MALIBU, CALIFORNIA, USA

[As Roy Elliot walks back down the Malibu Pier Fortress back to his car, my next interview, and by far the biggest name on my list, parks her touring bike and walks down to me. Lena Gutierrez still has her childlike face despite the fact that she's pushing forty, and walks with all the glow that one would expect from somebody who had just won an Oscar for Best Actress. While passersby mostly keep their distance, all eyes are focused on her as she takes a seat next to me.]

I've learned to forgive my old bosses. Sure, they were a bunch of soulless corporate hacks who Breck Scott will likely be joining in the fourth circle, but they thought they were protecting their talent, and in hindsight they were right, at least on that count. And from a purely financial perspective, it looked like a good idea at the time. Shareholders still meant something in the early days of the Panic, so if you told them that you were going to kill your golden geese and cancel all production on new shows and movies, how long do you think it would take before your pink slip came in?

When corporate found out about that celebrity fortress in Long Island, a lightbulb must've lit up in their heads. They were not only going to create their own retreat around their studio in Burbank, private security and all, but they would keep filming new material for the duration of the zombie apocalypse. It helped that pretty much their entire cast and crew, plus their families, lived in the LA area. Most of us – those who hadn't run for the hills, at least – managed to make it to the new studio in time to get the place up and running. Since the TV system was reserved for news, propaganda and emergency alerts, we cranked out a feature film about once every month instead of shooting TV episodes. Some of the movies were original, a few of them were continuations of old series. My show was one of those that got continued. Mind Over Manners, it was called. You look like you're old enough to remember it.

That was the one about the high school kids with psychic powers, right? My little sister loved that show.

Lots of little sisters loved that show. The last season finale before the Panic was the highest rated program, other than sports, in cable history. I run a little museum for that show, and all the others. A giant shrine to pre-war kids' TV, from the old days of Nickelodeon to the last weeks before the Panic. Filled to the brim with old merchandise that people sent in or scavenged – backpacks, DVD sets, binders, standees, clothes, props from the set, diaries… the diaries. Shit. Forgive my language, but reading some of those diaries, the last thoughts of scared, panicked little kids whose only worry just a few months earlier was whether they'd be allowed to go to the sleepover, or if they could get up the courage to ask their pretty classmate to the middle school dance, or… or…

[Lena struggles to hold back tears, but quickly collapses. I leave her alone for a couple of minutes before she comes back to normal.]

Sorry there. It's just… I've tried to push those diaries into the back of my mind. I remember one of them, wishing that Sandra, my character from the show, would come and use her powers to save her from the monsters outside. It was the last entry. I… you know, let's just move on, okay?

[Not wanting to trouble her any more, I change the subject.]

So what went on at Burbank?

At first we tried to dance, or in our case sing and dance, our way around the giant elephant in the room. We kept making the happy, idealistic comedies and musicals that characterized the old network, avoiding any mention of zombies. The producers seemed to think that, if we could recreate a pre-war fantasy world with our movies, we could raise morale and combat ADS, especially among the young.

Kinda didn't work that way. How were people supposed to go back to the old world when the new one was pounding on their doors and windows every waking moment? And even watching the films we put out you could see right through the veneer of happiness on screen. We'd all lost BFFs and loved ones, we were all fighting back tears trying to smile for the cameras, and it showed. The outside talent pool had dried up – parents had much better things for their kids to do – so most of us had to do double duty, shooting two or even three movies at once. The sets, props and costumes were all getting worn out. Sixteen hour work days weren't uncommon. We all looked like Stepford wives, broken hollow shells trying to pretend that we were happy, and it wasn't working. Eventually, we'd had enough.

The Burbank riot.

What else could we do? They were working us like slaves, paying us checks that weren't worth the paper they were printed on. What were we even doing? Cranking out the same pathetic, saccharine pap we were making before the war? I think that some of those movies just made the ADS worse. The final straw was when Bridgit killed herself. Such a sweet girl. The only ray of sunshine still poking through in Burbank, always sang about how we could change the world, and when we were shooting a movie she just pulled out a letter opener and shoved it into her neck. Finally lost it. Mitchell, the asshole who took that footage and put it up online, I wanted to personally throw him into one of those Cuban zombie pits that I always hear about. Too bad he decided to go get drunk and go on a joyride right into the Five Colleges at the height of the Avalon siege. Watching Miracle at Avalon a few months later, I was screaming like a little girl at one of my old concerts when I saw him get eviscerated by that horde. The whole thing, caught on camera and displayed for the whole fucking world to see! Couldn't have died a more fitting death.

S-sorry, got a bit carried away there. What was I saying? Oh yeah.

All hell broke loose after she died. I personally wasn't in the boardroom when my co-workers charged their way up there, but I was in the lobby. I heard the crunch of the CEO's body hitting the ground outside, and saw the smear of red against the concrete. I always wondered who threw him out the window, or if he just jumped and saved them the trouble. Jennette, one of the girls who came here from our old rival network, she says she kicked him out the window like King Leonidas in 300, but then again, she's Jennette.

What happened after the riot?

They closed the studio for about a month. The ringleaders of the whole thing got dragged off for flogging and chain gang duty. I think I felt even more pathetic at that point than I did before. At least when filming was going on I was trying to do something! I was F-6, so I couldn't work. I couldn't contribute. I felt totally worthless.

Did you ever think about suicide?

[A pause.]

No. Never.

[Another pause.]

Y-yes. I couldn't help it. For a time, I thought Bridgit had the right idea. We were losing every day. Nothing was getting any better. I think the only reason why I didn't go through with it was because I took too long thinking about how I wanted to go out.

What made you change your mind?

My older brother. He was a huge comics nerd, reading all sorts of stuff from superheroes to Japanese manga. Sometimes, I snooped through his collection when I was bored. It was one of those manga that saved my life and reopened the studio.

Class Dismissed.

Oh yeah. As I read it, I thought up ways in my mind that I could adapt it to an American setting. I brought a couple of the writers in to read it. We watched Miracle at Avalon several times for ideas. That's when we settled on the final idea: us, some cameras, whatever weapons we could scrounge around the sets, and live zombies. Shoot it guerrilla style, in secret. We found a high school in Pasadena that had been used as a refugee camp, and had partly burned down. We rounded up some zombies and made ourselves a little horde that we kept locked up in the gym. In hindsight, what we did could've gotten a lot of people killed, but I don't regret one moment of it.

Especially once we started showing it to the kids back at Burbank.

What did the studio think of it?

They flipped right the eff out! They thought we'd all gone insane, going out on our own to shoot a movie, especially just two months after we'd rioted to stop filming. They had half a mind to give us to the police right there and then. But then the kids started raving about it. Suicides dropped to nearly zero. What Roy Elliot's films did for the grown-ups, Class Dismissed did for the youth of Burbank, and from there all over America. The perfect mix of teen romance, catty backstabbing and bone-crunching zombie mayhem. Hell, for many people just the novelty of seeing former tween pop stars killing zombies was enough to get butts in seats. My favorite scene was when we were blasting my old music at full volume to lure the zombies onto the football field for… disposal. Methinks the army owes us some credit for coming up with that trick.

[She smirks and laughs.]

The studio was running on full steam after that. Real production values. No more sugary-sweet fantasies. Okay, we were still cranking out fantasies, but they were more along the lines of "I wanna be a badass zombie hunter like Lena Gutierrez" than "I wanna be a fairytale princess/cheerleader/queen bee/pop star". I think our casts and crews burned through half the zombies west of the Rockies, we were making so many zombie-slaying epics. We even cameo'd in one of Elliot's "Wonder Weapons" movies.

Probably the moment when I realized that everything was gonna be alright was when we made Love Survives. It was right after we'd started pushing back across the Rockies. That movie was when we returned to the old musical-comedy format that most of us had made our names with. A teen zombie musical. Yes. It felt like we were back in the old days again. Finally got to dust off my old talent, the talent that got me hired in the first place. And shooting at Black Rock City, the place in the middle of the Nevada desert where those hipsters and artists banded together and held out for three years before rescue arrived. Ever see The Burning Dead, the documentary that they shot there?

Great movie.

But that wasn't the best part. Production on that movie just so happened to coincide with when the army reached Tennessee. When I saw them liberating Memphis, I knew that there was exactly one person I wanted to have in this movie. The studio kept saying "no, what if she doesn't make it?" "you can't shoot a movie on the front lines!" Why not? Roy Elliott was doing it all the time, I can't go out there just because I was a woman? And besides, if she could hold out in her bunker in the middle of nowhere for eight years while still writing songs, why can't I make just one visit to shoot this movie?

I can't begin to describe how much of a service she did. Remember when I said my brother's comics saved my life? I… wasn't being entirely truthful there. I picked up her broadcast over a shortwave radio I dug up. When most of the big musicians and celebrities were trying to get to that death trap in Long Island, she simply went back home to be with her family. Bought an old plantation home in southern Tennessee and turned it into a fortress, complete with a radio transmitter to signal for help – and tons of guest homes all around it. She made one last blog post before the power went out, saying that she would welcome all of her fans and anybody else who could reach her compound provided that they were willing to assist in its defense. Over a thousand people showed up. Nearly six hundred of them made it through.

And to think that she kept making music through it all! In between working on her fields and manning the barricades, she used what little spare time she had to maintain her radio station, which she kept improving through the parts she scavenged from the towns around her. For an hour every day, she took her guitar into the booth and just played. Songs about lost love, songs about fear, songs about hope. Hope. More than anything else, she gave me hope. Gave everybody hope, once she got her station connected with the government back west and they started playing those songs from Seattle to San Diego. That scene in Love Survives where the soldiers run up to her and give her that huge group hug? That wasn't staged. They'll never admit it, they'll say "ah, I never liked her music, what business did that pop tart have calling herself a country singer", but I know otherwise.

That was the beauty of celebrities. America never had official royalty like the British did, so we treated celebrities as our next best thing. People like me, her, Roy Elliot, and many others. Before the war, a lot of us were vain and shallow. I'll be the first to admit it. Our big concerns were fashion, paparazzi, gossip blogs and the size of our Twitter followings. Twitter, now nothing symbolized pre-war narcissism better than that stupid website. Needless to say, a lot of people fantasized about just getting rid of all of us. And in Long Island, some of them got to live out those fantasies.

But just as celebrities can represent the worst in society – there's a reason why I have some Long Island footage favorited – they can also represent the best in us. Back in World War II, many actors proudly served in the armed forces, and the rest of them were committed to upholding the ideals that our country was built on and fighting, with their words, the forces that opposed us. Even later on, celebrities understood that they had the power to shape public opinion. Why do you think benefit concerts existed? Why do you think so many actors and musicians supported charities and activist groups? Yeah, I know that many of them had self-serving reasons for doing stuff like that – ego boosts, public relations – but I can tell you that just as many were sincere in their support.

The same thing happened during this war. We remembered that we were America's role models, America's royalty, and that we had to act like it. Just as our parents and siblings were on the front lines, it was our duty to win over the hearts and minds of the people. And nobody did that better than she did. She was as much a hero as Raj-Singh was.

Still is, if you ask me.

[As Lena and I walk back to the parking lot, I check the news on my phone. The President has made a state visit to Moscow in order to smooth tensions between Russia and the Ukraine, and to seek Russian support in the international effort to clean out isolated regions of the globe. She stands head and shoulders over the Tsar at nearly six feet in height, and with her long blonde hair – a rarity in the post-war world – she looks ten years younger than the forty-something woman that she is.]