They all had a good laugh about that during the break, but then they started hearing more and more about the number of expected casualties and it stopped being funny. Jeremy couldn’t remember who suggested doing a fund-raiser. Maybe him, maybe Tom. Maybe Lydia. Or maybe it was one of those things that just evolved. At first it was something they thought would be good if someone else did it. Then it was something they thought they should do. Then it became something they needed to do. Then it became what was actually happening tonight.
Alcohol and some serious weed were involved in every stage of the process. Smoke your way to the right level and everything seems incredibly doable, even logical. The basic pitch was a comedy marathon for the duration of the storm, with Tom Segura and Jeremy Essig as ongoing headliners. Calls went out to other comics within driving distance.
Finding a name for it took the longest. Tom wanted to call it Blow Me, Zelda. Jeremy liked Comic Relief: Redneck Edition, but Lydia thought they’d get sued for that. After another blunt they settled on Laugh at the Storm, and bullied a friend who had a 501(c)(3) to accept donations via PayPal.
Now they were into the second hour of it.
They streamed the show live to the Net and put clips on YouTube, reposting those to Twitter and Facebook. Some friends of Jeremy and Tom Skyped in and did bits that were flashed onto the wall. While the comics were doing their bits, Lydia put the event on Foursquare, then pulled photos from the video stream and posted them on Pinterest, Tumblr, and InstaGram. Suddenly it was real. It was an actual charity fund-raiser for the victims of Superstorm Zelda.
The crowd at Trickster’s were totally into it, and within forty minutes carloads of people showed up from all over Pittsburgh, fighting their way through storm winds and rain hard enough to swell all three of the city’s big rivers. It was standing-room only, and the bartenders were mixing drinks and pulling pints as fast as they could.
Jeremy did several twenty-minute sets, cycling through old material and some new stuff, and also improvising on what was happening.
“According to the Internet news,” he said, half-smiling as he paced in front of the audience, “there are monsters out in the sticks around Stebbins. Slack-faced, empty-eyed, unthinking, shambling hulks who will kill anything that moves. And aside from the locals, they also have zombies.”
The audience loved that. It was a running joke that the entire length of the state between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh was an even more redneck version of Mississippi. A red state with blue bookends. Certifie
d gold for observational comics like Jeremy Essig and Tom Segura.
“It’s not really surprising that they have a zombie outbreak in farm country. All those graaaiiiiins.”
A smaller laugh that time, but they were still with him. Jeremy took a beat to comment on the lack of laughs, and that got a laugh. One of the golden rules of his kind of comedy was to own the bad moments so they were part of a shared experience, rather than simply try to limp away from a wounded joke.
He switched gears a bit and drove his routine onto safer ground by talking about how people on the Net were saying that the government was trying to cover up the zombie thing. No matter which lever the audience pulled, it was usually safe ground to attack the government as a whole. Not necessarily taking potshots at specific politicians but at the huge, self-destructive, creaking machine that was national politics. He saw Tom and Lydia watching from offstage, grinning and nodding encouragement.
Jeremy took some of his old jokes about FEMA’s failure after Katrina and gave them a Superstorm Zelda spin.
“If you wait until the zombies eat most of the people, then you only have to save a few. And since the survivors will be the ones fast enough to outrun the living dead, you have people who look better on TV.”
From there he cruised into the vagaries of pop culture.
“Tell me there won’t be a reality show in six months. Real Zombies of Stebbins County. Strap on a lie detector and tell me we won’t be watching that.”
And he was casting the show with redneck subtypes when someone in the audience screamed.
It wasn’t a scream of laughter or even a shout of inarticulate drunken mirth.
It was a real scream.
A stop the show scream.
The kind of scream where the entire crowd is jerked out of the moment, the spell instantly broken, and they focus on a single spot in the room.
In the back of the small club, standing framed in the pale rectangle of light from the lobby, stood a tall figure. A man. Bare-chested and wild-looking. Grinning. The woman who’d screamed sat at the table closest to the exit, and she and everyone at her table were frozen in a tableau of horrified recoil.
And …
Here Jeremy’s mind began stumbling over the details.
The man was wrong.
His whole body was wrong.
It was red.
Bright, glistening red.
Like he’d been splashed by red paint. Or …