Greatest Zombie Movie Ever (19 page)

“My name is Justin Hollow. This is my video confession. If you are watching this, we got busted breaking into the school, and I want to make it clear that nobody else associated with the motion picture
Dead Skull
, coming soon to a theater near you, is aware of this scheme. As far as they know, we have permission to be here. I've been really busy with this movie, and I haven't had a chance to research exactly how illegal this is. But I'm a student at the school, and we're not going to break anything. And we'll clean up when we're done, so I'm hoping that it's no big deal. Nevertheless, I want to take full responsibility for the whole trespassing thing just in case. Thank you for your time.”

Justin shut off the camera and handed it back to Spork.

“I can't believe you made me an accomplice,” said Spork. “That's so cool.”

“You have plausible deniability,” Justin told him. “As far as I'm concerned, you were never here. If we get caught, I'll say that I took your camera when you weren't looking. If we don't get caught, I'll upload the video to my computer and then delete it from your camera just so that nobody asks why you didn't say anything when you found the video. But we'll only need to worry about that if we leave behind some evidence and get caught after the fact.”

“Are you guys about done?” asked Patrick.

“Yeah. Go ahead and break in.”

“I'm not breaking in. I've got keys. My dad's a custodian.”

“Oh. Does that mean we're actually allowed to go inside?”

“No, it's still trespassing.” Patrick unlocked and opened the side door. “There you go.” He propped it open, picked up his backpack, and then walked inside.

“Wait,” said Justin. “You can't do any vandalism while we're here. We already talked about this.”

“It's not vandalism if it's artistic.”

“No, really. We can't mess with anything. No graffiti.”

“I can't be in the school after hours without creating some graffiti. I'm sorry.”

“Won't your dad have to be the one to clean it up?”

“He'll get over it.”

“There can't be any evidence that we were here.”

“Won't the movie itself be evidence?”

“Yes, but by then nobody will care. I just don't want to get caught before it's finished.”

Patrick jiggled his backpack, which rattled as if it were full with cans of spray paint. “I don't know…”

“I'll make it up to you. I promise. I guarantee complete graffiti satisfaction. You just can't do it tonight, okay?”

“All right.”

“Thank you for unlocking the school for me.”

“No prob. Don't hurt any fish.”

“I won't.”

Patrick left. Breaking into the school after dark didn't feel as deliciously naughty as Justin might have hoped, but then again he'd never aspired to become part of the town's criminal element. They were going to get the shot and leave.

He walked through the hallway and turned on the lights. The school was actually kind of creepy when he was there all alone. Even the football trophies were a little unnerving, and he'd never noticed the haunted look in the eyes of their bumblebee mascot.

There were lots of doors and lots of places for zombies to spring out. Honestly, Veronica Chaos and Runson Mudd were not very bright for choosing this place for their final stand against the zombies.

This scene would work. It had to work.

“It'll work,” said George A. Romero, director of
Night of the Living Dead
. Justin could see right through him like Obi-Wan Kenobi. “You just have to believe in yourself.”

“Are you sure?” asked Justin. “A lot of my problems seem to be because I believed in myself too much.”

“You can do this,” said Sam Raimi, wearing a transparent
Army of Darkness
T-shirt. “I don't say that about everyone. Some people
can't
do it. And I tell them that to their face, and then I laugh at their tears. But not you, Justin. Not you.”

“There's no way you'll mess this up,” said a conjured Peter Jackson. “When I made
Dead/Alive
all those years ago, nobody thought I'd go on to make a multibillion-dollar hobbit franchise. Now I could have all of my enemies killed if I wanted. And I do want. And I have. But you shouldn't because it's wrong.”

“They're all right,” said a glowing and see-through Penny Marshall. “I've never made a zombie movie, and I don't have any plans to start now. And you're too young to remember me from
Laverne & Shirley
or even
A League of Their Own
…”

“I've seen
A League of Their Own
.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you think?”

“It was great.”

“Thank you. Anyway, this scene will be fine. Talk to you later.”

The directors vanished.

This was it. This was Justin's moment to show that he had what it took to be a legendary film director. This was his time to make people say, “Holy cow, if this is what he can do at fifteen, what will he be doing when he's thirty-six?”

This was Justin's moment of glory.

Or this was his time to prove that if his moment of glory got all screwed up, he'd handle it well.

• • •

“Think of it like a really big fun house,” Justin told Alicia and Christopher. “You're going to walk through slowly for maximum suspense, and occasionally zombies will jump out at you. Do not hit them with anything. Do not throw anything at them. Do not punch or kick them. These zombies are to be shot only. If a zombie doesn't drop the first time, keep pretending to shoot it until it does.”

“We don't get to kick any zombies?” Christopher asked.

“You'll get to kick plenty of zombies later,” said Justin. “But these won't have padding.”

“That's reasonable.”

“Question,” said Alicia. “When I walk by my locker, is it okay if Christopher asks me whose locker that is? Then can I say that I have no idea? Like an inside joke?”

“I'd rather you didn't, but if you feel you must, I'll allow it.”

“What if I just do a sideways glance at it and raise an eyebrow?”

“Same answer.”

“I'll see how I feel in the moment.”

“That's fine. Is everybody ready?”

Everybody in the hallway indicated that they were ready. The zombies, who were hiding around the school, were not available to answer the question, but Justin was confident that they were ready as well. He would have loved (
loved!
) to use the principal's intercom as his means of communicating with the cast and crew, but he had to keep his vow not to mess with school property.

Daisy did the slate.

“Action!” said Justin.

Alicia and Christopher walked down the hallway slowly, cautiously, ever-vigilant for zombies. Bobby followed them with the boom mic, and Gabe followed them with the camera.

“Cut,” said Justin.

Alicia looked back at him.

“Somebody's shoes are squeaking.”

“I think it's yours.”

Justin took off his shoes and set them against the wall. “Can somebody please make sure I don't leave without those?” He was relatively certain that he wouldn't accidentally leave the school without his shoes, but that would be such a shameful way to get caught that he didn't want to take the risk.

“Action!”

They followed Alicia and Christopher down the hallway again. Gabe's arm was rock-steady as he held the camera. Bobby's arm was not quite rock-steady as he held the boom mic, but it didn't dip down into the shot.

As they reached the end of the hallway, Alicia put her hand on the knob to the door leading to Room 131, the site of many a frightening encounter with home economics. She very slowly turned the knob and then very slowly pushed the door open. She turned on the light.

Inside the room there was nothing.

Well, there was stuff, just no zombies.

She and Christopher walked into the room very slowly to build suspense. Gabe, Bobby, Justin, Daisy, and Spork followed them, being careful not to make any noise or cast any reflections. These smooth school floors were not ideal for walking around in socks. If Justin slipped and fell, he wasn't sure if he should try to land on his left arm and break it worse or land on his right and have two broken arms.

Alicia and Christopher continued walking through the room in a suspense-building manner. Nothing continued to happen because nothing was supposed to happen until the third room.

“Cut,” said Justin.

Everybody looked at him.

“Is it just me, or is this is boring as crap?”

“It is kind of boring,” Bobby admitted.

“Yeah, it's boring,” said Christopher.

“Very boring,” said Spork.

“I've been less bored,” said Daisy.

“The only reason I didn't scream out in boredom is because I didn't want to mess up the shot,” said Gabe.

“I was too focused on my performance to judge,” said Alicia.

Justin sighed. “This won't work. We can't do this for half an hour. What were we thinking?”

“
We
?
” asked Gabe.

“Bobby, go round up the zombies.”

“I just put them in their rooms!”

“We need them all in one hallway. Veronica Chaos and Runson Mudd can fight their way through a thick horde of them.”

“You don't have to use my character's full name every time if you don't want to,” said Christopher. “I know we're trying to speed things up.”

Bobby left to gather the zombies. Justin felt bad about ditching his astounding technical achievement of a final shot, but he was proud of himself for realizing that it wasn't working before he wasted any more time. That was the sign of an excellent director—knowing when to finally accept that the person who had earlier warned you that something was a bad idea was correct.

When they walked out of the home economics room, Justin noticed that his shoes were gone.

“What happened to my shoes?” he asked.

“They're over there,” said Gabe, pointing to them. “Right where you left them. You were looking the wrong way.”

“Oh. Yeah, okay, I see them now. The school looks a lot different when you're here without…” Justin almost said, “without permission,” but fortunately he managed to prevent himself from finishing the dumbest sentence he'd started to say in a long time during an era of his life when a great many of his sentences weren't brilliant.

He walked over to retrieve his shoes, hoping that Gabe wouldn't ask him to say the remaining words.

By the time he put on his shoes plus another twenty-eight minutes, Bobby had brought all of the zombies back to the hallway. Many of them looked annoyed, but Justin chose to believe that it was simply because of their makeup.

“I apologize for making you sit alone in a classroom waiting for a camera crew that never showed up,” said Justin. “I appreciate your continued patience. Rest assured that every one of you will get your name on the screen by itself during the opening credits.”

“Say what?” asked Gabe.

“I've decided that zombies work better in large groups. A pretty obvious part of the zombie mythos, I'll admit, but like I've said many times since I began this venture, I'm very tired. So I need you all to channel your inner corpse and be as scary as possible. I want to hear moans that chill me to my very core. Those of you with rotted fake teeth and the guy with real ones, I want your mouths open as wide as possible. I want your eyes to look so frightening that we don't need to digitally replace them, even though we will anyway. I want to feel the absolute unimaginable, nightmarish agony of being dead!”

One of the zombies raised his hand.

“Yes?”

“I thought this was going to be a fun movie.”

“No, it's unrelenting horror.”

“Gotcha. May I be excused?”

“Yes. Turn in your chin gash to Bobby on the way out. The rest of you, this is your moment! This is the reason you've given up a perfectly good Saturday to be with me, and this is the reason you won't mind when I tell you that you'll need to sleep in your makeup because we still need you tomorrow, and we can't afford to redo your faces. This is your chance to live forever. Most people don't get this chance. I think we all know somebody who was long forgotten. That won't be you. I'm not promising to make movie stars out of all of you, but in two hundred years, when civilization has crumbled to dust and been replaced by a newer, better civilization, somebody will excavate a Blu-ray player. And in that Blu-ray player will be a copy of
Dead Skull
or whatever we end up calling it. And they'll watch the movie, and
you will be remembere
d
!”

One of the zombies applauded. The others didn't join in, so the zombie stopped applauding and looked sheepishly down at his feet.

“So be scary, my zombie friends. Be scary! When I call, ‘Action!' I want to experience genuine fear! I want to capture the true essence of the living dead on the silver screen! You and you and you and you and all of you—please don't take it personally if I didn't point to you individually because I was just going left to right—you are going to make me proud! You are going to make millions of zombie fans happy! You are going to make millions of non-zombie fans into zombie fans! You are going to make millions of people who have no particular opinion about zombie movies into people who
do
have an opinion about them! This is your destiny!”

“I was with you until you said the destiny part,” said one of the zombies. “That's taking it a bit too far. I'm starting to feel like you're patronizing us.”

“Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, I'm not emphasizing your destiny enough! I'll drop it if that's the way you all feel, but I really was working toward something big with this.”