Boyd Capwell ran across an open field in Ojai, California. He was being pursued by half a dozen bug-eyed bald women in halter tops and cutoffs. The women were running with their arms outstretched and their gnarled hands clawing at the air in front of them as if it might bring Boyd closer to their drooling, wide-open, shrieking mouths.
He was racing for the forest and freedom when more of the mutant women poured out from between the trees like a tidal wave, screeching their insane, lusty cry as they charged toward him. There was no place for him to go. He was surrounded.
Boyd dropped to his knees, a beaten man, and looked up to the sky. Tears streamed down his chiseled anchorman’s face, his fists were balled up with rage.
“Why, God, why? What have I done to deserve your pitiless wrath?”
The sky rumbled, as if God were clearing his throat to speak, and out of the blue heavens came the Hellcopter. An airborne gunship that looked like a flying great white shark sheathed in cannons, machine guns, harpoons, and missiles.
The Hellcopter swooped down low, its machine guns spitting hot death, mowing down the mutant women. Boyd stood up to face the Hellcopter as it landed. The pilot’s door opened and out came Willie Owens, boobs first. Her enormous breasts strained against a tight, nearly transparent white T-shirt. Besides the double-D silicone boobs, collagen-plumped lips, and peroxide blond hair, there was nothing mutant about the woman in the Daisy Duke shorts and pumps. She was all woman and proud of it.
Willie strutted up to Boyd, tore open his shirt, buttons flying, and appraised his body, which wasn’t bad for a guy in his forties who didn’t exercise.
“Finally, a real man,” she said.
“Finally, a real woman,” he said.
He reached for her breasts, and she kicked him in the knee.
“Cut!” Boyd yelled, clutching his knee.
Nick Fox turned to Chet Kershaw, a big bear of a man in his early forties with a professional makeup bag slung over his shoulder. Nick and Chet were standing together out in a field, under a tent that covered a bank of monitors. The monitors showed various angles on the action. Kate O’Hare and Tom Underhill, an African American man in his thirties with a tool belt around his waist, were in the tent, too. Tom was holding a remote control joystick to pilot a drone with a tiny GoPro camera attached to it. They were watching the live stream of the GoPro’s video on one of the monitors.
“Was that kick in the script?” Nick asked.
“Nope,” Chet said.
Chet was the last in a family dynasty of Hollywood makeup artists and special effects masters adept at all the live, “on set” magic in front of the cameras that was now primarily done digitally in postproduction.
“That was my favorite part,” Kate said.
“Mine, too,” Tom said, landing the drone beside the tent.
Tom’s day job was making inventive playhouses, tree houses, and other fanciful structures. He’d retrofitted the old helicopter, which Nick had acquired for a past scam, into a fake Hellcopter combat vehicle for this film.
Willie marched over to them, Boyd trailing after her, limping. She was a fifty-something single Texan with a natural affinity and dangerous zeal for driving or piloting just about anything on land, sea, or air with a motor.
Joe Morey was right behind them, a Steadicam rig strapped to his upper body to hold a digital camera. He was an electronic security and alarm systems expert who excelled in hidden video and audio surveillance.
“Why did you kick me?” Boyd yelled at her. “You killed the emotion of the scene.”
“Because you tried to cop a feel,” Willie said. “That’s not going to happen.”
“I wasn’t ‘copping a feel,’ ” Boyd said. “My character was reaching out to touch the humanity that he thought he’d lost.”
“It was you using this movie as an excuse to feel me up,” Willie said. “Something you’ve wanted to do for years.”
“It’s acting,” Boyd said. “Didn’t you read the script?”
“Which you wrote so you could touch my tits.”
“Which I wrote to showcase your talent as a pilot, Chet’s talent as a makeup and visual effects artist, Tom’s talent as an imagineer, Joe’s talent with cameras and sound, and my skills as triple-threat multi-hyphenate writer, actor, and director.” Boyd looked back at Joe, who seemed startled to be seen. “Why are you still shooting? Didn’t you hear me say ‘cut’?”
“This is for the behind-the-scenes documentary,” Joe said.
“Turn it off,” Boyd said, then called back to the two dozen barely dressed, bloodied mutant women in the field. “Take five, but stay where you are. We’re going to do a pickup on that last bit of dialogue, and we don’t want to screw up the background continuity.”
“What are you guys shooting here?” Nick asked.
“A short film we can use as an industry calling card,” Chet said. “We’ll post it on YouTube, Vimeo, IMDb, places like that. It’s what you’ve got to do to get jobs in Hollywood these days.”
“We’ve all done our best work with you two,” Boyd said. “But we can’t exactly use you as a reference or show our reel, can we?”
“I see your point,” Nick said and turned to Joe. “I didn’t know that you had Hollywood aspirations.”
“I don’t,” Joe said. “I’m a single, hot-blooded man and I know my way around cameras and mikes. When Boyd told me he needed a camera and sound guy, and that there’d be a dozen strippers running around half-naked in front of me, how could I say no?”
“I see what you mean,” Nick said.
Kate looked out at the women lounging in the field, smoking cigarettes, checking their emails, and snapping selfies. “They’re strippers?”
“Who else would play these parts?” Willie said.
“This production must have cost a fortune,” Nick said.
“You’ve paid us a fortune,” Boyd said. “Unfortunately, we can’t count on you for future employment. Work with you is unpredictable at best, and we’ve got our muses to serve. So we’ve reinvested some of our earnings in our own potential.”
“I’m surprised you’re doing another zombie flick,” Nick said to Chet. “I thought you were tired of the genre.”
“Those aren’t zombies,” Chet said.
“They sure look like hungry zombies to me,” Kate said.
“It’s lust,” Chet said. “They don’t want to eat Boyd. They want to screw him.”
“Good grief,” Kate said. “Why would they all want to do that?”
“My character is the last man on earth,” Boyd said. “Germ warfare has turned people into sex-crazed mutants. The mutant men are sterile but the women are not. They need me, the last real man, to repopulate our planet and keep our race from going extinct.”
“Of course they do,” Kate said. “So what’s stopping you from giving all those women what they want?”
“They’re hideous,” Boyd said. “I can’t mate with them.”
“Because of their appearance?” Kate said.
“Would you want the next evolution of the human race to look like that?” Boyd said. “My character is a reluctant Adam searching for a still human, still hot, postapocalyptic Eve.”
Willie raised her hand. “That’s me.”
“So if you understand that,” Boyd said, “why did you ruin the dramatic and emotional payoff to the whole story?”
“You mean the money shot?” Willie said.
“I mean the passionate salvation of the human race.”
“Funny you should bring that up,” Nick said. “That’s kind of why we’re here.”
“I didn’t think this was just a friendly visit,” Tom said. “But aren’t you being a bit melodramatic?”
“Unfortunately, he’s not,” Kate said. They were out of earshot of the strippers, but she lowered her voice to a near whisper as an extra precaution. “We need your help to prevent a biological attack on an American city by overseas terrorists.”
“Wait a sec,” Joe said. “Isn’t that a job for Homeland Security, the CIA, or the U.S. military, and not some high-end private security firm?”
Chet laughed at Joe. “You honestly believe that’s who they work for? These two go around the world taking down supercriminals. Have you ever thought about the money that they spend on the cons and thefts we’ve done together? It’s millions of dollars. Who could their clients possibly be to pay that bill? That’s why I’ve always figured that they’re really working off the books for some U.S. acronym.”
“I’ve never cared,” Willie said. “I like the fast cars and the money.”
“It doesn’t matter to me who they are working for,” Tom said. “What matters is that I can trust them, that they’re doing the right thing, and that we’ve put a stop to some very bad people doing very bad things.” He turned to Kate. “You can count me in on this.”
“I appreciate that,” Kate said. “But you don’t even know what the assignment is yet, what the risks are, or what we are paying. You have a family to think about.”
“That’s right, I do,” Tom said. “That’s why if there’s anything I can do to stop that biological attack from happening, I will do it and I won’t take a dime for it, either.”
“You’ll do it for God and country,” Boyd said. “That’s powerful motivation for a character. I know, because that’s my character’s motivation today.”
“Your motivation today is vanity and booty,” Willie said. “You’ve cast yourself as the last man on earth that every woman wants to screw.”
“Who is saving his precious seed for your character out of his profound love for God and country,” Boyd said to her, then looked back at Kate. “The point I’m trying to make is that I’m in for whatever part you want me to play in this life-or-death drama. I am an American and this country ’tis of thee.”
“I’m in, too,” Willie said. “Because I like kicking ass and this sounds like some ass that needs kicking.”
Chet raised his hand. “Count me in.”
“Me, too,” Joe said.