The End Is Nigh

Will McIntosh — DANCING WITH DEATH IN THE LAND OF NOD

Taking it slow so the ruts in the dirt drive didn’t ruin his Mustang’s suspension, Johnny cruised past the Lakeshore Drive-In’s worn neon sign, past the faded and battered red and white ticket booth, into the big open field.

Dad was at the snack bar getting the popcorn popping, putting hot dogs in their aluminum sheaths for no one. It was a half hour before showtime, the sky halfway between blue and black, and there were no customers yet. Toward the end of the second feature, Johnny and his dad would end up eating dried-out hot dogs. He was so sick of hot dogs. Every night, Dad prepped the snack bar like they were going to have a full house, and every night, maybe half a dozen vehicles rolled through the gate.

Tonight they’d be lucky to get anyone. Everybody was glued to their TV sets, watching the news, scared shitless by the nodding virus. Johnny was scared shitless too, but he still had to drag his ass out to babysit his father.

Every time he took the hard right off Route Forty-Six and passed that old neon sign, it gave him a sick feeling of indigestion. When the Alzheimer’s finally took his father, Johnny would inherit 11.27 acres of useless land, a snack bar refurbished to resemble a 1950s diner, a shiny new movie projector, and a shitload of frozen hot dogs. He would also inherit a sixty-six thousand dollar business loan at eight percent interest, the loan guaranteed by the house he’d lived in his entire life.

Kicking up dust as he pulled in, Johnny parked by the walk-up window. He slammed the Mustang’s door, strode past old picnic benches squatting under a roof that extended from the squat building like the bill of a cap.

“Don’t park there,” Dad said as he set boxes of fresh popcorn beside the machine. “You don’t want anything obscuring the customers’ view of the snack bar. I read that on the internet.”

“I’ll move it when the movie starts.”

Dad put his hands on his hips. “People buy half of their snacks before the movie starts.”

Johnny wanted to point out that half the snacks they sold on an average night amounted to about twelve bucks’ worth. It was on the tip of his tongue, but he let it go. At least his dad was making sense. When he’d dropped him off that afternoon, Dad had been sure it was nineteen seventy-six, and was contemplating decorating the drive-in to commemorate the nation’s bicentennial.

“You watching the news?” Johnny asked. “The virus broke out in Wilkes-Barre. Something like two thousand people have it.”

“Is that the swine flu? Or the bird one?”

Maybe Dad wasn’t having such a good evening after all. “No, Pop. The new one, the nodding virus.”

Dad took it in like it was the first time he’d heard about it. “How many dead?”

“Hard to say. It doesn’t kill you, it paralyzes you. You can’t move.”

Johnny would be less scared of the virus if it killed you outright. The thought of being aware of what was going on, able to breathe, even eat if someone fed you, but not able to move…Johnny didn’t even want to think about it.

“You remember seeing Spaceballs here?” Dad asked.

“I remember, Pop.” Here we go, off on a ride down memory lane.

Johnny was so tired. So sick of giving up four nights a week for nothing. He spent all day walking on that greasy floor, listening to people’s complaints about their fucking fish sandwiches while his back ached. He resented having to waste all his time off so his father could live out his dream and reminisce about how much better the world was when everyone loved to watch movies through their dirty windshields while mosquitoes ate them alive.

Dad looked at the big white screen. On the day he’d brought Johnny out here to tell him he had Alzheimer’s—and that he was buying this beat-up drive-in as some sort of big carpe-diem fuck you to the universe—the screen had been peeling away in squares, exposing the rusting steel latticework underneath. Now it was bright white and flawless.

“The day after this place closed, the marquee out front said, ‘The End. Thanks for thirty years.’” Dad shook his head. “It broke my heart, to think your kids would never get to go to the drive-in.”

“Tiffany moved the kids to Baltimore before they were old enough to go to the drive-in,” Johnny said, bitterness leaking into his tone. He wanted to go home, crawl under a blanket with a six of Pabst and watch porn until he fell asleep.

A truckload of teen-agers pulled through the gate. Johnny headed off to collect their admissions. If they were super-lucky, the kids would smoke some weed and get the munchies. They could sell some hot dogs for a change.

In the car on the way home, the radio played some Springsteen then gave way to the news. Johnny wasn’t in the mood to hear any more about the outbreak, so he stabbed one of the preset buttons and caught a Charm City Devils song in progress.

The sound of their success only reminded him of his own faded rock star dreams. He turned the radio off.

Dad stared out the side window, watching the street lights pass like they were the most fascinating things in the world.

It was past time to put him in a home, but Johnny just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was having such a ball, running his drive-in. It was killing Johnny, though, getting home at one in the morning, then his alarm going off at six.

And the place was bleeding money.

“How much did we gross tonight? Forty-something dollars?” Johnny asked.

“Something like that.”

Johnny waited for his dad to offer some excuse, some airy-fairy optimistic spin on the two of them working their asses off for forty-three bucks, minus utilities, minus the film rental fee, minus taxes, minus gas, minus five hundred and sixty-three dollars a month in interest on the loan.

“If this virus thing gets any worse, people will stop going to the indoor theaters, cause they’ll be afraid of the germs. They’ll start coming to the drive-in instead.”

“The virus is in Wilkes-Barre. If it gets any worse, people will have it, and they won’t be able to go anywhere.” The thought sent an electric dread through Johnny. “Come on, Dad. We gave it a good try. It’s just not working.”

Even if he could convince his dad to sell the drive-in, who would buy it? Especially now. Maybe after the virus scare blew over he could at least get three thousand an acre for the land and pay off part of the loan. He’d have to use his savings to pay off the rest, which meant his new, post-rock star dream—opening up his own bar and grill—was never going to happen.

Johnny cruised to a stop at a red light at Aker Street, waiting, silently beseeching his father to see through the fog in his brain and agree it was time to put this business out of its misery.

“First movie I ever saw there was a monster flick. Them, it was called. Giant ants. I don’t remember the second feature. They put real butter in the popcorn then.”

Johnny felt like he needed to scream. “Yeah, yeah. Everything was great, back in the old days.”

This time Dad caught the sarcasm. He looked at Johnny. “You know why I keep saying things were better back then? Because they were. That’s the thing. Things really were better.”

“I’ll give you that, Dad. Back then, they gave you a pension. Health insurance. You got paid a decent salary. How much were you pulling down, your last year at the Goodyear plant? Fifty-five? That’s seventeen grand more than I make now.” Johnny slapped the steering wheel so hard his palm stung. He was forty-one years old, and even getting promoted to manager of Burger King was out of reach, because he didn’t have a college degree. “‘Would you like to get a large for only fifty cents more?’ I’m so sick of saying that, Dad. You have no idea how sick I am of saying that.”

Johnny took a deep breath. He shouldn’t be talking to his dad like this, but he was tired and angry. And scared. “I’m sorry, Dad.” He touched his Dad’s shoulder. “You never raised your voice to me. Never once, the whole time I was growing up. I’ve got no right to raise my voice to you.”

Around the curve, in front of the old brick schoolhouse—which was now a plumbing supply warehouse—red lights were flashing. Two police cars and an ambulance were parked beside a Taurus wrapped around a telephone pole.

Johnny slowed to a crawl as they passed. The driver was still in the car. “That’s Arnie Marino. He works at the post office.”

Paramedics were easing him out from behind the wheel. His nose was bloody, and it looked like he was resisting them, trying to stay in the car.

Johnny realized he wasn’t fighting them, he was jerking, having a seizure.

“Poor bastard,” Johnny said under his breath. He sped up, knowing if he watched any longer he’d look like a rubbernecker, not someone slowing down in the name of safety.

The poor guy. He’d been jerking like a puppet on strings, almost like—

Johnny missed their turn. His hands felt numb on the wheel, like blocks of wood.

Arnie Marino’s head, especially, had been jerking up and down. Nodding.

Johnny took a big breath, tried to relax as he took the next left to double back around. It could have just been a seizure. Or there were other things that would look the same as the virus.

Of course there was also no reason to think it wasn’t the nodding virus. It was out there, and it was still spreading. He glanced at his dad, but he seemed like he’d already forgotten the accident.

That evening, back at home, Johnny heard the sounds of sirens warbling and howling outside, some far away, some nearby. As they grew more persistent through the night, Johnny felt certain the virus must have hit their town.

He turned on the TV in his room, the screen taking forever to warm from black to an image of the CNN newsroom, where a blonde news anchor was talking beside a virtual map of the United States. There were at least fifty red dots glowing on the map. Most were in Florida, but a few ran up the coast, a few were out west, and there was a cluster nowhere near the rest, in Pennsylvania. One looked like it was right where Johnny was standing.

He turned the sound up until it was blaring, watched images of soldiers jumping from the backs of camouflage brown trucks, setting up roadblocks. Pulse pounding in his hands and feet, his tongue and his balls, he heard the word “quarantine,” but had trouble understanding most of what came from the news anchor’s red lips. Her words couldn’t compete with the terror trumpeting in Johnny’s head.

A bang on the front door made him jump. Johnny glanced at the clock (3:13 a.m.), pulled on sweats and headed downstairs.

Dad was up, looking bewildered.

“What’s going on?” Dad asked.

“I don’t know.”

It was Kelly Cramer from across the street—Leon and Patty’s daughter—who’d dropped out of community college and moved back home. Her breath was coming in big, frantic gasps. “My folks. I think—” She let the thought go. “Help me.”

Johnny pushed on his sneakers without tying them and followed Kelly across the street as a voice in his head screamed, This is not good.

Leon and Patty were in bed, the blanket pulled up to their necks. Both were nodding, their chins rising and falling. Beneath the blanket their toes were trembling. Leon was making a choking, strangled sound.

The worst thing was their eyes. They were clear and focused, moist with fear, following Johnny as he moved.

Johnny’s knees turned to jelly. “Call nine-one-one,” he said, his lips numb.

“They said they can’t do anything. There are too many. The hospital in Framington is full, and they can’t move anyone out of the quarantined zone.”

It couldn’t be.

It could, though; of course it could. Wilkes-Barre was barely forty miles away.

“We need to get out of this room,” Johnny said, backing up a step. “Out of this house.”

“Help them,” Kelly said. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

Johnny took another step backward. Another. “You know there’s not. We need to get out of here. Right now.” He took off down the stairs and outside, his loose sneakers slapping his heels, adrenaline pushing him to run faster.

When he reached his door and turned, Kelly was on her front lawn.

“I can’t just leave them. What do I do?”

“It doesn’t help them if we get it, too,” Johnny said, holding the door half-open. He didn’t want to be near Kelly, let alone her parents, but he felt bad closing the door in her face. She was only twenty-two or twenty-three, just a big kid, and she had nobody to help her. At least, he didn’t think she did.

“Do you have any family nearby?” he called.

She pulled out her phone, hit a key and held it to her ear.

Johnny so wanted whatever aunt or grandparent she was calling to answer, but she just went on standing with the phone to her ear, her face streaked with tears, her long brown hair frizzy and tangled.

Finally, she let her hand drop. “No answer.”

“Fill up your bathtub,” someone called.

Johnny turned. Mrs. Mackery from next door was on her lawn in a bathrobe. It was a man’s bathrobe, probably her late husband’s.

“The radio said the power’s bound to go out, so to fill your bathtub,” Mrs. Mackery repeated.

Headlights appeared down the street, accompanied by a rumbling. An open-bed military truck came around the corner, soldiers in yellow hazmat suits riding in the back. Kelly ran to the edge of her lawn, waving frantically, both hands over her head, screaming at the top of her lungs for them to stop.

They blew right past. They barely looked at her.

Behind him, Johnny’s screen door squealed open. He turned to find his dad, dressed in jeans and one of his old blue Goodyear work shirts, heading down the sidewalk carrying a brown bagged lunch. “I told you once already,” he muttered. “I’m not gonna argue about it.”

“Dad. Hang on.” He jogged up the lawn, got his father turned around and led him back inside.

A few doors down a minivan was backing out of the Rosso’s driveway.

“Look,” Johnny called to Kelly and Mrs. Mackerey from his door, “I’m here if there’s anything I can do to help.” He looked at Kelly. “I’m sorry, though, I’m not going back in that house. I don’t think you should, either.”

Johnny closed and locked the door.

He passed Dad, who was peering out the back door, into the yard, his bottom lip working soundlessly. He’d stare out at the aluminum shed and the discarded tires for an hour if Johnny let him.

As if the solution to all his problems, the answer to the secrets of the universe, could be found in there, if only he looked hard enough.

Sometimes Johnny was sure his dad was looking into the overgrown weeds beyond the shed, trying to locate the stone that marked Buster’s grave. When Buster no longer had the strength to stagger out into the yard to relieve himself, when he just lay curled up on the carpet whining, they’d taken him to the vet and had him put down.

By sunup there were twice as many dots on the CNN map. No one was allowed out of the infected areas.

“I’m sick of the news,” Dad said, still in his Goodyear work clothes, the pants on backwards. Johnny wondered if he was going to have to start dressing his father. The thought made him a little sick.

“Put on something good,” Dad persisted. “I want to watch The Rockford Files.”

Jesus, Johnny had only the vaguest memory of The Rockford Files. He must have been five when it went off the air. He turned off the TV. “Come on Dad, we have to go to the grocery store.” They needed more food; there was almost nothing in the house.

As soon as he hit the driveway, Kelly Cramer was out of her house, running toward them. “Can I come with you?”

Johnny motioned toward the Cramer’s driveway. “You have a car.” It came out harsher than he’d intended.

“I’m scared.”

Scared of what, he wanted to ask. This was Ravine, not Philadelphia. There weren’t going to be looters and gangs running wild among the six or seven stores that made up what passed for a downtown.

Kelly stopped a few paces short of them, folded her arms. “If you were going to get it, you’d probably have it already. It takes seven days for the symptoms to show up, so all the people getting sick now were exposed a week ago.”

Johnny pictured the drive-in’s few customers handing him money. Christ, Arnie Marino was a mail-sorter; if he’d gotten it, he’d spread it to all the mail.

Kelly was waiting, her eyes pleading with him.

Christ, when had he become such a dick? He’d known Kelly since she was a baby, and he was, what, sixteen? He’d seen her at a hundred neighborhood barbecues, almost hit her backing out of his driveway about twenty times. They’d never been anything like friends, probably because of the age difference. She’d been kind of a rebel back in high school—shaved head, shredded jeans, cigarettes. There was no sign of that side of her now—she was wearing cut-off denim shorts over purple leggings, her hair in a ponytail.

He put a hand on her shoulder. “Come on, get in.”

Johnny cruised past Burger King just to make absolutely sure it was closed. He was scheduled to work the eleven to seven shift, but it was completely dark inside, as he’d suspected. He drove on down Route 60, which doubled as Main Street in Ravine. There was no mystery about how the town had gotten its name: it was set in a long, thin sliver of flat land, hugged on both sides by steep hills. If you were in Ravine, you could see both hills pretty much wherever you were.

People on the streets were hurrying along, heads down, many clutching handkerchiefs or hand towels to their faces.

“How are your folks?” Johnny asked. He knew how they were, but he didn’t want Kelly to think he didn’t care. He glanced over at her: she was fighting back tears.

“They’re good people,” Johnny said. “Your dad used to take me along to Penguins games up in Wilkes-Barre when I was in high school. You remember that?”

“If you were in high school, I was like, minus two years old.” She wiped under her eyes with her knuckle.

“Oh, right. Duh.” Sometimes he forgot he was almost forty-two years old. It just didn’t seem possible.

He spotted the military vehicle that had passed them, parked in the parking lot of the firehouse, beside a big silver delivery truck.

Johnny pulled in. “Here we go. We can find out what’s going on.”

People in hazmat suits were carrying sacks and boxes to idling cars. Johnny watched as a hazmatted soldier dropped a sack and a small box in the back of an F-150 pickup. The truck took off.

Johnny popped his trunk, waited for someone to carry supplies over. He rolled down his window. “How long is the quarantine gonna last?”

The soldier came around to the window. He was a young guy, Asian. “Two weeks, at least.”

Johnny jerked his thumb toward Kelly. “Her folks are sick. What is she supposed to do?”

“Feed them and keep them hydrated.”

“And what if she gets sick, and I get sick? Who keeps us fed and hydrated?”

The solider looked left and right, like he was looking for help. “Look, I’m just handing out supplies. I don’t have the answers. Listen to the radio.”

How could they do it, Johnny wondered? Go house to house, carry out the infected and take them…where? To big tents? CNN said twenty-eight thousand people had gotten sick in Wilkes-Barre in two days. Those tents would need to be awfully big.

“There aren’t enough hazmat suits, are there?” he asked the soldier. “Not enough doctors and nurses.”

Johnny could barely hear the soldier’s words through the faceplate: “There’s nothing doctors can do for them.”

Johnny spotted movement out the picture window: Kelly, wearing one of the white surgical masks from the survival kit they’d been given. He watched as she went three doors down, to the Baer’s house, and knocked. When no one answered, she let herself in.

Ten minutes later she came out and went to the next house down. The Pointers lived there: old lady Pointer, always digging in her flower garden out front; her son Archie, who worked at the body shop; and Archie’s kids, Mackenzie and Parker.

What the hell was Kelly doing? She wasn’t the type to be ripping off her neighbors while they were in there dying. Whatever it was, she was all but guaranteeing she would catch the virus.

Cursing under his breath, Johnny pulled on his Steelers windbreaker and headed out. “I’ll be right back, Pop.”

“We gotta leave by three, don’t forget.”

Clutching the doorknob, Johnny opened his mouth to tell his father that people were dying, that no one was going to the frickin’ movies. He didn’t, though.

“I won’t, Dad.” He closed the door and headed toward the Pointer’s house.

For once, Johnny wanted to go to the drive-in. Not just to escape the nightmare unfolding in his town for a few hours, but because it was the only place his dad seemed like himself. It was the only thing keeping his dad going.

The Pointers’ front door was ajar. Johnny knocked, called, “Hello?”

“In here.”

Hands in his pockets, feeling like he was surrounded by the virus, Johnny followed her voice down a hallway covered in water fowl-patterned wallpaper, into the Pointer’s living room.

The four of them were sitting on couches and stuffed chairs, hands in their laps, all perfectly still except for Parker, whose lips were wrapped around a straw, sucking greedily from a water bottle Kelly was holding, his throat pulsing as he swallowed. The TV was on, showing some Pixar flick. Wet stains bloomed on the couch cushions beneath each of the Pointers. The smell of piss was overpowering.

“Jesus, what are you doing?” Johnny asked.

Kelly held out a mask. Johnny took it, pulled it over his mouth and nose. It was one of those little plastic jobs you wore when you mowed the lawn, probably not worth shit against a virus that the news described as incredibly resistant, able to survive on surfaces for days.

“What are you doing?” Johnny repeated. “The more houses you go into, the more likely you are to catch this thing.”

She shrugged. “My folks have it. I know I’ve been exposed.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t know that for sure.” Johnny did not want her words to be true, for his sake as well as hers. “You’re dancing with death, coming in here.”

Kelly chuckled. “Dancing with death. That’s poetic.”

Actually, it was a line from one of his band’s songs, but after saying it out loud he was too embarrassed to admit he’d just quoted his own band’s lyrics.

Kelly wiped Parker’s chin with a kitchen towel she had hooked through her belt. “I kept thinking about Mackenzie and Parker. I babysit them sometimes. I kept picturing them in their rooms, all alone, scared to death. Not able to move. Hungry. So I came to check on them. Parker was just like I pictured him—all alone in his room. Probably since yesterday.”

“You touched him? Jesus.”

Kelly put her hands on her hips. “He can hear you, you know. So can his mom and dad.”

“Sorry,” Johnny muttered. They were looking at him; all four of them.

Kelly squatted in front of Lara Pointer, guided the straw into her mouth. Immediately, Lara began pulling on the straw, her mouth suddenly animated, looking completely normal. The news had described how the virus keeps people from initiating movement, but not from reacting; seeing it, however, was another thing completely. If she could drink, why couldn’t she talk?

When she’d finished, Kelly went to the Pointer’s sink and refilled the big plastic water bottle before heading for the door. Johnny followed her out, closing the door behind him.

Instead of turning right, back toward her house, Kelly headed left across the lawn.

“Where are you going now?” Johnny called after her.

“When’s the last time you saw the Cucuzzas?”

“What are you gonna do, go door to door?”

She stopped, turned to face him. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“You’re out of your mind. It’s like you want to die—”

She held up both hands to ward off his words and shouted, “They’re all alone. They’re scared. Can’t you see it in their eyes?”

He stood on the Pointer’s front stoop, not wanting to think about their eyes.

“Can’t you?” Kelly asked.

“Yeah. I can see it.” He would see it for the rest of his life. And, God, he didn’t want to go through it. Johnny looked at his watch. “Look, I have to take my father to his drive-in, or he’ll try to drive himself. Will you be okay?”

“No,” she said, like it was the dumbest question she’d ever been asked. “Will you?”

“No,” he admitted. “I guess not.”

A pickup cruised by. They both watched it in silence. There were fewer vehicles passing every hour.

“They’re saying three percent of people seem to be immune to the virus. Did you hear that?” Kelly said.

“I don’t love those odds.”

“No, they suck bad.”

It was a chance, though. There was hope.

“Neither of us has it yet, and lots of other people do. Maybe that means something,” he said.

Kelly nodded. “Maybe it does.”

Johnny had a sudden urge to give Kelly a hug, but he was afraid it would be awkward, or Kelly would think he was weird. “I’ll check on you in the morning,” he said. “That okay?”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

Back at the drive-in, Johnny was terrified he was going to start nodding at any minute. He was actually glad to have something to do to take his mind off it, even if it was filling popcorn boxes for no one.

He wondered what it felt like, to be trapped in your frozen body. Were you numb?

If he was going to die, he wanted to feel a terrible pain in his chest and be dead before he hit the ground. He didn’t want to have days and days where he knew he was dying. That was when you took stock, when you had nothing to do but think about your past, and he didn’t want to think about what a waste his life had been to this point.

He’d always thought he was just slow getting started, that he’d leave Ravine and Burger King for bigger things. His first plan had been to hit it big with the band, then it was opening his bar and grill. His savings, the house, a little inheritance money was the kickstart he’d been counting on for the past decade or so, except, surprise: his Dad had his own dreams, even at seventy-one and diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Dad was staring out at the big white screen through the window, his hands in his back pockets, smiling.

“You’ll see,” he said. “Wait and see.”

No one showed up. Not one car. Johnny would have choked on his Coke if a vehicle had pulled through that gate with this hell-virus crawling through their town. The marquee said they were showing Green Lantern tonight, but Johnny went back to the claustrophobic little office next to the restroom and pulled the reels for Ghostbusters out of a pile of old films his dad had bought on Ebay a month before they opened. He didn’t think he could sit through GL again, but a comedy, especially an old, actually funny comedy, fit the bill.

Johnny sat in his Mustang while Pop manned the snack bar.

At 7 a.m., Johnny spotted Kelly loading containers of water into her trunk. He set his coffee mug on the kitchen counter and slipped on his sneakers. He’d promised to check on her, after all.

“I should start calling you Florence Nightengale.”

Kelly smiled, but it was the smile of a Burger King cashier toward the end of a shift. She looked exhausted; there was a sheen of sweat on her face, as if she hadn’t washed up in a while.

“You were studying to be a nurse, weren’t you?”

“For a little while.”

“Why’d you stop?”

She shrugged. “Because I was too stupid. Couldn’t pass the biology courses.”

Johnny cringed, wishing he hadn’t brought it up. He wasn’t sure what to say. “Shit, that sucks. You seem like a natural.”

Again, she attempted a smile. “Thanks.”

“You’re really going door to door?”

Kelly pushed her hair out of her face. “If you get it and I don’t, you’ll be happy to see me and my water bottle.”

Johnny raised his hands. “I’m not criticizing. I’m just worried about you.”

That made her smile. “It’s nice to know someone is.”

He watched, arms folded, as she slid into her dad’s SUV.

Maybe he should be going with her. If he made it through this, for the rest of his life people would ask what it was like, what he’d done. It would be nice to be able to say he worked tirelessly to help people, that he hauled water and fed his friends and neighbors, and even strangers. And if he didn’t make it through this, maybe God would look more favorably on a man who wasn’t there for his kids if that man had died helping other people’s kids.

Kelly was putting the SUV in drive. Johnny raised his hand, jogged down the driveway. “Hang on.” She braked, rolled down the window, her eyebrows raised. He ran around and hopped in the other side. “Let’s go.”

Kelly smiled brightly. “When this is over, I swear, I’m gonna buy you a steak dinner.”

As soon as Johnny set the spoon of farina—or whatever this gruel was the soldier had given them—on the kid’s tongue, his mouth closed around it. Johnny drew the spoon out as the kid chewed and swallowed. He didn’t know the boy, who was about ten, the same age as his son Danny.

Johnny tried to ignore the stale urine smell, the wet crotch of the kid’s pants. It would take too long to change all these people; they had to focus on keeping them alive. Johnny was both relieved and sorry for that.

The boy watched him, watched Johnny’s face instead of the spoon, and Johnny couldn’t help thinking the kid was as desperate to have someone look at him, to have someone notice him, as he was for the food.

“I know. It breaks your heart,” Kelly said.

Johnny glanced at her, not sure what she was talking about. A tear plopped onto his forearm, and he realized he was crying, and when he realized it, it was like something inside him burst open, and he was sobbing.

Kelly gave him a hug, patted his back. It felt good—safe, warm—to be in her arms. “I cried all day yesterday. Eventually you run out of tears, and all you’ve got is a big lump in your throat.”

The lights went out; the picture on the TV contracted to a dot and vanished.

“Shit,” Kelly said.

Something in the boy’s eyes told Johnny the TV had been a huge comfort to him, that he’d be so much more terrified with nothing for company but his frozen family.

“Come on in,” Kelly called when Johnny knocked. As he climbed the stairs he heard her speaking softly.

“I’ll check on you at lunchtime. Try not to worry; everything’s going to be okay. Help is coming.”

He paused as he passed Kelly’s room. She had a billion CDs, a big Union Jack for a bedspread, a Black Sabbath poster on the wall, and a long shelf up near the ceiling crammed with hundreds of Beanie Babies.

Johnny nearly shrieked when he found Kelly’s parents standing in the middle of their bedroom.

“Jeeze,” he breathed.

Kelly, in a Luzurne County Community College t-shirt and jeans, was brushing her mother’s hair. “I figure they’ll feel better if I stand them up once in a while, exercise their muscles a little. Can you help me?”

Johnny hurried over to help ease Kelly’s mother back into a chair.

“I didn’t realize they could stand,” he said. They stayed in pretty much any position you placed them in, but he’d figured standing would take too much coordination.

“They can. You ready to go?”

Johnny followed her out, steeling himself for another day of playing Florence Nightengale’s sidekick.

They started with the first house on the left on Princess Lane. When they knocked, an upstairs window creaked open.

“What do you want?” it was a woman, Johnny’s age or a little older.

“We’re checking for people who need help,” Kelly said. “Anyone around here that you know of?”

“I haven’t gone out.” They turned to go. “If you were smart, you’d stay in your house, too.”

“Somebody’s got to help these people,” Johnny shot back, self-righteous anger rising in him. As they headed back to the van it occurred to him that two days earlier he’d been that woman. If he hadn’t seen Kelly loading water into her van, he’d still be that woman.

Watching Kelly walk beside him out of the corner of his eye, Johnny wondered what it was about her that made her different from all the people hiding in their houses, worrying only about themselves. It was like discovering there’d been a saint living across the street from him all these years, a saint with a shaved head, smoking a cigarette.

“So what happened to the shaved head and the combat boots?” he asked as they slammed their doors closed with a double thunk.

Kelly studied his face. “You thought I was a joke, is that what you’re saying?”

“No,” he laughed. “I thought it was great. There’s not enough shock and awe in Ravine.” He tapped her knee. “Come on, I’m in a band. Or I was, until all the other guys moved away. I live for rebellion.”

“You live for rebellion because you played covers of Tom Petty and Korn at the fire station’s social club?”

“Hey! We played in bars in Wilkes-Barre and Binghamton. And we played a lot of our own stuff.”

Johnny pulled up to a house that looked too quiet. He opened his door, then noticed Kelly was staying in her seat.

“What?”

“Remember when you asked why I left nursing school? I didn’t flunk out. I chickened out.” She propped a foot on the dash. “I got homesick and came running home to my old room and my Beanie Baby collection.”

Johnny nodded. He was afraid anything he said would trivialize what she was telling him.

Kelly tilted her head back, looked up at the SUV’s ceiling, her brown hair sliding down her shoulders. “I always hated this town. It’s not even a town, it’s just a few houses and lame stores strung out in an ass crack. I was always talking about how I was going to get out of here as soon as I could. And I did, but then I came right back with my tail between my legs.”

Johnny shook his head. “I never even tried to leave. When I was in the Ravine Raiders, we always talked about how we were going to hit it big. We drank beer, were rock stars in our own minds, then we got married, had kids, and I found myself at Burger King. This town has a way of sucking you in and hanging on to you.”

It was strange: this suddenly felt like a date that was going better than any of Johnny’s actual dates ever did. Maybe it was their fear, stripping away all the pretense, but Johnny didn’t think that was all of it.

He put his hand on his head. “Wait, what does this have to do with you letting your hair grow out?”

Kelly smiled. “When I moved back home, I imagined having a kid one day, and that kid seeing a picture of me and saying, ‘Mom, you were one of those edgy rebellious kids when you were my age?’ And I would have had to answer, ‘No, I just dressed like one’.”

The army vehicle was gone. So was the delivery truck full of grain, and the tanker truck of water.

Kelly called the national emergency information number. The woman on the other end told Kelly they were spread too thin, that the Interstates had been shut down to slow the virus. She told Kelly to use a lake or pond, and boil the water before drinking it. Kelly suggested the woman boil her ass, then disconnected, and completely lost it. She pressed her hands over her ears and wailed, her face bright red.

Johnny held her and patted her back, shushing. He told her they’d be okay, and other comforting things he didn’t believe.

“What do they expect us to do with all of these people, without food, without doctors?” Kelly asked, drawing back into her seat.

“I think they expect us to let them die.” Johnny watched as another vehicle slowed in front of the empty parking lot, then drove off. “That’s why the soldiers left. It’s spread too far; we can’t take care of this many people, so they want them to die.” Johnny rubbed his eyes. He was so tired they were burning all around the edges. His head had this dull achy feeling that wasn’t quite pain, but was still unpleasant. Another couple of hours and he’d take his father to the drive-in. It was Stripes tonight. With each day that passed, Dad was more out of it. Most of the time Johnny felt like he was alone at the drive-in.

“Why don’t you come out to the drive-in tonight? You need to rest or you’re going to—” he was going to say get sick, but he bit back the words.

“How are you even showing movies, with the power out?” Kelly asked, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“The place came with an old generator. Power outages are a great time to sell tickets, because no one has anything else to do.”

Kelly laughed dryly. “Assuming people can move.”

“Right.” If they could move, Johnny would invite everyone to come out and watch Stripes for free, and for one night his Dad would think his goddamned drive-in was a success.

He sat up ramrod straight in his seat. “Wait. I just got an idea.”

A plume of dust followed the Ford Taurus as Johnny cruised along the drive-in’s back aisle, to the very last spot. He swung the Taurus into the spot, the front rising on the hump until the screen was framed inside the windshield. He turned off the engine, then twisted to look at the car’s four passengers. It was an older couple, in their seventies, and two kids, two girls. Grandparents raising their grandchildren, maybe. Or maybe the girls had just been visiting. It smelled bad in the car—really bad—but Johnny smiled and tried to ignore it. “I’ll be back with food and Cokes later. As soon as the sun goes down we’ll start the first show.” He looked at his watch. “That’s about an hour from now. I hope you enjoy the movies.”

Kelly was waiting in the aisle. “That’s it.” She pressed her fists into the small of her back. “God, my back is killing me.”

How many people had they carried to their cars? Too many to count. On the tail end of three endless days of feeding people, Johnny was so exhausted he’d traveled beyond tired, into a manic, hungover netherworld.

There was just one last trip to make.

“Holy shit,” Johnny’s dad shouted when they pulled into the drive-in. “Holy, holy shit. It’s packed!” He looked at Johnny, and for the first time in days Johnny was sure his dad knew who he was. “I told you. Didn’t I tell you? It’s catching on.”

“You told me, Pop.” He caught Kelly’s eye in the rear view mirror, and they exchanged a smile. “I didn’t believe you, but you were right.” Johnny pulled up in front of the snack bar. He felt like laughing and crying at the same time. “Kelly and I are going to run concession orders right to the cars. People don’t want to get out, on account of the virus going around.”

“Oh, okay,” Dad said. “Smart idea.”

Johnny led him into the snack bar, where they had a hundred boxes of popcorn lined up and ready to go, dozens of hot dogs turning on spits in the warmer. His dad’s steps were so tiny, so tentative. When had he lost that broad, assured stride Johnny had known since he was a kid?

They kicked things off with E.T. Kelly started feeding people in the front row, Johnny in the back, figuring they’d meet in the middle.

They hadn’t had the time or space to bring all of the afflicted to the drive-in. Ninety percent of the town had it now. But they’d done what they could.

Heading back to the snack bar for another armload, he passed Kelly. She looked exhausted, but there was a fire in her eyes as she smiled at him.

“Can I ask you something?” Johnny said.

Kelly paused, swept her hair out of her eyes.

“If things ever get back to normal—” he paused, realizing how inappropriate his words sounded as they stood surrounded by people suffering from a horrible disease.

But Kelly smiled. “If things ever get back to normal, yes.” She headed off toward the cars.

Johnny turned, imagining the two of them sitting together at the Outback Steakhouse in Pine Grove, and for a moment he felt light, and hopeful.

As Dad filled him up with a tray of Cokes, popcorn, Snickers and Milky Way bars, ice cream and hot dogs, Johnny could see the confusion was back, but Dad was smiling, and whistling.

A little before three a.m., Johnny’s dad dozed off on his stool behind the snack bar. Johnny loaded him in the Mustang and took him home, then turned right around and headed back to the drive-in. They showed movies until the sun came up, then left all those poor people sitting in their cars and went home to get a few hours’ sleep.

“Holy shit. This is unbelievable,” Johnny’s dad cried.

If his mind had been clearer, he might have noticed they were the same vehicles, in the same spots as the previous three nights. “Another full house!” He patted Johnny’s thigh.

Kelly was already there, stirring huge pots of “kitchen-sink soup” over open fires, a waist-high pile of discarded soup and vegetable cans behind her. It had taken them six hours to gather the cans from people’s cupboards, another to open them all.

An hour into the night’s feeding and watering, Johnny and Kelly paused in the second aisle, out of his dad’s earshot.

“What are we going to do tomorrow?” Johnny asked. Most of the fresh food in town had turned. The nearest grocery store was outside the quarantine.

“Did you try the Red Cross?” Kelly said.

“Yeah. They aren’t allowed into the quarantined areas.” Calls to the authorities had resulted in awkward explanations about limited emergency response resources, and shock and consternation when Johnny explained how many victims they were trying to keep alive. He’d been right: the plan was to let most of the victims to die off.

“I guess it’s whatever we have left, then.”

Johnny didn’t ask what they’d do after that. According to the radio, the virus was still spreading. There were infected zones from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. It didn’t look like the quarantine would be lifted any time soon.

On the drive home, Johnny’s dad wet his pants. He didn’t seem to notice; he just went on muttering something about a cold can of Pabst and a mad, mad world. There’d been a movie called It’s a Mad, Mad World. Johnny had seen it when he was a kid. Maybe his dad was watching it in his head.

“Dad, look—another sellout crowd.” Johnny tapped Dad on the shoulder.

“What?” Dad looked around as if waking from a dream. “A what? Oh. Right.” He laughed. “That’s good. What are we showing?”

“Spaceballs.”

“Oh yeah? Is it any good?”

“It’s hilarious,” Kelly said from the back seat. Her nose was plugged from crying, but she kept her tone bright.

There was nothing for his dad to do—not a crust of frozen pizza left in the snack bar. They sat him in a lawn chair in the front row. It was a perfect drive-in night: just a nip of crisp fall in the air, the leaves on the trees beyond the screen whispering on a light breeze.

As soon as the movie started playing, Johnny and Kelly hoisted the big roll of plastic pool vacuum hose out of his trunk, set it on one of the picnic tables under the eave outside the snack bar. Johnny measured out six or seven feet of hose, cut it with a hack saw, repeated the process until they had several dozen lengths of hose.

They both carried several cut hoses and a roll of masking tape, heading toward the back row, arm in arm and crying. They would have to start in the back and work their way forward. They didn’t want people to see what they were doing.

He set the hose on the trunk of the first car in the row, went to the driver’s side door. Wiping his eyes, Johnny took a few big, huffing breaths, then forced a big smile and ducked into the car.

“How are you folks doing? Enjoying the movie?” One of the people in the back was Mr. Liebert, who’d taught him algebra in the tenth grade, all those years ago. Johnny reached over, turned on the ignition. “I’m gonna turn on the heat so you stay warm. It’s supposed to be a cold night. Cokes and popcorn are on the way in a few.” Using the buttons on the door, he lowered the back, driver’s side window a few inches. Feeling that he was about to lose it, he ducked out of the car.

Choking back sobs, he pulled the hose off the trunk, pushed one end over the car’s exhaust pipe and taped it into place. He slid the other end through the crack in the back window, and moved on.

Kelly was crumpled over the back of the next car, her face in her hands, her shoulders bobbing. She’d already set the hose in place. When Johnny put a hand on her back, she spun, hugged him with all of her might.

“This is the right thing to do, isn’t it?”

“I think so. Not the easy thing, but the right thing,” Johnny said. “Isn’t it what you’d want?”

Kelly nodded, eased out of his embrace. “It is.”

Johnny opened the door on the SUV next in line, smiled big, knowing his eyes were red, his face tearstained. “Hi folks. Let me turn on the heat for you; it’s going to be a chilly night.”

They sat on the picnic table and let the cars in the back row idle for half an hour, then moved on to the next row. Johnny’s first love, Carla Meyer, was in a Honda Civic in that row, with Chris Walsh, the man she’d married, and their teenage daughter.

It got easier by the third row. Not easy, but Johnny didn’t feel quite so much like he was carrying an anvil on his shoulders while someone punched him in the stomach.

They took a water break at the picnic table as the vehicles in the fourth row idled. Two more to go.

“Could we go to jail for this?” Kelly asked.

“I dare them to try. There should be doctors and nurses here with IV bags and truckloads of food.”

Kelly nodded.

The bodies would be in his drive-in. When the authorities investigated—and Johnny guessed when the dust settled they probably would—he would leave Kelly’s name out of it.

“If I have any say in it, they’ll build a statue of you in front of Town Hall,” he went on. “What you’ve done over the past week…” Johnny shook his head. “Mother Teresa couldn’t have done more. You’re a remarkable person, Kelly. I can’t tell you how much I admire you, how much you’ve changed me.”

Kelly went on nodding.

“Kelly, cut that out. You’re scaring the hell out of me.”

“Cut what—” And then she realized what she was doing, and Johnny could see her try to stop as her eyes flew wide and she went on nodding. She held up her hands and looked at them. They were trembling like an electrical charge was running through her. “Oh, God. No, no, no, no.”

But her head kept nodding, yes.

Between ragged, terrified breaths, she said, “Don’t you dare chicken out, Johnny. Don’t you dare.”

Crying silently, Johnny carried Kelly to her parents’ Avalon and set her in the driver’s seat. He ducked so he could see Leon and Patty, sitting in the back. “I’m so sorry. I thought she was going to beat it. I truly did.” He wiped his eyes before adding, “I’m going turn on the heat; it’s getting cold outside.”

When he’d leaned in to turn on the ignition, Kelly beat him to it, lifting her quavering hand and, on the third try, started the car. A tear was working its way down her quivering cheek as her head went on nodding, nodding.

Holding her head as still as possible, he kissed her cheek, then the corner of her mouth. If he was going to get it, he already had it. “I love you,” he whispered.

He taped a hose to the Avalon’s exhaust. Just as he realized he’d forgotten to crack the back window, it rolled down three inches. Johnny slid the hose through the crack and turned away.

His dad had fallen asleep in his chair.

“Come on, Pop.” Johnny helped him to his feet.

“Huh? William? Let me have a carton of them Pall Malls.”

He led his dad into the snack bar. They sat on stools behind the bar while the cars in the front row idled. On the big screen, Lone Starr was battling Dark Helmet in the climactic scene of Spaceballs.

Johnny figured either he was going to start nodding soon, since he and Kelly had been in all those houses at the same time, or he was one of the three percent. Maybe he and his dad were both part of the three percent. Good genes.

If he did start nodding, he thought he’d just go on sitting there in the snack bar, looking out at what he and Kelly had accomplished. He felt proud of what they’d done. Maybe others would think differently when they found all the bodies, but they hadn’t been here. They hadn’t lived through it. He watched as plumes of exhaust drifted up from the front row.

“Another sellout,” Dad chuckled. “I told you. Didn’t I tell you?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Will McIntosh is a Hugo award winner and Nebula finalist whose debut novel, Soft Apocalypse, was a finalist for a Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Compton Crook Award. His latest novel is Defenders (May, 2014; Orbit Books), an alien apocalypse novel with a twist. It has been optioned by Warner Brothers for a feature film. Along with four novels, he has published dozens of short stories in venues such as Lightspeed, Asimov’s (where he won the 2010 Reader’s Award), and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy. Will was a psychology professor for two decades before turning to writing full-time. He lives in Williamsburg with his wife and their five year-old twins.