writing

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…

Last night, I watched The Spectacular Now, which I rather liked. Today, I watched The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which I rather didn’t.

There’s not a lot I can say about the former, which was both a lot different and exactly what I expected. And everything I could say about the latter is filled with spoilers. (Here’s one big one, with fair warning: it’s plenty shocking the one time the movie decides to stick to major Spider-Man continuity.)

I spent the rest of the weekend reading some Kaleidotrope submissions and writing. I’m working on a short piece right now that I’m trying to tie together, and then I also wrote this during my weekly free-writing group (before the movie):

He could no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead.

Only a year ago that might have bothered him; he remembered sleepless nights, empathy, doubts; even if he no longer had direct access to those emotions, he hadn’t yet excised their memory, and he could recall them well enough to know that he was a different man. Well enough, too, to know that he should probably be disturbed by that difference. If he wanted to, the shunt in his brain could be easily removed, a simple surgical procedure, and he could go back to being the man he’d been a year ago, doubts and all. But a conscience wouldn’t bring Stacy back, and it wouldn’t change what was happening in the world below. If Magnus went back to being bothered by all of this, it probably would just get him killed too.

His real name wasn’t Magnus, of course, but he felt he’d long gone past the point of real names. Who was left to question him? Stacy would had said he sounded like a mad scientist or super-villain, like something straight out of a comic book. Oh really? he might have asked her. Then what does a mutagenic plague that turns two thirds of the world’s population into flesh-eating zombies sound like? Because that’s what they were up against. That’s what he’d released into the world. It seemed to him like they’d moved past concerns about any of this not sounding believable.

Take the space station, for instance, or the nanobots that kept it operational: that was pure comic book, but it was also the only reason why he was still alive. The plague had found its way here, escaped into the atmosphere aboard the station just like everywhere else, but…

No, he didn’t want to think about that now. There were some emotions even the shunt wasn’t capable of blocking.

The point was, it was a ridiculous situation, but it was the one he’d been forced into. If circumstances dictated that he go from mild-mannered lab tech to super-genius mad scientist in order to survive, then, by damn, he was going to play the part.

Still, he wished he could tell which of the infected he’d brought aboard were living or dead. In theory, he was running these tests to save those who hadn’t completely succumbed. But as he looked through the observation window, they all just looked like zombies to him. He wasn’t much sure he cared about finding a cure.

Would it really be so bad to let the human race go? Magnus hadn’t released the plague — that had been Albert, the dumb lab tech he’d once been — nor had he even designed it — that had been the men who’d built this space station, almost as smart as he was now. But were things really worse now? Magnus sort of liked the quiet.

But he’d run a battery of tests all the same; it was something to do. He didn’t expect to find a cure, or to begin to care, expected he’d just have to vent the whole lab to space like he did when Stacy was bit.