Villain (Gone 8)

Unfortunately, one of the cashiers immediately ran at him, jaws gnashing, and he had to amend that a bit before he started losing body parts.

A craps croupier suddenly grabbed a woman and began gnawing on her nose. A man in a wheelchair was set upon by three people. He yelled feebly for help even as he tried to bite the people biting him. A woman pushing a stroller toward the front desk stopped, pulled her baby from the stroller and, eyes streaming, babbling apologies and desperate pleas for someone to stop her, began to chew on her child.

“No, no,” Dillon said. “Not you, lady. There are limits!” He keyed the microphone and amended: “Don’t eat children under . . .” He considered an appropriate age, then grinned. Of course. The cutoff in the FAYZ, the age beyond which people had poofed, was fourteen. “Don’t eat anyone under the age of fourteen.”

The woman returned her bleeding, screeching child to the stroller, at which point she was attacked from behind by an old man biting with feeble jaws into her neck.

Dillon clapped his hands in sheer amazement. He kept doing the impossible, and it kept working!

From everywhere came cries of outrage, screams of pain and

anger, shouted apologies as people clawed and bit like . . . well, like zombies. But self-aware zombies. Zombies who knew they were doing terribly wrong things. Tears dribbled down into blood.

It was mayhem. And given that the average age of the Venetian’s patrons was ninety . . . No. Try again. Given that the average age was senile . . . Not quite. Given that the average age was Jurassic. Yeah, that was funny. Jurassic. Anyway, given the age of Dillon’s zombies, it was wildly funny and, despite the frenzy, not likely to actually get anyone killed.

That will be my rule: funny above all, and no actual killing.

He savored the madness for a while and tried to gauge the reaction of the Dark Watchers. He guessed they were loving it—yeah, baby—but also that it wasn’t enough. Not enough. He felt harassed by a need to think of the next line, the next wacky move. And he’d had very little sleep. He was tired.

He sauntered out of the casino toward the elevators to the rooms above through a mad melee of people biting and clawing and crying and apologizing as they did it. Despite the TV and movie depictions of zombies, it isn’t easy for a human jaw—especially the jaws of the Venetian’s septuagenarian patrons—to actually pierce flesh. But he saw an elderly man doing a reasonably good job of biting off a woman’s ear as she in turn tried to bite a chunk out of his shoulder.

“Come on,” he said, hands outstretched, addressing the Dark Watchers, “you have to admit: that’s funny.”

Security people who’d been beyond the reach of his voice were pouring from concealed doors, unaware that Dillon was the source. He nodded at them as they rushed past, took the elevator to the top floor, and ordered a maid to open the nicest suite. A man was sleeping in one of the beds, and Dillon ordered him to go away. The man, wearing nothing but underpants, left immediately.

Dillon wondered vaguely how the man would interpret the word “away.” The English language was not designed for such orders.

Specificity, Dillon, specificity. The best comedy is always specific.

This all might become part of a routine. He could see himself on Fallon, doing a tight five minutes, then schmoozing with Jimmy afterward.

It was gray-on-gray violence, Jimmy. Old people thinking it was the early-bird special! Today’s specials: human sushi. And for dessert, ear à la mode! And you know old people: waiter! Oh, waiter! This bicep is cold! Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Biceps? Thigh? Liver?

Liver. Liver was always funny. And it would be a sort of reference to Silence of the Lambs. People liked Anthony Hopkins, even when he played a cannibal.

But what about the Dark Watchers? Would they get that kind of reference?

The suite was fabulously gaudy and tasteless in the way only Vegas could be, and Dillon threw himself back on a king-sized bed and looked up at his own reflection in ceiling-mounted mirrors. It was the first time he’d seen himself in this body, and he spent some time admiring what he saw. High school would have been a very different experience if he had looked like this.

He contemplated an amazing fact: he, Dillon Poe, was quite likely the most powerful person on earth. He could do anything, or at least anything he could order another human being to do. He couldn’t fly or live forever, but if a human could do it, Dillon could do it.

Amazing!

But after a while of contemplating just how he could use that power, he came back to a couple of realities: he did not have much imagination, and, aside from comedy, he’d never had any sort of life plan or ambition. The dark audience had appreciated his act in the drunk tank, and the impromptu finger-ectomy as well as the old-farts zombie attack. But Dillon knew the difference between a spontaneous bit of fun and a well-thought-out, well-honed act. (Jerry Seinfeld was his uber-hero, and Jerry was a meticulous craftsman.) Random acts of gore? He could do that easily enough, but audiences always wanted more, and he didn’t have more. Not yet.

He needed a narrative, a goal. A point of view. He had listened to almost all of Marc Maron’s podcasts, and Maron always emphasized specificity in comedy. You had to have a position, an approach, and you had, above all, to be yourself.

Also, as much as he hated to admit it, nothing was much fun unless you had someone to share it with. So he made a call. Strange, he thought, but he was nervous calling Saffron even now. She was a year older and, to his eyes at least, the essence of the sort of girl he could ordinarily never hope to approach.

“Saffron?” he said into the phone, delighted by the suave confidence that had replaced his more usual thin squeak.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Dillon. Dillon Poe, from school. I was just calling to—”

“I’m kinda busy—”