Friends for a Night

Ozzy stormed out of the precinct and slammed the door shut behind him. He was royally pissed off, and with good reason; he'd just spent the better part of an hour being yelled at by the Mayor of Frank, having the Police Chief scold him like a little kid, hearing the disapproving tuts of the Mayor's aide (not to mention his long-time crush) Leah, and to make matters worse, he'd been demoted to a lowly patrol officer, and up in the mouth of all places!

He'd also been suspended without pay, and they hadn't specified how long it would be until he could start working again. Mercifully, they hadn't taken his gun or badge away, but he wasn't allowed to wear the official FPD uniform anymore, nor respond to calls on the police radio.

He tensed his hands into fists as the acrimonious conversation echoed around in his mind: "I might as well not even be a cop at this point!"

"You should be thanking your Chief that you still have a job at all. If it was up to me, you'd be flushed out of Frank along with all the other waste."

He shut his eyes and hung his head. What the hell was he supposed to do now that he was suspended? The Mayor was not a forgiving man; he'd probably make Ozzy wait weeks before allowing him to return to work, just out of spite.

Yes he'd acted recklessly. Yes he probably should've called for backup, or tried to arrest the germ on the oyster instead of pressing that button, but if he hadn't, Frank only knows what would've happened if it had got into the bloodstream.

He turned his head to look up at the Chief's office window. He could see the three shadows of the Mayor, the Chief and Leah behind the blinds, and it looked as if they were laughing about something.

A sting of shame mixed with fury shot through his body. They were surely laughing about him, about how stupid and incompetent he was.

He thought about throwing himself into the stomach acid and ending it all. That'd teach them. The Chief would never recover from the guilt, Leah would sob at the funeral, screaming 'oh, this is all my fault! If only I'd told him how I felt before it was too late!', while the Mayor would get arrested for being such an insufferable dickhead.

Ozzy frowned and shook his head. Of course, none of that would happen. In a body with over 78 trillion cells, it's not like anyone would actually miss a troublemaking cop who'd managed to fuck up more in his first year on the force than any other white blood cell in their entire career.

He swung his body round and traipsed through the streets for a while, dragging his feet. He wasn't really going anywhere in particular, but he was too upset to go home, and all his regular haunts would be crawling with other immunity cells; with the speed that news travelled around that precinct, they'd have all heard about his balls-up by now.

By the time he reached the cheek, it was already night time. He shivered and began to wonder if he should turn back and go home, when all of his senses were suddenly assaulted at once as he turned a corner onto a particularly dodgy street. Before him stood a nightclub, the type of nightclub you would only ever have the misfortune to stumble across in a body like Frank's.

The pavement surrounding the entrance was covered in a thick paste of what looked like cytoplasm mixed with beer. An acrid stench issued from inside the building, along with a cacophony of different types of music and angry voices. The paintwork was peeling off the walls to reveal stains of every type of bodily fluid you could imagine, and Ozzy could've sworn he saw two cells fucking in the alleyway off to the side.

It was absolutely foul; a metaphor for Ozzy's life right now.

He raised his head to look at the name, squinting in the bright neon lights around the sign.