It’s not a competition, sorry if we seem to be competing. It’s not the case. I’ve already won, so there’s no reason for him to keep trying.]
[TK: That had to hurt. I think that’s literally the most credit you’ve ever given me. I feel like I should say something nice about you, too. You sir, have an awesome brother.]
Thirty-Six
"That's bullshit," Tall Bill said.
Erin only shrugged. "That's life," he said. "Literally."
“So run it down for me again. First degree?”
Erin shrugged again. “The prosecutor threw the book at me. It was a really politically charged case. I couldn’t afford a lawyer, and no one wanted it pro-bono because of the death threats. Hell, even if I could have afforded one, I couldn’t have gotten one.”
“Holy fuck, I remember that,” Bill burst. “It was all over the news for like a month and a half. You shot that…”
“Black kid,” Erin stopped him.
“Right.” Bill nodded. “You shot that black kid that didn’t have a gun.”
“How they expected me to know that, I’ll never understand.”
Bill shook his head. “That’s the fucking government for you: always out to fuck you over. They said you were white…”
“Halfway there…”
“It suited their purpose.”
“Guess so.”
“That’s why I don’t trust these guards. ‘The nine most frightening words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
Erin laughed. “That’s good,” he said. “I like that.”
“Ah, I can’t claim it.”
“Who said it then?”
“Reagan, man, Ronaldus Maximus.”
Erin looked at him, blinked a few times.
“What? I told you I followed politics.”
Erin shrugged and shook his head. “I just…”
“What?”
“I’m just surprised to hear a felon quoting Reagan, that’s all.”
“Why?”
[RL: A very, very key exchange here. The political angle of Tall Bill’s personality isn’t explored in a hell of a lot more detail as we move along. We delve more into their interactions and their budding friendship – very important points, to be sure. But his affinity for political debate and his distrust of the government are going to be one of the driving forces behind Season Three.]
Erin looked at him again, dumbfounded. “How exactly,” he finally asked, “did you get in here?”
Tall Bill Mahone sighed. “Stupid,” he said. “I’ve been a hard drinker most my life. And I know you’d think I’m a nice enough guy with the conversation here, but I’m a mean drunk. That’s why I spent so much time in places like this.” His finger went in a circle in the air, to indicate the concrete and bars. “But shit happens,” he said. “It’s usually a bar fight or a DUI or something like that. I’ve got seven, by the way.”
“Seven DUI’s?”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “I think it’s a record or something. Anyway, I should’ve learned my lesson. And I hadn’t driven in a while. My old lady hated me for it, but I wasn’t about to get popped again. Go back to the clink. So I had her run me around. Couldn’t get a job because I couldn’t drive to work. One night, she just starts laying into me about what a ‘lazy sack of shit’ I am and how I was ‘so drunk’ I ‘couldn’t even fuck her half the time.’”
Bill cracked his neck at the insult. “I lost it,” he said, shamed. “But not on her. Her car. I left the house and got in her car – a brand-fucking-new Subaru. I used to joke she loved it more than me. Probably true, in the end.
“I took it as fast as it would let me and mowed down every damned sign, brushed every guard rail, and clipped every fender I could on the way. Just fucked that car in every damn way.”
He stopped. Grimaced. Continued: “I wasn’t even looking. I was so pissed. I didn’t even care. The kid shouldn’t have fucking been there in the first place. It was ten o’clock at night. Who lets their kids out at that hour?”
Erin felt a sadness settle over him.
“Fucking little bastard,” Bill said, wiping his eyes. “He ruined everything.”
Bill sat there a moment, looking at the ceiling. Erin just watched him.
“I… I tried to… I don’t know…” He was quiet again. Then: “I felt him get cold while I was holding him.” Bill looked into Erin’s eyes with an intensity he couldn’t describe. “I could feel it. It was real. I felt him die. In my arms. I felt it. Like he got lighter. Like…”
“First degree due to extenuating circumstances,” Erin quoted from memory. He understood the charge. It fit.
“Yeah,” Tall Bill said. He blew air out and rubbed his face. “Sent me away for life. What about you? You said first degree, you didn’t say sentence.”
“Forty years to life, whichever comes first.” Erin sighed. “But that was for my crime. All the people I’ve had to toss in here, it’s longer.”
“They hit you for those?”
“The ones they didn’t ask for.”
[RL: Again eluding to Erin killing on the guard’s behalf.]
Bill nodded. “So,” he said, “how long, exactly?”
Erin looked at him with baleful eyes. “Until I die,” he said, “or the end of the world. Whichever comes first.”
[RL: Of course we know which one comes first. We used the constant references ending each scene to build the tension – hopefully – and to keep the reader in while we developed the different strands. Again, it’s hard to write a zombie book that spends pages and pages of the opening without any zombies. So we had to use some other means of building and holding tension. Saying things like, “Until I die, or the end of the world. Whichever comes first,” especially in a story about the apocalypse, helps to feed that sense of foreboding. Hopefully it was effective, I certainly thought it was.]
Thirty-Seven
Tim Harper said: “Warden wants to see you,” when Chris pulled up to the gate. Chris looked around, at the empty truck and his blood soaked appearance.
“That all?” Chris asked.
Tim shrugged at him and triggered the gate.
“Tell him I’ve got to get cleaned up first,” Chris told him. “Change my shirt.”
[RL: I get a kick out of this visualization every time. Chris leaves with three other guys. Comes back twenty minutes later alone and covered in blood, and Harper doesn’t say a fucking word. It’s those odd quirks that I love in all entertainment and try to add to ours every chance we get. That being said, Harper stays beautifully in character: he’ll talk shit, hold people up, and just generally be a pain in the ass, but when the Warden says something, it gets done. Always. The first time. Everything after that is secondary. Most of the guards at Brennick behave this way, because it’s the only way to survive working at Brennick.]
Tim shrugged again and Chris pulled forward. He parked, got out, and started the long journey in. At each gate – save for the main one – he got increasingly speculative looks and comments.
At the first gate: “Where’s everybody else?”
At the second: “What the hell happened to you?”
He entered the Admin building and each person in attendance pulled in a gasp. He ignored it and kept on. There were two locks separating him from the locker room – with showers and a shirt change.
First, he dealt with Ed: “Jesus, you look like you just partied with Ozzie Osborn.”
[TK: For those youngies out there, this reference is from back when Ozzie was a bad ass sicko, FYI I’ve seen him in concert, before he became shaking mass of gibberish that now lives in Reality TV Land.]
“Open the lock.”
“What’s the other guy look like?”
“Open the fucking lock! Ed! Now!”
He opened the lock.
Next he had to appease Mystique – not her real name – and try and get her to open the doors without a lick: “Please, Myst…”
[
RL: “Not her real name” – I don’t know why that kept coming up. Someone must have thought it was funny and everyone else went along. I mean, it is funny, the first fifteen times.]
“Mystique.”
“Please. I’m tired and… Look at me. I need a shower.”
“I love a disheveled man. Two minutes. Tops. You’ll be in and out – so to speak.”
“Warden’s waiting for me.”
The lock opened.
“Thought so.”
He entered the locker room and disrobed. Went to his locker and took out a new shirt, left the pants. Went in the washroom, found the iodine, poured it over the wound and bandaged it. Then put on the new shirt. The arms rolled all the way down to his wrist to hide the mark. He made sure it wouldn’t bleed through by putting on a jacket.
He left the washroom with blood still on his face. He had forgotten to wash it off.
Thirty-Eight
“Well,” Warden Bowers said, “what do you think?”
“I think this a completely fucked situation,” Sam Watkins reported. “Completely fucked.”
“’Completely fucked’? Is that a professional term?”
“In light of recent events – I say we make it one.”
[RL: A continuation of the “What the fuck?” concept. Obviously, this situation is completely fucked. No amount of movies or games or books can prepare a person for actually having zombies attack. Therefore, the best possible way of explaining it is that it’s completely fucked. Often times in fiction we forget that people are people, and used to their routines. We explore that more deeply as Season One moves along and even further in Season Two. It’s somewhat of a constant theme, one of the driving motivators of writing the series in the first place.]
There was a knock at the door. A very quiet, respectful, rapping. “Sure,” Warden Bowers said.
Chris entered. His shirt was neatly pressed and clean. His pants were soaked to brown with clotting blood. His face a tapestry of drying plasma. He didn’t say a word as he sat in one of the Bowers’ plush chairs.
“And?” Warden Bowers asked. “I hear just you made it back.”
“Sir,” Chris said, nodded. “Don’t have to say I’ve never seen anything like it. Not one person on this earth has ever seen something like I saw today.”
Bowers sat heavily behind his desk and laced his fingers. “I’m glad you made it back, son. But we need to know exactly what you found in those woods.”
[RL: Hint, hint.]
“Zombies,” Chris said, looking up. “Hundreds of them. I know it sounds insane, but that’s what they were. We found a girl – a teenager, maybe – and she was eating a fucking leg. And the leg had a uniform pant on it. It was our maintenance men, sir. She was eating one.”
Bowers nodded and looked at Watkins. “We saw the surveillance tape,” he said.
“And she attacked Statham,” Chris continued. “She went and tore out his throat. Jones and I tried to help, but it was no good. Smith went and shot her in the head.”
[TK: I love how he feels the need to lie about that, like the Warden or Sam are going to give a shit that he shot a girl that killed several guards.]
“The right thing, under the circumstances,” Sam assured him.
“Right,” Chris said, nodded again. “But we all got separated in the rush. There were hundreds of them,” he repeated. “By the time I made it out, it was just me.”
[RL: Notice the twisting of events? Chris shot the first zombie, but like Tom says, blames Smith. Then he says they got separated, when they hadn’t. What he’s doing here is covering his ass. Every person, when things go wrong, is thinking about right that moment. Once they’ve had fifteen minutes to concoct a story, they’ve spent that time thinking about right then, and about the next day and the day after. What if they go out and check on the bodies? What if the National Guard rolls in an hour later? How am I going to explain this? This is a huge part of how Sam acts and reacts throughout Season One, as well.]
Warden Bowers nodded at him and rubbed his belly. Sam Watkins started pacing.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why would they stay in the woods until we were that close? The boys from maintenance had basically danced all around out there and suddenly when they get to the cell tower those fucking… things come out. It’s bullshit – is what it is. A great big distraction.”
“Maybe,” Bowers said absently. “Maybe they don’t love the light.”
Sam stopped pacing and looked at the Warden.
Chris said, “It’s called ‘nocturnal.’”
“What was that?”
“When animals don’t hunt well in light. It’s called ‘nocturnal.’ Like an owl: it can survive in light, no big deal, but it likes darkness better. The forest is dark. The field is light.”
“During the day,” Sam finished.
“Jesus Christ,” Warden Bowers said. “It’s almost dark.”
[RL: By far the weakest cliffhanger of the season, In My Opinion.]
[TK: What’s not in here is that we believe it’s important to ground our stories, no matter how strange, as close to reality as possible. The concept of them being nocturnal came to me during a nightly run (I live in Vegas and it’s too damn hot to run in the day). I thought it would be creepy (pun) to have a group of zombies be waiting for me around the next corner, they’re out at night because they don’t have any blood flow to contract their pupils so all the light comes flooding in during the day, like turning on a light once you’re eyes have adjusted. That’s why they chase sounds during the day, and can see when it’s overcast.]
[RL: It’s unnoticeable now – due to the extensive editing any entertainment project goes through before being accessible to the public – but halfway through this episode we experienced our first, and thankfully only, crisis meeting.
On most of our projects we have meetings anywhere from once a month to two or more times a week. When things seem to have hit a brick wall and no one knows where the fuck it’s all going. In this particular instance, the problem was we had only ever planned for one season.
So, halfway through the pilot, with the story developing well beyond what we could have originally imagined in the initial email from Tom to me about a prison cut off during the zombie apocalypse, we had to consider the idea of having season after season. There was too much story and not enough time. The writing already being leaned down to the point where we were nervous that it was too sparse, any further brevity and we risked a backlash. So, where did we go? How did we link the original idea to what we were now faced with?
We had a solid grouping of characters, had dealt a good hand. But we would need to check our way to the finish. And so, sitting on a bench and barking off possible plot points into it, I heard Tom hit on the idea that would fundamentally shape Season One:
“Okay,” he said, “why don’t we have Chris and Smith go into the woods. Chris gets bitten, and then Smith freaks out. He says ‘You’re bit, man, you’ll turn.’ He offers to go get help, and then Chris shoots him in the back as he runs for the truck. Rolls down his sleeve, and goes back in.”
At that moment, sitting on that bench, I literally could see the entire season click into place. It didn’t happen anywhere near how we had originally thought it would, but I’m personally happy with how it did. Spontaneity has a way of creating realism, and I think the organic nature of this project is its real shine.
Tom, anything to add?]
[TK: Nope, you pretty much nailed it. I knew after the first episode was done, we had something pretty sick on our hands.]
EPISODE 2:
OUT OF THE DARKNESS
One
Sam Watkins never realized how many fucking people there were in the world until they all started trying to eat him.
[RL: My favorite opening line of Season One.]
“Fire!” he boomed, and the night lit up with muzzle flashes and the popping of rifles. The twenty guards huddled around him on the tower’s ledge pouri
ng down murderous fire. Murderous, if they hadn’t already been dead.
Around them, glistening with every explosive burst, snowflakes fell in ever increasing numbers. The small, crystalline discs, fluttered away in a rush at the muzzles as the guns fired like frightened jellyfish and danced their way to the ground. That meant there would be a heavy fall: big flakes = lots at once; small flakes = lots more, over time.
Sam pushed the stock of his rifle – an Aptomov Kalashnikov 1947 – lined up on what had only days ago been a boy no older than eleven, and put two shots into its head. From the height of the tower, he only saw a flash of black and a smear of the same on the snow as the boy fell.
The spot light swept across the mass of bodies. The men continued to fire. Blood soaking through the newly fallen snow, turning it a sickly deep brown with the lack of oxygen in the fluid.
But they kept on coming. Fifty feet down and a hundred ahead, hundreds and hundreds of what the guards had started calling “Creepers” were pressing against the prison’s chain link fence. Trying to get in.
“Don’t be shy,” Sam told the guards. “They want some, they get some.”
[TK: We wanted to explore the different responses to traumatic a event. Some people lock up, some embrace the horror, some lose it in the darkness. Sam is an embracer, not to the level of Phil, however. It might not be possible to embrace the events more than Phil does.]
He let his rifle run dry into the mass. Dropped the clip out and let it fall to the floor. Reloaded and started firing again. A secretary skittered over – sliding in the snow – picked up the spent mag and pressed a fresh one into his belt.
Sam paused his firing, nodded at her, then went back to work.
Outpost Season One Page 36