The buildings are burning all around Scar. Complete infernos surround him. He leans toward one of them, his last cigar hanging off his bottom lip. Lights it up and takes a pleasing tug off it. Take in your enviornment, his brain reminds him. He slaps his forehead as he whips around and fires off two shots from his revolver into a reanimated, chest, head, boom.
“That all you fuckers have to offer?” he asks as he replaces the cigar back on his lip. In front of him, a horde stands. An army of reanimated shamble towards him, hunger in their eyes. “Fine,” he grumbles. Checks his magazines. Checks his guns. Time to make a stand, he decides. Here or never.
“So, that's how it ends,” Lukas says, setting his tablet face down on the table in front of him. “Big fight, lots of cool shit, does he live does he die? Crowds love that.”
A squeaky chew toy in between his two front paws, Red Son the Pug mutters, “Crowds hate that.”
“I thought people liked cliffhangers.”
“Crowds hate cliffhangers. They have been done to death.”
“Name three good cliffhangers. I bet you--”
“Italian Job; Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels; and goddamn Inception.”
“Damn it.” It infuriated Lukas when his dog knew more about films than him. Well, he thought, fuck it. He's a dog and I'm the writer and I say cliffhangers are cool.
“Oh...” the white fur pug began to lick his nether regioins while still muttering, his accent that of the northern Minnesota variety. “And stop doing so much foreshadowing. We get it. His wife gave him the cigar and said that he could smoke it the day he dies. You kinda hit it too hard on the head. You wanna tease the ending, not give it away. That's proper foreshadowing.” The small dog stopped licking long enough to ask, “This is the same ending you read to me two days ago. I thought you changed it.”
Lukas dodged the accusation. “People are dumb. They need shit spoon fed to them. I'd probably make two or three listicle videos on YouTube if I kept the foreshadowing in.” Lukas picked his tablet back up and tapped into the IMDB application, bookmarked to his page. At the top of his 'Written by' category, the film 'Scars 2' sat with the date Late 2018 next to it. He'd need to have the script turned into Walther before the end of the week.
Walther had given him many extensions and even allowed him to return to his suburban Atlanta apartment to put the final touches on the anticipated sequel's shooting script. The first Scar film was a massive hit with audiences but a dud with critics. Adapted from a graphic novel that Lukas Carissimo had written between papers at Princeton, Scar was never meant to be made into a movie. Zombies were so 2008 and the bad ass unkillable archetype of the titular character was so overplayed that it bordered on satire.
Reading his IMDB page for irregularities for the fifteenth time this week, Lukas whispered, “It was satire.” It was too good of a satire. It transcended satire and became the very thing it was satiring. It satirized itself into a half a billion dollar box office.
To say the least, this was not the path that Lukas had pegged himself for. He was always going to be a writer. He had to be. He'd rather be dead than sit behind a desk answering phones or selling used Pontiacs like his father. Since he didn't have any other decent skills other than his ability to drink a fifth of whiskey in a single night without having a hangover the next day, Lukas was going to have to try his damndest to become a world-renowned writer.
Two years after graduating from Princeton, Lukas had done just that. Nominated but eventually losing the Pulitzer, 'Respect Your Elders with Your Fists' was seen as an instant Great American Novel, a title long since reserved for the transcendentalists and the slave owners who could write jokes. It wasn't blunt nor was it edgy. It was smooth. Clear first, second, final act structure with a relatable plot.
And it was all going so well until...
His phone rang. DICKHEAD flashed on the caller ID.
The ad hominem was reserved for D.C. Light, actual name Jerrod Wernstein. A fellow Princeton class of '12 graduate, Jerrod's completely by-the-numbers erotic political thriller '..And So the Kingdom Fell' stole the Pulitzer from Lukas. The struggling writer had long since theorized that it was a name issue. Wernstein's pen name looked much better on a hardcover than Lukas Carissimo did. The D.C. didn't even stand for anything. It was just a set of initials.
Lukas answered, “Yes, Jerrod?”
“Lukas! How's Scar 2 going?”
Jerrod was a dickhead. Every time Lukas spoke to him, his brain was filled with images of a human penis talking on an Apple smartphone walking around a New York City loft because of fucking course DC Light had a NYC loft. Admittedly sore at the prospect of not having a contemporary to share life's issues with, Lukas had begrudgingly kept Wernstein in his life.
“It's...it's going well, I guess.”
Red looked up from his chew toy. “Tell him to eat shit and die if he asks to help again, eh?” The pug jumped off the couch and waddled his way over to his food bowl.
“Oh, jeez,” Jerrod began, feigning sympathy, probably stroking the Pulitzer like a pubescent cock. “You sound so unsure of yourself.”
Lukas rubbed his temple. “It's the ending. I can't end it. And if I can't end it, I can't begin it. The middle. I've got a really good middle.”
“Well, it's a zombie movie meant for massive consumption. Are you struggling to find just the right spot for product placement? Is Clooney Roberts Pitt asking for too much money and wants to film it in Hawaii?”
This was Jerrod's endgame for every conversation. Insult the core of Lukas' work whilst still presenting it as actual concern. He could care less about Lukas and his writer's block. He would probably see the sequel much like he saw the first one. He'd also write another review for it like the one he had hacked together the first go around aptly titled in the Village Voice as “I Feel Scarred After Watching Scar”.
This was the man who beat him for the Pulitzer. The guy who wrote that title. He got the prize. The world is a double ended dildo and Lukas was somehow on both ends.
Friends close, enemies closer, and harshest critics as best friends, Lukas supposed.
He pressed on, “Let me ask you something.”
“Shoot,” Jerrod said. “Just don't ask me how the new book is going.”
Well, he wasn't going to ask that, but now the curiousity overwhelmed his interrogative function. “Wait, what's wrong with the book...what's it called again?”
“S and S made me change the title again. I liked 'They Cried the Night Away' but now they want to call it 'Disco' something. They said shorter titles sell better.”
“Short titles are for squares.”
“Amen. Anyway, they want me to change the female lead into more a strong independent type and I'm like 'But it's the '70s disco scene in New York... women weren't that independent.' But they insist. So now I'm doing rewrites on Act Two.”
'They Cried the Night Away' was supposed to be a disco-era murder detective novel that, like '...And So the Kingdom Fell', would follow multiple character driven story lines that eventually cross paths and coexist. It was pleasing to Lukas to hear that Jerrod's second book was reaching bumpy terrain, even if it was just a minor speedbump. The idea of Jerrod DC Light Wernstein doing badly made Lukas smile.
“Do you like foreshadowing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Foreshadowing. Like hinting at something early in the book and having it pay off in the falling action.”
“I don't like foreshadowing. Crowds hate foreshadowing. They're not dumb. Chekov's gun is a bunch of bullshit, in my opinion.” Lukas could hear the sound of ice cubes clinking into a glass on Jerrod's end of the phone call. “Why do you ask?” Pouring.
“I've got this really good bit of foreshadowing and my...” he looked at Red Son, washing down a small bit of kibble with laps of water. “assistant says that it might be too on the nose and that crowds wouldn't like it.”
“Smart assistant you've got there.”
Lukas smiled at his dog. “You got that right.”
“Look, foreshadowing only works if it is extremely subtle. Look at George killing the lady's dog in Of Mice and Men. You don't know at the time that he's going to eventually kill Lennie, but it subtly hints that George has the capacity to kill a mindless animal.”
“Right.” Lukas had never liked Steinbeck.
“Anyway, the original reason I called.” He took an audible sip from his glass. “I'm coming to Atlanta and was hoping to stay with you while I was there. Like those nights in the dorm at Princeton when we both stayed home for Christmas break. I thought it could be fun.”
Lukas took a long and pitying look around his apartment. He was situated on the outskirts of downtown, a gentrified neighborhood with apartments built right over the top of the previous warehouse it once was. Half drunk bottles of liquor, soda, and water were scattered around the floors. A stack of unread and brand new copies of his novel stood as his nightstand in the bedroom. An overflowing ashtray could be found next to his laptop.
“I... don't know.”
“Well, I'm flying down next week. I've been asked to appear on a talk show that films in Atlanta and I thought maybe not but then I thought oh, that's where Mr. Hollywood is at currently.”
Lukas began to clean up random pieces of debris, moving them from one place to another. He worked feverishly as if Jerrod was walking up the stairs to his apartment at this second. “Fine. You can crash here. It should be fun.”
“Quite.”
A few more minutes of quipping and jabbing later and the phone call was ended. Lukas turned and surveyed his one-bedroom kingdom.
What was life to him? He wrote a book that was critically lauded and sold well. After the success of it, keen internet fans found the graphic novel he had quietly published in college to little to no fanfare. Suddenly, the exploits of Scar, his cigars, and twin revolvers were tapped for a mid-range budget action vehicle for Channing Tatum and some skinny nerd actor from television who wanted an excuse to expand his steroid usage and bulk up to '80s Hulk Hogan levels. The studio completely ignored the graphic novel's biting humor and satire, added a son-father dynamic, and changed the setting to Chicago because Chay-Chay really wanted to film a movie in Chicago.
After all of this was decided, that's when they gave Lukas Carissimo a call and asked him if they could option it. Sure, he had said, but I get to write the adaptation. No, they said. Then no option, he said. Fiiiine, they muttered through gritted teeth, but no foo-foo bullshit.
The movie made so much money that Hollywood insiders called it the first film of the Third Wave of Zombies. And oh my god, the insiders had said, what a great script. So cheap. So full of fluff. So many archetypes.
Was this it? Was Lukas going to be a Hollywood screenwriter for the rest of his life?
He looked at his dog. “Why am I doing this?”
“Doing what? Staring at a pug as he cleans his balls?”
“Why am I struggling to finish a script I don't even like?”
He cracked open his laptop and pulled up the master copy of Scar 2's script.
Throughout his life, Lukas had always thought he was doing obvious things wrong. He'd flush the toilet and wonder if somehow he was doing it wrong. The first time he smoked a cigarette he kept looking at the group of older kids in Newark and wondered if they were smiling because he was smoking it wrong. He spent his first trip on mushrooms asking his girlfriend if he was doing the trip right. Do I dream like this? Hallucinate like that? The levels of self-doubt he had rivaled Satan during his fall.
As he hit the delete button on the entire script, Lukas felt the greatest sense of relief of his life. No more. No more doubt. He would write the script he wanted to write. He'd write a new novel. He'd write a new series of poems. He'd paint, design buildings and roller coasters. He'd cure cancer. Lukas would be the man he wanted to be.
Looking out the window of his apartment at the view of the Atlanta skyline, he smiled. Life had given him a big red button to press for reset and he had been acting like pushing it was never an option. It was always an option. Reset your life back to the way you want it to be and rework it from there.
He heard sounds of grunting and struggling as he flipped around. Red Son was choking on his chew toy. As Lukas pulled the toy out of his pug's mouth, he smiled. Everyone loves foreshadowing.