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.”
<
br /> 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 e
nough 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.
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 22
