EBO

EBO
Category: Short
Genre: Science Fiction
Logline: A young husband finds the cure for his wife’s incurable disease sitting in an old tanker inside a junkyard, but the owner of the yard is not about to let him leave with it or let his secret get out to the rest of the world.

Matt and Shana Reed are a young newlywed couple who moved away from a small town to the big city and who were forced to return to their roots when the Grand Conjunction occurred – the alignments of the nine planets in our solar system.

The various radioactive particles emanating s from the combination of the planets in the sky, mixed with the sun’s rays, produced a radioactive skin disease called the Shimmers. It was thought at first that sunscreen would protect the population, but little did anyone realize—until it was too late—the chemicals in the sunscreen acted as a catalyst to making the disease full-blown. A vaccine called EBO was created to counter the radiations’ effect, but people fought and killed each other over it. Soon, EBO became almost nonexistent as people hoarded it for themselves and their families.

Because aluminum salts like aluminum hydroxide and aluminum phosphate are common adjunctive properties to help stabilize the other chemicals in the vaccine, people took it upon themselves to melt down any aluminum they could find and inject it into themselves to build up their body’s immunity to the disease.

Shana has contracted the Shimmers. As a last-ditch effort, she and Matt break into a junkyard to find aluminum scraps to treat Shana. Matt is cornered at gunpoint by the yard’s owner, Creek Butler, an old redneck who’s seen more than his share of thieves, but Shana gets the drop on Creek. The couple force Creek to take them to his home behind the junkyard to use a common contraption called a COOKER to melt down the aluminum to inject into Shana’s veins, heroine style.

When the couple removes their face masks and skull caps inside Creek’s home, Creek recognizes them because he was friends with Matt’s deceased parents. Creek gets on them for his mistreatment and agrees to help them. He brings them his cooker, and Matt melts down a piece of an aluminum side-view mirror to inject into a weak Shana, who’s almost at death’s door.

Creek, knowing that the metal is toxic and killing more people than it is helping, knocks the aluminum out of Matt’s hands. He tells him there’s a better way. He takes them back out into the yard and rolls back a tarp covering a sludge-covered, rusted-out tanker marked EBO, which he hijacked a while back. Only a couple of sips of the EBO are all it takes to heal Shana, and she does a black-flip in the yard to show her power and energy. The acid rains, a common occurrence since the alignment, begin to fall, and the three head back to Creek house for shelter.

While the couple sleeps, Creek comes back out into the yard in the morning to gets some more of the EBO for the couple to take with them. Creek never shows the couple the stolen truck shipping order that he keeps hidden in a desk drawer. The tanker’s true content is only a PLACEBO trial vaccine.