Double Feature: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies/Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies (The Russel Middlebrook Series Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

worried about what people would think. It's like they were upset because of the way it made them feel, but now they were retroactively applying religion to it, to justify their preexisting feelings.
    I'm not saying my parents were hypocrites. I'm just putting it out there, okay?
    "Russel, you can't be gay!" my mom said, erupting again with a regularity that was suddenly not unlike Old Faithful. "What would our friends say?"
    I give up: it's true, my parents were hypocrites.
    "He'll help you," my dad interjected. "Father Franklin? He's good at this kind of thing."
    "I don't need help," I repeated. "You guys sound like you're the ones who need the help. Why don't you talk to Father Franklin?"
    "We can all talk to him together if you'd like."
    That was all I needed. Three against one!
    "No, that's okay," I said.
    "So you'll talk to him?" my dad asked me.
    At that point, it seemed like there was only one thing I could say to get my parents to shut up. Besides, they were my parents. What could I do?
    "Yeah," I said. "I'll talk to the damn priest."

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    That Saturday, we had our first day of extra work on Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies . We had a wardrobe-and-makeup call at eight in the morning, so Gunnar and Em picked me up at seven-thirty. Min wasn't with us—she had her own car and lived on the opposite side of town anyway.
    I felt like crap on a cracker. I am so not a morning person.
    As we drove to the shoot, Gunnar enlightened us on another aspect of moviemaking.
    "That board they knock together before every scene?" he said. "That's called a clapper board. They use it to keep track of each take in postproduction. They record the sound and the film image on two different machines, you know? So they need some way to make sure that the image matches up with the right sound track."
    "I thought they rerecorded all the dialogue anyway," Em said.
    "Not always," he said. "Sometimes they try to keep the on-set dialogue, because it looks and sounds more natural."
    We drove into the school parking lot, and I spotted Min and Kevin over by his car. It looked like they were talking. I wondered what they were talking about .
    We pulled up next to them, and I climbed out of the car.
    "Hey," I said.
    "Morning!" Kevin said.
    Min just rolled her eyes. I wasn't sure what that was about. Had they been talking about me?
    We walked toward the school as a group.
    "Why do we need makeup anyway?" Kevin said, a little too loudly. "They're not turning us into zombies yet. Aren't we just normal teenagers today?"
    "It's so our faces don't shine in the movie lights," Gunnar said. "It won't be full makeup."
    "Well, what about wardrobe?" Kevin said. "Don't we already dress like normal teenagers? We are normal teenagers."
    Even Gunnar didn't have an answer for that one.
    Soon I found myself walking side by side with Kevin. "Isn't it funny?" he said, talking too loudly again. "We get up this early every morning. But today it seems early. Is it just because it's Saturday?"
    "Probably," I said. But to myself, I was wondering why I hadn't ever noticed before how Kevin's voice got louder when he got nervous. What exactly was he nervous about?
    Just inside the school, there were a couple of production assistants waiting for us at a table. They took our parental release forms (I had told my dad it was "a school project," which it sort of was). Then they gave us each a plastic number, and said they'd call when it was our turn to be made pretty. I was number two.
    Finally, a production assistant led us to the school cafeteria, which she referred to as the "hospitality suite." There was only one other person waiting inside, a girl.
    Min immediately dropped her plastic number.
    I bent down to pick it up for her. "Oops," I said, giving it back. "You dropped this."
    She didn't answer.
    The producers had set out some food—doughnuts, bagels, fruit, and juice—on one of the cafeteria tables. Min headed over to check it out. Maybe it was early