Brian Keene - Jack's Magic Beans

Jack cupped his hands over his mouth. “Are you on Prozac?”

The man didn’t reply.

“If you are,” Jack shouted, “then you need to keep taking it. You’ll be okay as long as you stay medicated. We’re leaving now. We don’t want any trouble. Okay?”

Silence.

“Are you listening? Don’t shoot us, man!”

Slowly, excruciatingly, Angie crawled towards Jack. She held her breath, anticipating another shot, expecting to feel a bullet slam into her—but the man in the restaurant had fallen silent. When she reached Jack, the two of them crab-walked to a nearby vehicle. They ducked down behind it, breathing hard.

“Well,” Angie panted, “there’s one crazy person who’s not dead yet.”

“I still don’t think so.” Jack wiped the sweat from his forehead with his t-shirt. “I don’t think he was crazy.”

“He tried to kill us!”

“Because he was afraid. And I think that’s all it was. He’s like us—he’s scared. Paranoid.”

“And that’s what we’ve got to look forward to? Paranoia? Shooting at everyone, be they friend or foe?”

“Only if we give in to it.”

He got quiet. His head hung low and his shoulders slumped. At first, Angie thought he was just waiting to see if the man in the restaurant had forgotten about them. The she realized he was sulking.

“What’s wrong?” Angie asked.

“I’ve been thinking,” Jack said. “When we get to a safer location, we need to check the expiration date on these pills.”

“They won’t have any,” Angie reminded him. “We filled the prescription ourselves. We didn’t print out one of those little labels that has the expiration date. But usually, I think it’s about a year.”

“Well, after we check on our families, our next stop needs to be another pharmacy, so we can load up on more.”

Angie sighed. “So that’s our life now? We’re going to be drugstore cowboys, spending every day looking for more and more magic beans?”

“As fucked up as it is, yes. We need Prozac even more than we need food and water. Without Prozac, we’re screwed. I mean, without it, we might as well just give up right now and march back there and let that guy shoot us. We need more.”

“No,” Angie said. “What we need is a fucking pharmacist. With no labs producing it, how long before we run out of magic beans?”

“One step at a time, my fellow giant-killer. One step at a time.”

They slowly crossed the parking lot, taking deliberate steps and picking their way through the wreckage. Then they walked down the main drag, heading away from the relative safety of the store. Both of them felt eyes upon them, but when they glanced behind, there was no sign of the man with the gun.

The city skyline loomed in the distance. Columns of smoke rose into the sky. Massive fires burning on the freeway, washing the bellies of the clouds in a wavering orange glow. They saw signs of an explosion. The burned out shell of a tanker trunk sat smoldering on the median strip. The overpass had collapsed, burying the road beneath it in a mountainous pile of rubble. Chunks of concrete lay on top of crushed cars.

They reached an intersection and came across the first dead body. Then another. Then a dozen. Then two dozen. And then hundreds. Their revulsion grew with each city block. The streets resembled the grocery store’s interior, but on a grander and more gruesome scale. The only thing moving were the birds—crows, gulls, pigeons; they swooped down from the rooftops, perching on the mounds of corpses and feasting on the choicest morsels. Dogs and cats and even a few rats were present as well, not quite as bold as the birds—but they would be by the time the sun went down.

Jack and Angie walked in silence. They stopped at a restaurant and grabbed some napkins, and then stuck the napkins in their noses to block out the smell. It was already bad. It would be unbearable after the corpses had laid out in the sun for a few days. After a while, the silence began to get to them both. Jack tried calling out once, but the sound of his voice echoing through the empty streets disturbed him even more than the carnage all around them.

“Jack?”

“What?”

“Are you sure we won’t change?” Angie asked. “Are you sure we won’t become like them?”

“Yes,” Jack lied. “As long as we take our meds, we should be fine.”

They went out into the world, and hoped they wouldn’t wake the sleeping giant.

Jack’s Magic Beans started with the opening sentence.

Okay. Yes, I know that’s how all stories start, but in this case, that’s all I had—the opening sentence. I had no ideas about plot or characters or even a title. All I had was an opening sentence. I typed: The lettuce started talking to Ben Mahoney halfway through his shift at Save-A-Lot. Then I stared at the laptop. I had no idea what happened next. I had no idea who Ben Mahoney was or why the lettuce was speaking to him.

About six months later, my wife at the time (now ex-wife but we remain best friends), Cassandra, told me about a business associate who referred to Prozac as ‘magic beans’. I thought that was interesting. I mulled it over for an evening.

The next day, I knew what happened after the lettuce started talking.

What happened was this story.

I seem to write two kinds of stories. There are my serious books (such as The Girl on the Glider, Ghoul, Dark Hollow ) and then there are my fun books (such as The Conqueror Worms and all of my zombie novels). Critics and fans may disagree with those classifications, but that’s okay. These are just personal terms. This is how I think of my work. Anyway, I’ve noticed that I tend to write a fun book immediately after finishing a serious one. With the exception of the opening sentence, I wrote Jack’s Magic Beans right after finishing Ghoul —and Ghoul was a novel that kicked my fucking ass on both a psychological and emotional level. It was a serious book. It was a hard book. It was probably—at that time—my most autobiographical work to date, and it was difficult to revisit some of the shit from my childhood and work it into my fiction. In short, it left me depressed.

Luckily, Jack’s Magic Beans worked like an anti-depressant—just like in the story. Writing this novella was a cure for the depression I felt after battling my way through Ghoul .

Jack’s Magic Beans was originally supposed to be published by a small press. They never managed to get it into print (although they did publish a handful of promotional soft cover copies—I’ve never understood why they spent their money on promotional copies rather than just spending the same amount and publishing the actual book). When the contract expired and the book still wasn’t published, I got my rights back. Then I included the novella as the opening story in my now out-of-print short story collection Unhappy Endings. And now, Deadite Press have brought it back into print for everyone to enjoy. And that is my hope. That you enjoyed it, and enjoy my other books, as well. You keep reading them and I’ll keep writing them.

I woke up this morning and shot myself twice.

Carolyn had already left for work. She’d tried waking me repeatedly, as she does every morning. It’s a game that has become an annoying ritual, much like the rest of my life.

The alarm went off for the first time at six. Like always, she was pressed up against me, and my morning hard on was wedged into her fat ass. She thinks that I still find her desirable, not realizing that every man in the world wakes up like that if he has a full bladder. Carolyn hasn’t turned me on in over ten years.