NoHo Noir: Take the Bunny and Run

Illustration by Mark Satchwill

TAKE THE BUNNY AND RUN

By Katherine Tomlinson

Illustrated by Mark Satchwill

Rob Nolan didn’t like any of his teachers but he hated Adam Chu the most. He’d had the biology teacher freshman year and although he was now in P-Chem and would never take a class from him again, Rob was stuck in his home room. It seemed like Chu was always watching him with those slanted eyes, watching and waiting.
They’d clashed early in the semester when Rob had confronted the teacher about the constant surveillance.
“You like what you see Adam?” Rob had taunted, running a hand down his skinny chest seductively.
“I’m a biologist,” Chu had replied without heat, “I’m interested in mutated life forms.”
Some of the kids had laughed at that until Rob had looked at them.
That’s all it usually took. One look. And if that wasn’t enough, he could always sic Poo on them.
Poo liked hurting people.
Rob had thought about reporting the teacher to the principal—Wayne Richtman was a raging racist and homophobe and that made Chu a double target—but he had decided he wanted to deal with the teacher himself.
He’d put quite a bit of thought into what he might do and a lot of preparation as well. Rob had read about a guy who’d been blown up by terrorists who’d planted explosives under a floor years before their victim ever set foot in the room. He admired that kind of advance planning.
So he’d been keeping his head down, biding his time, lulling the biology teacher into a sense of complacency.

NoHo Noir: Both Sides Now

Illustration by Mark Satchwill

Both Sides Now

By Katherine Tomlinson

Illustration by Mark Satchwill

It was the kind of California day Ron Zubic liked best, warm and windy after two days of rain, a soft sun falling on his face like a kiss..

Zubic’s best friend, a native Californian, complained about the sunshine all the time. “It depresses me,” he’d say. When Zubic had laughed at him, Terry had shown him a printout of a news story on CNN about summer-onset Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Zubic had not been convinced.

“It says here it only affects one percent of the population,” he’d pointed out.

“What, you don’t think I’m special?” Terry had countered, but then he’d laughed, bitter humor being his default option for dealing with unpleasant topics.

It was no joke, though, how he started getting depressed and agitated the hotter it got. By June Terry would be damn near suicidal and there would be nothing Zubic or any of the guys could do.

Gene Burkhart had tried to get him into some kind of treatment but the VA system just wasn’t set up to handle anything but the basic alcohol- and drug-related problems. Not that those programs helped anyone either.

Kids were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan so fucked up nobody was going to be able to fix them. And a lot of them kept getting sent back or kept going back out of some sort of screwed-up sense of honor. And that was fine with the Army until someone went nuts and started shooting women and children.

And then nobody wanted to know.

It had been the same way a generation ago.

NoHo Noir: Family Secrets

 Family Secrets

by Katherine Tomlinson

Illustration by Mark Satchwill

Illustrated by Mark Satchwill

The police had calmed down when they discovered the gun Alex had brandished was a prop gun. Of course, once they realized it was a prop, they wanted to know where he’d gotten it and that had gotten sticky. He didn’t want to say and they told his lawyer they weren’t going to release him until he did. He might have held out but his wife was close to hysterical by the time she arrived at the station and there didn’t seem to be much point in clamming up.

He’d told the unsmiling detective he’d “borrowed” the gun from the web series he was working on; adding that he’d planned on returning it the following Monday before anyone noticed it was gone. “That’s not going to happen,” the detective had said snarkily.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he’d added.

Well, that was the problem. Alex hadn’t been thinking. He hadn’t had a coherent thought since his son had died.

Not died. Been killed.

The police had kept the gun and that was a problem because it had been established as the weapon the series hero was using and it was the only gun they had.

The producer had wanted to fire Alex but they only had two more episodes to shoot and replacing him would have been a PITA. Alex was playing the hero’s father and he was heavily featured in the storyline.

The mood on the set had not been supportive. Alex’s comments at the job fair had been widely quoted and even with asterisks inserted in place of strategic vowels, any reader could get the picture.

Jeroyd the sound guy had heard about the “nigger” line.

Alicia, the hot girl who played the hero’s fiancée, had heard about the “cunt” remark.

Alex didn’t even try to explain because he knew there was no way he could. He didn’t think of himself as either a racist or a misogynist, but those words had come from somewhere, hadn’t they?

And never mind that he never used words like that. He had used them and there had been witnesses and now there was no unsaying them.

EBSQ Facebook Artist Of The Week

NoHo Noir's illustrator Mark Satchwill is this weeks Facebook Artist  over on EBSQ. There's a short interview with Mark and some images of his recent digital paintings, plus NoHo get's a plug too!

EBSQ Facebook Artist of the Week: Mark Satchwill

New NoHo Noir Monday

Scoundrels Anthology--free story by Kelli Stanley

Over at Criminal Elements (one of our must-read blogs), they're featuring an excerpt from the new anthology   Scoundrels: Tales of Greed, Murder and Financial Crimes, edited by Gary Phillips. The featured story is by friend of NoHo Kelli Stanley. You can read "Survivor" herehttp://www.criminalelement.com/stories/2012/03/scoundrels-new-excerpt-survivor-by-kelli-stanley.  Here's Kathleen George's review of the anthology, also on Criminal Elements.

The Zombie Awareness Bracelet is here!

Sure, anyone can have one of those boring yellow LIVE STRONG bracelets. But you can be the first on your block to have one of these new Zombie Awareness Bracelets. Just $4.99. Available from the Zombie Research Society.