By Josef Schwem

Look I love the cops as much as the next cretinous worm, I’m just saying maybe they’re going a little too far with this whole blood business. And hey, you’re never gonna catch me crying over “prisoners’ rights”—way I see it, if you don’t want the carceral state to harvest your blood for our brave men and women in uniform, you shouldn’t do the crime, as the old saying goes. But I gotta think injecting all that criminal blood into your body has gotta have some side effects. I’m pretty sure there was a Twilight Zone about that, or at least a Tales from the Crypt. If we’re not careful, our precious law enforcement could turn into a gang of violent, unruly thugs. Can you imagine?

Case in point: the other day I was curled up in a ball at the side of the road getting the absolute piss beaten out of me by one of our beautiful boys in blue. The officer in question was a strapping boar of a man, I mean a real prize pig, and I could tell, by the way his skin was all taut and red like a ripe tomato, that he was also a voracious hemogoblin.

He was thrashing me something good, and I was thanking him for his service and begging him to use his nightstick instead—y’know, to avoid bruising his heroic knuckles on my pathetic civilian skull. Sadly his passion was too great. He just kept on pounding me until, what do you know? His fists start to bleed. And once it started there was no stopping. First there were just some dribbles from his scraped knuckles, then it was burbling up from his nail beds, and then it was like all the blood in his body decided to make a break for it all at once. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and the less savory orifices as well (I assume!) He was sweating pink foamy droplets of perspiration that burned my exposed skin.

I was saying, please, officer, you need medical attention! But he was either too far gone or had too much blood in his ears, because he just loomed over me, taking increasingly feeble swipes at my kidneys while his body deflated. All of a sudden he seized up, let out this great howl and then choked out a frothy torrent of blood, peppered with clots, absolutely drenching me and more regrettably soiling his honorable uniform.

That must’ve been some kind of signal, because next thing I know I was kicked away, and a pack of beautiful courageous policemen (who I hadn’t even noticed before) swarmed on the officer and started tearing him apart. When the frenzy subsided, all that was left was a bundle of wet rags, some jagged bone fragments, and a citation for performing a rolling stop in a school zone. In my defense, it was summer vacation. Anyway the doctors let me out of the hospital in time to attend the funeral. He was honored by a twenty-one gun salute directly into a kennel.