“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.