The Complete Drive-In

EPILOGUE

I leaned against the door and kept my sore hands in my lap. As we started rolling, I looked around at all the vacant cars, many of them wrecked. There were also lots of bones. You could see that clearly now. We drove by one car with its roof decorated with human skulls wearing popcorn sacks, and there was another car with a baby seat sitting on top of it with a little skeleton in the seat holding a rattle.

I glanced through the gun rack and the back glass, saw Bob and Sam stretched on the floor of the camper. Bob was up on one elbow, gingerly managing sardines from a can Crier had opened and left for him. Sam wasn’t moving. Later Bob told me he died before we got out of the lot.

We went through the exit, and though the highway was there, the yellow line had faded and the concrete had buckled and grass grew up through it in spots. Nothing else was remotely familiar. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. I remembered what Sam had said: “It ain’t over yet. It ain’t never over.” No, it wasn’t over. It was time for the second feature. A lost world movie. As we drove, a massive shape stepped out of the jungle foliage at the right of the highway and Crier eased on the brake and we watched. It was a Tyrannosaurus Rex covered in bat-like parasites, their wings opening and closing slowly, like contented butterflies sipping nectar from a flower.

The dinosaur looked at us in a disinterested way, crossed the highway and was swallowed by the jungle.

“I don’t think this leads home anymore,” Crier said, and eased forward again, started picking up speed. I looked in the truck’s wing mirror and I could see the drive-in in it, one of the screens in Lot B. The projector might still be running back there, but if it was, I couldn’t make out a picture. The screen looked like nothing more than an enormous slice of Wonder Bread.