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 kis
sed 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.
HOUSES WITHOUT AIR
Megan Arkenberg
The First Match
Six weeks before the end of the world, a new bar opens on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. The proprietors are a middle-aged West Coast couple, evacuees from Seattle or Portland, Beth can’t remember which. The bar is on the first floor of the building where Beth’s favorite bookstore used to be, but the familiar smells are gone—dust, vegetable glue, and old, acidic paper, all drawn out by the pair of sleek Blueair filters that add their silvery humming to the murmur of the television and the small Wednesday night crowd.
The hanging colored-glass lamps have disappeared, too, replaced by fluorescents; the light from the tall street-facing windows is unreliable now, dirty, gritty and dry. At least the restroom graffiti is unchanged. The back door of the middle stall in the women’s room still says “No danger shall balk Columbia’s lovers,” an obscure scrap of Whitman in dark purple Sharpie.
Wednesday nights have been Immerse team nights for the last four years. They used to walk the five blocks from the University to a small Thai place near the river, but with the ash and acid of the ongoing eruptions in the air, a five block walk has become unendurable, even with carbon masks. Beth proposed a migration to the new Georgetown place, which is right on the bus route that she, Aidan, and Lena take to work every morning. Even so, after the first two weeks, she and Aiden are the only Wednesday regulars. Immerse is still running—one of the few projects anywhere that is—but the team is drifting apart. Spending more time with their families, as the official line goes, even though none of the contracts have been officially terminated. It looks like everyone’s losing enthusiasm for immersive alternate reality. Everyone except for Beth, who has no family to speak of—and Aiden, who is borderline delusional.
“Give it to me, Beth. The honest assessment.” Aiden’s brown eyes are lit up like gin under a black light. He’s two drinks in, which, considering the strength of this place’s rum-and-colas, is closer to four. The most recent DOI press release sets the remaining atmospheric oxygen levels at six weeks, maximum, and Aiden McCallum is the only man in the world to whom that could possibly be good news. “They’ll have to increase our funding now, right?”
“Jesus, Aiden, give it up.” Beth has been willing to play along for the last few weeks—Wednesday nights would get damn lonely, otherwise—but even she has a limit. “You can’t upload yourself into a damn computer. We’re talking decades of development, centuries even. You can’t just throw money at Immerse to turn it into a functional alternate whatever.”
The last word comes out more harshly than she intends, waffling over the word dimension, which sounds too science-fictional. Beth rubs the bridge of her nose as though she can massage away the soreness. Nose, throat, lungs, everything aches these days.
Her phone beeps from deep in her purse before Aidan can say something stupid. It’s a text from Farah: Where do you keep the baking sheets?
Cabinet to the right of the fridge. Beth hits send too quickly, curses under her breath. Wait, why?
“Is that crazy woman still living with you?” Aidan asks. It looks like he’s letting go of Immerse for the moment, which is probably for the best—but as far as Beth’s concerned, Farah Karimi is hardly a safer subject.
“She’s fine.” Beth forces herself to smile. “Going batshit with cabin fever, but then, who isn’t?”
Aiden shakes his head and stands up to get another drink, almost knocking over his bar stool. Another text from Farah shimmers on the small screen.
Do you have sand anywhere?
WTF are you doing?
Work. A second later: Is the sugar still in the cabinet over the microwave?
Yes.
Can’t reach. Where R U?
Now Aiden is deep in conversation with the bartender, gesturing at the television that hangs above the shelves of neon-colored bottles. It’s a basketball game, but the DOI announcement is scrolling along the bottom of the screen on a blue banner. The world has a use-by date now, just like a gallon of milk, just as arbitrary, just as inevitable.
Beth looks down at her phone. Farah again: I need sand or sugar. Also aquariums. Plural. Where’s the nearest fish supply shop?
On my way.
• • • •
The Second Match
Immerse is long past the data-gathering stage, but Beth still catches herself in the habit of collecting sensations, of watching the fluorescent light play across the raised numbers on her credit card, of running her hand along the smooth-sanded barn boards of the bar’s countertop, picturing the precise regions of her brain that would light up in a scan as she alters the pressure of her fingertips. After years of this, she knows the patterns of wood from laminate from drywall, granite from sandstone, leather from writing paper. The sound of her heels on the bar’s tile doorstep compared to the sound of Farah’s rubber-soled crutches in their apartment’s tile stairwell. Some senses are impossible to program. Colors, for example—but she’s used to dreaming in black and white, and so is everyone else, if they’re honest. Smells are also difficult. Beth can hardly remember a smell—even inside Immerse—that isn’t smog and sulfur dioxide, the half-electric scent of a struck match.
She fits her carbon mask over her nose and mouth and strides quickly across the street to the enclosed bus stop. In the June twilight, the air is actually visible—shimmering, tangibly thick, settling between the restaurants, bakeries, furniture stores, and boutiques like a black-gray mist. The bus stop’s air filter sounds like it’s gasping for breath. Soon scrubbing out the pollution won’t do any good; there won’t be enough oxygen left in the air to make it breathable.
The bus rolls to a stop, and Beth darts from the enclosure to the top of the boarding stairs. Even the short climb leaves her winded. As usual now, the bus is almost empty, and she has no trouble taking a window seat. Not that it’s worth looking out. It’s a night in late June but it doesn’t feel like summer, not with the air so close. The anxiety is gone, Be
th thinks, the clear gold glimmer that used to come with summer twilight, when everything is so fresh and open that it takes your breath away, when the sounds of traffic and sirens and thunderstorms made your stomach flutter with excitement.
It doesn’t feel like June without a sudden burst of agoraphobia.
• • • •
The Third Match
She gets back to the apartment, finds Farah curled on the short couch in the corner of the front room, seemingly asleep. The sight makes her chew her lip, and she’s not sure why. Farah looks sickly, almost transparent these days, her thick hair pulled back with a bit of elastic, no make-up on her round, dark face. When she took the second bedroom three months ago, Farah warned Beth that she never eats when she’s working on a project, just sticks to liquids, and it’s starting to drive Beth mad. There’s a gallon of milk uncapped, souring on the kitchen counter, half a pot of coffee grounds clogging the old sink.
The door at the back of the narrow kitchen has been left ajar, and the back room is a complete disaster. Farah’s crutches lean against the asthmatic air conditioner, which has been hastily patched with blue electric tape to stay as airtight as possible. A stack of books has been accumulating around the ironing board for weeks, staggered and tilting like a bizarre art piece. Architecture books, landscape, interior design. Neuroscience textbooks and monographs on alternate reality.
What do you work on? they’d asked each other during that first phone call. Computer games, Beth had said. Memorials, said Farah Karimi.
All of Beth’s cookie sheets, plus all of her muffin tins and a loaf pan, cover every available surface. Each holds a tiny sugar landscape, dunes and valleys, a few toothpicks rooted in clay. Trees? Supports for something larger?
I need to work with my hands, Farah said. To touch things, mold them. I can’t start on a sheet of paper.
Beth takes a deep breath, goes back into the front room.
“What is all that about?”
“That is an entire afternoon’s work. Don’t touch.” Farah’s voice sounds distant, sleepy. Her hands are steepled and pressed against her lips. She doesn’t open her eyes. “You had extra sugar in the back of the pantry. I still need the aquariums, though. And matches.”
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 24