Ten Dead Comedians

by Fred Van Lente

  She pulled on her robe and went into what had been Ruby Ng’s room. Ruby had a few clothes in her carry-on but nothing that fit Meredith.

  She did not want anything from “Janet Kahn’s” room.

  She went into Zoe Schwartz’s room. The only clothes she found there were a gray T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts lying on the floor. The front of the shirt had a generic man from a washroom sign raising his arms in triumph.

  I POOPED TODAY!

  She and Zoe were close in size. She put on the shirt and shorts.

  VIII

  Meredith checked in on Dante, who was still breathing, barely, maybe sleeping, maybe unconscious. She tried to make him drink water from a glass, but after a few sips he just sputtered the remainder down his chin and out the corners of his mouth.

  She went outside, into the sun, and looked into the blue sky, whose brightness seemed like a rebuke. The world dared to be beautiful even while her own misery persisted and her demise was imminent.

  She paced the grounds, her mind racing:

  They had water, but no food. How long could they last? A week or two at best?

  What had Dustin told Captain Harry? That it was all an elaborate prank and the boat shouldn’t return until he said to?

  People would start wondering about TJ, and Zoe, and Dante, and Ollie, and Janet. Agents and assistants would start looking for them when they did not return on Tuesday. There’d be phone calls and emails, but the only contact information they would have was Meredith’s, and she had no way of responding.

  How long would it be before the celebrities’ people took matters into their own hands? Twenty-four hours? Two days? A week? Anyone who investigated would know what times the comics’ flights had landed in Saint Martin; they would find the limo company she had hired to take them to Captain Harry’s boat. They could find Captain Harry himself.

  By one week, at the absolute latest, someone would be here.

  She was pretty sure she could survive without food for that long.

  But she was equally certain that Dante would not.

  And if they found her here, the only living survivor, and with all the evidence that Dustin had painstakingly arrayed against her…and the fact that she had killed him, that much was clear…

  She knew cops. She knew them well. They would only ever believe the most obvious version of any story.

  Not her, not the gold-digging nutter tart. No way, there was not a chance in hell of that.

  She had to get Dante to a hospital, not just because he was Dante Dupree and she wanted him to live, but because he was the only person who could corroborate her utter bollocks story. She needed to get him out alive.

  Just as Dustin needed her dead.

  He was going to dump her in the ocean, wasn’t he, and disappear?

  That means he needed a boat. He had a boat. Either one was coming, or one was already there.

  But she had searched the island multiple times, all the comics had, and no one had found so much as an inner tube.

  Yet, Dustin had an exit strategy.

  What was it?

  IX

  Meredith wandered unconsciously past the pink bouncy castle, with its flappy Dustin Walker on top, catching her toe in the metal spike mooring it to the ground. She cut the top of her big toe and tripped and fell onto her knees, exacerbating the laceration she had received in Gordo’s explosion. Pain bit into her and it was all she could do to roll around in the grass in a near-fetal position, clutching her thighs, for the better part of two minutes.

  She sniffed and screamed curses at the stupid house, the utterly pointless bulbous construct with a half-dozen metal stakes being the only thing that…

  Wait.

  She had loosened the nearest anchor stake when she tripped over it. It was simple enough to wriggle it free of the soil and let it go.

  She went into the club and found the empty shotgun. She could use its stock as a lever to pry the second anchor from the ground.

  And the third.

  When she freed the fourth stake, the other two weren’t enough to hold back the wind. The whipping ocean breeze picked up the house and tipped it onto its side, and then with one more gusting push it rolled over again and fell off the edge of the cliff and into the sea.

  Revealing a metal hatch beneath.

  She threw open the unlocked door and jumped up and down and screamed like a triumphant beast at the uncaring heavens.

  Inside lay a jet boat, just over four meters long, resting on casters that could be pulled by a line up a short ramp, out of the bunker and across the island, to the huge elevator on the other side.

  While she was jumping in exhilaration, no matter how much it hurt, she thought she noticed something out of the corner of her eye. But it wasn’t until she stopped and looked soberly at the horizon that she saw the large boat approaching the island.

  X

  The boat wasn’t Captain Harry’s, of that she was sure. It was much smaller, more the size of a pleasure yacht, which perhaps was what it was, white as a baby seal against the blue Caribbean waters.

  Fear gripped her chest when she caught sight of it. Her first thought was that these were co-conspirators coming to help Dustin put any final touches to the crime scene, to help carry her body out to sea, where it could be weighted and dropped, transforming her overnight from wannabe nobody to world’s most-wanted woman. And once she was never found, into a curious legend, like Amelia Earhart or Jack the Ripper, a mainstay of unsolved mystery programs. That other boat—the one under the bouncy house, it was so small—maybe it was just for backup.

  Should she hide? At least until she could determine whether they were rough characters or not?

  But the sound of Dante’s ragged breathing, as soft as it was in the club room, remained deafening in her ears. And as much as she feared the unknown now nearing the dock, she feared more the certainty of him dying on this green-topped rock and her joining him not long thereafter, if she had miscalculated when rescuers might arrive.

  She headed down the stairs, leaning on the banister to keep the weight off her wounded knee, and suddenly realized she didn’t have the pistol. Her mind ran frantically over her previous steps before concluding that she must have set it down on Zoe’s bed when she put on the dead woman’s clothes, walking out of the room without it.

  She looked up. She was about halfway down the steep, shuddering, utterly dizzying steps. The elevator was interminably slow and she wanted to make sure she had eyes on the boat and its crew the whole time.

  She looked back down at the boat. It was just docking. A sailor in a bright-orange jumpsuit, like a hazmat uniform, appeared on deck and waited until the boat got close enough for him to hop onto the pier with a towrope in one hand.

  She looked back up the stairs. She’d have to go back the entire distance, hobble up the house stairs to Zoe’s room, then come back down here.

  Weariness enveloped her like a lead shroud. She was tired—tired of fighting to stay alive—and if she was going to die because she couldn’t be bothered to walk up a bunch of stairs to fetch a pistol with which to defend herself, well, then, bloody hell, that was how she was going to die. She was just sick of it. She couldn’t take it anymore.

  She wanted to be a comedian, right? She’d just have to read the room. She’d have to charm the pants off these blokes.

  She’d have to.

  Her life depended on it.

  Meredith Ladipo reached the bottom of the stairs just as three people got out of the boat and stood on the dock. They faced each other warily. The three boat people all wore the same orange jumpsuits as the first man Meredith had seen, except they didn’t, because they weren’t wearing jumpsuits at all. They were black men wearing white diapers, painted from bald head to expertly pedicured toes in bright-orange paint. Only the diapers around their waists were untouched by the hue.

  The lead Orange Baby Man said in a thick West Indian accent:

  “Is Oliver Rees here, missus? We received
his message in Saint Thomas and got here as soon as we could. Is he all right?”

  Just then she spotted the logo of Sandals Resorts on the boat’s bow.

  Meredith Ladipo opened her mouth to reply, but whatever response she was trying to make was overtaken by a snicker.

  Then a chuckle.

  Which burst open into a guffaw.

  And soon she was laughing, heaving, bent over, arms clutching her sides.

  She laughed and laughed.

  And she just couldn’t stop.

  Life after Death (Island)

  [As the audience gathers, they see a table and a chair on an otherwise empty stage.]

  [A few minutes after the show is supposed to begin, the lights begin to dim and a prerecorded voice is heard:]

  Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming.

  If you could please take the time now to turn your cell phones and, if you are a 1990s drug dealer, your beepers, all the way off, it would be most considerate to the performer and those around you.

  That performer is I, Meredith Ladipo.

  Due to my unique condition, which I imagine you’ve read about elsewhere, I’d like to direct your attention to the screens on either side of the stage. If the stage managers discover I have substituted an incorrect word for any correct one in the script, they will flash the correct version on the screen, so keep your eyes peeled.

  It’s not an ideal situation or a perfect situation, but a wise man once told me never to let the absence of those prevent me from pursuing my dream.

  So, I’d like to thank my husband, Dante Dupree, for opening for me. Please give him a hand once more. Wasn’t he terrific?

  Now sit back and enjoy selections from the acts of the late, great:

  Janet Kahn

  Zoe Schwartz

  Ruby Ng

  Billy the Contractor

  TJ Martinez

  Orange Baby Man

  And Steve “Gordo” Gordon.

  [The actual Meredith Ladipo walks on stage to thunderous applause. She carries a spiral notebook and a glass of water. She wears eyeglasses, and her hair is in braids.]

  Sit back, enjoy, and think of the right answer to this question:

  [She sits at the table.]

  Are you ready to laugh?

  —Meredith Ladipo

  O2 Arena

  Greenwich, London

  Two years from now

  Many thanks to Aziz Ansari, Dave Attell, Maria Bamford, Todd Barry, W. Kamau Bell, Mike Birbiglia, The Carol Burnett Show, Dave Chapelle, Louis C.K., Stephen Colbert, Flight of the Conchords, Stan Freberg, Jim Gaffigan, Bobcat Goldthwait, Bill Hicks, Jim Jefferies, Key & Peele, The Kids in the Hall, Sam Kinison, Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Maher, Steve Martin, Dan Mintz, Eugene Mirman, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Eddie Murphy, Tig Notaro, Chelsea Peretti, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, Michael Showalter, Sarah Silverman, Wanda Sykes, Tenacious D, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Robin Williams, Ali Wong, Steven Wright, WTF with Marc Maron, and, most of all, the one who started it all for me, when I was 13 or so, George Carlin.*

  You know, for the laughter.

  Apologies to the writing staffs of NewsRadio and Spitting Image for my stealing those two jokes, one from each of you. You know which ones they are. I have no excuse.

  Many thanks too to Grady Hendrix for putting me together with Quirk, Jason Rekulak for having the idea in the first place, Tim O’Donnell for that map (that map!), Jason Yarn for superlative agenting, and Crystal Skillman for laughing at more of my jokes than any wife should be required to.

  No thanks to those stupid cats of mine, Newt and Zelda. They were no help at all.

  * boldfaced = I’ve seen live

  FRED VAN LENTE is the #1 New York Times best-selling writer of such comics as Odd Is on Our Side (with Dean Koontz), Weird Detective, X-Men Noir, and Action Philosophers! He also cowrote the graphic novel Cowboys and Aliens, which was made into a film starring Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig. He lives in Brooklyn. This is his first novel.

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