Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead

Author:Joe Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061843655
Publisher: HarperCollins

“IT’S GOING TO be a great picture, Mr. Romero,” Bobby said. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, making small talk, waiting for Savini to finish wiring Harriet with her squib—a condom partially filled with cane syrup and food coloring that would explode to look like a bullet hit. Bobby was already wired…in more than one sense of the word. “Someday everyone in Pittsburgh is going to claim they walked dead in this movie.”

“You kiss ass like a pro,” Romero said. “Do you have a show-biz background?”

“Six years off-Broadway,” Bobby said. “Plus I played most of the comedy clubs.”

“Ah, but now you’re back in greater Pittsburgh. Good career move, kid. Stick around here, you’ll be a star in no time.”

Harriet skipped over to Bobby, her hair flouncing. “I’m going to get my tit blown off!”

“Magnificent,” Bobby said. “People just have to keep on going, because you never know when something wonderful is going to happen.”

George Romero led them to their marks, and walked them through what he wanted from them. Lights pointed into silver, spangly umbrellas, casting an even white glow and a dry heat over a ten-foot stretch of floor. A lumpy striped mattress rested on the tiles, just to one side of a square pillar.

Harriet would get hit first, in the chest. She was supposed to jerk back, then keep coming forward, showing as little reaction to the shot as she could muster. Bobby would take the next bullet in the head and it would bring him down. The squib was hidden under one latex fold of his scalp wound. The wires that would cause the Trojan to explode were threaded through his hair.

“You can slump first, and slide down and to the side,” George Romero said. “Drop to one knee if you want, and then spill yourself out of the frame. If you’re feeling a bit more acrobatic you can fall straight back—just be sure you hit the mattress. No one needs to get hurt.”

It was just Bobby and Harriet in the shot, which would picture them from the waist up. The other extras lined the walls of the shopping-mall corridor, watching them. Their stares, their steady murmuring, induced in Bobby a pleasurable burst of adrenaline. Tom Savini knelt on the floor, just outside the framed shot, with a metal box in hand, wires snaking across the floor toward Bobby and Harriet. Little Bob sat next to him, his hands cupped under his chin, squeezing the spleen, his eyes shiny with anticipation. Savini had told little Bob all about what was going to happen, preparing the kid for the sight of blood bursting from his mother’s chest, but little Bob wasn’t worried. “I’ve been seeing gross stuff all day. It isn’t scary. I like it.” Savini was letting him keep the spleen as a souvenir.

“Roll,” Romero said. Bobby twitched—what, they were rolling? Already? He only just gave them their marks! Christ, Romero was still standing in front of the camera!—and for an instant Bobby grabbed Harriet’s hand. She squeezed his fingers, let go.

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