Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35711173-20180705051303

I thought I'd do a story set in a city I've never been in.

I was thinking of categories Cryptids, but I wondered if this could qualify for Dismemberment too. ---

I drove my old hooptie down Saint Aubin Street. It was all boarded up houses and abandoned small factories. It was the Friday before Christmas. The weather was ice cold and foggy in Detroit. We were looking for Cheer, but we weren’t going to go begging with the Walmart Santa Claus to get it. We knew right where to go to get enough Christmas Green for snow and blow to last until we had a Happy New Year.

My cousin had told me all about the place. It was the Queen of Sheba Automotive Machine Shop. I pulled into their parking lot, and Jayden and I got out. We walked around and cased the place. By now it was late, almost sunset.

The shop had a loading dock in the back and a front door. They didn’t have a front room, just desks on one end of a large room. I looked in the window and saw two huge, fat women in those full-length Somali jalabeebs with the giant scarves they wear. All I could see was some of their faces and part of their hands, and they looked so ugly that was a good thing. They sat at a long desk that was the counter while on the other side of the room skinny little men worked using giant machines.

We stepped away. “No witnesses,” I said to Jayden. I had two clips, enough bullets for my nine to take them all.

“No witnesses,” Jayden answered.

We put on our masks, pulled up our hoodies, pulled out our guns and stormed the front door. “Alright, everyone. Nobody moves, and nobody gets hurt.”

Several of the workers burst out in a nervous, cackling laughter, very high pitched and fast as they chirped in their African language. It was unnerving.

“All you shut up. Now close those doors,” Jayden said.

Without a complaint or another word, the workers began pulling the chains that closed the big metal doors. What surprised us was that they barred and padlocked them all securely. “Dumb,” I thought. But it would make it easier to line them all up and shoot them without their running away.

I pointed a gun at the fatter of the women behind the counter. “Are you the Queen of Sheba? This place yours?”

She stood up, and she was huge, taller than I was. She locked with keys the many double deadbolts on the front door. “Yes, I am the Queen of Sheba,” she said in a booming bass voice. “And this is my daughter, the princess of Sheba. Our clan has been ironworkers in Africa since the beginning of time.”

“Shut up,” Jayden said. “Just open the safe and give it to us.”

She giggled in that the same bizarre cackling sound that the men made, only her laughter was deeper. “What safe? We got no safe, silly boy.”

“Everyone knows you got the cash. Hand over money and your payroll.”

“What do you think this is, 1950? Everything is electronic direct deposit. The big business deposit to our account. We pay everyone direct deposit. No cash.”

I looked around at the counter and noticed that there wasn’t a cash register. The Princess of Sheba stood and pointed at a sign on the back of her computer terminal that read “No personal checks and no cash.” Then she joined in the cackling, her laugh as deep as her mother’s. “They charge us at the bank if we deposit more than a thousand dollars cash a month.”

Jayden turned angrily to me. “You said this place is all cash. You said we would get 30 large.”

I shook my head nervously. “That’s what my cousin Malik said. He said he saw it.”

I looked around the room and noticed the faces of the workers. All the little men were now taking their clothes off and neatly folding them on their big machines. A few were still smiling, but most were now drooling with hunger. “What are you doing that for,” I asked.

“No point in getting good clothes ruined,” one of the men said.

The queen and the princess took their clothes off too. “Blood is so hard to get out,” the princess said. They definitely were female, but they looked like no woman I ever saw. Their big bosoms came off with the outfit. Their thick necks and huge arms were solid muscle with bulging veins. Both had pumped calves and washboard stomachs.

“I had wondered where we were going to get dinner tonight,” the queen said. “And look, dinner comes to us.”

I heard the groans and stretches of the men as I could see them change in front of my eyes. Their ears went back. Their jaws and necks grew. Tawny spotted fur sprouted on their skin. They became great clawed beasts with huge teeth staring at us, bigger and stronger looking than any dog. I couldn’t help it, but I screamed. The animals all laughed, circling. “Get back. Keep back,” but they kept getting closer. I fired at one, and it shrugged off the bullets like baby bitch slaps. Another leaped and grabbed my arm. I could hear the bones in my arm crunch as the pain exploded. My hand was useless, and the gun fell out of it and onto the ground. I turned to see another mouth snap Jayden’s wrist and bite his hand off. The beast proudly trotted away, clutching Jayden's hand in his mouth.

The princess was rapidly becoming a beast. Even the queen was starting to grow fur. As I stared in shock, a mouth reached up and bit me on my manhood, taking it for a snack. “They like to play with their food,” the Queen said as her claws lengthened and she grew a short tail. “You should have listened. We are from the most ancient clan of ironworkers in Africa, and that means we change at night into hyenas to eat.”

The pain was indescribable. I felt dizzy, but I tried to get away from the snarling mouths. Another leaped and bit deep into my thigh and swallowed. I was feeling weak from lack of blood and couldn’t fight. I called to Jayden for help, but his only answer was horrible screams amid the snarls, snaps and cackling laughter.

The world began to look dark. I grew weaker and weaker. The queen trotted up to me, licked my blood and then bit into my stomach, shaking and tearing me apart, pushing her great head into my body and ripping the guts and insides out of my body. The pain became too horrible to move. As more and more mouths chewed on me, the world faded to black.

DrBobSmith (talk) 05:13, July 5, 2018 (UTC) 