by Phoef Sutton
Because over the past couple of years Matt had learned how to take care of himself.
When Flint came running at him, ax lifted above his head to strike, Matt went low and charged him, hitting him in the gut with his shoulder. Flint toppled over Matt, and the ax went crashing into John Huston’s crypt.
“What’s going on?” Eva cried.
Matt scrambled up and dashed to the ax before Flint could get his bearings. He seized the ax by the handle and swung it at Flint, just as he lunged for Matt, crying out, “You’re his new favorite, damn it!”
The ax struck Flint just below the temple.
If the ax had gone at him blade first, it would have chopped off the top of his head, spilling his brains all over John Huston’s nice marble sarcophagus. But Matt had turned the blade away so that the butt of the ax struck Flint on the brow and knocked him off his feet, felling him like a tree.
Matt didn’t really know why he spared Flint. Maybe it was because he felt sorry for him. Maybe it was just because there were all these people around and he’d have to explain himself.
Maybe it was because of Eva. Because she was looking at him with pure horror in her eyes.
“Why did you do that?” she asked.
He turned to her and was about to explain that he’d had to do it, to protect himself and her and everyone around them from what Flint had become.
But before he could speak, he felt someone grab his head from behind and twist it to the side violently. Matt saw stars and thought, Somebody’s trying to break my neck, as he fell to the ground. Fortunately that move, which looks so easy in the movies, is pretty hard to pull off correctly, and the “someone” had botched it, merely wrenching Matt’s vertebrae and giving him a bad case of whiplash.
He looked up to see Flint, on his feet again, not looking too worse for wear after the ax blow to his head, stepping over him and lunging for Eva.
Eva screamed.
Just then a shining object flashed down from above and clipped off Flint’s right thumb.
Matt looked over and saw Barnabas holding a sword. A samurai sword.
“We better go!” Barnabas said. Was he really laughing?
Flint fell to the ground, grasping his thumb and crying.
People were watching.
And applauding.
They’d seen Barnabas Yancey chopping off somebody’s thumb with a sword, thought about it, and decided it had to be an act. A part of a show Barnabas was putting on to promote a new movie. And to think they were there! A big hand all around!
Barnabas bowed, then grabbed Matt’s arm with one hand and Eva’s with the other and dashed to the hearse.
Eva slipped and Matt picked her up. She was oddly passive in his arms, and he realized that what she reminded him of was Barbra in the movie they were watching. Or weren’t watching. The first victim of the zombie attack, rendered catatonic by the shock of it all.
Death imitates art.
They made it to the hearse, and Barnabas clicked his remote control key and the doors unlocked for them.
Matt stuffed Eva into the passenger seat. Just then, Barnabas, around the other side at the driver’s door, was yanked down to the ground by an unseen hand.
Leaping over the hood of the car like Starsky (or was it Hutch?), Matt caught a glimpse of Barnabas being pulled under the hearse. For the first time he saw real fear in Barnabas’s eyes.
He dropped his ax and seized Barnabas’s hand before it disappeared. Matt pulled with all his might—whatever it was that had Barnabas pulled from the other side.
But Matt was stronger. He yanked Barnabas from under the car, dragging the whatever-it-was, still clinging to Barnabas’s heel, with him.
Flint.
Matt slammed his fist down into Flint’s face, just like he had in the toilet, but with more force this time. It took only one blow to knock him unconscious. Or maybe kill him. Matt wasn’t feeling particular.
Barnabas struggled to his feet. Matt grabbed his ax and opened the door of the hearse, trying to push Barnabas inside.
He resisted.
“We can’t just leave him here!” Barnabas said. “His thumb is bleeding!”
Matt hadn’t given Barnabas credit for that much humanity.
Barnabas pulled away from Matt and bent down next to Flint. He yanked a handkerchief from his pocket (who still carried handkerchiefs?), wrapped it around the bleeding stump that used to be Flint’s thumb, then bodily dragged Flint into the back of the hearse.
Matt climbed into the driver’s seat and started the ignition. After Barnabas finished loading Flint into the back, he got into the passenger seat next to Eva and hit the button that raised the glass divider, separating the living in the front seat from the dead in the back.
“Hit it!” Barnabas said.
It was an unnecessary flourish. Matt had already floored it.
“What is happening?” Eva screamed suddenly, snapping out of her funk.
“It’s Mr. Dark!” Barnabas said. “He doesn’t want me to show the movie either. He wants to stop me!”
“Stop you from what?” Matt asked as he cleared the gates and drove onto Melrose Avenue.
“Trapping him!” Barnabas said. He was laughing again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Flint’s jaws snapped shut as he lunged forward and the chain pulled him back.
“Flint, my man, I’m sorry I didn’t read your script before,” Barnabas said, flipping through a manuscript. “It’s actually pretty good. Kudos.”
But Flint was too far gone to appreciate this faint praise. His face had rotted away so that his skull-like visage approximated the mask he was wearing when Matt first met him. He was chained by his ankles to the back wall of the theater office. Matt had wondered what those chains were there for.
“What are you keeping him here for?” Matt asked.
“What do you want to do with him?” Barnabas replied. “You want to kill him? Why? He can’t hurt anybody.”
Eva was in the back taking a drag on a joint to calm her nerves. “What’s the matter with him? Should we call a doctor? His thumb looks pretty bad.”
Matt had to remind himself that Eva couldn’t see the rotting of Flint’s flesh. As far as she was concerned, he was just the same as he ever was—except that he’d turned into a bloodthirsty crazy man and tried to kill them a couple of times.
“Don’t worry, I already called Dr. Hopley,” Barnabas said. “He’s our ‘private doctor,’” Barnabas explained to Matt with a wink.
“What did you tell him?” Eva asked.
“That Flint went berserk,” Barnabas said. “Probably a flashback from some drug he was taking.”
Barnabas leaned in to Flint, and Flint went wild with anger and hunger and spite. Barnabas laughed. “I like that word, berserk. It means an ancient Scandinavian warrior, so frenzied in battle as to be invincible. Cool.” Barnabas was swinging his samurai sword around his head in slow motion. “Not quite invincible, though, are you, Flint?”
Flint growled. His bloody right hand shot out at Barnabas’s face like a snake. Barnabas didn’t flinch. He knew the chain would hold.
“Where’d you get that samurai sword?” Matt asked.
“It’s a katana. The one used by Toshiro Mifune in Sanjuro. Supposed to be, anyway. I keep it with me in the hearse at all times. You never know when it might come in handy.”
Flint lunged forward again, his teeth gnashing, his one good eye blazing. The chain restrained him.
“You have to do something! When is Dr. Hopley going to get here?” Eva cried.
Barnabas chuckled and put the sword back in its sheath. “Anytime now. Right now, me and the Cowboy have to have a grown-up conversation. Why don’t you be a good little girl and get the box office ready for tonight?”
“Fuck you,” Eva said. “I’m going to call the police.”
“And what do you think the police will do to poor Flint? Why don’t we let him get off of whatever trip he’s on first. It’s onl
y fair.”
She hesitated and then she nodded. “I guess.” Then she looked over his shoulder at Matt. “Don’t listen to his bullshit, Matt. I’ll be downstairs.”
Barnabas shut the door after her.
“How long before the doctor gets here?” Matt asked.
“I didn’t call any doctor. We both know that won’t do any good.”
Barnabas took out three shot glasses and a bottle of Patrón. “How ’bout a nightcap? We gotta get plenty of sleep. Big day tomorrow.” He poured three shots, picked up one, and slid the other across the desk toward Matt.
“Who’s the third for?” Matt asked.
“Absent friends,” Barnabas replied.
They shot the tequila back.
“I already know your story, Cahill. Do you mind if I tell you mine? It’s short and I’m good at telling stories.”
Matt nodded.
“Well, the first part you know all about,” Barnabas began. “After all, I don’t have to tell you what it’s like to die.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I drowned in my bathtub a year ago last March. There were about thirty people in my house, so you’d think somebody would have noticed me slipping under, or at least would have wondered where I was for the two hours or so I was dead, but they were otherwise occupied.
“Have you ever been to an orgy?
“I used to have one at my house in Brentwood every other week. You’d think it would get old, but it really doesn’t. Every girl and every guy, they’re so different. And the combinations! You could really do it for years before you run out of variations.
“But this Wednesday I was feeling a little tired of the whole thing, so I just thought I’d take a bath. Maybe I’d been mixing too much Ambien with too much vodka, I don’t know. Somehow I just drifted off and under and nobody was with me, because they were all too busy downstairs fucking.
“They tell me Eva was the one who found me. It makes sense. She was probably trying to avoid the party. She had turned into kind of a wallflower in the past few months. Used to be, she was up for anything, and anybody. But you know how young girls are. Very changeable. The least little thing can set them off.
“Anyways, she found me, and despite what she says now, she didn’t want me to be dead. She performed CPR on me and called the paramedics. That broke up the party downstairs pretty good. When you die, that’s when you know who your real friends are. Most of the people just split. They didn’t want to be caught up in the TMZ of it all.
“Well, the paramedics showed up and tried that defibrillator thing on me—zap!—but it was a no go. They pronounced me dead and zipped me up in one of those cool body bags and proceeded to carry me downstairs.
“Now what was I doing all this time? Was I heading down a long corridor toward a heavenly light? Was I in a field of fire getting prodded up the ass by red-tailed demons with pitchforks? No. I was just…nowhere. So if you ask me if there’s an afterlife, I have to say, not so far as I can tell.
“To quote Bill Shakespeare, ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here.’
“Anyway, they took me downstairs, and Eva stopped them when they tried to take me out the front door. All the paparazzi were there hoping to snap pictures of my naked, dead carcass, and she wanted the paramedics to go out the back door to avoid them. She was like you. She thought all that publicity wasn’t respectful. Me? I’d have loved the attention. Ask anybody—they’ll tell you what a headline whore I am.
“Anyway, it was while they were arguing about which door to take me out of that I woke up.
“Those zippers on those ziplock body bags, they don’t work from the inside, so I just sat up and fumbled around in there, not knowing what the hell was happening, but thinking I must be involved in some kind of kinky sex play that I couldn’t remember. Then I fell off the fucking gurney.
“Everybody rushed around me and I remember that Eva was crying and the paramedics were covering their asses, trying to make sure they didn’t get sued.
“I just went up to bed and left them arguing with my lawyer, who had been heading out the side door with two Asian chicks when he thought I was dead but, now that I was alive again, was making sure that I saw that he was my loyal representative.
“Fuck them. I just crawled under the covers and tried to sleep off the memory of death. Eva came in and said she was glad I hadn’t died. I thanked her for her honesty. That’s why I stay with her. Because she’s honest. I don’t know why she stays with me.
“It was when my lawyer came up to tell me about the good chances I had for a lawsuit against the city that I realized things had changed.
“He was stinking. And rotten. You know the drill.
“His left ear, where he wore his Bluetooth, was decaying so much the little earpiece was dripping with gore. I didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want to be rude. I just kept gesturing to my ear, brushing something away, hoping he’d get the hint. Nothing. When Eva came in, I pulled her aside and asked her about Isaac’s ear, and all I got was a blank stare. Nobody saw it but me.
“So I figured, OK, I’ve suffered some kind of strange brain damage. What do I expect after being dead for a while? There are bound to be some hiccups.
“When he arranged for a secret meeting with the paramedics at an office I have off Santa Monica Boulevard, I didn’t think too much of it. When he told them not to bring anybody along with them, or even tell anybody where they were going, I thought he was just being dramatic. I mean, what was he going to do? Blackmail them? I had all the money in this equation.
“I got there a little late. I always get everywhere a little late. Or a lot late. It’s a power thing.
“When I got there (it was the weekend, so the office was empty), my lawyer had the two men trussed up like Christmas turkeys, all naked. One of them was screaming his head off. The other one didn’t have to—his head had already been cut off. He was spouting a fountain of blood from a neck hole all the way across the room and all over the other paramedic.
“Isaac was standing over him holding this katana, which he’d taken from a display in my office, without so much as asking me. Also he was naked, which wasn’t a pretty sight.
“He looked up at me and said, ‘Hi,’ like you’d say any other time you met somebody. He said he hoped I didn’t mind, but he’d started without me. It was just too exciting. But he’d saved one for me.
“I said, ‘What the fuck?’ Isaac was bewildered. His deterioration had increased. His body was bloating and splitting open. Maggots were having a field day in his intestines. Even then I knew that whatever was making him rot on the outside was making him rot on the inside too.
“He didn’t understand my objection to the scene. Wasn’t this just the logical conclusion of all the orgies and whatnot we engaged in over the years? ‘You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the light go out of somebody’s eyes and you know you did it!’
“He handed me the sword. Just handed it to me like I would naturally give it a try on the poor guy tied up at his feet.
“I turned the blade on Isaac. I told him to untie the schmuck and that I was going to call the police. Isaac was thoroughly confused by this turn of events. It was like I was busting him for smoking a joint or something.
“When I took out my iPhone, when he really believed I was going to call the cops, he ran at me. It wasn’t too hard to slice through him.
“They really make these swords well.
“When he died, he looked at me and I saw the light go out of his eyes, just like he said. It was awesome. And I don’t mean ‘awesome’ like the Valley Girls say. I mean it was truly awe inspiring. It was the biggest reaction I’ve ever gotten. More than any scene from any movie I’ve ever made. More than any laugh or any scream or any standing ovation I’ve ever elicited. It was truly the reaction to end all reactions.
“Awesome.
“I’m not saying I liked it. But I knew right then and there that I’d have to do this again sometime.
“When he fell back off the sword, when the air was filled with a mix of blood and shit, I just sat back down and breathed for a while.
“The surviving paramedic was breathing too. Panting. His eyes shut, like he could make all this go away.
“I went to untie him. I couldn’t do it. The knots were too good. Isaac had really known his way around ropes. I took the sword and cut through them, like Alexander and the Gordian knot. I noticed some sores on his wrists—bad sores—but I thought they were rope burns.
“I don’t have to tell you where this is going.
“In a situation like this I would normally have called my lawyer, but since I’d just stabbed him through the liver, I couldn’t think of anything to do but either call the police or call my producer.
“I called my producer. He’d gotten me out of some jams before. Drunken driving, possession, etcetera. Nothing on the scale of two men killed with my samurai sword, but still, he knew his way around public relations problems.
“Before I even got out the story, Simon told me to shut up and tell him nothing. He could tell from my tone that it was bad. He said he would send somebody over—a fixer. And he hung up.
“I should tell you that there are, or were, a lot of weapons around my office in West Hollywood. That’s the basic decor. Swords and knives and maces and lances and guns, all souvenirs from various movies, all mounted on the walls in various pleasing arrangements. It lends the place a kind of a whimsical ferocity. Like KAOS headquarters or something.
“So when the paramedic went all—let’s just say it—berserk, he didn’t have to look far for a weapon. He grabbed the butcher’s knife from Psycho off the wall and just stuck it in my back.
“It skidded against my ribs, but it still hurt like a motherfucker. I turned around with the sword in my hand, more surprised than injured. I was totally confused since I’d saved this asshole’s life and now he was stabbing me, for Christ’s sake.
“Then I saw his face. Rotting, decaying.
