What’s happening next:
Jenny’s stuck in pediatrics. Lanz is coming for her.
Blake and I want Benny to take Randall’s chainsaw, but we’ll leave that up to Jeff.
Randall needs to keep the girl safe, and get down to the basement and flip on the circuit breaker so he can use the intercom like Clay did, to get a message to Jenny.
Stacie and Adam have to deal with birth, and Oasis. Blake, I dunno where your Grammie Ann scene fits in (nice scene!) Stick it into 2.0 where it goes.
Clay and Shanna are heading to the parking lot, but they’ll find Mortimer there, tearing cars and tires and radios to shreds. Should have a Mort POV scene here, doing it. He’s also stronger than the other draculas, so Clay may take it as a personal challenge to try to bring him down.
Also, Shanna is going to either tell Clay, or use internal monologue, to recap how this outbreak might have happened, going back in history to recall Baron Von Wolkenstein. This will give the reader a bit more of where the vampires came from, how they spread and helped to form the vampire legend that we all know. Blake and I have a lot of this figured out, so if you can set it up, Paul, we can just plug it in.
The police will be coming soon. We all have our villains to deal with (Clay and Shanna vs. Mort and a lot of draculas, Randall vs. Benny, Jenny vs. Lanz, Stacie and Adam vs. Oasis.)
I think we can take this up to the army surrounding the hospital. Then we can begin the final act.
Joe
September 8, 2010
I put up some new Clay and cut off at a spot where Joe and Blake can put in the myth/lore they’ve worked up. After that, I’ll have Clay give Shanna the ring (he thinks it’s possible he won’t see her again). They’ll make it to the parking lot to find the dead staties and the slashed tires.
Paul
• • •
I added Draculas 2.2, which includes a very short moment on page 113 where Randall loses his chainsaw.
Also Benny 2.0, in which the clown picks up the aforementioned chainsaw.
Jeff
September 9, 2010
BLOOD BLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOOD…STOP! He released the girl he’d been slurping, even though she still had some blood left. Moorecook wanted them to turn. He wanted as many of his kind as possible.
This implies if victims die they don’t turn. But what about the morgue scene?
Paul
• • •
If they die, they come back, but they can die through exsanguination. A dracula needs a certain amount of blood left to transform. Which is why draining their blood kills draculas.
I’ll try to make that clearer in the text.
Joe
• • •
Okay, I’m going to have Clay and Shanna in the parking lot with the ruined tires and the dead state cops. They can’t escape but they’d be crazy to go back in…
…unless they see Jenny waving from an upper floor window. Clay will go back in to get her, Shanna will come along (because what if these dead staties turn into monsters?) and that’s when Clay and Randall meet.
As I said before, Clay will be wounded and will find a dramatic way to take himself out of the picture and take a whole buncha draculas with him.
Think it would be possible to have a conference call and do a little spitballing? I’m not comfortable with the complete isolation of the hospital. Every patient room has a land-line phone. Calls would be going out left and right. When the sheriff calls in the staties, the police beat reporters hear about it. Local TV stations would be sending camera crews. National cable TV news would be picking it up and sending helicopters for aerial views. You’ve seen it: I guy waving a gun and the whole world’s on it. People can suspend their disbelief only so far. If we’re going to keep them onboard, we need cell towers down, we need land-line junctions exploding, WE NEED A CONSPIRACY!
The series potential here is obvious and I think we need yet another layer.
Paul
• • •
Here’s what Blake and I have been thinking:
Jenny is trapped in a storage closet. Randall is going to fight his way back to her. I’d like him to confront Clay, and for them to have a physical tussle. (I think they should stop fighting when Randall quotes a line from the movie ALIENS, as I mentioned in a previous email.) Clay could agree to help Randall get Jenny, but first he needs to get Shanna safe.
Randall deals with Benny and his chainsaw. Jenny deals with Lanz. Adam and Stacie deal with Oasis.
Clay and Shanna get to the parking lot. Clay leaves Shanna with the media—they do arrive because they were called—but Clay is honor bound to go back in to help Randall. But first, he proposes to her.
Clay, on his way to Jenny and Randall, encounters Adam and Stacie. He helps to kill Oasis, and they join Randall to save Jenny.
They do save Jenny, but Randall gets bitten. Jenny refuses to let Clay kill him, and Clay agrees, but will be ready when Randall turns. They decide the way to survive is to get onto the roof and flag down the TV helicopter circling the hospital.
They’re chased to the roof. Clay is down to his last few rounds. Randall becomes a dracula. But his love for Jenny is so strong he doesn’t attack her—he attacks all the draculas coming after them. He wipes out a bunch in a killing frenzy, but is mortally wounded.
Clay can either die heroically, or else get off the roof and wind up with Shanna for a happy ending.
Adam dies heroically, but gets his wife and child into the TV helicopter, which lands on the helipad on the roof.
The army arrives. Jenny stays with a dying Randall on the roof. Just as they’re surrounded by draculas, the army blows up the hospital.
A young, bloody man survives. He’s Mortimer, who changed back into something resembling a human—the real Count Dracula who is now going to turn the world. This is a reverse Night of the Living Dead ending. Rather than the rescuers killing the hero, the rescuers save the villain.
I want the media and the army to come. There’s no need to keep them at bay. The secluded area, and the local cops dead, mean it will take some time for the army to show up.
We’ve only got about 3000 words each to write with our characters, then the slam bang ending where we can divvy up the final scenes.
How does that sound?
Joe
• • •
I’m okay with this, and I do like the finale happening on the hospital roof…Paul does this address your concerns with the isolation, which I also had from the beginning? I’m up for a conference call if we need to flesh this out some more.
Blake
• • •
Here’s what Blake and I have been thinking:
Jenny is trapped in a storage closet. Randall is going to fight his way back to her. I’d like him to confront Clay, and for them to have a physical tussle. (I think they should stop fighting when Randall quotes a line from the movie ALIENS, as I mentioned in a previous email.) Clay could agree to help Randall get Jenny, but first he needs to get Shanna safe.
Okay, I’ll have to rewrite the stairwell scene. I can have C & S forced upstairs by the draculas and bump into Randall and the kid. (Speaking of the kid, it would be cool to have her transform into a dracula while she’s on Randall’s back. He notices these little teeth dropping on his shoulder…)
Randall deals with Benny and his chainsaw. Jenny deals with Lanz. Adam and Stacie deal with Oasis.
Clay and Shanna get to the parking lot. Clay leaves Shanna with the media—they do arrive because they were called—but Clay is honor bound to go back in to help Randall. But first, he proposes to her.
Okay. I’ll have him pull out his MM-1 semi-auto grenade launcher (a la Dogs of War) loaded with 40mm buckshot rounds instead of grenades, and go back in.