Girls Save the World in This One - Ash Parsons Page 0,27

the night, holed up with a bunch of desperate strangers in a lonely gas station.

And she’s one of the only female characters in early horror who isn’t a Madonna or a whore. And let’s not get me started on that horrible trope, which makes me so mad, and is a shortcut lazy storytellers take. As if a woman’s value is reduced to if she has sex or how often. Ugh.

Which is another reason why I love Janet O’Shea in Fight the Dead so very, very much.

She’s not a mother, not a lover, not a daughter. At the start of the movie she is shown on the phone, telling someone (presumably her boyfriend) that she’s not pregnant. It’s just a quick moment, but absolutely groundbreaking. After that, once the zombie apocalypse starts, she’s just a scared girl with big blonde helmet hair, looking out of her depth always, but holding in there somehow. Realistically. Authentically.

And she’s one of the last ones to die. Which is pretty good if you’re trapped in the zombie apocalypse. It’s all you can hope for, really.

Fight the Dead came out in 1968, when Janet was twenty-one. That makes her kind of old now; she’s in her seventies I guess, but in her pictures on the ZombieCon! website she looks spry. Or whatever word you use for a cute older lady. Like a fairy godmother. Except thin and with a cute pixie-cut hairstyle.

I leave my girls lounging and looking at their phones, and I walk down the one-sided row—windows all on one side, tables on the other.

If I’m being completely honest, I’m a little scared to go talk to Janet O’Shea by myself. It’s not that I think she’s going to bite me or anything (har!) and it’s not that I think she’ll be mean.

It’s just . . . I feel safer. I feel stronger. I feel like a better person with my friends around me. Because they’re so awesome! And if they like me, it shows I’m all right, right?

Or at least it camouflages how not-cool I actually am, comparatively.

Imani and Siggy, and Blair, too, before everything happened; they all hated it if I’d say that sort of thought out loud.

But it’s the way I feel.

Ugh, next year is going to suck so hard. How am I supposed to just start over? Sixth grade was bad enough, when we were split into different teams, and somehow I was the only one who got on the Cool Cats team, and they all got Flamingos.

My feet keep walking, and I’m going down the aisle, and even though there are other people here, well, it’s just not that crowded, and I start to feel bad for walking past these other actors. It’s like they’re animals in cages, on display. And when I make the mistake of glancing their way, I get glimpses of friendly smiles and tables with headshots and Sharpies, and these floor-to-ceiling banners telling you who they are and why they’re important to the horror movie world.

I start saying hi and giving these little apologetic waves, which I hope sort of encapsulate that I think they’re all awesome but I’m just a kid and don’t have enough money for all their autographs.

There she is. No one is waiting at her table. Janet O’Shea stands behind it, cute white-and-gray hair in a Peter Pan cut, and a smile that reaches her eyes. She’s tiny! She’s sweet, I can just tell. A booth-wide banner hangs behind her, with her black-and-white picture from Fight the Dead looking out from her most famous scene: when she first sees the zombies in the park. And her obnoxious brother makes fun of her fears; when she sees this shambling form coming toward them, he tells her it’s a wino. He makes fun of her! Saying, “There’s no stopping them, Vivian!” and then CRUNCH he gets bit.

Serves him right. Listen to your little sister’s gut, am I right? Women have more of a sense of self-preservation. Our Spidey senses are just attuned to these things. To danger.

A loud bang draws my eyes to the end of the hall and the emergency exit. A skinny white man in a T-shirt and jeans is messing