Zombie Kong - Anthology (26 page)

An extra fainted, the bean counters applauded, and everyone said all the right things.

Two hours later, they axed the movie, killing the project stone dead.

“We want to do something with tentacles, something in stop motion. Harryhausen is hot this year.”

* * *

Doug went home and made a start on drinking himself into oblivion.

“Those men are wrong,” Mr. Mkele said. He sat across the table, not drinking, but not stopping Doug from doing so. “Your city needs to see what the jungle is like. Your city needs to see freedom.
You
need to see freedom.”

Doug took a swig directly from a bottle of rye; his third, or maybe it was his fourth––he was already starting to lose count.

“Freedom seems a heck of a long way away, my friend,” he said.

“That is because you have forgotten the dream.”

Doug slugged down more rye.

“Not forgotten,” he said. “But what good does it do me now?”

Things started to get foggy, but he heard the little man’s words well enough.

“You just have to have faith in the dream. There is still time to show them the power of the free.”

* * *

Doug opened his eyes to a wash of fuzzy green that slowly came into focus. He was lying in thick foliage. As his eyes focused, he realized he was back on the soundstage, in the artificial jungle.

I really tied one on this time.

He stood, shaky on unsteady legs.

A janitor was sweeping the set, an older man who Doug barely knew. He had his back turned, lost in his brushing.

“Hi,” Doug said. It came out as a deep rumble. He cleared his throat. The old janitor turned and looked up, then fled, screaming. It was only then that Doug started to suspect something wasn’t
quite
right.

He seemed to be too big, too bulky. He raised a hand towards his face, and screamed at the sight of a broad hand, covered in thick coarse hair, with broken, dirty nails. That wasn’t the worst part––the hand was nearly three feet across. He screamed again. It came out as a
bellow
that echoed around the soundstage. A security cop arrived at the door and immediately raised a pistol and fired. Doug saw the flash, but felt no impact.

He missed.

But he was wrong in that assumption. He looked down to see a hole in his side, pieces of dry straw poking out of it.

“Hey,” he shouted.

The whole set vibrated, and the security guard dropped his gun. He, too, fled.

Doug lumbered towards the door. He was too big to fit through. He put up a hand to push the tall sliding door aside. It fell away into the road outside with a
crash.

Somewhere, people started to scream, but Doug scarcely noticed. Something was
very
wrong. He seemed to be inside the
gorilla
.

Living the dream
.

A
nee-naw
wail heralded the approach of several police squad cars that screeched to a halt out in the lot beyond the soundstage. More shots rang out and
puffs
of straw flew. Doug yelled again.

“Hey, stop shooting at me!”

It came out as a roar that shook the whole street, and several of the police officers backed away quickly. Doug took his chance and broke into a run, but, uncoordinated as he was, and unused to the sheer bulk of this body, he stumbled into one of the patrol cars. He swatted it with a hand, and the car flew ten yards in the air before landing with a
crump
of glass and metal. The shooting got more intense.

Doug fled in the opposite direction from the gunfire––and straight onto an exterior set where they were filming a western. He stumbled, almost fell, and demolished the whole façade of a street, the thin wood splintering beneath him. Horses whinnied, women screamed, and more police cars arrived.

This isn’t going to end well.

Doug had no plan beyond escaping the shooting policemen. He bounded through the western set, scattering film crew and extras to all corners, before he realized that continuing in that direction would take him into the heart of the city.

He stopped running, but that allowed the police to blow more holes in his body. Straw flew everywhere. He was seriously considering just standing still, letting them take him down, when he heard a singsong chant that he recognized. It seemed to come from the hills to the east of the city. Doug turned in that direction and broke into a run. More shots followed behind him, but none hit him—at least none that he felt. He bounded through suburban streets, past the shocked faces of homeowners and children, knocking cars and trees aside if they got in his way. All he could think of now was the song.

It led him high, to the hill overlooking the city, to the large letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign. There was a car parked beside the sign, and a small man stood beside the open driver’s door. He was the source of the song. As Doug slowed from his headlong rush, he saw another person slumped in the passenger seat.

That’s me!

Mr. Mkele’s song rose to a crescendo.

Doug blinked—

* * *

—And woke up sitting in the car, staring out at the HOLLYWOOD sign, seeing a giant gorilla trying to tear it apart.

“Quick,” Mr. Mkele shouted. “The sorcerer has been awakened. We do not have much time.”

Doug pushed himself groggily out of the car. The little man was already running—not away from the gorilla, but towards it. He was carrying a bulky kerosene container. There was another on the ground beside the car, and Doug immediately saw the intent.

He means to burn it.

Mr. Mkele had reached the sign and had already started sloshing kerosene around as Doug lugged the other can over to him. The gorilla paid them no attention, seeming intent on tearing the HOLLYWOOD sign apart. Even as Doug arrived beside the smaller man and joined him in pouring the kerosene, the gorilla managed to tear the leftmost O from its moorings and threw it, like a discus, down towards the city where it swooped away, out of view. The beast roared its defiance and slapped at its chest, but now that he was closer, Doug could see that it was already badly damaged. Several large rents ran down its left side, straw having already fallen in a pile at the gorilla’s feet. Enough had escaped to make the body look strangely deflated.

And that was not all. One of the stitched seams in the head had split, and more straw was already falling from it. The beast was not finished yet, though. Even as Mr. Mkele flipped a lighter and tossed it at the creature’s feet, it had torn the H from the sign and was using it to beat the rest of the sign into a broken pile of wood and plastic.

The flame took it fast. With one last statement of defiance, the gorilla stood tall, slapped its chest, and roared long and loud, before falling in on itself in a shower of flaming straw that danced away in the wind.

* * *

Later, on their way back down the hill, while the Army and police were headed up in the other direction, Doug finally decided to ask the question that had been bothering him.

“What just happened?”

He got an answer, but maybe not the one he was expecting.

“The city has seen,” Mr. Mkele said. “And you have shown your skill. I believe that your
bean counters
will now be more than keen to procure your services. And I shall be more than willing to help you. For you see, the sorcerer could take more forms than just the gorilla.”

The little man laughed, showing the gap in his teeth.

“Would you like a crocodile skin?”

T. A. WARDROPE

The Upright Gorilla

“You’re the one writing the movie about the Tortuga Gorilla?” The woman on the phone asked in a breathless voice. Jonas looked at the number on the phone; this was certainly not anyone he knew. He wasn’t nearly famous enough to have a fan stalker of any kind. In a perfect world, she would be a reporter for Variety, asking about his script deal.

“I am working on the screenplay, who am I speaking with?” he asked. Instead of an answer, he heard the dull rumble of background traffic and the hiss of dead. This was the kind of prank that his half-wit roommates would think was really funny. Maybe if they’d stop wasting their time on this kind of shit, they might finally get a break.

“They will kill all of us if you make that movie,” she said. “I know you aren’t going to just take my word for it, so I’d like to explain it all to you.” Jonas looked around the bar’s patio for a manic-looking lady on a cell phone. This was the part where she was supposed to say she was right behind him. He didn’t see any women on the patio at all, besides the waitress heading toward him with another bottle of Miller Lite. If it wasn’t a prank, the woman on the phone could be just the kind of crazy that could spice up a script that was going nowhere. He wasn’t getting any writing done—hadn’t in a few days. He could tell her that he hadn’t actually written anything; that would get her to go away.

“Okay,” he said, “How about in an hour?”

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“I’d rather meet in public.”

“No, no,” she said. “It’s not safe at all.”

“We’re not meeting at my house; I don’t even know why I should meet you in the first place.”

“Okay, meet me at the LA County Natural History Museum. Come to the Exposition side of the building and knock on the single door staff entrance in the southeast corner,” she said. “I’ll be there at 5 p.m. to let you in.”

“Today?”

“There’s hardly any time,” she said. “Finding you took too long.”

Metro and a bus got him through the early rush hour traffic just in time to be at the door at 5 p.m. The woman hadn’t given her name, but as she opened the door, she said, “Jonas,” very clearly. The woman was about ten years older than Jonas, much more physical than he assumed she’d be, and dressed in casual work clothes. Her hair was a tangled mess. A laminated ID badge hung from her pants.

She led him through two security doors and into a small conference room lit by an overhead fluorescent bulb. She closed the door behind them and sat down at the scratched and stained wooden table.

“Sit down,” she said. Jonas pulled out the closest chair and sat in it with a loud creak of wood. She didn’t look all that crazy; maybe she had a few more wrinkles and grey hairs than a woman her age should, but that was all. He hoped she wasn’t going to bring up the Illuminati, that was so two years ago.

“You didn’t tell me your name,” he said.

“Precaution. Couldn’t risk it until I met you face to face,” she said, as if he’d understand. “I had to know you weren’t one of them.”

“You found me, you know who I am. Who are you?” he asked, but he really wanted to get to whom exactly ‘
they
’ were.

“My name is Alex,” she said, as she folded her arms on top of the table. “What is it going to take to get you to just abandon the project completely and pretend you never heard of it?”

He laughed loudly. Two years of menial, ambition-killing servitude, and his rookie agent had finally managed to get him some sort of script gig. A first draft of a film that was destined for straight-to-video if it ever even got produced. If he could work his way through it, he’d have a check, a credit, and a membership in the Writer’s Guild. Nothing this woman could say would get him to throw that away. Especially since he was only a month’s rent away from moving back to Ohio with his tail between his legs.

“I don’t think you can do that, um, Alex,” he said.

“Was this idea your own—the idea to write this movie about the Tortuga Gorilla?”

“No, not at all. A producer needed it written and I was lucky enough to get the job,” he said. He wanted to tell her that he received a vision from an alien life form, but decided not to confuse her any more. He didn’t tell her he never had any interest in monster movies of any sort. He wanted to write crime, thrillers, and the dark human drama that didn’t need some hokey rubber suit to be realized on screen. So the complete writer’s block that followed was not a surprise. Alex might be able to give him some new angle on the story. This could work out well.

“What did they tell you about the gorilla?” she asked, as she dug through a file in the corner of the room.

“Well, the producer heard a legend about a group of scientists who found a giant gorilla on Tortuga Island and tried to study it, but wound up angering it and setting it on a path of total destruction. They want a final scene where the gorilla swims ashore in Miami and wreaks havoc. They kill him with an air strike that levels half the city. You know, like
Cloverfield
,” he said, with a grimace.

She slid a photo in front of him. The photo was out of focus, and looked a little bit like one of those pictures of Bigfoot. Instead of a loping human shape, the large subject was clearly a gorilla. An adult tree stopped short of the gorilla’s blurry chin.

“Did your producer show you this?” she asked. He felt like he was being cross-examined.

“No,” he said, and then he decided to take the bait. “What is this?”

“This is a photo of the real Tortuga Gorilla.”

“There are a hundred ways this picture could be faked.”

“I was there when the picture was taken and I can assure you that it was very, very real,” she said. Could she hear what she was saying? Did this whole situation strike her as being natural and acceptable? She had a job at the museum, so she couldn’t be a total nutjob. NASA had their burnouts that believed in UFOs; maybe Alex was the biologist’s equivalent. Even so, why didn’t she want him to write about the gorilla? Shouldn’t she want to expose it to the world?