All the Good That Won't Come - Writers Forum

Rufio · 03-23-2005, 06:11 AM

Haven't posted in a long while, so I figured I'd post this draft I've written just tonite for kicks (while I avoided working on the FIRST 10 pages of my screenplay...I have more than 10 done...but they aren't the FIRST ten...dammit). Geez. There's definately a lot I need to expand upon, but this is a good startingoff point, and I hope I get enough feedback from the bullpen to add to it (as opposed to the more common "there's an error in syntax here; I'm an anal-retentive nail-bitter who can't contribute other than this unconstructive criticism here").

Give me all you got!

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All the Good That Won’t Come

When you’re young and stupid, you never really suspect that everything can turn from fast and exciting right into the broadside of a brick wall.
The night was bright and flashing by us in a heartbeat as we sped down the freeway off ramp onto Los Fortuna Drive. A cold breeze rushing through our hair and into our lungs made us feel free and unbound by the laws of the universe. The countless laws of man held no chains on our free spirits as we drove hit 88 on a 35 rode while taking a hit on a fresh roll.
Alex had a fresh card and battery in his camera, and we posed for the man with the view like we were going to be on television during the evening news. Even Andrea managed to flash a smile and a single bird as she maneuvered over the majority of the pot holes on Fortuna.
Eve let out a loud shout as she leaned over the passenger side door of the green Camry.
“Glad to see you’re feeling better!” I shouted out to her from the back.
I saw her lips mouth something in the side mirror, but I couldn’t quite make it out.
“Hey, Eve, I think he’s checking you out,” Alex said like it was the most natural thing in the world, with the camera zooming in on my red face.
She was still leaning out the window when she gave her ass a few exaggerated slaps with her left hand and yelled more out the window.
Alex held the joint in his hand and waved it in front of the camera. “Hey, Annie, you want another hit of this?”
“Hell no, that shit is screwing up my driving,” she replied.
It was almost three in the morning on a Saturday night, and there wasn’t a car out on the street. We knew where all the checkpoints were, and we managed not to see a single black and white the entire time we were sped down the shadowy black river Styx. The four of us stood on the line between eternal youth and the eternal and we were kicking up all the dust we could.
The wind blew hard through the car and a good size piece of ash fell on Alex’s arm while it still flickered with that eerie red and orange that never mixes.
“Fuck!” was all he managed to let out for a moment as he grabbed his arm and tossed the camera into my lap.
I strapped it to my hand and filmed him literally licking his wound. I still don’t know if he was trying to ease the sting from the burn, or licking up the ashy weed he thought he was wasting.
Eve slapped the hood of the car and cried out something.
Andrea pulled Eve down by the thread of her exposed thong and asked her to nicely fucking repeat herself.
“I said, ‘Pull into that fucking supermarket!’” she replied in the same volume she had yelled outside the window.
We had gone in to grab some quick snacks and head off to the park to kick back in privacy, but for the next thirty minutes we managed to piss off every single one of the night employees at the 24-hour supermarket Eve managed to pick out. Alex and I switched back and forth with the camera, and we caught everything funny idea we could fathom. Alex and Andrea posed with various feminine hygiene products directed in the oddest of places, and Eve and I managed to come up with the most disturbing sexual references using various produce.
A half-eaten tube of cake frosting and a bottle of coke later, we strolled out of the market with a box of ice cream bars, a case of cola, and a handful of random candy bars.
How Annie managed to drive a car while drinking a can of warm soda and eat an ice-cream sandwich I will never understand. Despite her erratic driving at times, we managed to reach the park without a problem. Evidence on the camera later revealed Alex falling behind a bush for a moment to let out his swirling sandwich and warm coke.
To say the park was cold is an understatement punishable by death. When you’re high and grouped together in a small Japanese sedan, it isn’t hard to ignore the light drizzle and needle-like wind. We huddled around a table in the center of the park’s designated party and barbeque area and spat on about anything that crossed our minds as we passed around the camera like the joint in the car.

Just as we finished off the last of the sandwiches, Andrea pointed out something moving in the distance. With the park technically being closed after ten at night, the only light we had was the small array of security lights in our immediate area, so everything outside of their six yard reach looked like everything else.
She smacked me and called me a jackass for even thinking she was seeing things.
“Hey, I see something too,” Alex said pointing to something behind a large tree.
Andrea and I peered over to see what he was pointing at, and she slapped me once more for believing Alex and not her.
While the three of us argued over just what the hell that could be moving around the trees, we heard a shrill scream from behind us.
We turned around and saw three men who were stalking towards Eve while she had gotten up to thrown something in the trash.
Each one had sickly pale skin that was blistered and torn all over. Their eyes seemed to stare through us.
Alex began throwing his trash at them and shouting at them to leave. He struck one of the sick men in the face with his soda can, but he didn’t as much as blink.
“Eve, get away from them, they’re fucking crazy,” I shouted at her.
“Dude, they’re sick,” she snapped back at me. “We have to get them some help.
“They’re just trippin’ on some bad shit,” Alex said. He held his camera on Eve and the four men the whole time.
Andrea was the first one of us to make any move at all, but the moment she moved to grab Eve, the smallest of the three men lunged forward. It still churns my stomach thinking about how loud she screamed as he dug his nails into her arm and tore out a large part of her just below the elbow.
It looked nothing like the movies where the flesh seems to struggle free from the bone. In the moment it took us to leap to our feet, the man had managed to tear out that piece from Eve as if it were nothing more than a raw hamburger patty.
Eve couldn’t stop screaming as Andrea did her best to pull her away. Finally, my feet let loose from the concrete and I sucker punched the man so hard the chunk of Eve left in his mouth flew out along with what looked like a tooth.
I yelled at Alex to help Andrea carry Eve to the car, which he answered to with a wide-eyed star and a nod of his head.
While they dragged Eve to the car, I gave one last kick to the man that still had a small piece of Eve’s arm in his mouth and ran off behind them.
I dove into the back seat with Eve while Andrea fumbled to find the key to the car on her overly decorated keychain. Alex continued filming the men with his camera from the passenger side seat. Eve’s wail of pain echoed in my ear even as the car engine roared to life and George Michael sang about being left hanging like a yo-yo.

I was freaking out like a man who just watched someone dive to the pavement from ten stories, and I was just as messy. Her arm was bleeding badly, and the backseat and I looked like a butcher’s apron. Her screams grew fainting as she began to quickly succumb to shock. Her body convulsed and she moaned more and more, and screaming less and less, as we got further away from the park.
As Andrea drove like a verifiable maniac, and Alex focusing on us in the backseat like some pervert filming a couple fucking the back of a car, I applied as much pressure as I could to Eve’s hemorrhaging arm with her brand-new jacket that I had actually given to her a month earlier for her birthday.
“Hey,” Andrea said, doing her best not to let her voice shake too much. “Where the hell are we going?”
“How the hell do I know?”
“Fuck you, Steve, just tell me where to go.”
“A hospital, maybe?” I snapped, doing my best to sound like a jackass.
“Don’t give me that right now, or I’m going to drive us into a goddamn pole,” she said, this time her voice rattled like she was jittery from one too many espressos.
“Dude, she’s dying, ain’t she?” Alex managed to squeak out from behind the camera.
“Aw, fuck me. Alex, shut up and turn that damn thing off.”
“What? There’s nothing else I can do. I either do this or I can start freaking out like you and Miss Fucking Jitterbug here.”
“Dammit, will you two pricks just tell me where the fuck I’m going?”
“Just take us to the damn City General already for fuck’s sake!” I shouted as loud as I could muster.
She was still alive and breathing, but as I wiped the sweat from her brow, her flesh was as cold as ice.

We arrived at the hospital soon enough, and none worse the wear, despite Andrea crashing into one of the parked cars in the emergency room lot.
Alex and I carried Eve into the ER on our shoulders why Andrea tended to her wreck of a car. To our horror, the hospital was as empty as the street was the whole night.
“Hey, we need some help here!” I shouted. “Our friend’s bleeding like a fucking stuck pig out here, so help us already!”
When no one answered, I pushed Eve’s weight onto Alex and went off on my own.
He dropped the camera to support her weight and shouted out to me to hurry.
I must have run the entire floor of the ER, and didn’t see so much as a patient, let alone a staff member. Just as I began to double back once more, I heard Andrea scream from the lobby.
I rushed back to my friends and found them backing away from a crowd of people that looked just like the men we had seen in the park. They flooded through the front door, some trampled underfoot in the wave of bodies pressing through the relatively small automatic door.

We managed to barricade ourselves in the cafeteria on the first floor of the hospital for a couple days. But we quickly realized we had to get to hire ground as soon as possible.
This proved a somewhat easy task as we didn’t have to worry any longer about Eve.
As the sun rose, or so we figured from the clock on the wall, on what proved the first of two days that we were trapped in the cafeteria, Eve died. I had been tending to her, redressing her wound with some supplies I had found during my initial run around the ER, and she just stopped breathing. I checked for a heartbeat and a pulse only to find nothing.
Her face had gone pale like the man who had bitten her, and her lips were an icy blue.

With all the supplies we could carry, we scurried like roaches across to the nearest elevator and made our way to the second floor waiting room.
There wasn’t a single threat as we entered the floor, and that made us more uneasy that we had been moments earlier.
For another two days, we managed to survive on our supplies without trouble. In fact, I believe we could have continued on much longer, but Andrea finally snapped.
Alex had continued filming with his camera, and I suppose that’s what set Andrea off. It was only 7pm, but she had spent the better part of twelve hours trying to reach someone on her cell phone and on the hospital phones. She was cracking under the pressure, and Alex’s own stress reliever sparked off a full out explosion that caused her to wail on him with everything that wasn’t nailed down.
She left on the elevator never to be seen again by either of us to this day.

It’s been two weeks since that night, and I’m still here with Alex’s camera. I’ve done my best to keep tabs by recording everything I can as a journal, both as a way to keep our sanity, but also because we realize that this camera and all of these tapes we will be making are all that will be left when this ends.
If this ever ends.
And Alex has gone off on another search for food and hasn’t returned yet. Food hasn’t been difficult to come by yet, as we have found some ducts and hallways near elevators that lead directly to the kitchen from any floor. We’ve had to move up through all the floors of this building to avoid the marching hordes. And, sadly, we haven’t seen or heard anything from Andrea beyond a gruesome scene we saw on the third floor.
All the good this does me.
We saw this written all over the walls in something we didn’t even want to think about.
Suffice it to say, after a quick sweep of our surroundings, which brought up no other sign of Andrea, we moved up to the fourth floor.

Another sunset has begun, and it looks so beautiful from this height. It’s almost comforting as we hear the sound of the marching hordes below us cry out with their wails of pain.

Mercury · 03-23-2005, 07:23 AM

Great, vivid descriptions to begin with, apart from the zombies themselves which seemed strange. They just seemed to come from nowhere without any of the usual horror story atmospheric build up. I think you could do with building more atmos. Judging by your writing you cetainly seem capable.

From the second half onwards its apparent that the peice was rushed. And we are told a lot of stuff rather than be shown it. Its a shame really as you built up the characters nicely but two of them just seem to dissappear or die with barely any explanation.

I think it could do with a bit more time spent on it as the start is quite interesting.

Rufio · 03-23-2005, 07:41 AM

Yeah, I admit I just sort of rushed things at the end, but its a rough draft, and that let me get all my basic ideas out real easy. At six pages, you're right to point out how little I built up the atmosphere in many places, I just hope it interested you, and other readers, enough to look forward to the next draft.

=P Also, if you notice, I never mentioned anyone dying except for Eve. The others are just up in the air as part of the open ending I'm aiming for. O~h, what will happen? I'm curious how people will resolve that in their own minds.

But what I'm really interested in, are your ideas on the characters. You mentioned enjoying two of them, and I was wondering who specifically they were (are?). I really want to work on another draft of this, and any addition to the characters would help (especially as the end result is to be yet another screenplay I wish to start filming sometime next year on my own). Any help there would definately be well wished for.

Also, it should definately be noted that I consider myself an avid fan, and self-proclaimed student, of George Romero. Also note, Romero "teaches" that the focus of the "zombie" style story should be built on the people, and ONLY the people, with the "Zombies" acting as a constant outside conflict/threat. They should never truely become the main focus unless absolutely necessary. There is no need to build up some over-the-top explination for the appearance of "zombies" (note: I never mention the word zombie; readers just tend to assume such--this is the case with Romero's work as well). A build up to the eventual appearance is fine, but that sudden thrust of chaos adds a lot to the tension. It's a very modern and Hollywood approach to explain every little nuance of a story, especially those in the horror genre. Just watch any modern horror film from Hollywood (especially the Dawn of the Dead remake), and compare those to films from as recent as the 1980s, and you'll see a huge difference in story telling. If I sound a tad defensive, sorry, it's just that I am highly defensive of the overall genre in general, and particularly the often misinterpreted and misused Zombie sub-genre.

Kane · 03-23-2005, 11:14 AM

Over all I think it was a good story. A few things bugged me.

In the beginning I wasn't sure if Eve and the narrarator had something going on, or might in the future... After she got bit, I think I would have liked to see some of the feelings that the people had about it. There was the rush to the hospital, but after that it was pretty clipped. Her death didn't seem to affect the narrarator at all. You say that the focus should never be on the zombies, however, as soon as they were introduced into the story, your descriptiveness seemed to peter off and you kinda skipped over a lot of stuff. I mean, if the focus of the story is the people and not the zombies, perhaps we should see the people reacting to the situation. Eve died and Andrea ran off. But you told us they did this in past tense. Was there no worthy dialogue while Andrea was snapping? Nothing worth writing about in the was the two guys dealt with it?

I began to cringe everytime another cliche popped up in the narraration. I feel that you have the ability to use lines in your descriptions that haven't been done a thousand times already.

I was able to tell they were zombies in the park scene. But only because Hollywood has churned out so many zombie movies. If I had never seen a zombie movie or read a zombie book, I would be left wondering what the heck just happened. Maybe you could spend more time developing that part of the story.

Overall I think it was a good start but with more time and effort you could do a lot more to make it yours. This would include, I think, straying a bit from the "George Romero" school of thought and make the story your own. I wouldn't waste my time reading a vampire book done in the style of Anne Rice by anyone but her. I wouldn't read about middle earth unless Tolkien had written it. If Joe Schmo wrote a new chapter in King's Dark Tower series I wouldn't give it the time of day. I think you get the picture.