[Laurence - TSW] The Hero
“I think that went well, don’t you?” Laurence asked no one in particular. He was curled underneath a thin blanket, trying to rest on one of the pews in the church. He was used to the California weather; New England might as well have been a frozen tundra. He wasn’t sure what karma was doing to him lately, but he knew he didn’t like it.
At first it’d been like a bad acid trip. The dreams, the people speaking to him, blue fire exploding from him at random intervals. If he hadn’t been convinced the rehab doctors had given him a bad mix of meds before he left he probably would have been freaked out. As it was, he just went with the flow. He’d seen weirder things, after all. Never sober, but still. Fear and Loathing in Chino Hills.
Then he’d gotten sucked into a low budget action movie. The mysterious stranger with the card, the cryptic clues, then the mad scientist. That sucked. Not much else to say about that. Then the ultra-vivid out-of-body scenario, shotguns, magic healing, sword-battles against evil magic things in the subways of Tokyo… What the hell?
The speeches hadn’t helped much either. Between the hard-bitten Drill Sergeant ripped straight out of Full Metal Jacket and the boss who’d probably watched too much Basic Instinct he’d half expected to be given command of a crack squad of commandos. That’s when the genre shifted again.
He’d never been fond of horror movies. He couldn’t even just hunker down in the church here, nice and safe, occasionally taking a potshot at a nearby corpse and watch it dissolve at the doorway. No, he was the big damn hero. He had to stand tall and grin, fire off bullets and one-liners, pull Priscilla’s ass out of the fire when she jumped into a cluster of zombies. He had to ignore the stench of dead wet flesh, ignore the almost-human faces twisted in fear, panic, terror, anger, so many bad things. He had to ignore the overwhelming urge to vomit and sob and throw down his weapon and just run away.
If he did, he wasn’t really the hero, was he? He had to be the hero. He knew what would happen, otherwise: what always happened to the sidekick in a horror movie. He curled tighter under the blanket.