Part 1 (1/2)

Russel Middlebrook.

Double Feature.

Brent Hartinger.

For Michael Jensen, who is all the protection I need against zombies.

CHAPTER ONE.

I was standing far from daylight, deep in an echoing corridor of stone. The air was dry and dusty, and all around me, lifeless bodies lurched and groaned.

Then my best friend Gunnar motioned to me and my other best friend Min from over by a bulletin board next to a row of lockers. ”Russ! Min!” he said. ”You have to come see this!”

I was standing in the concrete hallways of Robert L. Goodkind High School, surrounded by sleep-deprived high school students. Hey, it was 8 A.M.-what'd you expect?

Why the zombies-in-a-crypt imagery? Well, that's just me, Russel Middlebrook-always trying to be cute. But it also had something to do with the flier that my best friend Gunnar had seen on that bulletin board.

ZOMBIES WANTED! it read. Below that in smaller print it said: Teenagers needed as extras for upcoming horror film, Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies, to be produced in local area. Come let us turn you into gruesome, monstrous zombies!

Then there was contact info.

”They're filming a zombie movie in town, and they

need teenagers to be extras, isn't that cool, we should totally

do it!” Gunnar was saying, all without taking a breath. I

2 hadn't seen him this excited since he found lamprey eels in

the creek near our houses. Let's face it, Gunnar was kind of a geek. But I loved that he got so obsessive about things, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. He was originally from Norway, which has nothing to do with anything, but he has this slight accent (which people used to make fun of him for), so I figured it was something you should know.

”Aren't they kind of late for zombies?” Min said. ”Halloween was two weeks ago.” She was right. It was already the second week in November.

”They're filming the movie,” Gunnar said. ”Not releasing it.”

”And what's a 'brain zombie'?” I asked. ”I know,” Min said. ”Brain zombies? That doesn't even make sense.”

”I'm sure it's explained in the script!” Gunnar said loudly. ”Look, do you guys want to do it or not? I know Em will!” Em was Gunnar's girlfriend, who was just as geeky as he was (in a good way).

”I don't know,” Min said. She was the school egghead, but she wasn't your typical Chow Mein Brain (her term, not mine). For one thing, she wasn't at all shy and submissive.

She was actually pretty in-your-face. Example: she had 3 recently put purple streaks in her hair. And she was bi and open about it. Still, she loved monster movies, so I would have thought she would have wanted to be in one.

I looked at her. ”What's wrong?”

”Huh?” she said. ”Nothing.”

But I like to think I'm a pretty observant guy, and I knew she was lying. Min was lonely. She'd had bad luck lately, with both guys and girls. I could relate. I'm gay, and before I came out the previous spring, I had felt like the only gay person in the universe. But I had a boyfriend now, this great guy named Otto (who, unfortunately, lived eight hundred miles away). ”This zombie thing could be fun,” I said to Min. ”Yes, maybe.” She stared past me, down the hall. ”We'd all be together, at least.”

Min met my gaze. ”No, we won't. Not really.” ”Yeah, we will!” Gunnar said. ”Why wouldn't we be?” Min sighed. ”Because people are always alone. Sure, we're 'together,' but not really. We all might be doing the same thing, being zombie extras on this movie set. But we wouldn't ever really know what the others are thinking or feeling. It'd be a completely different experience for each of us.”

Needless to say, not only was Min in-your-face, she 4 could also be full of it. But at least now I knew I'd been right about her feeling lonely.

”Please,” I said. ”Zombie guts are zombie guts are zom bie guts.” This was a play on that poem, ”A rose is a rose is a rose.” Trust me, I didn't go around quoting Gertrude Stein to just anyone. But I knew Min, being full of it, would get the reference.

”Are they?” she said. ”Zombie guts might mean one thing to you, but something completely different to me. Even if we were always together, which we won't be, it wouldn't be the same experience at all. I bet you ten dollars that if we do this, we'll have completely different experiences.”

”Yeah, but that doesn't mean-”

Suddenly Gunnar erupted (and interrupted). ”Enough with the boring philosophy talk!” he said. ”Are we going to do the zombie movie or not?”

”Oh, calm down,” I said matter-of-factly. ”Extras in a horror movie? Of course the three of us are going to do something as cool as that.”

So a couple of days later, Min, Gunnar, Em, and I trundled off to this informational meeting for extras who wanted to be in Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies. It was held in the afternoon in the auditorium of a local high school, one that had been closed for the year for remodeling. About forty 5 other teenagers s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably on squeaky wooden seats. I hardly recognized anyone-almost everybody else must have come from the other high schools in the surrounding area. The somewhat meager turnout surprised me, since I couldn't imagine any teenager not wanting to play a zombie in a real movie. Then again, I'd learned long ago-and had been reminded so many times in my life!-that what interested me didn't necessarily interest other people my age.

There were a few wannabe divas from the schools' various drama clubs, but most of the other people who'd showed up were pretty clearly geeks. The teenage zombies in this movie were going to be doubly scary: in addition to mangled faces and intestines hanging out, they would all have an irritating knowledge of calculus and old Star Trek reruns.

”Carrots and peas,” Gunnar said out of the blue. ”What?” I said.

”That's what movie extras are supposed to say to make it look like they're really talking,” he explained. ”They don't say real words, they just repeat the phrase 'carrots and peas' over and over again.”

”Really?” Em said. ”That's very interesting!” ”The thing I don't get,” I said, ”is why they didn't film this movie over the summer.”

6 ”Lots of reasons,” Gunnar said. ”Maybe they didn't have their financing in place. Maybe they needed the outdoor shots to be autumn-specific. That's the thing about filmmaking-you need to be flexible.”

”But most of their extras are high school students,” I pointed out. ”During the week, we'll be in cla.s.s all day!”

”So that's when they'll shoot the scenes that don't need extras in the background.”

Gunnar had obviously done his research. I knew right then that he had suddenly become an expert on absolutely everything related to making movies.

A few minutes later, two guys plodded out onstage. They looked younger than I would have thought, like college students (freshmen, not seniors). I wondered if they were extras who had gotten lost backstage.

Then they introduced themselves as the producer and director of Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies.

”In Hollywood, being young is a good thing,” Gunnar whispered.

”So,” the producer said, ”you guys want to be zombies, huh?”

The crowd immediately whooped it up. They didn't care that the producer and the director were only shaving twice a week. They wanted to be zombies!