Review - Dallas Buyer's Club

"Dallas Buyer's Club" has gotten a lot of attention and Oscar nominations lately mostly for the fact that Matthew McConaughey proves he actually can act his way out of a wet paper bag filled with illegal drugs. The problem is that his character isn't very likeable. He's a tragic hero that is just too hard to relate to. That being said, Jared Leto's performance was fantastic, Jennifer Gardner was wooden. Her outstanding compassion comes off as unlikely. The story plods and is ...grim, relying on rare and ill placed humour to jump a few emotional hurdles. The biggest problem is that there is no real bad guy. The FDA comes off as the biggest bunch of pricks but they are still portrayed as having a job to do, just being overzealous about it. All in all it's a story of a bigger than life character pretending to be an average joe trying to overcome his humanization by being bigger than life. I feel for the real people who were involved in this biopic but I just don't give much for the characters they became. 2.3/5.

Dream #18 - Why Do I Keep Dreaming of Batman?

Batman and I stood there in our French Musketeer uniforms by the grand fireplace, foils in hands. I was Chris O’ Donnell. I had the sensation of having just been buried up to my neck in sand. “Well that was unusual,” I said. Batman grunted in response.

“I want to show you the estate,” he said. Clearly I was his new sidekick.

I looked around thinking I was already seeing the estate but figured, hey, he’s Batman. Whatever.

We stepped out of the mansion into the Arizona desert. The Batmobile was parked out front. We got in and shot across the desert raising a cloud of dust in our wake. We headed straight toward a cliff with a waterfall cascading down to a small lake. The Batmobile suddenly sprouted wings and splashed across the water directly at the waterfall before making a sudden upward jerk. The top of the waterfall fell away revealing a dark opening three quarters of the way up with another waterfall spouting from it. We flew into the cave.

To my right I could make out several open cement floors held up with red iron girders. The floors seemed to contain a mishmash of large bones and rocks.

“It kept falling away,” Batman explained (such as his explanation was). “The locals kept filling it up with rocks. But it kept falling away.” He gestured to the end of the wing which was exposed to sunlight. How did people not notice this? How did I not notice it before entering? “Eventually they started using it as a burial site.” I picked up a smooth, black, oblong stone, carved with evenly spaced concentric rings in both directions. Where the line met they stopped and had perfectly carved heart shapes. On one end was a smiley face. “Grave markers.”

Back at the mansion we stood outside surrounded by a jumble of wooden crates of various sizes. The mansion now had a Spanish look rather than the gothic look I was used to. We stood under the veranda when suddenly a helicopter turned the edge of the building trailing some kind of large buzzsaw on a jig a la James Bond “Tomorrow Never Dies.”

We ran into the house which was just as filled with wooden crates. The saw buzzed through the building as we tried to escape. I hid behind a crate while Batman disappeared. The buzzsaw was now wielded by a man in a suit, short hair and jacket hanging open. He walked the aisles between boxes swinging the horrible thing wickedly in all directions.

[Intermission]

The lackey in an aquamarine shirt and jeans, balding head and dark sunglasses examined the man standing there in front of him in a Hawaiian shirt. Blood dribbled from the man’s chest. The bullet hole was just above his heart. The lackey went around to the back of him finding the top of the bullet poking out of the skin in the back of his shoulder. He pushed it with his finger and the bullet wormed through the man’s body back out the hole it had entered.

Batman arrived. “Let me see him.” He examined the man.

“The bullet didn’t go all the way through. Just about though.” The lackey tossed the bullet in the air and caught it in his open palm repeatedly, smugly.

“This man needs a doctor.”

I happened to be a venerable old doctor, a famous surgeon in fact. I wore a lab coat and dark framed glasses, my grey hair making a horseshoe around my head.

I stood in the mansion thinking about the supplies I was going to need. I searched through a box of large brass staples for restraining the patient to the table. The staples had small holes in the ring part for stringing wire through. Some had only one hole, others had up to five or six. “We’ll need to get some smaller ones of these,” I said showing a staple with only one hole. I pointed at a lackey in a black suit leaning with the flat of his foot up against the wall. “You go find some.”

Two other doctors to his left said “We’ll start prepping.”

I imagined the horror of delving into the man’s shattered arm, peeling back the muscles, tying up the skin using the staples and black thread.

The other doctors looked at me quizzically. I was suddenly afraid they thought I was afraid. Just as suddenly I realized I was. Despite my fame, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was a fraud. “I’ll go with you,” I muttered, pointing again at the lackey. “I want to make sure you get the right ones.” My chin hung to my chest, pointing my words at the ground in shame. I felt the other doctors’ disgusted glares on me.

Dream #17 - The Outside World

The big rig pulled into the parking lot behind the Charlotte Pantry. The white cab hauled a 60 foot orange trailer. The trailer hauled another 60 foot “flocking” machine, apparently made by John Deer, a scaffolded construction of red and yellow with a variety of pipes and a large bell shaped projector.

I sat on a blue wooden pallet flattening cardboard boxes and tossing them on a pile. My partner, an oaf dressed in blue jeans, a white tank top and green trucker cap on slightly crooked, goofed around, jumping on the boxes and generally being useless. I hefted my pile of flattened boxes and stowed them in the back of the trailer.

I stood helplessly looking at the cab of the truck. I didn’t even have a license and was pretty sure I wouldn’t have a chance at even getting the 120 feet of trailer out of the parking lot. I turned and saw my Dad coming toward me. “Oh, thanks dad. I didn’t think I could drive it myself.”

He hopped in the front and I jumped in with him. We pulled out and turned left onto Town Line Road East. We cruised toward the lights that had just turned red. “Put in that code,” dad said. I looked in the mirror and saw a police blockade behind us, lights flashing, orange cones placed everywhere. A large white sign had the code 12677 stenciled in large red numbers. I leaned forward to input the code which would suddenly change the red light to green when I noticed the black and white OPP cruiser in front of us. “Uh, dad, I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.”

[Intermission]

My friend and I were looking for a new apartment. We stood in a basement painted a pale shade of pink. The rooms were fairly large and bright for a basement. There was a fireplace in the living room and polished hardwood floors. It looked nice enough at first glance, though it would clearly need a paint job. But closer inspection revealed chipped paint, improperly set trim, and warped door frames. It was clearly an old building. Not exactly deal breakers but not selling points, either. I went to check out one of the bedrooms and had to step over a stepped piling that spilled out through the doorway, the bottom of it reaching almost all the way across making closing the door impossible and stepping through awkward, something I would likely trip over in the middle of the night. Deal breaker, I thought. And then it occurred to me. “We’ve looked at this place before. Let’s go.”

My friend pointed at the window. I turned and locked looks with a remarkable beauty, red bob of hair and bright round eyes greeting me over the top of a blue Honda in a dingy back alley of red brick, garbage cans and random scraps of wood and chain link fence. She smiled. I smiled. Deal not broken. A kid bolted out from behind the car, about three or four in a blue ball cap. “Let’s go.” I turned and melted away.

We walked down the street and I noticed the neighbourhood was composed entirely of dejected looking black people, slouched, hands in pockets. At the end of the block we crossed the street and it was entirely different. Here were a bunch of hipsters walking around in gingham shirts, jeans with rolled cuffs, thick framed glasses and straw Havana hats, noses in the air. I wondered at the segregation of the world and made my way into the subway.

The train rolled out of a tunnel past a few decaying brick faced factories and into the yellow pansy filled meadows surrounding London. The sky shone bright flecked with white clouds. The fields rolled green forever. It was a beautiful day.

[Intermission]

My partner from the box flattening episode before and I stood in the doorway.  We had a pile of clear bags filled with some clear and slippery liquid to move over to a trailer. The liquid was some kind of drug, apparently.

We looked at a black truck parked out front but knew the bags had to go in the open trailer of the red Toyota double parked on the other side of it.

“Let’s just heave them,” my partner said. I didn’t have the energy to argue anymore. We started slinging them through the air over the truck and hoping they landed in the trailer that we couldn’t see. The bags were tied closed and were dribbling their contents all over my hands. As we finished, my partner pulled the gun I loaned him from his pocket and began hooting and hollering into the street.

“If you’re going to let him go waving your piece around like that, you might as well just turn yourself in,” said the boss following me as I slowly crossed the lawn.

“Because an open trailer filled with drugs isn’t obvious enough,” came my retort.

We came up behind the truck and found a pile of the bags, about 35 of them, laying derelict in the street. None of them had hit their target. Miraculously, none of them had burst open, either.

The boss and I walked back to the house leaving the other guy to clean up the mess and get arrested.

I looked at the TV and noticed it was playing a scrambled channel. I tilted my head as I watched, squinting. “You know, that’s not the Playboy channel. That’s the Disney channel.”

The boss shrugged. “I like Disney better anyway.”

Dream #16 - Gamer Girls

[This was actually a really fun and very long dream lasting several hours but unfortunately much of it slipped away before I could write it down].

 

I stood there rooting through the grass seeking some object. I wasn't sure what but I knew it was important.

 

A woman who vaguely resembled Lara Croft knelt down on the mossy bank behind the small waterfall. She slung her khaki backpack off her shoulder and began to rummage in the contents. Her black braid hung over her shoulder and gently swayed as she shook her head in disgruntlement. Her head jerked up with the sound of approaching motorbikes.

 

"Everybody! Into the river!" I shouted. Our group of four splashed into our waists and began to flow with the current. Lara's aquamarine shirt clung tightly to her chest, I noticed.

 

We were whisked away down the river of some hospitable jungle canyon, dark trees with vines hanging overhead, bright green banks on either side glistening in the sunshine. And then came the dark dreary entrance to the culvert. Down we went, swept over the edge into a murky abyss.

 

The pipe was dark and filled nearly to the top with water. One of the group, a true adventurer looking something like a ginger haired Rachel McAdams, was tossed noiselessly through the gurgling of the stream. Her quick eye spotted something shiny on the corner of a pipe. Carried past it by the current, she righted herself and swam ferociously toward it, knowing instinctively that this small gem was a crucial piece of the game's treasure. She managed to get back to the lip and hold on while trying to pry out the gem which happened to be embedded in a locking nut. Not having much luck she reached over her shoulder with one hand and dug out a ridiculously large monkey wrench and began to loosen the nut.

Review - A Monster in Paris

Sometimes you stumble on a gem when you're kicking around the dirt. "A Monster in Paris" is one such gem. It's the story of two friends who accidently turn a flea into a human sized monster singing sensation and must protect him from an ambitious police commissioner. It's loosely based on "The Phantom of the Opera" with touches of "Frankenstein" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" thrown in. The story is a little slow getting going, but, hey, that's French cinema for you. It's a bit of an odd movie, kind of like what I imagine the French think American's think of the French. The animation rivals anything done by Pixar and Vanessa Paradis' voice... emmenez-moi au paradis. Is it possible to fall in love with a voice? Because I think I'm in love. But the real standout of this film is the soundtrack. It is hands down the best original soundtrack I've heard in probably a decade, maybe longer. 4/5.

Review - Her

"Her" is kind of like watching your slightly mentally unstable friend go through a breakup interspersed with listening to a committed couple have phone sex. At first it's kind of endearing and funny. Then it's heartbreaking. Then it starts to grate on you and you kind of just want to slap some sense into them. "Her" is the story of a man that falls in love with Siri Samantha, his operating system. This part isn't all that hard to believe. But the fact that everyone seems pretty much ok with that kind of loses the edge the movie could have otherwise have had. Mostly it's just a very intimate look at the way we talk in relationships and in the end of relationships. This may seem very blah to many of you, but it's not that bad. Being broken up with by Scarlett Johansen's disembodied voice is heartbreaking. And rest assured, there are some other very strange things going here. Computer generated bitches be trippin'. Or should that be glitchin'? I can't help but think that maybe if Joaquin Phoenix shaved the stashed and pulled down his pants a bit, he might not have been so lonely. 3.8/5.

Dream #15 - Crowded

My tall, blue and gangly sidekick and I came around the corner to a full stop. Two black suits with black shades and submachine guns held dutifully across their waists guarded the large brown double doors. They didn’t flinch at our appearance. Two more of my blue brothers - these two a little shorter - came up behind us.

“Take positions!” I shouted. The two suits didn’t move. The two newcomers took up defensive stances to the right of the suits. My partner and I took up position to their left. We stood sideways, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee to brace ourselves.

“You’re not going to do it like that, are you?” I asked. “You’re pushing me off balance.” It was true. The weight of his forward knee against my own was making me fall to my left into the wall.

As we shifted positions, the doors opened behind us and the two suits were yanked back into the other room, the doors closing again with their disappearance. A screeching came howling down the halls.

“You take the one on the right. The left one is mine!” Around the corner came a flurry of tiny grey creatures with barbed tails. The air was thick with them, reeling and swirling like leaves in a dust devil. It was hard to see through them all. But two larger forms made through the crowd as we shielded our faces from the onslaught. They snatched up the two other blues from my right and retreated, taking their spawn with them. It was just the two of us now.

“Follow them!” The two of us charged down the hallway, swords at the ready. We turned the corner and barged through another set of double doors into a large and brightly lit yellow grocery store. The tiny gargoyles began to assault us again but I could see The One on the Left across the barges of oranges and pineapples. “Attack!”  My own set of minions came bursting forth from nowhere, a horde of screaming children with shopping carts at the ready, plowing through the thick morass of grey beasties, mowing them down with abandon.

[Intermission]

My eyes took in the old gothic mansion with its spires and soot stained bricks. Empty black double windows look hatefully down upon us. The grass seemed so much greener, the sky so much bluer in comparison. A red and yellow pavilion was set up to the left of the mansion from which the DJ was pumping his beats.

My high school graduation, I thought though it looked nothing like the one I had experienced 15 years ago. I mingled, said and took my congratulations to my classmates. We were all elegantly dressed and sipping from champagne flutes. The afternoon grew long and turned by degrees to dark. The pavilion lit up as did the windows of the mansion, yellow and welcoming in contrast to their death glare from earlier.

I grew frantic, trying to find certain people. I hadn’t thanked ____ yet. Or ____.  Damn she looked good in that dress. If I played my cards right, I could take her home tonight. But no. Cassie. Where’s Cassie? Her face framed with her blonde hair flitted through my imagination, southern belle smile crossing her lips. The night’s almost over. This is probably the last song. I want to dance with her, to thank her most of all. Without her I couldn’t have made it through. She was my rock. [In reality I didn’t even know her in high school, she wouldn’t have even been in high school yet when I graduated. But, hey, it’s a dream. Don’t take it too seriously.]

I dashed through the crowd, feet shuffling partnerless, shouldering people out of my way to find her or ____ or the other one. So many people. My heart thudded through my chest.

Dream #14 - Fragments

I strode into the room confidently. “I’m back! For the seventh time!” The convivial crowd in the hostel raised a cheer. The room had a Spanish setting though it was somewhere in France, ochre painted walls, potted ferns, a wrought iron chandelier hanging from the ceiling. I made my way behind the desk beside the jointed stairway to the stage of lockers, some empty, some closed. I struggled for a few minutes to remember in which one I had stowed my bag in. After some time I stuck my key in a lock and it opened but there was something unfamiliar about the turquoise hard case with black accents and collapsible handle. “Oh, well,” and headed up to my room.

I awoke in the warm afternoon light in the arms of a lovely long haired blonde with legs that didn’t quit until St Petersburg. Our legs were intertwined among the burgundy silk sheets, flesh peeking out at enticing opportunities. The room was more of a hotel room than a hostel room. It was a private room with a double bed, painted the same ochre colour as the lobby with drapes that matched the sheets undulating in the breeze from the window. A mirror hung over a small vanity across from the bed. Beside the window was an oversized Louis XV chair on which two suitcases tumbled. The one on top was the turquoise one I had grabbed from the locker. The other was a matching one in pale blue. It struck me that the blue one was mine, despite certainly not being my style. So to whom did the other belong? The girl? I disentangled myself from her sinuous limbs. She groaned slightly as she rolled away. I stepped naked to the window and opened the turquoise case. A few rather ugly shirts in multiple colours and patterns slid out as if on a board. The girl was coming around. “Is this yours?” I asked, somewhat disgusted with her taste in clothing if it was indeed hers. She shook her head, loose hair tumbling about highlighted cheekbones. “I seem to have stolen someone else’s bag. Why would I do that? A mystery…”

[Intermission]

I opened my eyes in confusion. The room was dark but for the green glow of one alarm clock set into some kind of alcove and the red glow of another on a table beside me. 4 am. Shit. I haven’t slept yet and I have to be up in an hour. Or have I slept? I feel like I’ve been through this scenario three times already tonight. Have I been dreaming that I can’t sleep? [Now I would like to point out that as someone suffering from insomnia and often has this scenario in waking life, this dream of insomnia really fucked my head up.]

[Intermission]

I placed my order and leaned back in my chair, dully glazed eyes staring at the blue light of the monitor. I had finished a few minutes before the deadline. Oh, shit. Debbie [my old boss] asked me to order some parts for this skateboard. I turned and lifted it from the desk it was leaning against. It was the kind of thing Bart Simpson would use, bright green with orange wheels. I flipped it over. There were four legs on the inner part like some kind of stand that would render the wheels meaningless. On each of the four outer corners there were grey plastic squares screwed on. By all accounts this skateboard wouldn’t go anywhere even with replacement parts. I wondered just what its purpose was. My mind reeled back in time, remembering sitting in the same chair at the same desk holding the same skateboard with Debbie pointing out the broken parts to me. I sighed and leaned exhausted toward the screen to try and find these parts in the few minutes before the cutoff.

[Intermission]

I approached the mirror image buildings through the quad. I stopped and stared up at the two eight storey structures. They were made of yellow mirrored glass with roofs that slanted slightly down toward each other. Two huge billboards promoting something I couldn’t understand in bright colours – blue on the left and red and yellow on the right – stood atop each building. It resembled something out of the Soviet era if the Soviet era had any interest in selling cereal or toothpaste or whatever these sparkling faced Koreans were trying to sell. This is a high school? I thought.

CJ met me in the lobby and led me upstairs. “This will be your dorm,” he said. I glanced around the L-shaped room and sighed. The room had wall length windows letting in a pale morning light. The walls and floor and bed were stippled with every kind of Hello Kitty paraphernalia being sold on the internet. The room was evidently still occupied. But what made me sigh was the other half of the L-shape. Another bed. This one tidier. But it meant a roommate. I was not looking forward to a roommate.

“Let me show you around,” CJ said. We descended a few floors, walking through halls painted red on the bottom and green on the top, interspersed with the occasional numbered wooden door.

“Lily?” I saw my dog trot off in the opposite direction out of the corner of my eye. When I turned to see where she was going she had disappeared. The hall turned right at the end but she wouldn’t have had time to make it there so she must have taken the stairs leading down closer on the left. I turned and at the bottom of the stairs the path split in opposite directions with no sign of Lily in either. I figured neither could go far. If she wasn’t around the corner, I’d turn back and go the other way. I went left only to find the paths split again, left leading up and right going farther down. Exasperated with finding myself chasing a determined dog through a labyrinth I glanced around and noticed that the red and green walls had points peeking up or down into the opposite colour in a half arrow indicating which way to follow. Great, I thought, if only the dog knew to follow the arrows. Turning another corner I noticed the red and green separated by a yellow stripe with arrows pointing in both directions. “Well, now, that’s just ludicrous…”

[Intermission]

I entered the post-New Year’s decimated grocery store through the front door. The wall on the left had three bays of shelves used for produce, painted green around the bottom with silver shelves. There was little there to be had, as though people had looted the place in the apocalypse. Everything that was there was equidistantly placed on the shelves and resembled bags of Ruffles potato chips – blue and white bags with red lettering. But they weren’t the flavours that Ruffles ever produced. One I noted said “dried and savory woman chips.” I was at once appalled and curious. I had the feeling they were slices of human beings dried and roasted with paprika. Hence the revulsion. On the other hand, maybe this wasn’t a grocery store at all. Maybe it was a porn store and this bag of woman represented something else entirely in which case I licked my lips. Deciding however that it was more likely the former I shivered at my own perversity and continued on. Another bag was marked “peanut butter and chocolate bowties, for when the party is over.” I smirked, thinking this actually sounded tasty but then had an image of myself sitting in an empty ballroom at 3 am surrounded by spent confetti and tattered streamers, tipped bottles of champagne, a purple party hat sitting sideways on my manicured hair (damn, I have great hair) and clashing terribly with my tux, eating morosely from a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Bowties. I shook the sad and lonely image from my head.

There were other bags, all laid out uniformly like some kind apocryphal library. I glanced at another and then another. Each bag contained something both horrific and somehow enticing…

Dream #13 - The Pool at Bruges

Bored, I flipped through a copy of The Seven Things to See Before You Die. Among the seven things was the Pool at Bruges.

I glanced out from my perch at the skyline of Bruges, the lights glimmering in the dark, serpents of cars slithering through the hills, wind whistling through the tops of buildings. Below me across the alley was the Pool on a rooftop encased in a glass ceiling. Wall sconces light the outside walls interspersed with neatly trimmed globes of bushes. I swooped down and crashed through the glass ceiling, avoiding the pool and landing on the tile walkway around it. Roman tradition. The walls were decorated with murals and mosaics of simple colours. The water was pale blue, rippling with tiny white waves and the reflections of city lights overhead. Nice, but hardly one of the seven wonders of the modern world. Or if it was, the modern world was not very wonderful.

I found the exit and went down a flight of stairs to the hostel. I entered a modern room, white with large windows, potted plants, highly polished hardwood floor, a TV playing the soccer game – red vs. blue and white, whoever those teams might be – and a red couch. A few small groups of people milled around exchanging pleasantries in their native tongues, sipping glasses of champagne and pints of beer. I approached the desk at the back of the room. The clerk, a tall, well built man, about my age but of a busy man’s demeanor called to me before I reached the desk. “You’re room will be ready in a few minutes. One down, tenth floor. Room 201. Have a seat and wait a bit.”

I turned to the window of the eleventh floor and looked out at the thin crowd in the street, huddling toward yellow and red beer tents on the grey cobblestones.

“Small crowd,” I said over my shoulder to the clerk. “I was expecting more this year.”

“Small and angry,” he replied. “They’re rioting in parts.”

“It’s just a game…” I muttered.

I turned and took a seat on the end of the red couch. I sunk comfortably into the leather and felt myself draped in an afghan.

“You’ve been here before,” I said, fishing my phone out of my pocket and markedly laying it in the yellow glow of the lamp on the end table and not looking up at her.

“What?” asked the girl beside me. She was pretty with big blue eyes outlined with a poor eye lining job. Blonde hair hung in waves about her shoulders. The shade of lipstick she had chosen didn’t suit her. It looked unnatural but highlighted a fair complexion. She tilted her head in curiosity.

“You’ve been here before. Seven years ago. You were meeting someone here. Or waiting for them. They never showed up.”

The smile faded from her lips. “How did you know that?”

An empty smile crossed my lips while glancing at her from the corner of my eye, hand still on my phone, illumined in its blue glow. I had been here seven years ago, too, across the room, drink in hand, watching this girl. I’d made a move and been shot down, given the explanation of someone else. I waited out the night in the room, drink after drink until finally she had left the room crying when the place had shut down for the night. It was mere coincidence that we were both here again seven years later. But I felt an opportunity that had slipped by me before. I looked her in the eye and placed a hand on her bare knee. I wasn’t going to tell her.  “What are you doing tonight?”

Hopeless. Romantic.

I wish you'd call.

Dream #12 - Sleep Walker

The zombie apocalypse came on suddenly. Almost instantaneously, even.  In this case it wasn’t the spread of some wild virus. People’s brains just turned to oatmeal in the blink of an eye. They weren’t even all that intent on eating us.

A bunch of us were holed up in a conference room of 60’s design. Dark stained pine paneling, brown leather chairs arranged around a large oval glass table, a ficus in a terracotta pot in the corner. A wall of windows looked out from the 20^th floor over the city skyline. We’d been locked in for several minutes already. Two or three had their backs to the door while others took what they could to shore up the barricade.

“We can’t stay here forever,” I argued. “We have to make a break for it.” A few others nodded their ascent. The barricades came down and the wide double doors opened. I strode out into the hallway with its flickering wall lamps with the others falling in behind me, posse style. At the end of the hallway was a tall man in a blue suit and red tie. His teeth were yellow and his hair wispy, combed over the chrome dome in an obvious way. Beside him was a desiccated grey corpse with long grey hair and a dusty grey jacket looking mysteriously like The Cryptkeeper. He hung himself in a dejected way, shoulders drooping, listless arms hanging forward, head looking up and to the left in a slightly odd way in my general direction.

He turned to me. “I don’t think there’s anything to this,” the Englishman said. “I’ve been talking to this one for ten minutes now and he hasn’t tried anything. Bloody stupid they ARRRGGGHH!!!” The zombie collapsed on top of him and started eating out his throat.

I used the distraction to dart past the zombie and down the stairwell at the end of the hall. The others with me were suddenly set upon by a horde as the elevator doors on either side opened. I felt no remorse as the screams faded behind me, drowned in the echoes of my feet on the stairs.

[I should point out that the zombies weren’t necessarily eating brains. Many of them were just muttering inanities.]

Well, if it’s going to be the zombie apocalypse, I guess I’d better stock up. Off to Walmart.

[Some things happened here that I don’t specifically recall.]

A checkerboard of florescent lights and white ceiling tiles hung over a huge area bordered with distant yellow walls. The whole place had a slightly yellow tinge to it, in fact, like a sulfur miasma. Shelves upon shelves 12 feet high stocked with everything under the sun. A blue tent caught my eye, already set up and hanging from the twenty foot ceiling. Shoppers milled about with their carts, cutting each other off and standing in the middle of the aisle just for the hell of it. I was in the corner with a bank of frozen food coolers. A rock the size of a Lay-Z-Boy smashed against the wall above me, shattering into a hundred pieces around me. I flipped up my collar to avoid the falling debris.  

“Was that the giant again?” I called, a quiver of fear to my voice.

“Sorry!”

I looked around and caught sight of a scraggly head moving above the boxes on the top shelf in the next aisle. A large furry backed hand waved apologetically.

“Is that Larry, The Blind Guy?” someone asked beside me as a man hideously dressed in brown slacks and an orange vest turned the corner of the aisle with his grey cart. He had a few rifles in there with boxes upon boxes of ammunition. His cart bumped into me repeatedly. I tried to steer him off until it became apparent that he knew I was there. He was trying to get my attention.

“Hey, look at this,” the other guy said, lifting up something from a bin. “And this!” It was a dog toy shaped like a bone with plastic ends and a flat rope centre. “A cherry flavoured dog chew!” Hardly the kind of thing one requires in the apocalypse but for a brief second I considered picking one up for Lily. Ashamed of myself I realized, beagle though she is, she probably doesn’t like cherry flavour.

Glancing to the side I saw a plastic bubble beside Larry, The Blind Guy. Inside the bubble was a dog, brown and white, sitting patiently. What the hell? I thought, panicking for the dog. “Who put that dog in there? He’ll suffocate!” The other guy stepped over to the bubble. There was an indent in the side of the bubble resembling the inside of a mask. The guy put his face into the indent and the thin plastic of the bubble formed to his face. “What the…?” he muffled as he tried to stumble back. The bubble was sticking to his face, peeling away with long sticky string of glue like tearing off a band-aid. He managed to get away enough that he could cut the strings with a swipe of his hand in front of his face. The dog sniggered inside his bubble, reaching up to take the newly formed mask of the stranger and peel it off the side to use for some unknown nefarious purpose. He rolled away with the clear plastic mask between his teeth.

Larry, The Blind Guy and the other stranger began to wander off. I was vaguely aware of someone else following me. Strangers but somehow familiar.

I rounded the corner and found myself in the corner of the building again surrounded by banks of refrigeration units. There corner was oddly shaped as though there were a square room behind the banks. I stood there hesitantly as I eyed the three obvious security guards with their thumbs in their thick black belt and the at least one - possibly two - undercover guards milling around feigning interest in frozen waffles or a hangnail.

Larry, The Blind Guy came from behind me and strolled right toward a unit. One of the guards stood aside and opened the false door for him.

I nodded to the guard like I knew exactly what I was doing despite him having stood there watching me clearly at a loss. He held the door for me anyway.

Larry, The Blind Guy had disappeared. I was in a square room with black walls scuffed here and there with jagged white scars and a pitted cement floor. A pair of fluorescent light fixtures hung from chains. A stock room of some kind, apparently. A few upended cable spools lay around the room being used as card tables by sneaky looking characters in black pinstripe suits and fedoras. They eyed me above their cards. Cigar smoke hung heavily in the air. A bright red fire extinguisher by the door marked the only real colour in the room. A three foot long bar jutting from the wall had the poorest stock of booze I had ever seen. An ashen looking flapper girl in a pale ice blue dress stood behind it, eyes cast down.  In the opposite corner was a black painted door with a white frame. I made toward it.

With trepidation I opened it and stuck my head through; my body followed of its own free will and certainly had nothing to do with what my head wanted. The room was a bathroom, black like the one I had just exited but with white tiles on the floor and a few feet up the walls. In the middle of the floor were a few milk chocolate brown turds by a floor drain. Wads of wet toilet paper were balled up in the corner behind the toilet, much of which had been used. I didn’t dare approach the toilet itself. The seat up, the bowl streaked with brown and yellow, it emitted a nauseatingly noxious smell. The tile wall beside the toilet was smeared with about three feet of black dripping mold. The mirror above the sink was completely cloudy as though it had never been a mirror at all. A disused or never used mop was propped in the corner. Paper towel was strewn about the floor and piling clumsily around a white metal garbage can.

Repulsed, I backed out of the room. I turned to Buddy, sitting beside the door in a red t-shirt and jeans on a wooden crate, out of place in the room of gangsters. One of the crew caught in the shot. My hand gestured toward him as I paused in what I was about to say. “Can I just say… my congratulations to the set designer and the prop master. That’s just fantastic. So real….” A wide smile spread across Buddy’s face. My voice trailed away as the wall across from me slid out of place to reveal Steven Spielberg sitting in his director’s chair clapping and cheering. The cart mounted camera panned up as the boom mics and lighting crews spread apart. The crew took up the cheer, raising celebratory fists in the air. I noticed a concession table at the back of the room covered with melon slices and made my way toward it, the hero of the day receiving his much deserved reward.