The original Criswell had been played by the late Jeron Criswell Konig, a mentalist known for his flamboyant style and crazily inaccurate predictions about the future. He once said space rays would convert all metal in the city of Denver to a rubber-like substance. Another time, Criswell said the world would end in cannibalism in the year 1999. Johnny Carson loved him as a guest on The Tonight Show. But his most famous performance had been as host of the original Edward Hickory film. “Can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?” Indeed it could, because Grave Robbers from Outer Space became a cult classic.
Maliki’s favorite YouTube promo as Criswell was a monologue. He delivered it under the original Criswell Predicts! logo from the first film. Staring into the camera, he intoned:
I predict that a surplus of automobiles powered by electro-magnetism will cause the Earth’s magnetic poles to shift. The planet will tilt ninety degrees off its axis. North will become East, and West will become South—to disastrous results.
Country and Western music will become Country and Southern music. British actors will be further confounded in their efforts to perform believable accents for Southern vampires. And backpackers hiking the Appalachian Trail, still following their compasses like lemmings, will drown in the Atlantic Ocean. The only person who will benefit is Santa Claus because the North Pole will become the Far East Pole, thus enabling him to buy cheap toy supplies from China.
The Earth off its axis. Funny how such an idea might explain current events. The dead now walked outside this grocery store. They had driven the young mother insane and killed her. She had looked too much like the former Mrs. al-Fulan, all creamy white skin and vacant eyes, and that somehow made it worse. The happiness of the past was well and truly dead, smeared in bloody clumps across the asphalt. Maliki decided he no longer cared for the monologue about the tilted Earth.
In any case, here he was now in some Virginia toilet town, Nilbog—God, what a depressing name—where he would probably die. What a perfect cherry on top of the shit sundae of getting fired.
Of course he knew he’d been a royal asshole since the moment he stepped off his plane in Richmond. Travel expenses and eighty dollars a day, although more than he should have rightly expected at this point in his career, were still an insult to someone of his experience. But the most unpleasant surprise occurred when he arrived on set: he discovered he no longer enjoyed acting or any part of the movie-making process. Every camera, every production assistant, every makeup artist running a lint-roller across his black suit, they all reminded him of what he’d lost. And he didn’t hesitate to tell them so.
Still, maybe he’d gone too far today with the attitude. He shouldn’t have pointed his finger at the director and then at Edith Holman—who’d flown in from Atlanta to babysit him—and called them corporate fucktards. And it probably didn’t help that he’d stormed off set—coming straight to Sammy’s Grocery—which forced them to cancel the rest of the day’s shoot.
“Your first YouTube promo hasn’t aired yet,” Edith Holman told him that evening on his cell phone. “We could still cast another Criswell, you know.”
He’d stood in the aisle of Sammy’s Grocery—before zombies, before death, really another life—and listened in disbelief. There was no way she would do that. Cast another Criswell? At this point? In fact, he should threaten her with the prospect of his leaving.
“Well then, fine,” he’d said. “Maybe I should walk, and you can find another Criswell to carry your shit.”
She wasn’t impressed. He could tell that because she hung up on him.
“Call me Mr. Levolent,” he whispered now. He kicked over his empty beer bottle. It clattered against the base of the checkout counter and then was as silent and empty as he was.
He should start over. Fly home, find someplace to live—not inside his brother’s house—and choose a new career. Marry a woman with an IQ higher than her dress size. Lose some weight. Maybe even get right with God.
I will pray for you, Maliki.
No. He would pray for himself.
And all that sounded good. It sounded very good.
He’d get right on it as soon as he survived the night.
Maliki chuckled as he gripped the counter and pulled himself to his feet.
The younger brother with the scratches on his neck—his name was Justin or Joe Bob or some shit—gave him an alarmed look before turning to address Asshole Number One: “Jeff, what do we do now?”
Maliki found his axe and held it at port arms, imitating the pose of Asshole Number One with the shotgun. Time to cooperate, I guess. Let Number One be Number One. “I have to agree with our blood-speckled young friend here. I’ve seen enough. Crazy naked lady was enough to kill any doubt I had. What do we do now?”
Jeff looked at each of them in turn: the two brothers, Asshole Number Two with the bleeding shoulder, the store clerk, and finally at Maliki. He seemed reluctant to answer. “We take as many down with us as we can.”
In other words, We die.
Maliki closed his eyes. Too bad he didn’t have any more happy memories.
***
Footsteps pattered across the aisle behind him. Maliki snapped to attention and brought his axe up to his shoulder.
The others heard it, too. Someone else was in the store.
Jeff crouched and aimed his shotgun. “New problem.”
His friend with the bloody shoulder knelt next to him. “If Sammy’s awake—”
Before he could finish his sentence, a blur of small limbs and blonde hair raced in and tackled Jeff. It was the girl who’d died of the drug overdose. Faster than Maliki would have thought possible, she knocked the shotgun aside and clamped her fingers around Jeff’s throat.
Maliki stared in confusion. But I thought she died.
Jeff pushed her away, cracking her head against the display table of gift bags. He still held the gun, so he rolled onto his stomach, aimed, and fired.
The girl’s chest disappeared a red spray.
In the silence that followed, Maliki sunk to his knees. Too much. I can’t take it anymore.
“Jeff,” bloody shoulder man said. His tone implied the same emotion.
“I know,” Jeff said.
At last, Maliki thought. We all agree on something.
***
In fact, he didn’t dislike Asshole Number One as much as he’d made out to. His treatment of Jeff was kind of like being on the Grave Robbers set: being a jerk carried its own inertia. And, as he’d already established, maybe he should rethink that strategy. Jeff and bloody shoulder man, a.k.a. Asshole Number Two—Danny, he remembered now—might be the only ones who could help him keep his date with his future self. That would be Maliki al-Fulan, version 2.0, the happy man who no longer browsed guns for the perfect oral fit.
Back when they were arming themselves with camping equipment and sparklers—and don’t forget the No-Doz pills, mustn’t forget those—he overheard the conversation between Jeff and Danny from the next aisle over. He hadn’t known until then that their self-appointed leader was married. And sure, it gave him a moment’s pause when he learned the wife was currently alone in a house next to a graveyard. No wonder he’s pushing us along. Jeff had someone to get back to, someone he was worried about.
Maliki didn’t feel the jealousy he would have expected at such a revelation. The tall, white man in the open flannel shirt wasn’t a marital loser like he was. Earlier, Jeff revealed he owned a plane at the local air strip, which meant he still had a good job. Instead of envy, this information saddened him. It was one thing for a washed-up actor like him to face death; he half wanted it to come anyway. But he would have felt differently if all this had happened during the happy time, when he was still a success, like Jeff. When he could still get laid. Jeff should be in his happy time, but now he’d implied this was the end for all of them. They would die fighting, but they would still die. What would happen to the wife alone in the house? Maliki hoped she had the b
rains to run.
As for himself, how could he salvage some dignity in his final moments? Maliki straightened his bowtie and tried to straighten his bowed back. Mal Levolent would have welcomed a brawl with the undead. Sure, they would have performed a Broadway kick line in the process, but Mal Levolent was as comfortable with zombies as he was with any Hollywood monster—except perhaps for sentient blobs who tried to feed him Jell-O (Sinful Cinema episode 4, showing The Blob). Maybe it was time ole Mal taught Maliki how to kick some ass.
He turned to Toby, the former co-worker of the zombie making a racket in the storage room. “You have any weapons back there you haven’t told us about? Something else in your meth lab?”
Toby frowned at him.
“Sorry. That came out wrong.”
Toby stepped up to Jeff. “I think there might be another option.”
It took Jeff a moment to acknowledge him. He was still staring at the corpse of young Miss Rooter, now bleeding out beside a shelf of potpourri. Jeff blinked and seemed startled by Toby’s presence. He tried to wipe the girl’s blood off his face but only succeeded in smearing it.
Toby had been sprayed across his cheeks as well, but he made no such effort to clean himself. “Jeff?”
Jeff nodded as if Toby had said something profound. Slowly, he cracked open his shotgun and replaced the spent shell with a new one from his pocket. Maliki wondered if the man had finally snapped. Couldn’t say he blamed him.
Sammy the zombie continued to beat on the storage room door. As Maliki listened, a second set of fists joined in, adding a rhythmic counterpoint. Rat-tatta-tat-tat. Rat-tatta-tat-tat.
Danny shook his head. “Sammy made some friends.”
It didn’t seem dire yet—the door would hold against fists—so no one moved. Maliki thought Toby was doing an admirable job of ignoring the sounds to stay focused on Jeff.
The noise snapped Jeff out of his stupor. He nodded at Toby. “What’s your idea?”
“That lady said her van was on the other side of the Gas ’N’ Sip. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I think I can get us over there—or at least closer.”
The older Owens brother was crouched on the floor, holding his head like it was about to burst. “How? Those things are everywhere outside.”
“The cooler.”
Maliki glanced at the glass-doored drink refrigerator in the back. “The cooler?”
Toby pointed to the back hallway that led to the restrooms. “Through there. It’s where we take deliveries for meat and beer and stuff? And, you know, them ice cream doohickeys that look all vulgar?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Sammy had a door to the outside put in for the delivery men. Them things might not know it’s there.”
Jeff closed the shotgun’s breech. “It’s worth a shot. What do you think, guys? You up for it?”
Danny shrugged. “It’s better than the ‘we all get fucked inside’ plan.”
Maliki braced himself as Jeff made eye contact with him. Maybe Jeff was wondering if the actor would again retreat behind the cash register with beer and potato chips. So Maliki forced himself to hold his gaze and nod.
Jeff nodded back. He turned to the guy on Maliki’s right. “How about you? Did…” He trailed off.
Maliki’s first thought was that the newcomer was another zombie, but the young, dark-haired white man who stood there didn’t appear dead—wasn’t decayed, wasn’t injured, wasn’t dirty—and he wasn’t attacking them. He wore a dark gray suit and white dress shirt with no tie.
Maliki glanced at the opaqued entrance door. The locked deadbolt still glinted in the crack of the doorframe. How did he get in here?
The man stared at them with such an intensity that Maliki imagined he felt heat. His eyes were red, much redder than normal. He looked at them each in turn, as if searching for a particular person. Then he frowned, apparently not finding him or her.
Jeff approached him. “Hey, where did you come from? I didn’t notice—”
The newcomer opened his mouth, displaying rows of pointed teeth. He spat twin jets of black fluid into Jeff’s face.
Jeff screamed.
“Watch out!” someone said, but it was too late.
Before anyone could move, the man stepped forward and thrust his hand into Toby’s chest. Maliki was close enough to see how the hand seemed to melt through the material of Toby’s blue-and-white flannel shirt. In an eyeblink, he pulled the hand back out—and this time it solidified as it withdrew, separating cloth and flesh in a miniature geyser of blood.
The room spun in Maliki’s vision as the man with the pointed teeth held aloft the red bulb of Toby’s heart in a blood-soaked fist. He allowed it to drop to the floor, where it landed with a splat.
The man turned and ran for the door.
“Stop him!” Jimmy Owens said.
But they couldn’t manage that, either. They might as well have tried to catch a fighter jet, the killer moved so quickly. He passed through the closed front door like it wasn’t even there. Glass and wood indented slightly with his passage like the surface of a bubble before snapping back into place.
Maliki watched in shock as Toby continued to stand. The sharpened tent pole finally dropped from Toby’s fingers before he crumpled. Maliki tried to catch him but missed.
***
The room continued spinning, and Maliki realized he was going to faint. He crouched on the floor and sucked in deep breaths. Zombies and venom-spitters. This is bullshit.
He imagined the world outside the store, swarming with the undead and fang-toothed Caucasians, shockwaves of blue light spreading out from every step they took. Clearly, there was more happening here than a simple zombie outbreak, if that was ever simple. Somebody had to know what was going on. Maybe it was somebody here.
Jeff sat a few feet away, hands pressed into his eyes.
Danny pulled them away to look, but Jeff kept his eyes shut. “You okay, man?”
“My face is numb. I can’t see anything.”
“Oh, shit.”
Maliki stood up, buoyed by an anger that inflated him like a hot air balloon. “I feel as though I was not completely informed on what the fuck is happening here. Who knew they could do that?”
Danny glared at him. “They can’t. That was something else.”
“Else? Something else? Son of a fucking whore from hell.”
He needed to destroy something. Anything. Maliki seized an endcap display and hurled it down Aisle Four. Three-ring binders and disposable cigarette lighters skittered along the vinyl floor like trash in a gutter.
He stared at the mess he’d made, aware of everyone staring at him. Way to go, Mr. Levolent. How many temper tantrums does that make for today? Three? Thirty?
At his feet, Toby’s body lay facedown in a spreading pool of blood. And right behind that, more blood poured out of the shattered body of the little girl.
The zombies in the storage room continued beating on the door. Rat-tatta-tat-tat.
Maliki blinked away tears. A scream rose in his throat. I’m going to let it out, right now, and then I’m going to run outside naked like that woman.
Jimmy Owens scowled at him. “You okay?”
“Did you really just ask me that?”
***
He regained control of himself as Danny escorted Jeff to the men’s room. For a long moment, as the Owens brothers conferred in the corner—probably about him—Maliki stared at his remaining beers by the cash register.
He looked down at the dead girl and the dead store clerk.
Pointless. It’s all so pointless.
He stole another potato chip bag and sat down on the floor between the corpses.
Jimmy and Justin Owens shook their heads at him before going to the restrooms, probably to check on Jeff.
Idly, Maliki wondered if their fearless leader was dying—acid eating through his face like a victim in the first Alien movie. (He hadn’t had the budget to acquire that
one, but Mistress Cinnamon featured it on her second episode. The bitch.) Maybe Jeff would lose his sight.
Despair and pessimism soaked into him as the spreading blood pool from the two bodies soaked into his pants. Maliki ignored it and went on eating his chips. He thought of offering a chip to dead Emily Rooter but then vetoed that as too crazy, even for him.
What’s happening to me? I need to pick myself up.
Still, he would have gone right on sitting there if he didn’t remember his brother, Youssef. They’d argued as he loaded his suitcase into the taxicab bound for LAX airport, and from there to Virginia. How much longer will you do this, Maliki? This career is a dead end for you. My friend can pay you good money at his shoe store, and yet you spit in my face. Submit to God. You must submit.
Islam, after all, was all about submission. But what Youssef really meant was that Maliki should submit to him. Allah had little to do with it.
Maliki heaved himself up off the floor. He stooped to retrieve his axe. And then he stood there and forced himself to inhale the stench of blood. Bracing himself.
Jeff soon emerged from the men’s room, escorted by his friend Danny and the Owens brothers. Jeff’s eyes looked red and irritated, like he’d had a particularly bad allergy attack, but that was about it. As he picked up his shotgun from the floor, he glanced at the bodies lying nearby. “I hate this.”
Justin Owens picked up his chainsaw. “When this is all done, Jimmy, can we come back and bury them? Maybe we can bury Mom, too.”
Jimmy nodded as he retrieved his lighter fluid Molotovs. “Sure.” Despite the ruggedness of the blood and grease stains, Maliki thought Jimmy still looked awfully young. Too young to lose his parents. Maliki’s parents had died half a world away, but he’d been much older.
If they can get through this, I can get through it.
He followed the others as they made their way to the walk-in cooler. It waited at the end of the hallway to the restrooms. It had a metal door with a small square window at face level. Jimmy gripped the horizontal metal handle and prepared to pull it open.
Danny turned to Jeff. “You sure you’re feeling okay?”
Plan 9- Official Movie Novelization Page 17