The Heist

you to help me trick a man into telling me where to find an international fugitive who has stolen half a billion dollars.”
    “So you can take the money?”
    “So I can give it back to the people he took it from,” he said.
    “What are you, one of those Robin Hood do-gooders?”
    “No. It’s a job.”
    He took a key out of his pocket and aimed it at a red Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, the most powerful car ever built by the Italian automaker, capable of going from zero to 120 miles per hour in 8.5seconds, thanks to a 730 horsepower V12 engine and 509 pound-feet of torque. The car chirped and Wilma sucked in air.
    He dangled the keys in front of her. “Want to drive?”
    She snatched them from his hand. “I’m in. And you can call me Willie.”
    While Nick Fox was handing the keys to a $375,000 car to Willie Owens, the zombie apocalypse was beginning in the desert outside of Gallup, New Mexico. It was a very low-budget nonunion apocalypse, written and directed by a twenty-seven-year-old whose prior filmmaking experience was a series of viral videos of drunk girls taking their tops off at Lake Havasu during spring break.
    The job of making the two dozen amateur actors look like decaying zombies hell-bent on eating human flesh fell to Chet Kershaw, a big bear of a man who, at thirty-eight years old, had come to the sobering conclusion that he was an aging dinosaur facing imminent extinction.
    It was cruel and ironic that he was having this epiphany while sitting in the western-themed bar at the El Rancho Motel. The motel had been built in Gallup in 1937 by the brother of director D. W. Griffith to cater to all the big-name Hollywood directors and actors who were flocking to this dramatically photogenic patch of desert to shoot westerns. Perhaps Chet’s realization of his bleak future was hitting him with such force because Chet was sitting exactly where Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and John Ford had once washed the sand out of their throats.
    Among the many filmmakers who came to Gallup in those early days was Chet’s grandfather Cleveland Kershaw. He was oneof the greats in the art of movie makeup and related special effects. Cleveland passed along the experience, skills, and tricks that he knew to his son, Carson, who carried on the family business in film and TV well into the 1980s.
    But by the time Chet took over the family business in the 1990s, his art was quickly becoming a software application. More and more makeup effects, and virtually everything that was once considered a “special effect,” including simple gunshots and bullet hits, were being done in postproduction using computer graphics.
    Even location shooting and the fake streets on studio back lots were becoming a thing of the past. A director didn’t have to go to New Mexico to get the desert look. He could shoot in Calgary in the dead of winter. All he needed was a green screen and a digital effects company. Now if directors came to New Mexico to shoot, it was because of the generous production tax credits and rebates, known in Hollywood as “free money,” offered by a state government desperate to stimulate the local economy. Which was one reason why
Revolt of the Zombie Strippers
was being shot in Gallup and not in a warehouse in Van Nuys. The other reason was that the producers of the film were so incredibly cheap, they couldn’t afford even the simplest digital effects.
    But, sadly, they could afford Chet, who was finding it harder and harder to get work that took advantage of his many skills. So he’d schlepped from L.A. to the hellhole of Gallup just for the pleasure of plying his trade. He didn’t want to spend his days in a trailer powdering noses and applying concealer to the Botoxed faces of aging actresses for shit wages. Instead, he was out in the blazing desert sun making a bunch of young strippers look like decomposing brain-hungry corpses for even worse wages.
    The usually jovial Chet might have found the decomposingstrippers amusing if he wasn’t so miserably depressed. And then he looked up from the bottom of his fourth beer and noticed Kate sitting on the bar stool next to him. He had no idea how long she’d been there, studying him with undisguised curiosity.
    “Can I buy you another beer?” she asked, gesturing to his empty glass.
    It was an unbelievable question. No woman in a bar had ever offered to buy him a drink before, and while he wasn’t painful to the eyes, he knew he wasn’t Sam Worthington