The Living Dead by George A. Romero

Author:George A. Romero [Romero, George A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250305282
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Walk Away

If one were to recount the occasions of hard work and good luck that had thrust WWN into the sphere of the cable-news big boys, the July 15, 2015, events at Jo-Jo’s Hog, a dimly lit cellar nightclub in New Orleans, had to be in the top five. On that night, one of the station’s first stars, Octavia Gloucester, a bulldog reporter drafted from a Charlotte NBC affiliate, was in the French Quarter, finishing a special report on the return of music venues fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina.

Muse King, a.k.a. King Kong, or KK to his friends, had been doing the Jo-Jo’s Hog version of a sound check when Gloucester, working without a field producer in those bare-bones days, ambled over to the band’s impossibly young leader to let him know she’d be shooting a scripted shot during his first set. The band ought to do an original.

“You never know,” Octavia Gloucester said. “National TV, Someone might dig it.”

Muse had been in awe of the beautiful, no-nonsense reporter. He was just seventeen, young enough to believe that some background noise on a thirty-second piece of video on a second-rate news network might actually catapult him to fame. He’d been playing dingy blues clubs for three years, forever the youngest cat in the joint. That was a serious chunk of his life. He was impatient for his break.

He’d acted cool, said something like, “Yeah, I might have something.”

When it was time to play, he let the band settle first, then strolled onto the stage. The city’s smoking ban was brand-new and, in pits like this, being flouted. He tilted his head into the smoke-filled beam of a tinny, red-gelled spot, pressed his mouth against the standing mic, and growled out the opening a cappella eight-count to “If the Blues Wuz a Woman,” not his most unique song, but if the reporter lady wanted blues, here was an A-major, fifth-position, twelve-bar, blues-with-a-capital-B riff that ought to read no matter what the reporter was saying.

He was past the chorus, about to step back to grind on guitar, when a man who would later be identified as twenty-nine-year-old Preston Gourlay fought across the front of the smoky room, stage lights shimmering down his sweaty face, and lifted a long arm holding a .357. His target was Juniper Coulbeck, a girl he claimed had spurned him, but who insisted she only knew him as some guy who lived in her building.

Coulbeck was able to clarify this because Coulbeck didn’t get shot. Coulbeck didn’t get shot because King Kong, living up to the sobriquet—though it had originally been applied to the skinny kid ironically—continued drawing back his guitar into a full baseball backswing, leaned out over the stage, and crashed his best friend—the royal-blue, gloss-finished, hollow-bodied Gretsch Electromatic his uncle Marlon had given to him when he was five—into Preston Gourlay’s skull.

It had the makings of just one more New Orleans legend, except it was captured over Octavia Gloucester’s left shoulder. Muse watched it a hundred times on YouTube.

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