound of Phil unspooling toilet paper from the dispenser inside the stall could be heard through the partition. “I figured you would have preferred to spend it with us, rather than being alone in that crappy apartment of yours. Sorry I had to leave in the middle of it, though. You know how it goes. When the top brass comes a calling, you gotta answer.”

   Steve chuckled to himself. Yeah, and that’s why your wife can’t get any satisfaction and needs good old Steve to release those floodgates of hers. “Don’t worry about it, I completely understand. It’s not like we don’t work the same job. Lucky for me, you’re the head scientist in charge of this project and I am simply the lowly assistant on stand-by.”

   “Keep talking that way and you won’t get any credit when this project is a success.” There was the sound of the toilet flushing before Phil opened the door and strode out the stall while buckling his belt, a relieved look on his face. “I feel ten pounds lighter now.”

   “I’m sure you do.” Steve shook his head with a grin as he continued to fidget with the mark on his face. “By the way, do you think this could be cancerous? With all the crap we handle in this facility, I think this might be something I should get checked out.”

   “Even if it was, if it is worker’s comp you are expecting from it, you know these assholes around here will do nothing about it.” Phil approached the sink next to his friend and turned on the tap. “It’s not like they will own up to any fault on their part. You work for the government, Steve. Their tagline is always, ‘Thank you for your service, now go fuck yourself!’” Phil gave himself a mock salute in the mirror.

   “Yeah,” Steve sighed and shrugged. “You are right about that…But at least the benefits are decent enough.”

   “Speaking of benefits,” Phil began, nonchalantly, while a dollop of foam was released into his palm from the soap dispenser. “How did you enjoy fucking my wife last night?” His friend nearly gouged a fingernail into his own skin, into the blemish he was still picking at, when Phil asked. Steve went into a coughing fit and stepped away from the man. Expecting Phil to take a swing at him.

   “Whoa, now! Hold on a minute! We didn’t-, how did you-, look man,” the young lab assistant stuttered; panic set in, as the words had difficulty escaping his throat. “She came on to me!”  To his surprise, though, Phil began to burst into a fit of laughter as he massaged the soap into his hands, and then proceeded to stick them under the tap of running water.

   “Calm down, you weeb!” Phil smiled and looked at Steve. “I’m not mad or anything. Cheryl told me about it after I got home last night.”

   “Wait, what?” Steve was now confused more than ever.

   “It’s a game we play sometimes,” the project lead went on to explain after he shut off the tap and retrieved a paper towel from the automatic dispenser hanging on the wall next to him. “The unsatisfied, lonely housewife seduces the horny lab assistant while her husband is away at work.” Mouth agape, Steve continued looking at his mentor like he had sprouted antlers from his head. “You still don’t get it, do you? We’re swingers, you dummy! Cheryl took a shine to you the last time you were over at our place and wanted to fuck your brains out.” Phil laughed as he dried his hands on the brown colored paper towel. “What? You thought I was some pathetic schmuck who didn’t know his wife was getting reamed in the kitchen by his friend?”

   “So, wait a minute…” Steve was desperately trying to wrap his head around the situation. “Are you telling me you didn’t get a call from the general to go into the lab last night? And all of that was just some ruse to get me alone with your wife?”

   “Oh, no. The call from General Bayley was real.” Phil balled up the used towel and tossed it towards the garbage can sitting next to the restroom’s entrance. He missed. “There was an issue with the subject’s dopamine levels that needed to be addressed. Turned out it was the guards posted on duty having a little fun with the test subject; they were teasing the freak by pelting him with some cookies they got from the Christmas party being held in the facility. Damn thing went ballistic and nearly broke out of its holding cell. Had to tranquilize the shit out of it just to stop it from hurting itself, and quite possibly getting loose and ripping those two idiots’ heads off.” Steve followed his friend to the bathroom door, where Phil bent down to pick up the paper towel to properly dispose of it.

   “Forget that freak of an experiment, what did you and Cheryl originally have planned?”

   “Well,” Steve continued to explain as they left the washroom and entered an extended hallway, with a network of corridors and entryways on either side: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer playing softly over the speakers in the ceiling. “You two were supposed to fuck each other while I kept eating dinner, pretending I didn’t know what was happening.”

   “What the fuck, man!” Steve looked at his friend in disbelief. “So, are you telling me that you are some kind of cuck?”

   Phil laughed. “Not really, I get to have my fun too…Do you know Susan from the genetics lab?”

   “Seriously? Shy as a mouse, pillow-tits Susan?” Steve was flabbergasted as the image of Phil and the meek lab tech, Susan McDiddle, going at it on one of the lab tables, popped into his head.

   “Yes-siree.” A look of satisfaction appeared on Phil’s face as he reminisced over his encounter. “Cheryl and I have an open relationship, where we have our fun and tell each other about it afterwards. Sometimes we even…”

   “Okay, okay,” Steve interrupted his mentor.  “One thing at a time; I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that you two are this kinky.” They continued to walk down the hallway before they turned a corner. All the while, oblivious to the eerie silence which filled the air around them when the music over the loudspeakers abruptly ended, and the patches of crimson staining the glass partitions built into the lab doors they had passed. They were even unaware of the absent guards that were supposed to be posted at their lab’s entrance. “But tell me this, how is Susan in the sack? Is she-” But before he could finish inquiring for further details of his friend’s escapades with the lab tech, Steve lost his footing and found himself planted ass first on the floor, after Phil had opened the door with his keycard and let Steve enter their assigned laboratory space ahead of him.

   “What the fuck?” Steve was a little stunned to find himself laid out on the floor, as he rubbed his aching behind. The lights were flickering wildly around them, so it was hard to make out what he had slipped in, when he first entered the room. All he knew that whatever it was, it was a puddle of thick, viscous liquid that surrounded him and was warm to the touch. It had the whole room smelling like a bag of pennies.

   “Who the hell would spill something on the floor and not even have half the mind to clean it up? Jackasses! And what the hell is going on with the lights?” Steve raised his left hand to his face, after he noticed it was covered in the stuff that made him slip. In between the strobing effect the fluorescent lighting in the room was creating, the young lab assistant could barely make out the identity of the substance he was sitting in, only that it had a dark red tint to it and felt sticky between his fingers. “What is this shit? Whoa, hold on a sec…Is this blood?” Before he could come to terms with what was happening, Steve’s other hand slid in the puddle of gore and bumped into something soft and squishy. When he looked down, he discovered his hand embedded knuckle-deep into the gaping neck-hole of a guard’s corpse. Its head completely torn off, with nothing left but a length of vertebrae protruding from the opening.

    With the remaining vestiges of sanity left, Steve panicked, and quickly yanked his hand from the body.  He tried to stand up, but only succeeded in falling on to his back, when he could gain no traction in the blood which had pooled from the cadaver. Staring up at the ceiling, he could see the florescent tubes blinking in their fixtures and swaying languidly from the wires that were torn free from the tiles. Casting shadows from the bodies of the deceased technicians strewn about the place, like rag dolls; illuminating the horror of their insides splattered across the cream-colored laboratory walls.

   “What the fuck, Phil! What, the, actual, f-f-uck!” Steve, having completely lost it, turned around to face his friend, who was still standing in the doorway. “W-what happened here? Everybody’s dead…fucking dead!”

   Phil remained silent.

   “What the hell man, say something! We need to get the hell out of here!”

   Phil said nothing.

   “W-ha…” It was now Steve’s turn to go silent when he noticed the expression on Phil’s face.

   At first, the lab assistant thought his mentor was frozen in shock at seeing the carnage before them. But then, Phil’s body suddenly lurched forward, while several red splotches began to form in the material of his lab coat. A wet, gurgling sound escaped his throat, as blood seeped and then spewed from his mouth. Steve watched, wide eyed and terror stricken, as his friend reached out to him before a pair of antlers burst through his chest. Hung on them like a jacket on a coat rack, Steve bore witness to his friend being lifted effortlessly into the air by a ruby-eyed creature with a deer’s head, adorned atop the body of a man.  Its naked frame blocking the doorway, with ungodly muscles that rippled and glistened under the blood raining down from Phil’s lifeless body impaled above it. The beast’s nose shiny with the gory remains of his colleagues, and aglow in scarlet from the incandescent lighting.  

   “Oh, fuck me…!” Steve groaned. The last words he would ever utter before the creature tossed Phil’s corpse across the room from its antlers, with a simple flick of its head.

   “Merry…Christmas…mother…fucker…” were the last words Steve heard - grunted from the creature’s bloody maw - before it charged at him.