Greatest Zombie Movie Ever (12 page)

“I am wearing a hat.”

“A monkey hat?”

“No.”

“Then I'm seeing a different hat.”

“We're ready to do the first shot.”

“Oh. Okay. I guess I should stop hallucinating and get up then, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Bobby sat up. “Whoa! Dizzy spell! Dizzy spell!” He rubbed his forehead. “Aw, jeez, I feel like I've got an ice cream headache without the reward of getting to eat ice cream first.”

“Are you going to be able to do this, or should I get an ambulance?”

“Can you keep an ambulance on standby?”

Justin shook his head. “Not in the budget.”

“Give me a moment.” Bobby glanced around the park. “Alicia's hair looks that way in reality, right?”

“Yes.”

“My mind is on the right track then. Let's go make a movie.”

Justin and Bobby walked back to join the others. Justin wished that Bobby was wobbling a little less, but at least he was upright.

“Does everybody understand what we're doing?” Justin asked.

Everybody nodded.

Justin felt a sudden tingle of excitement. This was it. The first shot of his first feature film. What could be more historic?

Alicia got in her starting position. Gabe turned on the camera and framed the shot. Bobby held up the boom mic.

“Why do we need a boom mic if I don't have any lines?” Alicia asked.

“I want to capture the natural sound of your footsteps, so we don't have to recreate it later.”

“But won't you three be walking right next to me?”

“You can lie down for a while longer, Bobby.”

Bobby thanked Justin and returned to the merry-go-round.

“Okay, this is it,” said Justin. “Camera ready?”

“Ready.”

“Slate.”

Daisy stepped in front of the camera. “Scene 15A, take one.” She clapped the clapboard without pinching her nose in it and stepped out of the shot.

“Action!”

Alicia began to walk across the park. She was walking exactly how Veronica Chaos would walk. It was perfect! She couldn't have walked more perfectly if her character was entirely computer generated!

Please don't trip. Please don't trip. Please don't trip
, Justin thought.

Alicia did not trip. She walked beautifully across the park, walking with attitude but caution until she reached the other side.

“Cut!” said Justin. He was so elated that he almost wanted to cry, though he didn't because there had already been more than enough crying on his set. “That was exactly what I wanted! Gabe, was it in focus?”

“Completely.”

“Yes! Then we have our first shot of the movie!” This was what filmmaking was all about! Justin felt invincible. He felt as if he could film a million shots of a million actresses walking across a million parks.

“Do you want another take?” Alicia asked.

“Nope, we're good.” Justin understood the value of doing multiple takes during the moviemaking process, but they were trying to shoot an entire feature film very, very quickly. So in a best-case scenario, he'd only have to do a second take if a sinkhole swallowed the entire crew on the first.

“Next is your close-up,” Justin told Alicia. “You're going to stop, listen, and then say, ‘Hello?' If another word feels more natural than hello, go ahead and say it. Just say something that's along the same lines as hello. We're not locking anybody into the written page here.”

“Hello will be fine,” said Alicia.

Justin took the clapboard from Daisy, rubbed out 15A with his thumb, and wrote 15B in its place. He supposed that he could have just rubbed out the “A” and replaced it with a “B,” but he'd remember that for the next shot. He retrieved Bobby, who put on his headphones and picked up his boom mic, and then everybody got in their places for the next shot.

“Action!”

Alicia stopped. She stopped
exactly
the way Veronica Chaos would stop.

She listened. Again, if you hooked Justin's brain to a video monitor and played the mental footage of how Veronica Chaos would walk, this was it.

“Hello?” she said. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. And Justin was glad she'd stuck with the word hello instead of ad-libbing a replacement.

Justin glanced at Gabe. Through the viewfinder, Justin could see that the boom mic was now in the shot.

Actually the boom mic was in motion.

He looked over at Bobby, whose eyes had rolled up in his head. Not all the way like he was possessed by a demon, but enough, and the boom mic slipped out of his hands.

It struck Alicia in the upper left temple, which was exactly where her infected eyebrow piercing was located. The microphone thumped off it and fell to the ground.

If you were to imagine the quietest scream in the world, this would be the opposite.

It was a scream that in the middle of a real zombie apocalypse, would send every zombie for fifty miles scurrying away, deciding that no amount of human flesh was worth the risk. It was a scream that old sailors might discuss in hushed tones on the night of the full moon when they were sharing tales of times they'd experienced genuine fear.

Alicia's immediate shocked response was to clutch her eyebrow in her hand, which even she would have to admit was not the best possible reaction. So she quickly followed her “boom mic smacked into my infected eyebrow” scream with a “my hand smacked into my infected eyebrow” scream, which wasn't quite as loud but certainly wasn't muted.

Bobby, it should be noted, was wearing headphones for the purpose of hearing sounds that were amplified through the microphone, which was on its most sensitive setting. Though Alicia did not scream directly into the boom mic, the noise was louder for him than it was for everybody else, and it was pretty darn loud for everybody else.

Justin rushed forward to try to help his lead actress, but she waved him away. “Leave me alone! Don't touch me! Ow! Ow! Ow!”

Justin tried to remember if aspirin had been included on the checklist. He didn't think it had.

Alicia closed her eyes and took some long, slow, deep breaths.

“I'm sorry,” said Bobby.

She charged at Bobby like a wild animal, knocking him to the ground. She picked up the boom mic and began to smack him with it over and over. “How do you like that? Huh? How does that feel?”

Bobby screamed in pain both from the impact of the microphone and from the fact that he was still wearing the headphones.

“Does that feel good? Does it?”
Whack! Whack! Whack!

“Somebody should pull her off of him,” Daisy suggested.

“I'm not comfortable doing that,” said Justin.

Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack!

“I surrender!” Bobby shouted. “I surrender!”

With one last boom mic smack between the eyes, Alicia got up. She paced around, breathing deeply, with her hand placed very gently over her eyebrow.

Spork, who had filmed everything, moved his camera back and forth between Alicia pacing and Bobby lying stunned on the ground.

Justin felt like now was probably a good time to do something, though he was a bit nervous about meeting Bobby's fate. “So, uh, Alicia—”

“
Veronica Chaos
!
”

“So, uh, Veronica, uh, Chaos, is it okay if we help our sound guy up, or was the plan to knock him down again?”

“You can help him up.”

Gabe and Christopher helped Bobby to his feet. Surprisingly he was not crying, although he had the wide-eyed, shocked look of somebody who'd just survived a plane crash.

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” Justin asked Alicia.

She shook her head. “I just need a few minutes to calm down.”

“I wouldn't mind going to the hospital,” said Bobby.

Spork pointed the camera at Justin. “So Justin Hollow, director of
Dead Skull
, now that you've had your first on-set battle, how do you feel?”

“I'd rather not talk about it.”

“You have to talk about it. I'm recording you.”

Justin looked at the camera. “I regret that Bobby didn't have a better grip on the boom mic. As the director, I'm responsible for every element of what happens on the movie set, so I have to shoulder my share of the blame for the incident. I also regret Veronica Chaos's reaction, which I'm sure was not intended to be quite as violent as it ultimately ended up being and which I'm sure was done because of the pain and not because of any sort of personal dispute with Bobby.”

“You should put it in the movie,” said Spork.

“I'm not going to put it in the movie.”

“For what it's worth,” said Gabe, “I think we got the shot we needed before Bobby dropped the boom mic on her infected eyebrow, so we won't have to redo it.”

Alicia continued to pace, muttering unsettling things under her breath.

“You know,” said Bobby, rubbing one of the eighteen places where he'd been hit, “I actually feel better now. I think she knocked the flu out of me.”

“I'm pretty sure that isn't medically possible,” said Justin.

“My head is clear. It hurts from all the bruises, but I can think straight again. You don't look like Snoopy anymore. I'm ready to make this movie.”

“I want him fired,” said Alicia.

Justin blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Fire him. Right now.”

“I'm not firing him.”

“Do it. Be a man.”

“Since we all just watched Bobby get beat up by a girl, I'm not sure that ‘be a man' is appropriate.”

“Fire him, or I will.”

Justin glanced over at Gabe as if he was trying to figure out if Alicia had the authority to fire a member of their crew. Then he glanced away from Gabe. Of course she didn't. He was the director. He made all decisions regarding hiring and/or firing. Yes, some sort of disciplinary action was appropriate, but he wasn't going to fire one of his two best friends.

“I'm not doing it,” said Justin.

“Fine.” Alicia pointed to Bobby. “You're fired.”

“No, you're not,” Justin told Bobby. “That doesn't count.”

“Yes, it does,” said Alicia. “Pack up your gear and leave.”

Bobby looked unsure of what to do.

“Look, I understand that we've had a very intense few minutes,” said Justin. “But nobody is fired. We can work this out between us. Bobby, you're sorry for what you did, right?”

Bobby nodded. “Very much so.”

“Veronica Chaos, if Bobby has admitted that he was wrong and promises never to do it again, isn't that enough?”

“No, I want him fired. Or blood. One of the two.”

“You can't have either. We are all sympathetic to how you're feeling. If I got my eyebrow pierced, which I never would, but if I did and it got all red and yellow and swollen, the last thing I would want is for something to smack into it. We understand your thirst for vengeance. But without a sound guy, we don't have a movie, and without a movie, your excruciating agony was for nothing.”

“You don't have a movie without a star either,” Alicia pointed out.

Daisy raised her hand. “I'll play Veronica Chaos if she doesn't want to.”

“Traitor!”

“Everybody, please calm down,” said Justin.

“No, no, everybody go nuts,” said Spork, moving the camera between Alicia and Daisy. “I'm getting great footage.”

“Spork, stop trying to manipulate reality,” said Christopher. “We discussed this before we got here.”

“We're all a team,” said Justin. “It's fine if we're dysfunctional. That's what moviemaking is all about. But we have to stick together. Veronica Chaos, you're the perfect Veronica Chaos. Bobby, you're the perfect sound guy…despite the evidence we've seen today. We have to think about what's best for the movie, and losing either one of you is bad for the movie. I know that with the passion that's burning deep in our hearts, we can put this behind us.”

“Fire him,” said Alicia.

“No,” said Justin.

“All right. But if anything like that happens again, I will
end
him. I mean it. He'll be nothing but microscopic traces in the city's water supply.”

“Noted,” said Bobby.

Justin considered asking the two of them to shake hands, but he was worried that Alicia might crush the bones in Bobby's fingers. Still, nobody had quit or been fired, so Justin was going to consider this a victory.

“Everybody take a five-minute cookie break,” he said. “Gabe and I will set up the next shot.”

While Bobby, Alicia, Christopher, Spork, and Daisy walked over to the picnic table, a minivan pulled up next to Daisy's car. The doors opened, and several screaming children got out followed by a man and woman. The children immediately began to run around the park, yelling and laughing rather than creating a background that was consistent with a postapocalyptic wasteland.

“Hi,” Justin said as he walked over to the adults. “I'm Justin Hollow, and I'm making a feature film.”

“Oh, how exciting,” said the woman.

“So we need the park.”

“All to yourself?”

“If that's all right, yes.”

“We're having Hugo's birthday party here. Surely you didn't think that this park would be empty all day?”

“No, not all day, just for the morning. That's why we got here so early.”

“Oh, well, Hugo wanted to start his birthday party as soon as possible. My little sweetheart gets so hyper sometimes. Here, Hugo, have some taffy.”

Justin noticed that the children were helping themselves to the cookies. “Hey,” he called out. “Those are for cast and crew only.” The children, hearing his message, limited themselves to four each.

“Isn't there another park where you could shoot your little movie?” asked the woman.

“Well, we've already done a couple of scenes here, so if we move, our footage won't match. And we were here first.”

Hugo, who was very wide, held out his hand. The woman put a candy bar in it. The cast and crew returned with their cookies.

“What kind of movie is it?” asked the woman.

Justin quickly tried to think of an answer that was not “a zombie movie.”

“A zombie movie,” said Christopher.

The woman scowled. “You should spend a little less time thinking about zombies and a little more time thinking about the Lord.”

“Zombies don't exist,” said the man. “Why don't you make a war movie?”

“We're not trying to ruin anybody's birthday,” Justin insisted. “All we need to do is get a few more scenes done, and we'll be out of your way.”

“Zombies,” the woman muttered. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves. It's not natural for kids to be into all of that blood and slime. When I was your age, I liked dolls and math.”

“Why don't you make a comedy?” suggested the man. “You could film a kid falling off the teeter-totter.”

“Zombies are not appropriate subject matter for your age-group,” the woman informed Justin. “Do your parents know?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Do they approve?”

“They know.”

“I will not be moving Hugo's birthday party so you cultists can play zombie games.” She gave Hugo a handful of gumdrops. “Disgraceful and disgusting.”

“Good makeup effects though,” said the man, gesturing to Alicia's forehead. “I'll give them that.”

“That's not makeup,” said Alicia. “It's the snakes in my head trying to get out. If you hold your hand there long enough, you might feel a fang.”

“In my day, kids were not smart-alecky to adults,” said the woman. “And we didn't do that to our hair.”

“This isn't dye. Don't drink the water, or the same thing could happen to you.”

The woman handed Hugo a pretzel stick, which he tossed onto the ground. “I think we're done talking to you. We can share the park.”

“You should make a movie about cats,” said the man.

Another car pulled up next to the minivan. The children squealed with excitement.

“The clown is here! The clown is here!”