Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  ANNCR, V.O.: “Drop what you’re doing — it won’t crawl away! Come on! Join us now for the most unpredictable hour on television: Deaaaad Giveawaaaaay!”

  Every night, without fail. Seven nights a week, live on the air, and no reruns.

  When Monty first checked his watch, it was a half-hour to showtime. He slumped a little deeper into the chair in his dressing room. Time on his hands. Time to kill. Would that lead to blood on his hands?

  Too late, Monty! It’s already there!

  So he reached out to the counter before him and plucked his bottle of Chivas Regal from the carpet of dust beneath it. And drank until it burned. Penance. A little later he was comfortably numb. And could live with himself again.

  Time was that Monty Olson lived with just about everybody. In image, if not in body. He traveled the airwaves, waltzing into bright sunlit living rooms and bedrooms, borne on the wings of daytime TV. Always a guest, never an intruder, forever welcome. Shows such as Deal of the Century and Bet You A Million had made him a star. And was he loved? Oh, was he ever … because he was the man with the cash, the man with the prizes, the man with the motherlode.

  The man with the million-dollar smile.

  He found it a little tougher to conjure up that smile these days, the big one that wrapped the corners of his mouth almost back to his wisdom teeth. But he managed. Once a pro, always a pro.

  Who would have ever guessed it? he wondered for maybe the billionth time since waking up to find that he and everyone else unfamiliar with the rigors of rigor mortis were in a declining minority. Who would’ve guessed that they’d still want to be entertained?

  Monty fortified himself with another character-building gulp of Chivas and reached for his makeup case. He did his own makeup these days, wondering why he bothered. His face may have become a little flabbier, a little looser, with a few more broken veins mapping his nose, but he was still a regular Clark Gable by comparison with the rest of the folks on the show. Monty peered at the lines webbing from the corners of his eyes and mouth and did his best to erase them with pancake.

  They still want to be entertained.

  It wasn’t that crazy a notion, not after you gave it time to sink into your already shell-shocked head. Because back in the days when the dead were suddenly no longer obliged to stay in their holes and their morgue drawers, Monty had found himself wandering the streets. He didn’t want much, only to avoid becoming lunch for some newly awakened cadaver, and maybe to link up with someone else whose blood still ran warm. And he’d seen the zombies in their homes — by themselves, in pairs, as entire families — parked in front of their televisions just as before, as if nothing whatsoever had changed. Even when all the networks and independent stations had dropped from the airwaves like fruit from a dying tree, they watched the blank screens anyway. Mesmerized by the static.

  The watching dead, waiting to be entertained.

  Most of the zombies weren’t that bright. Most of them weren’t much more than two-legged dinosaurs in search of the nearest tar pit to blunder into. But some of them — perhaps those who’d been the sharpest and shrewdest to begin with — had managed to retain enough intelligence that it was downright scary in itself. You looked into those glassy eyes and found that they weren’t quite as dull as you’d thought. Or hoped. The lights were still on and somebody was still at home up there … only now the resident’s priorities had been turned inside-out.

  Such a creature was Brad Bernerd. Here in New York, he’d been a fast-track network executive with a string of hit shows as long as your arm. Some people, before the demise of what Monty was beginning to nostalgically regard as the Old World, had said that Brad Bernerd was going to launch his own network.

  It came about a lot differently than expected, but he got his chance after all.

  Monty had wandered up to the studio soundstage of Deal of the Century one day, a huge and silenced amphitheater where even the echoes of past applause had died. He stood at center stage, where he’d spent nearly half of his forty-three years, feeling the glorious pressure of the lights burning through him … and he was ready to blow his brains out and die where he’d lived his finest hours.

  Except that Brad Bernerd had chosen that moment to make an entrance.

  He didn’t look much different than Monty remembered, except for a fist-sized dent in the right side of his head. He moved more slowly, more deliberately, but still managed to carry himself with pride. Even arrogance, after death.

  Monty nearly piddled his pants like a three-year-old when he looked into those unblinking eyes and saw that they recognized him.

  They stared forever.

  “I have a job for you,” Bernerd said at last. The voice held little of its old animated enthusiasm. But that didn’t mean it had lost its power to persuade.

  Hey guy, no reason to cash in your chips now, was what it boiled down to. Not when the show must go on. Not when I can put you back on the air. Not when you can reclaim your rightful place in the limelight.

  And thus was born the first television program conceived entirely for zombies. I want my ZTV.

  Monty checked his watch one last time, found that the zero hour had just about drawn nigh once again. He suckled a final pull from the Chivas and left it behind when the knock came at the door, right on schedule.

  “Time for tonight’s show,” said Brad Bernerd when Monty opened the door. “It’s showtime, my man.”

  Yeah, like I really need a reminder NIGHT AFTER NIGHT!

  Monty wound his way backstage among the skeleton crew that kept the cameras whirring and the lights burning. They still needed to do something about the ventilation, but Monty had gotten used to the week-old roadkill smell months ago. Once a pro, always a pro.

  How do you do it? they used to ask him; the admirers, the hangers-on. How do you manage to seem so on top of the world every single show?

  No sweat, he would tell them. It was simply a matter of knowing the right buttons and what to do with them. Turn ON the adrenaline. Turn ON the smile. The charm. The juice. But just as important, turn OFF the mind. And especially the conscience. After all, how long could you live with yourself if you acknowledged that your mission in life was encouraging people to debase themselves for cash?

  The switches were all aligned in their proper ON/OFF positions by the time he strolled over to stage left, behind the three huge doors. The crew was putting the final touches on the displays. Now and again, a foreman would have to restrain an overzealous stagehand from helping himself to one of the prizes.

  “I rec … recog … hey I know you.” A weak voice from the cage behind Door Number Three. Since the lights were dimming, it was tough to tell who the voice belonged to. Still warm and breathing, of course, if she was in the cage. Monty was the only live one who walked these particular hallowed halls.

  “I know you.” The voice was thick, but clear.

  He was drawn to her voice as a moth to the flame, curious why she was still able to speak coherently. Everyone else in the cage had succumbed to the doses of Thorazine administered earlier. It made the live ones so much more docile, kept them from agitating the audience. And the master of ceremonies.

  “Please let me out … please…?” She knelt on the cage floor, her face framed by long dark hair. She wore a red and white skirt, and a dirty white V-neck sweater with a large red M on the front. Her hands clutched the bars so tight they looked albino. “Please?”

  All switches in place, all systems go.

  “No can do, babe,” he said, and just to charm the fear out of her, he gave her a great big Monty Olson smile, one to rival any from the Old World. When you still got it, flaunt it. “The stagehands’ union would rip me a new one if I did their job.”

  “How can you just sell us out like this? You’re still one of us.” She gestured toward the identically dressed girls sharing the cage with her. “You’re not one of them.” She was beginning to cry, eyes glassy but not yet blank, as she fought an uphill battle against the Th
orazine. “How can you sell us out?”

  “Look: They’ll get you one way or another. They’re the ones calling the shots these days. And they’re the ones signing my paycheck, as it were: They let me live.” Monty knelt close to her, his voice almost fatherly. “Remember Andy Warhol? Hmmm? A long time ago he said that everyone was going to be famous for fifteen minutes. Remember that? Well, this is your night, sweetheart. You’re gonna be seen from coast to coast tonight.”

  She stared at him, clawing for more comprehension, then her fingers opened and trailed down the bars. She stared at the spot they’d been clutching.

  “Just make the best of it and give us a good show,” he said, and left her. He had a date with a lapel mic.

  “Showtime,” Bernerd called from the shadows. “Look alive, folks.”

  Bernerd cued the guy in the soundbooth, a forever-young fellow dubbed DeadHead, since he had perished and was then reborn in a Jerry Garcia T-shirt. DeadHead’s job was to play the proper music at the proper cues. He juggled a dozen cartridges and, considering his infirmities, managed a remarkable job of keeping them sorted.

  The music: “Mars, Bringer of War,” throbbing with menace.

  The lights: coming up from dim.

  The cameras: red tally lights winking on, lenses focusing, slack gray faces peering into the viewfinders.

  The pseudo-Don Pardo: “Drop what you’re doing — it won’t crawl away! Come on! Join us now for the most unpredictable hour on television: Deaaaad Giveawaaaaay!”

  Monty cemented that huge smile across his face and came striding onstage, sharp and natty in his slacks and blazer. The bulge under the left sleeve was barely noticeable. Doors One, Two, and Three were at his left, and the enormous Wheel of Opportunity at his right. Down he went, down to the very lip of the stage as the curtain rose, the final barrier removed…

  And there they were. His audience.

  They sat politely, somewhere around a thousand of them, somewhat less than two thousand unblinking eyes staring back at him. Some of them clapped, or tried their best, clumsy hands slapping together like pairs of gutted fish. Others cheered, sounding like contented cattle lowing gently into the evening.

  A sea of gray faces, agate eyes. Let me entertain you, let me make you smile.

  “Right you are, Don, this is Dead Giveaway, and my name’s Monty Olson. Good-looking crowd tonight, wow. Well hey! I know you hate waiting for the fun to start about as much as I hate long kiss-ass monologues, so let’s just get right down to business, what do you say?”

  The studio audience murmured its agreement, mottled gray heads bobbing here and there. He imagined their counterparts at home, doing likewise. Monty went striding back toward the wheel, feeling more vital than he had all day. The lights, the cameras, the smell of makeup … he knew no better sustenance.

  “Just one thing before we get started. Let’s run through the rules, shall we? They’re simple enough, in keeping with most of your minds out there. Each contestant gets one spin at the wheel, where they can be an instant winner or loser. If the wheel stops on a number, they’ll win one of our big prizes behind the three doors. And trust your generous Uncle Monty, we’ve got some real goodies stashed behind there tonight. Only one word of warning: Just don’t commit the Big No-No. We all know what that is and what that means, don’t we, ahahahahahaaaaah!”

  As Monty patted the bulge beneath his sleeve, there came from the audience a thick rumbling that was probably laughter.

  “So! Now that that repetitious bullshit’s over with, who’s our first contestant tonight?”

  DeadHead began playing Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” as the announcer introduced the shape beginning to scuttle onstage.

  “She’s a hometown career girl from mid-Manhattan, a former director of sales and training at a downtown bank. First up tonight on Dead Giveaway … please welcome Cynthia!”

  Again, that dead-fish splatter of applause, while there arose several agitated wheezes that in the Old World might’ve been wolf-whistles. Cynthia shuffled toward the wheel, tall and angular in the moldering remnants of a pinstriped business skirt and jacket. Her mouth was a harsh red slash of lipstick against a white face the texture of dried-out Play-Doh.

  “Welcome, Cynthia, welcome,” Monty said. “Damned if you don’t sound like a lady who has it all together. So tell me, what do you owe your success to?”

  “Brains,” she said with a lopsided grin.

  Monty dug deep and chortled out a big belly laugh. He had her step up to the wheel and she gripped one of the many handles circling its edge and gave it a good shove. An overhead camera flashed the spinning image onto the studio monitors. Numbers and prizes alike flickered past the marker, a blur at first, then settling into focus as the wheel lost momentum. At last the marker settled on a huge numeral 2.

  “How ‘bout that! A big winner on the first spin of the night!” Monty boomed. On went the aching wraparound smile. “Tell her what she’s won!”

  Door Number Two eased upward to reveal a display that resembled the back room of a well-stocked butcher shop anticipating rush hour. Stainless steel tables and white-draped gurneys were loaded nearly to the point of collapse. A groan of envy rippled through the audience.

  The studio monitors and home viewers were then treated to stock newsreel footage of a suburban neighborhood reduced to the apparent aftermath of a war zone. Grim-faced rescue workers crawled past mounds of burning rubble, extracting victims whole and in part from wreckage twisted beyond recognition.

  “Who’ll ever forget last May twenty-third?” said the announcer. “Flight 901 out of O’Hare Airport? It crashed a minute after takeoff, but the nation’s third worst airline disaster is your gain, Cynthia! Direct to you from cold storage in the Cook County Morgue, it’s the last of Flight 901! Courtesy of Dead Giveaway.”

  Whatever remained of Cynthia’s professional composure was abandoned where she stood. She went lurching toward Door Two in a stiff-legged hobble, falling toward the nearest table and overturning it in an avalanche of assorted parts. Two cameras zoomed in and caught her delight … the sweet taste of victory.

  The next contestant was a trim lady wearing a tattered dress belted around the waist and a string of pearls. Earrings showed through the matted filth of once-carefully coiffed hair. Her name was June, a homemaker from Mayfield, Ohio, and she lumbered away an instant winner, the proud owner of the thigh and lower leg of what the announcer said had been a marathon runner.

  A Brooklyn construction laborer named Carl was up next, entering to the strains of “Born in the U.S.A.” His blue workshirt was stained in numerous places where it puckered into the gellifying flesh of his belly and chest, and his shoulders looked as broad as a freezer door.

  “Whoa, Carl, let’s be careful, okay?” Monty said, laughing. “That wheel’s gotta last us the rest of the season, you know.”

  Carl grunted, and a low moan escaped the audience as he clutched a handle, staggering when he spun the wheel. Then, with the sound of a large, half-rotten carrot snapping in two, the zombie’s arm parted company with his shoulder. The arm slithered out of its sleeve like a great gray worm, the hand still holding fast to the wheel. Carl watched in dumbfounded surprise as his arm spun in broad circles, like the last remnant of a child desperate to remain aboard a merry-go-round. Carl looked up, mouth agape, eyes bovine in their stupidity.

  Silence, save for the clattering of the marker.

  Then a red beacon and the sound of a buzzer ripsawing through the studio.

  “Uh oh, that’s it! The Big No-No!” cried Monty. “Self-dismemberment is grounds for automatic disqualification!” He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a long-barreled .38 revolver, leveling it at the zombie’s head. “Too bad, Carl. That was a good spin, too.”

  The audience uttered a mournful groan at the gunshot, at the mushrooming of the back of Carl’s head into gray and maroon, at the thud of his body on the soundstage floor. A pair of stagehands shuffled out to drag the remains away; one
licked his fingers when the job was done. Monty reholstered the .38 and grinned broadly and hunched his shoulders in feigned innocence — whattaya gonna do? Always a laff-a-minute here on Dead Giveaway.

  And on and on it went, a constant, plodding parade of the undead coming to claim their prizes. Shawn, the California beach bum who still had shards of a surfboard sticking from his chest, walked away with a four-pack of heads of various network executives Bernerd hadn’t liked. Millicent, who’d been killed shortly after her debutante coming-out party, won the massive arm of a weightlifter and wore it around her neck like a fine fur stole. And on and on…

  Until, at last, the final contestant.

  “Looks like the old clock on the wall says we’re just about out of time,” Monty said. “But hey, let’s squeeze in one more of you grabby eating machines, what do you say? Who’s up next?”

  “Well, Monty, he comes to us from the Lower East Side, and his interests are slamdancing and graffiti. Six-foot-two, hair of blue, just call him Fang!”

  An imposingly tall figure emerged from offstage, made even taller by the blue spikes of hair exploding from his head at all angles. Beneath a loose black-mesh shirt, his sunken chest was crisscrossed with chains. His upper lip was eaten away entirely up to his nose, giving him a perpetual snarl. Fang took his place at the wheel.

  “Last spin of the night, Fang,” Monty said. “Let’s give ‘em a good one.”

  And good it was. The wheel spun forever, slowing at last with a clattering of the marker blade, until it came to rest on a large 3. The crowd broke into a spattering of applause.

  “Whoa ho ho ho, what luck!” Monty roared. The best he could tell, Fang was grinning too. “Another big winner! What have we got for him?”

  “They’re young! They’re nubile! They’re fresh from Hollywood! And they’re all yours, Fang! The entire female cast of last spring’s trash-theater epic, Cheerleader Party Massacre!”