The One with Ludlow and the Phonebook

Written by Anakin McFly

(After people said that they would pay money to watch Keanu read from a phonebook.)

A drab, grey room. Ludlow sits in the middle, handcuffed to a table, forced to read the phone book aloud.

His bored and increasingly angry voice fills the room. On the other side of the bulletproof glass wall sit a scattering of fans who are starting to realise that maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. They first started to realise this somewhere around the early B's; for the more attention-challenged ones, somewhere around the A's. Only a thousand pages to go.

A wave of restlessness moves through the crowd. Guards glare at them until they stop.

Ludlow reaches the end of the page and flips it. For a moment he just stares at the page in barely-suppressed defiance and takes a tense breath. He looks up at the crowd. His gaze is close to murderous.

"Please continue," a guard drones, hidden menace in the command.

"...Brown, Emmett Lathrop. 1640 Riverside Drive." Ludlow stops, throat choked up with rage. His handcuffed fists clench on the table.

"Continue."

"Hill Valley, California 95420." Another pause. Another scathing glare.

"And his phone number?" the guard asks. His hand twitches above the electric rod.

Ludlow grits his teeth. "916..."

"Go on."

"555..."

"You're slowing down, Detective Ludlow. Do you need more... persuasion?"

The electric rod is out of its holster now, sparking the still air with threats.

"Get that thing the f*** away from me."

"Well then, you know what you have to do. Read."

"Why?"

The guard shrugs. "They asked for it," he says, pointing the rod in the direction of the audience, now a little more interested in the goings on of the room. "They paid for it. Get on with it. Time's a-wasting." He taps his watch to make the point.

"I don't want to do it," Ludlow says, slowly, forcefully, with a look that would have sent many a regular human being running for cover.

The guards are not regular human beings.

"Mm-hm," says the one with the rod. "Well, I'm afraid you don't have the luxury of that choice. Hurry up and you might just be done by teatime tomorrow."

Ludlow continues glaring.

"I believe you were halfway through a phone number?" the guard says in encouragement. "916555-?

Ludlow continues glaring.

The guard moves closer.

"You're being stubborn, Detective Lud-"

Ludlow wrenches his handcuffed hands off the table with an angry cry, crashing it into the guard and sending the phonebook flying off the table; the guard stumbles back, dropping the electric rod as his colleagues come to his rescue.

Ludlow swings the table at them with painful wrists, knocking out another; the guard lands on the phonebook, lying coincidentally open at 'Reeves, Keanu'.

Alarms ring. More guards pour into the room; they jump on Ludlow, pinning him to the ground, unlocking the handcuffs to rid him of his one weapon as he yells and struggles and tries to bite anyone who gets too close; parting for the guard with the tranquiliser to come, who aims it squarely at his chest-

BANG.

The guard's eyes widen in shock. The tranquiliser falls from his grasp; he collapses onto the floor in death, revealing the person who stands behind him with a smoking Holy Shotgun in his hands and a smoking cigarette in his mouth.

John Constantine casually pulls the trigger a second time, ignoring the stunned looks of the guards scrambling to get out of the way, hands rushing to their own guns and never quite making it.

Ludlow frees himself from the grasps of dead hands and sits among the bodies, looking up at his rescuer. "You," he says.

John surveys the enraptured audience. "I'm sorry," he says. "Was I interrupting something?"

Ludlow gets off the floor. "Yeah, I was reading."

John's gaze falls on the open phonebook. He smirks. "You owe me so much for this."

"Go to hell."

"I've told you before, I need a cat."

They walk towards the door and freedom, the eyes of the audience tracking them as they go.

Ludlow looks at them, meeting their eyes.

"4. 3. 8. 5," he finishes with deliberate firmness; and then he follows John Constantine out the door and out the room, never to return again.

#