APEX
INT. DIRT ARENA – MORNING
Red clay baked to the color of old liver, cracked in patterns that look planned. The sun overhead.
One hundred men. Counted twice by the promoter, a clipboard man with pit stains who mouthed the numbers like a child learning to read. Insurance purposes.
They stand in accidental demographics. Four guys from the same CrossFit box compare calluses near the eastern wall, their matching Inov-8s. A cluster of middle managers check phones. No signal. One guy, DEREK, lies face down in the dirt, arms pinned to his sides, breathing through his teeth.
"Just getting comfortable," he tells the ground.
Six hundred pounds of silverback shambles through a gate that someone has welded shut behind him. The animal rolls its shoulders the way a man rolls his shoulders when he has never once been told no. Probably something like "Mr. Pickles" at whatever facility they pulled him from.
Mr. Pickles stops. One hand comes up, scratches. The other rests on the ground, fingers splayed, each one thicker than a man's wrist. The yawn opens him all the way back to the molars. The teeth go further than teeth should.
Forty feet away, a marketing director from Scottsdale watches his own khakis darken at the crotch. Beside him, a car salesman stares straight ahead, jaw working, and says he's fine.
CLOSE-UP: THE GORILLA'S EYES
Brown glass. The eyes move across one hundred men the way a man's eyes move across furniture he has to shift.
BILL, thirty-five, seven years into the minimum payments on an MBA that cost more than his parents' first home, steps forward. His Costco running shoes leave prints in the clay.
"There's got to be rules," Bill says. "A referee. Something."
TYLER, twenty-eight, whose Instagram bio reads entrepreneur though the product is vape juice and the revenue is his mother's Amex, grins the grin of a man who has never been hit in the face.
"Brother, the only rule is—"
Crack.
Tyler's skull opens and what comes out is the wrong color. Pink. The tender pink of shrimp at a buffet.
Ninety-nine men remaining.
The gym bros charge. Tribal ink on their deltoids. Pre-workout still buzzing behind their eyelids.
Mr. Pickles catches the first one, BRAD, by the ankle. Lifts him the way a man lifts a sandbag. Uses him.
DEREK (from the ground, face in dirt)
"Oh no. I'm so dead. Very deceased. Don't mind me."
The gorilla steps over him. One foot lands close enough that Derek smells it: damp straw, fermenting fruit.
Three more bros drop in four seconds. Their shaker bottles burst. Whey protein and blood mixing into a paste that costs forty-two dollars a tub.
MATTHEW, Goldman Sachs, third divorce pending because each wife eventually met the version of him that came home at 2 a.m. with powder on his cuffs, backs toward the wall.
"We need to short his position. Find the weakness."
JONATHAN, hedge fund, who had cocaine for breakfast the way other men have oatmeal, reaches for his wallet.
"I'll give anyone here ten grand to go first."
STEVE, day trader, who lives with his mother and calls it "managing the family property," snorts.
"Make it Bitcoin."
Mr. Pickles arrives mid-negotiation. Grabs Jonathan by his Hermès tie. The silk holds. The gorilla swings the body twice, and on the second swing Jonathan's own Rolex hits Marcus in the temple. Marcus drops. The watch face cracks but the second hand keeps sweeping.
Ninety-one men remaining.
PROFESSOR WILLIAMS, Philosophy, Yale, three books published, nine copies sold between them, draws himself up to his full five-foot-eight.
"Gentlemen! Violence is just fear expressing—"
His head separates from his neck with a sound like someone pulling a boot from deep mud. The head travels. Lands near Derek.
DEREK (still playing dead, whispers to the new arrival)
"You were saying?"
Williams. The body beside Derek is Tyler, dead three minutes now. Tyler's mouth still open, mid-word, the last consonant of "rule" frozen on his tongue.
Forty seconds in. Seventy-three men left.
It starts as a sound. A low collective exhale, seventy-three sets of lungs arriving at the same conclusion at the same instant.
They stop looking at each other's clothes.
A man in a red cap grabs the shoulder of a man he'd have crossed the street to avoid an hour ago. A portfolio manager locks arms with a barista whose name he will never learn. Nobody checks a phone.
They move. A single organism. Eight thousand five hundred pounds of credit card debt and custody schedules and unfilled prescriptions and every lie they told at dinner.
Mr. Pickles ROARS for the first time.
SLOW MOTION:
Bodies arcing through afternoon light. A toupee helicoptering past the sun. Teeth hitting clay and bouncing.
REAL TIME:
Crack. Snap. The soft wet sound of something structural giving way inside a man whose name nobody here will remember.
Bill. Remember Bill. Bill kneels on the gorilla's back with his hands wrapped around a length of intestine that belongs to someone else. The intestine runs warm and slick through his grip, and he pulls it tight the way you pull a line when the thing on the other end wants to kill you. His wedding ring bites into the swollen flesh of his finger. His breath comes in counts: one, two, one, two. Six weeks of Krav Maga at the Jewish Community Center. He quit because the parking was bad.
CHEN, a barista, sinks his teeth through the gorilla's fur and finds the artery beneath. The taste hits him in the back of the throat, hot metal and salt. Chen holds on.
The gorilla spins. Men orbit. Two peel off and hit the wall with a sound like grain sacks dropped from a truck bed.
DEREK (from the ground, covered in fluids that belong to other people)
"Still dead over here. Super dead. The deadest."
One cheek pressed to the clay. One eye open. Through that eye: the underside of the gorilla's jaw, the cords of muscle working, the foam at the corner of the lips. Bill's hands.
Derek closes the eye.
Grade school, the bigger kids came through and Derek went flat. The apartment, his father's voice climbing registers, and Derek went flat. The first marriage. The second. Go still. Let whatever it is pass over. The stone survives. The stone did not see anything.
Fifty-one men left. Eight thousand five hundred pounds of desperate human against six hundred pounds of silverback.
They pile on. Arms and knees and elbows, each man gripping the man beside him.
The gorilla's arm breaks three jaws on its way up. Forty-eight jaws left.
CLOSE-UP: BILL'S WEDDING RING
The gold band has bent into his finger, pressed into flesh so deep it will need pliers to remove. His thumb finds the gorilla's eye socket. The pad of the thumb against the wet give of the eyeball.
He pushes. Less than he expected. Like pressing a grape into warm clay. The gorilla looks at him with the remaining eye.
Pop.
Vitreous humor hits Bill's cheek. Warm. He opens his mouth and the sound that comes out is laughter or is grief. Same muscles.
Mr. Pickles drops. The chest still rises. The arms still twitch.
Nobody lets go.
THE PROFESSOR'S ASSISTANT, who survived by pressing himself behind his mentor's torso, lifts his head.
"Is it... over?"
The gorilla twitches. One arm.
Everyone tightens their grip. Derek screams.
DEREK (jumping to his feet, the act abandoned)
"FUCK THIS SHIT I'M OUT—"
Fifty sets of eyes find him. His shirt is clean. Everyone else looks like they've been fed through a combine.
Derek lowers himself back to the ground with the care of a man climbing into his own coffin.
"I mean... oh no... still dead..."
The gorilla's chest rises. Falls. The interval between breaths stretches.
Does not rise again.
Thirty-eight men standing. Twelve crawling. Derek horizontal by choice.
They separate. It takes time. Fingers have to be pried from other men's shirts. One man grips another man's belt and neither of them can say when that started. They step apart and look at each other the way strangers look at each other after sex, when the sweat has cooled and what remains is two people who ride the same elevator in the morning.
BILL (staring at his hands, at the ring sunk into his finger, at the clear fluid drying on his wrist)
GREG, nineteen, holds the side of his head. Blood between his fingers. The left ear is gone, the whole ear, and Greg does not know this yet. In the parking lot he will reach for it. His hand will find smooth wet nothing.
"Honest," Greg says. "At least he was honest."
In the corner, someone's phone buzzes. A single ping in all that silence. A Slack notification.
Hey team! Quick sync at 2?
The man reads it. Reads it again. Laughter bends him in half and the laughter becomes retching and the retching becomes laughter.
AERIAL SHOT:
The arena from above. At the center, Mr. Pickles, six hundred pounds, motionless. Around him, in a rough circle, men finding their phones, checking their faces in cracked screens. One pats his pockets for car keys. Another tries to button his shirt with fingers that will not stop.
DEREK (standing, brushing dirt off a shirt that carries no stain)
"So... we split the prize money thirty-eight ways, or—"
BILL
"There's no prize money."
DEREK
"What?"
BILL
"There was never prize money."
Derek pulls his phone from his pocket. The screen lights up. One bar. A text from his wife:
Did you remember to grab milk?
He looks at Mr. Pickles. At Bill's hands. At his own clean palms.
"Anyone know if they validated parking?"
CUT TO BLACK.
TITLE CARD: "Derek survived every major historical conflict by playing dead. He now runs a successful life coaching business."
SOUND: A single fly. Then ten. Then ten thousand, the sound of wings on wings on wings, arriving for the clay and the blood and the sun that never once looked down.