Month: May 2014

It’s been a relatively quiet weekend.

I watched a couple of movies yesterday. The first was Bowfinger, is one of those “hey, Eddie Murphy isn’t actively terrible in this so maybe’s it good, oh no wait, it isn’t” movies. The movie has its moments and a game enough cast — I wouldn’t say Murphy’s good, but he’s at least there — but few real jokes or laughs for a comedy.

Then, later, I watched The Long Good Friday, a very good 1980 gangster movie starring the very recently departed Bob Hoskins. As I say, the movie’s very good, but Hoskins is terrific in it, and the movie’s worth it for how great he is in the final scene alone. In the wake of his passing, the movie’s gotten a lot more play — I’d never heard of it before — and it’s worth checking out.

No movies today, at least not yet. I’m thinking about it, since I’m off from work tomorrow, but I’ve mostly just been watching Parks and Recreation episodes.

I did write this with my writing group today, though. It’s not exactly my finest hour, but you get what you can out of the prompt and the forty minutes:

We never did learn what had killed Dr. Jacoby. Robert said it looked like poison, maybe strychnine, and he proposed an autopsy right there on the hangar floor. But it was clear we weren’t safe hanging around for that, even if we could scrounge together surgical tools, and we needed to break camp for someplace more secure before nightfall. The airfield had been a bust — we’d lost not only Jacoby, but also Claire and Frank Wilson in the first of two attacks the night before — and we had to focus on where to go next. It didn’t really matter what had done in Jacoby, poison or not; it had pretty obviously been by his own hand. We didn’t need to look much further than the bite mark on the back of that hand to figure out why.

I’d never liked Jacoby, but I wouldn’t have wished this on him, and it was obvious, to me at least, that we were poorer for his loss. There were only five of us now — Robert, Clive, me, and the twins — and none of had any kind of medical training. (That was all the more reason for us to get moving. Robert talked big about an autopsy, but who was going to perform it? Not him.) None of us had trained as scientists before the turning, and with Jacoby gone, none of us had the know-how needed to look for a cure.

All the more reason to make a run for it now, I said. If we were cornered here by the pack, we’d be lucky if any of us made it, and we’d spend the last few minutes of our lives envying Jacoby the last few minutes of his. If we were really lucky, we’d have enough bullets left to let us join him. I didn’t much feel like dying, so we needed to be long gone before moonrise.

To his credit, Robert agreed, and the twins, though never talkative, always sided with him. I thought Clive might try to be difficult, since the airfield had been his idea from the start. He’d worked there before the turning — I don’t think he was military, but he knew his way around the base — and it had been his idea to come here for supplies, maybe radio for help, find a plane.

That had all gone out the window the first night when the pack arrived. I don’t know if it was the same one that had tracked us from Phoenix, but I also don’t know if that mattered. It was all one big pack anyway, right? That’s what they’d said at the turning, before it all went to hell and dark.

Half the pack had kept us pinned inside the hangar, while what Robert said was their alpha had…