by Jeff Strand
“Yes,” said Uncle Clyde. “I’ve taken care of it.”
“It’s almost time to go in,” said Justin. “Everybody clear your mind except for zombie thoughts. Let’s hear your zombie groans.”
The zombies groaned.
“Perfect. And…action!”
The zombies shuffled toward the restaurant. The one in front helpfully held the door for the others, but fortunately that polite-but-inappropriate-for-a-zombie act wouldn’t be caught on camera.
Justin, Bobby, Daisy, and Uncle Clyde waited patiently for the first scream.
Somebody screamed.
Then somebody else screamed.
A woman came running out of the restaurant.
“Catch her! Catch her!” Justin told Bobby. “Make her sign a release form!”
Bobby hurried after the woman.
A man walked out of the restaurant, shielding the eyes of a young boy. Daisy went after him with another release form.
“How many people do you think will believe that this is the real zombie apocalypse?” asked Uncle Clyde.
“Not too many. I just want them to look startled.”
“Maybe they’ll play along.”
“I hope so.”
The screams continued.
“Yeah, they’re playing along,” said Justin. “Cool.”
“Or else your zombies are getting too much into their roles.”
“I instructed them not to.”
“If I’m in full zombie makeup and I’ve psyched myself up and some lady is holding her arm in front of her face, I don’t care what the director said. I’m going for the arm.”
“I think they’ll be responsible.”
More screaming.
“The customers are good actors,” Justin noted.
“They certainly are.”
“Maybe I should go in there.”
“You’ll get in Gabe’s shot.”
“This is the end of days!” a woman wailed.
Justin relaxed. “She’s just playing along.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. That sounds like movie dialogue. That’s not something anybody would actually say in this situation in real life.”
Additional screams.
“Run for your lives from the zombie menace!” a man shouted. “We’re all doooooomed!”
“Okay, good. That’s definitely somebody playing along. The zombies didn’t get out of control.” Justin frowned. “I wish he was a better actor though. I hope he’s not messing up the scene.”
There was the sound of glass breaking.
“Ummmm…” said Justin.
“Was anybody supposed to break glass?”
“No.”
“I don’t see any shattered windows. Maybe a server dropped something.”
“Even so, that’s not good. We don’t want people walking on glass.”
“Yeah, I’d better call cut.” Justin ran toward the restaurant. “Cut! Cut! Cut!”
• • •
Nobody was injured in the attack on Monkey Burger. A glass of water did get shattered, and three burgers were dropped on the floor. But overall the customers seemed to have been entertained, and all of them cheerfully signed release forms. It wouldn’t have made sense to blur somebody’s face in a movie, so if some people had refused to let themselves appear on screen, Justin would have digitally decapitated them.
The attack on the clothing store also went well. The lady who’d been in the fitting room did refuse to sign the form. But they could edit around her, and it was her own fault for rushing out to see what the commotion was about before she was ready.
The attack on the doughnut shop suffered a setback when an elderly woman was a bit too quick on the draw with her Taser. Though the zapped zombie was cool about it, after he stopped twitching, Justin decided that they’d pushed their luck far enough.
“How do you feel about today’s material so far?” asked Spork, filming Justin at such an angle that he worried about his nostrils being sufficiently clean.
“It’s great. Maybe it’s kind of cheesy if you watch the raw footage, but once we edit it together and add music, it will be true horror.”
“So do you think that you’re making the greatest zombie movie ever?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“If it turns out to not be the greatest zombie movie ever, will you feel like you’ve failed?”
“No. If it turns out to be the worst zombie movie ever, yeah, I might feel like I’ve failed. Because even the biggest zombie fan in the world has to admit that when you’re talking about the worst zombie movie ever, the bar is really low. In fact, it would probably be harder to make the worst zombie movie ever on purpose than it would to make the best one.”
“Maybe you should try that.”
“No, no, I’d rather make a good one.”
Spork went off to interview somebody else. Justin was really pleased, but deep in his heart—actually even on the surface of his heart—he knew that they weren’t making an all-time zombie classic. But at least they were trying to make something great. How many fifteen-year-olds actually completed a feature film?
Not that he could put himself into that category yet. They were so far behind schedule that he couldn’t even conceive of a way they could finish on time, unless everybody was willing to skip school for two weeks and fail their final exams. They weren’t. He didn’t even have to ask to know that they weren’t.
Nor was he. It felt good to realize that this project wasn’t entirely all-consuming and that he still cared about his non-movie future.
The only way to finish was to do something drastic. To not only take away the safety net but to raise the tightrope by about two hundred feet. And take away the pole that tightrope walkers use for balance. And make them wear boots filled with rocks. And then hang a bunch of yetis from the rope.
He had an idea, but Gabe was going to freak.
• • •
“What?” said Gabe, not freaking out but also not saying, “What?” in a particularly merry tone of voice.
“We do the whole final sequence in one shot.”
“That’s the last third of the script.”
“Right.”
“That’s half an hour,” said Bobby.
“Also right.”
Gabe gave Justin an incredulous look. “We can’t do half an hour in one unbroken shot.”
“If we pull this off, then we’ve got time to finish the rest of the movie! And you’ll get credit for an amazing technical feat.”
“The last half hour of the movie has stunts. Special effects. It takes place all over the school.”
“Right. In the new version, we follow Alicia and Christopher the whole time. They’re good at staying in character. We follow them through the whole school, fighting off zombies.”
“What about the blood? If we do it in a single take, nobody can wipe up the blood. Somebody will slip and hurt themselves.”
“We’ll add the blood later.”
“We said no CGI blood.”
“Did you see how much blood got dumped on Bobby and Mr. Pamm? If somebody watches our movie and complains about insufficient blood, that’s just them being unhappy with their own lives. I have faith in you, Gabe. You can do this. You can keep it in focus.”
“What if somebody really messes up?”
“If that happens, we’ll cover it with a digital shot of a zombie walking in front of the camera. I’m not promising you that it will turn out great. But if it works, this will be our hook! This will be what makes people want to see the movie!”
“There is a ninety-nine percent chance that this will be laughably bad.”
“I’ll take those odds.”
“Those are terrible odds.”
“But if it work
s…”
“Yes, on the one-in-a-hundred chance that it’s not embarrassingly bad, it’ll be pretty cool. But you don’t understand how much work goes into an extended single take. You don’t just improvise something like that. It takes tons of rehearsal. You have to know exactly where the camera needs to be at every moment. You have to figure out how to light the scene properly but keep the lights out of the shot. How are we going to get everybody through a doorway? Have you worked that out? Will our movie still be great if the camera is stuck behind a long line of zombies waiting to get through a doorway?”
“No,” said Justin. “It will not still be great. I’m asking you to trust me. Not to trust me that it will work. I’m fully admitting that it will probably be an epic disaster. I’m asking you to trust me that we should take the risk on the one percent chance that it does work and we make magic. If we don’t make magic, are we really any worse off?”
“I guess not. But I want it stated for the record that Bobby dropped a boom mic on our lead actress in a very simple shot that was only fifteen seconds.”
“He’s right,” said Bobby. “I did.”
“I understand that. And I believe he can do better.”
“I believe he can too,” said Gabe. “But I do want my comment on the record.”
“It’s on the record,” said Spork.
“So we’re going to try this,” said Justin. Neither Gabe nor Bobby had officially agreed, but he figured that if he moved forward as if they had, they might not protest. “I need you guys to work with Uncle Clyde on touching up the zombie makeup. Some of their wounds are starting to fall off. The maintenance guy is going to meet me at school to let me in, so make sure everybody is there in half an hour.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Gabe.
“No, that’s okay. I’ve got this covered.”
“What if you need to carry something?”
“I won’t. It’ll be fine. The zombies are more important.”
Gabe narrowed his eyes. Justin wanted to chuckle in a manner that deflected suspicion, but he wasn’t confident enough in his chuckling abilities to try.
“I’ll take Spork with me,” said Justin.
“All right. We’ll meet you at school.”
28
“My name is Justin Hollow. This is my video confession. If you are watching this, we got busted breaking into the school, and I want to make it clear that nobody else associated with the motion picture Dead Skull, coming soon to a theater near you, is aware of this scheme. As far as they know, we have permission to be here. I’ve been really busy with this movie, and I haven’t had a chance to research exactly how illegal this is. But I’m a student at the school, and we’re not going to break anything. And we’ll clean up when we’re done, so I’m hoping that it’s no big deal. Nevertheless, I want to take full responsibility for the whole trespassing thing just in case. Thank you for your time.”
Justin shut off the camera and handed it back to Spork.
“I can’t believe you made me an accomplice,” said Spork. “That’s so cool.”
“You have plausible deniability,” Justin told him. “As far as I’m concerned, you were never here. If we get caught, I’ll say that I took your camera when you weren’t looking. If we don’t get caught, I’ll upload the video to my computer and then delete it from your camera just so that nobody asks why you didn’t say anything when you found the video. But we’ll only need to worry about that if we leave behind some evidence and get caught after the fact.”
“Are you guys about done?” asked Patrick.
“Yeah. Go ahead and break in.”
“I’m not breaking in. I’ve got keys. My dad’s a custodian.”
“Oh. Does that mean we’re actually allowed to go inside?”
“No, it’s still trespassing.” Patrick unlocked and opened the side door. “There you go.” He propped it open, picked up his backpack, and then walked inside.
“Wait,” said Justin. “You can’t do any vandalism while we’re here. We already talked about this.”
“It’s not vandalism if it’s artistic.”
“No, really. We can’t mess with anything. No graffiti.”
“I can’t be in the school after hours without creating some graffiti. I’m sorry.”
“Won’t your dad have to be the one to clean it up?”
“He’ll get over it.”
“There can’t be any evidence that we were here.”
“Won’t the movie itself be evidence?”
“Yes, but by then nobody will care. I just don’t want to get caught before it’s finished.”
Patrick jiggled his backpack, which rattled as if it were full with cans of spray paint. “I don’t know…”
“I’ll make it up to you. I promise. I guarantee complete graffiti satisfaction. You just can’t do it tonight, okay?”
“All right.”
“Thank you for unlocking the school for me.”
“No prob. Don’t hurt any fish.”
“I won’t.”
Patrick left. Breaking into the school after dark didn’t feel as deliciously naughty as Justin might have hoped, but then again he’d never aspired to become part of the town’s criminal element. They were going to get the shot and leave.
He walked through the hallway and turned on the lights. The school was actually kind of creepy when he was there all alone. Even the football trophies were a little unnerving, and he’d never noticed the haunted look in the eyes of their bumblebee mascot.
There were lots of doors and lots of places for zombies to spring out. Honestly, Veronica Chaos and Runson Mudd were not very bright for choosing this place for their final stand against the zombies.
This scene would work. It had to work.
“It’ll work,” said George A. Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead. Justin could see right through him like Obi-Wan Kenobi. “You just have to believe in yourself.”
“Are you sure?” asked Justin. “A lot of my problems seem to be because I believed in myself too much.”
“You can do this,” said Sam Raimi, wearing a transparent Army of Darkness T-shirt. “I don’t say that about everyone. Some people can’t do it. And I tell them that to their face, and then I laugh at their tears. But not you, Justin. Not you.”
“There’s no way you’ll mess this up,” said a conjured Peter Jackson. “When I made Dead/Alive all those years ago, nobody thought I’d go on to make a multibillion-dollar hobbit franchise. Now I could have all of my enemies killed if I wanted. And I do want. And I have. But you shouldn’t because it’s wrong.”
“They’re all right,” said a glowing and see-through Penny Marshall. “I’ve never made a zombie movie, and I don’t have any plans to start now. And you’re too young to remember me from Laverne & Shirley or even A League of Their Own…”
“I’ve seen A League of Their Own.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you think?”
“It was great.”
“Thank you. Anyway, this scene will be fine. Talk to you later.”
The directors vanished.
This was it. This was Justin’s moment to show that he had what it took to be a legendary film director. This was his time to make people say, “Holy cow, if this is what he can do at fifteen, what will he be doing when he’s thirty-six?”
This was Justin’s moment of glory.
Or this was his time to prove that if his moment of glory got all screwed up, he’d handle it well.
• • •
“Think of it like a really big fun house,” Justin told Alicia and Christopher. “You’re going to walk through slowly for maximum suspense, and occasionally zombies will jump out at you. Do not hit them with anything. Do not throw anything at them. Do not punch or kick them. These zombies
are to be shot only. If a zombie doesn’t drop the first time, keep pretending to shoot it until it does.”
“We don’t get to kick any zombies?” Christopher asked.
“You’ll get to kick plenty of zombies later,” said Justin. “But these won’t have padding.”
“That’s reasonable.”
“Question,” said Alicia. “When I walk by my locker, is it okay if Christopher asks me whose locker that is? Then can I say that I have no idea? Like an inside joke?”
“I’d rather you didn’t, but if you feel you must, I’ll allow it.”
“What if I just do a sideways glance at it and raise an eyebrow?”
“Same answer.”
“I’ll see how I feel in the moment.”
“That’s fine. Is everybody ready?”
Everybody in the hallway indicated that they were ready. The zombies, who were hiding around the school, were not available to answer the question, but Justin was confident that they were ready as well. He would have loved (loved!) to use the principal’s intercom as his means of communicating with the cast and crew, but he had to keep his vow not to mess with school property.
Daisy did the slate.
“Action!” said Justin.
Alicia and Christopher walked down the hallway slowly, cautiously, ever-vigilant for zombies. Bobby followed them with the boom mic, and Gabe followed them with the camera.
“Cut,” said Justin.
Alicia looked back at him.
“Somebody’s shoes are squeaking.”
“I think it’s yours.”
Justin took off his shoes and set them against the wall. “Can somebody please make sure I don’t leave without those?” He was relatively certain that he wouldn’t accidentally leave the school without his shoes, but that would be such a shameful way to get caught that he didn’t want to take the risk.
“Action!”
They followed Alicia and Christopher down the hallway again. Gabe’s arm was rock-steady as he held the camera. Bobby’s arm was not quite rock-steady as he held the boom mic, but it didn’t dip down into the shot.
As they reached the end of the hallway, Alicia put her hand on the knob to the door leading to Room 131, the site of many a frightening encounter with home economics. She very slowly turned the knob and then very slowly pushed the door open. She turned on the light.