“You will obey guards’ orders at all times. You will not touch guards or your fellow inmates. You will dispose of all food and beverages before entering the facility. Flash photography and videography of any kind is strictly prohibited.
“Cell Block Z: Dead Men Running is brought to you free of charge by Skittles. MMMM SKITTLES: TASTE THE RAINBOW.”
I hopped off the bus with the others and followed a wide faux-concrete tunnel dimly lit with flickering red lights until it opened into a large, bright room marked Intake. Metal shelves at the far end were piled high with folded towels and orange prisoner uniforms. A bald turnkey stood next to it, slapping his fake nightstick into his free palm.
“Welcome, inmates, to your new home, the Laz!” he boomed out in the too-loud nasal monotone of the amateur actor. “I am Officer Downe, and I will be conducting your cavity searches today! Stand facing the walls shoulder to shoulder. Spread your legs and plant your feet on the floor and your hands on the wall where the painted guides indicate.”
Officer Downe was making a great show of snapping on clear plastic gloves to the nervous giggles of con-goers when a fist started banging on the frosted glass of the door to the guards’ station. Everyone against the wall turned, and before their very eyes were bloody crimson handprints stamped on the glass with each rhythmic slam.
“Inmates, do not take your gee-dee hands off that gee-dee wall!” Downe roared as he ran toward the door.
He fumbled through a big ring of keys on his belt, but before he could fit one in the lock, the window exploded outward. A growling zombie in an orange uniform lunged through the hole and caught Downe under the chin with the chains of its wrist manacles, pulling him through the jagged glass opening. His palefaced attacker took a huge bite out of his neck that jetted blood across the room, and then Downe vanished inside. He screamed, I screamed, we all screamed. Two-thirds of the “new inmates” leaped away from the wall and cowered and giggled in a clump in the center of the room.
The lights went out, inspiring more screaming, before red emergency lights came on. Alarm klaxons sounded.
At that moment the bikers walked into the intake room. They spotted me immediately and I spotted them.
“This is not a drill,” boomed a voice from the ceiling. “I repeat, this is not a drill.”
The bikers made their way toward me, but when they tried to push past the screaming clump of teenagers, the human barrier just screamed more. Thinking the “MEH” twins were part of the show, they fanned out, startling the men.
“A heretofore undiscovered virus has been unleashed on the prison populace, causing extreme violence and cannibalism. Corrections officers have lost control of the situation. All visitors are asked to leave the grounds immediately before you are infected.”
I backed up toward the metal shelves and made a run for the door with the window: it opened to a blank wall.
“Emergency Apocalypse Protocols have been activated. The CDC has calculated you have exactly three minutes to evacuate the facility before the germ vector multiplies beyond any possible containment. Escape in this time, or be trapped forever.”
I started slapping the wall, trying to find whatever triggered the opening, but found nothing.
The bikers had made it past the screaming fans.
They were almost on top of me.
There was no way out.
“Your time…begins…NOW.”
At that moment the entire wall to my left opened outward like a pair of giant doors, revealing a sprawling cell block with various spinning red and strobe lights flashing. A small number of guards and inmates fought off a growling horde of walking corpses with blood-smeared faces. With a collective shriek, everyone in the room except the bikers ran hell-mell out of the intake room like the starter pistol had been fired at the Summer Olympics. I joined them.
It was at this point it dawned on me that I had quite literally trapped myself inside a maze: there was no obvious way out of the room. As they dodged the fairly convincing lunges of the zombie actors, con-goers were running into cell doors and pounding on walls, looking for secret doors.
This gave the thugs a clear path. I looked around desperately and saw a Rita Hayworth poster hanging in an open, currently unoccupied cell.
Shawshank! I ran into the room. The poster was silkscreened on a single piece of wood that slid sideways when I tried to move it, revealing in the wall a large hole “dug” by a prisoner. I dashed inside. Many other escapees saw and followed me, once again impeding the bikers’ pursuit.
A makeshift tunnel wound away from the cell block, low enough that I had to stoop slightly to get through. Ultimately it sloped upward and ended in a hatch, which, when I pushed, opened into the wide exercise yard, enclosed entirely in barbed wire. More zombies loped around the basketball court, moaning. The tunnel exited onto a weight-lifting area where a zombie guard was swinging a barbell as a club.
“TWO MINUTES,” the loudspeaker blared.
The exit from this area was a chain-link corridor garlanded with razor wire, through which zombies struggled to reach out and claw the escapees as they ran through.
At the end of it all I burst through a door into several interlocking corridors with solid metal doors—“The Hole”—through which were solitary confinement cells with nothing more than metal cots and toilets. Con-goers were dashing in and out of doors waving their arms like they were in a Benny Hill skit.
I threw open one door and a zombie prisoner with half-eaten feet lunged at me, roaring from the floor.
I slammed the door shut and opened the next one: Empty.
And the next one: Empty.
The bikers ran into Solitary and spotted me.
The next one: empty.
They ran at me.
The next one: there was a hole dug in the floor. I dove for it and slid into a plastic chute that curved around and around until it dropped out in a bin filled with orange jumpsuits. I tumbled out of the cart and found myself in a laundry room, surrounded by rattling machines and flickering fluorescents.
The bin was on wheels; I had the presence of mind to pull it out from under the chute so the bikers would crash down to the floor. I didn’t stick around to see whether that was the result, but as I ran out of the room a zombie popped out of another laundry cart and yelled, “Dude, not cool!” at me, but that was partially drowned out by:
“ONE MINUTE.”
I ran blindly through hallways twisting and turning, through a cafeteria set and a death row set, until I wound up in the viewing gallery for the gas chamber, where a zombie priest had been strapped into a gurney, a lethal-injection needle inserted into his arm. With a flex of his biceps he broke the leather straps around his arms and lunged screaming at me.
A hand grabbed my shoulder and I pulled away, spinning around, fist cocked.
It wasn’t a biker—it was one of the zombies.
“Hey, you guys aren’t supposed to touch people,” I said.
“Dude! It’s me,” the brain muncher said through a grin. “Dirtbag.”
“Dirtbag?” It was my oldest friend in comics.
“Come with me if you want to live,” he said, and pulled off his mask. His wide grin grew even wider. “You know, I always wanted to say that.”
“YOU’RE ALMOST OUT OF TIME,” the loudspeakers boomed.
* * *
– – – –
Like me, Dirtbag had been one of Ben K’s assistants, back in the day, but while I ultimately wandered off and did my own indie self-published comics, he went in the opposite direction. He took a staff production job at Atlas Comics as the bullpen artist, the guy sitting in the heart of the cubicle maze in company headquarters who redrew or touched up or corrected or patched any piece of art before it went to the printer and there was no time to get the originating artist to do it. Ultimately, that position fell victim to Photoshop
and the relentless cost-cutting drive of Ira Pearl; it was eventually eliminated along with a lot of other midlevel production and sales positions.
I had forgotten when we last crossed paths on the con circuit that he told me he and his wife and daughter had moved to San Diego, where he had taken a position with some tech company, 3D printing I guess? Just as with Ben K, I lost touch with Dirtbag over the last few years when I got sucked into the La Brea Tar Pits of my own personal apocalypse. I was happy to see him—as much to redeem myself in the lost-friendship department as to be delivered from the hands of the bikers.
Dirtbag led me out a side door through the gas chamber, he and the zombie priest nodding at each other as we went:
“Thought you weren’t working tonight?”
“I was trying to pick up some extra hours, but now I think I’m going to take my friend out for a beer.”
“Sounds good. See you tomorrow, D-Bag.”
The side door led out to the concessions area ringing the stands, and through there we exited near his minivan, which was parked on a side street. At my suggestion, we drove down to South Mission Beach. On the way, we grabbed a six pack of Tecate and some microwave burritos from a rest-stop gas station.
In the beach parking lot he opened the side door of his Dadmobile and we sat and ate truly atrocious overheated tubes of graying refried beans. We talked and drank beer and watched the surf stutter against the sand over and over like it was desperately trying but not quite able to remember something of the utmost importance.
“Man, am I glad to see you.”
“Yeah, I just, uh…Look, man, I don’t mean to get all in your face after not having seen you for a couple years and all, but…”
“What?”
“Are you, like, on something?” He looked around and whispered: “And if you are, I’m not judging. I just was wondering if you had any left for me. It’s been a hard day’s night in the zombie apocalypse, you know what I’m saying?”
How must I look under the parking lot streetlamps, wide-eyed, pale, and sweaty? I laughed and shook my head. “No. Just an overabundance of adrenaline if anything. I’ve had…I mean, I’ve had some crazy cons before. Like, remember that con in Houston where the Sons of Anarchy cast stopped signing autographs because the organizers weren’t paying them and the cops had to flood the convention center because of all the fights breaking out?”
“Do I? How could I forget? Geez, that was back when I was still looking for inking work. Is that the last time I saw you?”
“Well, this whole con has been the insanity of Houston but cranked to, like, eleven.”
I told Dirtbag the whole thing, or most of it anyway, starting more or less from my arrival at the Marriott pool bar up until right now, including what I learned at the party. I even drew a quick sketch of the bikers to show Dirty what I meant.
“MEH?” he said, squinting at the image. “I have no idea what that’s supposed to be. Are they from a really militant fan site?”
“Who knows. Maybe I look like somebody who owes them money.”
“I can’t tell you that, but I bet I can run down that lady pedicab driver for you.”
“What? You mean it? I’m still trying to make some money here, so I’m kind of chained to my table for most of the con.”
“You got it. I’m mostly working nights at the Dead Men Running anyway. That 3D printer company went belly up, and Suzie and I split…”
“Aw, shit. I’m sorry, man. I know what that’s like.”
“Yeah, you do. So I can be your eyes and ears on the street while you’re doing the cogitating. You were thinking about paying a private investigator—screw that, man. I know the area. I’ve lived here for a couple years now, and I could use the extra scratch. Let Dirty do your dirty work for you.”
“No pun intended.”
Dirtbag frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Sure, man. That’s actually a great idea. Find out whatever the usual daily rate is for this kind of stuff and I’ll pay you that.”
I pulled the folded-up photocopy of the pedicab page from the San Diego Yellow Pages from my sketchbook and it disappeared into Dirtbag’s pockets.
“You got it. I’ll be like the, what do you call them, the little homeless urchin shits that run around for Sherlock Holmes.”
“The Baker Street Irregulars.”
“Yeah, I’m like your One-Man Irregular.”
“I doubt they reeked as strongly of weed.”
Dirtbag scowled. “How do you know? You weren’t there in Jack the Ripper times.”
We both laughed, then lapsed into smiling silence.
“Did you know Ben K was in so much financial trouble?” I finally asked after a while.
Dirtbag shook his head. “I haven’t spoken to him or Becca in years, to be honest with you.”
There was a tiny sliver of beer at the bottom of my last Tecate can and I sucked it down. “Once, maybe, the first couple months we started working for him, I showed him these Atlas samples I’d been working on, some generic Mister Mystery fight scene. I was so scared to show them to him, I was worried what he would think. And so finally, near the end of a workday, I broke the pages out of my portfolio.
“And he just flips through them real quick—just like that.” I waved my hand four times. “And he goes”—I made my voice gruffer, deeper, more staccato:
“ ‘You know what this is like, kid? It’s like a hamburger. It’s a damn good hamburger, and a damn good hamburger is a damn good thing. But I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve eaten a lot of hamburgers. And you know what the difference between a good hamburger and an okay hamburger is? This much.’
“And he held up his fingers like this.” I brought my thumb and forefinger together before my eye until they were almost touching.
“So I go, because I was twenty years old and didn’t know shit about shit, ‘Well, that just shows you’ve never had a really bad hamburger.’
“He’s like, ‘Bullshit! Of course I have. But I also know there’s a lot more to life than just hamburger. Every menu in the world has a goddamn hamburger on it. You know why? It’s for people who can’t decide anything else they might want beyond what they already know. It’s for people who are afraid to get outside their comfort zone. It’s a guaranteed seller because it’s perfect for dull minds with no imagination.’
“And I’ll never forget what he said next; he said:
“ ‘That’s what your art is right now, kid. It’s a coward’s meal.’ ”
Dirtbag barked out a laugh. “Shit, man! Ben K in a nutshell.”
I smiled down at my empty can. “Yeah. But I tell you, it made me bust my ass. It was the slap in the face I needed. I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere without that crit.”
“When I showed Ben K my portfolio,” Dirtbag said, “he told me about this class he took with Burne Hogarth when he was just a kid. And he said Hogarth said, basically, don’t be afraid to steal. Find an artist you love and just copy him until you erase all distinction between you and him. When you learn to destroy that thinking part of your brain, the one getting in the way of your eyes…that’s when you’ll finally start to see.”
I nodded. “The man was a goddamn Jedi Master.”
Dirtbag raised his Tecate high. “To Ben Obi-Wan K Kenobi.” He poured out the rest of his beer, splattering onto the tarmac. “You deserved better.”
Even though my can was basically empty, I did the same. “I don’t know if any of us get what we deserve.”
“Tell me about it. Look at that Sebastian Mod. He is such a phony piece of shit and he just keeps failing upward.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, sucking bean sludge off my fingers. “Although, you know, come to think of it…”
“What?”
“He was the only person who didn’t mention Danny’
s murder to me at that party.”
“Huh.” Dirtbag belched. “You don’t think…you don’t think Mod’s in on it?”
“Hard to say.” I looked out over the ocean. “I’m beginning to think everybody’s in on it. Everybody but me, anyway.”
FRIDAY
was late for a comic book convention; I was late for the train that would take me to the bus that would take me to the ship that would take me to the convention, which was on the beautiful island nation of Corto Maltese.
But I had accidentally told the mystery lady pedicabbie to take me instead to the ancient keep at Winterfell. The men-at-arms standing beneath the fluttering Stark banners would not let me leave without paying the toll; unfortunately, the card reader attached to the pikeman’s cell phone wasn’t recognizing the chip on my Visa.
“You don’t understand,” I pleaded with the apathetic north-man. “The toll should be when I enter, not when I leave.”
“You’re the one who let us inside your head in the first place,” Jon Snow said, fixing his sad brown cow eyes on mine. “If you’re the foreigner in it now, you only have yourself to blame.”
“Jesus, will you answer that?” I heard a voice say off in the distance, and within a few seconds my eyes were open. Dirtbag strode over from my hotel room couch, where he had been lying beneath a meager sheet. My cell phone lay on the bedside table, trilling the Mission: Impossible theme.
Dirtbag checked the lock screen before handing it over. “Whoa,” he said.
I instantly saw what he was reacting to: the incoming call was from Ben K.
“Hello?” I groaned into the phone, rubbing my bloodshot eyes. I am not drinking tonight, I swore.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry, did I wake you?” A woman’s voice. “What time is it there?”
I squinted at the clock. “Seven-thirty.”
The Con Artist Page 9