Greatest Zombie Movie Ever

by Jeff Strand

  Justin hated that he was behaving like a tyrant. But when James Cameron directed a movie, people on the set had nervous breakdowns left and right. His films were all box office smashes, so he was doing something right. Maybe Justin needed to be even more of a tyrant.

  “Does anybody have a copy of the script?” asked Bobby. “I need to start learning my lines.”

  “See ya,” said Christopher. “Veronica C., text me when you get off work. We’ll go get butterscotch ice cream sundaes.”

  Christopher began to walk away.

  Good. Let him walk away. Maybe he’d trip.

  No, Justin didn’t really want him to trip. Sprained ankles were extremely painful.

  “Wait,” Justin called out. “You’re unfired. I agree. It doesn’t feel like a real movie so far. But that’s going to change. I promise.”

  Christopher shrugged and walked back over. “Is Gabe unfired too?”

  “No. He quit. And he can stay quit for all I care. If he wants to come crawling back, begging us for his job, going all, ‘Oh, I made a mistake. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m such a dork, dur dur dur!’ then I’ll consider it. But I’m not making any special effort to get him back.”

  “It’s not really a special effort,” said Christopher. “We can still see him. He’s right over there.”

  “Ignore him,” said Justin. “This movie will be twenty-five percent better without him.” He took his cell phone out of his pocket. “Okay, we’re going to have to reshoot everything we’ve done so far today, but that’s fine because this will be a lot easier. You don’t have to worry about not looking at the camera anymore. In fact, I want you to look at the camera. You know you’re being recorded.”

  “Who’s recording us?” asked Alicia.

  “We’ll figure that out later.”

  “It’s kind of hard to know how to behave in scene if we don’t know who’s recording us. If my mom has the camera, it’s a lot different than if it’s the leader of a horde of cannibals.”

  Justin supposed she was right. Gabe was always good at spur-of-the-moment story changes. If only he was still part of the project.

  Maybe Justin should call out to him and try to get help with just this one creative decision.

  No! They didn’t need Gabe. Gabe was the kind of whiner who was always insisting on plot logic and character motivation. The movie would go much faster without having to worry about that kind of nonsense.

  “You’re being filmed by Doug,” he said. “We’ll decide exactly who Doug is later, but he’s not hunting you. He’s just a regular guy.”

  “Does Doug talk to us?”

  “Doug’s vocal cords were melted. We’ll add a scene at the very beginning of the movie where that happens. So no, you won’t carry on any conversations with Doug. If it feels natural, you can say, ‘Hey, look over there, Doug!’ or something like that. If you want to ask a yes-or-no question, I can move the camera up and down to nod or left and right to shake Doug’s head, but for the most part, just pretend that Doug isn’t there.”

  “Got it,” said Alicia.

  “Are we going to get screenplay credit for making up so much of the dialogue?” asked Christopher.

  “No. Places, everyone!”

  • • •

  “Action!”

  Alicia walked across the park.

  “Cut!”

  “Wasn’t I walking right?”

  “Sorry, you were fine, but I can see one of the clown’s balloons in the sky. We have to wait for it to float out of the frame.”

  • • •

  “Action!”

  Justin carefully followed Alicia as she walked across the park. He could tell that the scene was going in and out of focus, but that symbolized the way the world was going in and out of focus. This wasn’t so hard. Gabe’s abilities were overrated.

  In fact, if it weren’t for Gabe, he probably would’ve finished his first feature film six or seven years ago. Gabe ruined everything. Stupid Gabe. Movies without Gabe were so much better. Justin should have fired him as a friend the first day they met.

  “Cut!” he said. “Perfect!”

  He wondered what Gabe was doing now that they couldn’t see him anymore. Probably still walking home. Was he pouting? Was he muttering? Was he standing just out of their field of vision, trying to work up the nerve to come back and grovel?

  It didn’t matter. This was a Gabe-free motion picture. And that was the way all motion pictures should be.

  He missed Gabe.

  No, he didn’t. Gabe was a loser with both an uppercase and a lowercase L.

  Justin didn’t need him, and that was final.

  • • •

  It was amazing how quickly the shoot went now that they’d stopped obsessing about quality. Literally every shot was good enough.

  And Justin was starting to think that Doug was the true star of the movie. Veronica Chaos and Runson Mudd were just supporting players in the story of Doug. He wouldn’t share that with Alicia and Christopher though. He didn’t want them to get jealous.

  They finished up the scenes in the park, and then it was the special time that everybody had been waiting for.

  Time for the zombies!

  19

  “What’s that smell?” Alicia asked as they stood on Uncle Clyde’s porch.

  “It always smells like this,” said Bobby.

  “Yeah, but what is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bobby admitted. “It’s definitely not a dead body or anything, so you don’t have to worry.”

  Christopher sniffed. “It smells kind of fruity and kind of deathy.”

  “I promise it’s not death,” said Bobby. “He likes to burn candles, and he doesn’t always pick the scents that are best for your nose. You’ll get used to it.”

  Bobby knocked on the door.

  Nobody answered.

  “Are you sure he’s home?” Justin asked.

  “Of course he’s home. He knew we were coming. He wouldn’t let us down.” Bobby knocked again.

  “I think that smell is your uncle’s corpse,” said Christopher.

  “It is not. He wouldn’t die right after we gave him money.”

  “Should we try the doorbell?” asked Justin.

  “No, we’d get electrocuted. That’s why there’s tape over it.”

  Alicia took a deep whiff. “I can’t smell the fruit part.”

  “It’s there,” Christopher assured her. “There’s a hint of citrus underneath the rot.”

  “It’s not rot,” said Bobby.

  “We didn’t say it was human rot. There could be a dead caribou in there.”

  Bobby knocked again. “Uncle Clyde? Uncle Clyde?”

  “Your uncle is so dead,” said Alicia.

  “I already told you it smells like this all the time, and every time I’ve seen Uncle Clyde, he’s been alive. He’s just so busy working that he can’t hear us.”

  “He’s probably drunk and unconscious,” said Justin. “When I talked to him, I did get a ‘will be drunk and unconscious soon’ vibe.”

  The front door swung open. Everybody immediately gained a new appreciation for the door’s role in keeping the smell mostly contained within the house.

  It was kind of like if there’d been an Easter egg hunt, but the person in charge had forgotten to hard-boil one of the eggs and hidden it in such a clever spot that none of the children found it on Easter morning, so it just sat there, doing what eggs do when they’re left out in the sun—except instead of one egg, it smelled like it was eighty eggs. And when the gardener found the eggs a week later, he cracked them open and poured the ooze into a bucket, the contents of which were flung into everybody’s face when Uncle Clyde opened his front door. It was just like that, except only as a smell, not actual eggs.

  Unc
le Clyde looked like he hadn’t slept in three days or showered in twelve. He blinked at them as if unsure if he was seeing humans or aliens, and then apparently satisfied that they weren’t aliens (or were at least friendly aliens), he motioned for them to come inside.

  Bobby followed. Everybody else looked to Justin, their leader, for guidance. He walked inside as well.

  There were a lot of words you could use to describe Uncle Clyde’s house. Two of the more polite ones were “small” and “interesting.”

  Justin was the biggest horror movie fan he knew. Not in a snotty “You don’t appreciate the nuances of Land of the Dead as I do” manner, but nobody could beat him for sheer enthusiasm. Horror movies were cool. Horror movie memorabilia was cool. And so Uncle Clyde’s house should have been cool, but it wasn’t cool. It was creepy and disturbing.

  There wasn’t furniture made of bones or chickens locked in small cages or a pile of mostly dead serpents. Nor were there faces on the floor, dolls with cracked faces, or skinned people hanging upside down from the ceiling, whispering, Help me. Help me. I’ll give you fifty bucks if you help me. There also weren’t messages written in blood on the wall, saying how neat the devil was. There weren’t half-human and half-fly creatures trapped in spiderwebs or old men sitting in wheelchairs with roadkill in the tires.

  And he didn’t see any Muppets with their eyes removed, ectoplasm dripping from a piano, carnivorous plants doing musical numbers, people who’d had acid thrown in their faces, people who were just heads, people who were just brains, or people who were just armpits.

  There weren’t glass tubes of eight-foot-long toenails, scarecrows with a real person inside, a grim reaper’s scythe with eighteen blades, a spleen lying around, a matching pair of mummies, a computer without an Internet connection, or a life-sized model of Justin Bieber made entirely of teeth.

  It was a perfectly normal living room.

  A normal couch. A normal recliner. A normal coffee table. Some normal pictures of normal people hanging on the normal walls. A normal lamp. A normal television. A normal trombone. A shelf that wasn’t quite as normal as the other items in the living room but was still pretty darn normal.

  Justin couldn’t figure out why it was so upsetting. Maybe it was the fact that he didn’t know why it was spooky that made it so spooky. Fear of the unknown.

  None of the others had run screaming from the house yet, so Justin decided that he should set a good example and not do that either.

  “Come on down to the basement,” said Uncle Clyde.

  “I didn’t think any homes in Florida had basements,” said Justin.

  Uncle Clyde winked. “They’re not supposed to.”

  He opened a door and headed down a flight of stairs. Bobby followed him, which seemed to indicate that they were not headed down into a spike-filled pit, so Justin and the others went down the stairs as well.

  In the basement were several long tables covered with absolutely nothing. The walls and floor also had nothing. It was a surprisingly empty basement for what was supposed to be a makeup effects lab.

  “Where’s all the zombie stuff?” Justin asked.

  Uncle Clyde gestured to the tables. “You’re looking at it.”

  “There’s nothing there.”

  “Sure there is. Look at those tables. My old tables were all scratched up. You could eat off these.”

  “This is what you spent the money on?”

  “What was I supposed to spend it on?”

  “Zombie stuff!”

  “Haw haw haw!” Uncle Clyde laughed. His laughter was such that you could actually hear the h and w sounds in “haw.” He laughed and laughed, his belly shaking like a bowl full of custard. It was the kind of laughter that could either mean “I’ve trapped you down here forever” or “I played an amusing joke.” Justin hoped it was the latter.

  “I’m just kidding,” said Uncle Clyde.

  “He likes to kid,” said Bobby.

  “You should’ve seen your face.”

  “He likes to see people’s faces after he kids.”

  “I’ll go up and get the zombie stuff. Be right back.”

  Justin didn’t feel particularly safe with that idea, but he decided to avoid the awkward moment and let Uncle Clyde go.

  “He does like to kid around,” said Bobby. “One time he pretended to pull a quarter out of my ear, and then he told me it was a tumor.”

  “I can’t say that I like your uncle very much,” said Justin. “No offense.”

  “No offense taken. Most people don’t.”

  “I’ve figured out what the smell is,” said Alicia. “It’s loneliness.”

  Uncle Clyde came back down the stairs, holding a cardboard box that was about the size of four heads. He placed it on one of the tables, opened the lid, and took out a mannequin head, upon which was an unbelievably detailed zombie mask.

  “Whoa!” said Justin.

  “Pretty great, isn’t it?”

  “It’s one of the best zombie masks I’ve ever seen!”

  “When Uncle Clyde promises, Uncle Clyde delivers.”

  “This is incredible. I’m sorry I…” Justin almost listed some of the unkind thoughts he’d had about Uncle Clyde but then thought better of it. “Let’s see the rest of them.”

  Uncle Clyde raised an eyebrow.

  “The rest of them,” Justin repeated. He pointed to the box just in case his meaning was unclear. “The rest of the zombie masks that are in that box.”

  “Rest?”

  “You made more than one, right?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “That’s it? That’s the only mask you made?”

  “Yes. It surprises me that you thought there’d be more.”

  “Our deal was that you’d make as many zombie masks as possible with the five thousand bucks!”

  “And I did exactly that.”

  “How does one mask cost five thousand dollars?”

  “Labor.”

  Justin wanted to throw an explosive fit, but he also thought it might be a good idea to direct his anger toward somebody besides the creepy guy. “Bobby, you said he could do all of the zombies for our movie!”

  Bobby gulped. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere but right here. He licked his lips. Smoothed back his hair. Cleared his throat. “Uncle Clyde,” he began, “when I talked to you, you did say that you could make all of our zombies, no problem.”

  “I’m not the one saying there’s a problem.”

  “Right.” Bobby gulped again. “What Justin is saying—and I agree with him—is that we were under the impression that we would get more than one zombie for our investment. It’s our fault for not locking down an exact number in writing, and we’ll know that for future projects. But you do have to admit that you kind of implied that we’d get multiple zombies.”

  “If that’s the implication you inferred, then that’s on you,” said Uncle Clyde. “A measly five thousand bucks isn’t enough to cover the average special effects artist’s weekend gambling debt. What did you think you were going to get? The Avengers vs Zombies? If you went to Greg Nicotero with a five-grand budget, he’d give you a roundhouse kick to the face.”

  “Nobody is saying that the budget wasn’t an insult,” said Bobby. “But you agreed to it.”

  “Only because you’re my nephew. If you were a real person, I would’ve laughed in your face.”

  “You laughed in our face when we first came down here,” Justin pointed out.

  “Stay out of this,” Uncle Clyde told him. “It doesn’t concern you.”

  “Huh? It kind of does…I mean…I’m the…I’m responsible for the…uh…never mind.”

  “I delivered what I promised,” said Uncle Clyde. “If you misinterpreted that promise to mean something much less tiny, then that’s your own fault.”
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br />   “Look,” said Bobby, “I don’t want to play the ‘we’re only fifteen years old’ card, but we’re only fifteen. Give us a break. Make us more zombies.”

  Uncle Clyde furrowed his brow as he considered the request. “I’d have to spend my own money to get more materials. Family or not, that’s a pretty big request. I want a possessive credit. I want the film to be called Uncle Clyde’s Death Skull.”

  “That’s not gonna happen,” said Justin.

  “Just out of curiosity,” said Christopher, “why would you want it called Uncle Clyde’s Death Skull instead of your real name? That seems weird. Unless your first name is Uncle and your last name is Clyde, which would be even weirder.”

  Uncle Clyde ignored him. “Bobby, you’re not my favorite nephew, but you’re also not my least favorite nephew. I’ll make these zombies for you…in exchange for one favor.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to eat a raccoon paw.”

  “Excuse me?” asked Bobby.

  “I’ve got a raccoon’s paw upstairs. I want you to eat it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The raccoon is fine. Don’t worry.”

  Bobby looked over at Justin for advice. Receiving none, he looked over at Alicia. Receiving none there either, he looked at Christopher and then at Spork. Nobody had any wisdom to impart about the raccoon situation.

  “Is the paw, uh, fresh?”

  Uncle Clyde nodded. “It’s only been in the fridge for a couple of weeks.”

  “Is it small enough to swallow whole? Or do I have to chew it?”

  “There will be some chewing involved.”

  “Can I have a glass of milk with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a time limit?”

  “No. Actually, on second thought, yes. You have five minutes to get it down. If you go past that, I’ll find another raccoon, and you have to eat another one.”

  “I really don’t want to do this,” said Bobby.

  “And I didn’t want to kill a man in prison,” said Uncle Clyde. “So I didn’t. We have the power to make our own choices.”