by Jim Carrey
“Are you afraid of it?” he asked Sally Mae.
“Afraid of what?”
“It.”
“THE BIG SLEEP!” Cage shouted, against the rain.
“Oh. I dunno. I’ve seen people take it both ways.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Some of the toughest guys?” said Sally Mae. “They start crying, calling for their mothers. And as they pass they get a look in their eyes, like they see something horrible coming, like a reckoning. They’re scared. Then others, they’ll surprise you. They go out real calm and serene.”
“But they all end up the same,” said Carrey. “All gone, all forgotten.”
“Yeah,” said Sally Mae. “All gone. Forgotten.”
“I ain’t afraid,” said Cage. “I’ve lived and died a thousand times.”
“That’s what you tell yourself,” said Carrey. “I think the death fear’s just so strong the ego does anything to block it out. We hide in grandiose stories. Superheroes, God-men. Fame is a mind plague; we thought it’d make us immortal as it ate up our precious time.”
His whole striving life now seemed so distant. Had any of it mattered? He’d exhausted himself—for what? He thought of a puffer fish he’d seen on the BBC. A pathetic creature, little fins, bulging eyes, poppy-seed brain. Unremarkable in every way. Except that, way down on the seafloor, it wiggled in the sand to make a stunning geometric pattern, perfectly proportioned, intricate as any mandala. All to attract a mate, to pass on its genes. Was there any real difference between them? The fish, too, had a talent. But was, presumably, untroubled by anything like the panicked vertigo that came over Carrey now, huddled against the sandbags, heart pounding in his chest.
“I’m in a fragile place, guys,” he said. “Not sure I’m gonna be much of an asset here.”
A crimson light flashed over the hills. Cage was busy with his knife, scratching his name into the tar-tiled roof. Carrey took his binoculars and scanned the ridge. More flashes. Brighter, closer. He panned down to Taverna Tony. Travolta was in an argument with Willow, evidently refusing to huddle with the others, insisting on the dramatic choice of standing with one foot heroically planted on the sandbags, à la Washington Crossing the Delaware. Carrey swung his sights across the way, tight on Sean Penn, crouched in the bunker that had been Urban Outfitters, lighting up another Camel. Then the cigarette dropped from Penn’s lips and his eyes ignited with the same fear that sank Carrey’s heart as, swinging the binoculars up toward the hills, he saw them.
“Sweet Jesus…”
An alien mop-up crew.
They were worse than giant robots. And worse than giant serpents. They were giant robots piloted by giant serpents, a synthesis of scriptural and science-fiction horrors, Tan Calvin’s people in unmasked form, awful snaky guys, just as Cage had seen, piloting gleaming alloy exoskeletons, bipedal warbots painted with insignia representing all the worlds they’d destroyed, hieroglyphs of apocalypse swirling across the bodysuits that might have been described as futuristic if our heroes, after glimpsing these foes, still believed in the future as a meaningful concept.
“Who’s making up grandiose stories now?” said Cage. “Light ’em up, Sally Mae!”
“I’ll give the orders here,” Sally Mae said. “Both you bitches get ready to reload me.”
They hurried into position, Carrey standing over the crate of artillery shells, Cage ready by the breech of the gun, Sally Mae trimming and calibrating as the Striders neared, gaining twenty yards with each step, closing in five hundred yards, four hundred—
Three hundred.
Two hundred—
Sally Mae opened fire, raking the formation, hitting two directly. The machines just shuddered, then took their own aim. And out came the death rays. A hail of killing crimson light, each beam a foot in diameter, hundreds coming now from the Striders, filling Jim Carrey with terror. This was where he’d die. But the volley went wide, crashing into Mr. Chow. Giving them a second chance.
“Reload!” cried Sally Mae. Carrey lifted the artillery shells from their crate, passing each carefully to Cage. Never in his life had anything felt so arrestingly vivid as this simple act. The present, at last, unpolluted by thought for the past or the future.
So breathtakingly real.
“That’s it, Jim,” said Sally Mae. “You’re doing great.”
Aiming at the nearest Strider, she fired off the volley that would betray their position: seven shells howling through the night. The first three shots landed, disabling the devil bot’s shields. The fourth and fifth went wide. But the last one hit, turning this enemy into a fountain of greenish flames.
The other machines now locked in on the gunner’s nest, raining death rays on the Chipotle.
“Move!” said Sally Mae.
They hurried down the access hatch, raced through the front door, following the mighty woman onto Cross Creek Road. The Chipotle was ablaze, and through the smoke of burning meat and rubber they saw the first of the Striders enter the shopping village, triggering the buried Claymores. They ducked as thick white blasts shattered the storefront windows, their ears ringing. The Strider’s knees buckled, then it crashed to the pavement, sending out a bone-rattling shock wave. The remaining machines paused, scanning about for this newest threat, when, from Urban Outfitters, came a war cry unheard since Little Bighorn, issued then from the Lakota, now from Gwyneth Paltrow, who, with Sean Penn and Willow, opened fire with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Unlike the rest, Gwyneth experienced no combat fear. Only pure berserker spirit, a unified animal instinct chanting from a wild place beyond the human heart: dominate, kill, survive. She aimed for the downed Strider, lining its pilot’s pod up in her sights, launching three grenades at this creature who, while hideous to human eyes, had people who cared for him back in the Boötes Void, memories of weekends in the Sombrero Galaxy joined with others in a giant, slithering mating ball, memories that played within his mind as Gwyneth Paltrow’s first two grenades shattered his pod, as her third sailed right through, burning into his slickened belly before exploding him into caustic slime.
The other four Striders refused the trap.
Crimson death beams shot through the smoke-engulfed street. Sean Penn, Carla, and Gwyneth Paltrow struggled to sight their weapons, calling desperately to Willow and the Scientologists.
“Where are you? We’re getting slaughtered here!”
Only Willow had kept her cool, peppering the machines with a stream of plasma blasts. The others had fallen to infighting. Travolta’s two soldiers—Harley Sandler and Hurley Chandler—had been on the outs with each other ever since Sandler beat Chandler for a minor role on Days of Our Lives. Now they were bickering over who would shoot which alien first.
“Shut up, you two!” scolded Willow.
“Don’t command my men,” said Travolta.
“Tell them to fire! Return fire!”
“That’s it,” he said, summoning powers of concentration he’d mastered over years of study. “I challenge you to a staring contest.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“We’ll see who the real leader is.”
“We’re being blown to hell!”
“You blinked!”
The whole restaurant flashed brilliant crimson as the death beams homed in on their discord, raking Travolta’s chest, punching clear through Willow’s skull, bisecting Sandler’s and Chandler’s torsos, cauterizing the flesh and organs such that these poor souls didn’t die but persisted in stumpified form, their puzzled shrieks harmonizing over the tympanies of the alien cannonade. With what life they had left, they tried to elbow-walk to safety, staring up eerily, as they went, at the walls of Taverna Tony, painted with a mural of ancient battle on Trojan plains, Bronze Age heroes fixed here in the city of celluloid: Achilles, Ajax—and Diomedes. Whose spirit now rose up within Nicolas Cage, an Itali
an, after all, descended of Trojan stock. And a man who sensed that his hour had arrived.
“I’m going in,” said Cage. “They’ll all die if I don’t.”
“Don’t be crazy,” said Carrey. “They’ll blow you apart.”
“Naw. Told ya, Jimbo, I’m immune to the death rays.”
“That’s a grandiose story!”
“Grandiose stories are all we have left,” shouted Cage. “That and my sword, Excalibur.” The Striders were bearing down, turning their rays on the Urban Outfitters.
“Remember that well I told you about?” said Cage, eyebrows popping. “Well, they just pulled up a bucket full of hell.”
“I love you, Nic,” said Carrey. The end was close for them all; Cage had a right to the final moments of his choice. “I respect you as an artist. As someone with whom I shared dreams in this town a million selves ago. Aim well, my brother.”
“We did all right,” said Cage, with a smile. “You gonna use that plasma blaster?”
“Probably not,” said Carrey, and handed over the weapon, for which he had no special love anyway. Then, certain of his destiny, wolf rising in the heart, Nicolas Cage burst out from the cover of the Chipotle’s smoldering shell, firing both plasma blasters through the rain and smoke, walking toward the approaching devil bots, coattails blowing in wind, his mind reeling as he went with the thrill of all genres fusing at the end of the human narrative. He was Buck Rogers. He was Doc Holliday. He was Saint Michael slaying the dragon. He was Perseus bearing down on Medusa and he was Nureyev leaving his deathbed to conduct Romeo and Juliet one last time, and his face channeled all of these as few faces could. “Fuck the critics! Fuck the tabloids! Fuck you bastards for hounding me across space and time!” he screamed, charging that which any reasonable person would have fled and, maybe by force of sheer will, maybe by accident, maybe, indeed, by destiny, he was immune to the crimson death rays. They didn’t slice through him as he drew closer but rather diffused within him, the result of a slight mutation in his DNA, a tiny structural difference in his cell walls that simply shrugged off the wavelength of the beams—just as some tan at the beach, and others burn. His aim was true, he’d rehearsed this scene a thousand times. He fired dense plasma blasts into the pilot chamber of the nearest machine, and it froze as the direct hits killed the pilot at his controls.
“Woohaa!” he cried, sighting Gwyneth Paltrow, Sean Penn, and Carla through the smoke, grinning with the thrill of death defied, turning his plasma blasters now on the closest of the three surviving monsters. Overwhelming its shields, absorbing its crimson fire with little more than a twitch down his spine, he giggled, gaily, aiming for the knees, disabling the Strider as Sean Penn and Carla took down another with phosphorus grenades.
Leaving only one, the squadron’s alpha—Cage’s horrible, eon-spanning nemesis.
He drew close to the deathbot, twenty feet high, and its pilot, in his mind, the demon who had followed him through so many sweat-soaked nights.
“You drove me from my homes, my life,” said Cage. “Why? What love I might have known, what tenderness, across time, but for your demented hauntings. For what? The cosmos is brutal enough without people like you taking others’ suffering as entertainment. No more. It ends tonight.”
He raised his plasma blasters. “Final reckoning, motherfucker.”
He fired into the cockpit, watched by his waiting victim, the terrified reptiloid captain, who cried, in his own way, as Cage shot up the edges of his pilot’s pod, shattering its polymer shell, who struggled and spasmed in his harnesses as earth’s atmosphere poured chokingly over him. And who managed to send out a distress message as Cage raised up Excalibur to deliver the blow that would, Cage believed, liberate earth for millennia to come.
Down came the sword, gashing open the serpent’s abdomen. Cage didn’t stop there. He hacked and stabbed, mutilating each organ as if afraid it might respawn the demon, while Gwyneth Paltrow played at figure skating in the flow of guts dripping from the body—a pair of actions that may have offended the gods of battle.
“Guys,” said Jim Carrey, eyeing the ridge. “It’s not over.”
It wasn’t. Now, down from the mountains, came not six but at least a hundred alien mop-up machines. And not Striders, but Super Striders, each forty feet tall, crushing trees and rocks as they moved down toward the little shopping village, heeding the alien captain’s distress call. Chilling music sounded from every atom as they approached, the last movement of Calvin’s requiem was his final insult, an alien muzak version of Doc Pomus’s “This Magic Moment,” its tragic, supernatural banality draining the last traces of hope from their souls as out, now, came not crimson but raspberry death rays, the result of a slight tweaking of frequency, Calvin’s people having adjusted to the news of Cage’s immunity. In all his visions, all his dreams, Nicolas Cage had never ever seen a raspberry death ray. And now he realized that a few glimpses of the future do not form a complete picture.
“They figured me out!” he cried. “We gotta move!”
He fled with the rest as these new beams rained down, as the friends, who only moments before were planning a new world, now sought just basic survival.
* * *
—
Each Super Strider bristled with twenty cannons, the pilot pods all covered with protective shields, slightly beaked, suggesting giant plague doctors.
The survivors raced down Cross Creek Road, death rays following them in flight, raspberry reflecting in the rain. Then, hissing like a viper, a ray caught Gwyneth Paltrow’s leg, severing it just above the knee. Her debutante’s scream was the final cry of a certain kind of humanity, declaring the world as they’d known it a lost civilization. Carla scooped her up and carried her down the shopping mall street. They ducked into a side alley. Paltrow stared with awed horror at her wound, veins cauterized, charred femur tip just poking through the flesh.
“My leg is gone, my leg is gone…” she gasped. “It’s awesome!”
“We’re gonna get you a new one,” said Sally Mae, jabbing a morphine syrette into Gwyneth Paltrow’s thigh.
“We’re pinned down,” said Sean Penn. “No escape.”
“Can’t we gank a ride?” said Cage, nodding to abandoned cars up the alley.
“Useless,” said Sally Mae. “Those are all fancy. Computerized. Fried in the electromagnetic pulse.”
“How ’bout that one?” said Carrey, pointing to an old Triumph motorcycle, vintage, from the late 1970s. “Looks analog to me.”
“It’s worth a shot,” said Sally Mae. “Can’t fit more than three of us, though.”
They hurried toward the motorcycle. Sally Mae played with its ignition wires. The engine sputtered and faltered, three times. Then its headlight blazed to life.
“Come on, girls,” said Sally Mae to Paltrow and Carla. “Time for some tactical retrograde. By which I mean let’s haul ass.”
“Really?” said Carrey. “Suddenly it’s ladies first again?”
“It’s a woman’s right to change her mind,” said Sally Mae.
“This is how it has to be,” grumbled Sean Penn, squinting against the smoke of the Camel hanging from his lips. “Gwyneth’s wounded. Sally Mae, you’re the best fighter—they’ll need you. And Carla is with child.”
“What child?” said Carrey.
“My child,” roared Penn. “She’s with my child.”
The women climbed onto the motorcycle, Sally Mae at the handlebars, Carla holding up a morphine-dazed Gwyneth Paltrow behind her, turning to Sean Penn as he placed his hand on her stomach and made a final request. “If I die, tell our child I went peacefully. With grace. Tell our child that, in my last breath, I thought of its first breath. That this connects us. Tell her every time someone blows cigarette smoke in her face, it means I’m there. Watching over her.”
“I will,” said Carla, tenderly. “I promise y
ou.”
“Tell the kid about me, too,” said Cage. “Tell everyone, actually. Say I died after killing an alien in combat with my sword, Excalibur. And you don’t have to, but you could throw in the part about me being immune to the death rays. Make sure to say I died kinda falling to my knees with my arms in the air, in slow motion, like Dafoe in Platoon. That’s all I ask, in exchange for my sacrifice.”
“What about you, Jim?” said Sally Mae. “What do we say?”
“Should we say you killed a dozen alien Super Striders?” offered Carla. “A one-man Alamo?”
“No,” said Carrey. “I had a modest combat record.”
“Tell them Jim had a hundred heads and a hundred arms,” said Gwyneth, druggedly. “Say it took a hundred aliens to kill him and he never ever ever gave up.”
Carrey didn’t totally dislike this idea. What if each of the heads had its own expression? Wasn’t that close enough to his truth? That’d be something, a one-man carnival describing the artist who contains multitudes, the one man as all men. Didn’t he want some part of the record? A starring role in the Book of Regenesis? If he made no claim, he’d be a footnote. Doubts and confusions scurried like mice across his mind as death rays fell up the alley. No time now for funeral speeches, only for messages in bottles.
“Just find my daughter,” said Carrey. “Find Jane, tell her I love her.”
“Okay,” said Sally Mae. “And now we gotta move.”
Carrey looked to Penn and Cage, both practiced in war and action genres, and yet, like him, wholly terrified of what lay ahead, the three men sharing a look of assent hardly original to this moment, the same exchanged by boys charging the no-man’s-lands of the Somme a century before, a recognition that each was placing his life, his every caress, his every August evening, into fortune’s indifferent hands. And then Jim Carrey, Sean Penn, and Nicolas Cage, the last standing titans of Hollywood—mortals made colossal by worship in the marketplace—they charged down onto Cross Creek Road, plasma blasters firing against the raspberry hail, the Super Striders pursuing them, taking the bait. They drew away nearly all the fire, creating a window of opportunity in which the Triumph screeched down onto the Pacific Coast Highway, speeding north as, instincts switching from fight to flight, the leading men ran like panicked livestock.
