Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

He loitered outside until someone walked out of the building with an ancient, sick beagle and gave him a glance of suspicion. Rather than slipping in through the glacially closing door, he decided to walk around the neighborhood and wait for Ana’s call.

The rows of houses were dark; here and there a light was on. A dog barked in some backyard. The swings stood still on porches. Who lived here? He could spend his entire life in Chicago — in this very neighborhood — without ever learning anything about the people who lived at 4509 West Estes. The unknown lives, the dark matter of the city. Message comes, I arrived to the other world. Except, in front of a dark house, he saw a red car with a pair of plush dice hanging from the rearview mirror. It was Bega’s car.

His phone rang. It wasn’t Kimmy.

“Hello, Ana,” he said with the gentlest of his seductive voices.

“Teacher Josh,” she whispered, “you find your wallet?”

“No,” Joshua said.

“This is not good time,” Ana said. Esko yelled in the background. “I look for it and I call you. Or I see you on Monday. Goodnight.”

And then she hung up. What if Monday never came? Joshua thought. Script Idea #72: The last day on Earth as it approaches a voracious black hole. Title: The Last Fucking Time.

INT. THE AMBASSADOR — NIGHT

A group of men under the leadership of Major Klopstock moves through darkness, carving it with their flashlights. CADET (20) and GOITER (59) with a shotgun follow in Major K’s wake. They enter an open, vast space with high ceilings. They hear ECHOES OF WATER SPLASHING, and then the flashlights reveal a pool full of floating zombies in army uniforms. Most of them are bloated and fully dead. Some are broken open, like pomegranates. A few of them are on their backs, moving feebly, but it’s clear they’re done for. The men stand in silence at the pool’s edge. The water is murky with pus and blood.

GOITER

(scratching his goiter)

I wouldn’t wanna swim in that fucking pool.

CADET

This used to be our guys. Now they’re mindless killers.

MAJOR K

They’re harmless in the water. They don’t sink, but they soak up water until they burst like balloons.

A floating zombie slightly moves its hand, as if trying to swim. Goiter shoots it in the face. The head explodes into smithereens. The shot ECHOES. Cadet joins in, as do other men. They shoot like crazy. The waves make other corpses bob in the pool. Major K tries to interrupt the shooting.

MAJOR K

Cut it out! Cut it out!

But the men enjoy the free-for-all too much to stop. Finally, Major K rips the gun out of Cadet’s hand and smacks him. Everyone stops shooting. Major K stares them down angrily. The silence is even more oppressive. Except now they can hear ECHOES of a cell phone RINGING somewhere in the building. The ring tone is “Welcome to the Jungle.” They exchange glances, grip their weapons, and move in the direction of the sound.

Joshua needed his wallet and thus had a legitimate excuse to call Ana. He was shivering on the porch steps — it was a cold day, clouds on the western horizon getting lined up for a rain assault — because he was reluctant to call her from Kimmy’s house, as though his illicit desires were less so outdoors. He was going to claim urgency; he wasn’t going to tell her he’d canceled his credit cards because, well, he wasn’t exactly sure who those people at her place had been, nor could he trust Esko. Ana’s answering machine picked up but he left no message. He put the phone back in his pocket, but then took it out immediately because it appeared to be vibrating, which it wasn’t.

Cackling squirrels chased one another up and down the trees. There was a pretty spotted pointer across the street, for some reason pointing at Joshua; the young man on the other end of the leash bent over to pick up a clump of shit. Joshua felt in his chest the emptiness commonly accompanying the sense that he was wasting his life and that all this — this porch, this body, this mind, this Monday — was part of a self-generating delusion, his own private Matrix . What if he woke up one day, after a night of unsettling dreams, and realized he was transformed into a giant, chitinous failure? If one day someone were to write his biography ( The Fall of Joshua Levin ), this morning might end up being the turning plot point, the moment of his demotion to the middlest of ages, of his realization that the spoor of his meaningful existence was as scant as that of memorable sexual experience. He called Ana again, and this time Esko picked up, his guttural grumble befuddling Joshua, who hung up instantly.

Bernie honked from his ferry-sized white Cadillac. In addition to the glaring absence of sun, Bernie’s shades were not age-appropriate at all: the frames were too narrow for his sagging face; there was fake-diamond glitter on the sides; and the lenses were far too dark even for a bright summer day, suggesting glaucoma rather than senior coolness. The shades were most likely Constance’s present, just like the flannel shirt he was wearing with his sleeves rolled up, like a campaigning congressman feigning to be the American people. Constance bought things for Bernie Levin that made him appear younger (a razor-looking cell phone, many-geared bicycle, surfboard), thereby constantly setting up Bern (as she called him) for some kind of age-based failure. The next thing on her list was a spiffy car. She wanted him to get something smaller and sportier than his enormous Cadillac, which Joshua was presently entering and which would’ve smelled like a pine-scented taxicab if it wasn’t for the reek of Bernie’s rampant paradentosis.

“Where are we going?” Joshua asked testily. Once he’d watched a nature documentary in which young chimps would strut around the uninterested older males making contemptuous chimp faces; and then, one day, they would dare for the first time to smack the elders.

“I don’t know,” his father said. “Aren’t we having lunch?”

“It’s too early,” Joshua said.

“It’s never too early for being too late.”

Joshua was no strutting chimp, but Bernie annoyed him simply for doing what aged fathers did: asking Where are you? as soon as Joshua picked up, still confounded by the concept of the cell phone; always worrying about money, ever a Holocaust descendant; celebrating his Jewish heritage by imparting incomprehensible stories about obscure relatives; driving like a terrified lunatic, flying over speed bumps, hitting the brakes arbitrarily; insisting that he wasn’t as old as he was, even if he was nowhere near as young as Connie wanted him to be. And then there were the anthological non sequiturs, whose frequency kept increasing since he’d retired and sold his dental office. The previous time Joshua had seen him, just before he took off for the cruise, Bernie proclaimed — over dinner, out of the blue, Connie squeezing his hand as if to show her forgiveness and understanding for his dementia—“the future of the world is in a bag of dog poop, because that’s where the bacteria that can eat plastic will evolve.” After he’d retired into a life of magazine subscriptions and cruises, he had more than enough time to think inconsequentially. It’s never too early for being too late? What the hell did that mean?

“I’ve got to go to my screenwriting workshop later,” Joshua said.

“You’ll be fine,” Bernie said. “Let’s go to the lake.”

Whereupon he made a U-turn right in the middle of Broadway, cars honking furiously in their wake.

“How’s your movie stuff going?” Bernie asked. He didn’t really want to know, as he didn’t really care. Your movie stuff meant that, as far as he was concerned, it was all just plain indulgent.