by Mike Leon
“Neighborhood kids?” Lily says. “Do the children of the corn live on this block? There’s an animal sacrifice in the yard! Did you tell them I saw Ted this afternoon?”
“Lily, we talked about that,” Jeanette says.
“It was him! I saw him!” Lily shrieks in disbelief. She doesn’t understand why they won’t listen.
“New York State Department of Corrections confirmed for me earlier that Mr. Smalls is currently incarcerated pending his parole hearing next month,” Burnett says.
“Did you miss the front door somehow? He has a whole gang of biker lackeys! He could have sent any of them!”
“We see every kind of vandalism imaginable, Miss Hoffman.” Burnett smiles reassuringly. “Just last week, a kid spray-painted ‘fascists’ across the front doors at the Galleria. He didn’t even spell it right.”
“Do they hire just anybody to be cops now?”
“We’re monitoring the situation. If Ted comes here after his release and commits any crimes, we’ll put him away.”
“Yeah,” Lily says. “That’ll be awesome when I’m already dead.”
“Officer Burnett knows what he’s doing.” Jeanette pats Burnett’s hand on the kitchen table. “Do you and your partner want to stay for a while? I have some steaks I could grill up.”
“I can’t believe this.” Lily rolls her eyes.
“What?” Jeanette asks.
“We’re gonna be murdered, and you’re playing badge bunny.”
“Lily, you’re overreacting.”
“You weren’t there. He didn’t tell you he would hunt you to the ends of the earth for what you did!” Lily hammers the table with her tightened fists. Her mother’s glass of vodka rattles. “He told me!”
Burnett slowly inches his chair away from the table. He looks like he really doesn’t want to be here.
“Stop screaming,” Jeanette says softly, holding up her hand to talk Lily down.
“Then get your fucking head out of Inspector Gadget’s ass and do something!” Lily turns and stomps away.
“Lily!” Jeanette stands from the table.
Lily clomps back down the hallway and up the stairs to her room. Her mother shouts after her, but doesn’t follow.
In her room, Lily throws herself down on the bed and cries into a pillow. No one is going to help her. Her mother can’t do anything. The police are about as useful as horror movie cops. They don’t even care. If they were anything like the heroes in the movies she loves, this would never have happened at all.
She loses herself quickly. She’s back in the old kitchen, at the house where she used to live, in another life. Ted is there, and he’s angry. He’s like a giant in her imagination. She was so tiny then, and she feels so much smaller with him hovering over her. His breath is black smoke. His eyes are red in her memory. Her mother cowers in the corner, squealing like a frightened child.
Suddenly, the front door crashes down; the room shakes as it hits the floor. A foot comes through the doorframe from the glowing white nothingness outside. A tall man with receding brown hair and serious eyes steps into the kitchen pointing a massive revolver at Ted. It’s Dirty Harry.
Ted picks Lily up from the ground, putting a switchblade to her throat. He feels weaker than Lily remembers. Like she might be able to overpower him, even as a small child.
“You’ll never take me alive, Callahan!” Ted says.
With one hand, Dirty Harry raises his .44 Magnum. It’s the most powerful handgun in the world (and will blow your head clean off). He shakes his head, grim faced as always.
“Go ahead,” Harry says. “Make my day.”
Lily elbows Ted in the balls and runs. Harry shoots him with the Magnum, not once but all six times. Then he reloads, shooting Ted six more times just for good measure.
“You okay, little girl?” Dirty Harry asks.
She’s not okay. This is just a fantasy. She’s alone in her room and Dirty Harry is not real. He won’t be coming to save her.
EXT. SCHOOL CAFETERIA – DAY
The next fourteen hours are a sleepless mass of rage and angst and fear and nothing really coherent at all. Lily doesn’t speak another word until she’s five minutes from the end of lunch break and staring down a peanut butter and jelly sandwich she hasn’t taken one bite from.
She quietly slipped out of the house this morning while Jeanette was in the shower. She doesn’t know how long she can avoid her mother, but right now she hopes she can keep it up forever.
The gory animal head was gone when she went out the front door, but the bloody writing was still there. She tried not to look at it as she left. It called to her anyway. It taunted her. It threatened her. It made her feel powerless.
“So what’ll happen if he gets out?” The question is all she’s been able to think about for more than half a day, but hearing it from another person suddenly makes it so much more real.
She snaps out of her terror trance to look at Kayla, sitting next to her in the cafeteria.
“I don’t know.” Lily pokes at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich like a really careless scientist investigating the black goo from LV-223. “They’ll probably find me dead in a ditch somewhere—if they find me at all.”
“Come on,” Kayla says, taking an emphatically cheery tone. It seems out of place from a girl wearing a Robert Smith T-shirt and eating out of a Crow lunch box. “It can’t be that serious.”
“The guy has his own satanic biker gang.” Lily buries her face in her hands. “Literally. They worship the devil. He’s been in gunfights. I think he’s killed people. He carries a broken jagged baseball bat. He calls it the peacekeeper.”
“You could hire a three-hundred-pound guy to follow you around like Britney Spears.” Kayla laughs.
“Yeah. Not funny.”
“Sorry.”
The conversation crashes there, and after an awkward moment of silence, Lily begins to melt back into her solitary pit of despair. Kayla heroically changes the subject.
“So Jessica said there’s some hot guy working at the video store now?”
“Oh.” Lily forgot about the boy at the video store. Crushing on boys seems so trivial right now. “Yeah, he’s weird. I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“He just doesn’t talk much. He said he grew up in a cult or something. I think he might be gay.”
“Aw. That sucks,” Kayla says. “Where does he go to school?”
“I don’t think he does.”
INT. MORSTON PARKING ENFORCEMENT - DAY
The hollow man walks into the office of the Morston Parking Enforcement Authority and takes a bite from the steak in his left hand as he scans the room for threats. He sees none. A sign directs him to a service window which appears to be bullet resistant. He steps in front of the window and knocks to get the attention of the obese man on the other side.
“Hi,” he says. “You took my car. I’m here to get it back.”
The fat little man is taken aback as he looks up from his Michael-Scott Earle paperback and says “Are you eating a steak raw?”
“Is there another way to eat steak?” the hollow man asks, with a tinge of skepticism. He loves steak, and he always eats it this way. He chomps another bite from the red meat and feels runny red juice spatter his chin. The fat man doesn’t answer, so he shrugs and moves on to the next order of business. “I need my truck back. Sign said they took it here.”
He means the sign near the spot where he left his truck parked this morning in downtown Morston. After only a few hours running errands and exploring the city on foot, he returned to find no truck at all. After reading a warning sign posted nearby, he concluded the vehicle must have been towed by mistake. The sign he parked next to was clearly marked No Parking Except Truck Loading. The vehicle is a truck, and he was planning to load it later.
The parking attendant’s face turns from bewilderment to pure lethargy. “We’ll need to see your license, registration, proof of insurance, VIN number,
and all fees must be paid in cash.”
The hollow man sighs. He has none of those things. He took that truck from a dead man. “I don’t have time for this.”
INT. VIDEO TIME – NIGHT
“In local news, the Morston Police Department is looking for the man who drove a pickup truck through the fence at the city impound lot just about an hour ago,” reports news anchor Don Braun. The picture on the old video store TV shifts to a little woman in a flower hat standing in front of a collapsed fence strung with police tape. A puffy black microphone hovers near her chin.
“Errbody was runnin’ up in there gettin’ they cars!” she says. “I said lawdy it’s a free giveaway! Robin Hood came here today! Robbin’ from the rich and givin’ to the poor!”
Lily wonders if that sound bite is worth auto-tuning and uploading to YouTube.
She kneels in front of a shelving unit with a tough-built and reliable DeWALT® cordless power drill. She decided hours ago that the best thing would be to keep on plowing ahead. Some kind of project might help her stop dwelling on her problem. She’s assembling a new shelf that they can use for all the adult movies Amy wants organized. She wanted to assemble the whole thing in the back room alone while Jeremy watched the front of the store, but he still hasn’t appeared, so she’s started working on it at the front of the store. She’ll worry about hauling it to the stock room somehow later.
She’s still working on the shelving unit, and nearly certain they’ll never see Jeremy again, when she hears a thundering engine outside. She looks up to see him stepping out of a big brown Chevy pickup with no muffler to speak of and plenty of rust holes, wide enough to toss a baseball through.
“You’re late,” Lily says, as he comes through the door. She squeezes the trigger to drill the air threateningly.
“I got held up in a business meeting,” Jeremy says. It’s a ridiculous lie. Nobody who needs a job at this video store could possibly have any sort of business meetings outside of the occasional small time dope deal.
“Somehow, I don’t believe that,” she says.
Jeremy shrugs. He’s not even trying to hide it. He just doesn’t give a fuck—and there’s something she likes about that.
“I won’t tell Amy,” she says. “But you have to move this shelving unit to the back for me when I’m done.”
“Deal,” he replies. He picks up a stray movie from the counter and looks it over. It’s Stephen Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster hit, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Lily goes back to drilling. The old units they use only have peg holes every two feet, so they drill new ones every seven inches to have more shelves for DVDs. She drills another hole in the side of the unit and looks up to see Jeremy still examining the same video box.
“It’s a classic,” Lily says.
“It looks really strange,” Jeremy says. He sets the box down on the counter.
“It’s E.T.” Lily gives him an incredulous glare. “You’ve never seen E.T.?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Is it a horror movie?”
“No! It’s a kids’ movie.” She pauses for a second. “Well, actually, it started off as a horror movie, but some stuff happened with that, and then it was supposed to have a horror movie sequel . . . it’s a long story.”
“But there’s a monster,” Jeremy says, staring back at her in cold disbelief.
“Yeah, but he’s a nice monster. He just wants to go home.”
“That sounds stupid.” He picks up another video case from the counter. Poltergeist.
“You really don’t know what E.T. is?” Lily puts the drill on the counter.
He shakes his head.
“What’s the best movie you’ve ever seen?” she asks. She leans across the counter and ogles him, waiting for a response.
He takes a moment, and when he does answer, what he says is slow and uncertain.
“Batman?” he says, asking more than telling. He watches her for approval.
“Okay . . . I can see that,” Lily says. “Burton Batman or Nolan Batman?”
“The one with the shark in it.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Lily squeals. “Are you kidding me right now? You’re talking about the sixty-six Batman?” Lily smacks him in the shoulder. He means the Adam West Batman. The one nobody likes. “What do you have, like, a major hard-on for Lee Meriwether or something?”
“I don’t know.” He stares back at her ambiguously, as if waiting for her to attack or shapeshift into a twenty foot snake and snap at him. It makes her uncomfortable.
“What else?” she says, putting an end to the awkward staring contest. “What’s your second favorite movie of all time?”
“Adam Sandler,” he says. Lily waits for him to elaborate. He does not. She is forced to follow up.
“Which Adam Sandler?”
“The one with the brain damage,” he says. It certainly narrows down which actor he’s talking about, but not which movie. Lily can’t think of one where Sandler plays a character who’s supposed to have brain damage.
“I don’t even think that’s a movie,” Lily says. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He scrunches his nose at that.
“What about Scarface?” Lily asks.
Jeremy shakes his head. Nope. Mob movies aren’t for everybody, though.
“Terminator?” He has to have seen Terminator.
“No.”
“Star Wars?” Lily leans forward to glare at him in menacing anticipation.
He steps back as she encroaches. “No,” he admits. “But I’ve heard of that. Is it good?”
“What. The. Fuck. You haven’t seen Star Wars? Were your parents luddites or something? Were you, like, born blind and you just recently regained your vision through a miracle of science?”
“I can only see what they show in the theater.”
“We can’t let this go on,” Lily says, walking away from the counter toward the science fiction movies. “I’m educating you myself.”
The next step is finding a Star Wars DVD and loading it into the player on the counter near them. Truthfully, she doesn’t care that much if he’s seen it. Assembling shelving wasn’t enough of a distraction, and she’s just looking for an excuse to find a better one.
The two of them sit through the first Star Wars movie almost uninterrupted; the sole exception being some preteens who wander in from the nearby Section 8 housing to look at the candy. Jeremy doesn’t say a word through the entire movie and Lily almost forgets about her demons for a while. Almost.
When the credits roll, he turns and asks a question.
“Why did he turn off the targeting computer to fire the torpedo at the end?”
“Because he used the force. Obi-Wan says ‘Use the force, Luke.’ It’s one of the most epic moments in the history of cinema.”
“It’s stupid. It’s an obvious tactical misstep.”
“It worked.”
“So? He got lucky. It would’ve worked even better if he was actually aiming the torpedo.”
“But then he wouldn’t be using the force and the end would be boring. It's just how movies work, dude. The hero learns an important lesson during his journey and then uses what he learned to overcome overwhelming odds at the end of the story. He doesn’t just have a computer do it for him.”
“And the only reason he succeeds at all is that Han Solo guy just happens to come back at the right moment. What was his contingency plan in case that didn’t happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“His plan was to fail the mission.”
“You’re one of those people that like itemizes fast food receipts for your taxes, aren’t you?”
“I always have a plan.”
“Oh my God, you nerd.” Lily shakes her head at him. “Come on, and let’s close this bitch up.”
As she turns again to the front of the store, someone rips the door wildly open just as she reaches for the handle. She doesn’t have time to register what’s happe
ning before she’s shoved to the tile floor.
She looks up at a man in a black leather jacket, dark curly hair wrapped in a bandana. He has a fading tattoo of a teardrop under his left eye. He’s tall, and from her place on the floor he looks like a giant. He yells at her and waves something around. It’s a gun.
“Hey! I know you . . .” she starts. He’s the man who was watching her at school.
“Get on the ground, bitch! Get on the ground!”
“Seriously?” Lily says. “I can’t get any more on the ground!”
“I said on the ground!” the robber yells. “Don’t look at me!”
He points the gun directly at her face. It’s a big black six-shooter like she’s seen a thousand times in cop movies from the seventies, but this is the first time she’s ever stared down the barrel for real. She flattens against the floor as much as she possibly can.
The thug turns the gun on Jeremy.
“You! Open the registers!” he shouts.
Jeremy frowns briefly. He tilts his head slightly, his eyes moving up and down the thug across the counter. He looks like he’s completely spaced out—so scared he’s not connected to reality anymore.
“He doesn’t have the keys!” Lily says, jangling the keys in her hand. The gun whips back to her.
“Next time you open your cunt mouth you get a lead salad in your fucking face!” the robber says, snatching the keys from her hand.
He turns the gun back to Jeremy, pointing it with his arm outstretched over the counter.
“Open the register!” he says.
Jeremy wrests the gun away and breaks the thug’s arm in two places. He pulls the guy across the counter and elbows him in the face. Blood splatters all over the countertop, squirting into the air as the robber falls backward onto the tile next to Lily.
Jeremy fires a single shot through the front window of the store, missing the robber completely. Seconds later Lily hears the crunch of a car in the parking lot and realizes what he did. He’s killed the robber’s getaway driver.