“The aliens took a man. What did they do with him?”
Of course, I didn’t have an answer to that.
What were they doing with Jason?
That night, Ruiz came back. He’d lost some of the grimness he’d had over the last few days. He’d been afraid, too.
He ordered a pizza and waited for a couple to leave before speaking.
“We found him.”
“Jason Broadman?” Hank and I both came to the counter to gawp.
“Wandering around on Melrose. His car was out in Simi Valley.”
“They didn’t do something to him?” I asked.
“Does he remember what happened?” Hank asked.
Ruiz leaned in close. More glances over his shoulder. “I had a talk with him. It took a few days for the aliens to work out how to get the car back. The aliens treated him like royalty. Asked him for autographs, took pictures. I told him he can’t tell anyone. They’d think he was nuts. Official story is that he got drunk and had a blackout.”
A weight lifted off me. Tension drained out of Hank, too.
We knew what we’d really been arguing about. We knew the aliens were good people. They just liked pizza, and we liked serving it to them.
That night, they came back. Their gestures were apologetic, and they left us extra coins.
We changed the name from Pizza Shoebox to Alien Pizza. Jason recommended us as the spot to be.
He still stops by, always when the aliens arrive. Poses for pictures with them. He’s been different since the accident. More thoughtful, more focused on having fun in his film roles. His reputation went from a difficult actor to one everyone wanted to work with.
To be on the safe side though, we marked the portal parking spot with a sign “For aliens only,” with a picture of the gray ones off the internet. On our sign for the hours, we have “11:00 am–10:30 pm, Human Customers. 11:00 pm–1:00 am, Alien Customers.”
It’s fun to watch people walk past the store, then return to look at the sign. They always come in and they get to watch alien monster movies while they wait for their pizza.
Maybe aliens are good for business. We’re not telling.
Linda Maye Adams was probably the least likely person to be in the Army—even the Army thought so! She was an enlisted soldier for twelve years and was one of the women who deployed to Desert Storm. But she’d much prefer her adventures to be in books. She is published in Red, White, and True: Stories from Veterans and Families, World War II to Present. She is also the author of the military-based GALCOM Universe series, including the novel Crying Planet, featured in the 2018 Military Science Fiction StoryBundle. She has also been a three-time honorable mention winner in L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future. lindamayeadams.com.
Whoever Writes Monsters
Sam Knight
Whoever Writes Monsters
There is nothing so alone as a man without a woman, yet there is nothing more miserable than a man with one.’”
Carolyn raised her hands, fingers spread wide. “Fade to black. Credits roll.” She held her melodramatic gaze skyward until applause broke out around the boardroom. Stepping back, she took a half-bow. Long red hair fell forward, covering her face as she bent. Straightening, she pointed to Mike, seated in one of the extra chairs against the back wall.
Addressing the room, Carolyn spoke over the applause. “I think that is the most powerful message in a monster movie since King Kong, don’t you?”
One of the board members rose, still clapping. Others followed. Soon everyone stood, clapping for Mike.
Flushing, Mike nodded and waved, wishing it was all over. Carolyn motioned for Mike to stand, and he knew she wanted him to talk. It was all he could do not to glare at his agent. Talking was the thing Mike did not want to do.
But the ovation continued until he was unable to resist without looking like an ass.
“Thank you,” he said, standing. “You know I am a writer, not a talker, so I’ll be brief.” A smattering of laughter echoed around the room. Mike was notoriously reclusive. “I want to thank the board, and everyone here, for everything you’ve done. For helping make the world a more monstrous place.” He waved again and then sat, tossing Carolyn a look that said she’d better take over.
Taking the cue, Carolyn began wrapping up the presentation. When she finished, the chairman of the board stood and singled Mike out again.
“Before we adjourn,” the gray-templed woman said, “I would like to again offer our thanks to Mr. Michael Bernard, known to some of you as the famous Mike St. Bernard.” She waited as people chuckled. “We are enjoying a new golden age of monster movies, unrivaled since the early days of Universal Pictures’ classic monsters, and we are on the verge of usurping the age of the superheroes. Without Mike, and his wonderfully terrible monster stories, this would not have happened, nor would this company exist. I would not be here. You would not be here. I know you all know how he and his partner started this studio from a produced-in-their-basement MyChannel show, but I think sometimes we forget we owe all of this to Mike, Glen, and their wonderful nightmares. So, I wanted to say thank you, Mike. Thank you, and may you always have nightmares.”
Mike smiled, nodding graciously as everyone applauded, then he headed for the door at the earliest opportunity.
The elevator door slid shut. Carolyn slumped her shoulders and blew out through puffed cheeks. “That went really well,” she said, unbuttoning her top button and fanning her face. “You know, you don’t need me. Your stories sell themselves.”
Mike, leaning against the elevator wall, didn’t answer.
“I know you and Glen disassociated from the company as best you could to make sure there was no favoritism or appearance of impropriety, but, honestly, this company lives off your stories as much now as when you started it.”
“Are you trying to talk your way out of a job?” Mike asked.
“Hardly.” She bounced on her toes like an excited teenager. “You know I love this! I came to you, remember? What I’m saying is you’ve made a big enough name for yourself that any company would pay through the nose for one of your screamplays. I think we should consider putting your next one up for auction and see what we can get.”
The elevator jerked to a stop as though the look on Mike’s face had startled it still.
“You heard what Chairman Miller said,” Carolyn told him. “None of them would be here without you, yet they pay you less than five percent of what they make off your movies. They make hundreds of millions off each movie. They are pushing billions, and you get thousands.”
“I get hundreds of thousands,” Mike countered, stepping into the building’s lobby.
“Barely. If it hadn’t been for the cost of Glen’s treatments—” Carolyn stopped herself when she saw the look on his face. She tucked a wayward strand of red hair behind one ear. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. But truth is, this isn’t your company anymore. Working for pittance no longer benefits you in the long run, and you shouldn’t have all your eggs in one basket. We need to get you diversified. We need to have your stories everywhere!”
Mike, farther down the entrance steps, stopped and turned, looking back up at her. “You’re right. But you’re wrong. This company—these people were there for me when I needed them to be. Now, they need me to continue to be there for them. Going somewhere else would be like spitting in their faces.”
“I get that. But you deserve a lot more than what you’re getting. Just look at the merchandising sales—”
“You’re the agent, Carolyn. If you don’t like what we’re earning, then go renegotiate.”
She nodded as if that had been what she wanted to hear all along. “In order to do that, I need to know what you’re working on next.”
Mike shook his head and continued down the stairs to his waiting ride.
“I know you don’t like to talk about your screamplays before they’re done, but I need something.”
He shook his head again
.
“At least tell me what kind of monster! Supernatural? Ghost? Cryptid? Alien?”
Mike got in the car and waved goodbye to her with a pinched smile.
Standing in front of the fireplace, Mike’s gaze flickered between the portrait and the urn on the mantle. He was never sure which to talk to. Between them, they represented the best and worst days of his life.
The portrait, Mike sitting while Glen stood behind with one hand on his shoulder, had perfectly captured Glen’s gentle smile and loving nature. It been their big splurge when they crossed the million-dollar mark, when they left their day jobs and went full-time with their tiny production company.
The urn, small, white, and simple, contained all that was physically left of Glen in this world.
Mike talked things out with Glen, even now, but today he didn’t know what to say. The bottomless inkwell had run dry. No more ideas came from out of the ether, and he’d run out of unfinished projects to work on. Memories of how much Glen loved the monsters had carried Mike through the last few screamplays, as he re-worked old ideas they had bandied about but discarded. Now Mike had used up all those ideas.
Every last one.
Throwing himself into his work at a record pace, he’d cranked out ten full-length screamplays in the year since Glen’s death. Two had already been made into films and were successful—unexpectedly so. Another four were in production. Three were being adapted into series. The last, as of today, was in the queue, waiting for resources to free up so it could be made. It was the best position Mike, and the company, had ever been in.
But it meant nothing without Glen.
Mike turned from the portrait and looked around his smallish house. Glen would have loved it. Cozy yet open, it carried the white-picket-fence feeling while still being modern. It was something Glen had died thinking Mike would never be able to afford again.
The experimental treatments had cost them their home, their savings, and their ownership of the company, and it had put them deep in debt.
Worst of all, it hadn’t mattered.
Just as the treatments seemed to be working, just as Glen was getting better, he had a heart attack. More specifically, he suffered from takotsubo syndrome, also known as broken-heart syndrome—a heart attack induced by massive amounts of emotional stress. The doctors couldn’t know if it was related to the experimental treatments or not.
Mike poured a whiskey, breaking his own rule about not drinking alone. He held the glass tumbler under his nose and inhaled the biting scents of caramel and Earth, trying to ground himself in them. Breaking another rule, he threw back the shot instead of sipping it.
He grimaced and set the tumbler down, fighting the urge to throw it across the room and scream.
“Damn it, Glen,” he mumbled at the portrait. “I was writing them for you. Envisioning what you would think I was going to write and then figuring out how to surprise you. What would make you laugh, what would make you scream … How much you would love the monster …” He dropped into the chair and sank his face into his hands. “It wasn’t so hard when you’d already seen at least a peek at them, when I knew something about what you thought of them. But now all I see … is you’re not here. That you don’t laugh anymore. That you don’t scream anymore.”
Mike choked out a laughing sob.
“I don’t have any more monsters without you.”
“Sooo … when will it be done?” Carolyn asked, eyebrows raised as high as her expectations. She nearly vibrated with enthusiasm.
“When it’s done.” Mike shrugged, not looking at her.
“Wine?” an approaching waiter asked. He placed a basket of bread on the table and held out a bottle of red.
Carolyn immediately covered her glass with her hand. “No thank you. Sparkling water, please.”
“Just water, thank you,” Mike said. The waiter nodded and turned away.
The clinking silverware in the restaurant around them reminded Mike of the time Glen had suggested a story about aliens made of crystal fighting aliens made of metal. The company still sold a collection of hand-blown wine glasses and metal shot glasses shaped like the little beasties.
“Mike, you were cranking out a screamplay a month. I couldn’t keep up. Now, I’ve got nothing to do. It’s been six months. You gotta give me something. We gotta ride the wave! Heck, there’s a tsunami of interest in Mike St. Bernard monsters right now. We’ve gotta take advantage while we can! The world is alive with your monsters! There are so many markets we could—”
“Maybe,” he picked up a roll from the breadbasket and tore it open, “you should add another writer or six to your stable?”
“Are you kidding?” Carolyn stopped bouncing in her chair and leaned in, face clouding. “You don’t have anything, do you?”
Mike shook his head.
“Nothing at all?” Her voice quieted. “This is why you refused public appearances, isn’t it? You didn’t want anyone to figure it out.”
Setting the pieces of roll on his plate, Mike met Carolyn’s eyes. “I’m out of ideas, Carolyn. All out. I’ve written wolfmen, wolfwomen, vampires, mummies … lizard men, aliens, ghosts, giant every kind of freaking animal there is, not to mention all the shapeshifters … I am out of ideas.”
Carolyn’s face darkened.
“Do you have any ideas?” he asked. “Seriously. Name a monster that hasn’t been done. Hell, name one I haven’t done.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it.
“Let me try to trigger an idea for you,” Mike said. “Swamp monster, desert monster, mountain monster, sea monster, snow monster, jungle, lake, river, basement, attic, backyard, barn …”
Carolyn sat back in her seat, fidgeting with the napkin in her lap.
“Giant monsters?” Mike continued. “Tiny ones? Bacterium that eats you from the inside out? Flying? Invisible? Only in the dark? Only in the sunlight? The ghost of a monster? The man who is a monster? The monster who is a man?”
He picked up the roll again and, reaching for the butter, said, “It’s all been done already, and I’m all out of ideas.”
He ate the roll in silence as she stared at the table.
“What do I tell the studio?” Carolyn finally asked, her voice barely audible over the babble around them.
“I don’t know. Tell them I have writer’s block?”
Sitting across the table from Mike, in the little breakfast nook just outside of his kitchen, Carolyn looked tired and a little desperate. “It’s been a year,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s about time to at least try?”
The house, bright and full of springtime whites and yellows, was nothing at all what most people thought a horror writer’s house should look like. To Mike, it felt dead anyway. Abandoned. Like no one actually lived in it. Although he did. All the time.
Somehow, it felt even more dead with Carolyn in it.
“Money is starting to get tight.” Carolyn added milk and honey to her tea then picked up her spoon and stirred absently as she tried to get him to meet her gaze. “And I don’t mean just for me. Without genuine Mike St. Bernard screamplays to produce, the company is slowly imploding. Their other stuff just isn’t as good, and the infighting is getting out of control. People are starting to wonder if the age of monsters is over.
“What I am trying to say, Mike, just in case you aren’t getting it, is that if the company you’re so worried about betraying goes bankrupt, or out of business, or gets bought out, we may not have any royalties coming in anymore.”
Mike shook his head. “Putting pressure on me doesn’t help, you know. I’ve tried everything. Every writing prompt I could find, every weird news article, every murder in the news, every new scientific breakthrough. I even tried a story about an actual writer’s block that lived off ideas of writers, sucking them right out of their heads,” Mike stood and started pacing. “I’ve got nothing. None of it comes together anymore!”
He found himself in front of Glen’s portrait. He only ever
saw Glen in the image now, never himself, and lately Glen’s kind eyes had started to feel … accusing. “I’m sorry,” he said in a soft voice. “Our company, our baby, is falling apart. All those people who helped us grow, who we gave jobs to, who helped us when we needed it, are now at risk. Because I ran out of monsters.”
“Maybe we could revisit your early works? The internet shorts? Revamp them. Sell them to new places. Remakes are common in the film industry. Your name is still strong. We can keep things rolling if—”
Mike took a deep breath and turned to Carolyn, still sitting at the table. “You should go, Carolyn.”
“You know I have your best interests at heart, right Mike? I’m just trying to help. You worked so hard to build up this momentum. We shouldn’t lose it.”
“Yeah, I know. I just need to be alone right now. I need to—” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m here for you, Mike. We’re in this together. You’re not alone.” Carolyn picked up her briefcase and let herself out.
But I am alone, he thought, watching the door close. I am all alone. He turned back to the portrait. Without you, Glen, I don’t have anything.
Glen blinked. The eyes of his image becoming uncharacteristically hard as they turned to meet Mike’s.
Mike stepped back, horrified as Glen’s fingers turned into claws and dug into the shoulder of the Mike sitting in the portrait. The image of Mike didn’t move, but the real Mike gasped, and his knees buckled from the pain flaring in his shoulder. Blood soaked through the jacket of the Mike in the portrait, and Mike felt hot wetness dripping down his own, paralyzed arm.
Terrified, he looked to his shoulder and found the blood to be real.
He looked at Glen, gaping at the cruelty he saw in the eyes of the man he loved.
“You’re not Glen,” he gasped. “What the hell are you?”
Monsters, Movies & Mayhem Page 18