Invasion from Planet Z-4000, by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
It is ten o’clock on a spring morning in Death Valley and the dunes have started singing, heated sand grains avalanching with a bass hum like the blades of ghostly helicopters. Before this week, Alec never knew that this happened.
The temperature is somewhere in the nineties. Sweat already bands Alec’s forehead under his hat and slicks the nape of his neck beneath his headphones. The nosepieces of his glasses—his grandfather’s frames, Alec’s own prescription lenses recut to fit—slip and begin to raise the day’s fresh welts. Alec hears the natural wonder of the singing dunes and lets a ragged wail tear out of him. Two extras in their eraser-smelling lizard-man face masks turn to give him a wide berth en route to the card table stacked with bottled water and packets of instant coffee, the shoot’s attempt at a craft services department. White-knuckled, Alec grips his clipboard schedule—already two hours behind.
There’s the squeak of a rusty door spring, a familiar prod between his shoulders from above, and Anna spins him to look her over. She jumps the stairs of the women’s prep trailer and poses against its tawny, bug-spattered siding. The camper is one of the mismatched caravan of three they have dragged to the dunes with borrowed pickups.
“So?” Anna says, and sweeps her hand across her body. Her hair is still bedridden and heat-damaged, her face mapped with creases from their pillow. She and Alec have pitched their tent in the lee of a truck for the past two nights, forgoing a spot in one of the RVs as insurance against mutiny. Anna has always hated camping. But she is a good sport this morning—already in full costume as Jane Solomon. Sand-colored linen shirt ornamented in snaps and buckles; many-pocketed cargo shorts that fall voluminously to just above her knees. A lot of khaki, Alec had worried at first, but on his wife it’s classic sexy field-scientist, bit of an eighties throwback vibe. The leading lady character design was genius on the part of Matt—Alec’s writing partner, former roommate, and current male lead. And after weeks of shooting in the outfit, indoors and out, Anna’s calves and forearms have tanned desert-credible. Alec hopes the change hasn’t been picked up on camera, to be patchily edited out of order.
“You’re ready,” Alec observes.
“How are we this morning?” she asks, her voice arch pre-coffee.
“Behind.” Alec scrapes his fingernail over a freckle on his forearm.
“How far?” Anna stretches. Her voice is kind but tinged with something that blips on Alec’s Geiger counter. A radiation of warning that has been building between them in the weeks they’ve spent hemorrhaging their newly joint savings on the movie.
Anna cocks a hip and waits, adjusting her pose, folding and refolding her arms like a cheerleader at her senior portrait. “Alec? How far behind?”
“Not bad,” he says. “We’ll get what we need. Coffee?” He thumbs over his shoulder and shuffles backwards toward the table. Sand piles against the heels of his sneakers and filters into his socks. Anna squints at him and, finally, nods.
Invasion from Planet Z-4000 was supposed to be the jewel of Alec’s BFA in Film Production last year, a collaboration between him and Matt. Planetary geologist Jane Solomon and jaded vet Rex Hampton, dishonorably discharged for a crime he didn’t commit, team up—begrudgingly at first, though rough edges turn to love by the third act—to defend Earth against invading forces of humanoid lizard aliens from a distant asteroid, bent on colonizing our world and terraforming it into a desert monoclimate. Classic space western. Lawrence of Arabia meets Alien. At once a celebration and transcendence of the subgenre, was the agreed-upon goal.
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