Easy Money - The Weekend Freewrite - 1/26/2019

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This is an entry in the 3 prompt weekend freewrite. You start the story with a prompt (shown in the story below in bold print) and you write for 5 minutes. Then you go find the prompt for part 2 and write 5 more minutes. Finally you get the prompt for part 3 and finish the story with another 5 minutes of writing. Since you have no idea what your next prompt will be, it's a very fun and creative challenge to see how you can tie the story together.

Here's the link to the original post by @mariannewest that has your first prompt and the information on the contest.

Easy Money

I woke suddenly, a deep rumbling shaking the house. Wow, they forgot to mention in the description for this Airbnb how close their house was to the MetroLink track. I guess that’s a selling point in some way, being close to a station, but it’s not helping me get any sleep.

My appointment at the clinical research facility was for 9:00am and I already needed to be up early to make sure the bad road conditions didn’t make me late. This will be my first time with this company, and I don’t want to make a bad impression.

I punched down the pillow and tried to go back to sleep. I must have finally dozed off because now the alarm went off. I parted the drapes and looked out the back window at my car. Oh shit, there’s about 6 inches of snow piled on top of the car and that driveway is all uphill. Just great!

Twenty minutes later I was outside shoveling snow at the top of the driveway, totally unprepared to be battling a Chicago snowstorm. Damn weather forecasters. I should have brought my boots!

The reason I’m here in Chicago was because of my best friend, Ricky. His wealth was very great, and was derived chiefly from doing clinical research studies. There’s not many ways that a high school drop out with a suspended driver’s license for one too many DUIs can make a decent living. But Ricky had his health now that he was out of rehab and sober. Using his body for his source of income was not a new idea, but this beat the traditional way of selling your body by a long shot. Just check in for a week or two and be a human lab rat. What could be easier money than that?

He had convinced me to give it a try since the government had shut down, and my paycheck along with it, but no one had shut down my bills. After 35 days of no income, I was behind on my bills and in danger of having my utilities shut off. And I hadn’t eaten this many ramen noodles since my college days.

I arrived at my appointment on time, thank goodness. Ricky had warned me about the mountain of paperwork that was involved in screening for one of these trials. But I survived all the poking and prodding and endless questions.

I surprised myself by passing all the screenings requirements and checked into the facility the following week. Everybody in my group was assigned the purple scrubs and we were given our drug dosing schedule. Bright and early the next morning I received my first injection. This was a piece of cake - $3000 for 6 days of doing nothing.

The horse whinnied from the corner of the room as the lion roared from his crouched pose on the bedside table. The monkey standing on my chest was playing some mean Jimi Hendrix air guitar. The room suddenly smelled like a decayed corpse and when I leaned over the side of the bed to puke I saw the floor was crawling with snakes. Instead of spewing vomit when I opened my mouth, out flew a horde of fat black flies. Now I started seeing smoke rising from my body as my temperature was rising. I could see in my mind’s eye the bubbles in my blood as it started to boil in my veins. Run, monkey! Before you get burned alive with me.

I awoke to several white coated figures standing around the bed, a low murmur of concerned conversation between them. “He’s coming around,” said the nearest figure as he leaned over and shined a light back and forth between my eyes. “John, do you know where you are?” inquired another figure.

I licked my dry lips and nodded my head slowly. “What the hell was that stuff? Are you guys trying to kill people?”

“Not “people”, smirked the doctor, “Just the ones who have bad reactions that could lose us our FDA approval.” He turned to the nurse and nodded at the IV drip. “You know what to do.”

[credit@EdibleCthulhu]