Greatest Zombie Movie Ever (16 page)

“You said you wanted to make the greatest zombie movie ever. I tried to fence you in.”

“Rein,” Justin corrected.

“You're right. I tried to rein you in. But you got reined in too far because suddenly we weren't trying to make something that was great.”

“A little slower…and more emotion. Make the viewer feel the power of your words.”

“You're right. I tried—”

“Look at me, not the camera.”

“You're right. I tried—”

“Still rushing a bit. Just close your eyes and take a deep breath. Relax your whole body. Raise your shoulders, tilt your head back, and just breathe in, breathe out. Very good.”

“My battery is almost dead,” said Spork.

“Thanks for the warning,” said Justin. “Action!”

“But you got reined in too far because suddenly we weren't trying to make something that was great. We were trying to make something that was finished. That isn't what we set out to do. We need to return to the original inspiration, to
your
original inspiration, and we need to make the greatest zombie movie ever!”

“Yes!” Justin wanted to jump out of his bed and give Gabe a great big hug, but if he was only going to do smart things from now on, a good start would be to not jostle his broken bone.

“They all say we can't do it,” said Gabe. “And yeah, our first day kind of proves them right. But you know what? Now we're going to prove them wrong!”

“Who says we can't do it?” Justin asked.

“Oh, it's all over social media. You might want to stay offline for a while.”

“You know what? Let them laugh. It'll make us stronger.”

“I still want to make this movie, but I can't have you acting all Captain Ahab from
Moby-Dick
the whole time. Ahab was not a well-adjusted man. This movie can't be your white whale.”

“I understand.”

“And yet at the same time, I need you to be
more
like Ahab because what you were doing right before I quit is like if he said, ‘I must kill the white whale! I must kill the white whale! Actually no, I'll just kill a halibut instead.'”

“I'm not completely sure where you stand on this issue,” said Justin. “A few days ago, you were in the cafeteria, sarcastically pretending to try to jump up and grab the sun.”

“I want you to be like Ahab if his goal wasn't something ridiculous like to catch that one specific white whale out of all the whales in the ocean, but he still wanted to catch something awesome. Like maybe a great white shark. He chose a shark because he had access to the appropriate resources to catch one, and…I think I'm confusing myself on where I stand on the issue. Let's just make the greatest zombie movie ever, okay?”

“Okay.”

When Justin woke up, he was at home in his own bed.

He wondered if he was dreaming again, and then he noticed the polka-dotted lobsters parachuting from the ceiling. So yep, he was.

He woke up in the hospital bed.

A man was seated next to him.

Justin was fortunate enough to have lived the kind of sheltered existence where he didn't spend a lot of time around mob enforcers. However, if he were forced to guess this gentleman's career (possibly at gunpoint by a mobster), mob enforcer would have been one of his top three guesses. The other two guesses were much more dangerous, so he hoped the man was indeed from the mob.

“Hello, Justin,” said the man. He looked like he was about fifty, and there was a deep scar under his right eye.

“Uh, hi?”

“I'm a quote unquote
friend
of your grandmother's.”

Justin quickly sat up. “I see.”

“Apparently she has a financial investment in a motion picture that you are currently in the process of making.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And apparently she's beginning to worry about the security of her investment. How secure is her investment, Justin?”

“It's secure. It's very secure.”

The man looked at Justin as if gazing into his soul. “I hope you're telling me the truth. I'd hate to have you meet up with another quote unquote
accident
.”

“Another one?”

“Do you really think that your getting hit by a car was a coincidence?”

Justin gaped at him. “You mean it wasn't a…” He stopped gaping. “Yes, it was. Nobody could have predicted that I'd be running down the sidewalk like that.”

“Good work, Justin. You've found the hole in my story. I am not responsible for your broken arm. But that does not mean your arm is safe from me, if you know what I mean.”

“She'll get her twelve percent return on her investment. I promise.”

“Then you have nothing to fear from me.”

“Thank you.”

The man started to rise from his seat but then sat back down and sighed. “I can't believe she's got me going after teenagers. That's not where I wanted to be at this point in my career. I thought I'd be intimidating politicians or wealthy businessmen, not protecting some kid's grandmother's five thousand bucks. This is ridiculous. How much do you think she's paying me? Go on, guess.”

“I have no idea.”

“Guess.”

“Three thousand dollars?”

“She's paying me nothing. She's paying me in
experience
like I'm some kind of intern. Can you believe that?”

“Well, you don't
have
to do it, do you?”

“If only that were true. Your grandma is vicious, Justin. I hate to be the one to break that news to you, but she is. I don't know if she was born that way or if the circumstances of her life made her that way, but the woman is a monster.”

“Jeez,” said Justin.

“I'm not saying that she's the devil. And I'm not playing that trick where I say that she's not the devil and you relax, and then I say that she's
worse
than the devil. She's not as bad as the devil. But she's awful and frightening, and I very strongly recommend that you finish this movie and earn back her money.”

“I will.”

“Good. You don't want to see me here again.”

“I definitely don't.”

“Or someplace else. I don't only show up in hospital rooms after dark. There's no place that you're safe from me. I'm not trying to traumatize you. Just being honest.”

“I appreciate your honesty.”

The man stood up. “Anyway, I'm gonna get out of here and try to get some sleep. Remember what I said. I think we had a pleasant conversation, even if I did most of the talking, but next time it'll be less of a conversation and more along the lines of you screaming a lot. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Do you remember if I take a left or a right at the end of this hallway? I'm not great with directions.”

“I'm not sure. I woke up here.”

“Okay. It was inappropriate of me to ask in the first place. I'll figure it out. See ya later.”

“Unless I finish the movie and make back Grandma's investment, right?”

“Right, right. I was just being polite. ‘See ya later' wasn't meant to imply that I was going to renege on our agreement. Get some sleep, kid.”

Justin slept poorly.

• • •

He was released in the morning. As the nurse wheeled him down the hallway, Justin decided not to tell his parents about his encounter in the middle of the night. Maybe it was a dream, or maybe it was indeed a trainee mobster there to deliver a stern warning. Either way, it was best not to worry them.

Justin was going to miss the hospital gown. It was the most comfortable thing he'd ever worn. When he was a massively successful director and owned his own island, hospital gowns would be the mandatory dress code.

As he sat in the backseat of the car, he tried to figure out the best way to ask them to drop him off at Uncle Clyde's house so we could get back to work. There probably wasn't a perfect way to ask this. Still, if he was clever, he could phrase it in such a way that they didn't immediately scream, “Are you out of your mind?”

“Before you ask, you're not going anywhere today,” said Mom, glancing back at him.

“You already knew that, right?” asked Dad, glancing up at Justin's reflection in the rearview mirror since he was the one driving. “I mean, it's only common sense.”

“I knew that you might lean in that direction,” said Justin. “But it's truly not necessary. My arm actually feels better than it did before I broke it. Maybe it had too much marrow before.”

“You need to rest for at least a day.”

“Nah, I'm the director. My job is to order people around. As long as I don't break my jaw, I'm fine.”

“This isn't open for discussion,” said Dad.

“I completely understand. You want to keep me safe, and it's not only for emotional reasons. There are also legal factors involved. But really, people break their arms every day. Literally every single day, arms go crunch, crunch, crunch. It's not a big deal. I'm not going to do anything silly like lift weights or dangle from a tree branch or exercise.”

“You're working under the impression that you're going to be able to change our minds,” said Mom. “You're not.”

They really didn't sound like they were going to budge on this issue. What other tactics could he use? Temper tantrum? It had been a few years since he'd gone that route, but…

“And if you try to sneak out, you'll be grounded basically forever,” said Dad.

“If I tried to sneak out, it would mean that I was climbing out a second-story window, which is exactly the kind of thing I'm promising not to do. I swear I won't get hurt again. I'll be like some prima donna celebrity and make a rule that nobody can get within fifty feet of me. C'mon, please. I can't afford to lose a whole day.”

“Sorry,” said Mom, not sounding sorry.

“This is really important to me.”

“We get that. And it's why you only have to stay home for one day. But that one day is not negotiable.”

What was Justin going to do? Maybe there was a way he could turn his parents against each other. What was their last argument about? Dad had left the butter on the kitchen counter, right?

No, creating strife in their marriage would be wrong. He'd have to resign himself to his accursed fate.

In theory, he could ask Gabe and Bobby to carry on without him for one day. But his rule that he didn't want to make the movie without Gabe had darn well
better
work both ways. If they tried to make the movie without him, he'd have the most legendary meltdown in the history of humankind. He wouldn't even pretend that he was okay with it. He'd just start destroying things. He wouldn't even
faux
-suggest it with the expectation that they'd say no, because if they hesitated for even the tiniest fraction of a second before the word no came out of their mouths, he'd totally lose it. Justin understood this about himself, and he was okay with it.

“Can Gabe and Bobby at least come over?” Justin asked.

“No,” said Dad.

“
No?
” Justin asked, having expected a different answer.

“No,” said Mom.

“Why not? Do you think they're going to bounce a basketball off my concussion?”

“Because what you need,” said Dad, “is some rest. You're not going to get any rest if you're upstairs freaking out about your movie. Cinema will still exist on Monday.”

“You're becoming villains in my life story. You realize this, right?”

“Someday you'll think back on this with a brain that isn't permanently damaged because of our excellent parental care and thank us,” said Dad.

Justin scowled at him. He was too mature to pout, but he decided to sulk for the rest of the ride home. Then he decided that sulking was also beneath him, and he went for a mild, simmering rage. He knew that they were doing this for his own good. He didn't care. His own good was overrated. He'd worry about his own good when the movie was finished.

If he lost all of today, his chances of finishing the movie were essentially nonexistent, right? Now that making a good movie was important again, the lack of time was even more problematic.

He texted Gabe and asked him to spread the message that today's shoot was canceled.

I figured
, Gabe texted back.

We'll make up the time
, Justin texted.
This movie is going to get cone.

Cone?

Done. Stupid autocorrect.

Why would autocorrect change done to cone?

Fine. I typed cone by mistake. Are u happy?

The lies need to stop, Justin. The lies need to stop.

You probably think we'll never finish now.

We'll figure something out.

When Justin got home, he took a couple of aspirin and went up to his room. He'd been focusing on his frustration about
Dead Skull
, but he also had to admit that having a broken arm wasn't exactly pleasant. It was starting to itch like crazy, and since he wasn't permitted to crack open his cast and go after the itch with a fork, he just had to sit there and try not to think about how much it itched, which was impossible because of how much it itched, itched, itched.

He lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling. There was nothing interesting up there.

He'd take a quick nap and then sort things out.

When he woke up, it was time for dinner.

He ate dinner and went back to sleep.

The next day at school was great, or to be more specific, not great.

“How's the movie going?” the other kids asked him in a tone that made it pretty clear that they knew exactly how the movie was going. They just wanted to chuckle when he answered, “It's going fine.”

“How'd you break your arm?” kids also asked him. They knew how he broke his arm. Everybody knew how he broke his arm. And they all knew about the element of stupidity involved. They had to. They were all grinning when they asked it, and Kid Breaks Arm after Getting Hit by Car was tragic out of context.

At lunchtime Justin, Gabe, and Bobby sat in the cafeteria, all of them frowning.

“I wish the story about Alicia beating me up hadn't circulated so quickly,” said Bobby. “I knew it would get out to the public, but I was expecting maybe sixty or sixty-five percent audience awareness. I think we're at ninety-eight percent. That kid who doesn't speak English didn't know, but somebody mimed it for him.”

“What's worse is that you did your job as a sound guy poorly,” said Gabe.

“No, that's not worse at all. Do you know what people are calling me?”

“What?”

“Guy Who Got Beat Up by Alicia Howtz.”

“That's seriously your new nickname?” asked Justin. “That's the best they could do?”

“Yep.”

“A whole school full of kids, and they can't come up with something inventive? That's not even a real nickname. That's just a description.”

“I know. All day it was, ‘Hey there, Guy Who Got Beat Up by Alicia Howtz.' I thought they might sarcastically call me Muscles or something like that, but nope.”

“On the bright side,” said Gabe, “it's not something people will be calling you twenty years from now. It's too inconvenient to say.”

“Do you know what's weird?” Justin asked.

“Horses in princess costumes?” suggested Bobby.

Justin ignored him. “What's weird is that I don't regret this. I mean, I regret a lot of the individual decisions I made, and I regret the way most of it has turned out so far. But there's never been a point where I wished that I'd never decided to make this movie.”

“I feel the same way,” said Gabe.

“I feel a bit differently,” said Bobby, “but overall, there were way more moments where I was happy that we were making this movie than there were sad moments that Alicia was hitting me with my own boom mic.”

Gabe raised his container of chocolate milk in a toast. “No matter how it turns out, I'm glad we're doing this.”

Justin and Bobby raised their own chocolate milks and tapped them together.

Zack Peterson, who used to fling volleyballs at Justin in second grade, walked by and sneered. “Hey, Guy Who Got Beat Up by Alicia Howtz, did your boyfriend break his arm trying to protect you?”

Bobby flung his chocolate milk at Zack and hit the center of his shirt. It doused him like a water balloon.

“You little geek!” Zack raised his fist and stepped forward.

“I fought the worst. Do you really think I'm scared of you?”

“Yeah, I guess that's a good point.” Zack lowered his fist and continued on his way.

“Anyway,” said Justin, “we're going to still try to cram everything into the rest of the shooting schedule. It turns out I can borrow a camera from the media center. I didn't tell them that I broke the old one, so please don't mention that in casual conversation. Saturday and Sunday are going to be all zombies all the time. We're going to get our biggest, most epic shots. Starting with our easiest stuff made it feel like we weren't accomplishing as much.”

“So since we failed at the easy stuff, we're going to switch to the hard stuff?”

“Exactly. Go big or go home, right? Isn't that what people say on reality shows?”

“Constantly.”

“And that's what we're going to do.”

• • •

As Justin sat in his room, studying for his history test, his phone rang. It was Bobby.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Justin. Hey, you know how I usually like to have good news when I call?”

“Do you have good news?”

“Not really.”

“What's wrong?”

“Maybe you should see it for yourself.”

• • •

Justin and Bobby stood outside Uncle Clyde's house. They kept out of the way of the firemen as they watched the place burn.

“I wasn't smoking in bed!” Uncle Clyde insisted. “I was vaping! That's supposed to be one of the advantages to e-cigarettes. They don't burn your house down!”

The house was a complete inferno, including, presumably, the forty-nine hundred dollars' worth of zombie effects.

Justin felt like he was being a bit insensitive by recording all of this, but since he'd just lost the entirety of their amazing zombie army, he could live with his lack of empathy. They could easily add a new scene to the script where a house burned to the ground.

“It was insured, right?” Bobby asked his uncle.

Uncle Clyde shook his head. “I was in prison for insurance fraud, so no.”

“I'll be back,” said Justin. “I'm going to get a wide shot of the fire engines.” Keeping focused on his work was the only way he could resist the urge to drop to his knees and scream, “Why? Why?
Why?
”

He got a bunch of shots from various angles, but he was busy filming the Dalmatian when the house collapsed, which gave him another reason to want to scream in frustration.

“There's one positive thing about this,” said Bobby.

“What?”

“Nobody got hurt.”

“Oh,” said Justin. “I thought you meant a positive thing for us.”

“They're keeping the fire contained, so none of his neighbors will have any damage to their property. Uncle Clyde didn't own any pets, so no animals were harmed, and no humans had to put themselves in danger to rescue the pets.”

“I'm glad nobody was hurt. It means that we can focus on our own loss without being selfish and horrible people.”

“I think we can salvage this,” said Bobby. “What do you think of this new title?
Night of the Melted Dead
.”

“Are you kidding?” asked Justin.

“You don't see melted zombies very often.”

“Even if that was a good idea—and I'd like to emphasize that it's a bad idea—the entire house collapsed into the basement. We can't rescue what's left of the burnt-up blobs of the prosthetics. We have no zombies.”

“Maybe…maybe the twist is that it's a zombie movie, but we don't have any zombies. Like they're zombies of the mind.”

“No,” said Justin. “Hey, Uncle Clyde?”

Uncle Clyde took his electronic cigarette out of his mouth. “What do you want?”

“I still need zombies from you this weekend.”

“I lost everything, kid. My furniture, my carpet, my collection of Kleenex used by famous people. I've got nothing. What am I supposed to do?”

“I'll get you the money to buy more supplies.”

“How?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Plus labor?”

“No, you'll work for cookies.”

Uncle Clyde shrugged. “If you can raise the money, I'll make your zombies.”

“Did you really have a collection of Kleenex used by famous people?” asked Bobby.

“Yes. Well, no. They were people I hoped would become famous someday. None of them are yet.” Uncle Clyde motioned to the ashes that were whirling in the air. “Their germs are all around us now. Who knows where they'll end up?”

“How are you going to get the money?” Bobby asked Justin.

“I'm going to use an untapped resource,” said Justin. “My possessions.”

• • •

Justin would miss his video game system and his awesome assortment of games to play on it deeply, but there were more important things in life.

He would miss his vast collection of movies even more. Oh, what wonderful times they'd shared. He treasured his memories of even the terrible ones, and losing all of these discs was going to hurt his heart. Still, he had his own movie to make.

All of his cool horror villain figures were also going to have to go. He'd been amassing this collection since he was nine, and a couple of the figures were impossible to find anymore. But this was something he needed to do. Maybe someday figures would be made from the characters of
his
movie.

Doofy, the stuffed bear he had gotten for his second birthday, was not going anywhere. Forget that. Production of Doofys had been discontinued when their noses were found to be a safety hazard to young children, and they fetched a lot of money in online auctions, but…no way. Doofy stayed.

Justin hated to sell all of his stuff, but he was too young for a credit card. He had three more years before he could get into crippling debt on his own.

He'd placed the ads and gotten back quick responses. He wouldn't come anywhere close to making five thousand dollars, but it would be
something
.

The doorbell rang. When he went downstairs and answered it, Gabe and Bobby were standing on his front porch. Each of them was holding a cardboard box.

“What's that?” Justin asked.

“
Star Wars
figures,” said Bobby. “Unopened.”

“Aren't those your dad's?”

“Yes. Someday I will suffer for this. Let's make it worth it.”

“I've got
Simpsons
figures,” said Gabe, “and a bunch of comic books.”

“You guys don't have to do this,” said Justin.

“Yes, we do,” said Gabe. “We're in this together. Maybe we're spiraling into disaster, but if so, we're spiraling into disaster as a team.”

“Thank you,” said Justin. “This means everything to me.”

They all stood there for a moment, waiting for one of them to make a stupid comment that would diminish the emotion of the moment, but nobody did.