Copyright © 2018 Wayne Kyle Spitzer. All Rights Reserved. Published by Hobb’s End Books, a division of ACME Sprockets & Visions. Cover design Copyright © 2018 Wayne Kyle Spitzer. Please direct all inquiries to: HobbsEndBooks@yahoo.com

Based upon “Flashback,” first published by Books in Motion/Classic Ventures, 1993. Reprinted by Hobb’s End Books, 2017.

Parts of this story originally appeared in “X-Ray Rider: Mileposts on the Road to Childhood’s End,” published by Hobb’s End Books, 2018.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this book is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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THIS IS IT. The Food of the Gods, which piqued his interest in the TV ad because it contained giant monsters, has come to town: it is playing at the East Mirabeau Drive-in Theater as part of the semi-annual Drive-in Retro Fest—a nostalgic gala spread over two weeks, each night showcasing different movies and old-time ads—the second feature in a triple-bill which includes Empire of the Ants and The Giant Spider Invasion. They head out after the NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, which, because it is a slow news day, is full of nothing but generalized doom: sun flares heating the top layers of Earth’s atmosphere and increasing the drag on Tiangong-1—China’s abandoned space station—potentially causing it to fall anywhere, even Mirabeau Park; the U.S. Geological Survey predicting earthquakes and a possible eruption of Mount Kilauea in Hawaii, only a few thousand miles away; illegal aliens coming up from Mexico, from Central America, from California—all of whom are criminals, even terrorists, according to the President.

With so much doom in the air and the theater drawing nearer, the Kid feels giddy, maniacal. He ignores his brother who is in the bed of the truck with him, his arm propped on the opposite fender, and instead watches the streetlamps, which, because he is wearing the retro X-Ray Spex he ordered online especially for the occasion (it being a tradition at the Drive-in Retro Fest to dress up) shout X-RAY, X-RAY, X-RAY, because the word has been imprinted into their lenses as a kind of hologram—a cheap effect.

Regardless, he is becoming a different being behind the glasses. Behind the glasses he is becoming ultra-human—an agent of Divine Will—with an agenda having nothing to do with humans. Behind the glasses he has started work toward an inscrutable end that he himself does not understand. There is an incredible power and energy in there, in those oily black lenses. A bass hum. Something moving, which races and burns. But there is something else too. Something immutable, solid, like a planet light-years away which scientists recognize only by the echoes it makes through space-time. An asteroid in the wormhole. It cannot be seen yet but it can be sensed.

It is out there. It is on the horizon. It is coming.

“You look like a douche bag in those,” says Shane as they pull into the East Mirabeau Drive-in, late. They have had to stop at Zip Trip for tranny fluid.  The Kid just looks at him. He doesn’t know what to make of Shane either—this new brother who wears gold polyester shirts with stiff collars and pointy lapels, like garden trowels—clamshell necklaces, feathered hair. Who has transformed into Leif Garret seemingly overnight—like in a horror movie; like Lon Chaney turning into the Wolfman in fast-motion. He doesn’t understand why Shane has even come. He is old enough now to drive himself; has a job at Taco Time, his own money. He even has a car, a 1970 Fire-bird, which their father is helping him pay off. But they’ve been going everywhere together lately, his family; everything old is new again—including a black leather-bound Bible which his mother used to tote to Sunday services but which now lies on the truck’s dash. The black leather-bound Bible she has carried everywhere since her diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer.

Everyone honks as the beams of the  headlamps sweep across the screen. Through her open window he hears his mother say, “Away they go!” and laugh. “You’d think the world was at an end.”

He looks at the screen as his father kills the headlights and backs into a stall—takes off the X-ray glasses—sees black ants carrying disproportionably large yellow petals across steppes of chipped bark. As his father sets up the speaker the Kid hears an authoritative voice intone: “Have you ever taken a good, close look at what the ant is all about? Like these Atta cephalotes—one of the fifteen thousand different species inhabiting our planet. This one cultivates crops of fungus for food. Others herd aphids, just as man herds cattle. And what about the warriors, the builders of bridges, roads, tunnels.... Frightening, isn’t it?”

“About as frightening as The Crater Lake Monster, I bet,” says Shane. He helps their father set up the lawn chairs. “Your movie choices blow, bro.” He does a double take as some girls walk by. “Hellowe honies,” he says.

“They have a sophisticated communication system,” says the narrator. “Specific messages are transmitted from one ant to another through the use of a chemical substance called pheromones. It causes an obligatory response. Did you hear that? Obligatory.”

“I’d like to oblige her,” says Shane.

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BECAUSE THE MOVIE GETS off to a slow start, the Kid walks to the playground at the base of the screen—but pauses before stepping onto the sand. The swing set seems smaller than the last time they were here. He supposes this shouldn’t surprise him; it has been awhile since they last came to the drive-in, and he has gained several inches, almost entirely in the legs, so that he feels awkward and gangly and tends to slouch. A single girl is there, seated in the swing farthest to the edge. Stringy red hair hangs in her eyes and at the sides of her face, like his. He meets her gaze briefly then sits in the swing furthest from her. He feels silly sitting in the swing, immature, but he also feels dirty—realizes he is dirty, that he has not thought to bathe or to put on clean clothes; that he is still wearing the mustard-stained jeans from earlier in the day, the ones with enormous holes in the knees, and that he is wearing his tatty green shirt also, the one with the pale yellow horizontal stripes. Neither one of them makes any move to swing; both stir their sneakers listlessly in the sand. The freeway drones somewhere in the distance.

“Come on, you know what it’s all about, baby, come on....”

He cranes his neck to look at the screen, sees a man and woman struggling on the beach, their hair being tossed by a sea wind, waves crashing against the breakers.

“Let me go you son of a bitch!”

“Relax, relax....”

He looks at the girl in the swing. She’s looking up at the screen, face painted in its greenish half-light, mouth hanging open. He looks back at the screen.

“That’s it,” the man says quietly.  He begins unbuttoning her blouse.

“Okay,” she whispers.

“I just want to get to know ya, that’s all.”

“Okay.”

The man cups his hands around the woman’s breasts, which strain against her bra. She hangs her head back, sighs. The sighs produce a strange reaction in the Kid, a tightening in his groin, something he has felt before but never in association with anything, just feeling good. For the first time he notices that the screen has a texture, that it’s not actually flat but grooved, corrugated, like the metal walls of the lot. He looks at the girl, who glances at him briefly.

“Now just take it easy. That’s it. You’re gonna be a good—”

He is wondering what the girl is thinking when the woman on the screen knees the man in the groin, causing him to double over, gasping and holding his crotch. The Kid looks at the girl but she is gone. Her swing rocks back and forth, chains rattling.

He scans the parking lot for her but sees only the piercing white light of the projector’s beam and the glow of the concessions shack, the ghostly gray speaker stands, the darkened automobiles. It occurs to him quite suddenly that he has no idea where the truck is parked, that he was paying virtually no attention on his way to the playground. He jolts out of the swing and begins walking toward the cars, his shoes slipping in the sand, tripping over one of the railroad ties that box the sand in. He turns this way and that as he walks through the lot, wandering between cars, stepping between speaker stands. The faces of strangers stare out at him everywhere, muted by car windows, softly lit by console lights, by the cherries of cigarettes. When at last he locates the truck it is only because it is parked backward and he can discern the silhouettes of his family; they are seated in their lawn chairs in its bed; and because the projector’s beam has set fire to the divots in the windshield, one of which has become a crack and spread—just as his mother said it would—so that it runs half the length of the glass. So that it splits, branching, into new cracks.

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THOUGH THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION tries to be comical (it’s a bust as a giant monsters on the attack movie, there being only one giant spider, not an army as suggested by the title and poster, and this only a Volkswagen Beetle with legs welded onto it and its chassis covered in fake fur), it’s the horrific parts that form a knot in the Kid’s gut. His mother is not happy either, disapproving—as she disapproved of Empire of the Ants—of the sexual content and violence. She is particularly offended by a scene in which a teenage girl in a push-up top responds to a libidinous suggestion by her mother’s hillbilly boyfriend that she “ain’t no child no more” by waving her breasts back and forth, giggling, “Yeah, now I’m 35-24-35!”

His father doesn’t seem to mind too much though, and Shane is loving it, especially when the same girl, wrapped in a towel and with wet hair, is startled by her cousin, “Larry”—who causes her to drop the towel, revealing buoyant, pale breasts and nipples the color of acorns. It is not lost on the Kid that each time something like this happens the camera zooms up on the body parts. What compels him so much about the towel scene is the suggestion of something dark beneath the girl’s filmy panties, something he has never seen in any other movie.

Ultimately The Giant Spider Invasion relies upon explicit grossness to achieve its effect, as when the girl’s alcoholic mother unknowingly blenders a tarantula with her Bloody Mary—and drinks it—or lingering on close-ups of policemen being sucked into the spider’s oral cavity, which constricts and expands like a sphincter until red-black blood comes gushing down their trousers—until their crying out to God and cursing and grunting and moaning becomes mere gurgling, mere suffocation.

They decide that they will not go to the concessions stand at intermission, in part because they have brought a cooler, but mostly because The Giant Spider Invasion is so disgusting, ending with the spider being superheated from within until its pink-purple eyes explode, causing milky pus to geyser everywhere, and globs of green slime to roll down its shanks like snot, within which the Kid thinks he sees the policemen’s remains.

“How about some lasagna?” jokes his mother after, lifting the lid of the cooler, handing out Cokes.

“Oh yes, please,” says Shane. He looks at the Kid. “Good movie.”

The Kid is thinking about lasagna, about tomato sauce dripping, ricotta cheese oozing. “You seemed to enjoy it enough,” he says. He looks at all the people wandering to the snack bar and the lavatories—equilibrium off balance from sitting, shuffling like zombies. “So did Dad.”

His father chuckles. “That last one was pretty rough, buddy. Wasn’t it, Sarah Lee?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. She leans back in her chair, holds her Coke in her lap with both hands. It is unusually hot, even for July; her brow is beaded with sweat. She picks up the newspaper and fans her face and neck. “Seems every movie we see at the Retro Fest is full of sex and violence and profanity. Even kid’s movies. I liked that King Kong, though. And Close Encounters.”

“Those were family movies,” says Shane. “These weren’t even that.” He climbs out of the  bed, leans against the fender. “And we’re not kids anymore, Mom. Not even the Albino String-bean.”

The Kid looks at him through his bangs.

“I’m going to wander around a bit,” says his brother, looking back at him, then walks away.

They sit in silence, sipping their Cokes.

“I was here when they had that earthquake,” says his father, legs outstretched, eyes rheumy. “The whole car went like this...” He gestures palm down, as though his hand were a boat on the waves.

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THE KNOT IN HIS GUT does not go away during The Food of the Gods. It grows. He could not have planned a more perfect storm—horror piling upon horror until he himself hates the movies he has chosen, wonders what could be wrong with him that he wanted to see such things, what has gone wrong with him—as a boy, a student, a brother, the Kid.

Shane by contrast loves The Food of the Gods; he can see it in his brother’s face. It does not hurt that the main character, Morgan, is a professional football player, or that his best friend and sidekick, Davis, is also a football player, or that their rapport is just like Shane and his friends’—large, strapping fellows, working hard and playing hard. When Morgan and Davis are not playing football they’re hunting deer on horseback with rifles and dogs—somewhere in the Northwest wilds far from New York and L.A., where they actually live, respectively—where they waste no time drawing pictures or writing stories but wash their sports cars and lounge by pools; where beautiful women are drawn to them because they are men of action and wealth. They do not hesitate or fear or brood, and they never work or play alone but always in a posse, a team.

But because the Kid has chosen the movie—not his brother—no one has been carried off the turf on the shoulder pads of their buddies. Shane does Westerns, war movies, sports dramas, white hats defeating black hats. The Kid does rockets, new worlds, the unknown, Danse Macabres. The movie will not end with a freeze-frame of Morgan giving the peace sign with both hands. Already a man has died horribly—stumbling through the bramble with a two-foot long yellow jacket on his back; crying out for his friends, his face swollen purple, the wasp’s black legs hooked into his abdomen, stinger pumping, cellophane wings beating. Already an old man has been eaten alive by rats the size of wild boars—his blood hemorrhaging, his face white with terror, screaming, “Oh God, oh God! Oh dear God! Lord, save me, save me!”

The Kid asks his mother if he can have some money for a 7-Up—to settle his stomach. She opens her purse and hands him three dollars, says, “Next time I’ll pick the movies.”

He nods and swings his legs over the bed rail, begins walking toward the snack bar. There is a glint at the periphery of his vision as he passes the front of the car. He looks over his shoulder but keeps walking...it is a stream of transmission fluid, glinting red-black in the vespertine darkness—winding away down the asphalt like blood. And he notices something else, too, also at the periphery of his vision: something between two cars further on down the row. Something which moves when he focuses upon it and is suddenly gone, but which looks, for all the world, and for the brief time he is able to apprehend it, like part of an animal. A crocodile, maybe, or a Komodo dragon, but held high above the asphalt, by four feet at least.

A tail.

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THEY HAVE MOUNTED A flat screen in the corner of the snack bar, near the ceiling, so that theatergoers can watch the movie as they wait in line. “I know all about delivering babies,” says Mrs. Skinner, whose husband has been eaten alive by giant rats. “Living on a farm you get to know those things. Everything’s going to be all right.” She is talking to a young woman named Rita, who is about to go into labor. They are holed up in a cabin, waiting for the rats.

He weaves through the maze of metal handrails and waits in line, which consists mostly of older teenagers and some people in their forties. The old-style fluorescent overheads cast everyone in a pale-white light; the floor is covered in sawdust like the hog pens at the Interstate Fair. Everything smells of hot butter and rank perfume and armpits and marijuana—which he is familiar with because he once caught Shane smoking it with his friends. He doesn’t recall the first time he was allowed to go to the snack bar alone, but supposes it could not have been long ago. His stomach grumbles and his intestines shift audibly; he looks at the menu by the ceiling as the line moves forward, decides he’ll get a hotdog as well as a 7-Up. He wipes the sweat from his forehead, grips the metal railing. His knees feel wobbly. A slight chill crawls over his skin.

A tail. Like a crocodile, maybe, or a Komodo dragon, but held high above the asphalt, by four feet at least.

The movie plays: “If I told how I felt right now you’d think I was crazy...” Lorna, the good-looking biologist. “Tell me,” says Morgan.

“I want you to make love to me.”

He watches someone behind the counter scoop dregs from the popcorn machine, hears it begin popping fresh kernels, its glass sides shimmying.

“It is crazy, isn’t it? At a time like this?”

“Listen, the first thing we’ll do when we get back to the mainland is continue this conversation, okay?”

“That’s just it. I don’t think we’ll ever get back.”

He reaches the counter where he is met by a pretty girl with dark eyes and shiny black hair. He lays the bills on the counter and looks at the menu. The plastic letters swim in and out of focus. “I’ll take a regular hotdog, and...” He rubs at his eyes, swipes at his hair “—and a medium 7-Up. Please.”

“What?” She chews her gum.

“A 7-Up. Medium, please.”

She begins punching the register’s keys. “What else?”

“A hotdog. Regular.”

“Two seventy-five.” She takes the bills and slides him a quarter. He stares at her a moment before realizing she is waiting for him to get out of the way, that there are others behind him.

He gets out of the way, stands by the popping machine which rattles and shakes. He watches her through the glass, wonders what she looks like beneath her towel; if she has the type of breasts which strain against her bra or small pale ones with nipples the color of acorns. He wonders what kind of panties she wears, what texture, if they are thick like cotton or filmy like silk. He wonders what lies beneath—does she have a darkness, a demonic sublime, like the girl in The Giant Spider Invasion? Do all girls? Does the world?

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“THEY’RE ATTACKING AGAIN, I need more shells.”

He does not feel strong enough to walk back to the car and so sits on the grass in front of the projection booth. Morgan and the others are making their final stand against the giant rats, breaking out windows with the butts of their shotguns, pumping and firing into the horde, knocking the rats off the porch and the railings, sending them flying, causing them to scream and snarl, to regroup, to attack again and again. The Kid chews his hotdog as the scene shifts to the basement, where Lorna and Mrs. Skinner are acting as midwifes to Rita, who lies in the dark, rubbing her belly, listening to the blasts and the growling of the rats, listening to the wood splinter as they tear and gnaw at the cabin, as they claw at the planks and pull on the shingles. “How’s it going?” Lorna asks Rita.

He finishes his hotdog and crumples its paper boat, takes a sip of 7-Up. He isn’t sure if he feels better or not; he thinks perhaps not.

“I’m laying here thinking about what it’s gonna be like when those rats get inside,” says Rita.

“Morgan says we’re going to be fine.”

He lies back on the grass and stares up at the projector’s beam.

“Do you believe that?” asks Rita. “You know, I used to think about dying a lot. Sort of lie there, in bed...at night...in the dark. I don’t know. I guess I’ve always had a terrible fear of it.”

“Rita, don’t.”

From this close he realizes that it is not one beam but many; he counts them, 5—6—7—rotating, full of blue-green smoke, as though colored smoke bombs have been lit nearby. He realizes that it is not in fact smoke but steam, issuing from a vent high on the wall, billowing and pluming. The beams are full of insects, gnats and mosquitoes and moths and stick-bugs, which beat their wings in the flickering light, circling aimlessly, chaotically. He hears cars on the freeway somewhere to the south, a constant whooshing, a gray-white noise.

“I could fantasize the most horrible death. You know, the most frightening. None of them come close to being eaten by rats. Funny thing is, now that it’s happening...it doesn’t really seem to matter.”

Something kicks him in the pit of his stomach and he feels like he is going to ralph, is sure of it. Perhaps it can be avoided. Perhaps if he doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, it will pass. “This too shall pass,” his mother always says, and he hopes she’s right, because puking is the worst thing in the world.

“What do you think our chances are?” asks Thomas, Rita’s husband.

“Pretty good,” says Morgan.

“Yeah, like hell...”

“Have it your way.”

He is going to ralph—he is certain of it now. He climbs to his knees, sees Morgan filling jars with gunpowder and strips of cloth, preparing for the final onslaught. The Kid looks at the side of the building, remembers that the door to the men’s room at the East Mirabeau is inside the concessions bar.

“Look, goddammit,” says Thomas, “those rats are gonna bust in here and you’re still fussing around with some lousy jars!”

“It’s something to do,” says Morgan.

“Something to do?!”

He struggles to his feet, holding his stomach, weaving back and forth. Right here on the grass or halfway to the restroom? Squirting between his fingers or full-throttle ahead?

“That, my dear boy, is what life is all about. From the time you’re born it’s finding something to do while you’re waiting to die, and you try like hell to prevent it. Now you get your ass in gear and get over there and put that strip in that gasoline jar and move it!”

He covers his mouth and hurries through the door, rushes toward the men’s room—hold the pickle, hold the relish, special orders don’t upset us, all we ever ask is that you—bursts into a stall and drops to his knees. He grips the toilet seat in both hands—have it youuur way, at Burger King, have it youuur—lets fly.

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WHEN HE SWINGS OPEN the door of the men’s room he sees Shane standing at the concessions counter, chatting up the girl with the dark eyes and shiny black hair. Shane looks at him as the door’s hinges squeak. “There you are! Everyone was wondering what the hell happened to you.”

The Kid just stands there, dazed. “I’m okay,” he says.

His brother looks at the girl, hooks a thumb over his shoulder, laughs politely, insincerely. “That’s my little bro.”

“Hi there, Little Bro,” says the girl.

The Kid looks from his brother to the girl. Hi there, you little whore. He steadies himself against a pinball machine. He feels a little better—a lot better, in fact—but isn’t sure that he’s out of the woods yet. He can hear the projector rattling in the room next to the lavatories, the old analog projector the East Mirabeau claims is the last of its kind.

“You know where the truck’s at, right?” says Shane. He’s holding a cardboard tray piled with tinfoil-covered hamburgers.

“Yeah, of course.” In fact he has paid no more attention than the first time.

“Okay,” says Shane. He winks at the girl with the dark eyes, gives the counter a little pat.

The Kid watches him go. He supposes he is lucky to have a brother, though he misses the days when they were more alike, when they spent whole afternoons building model kits together—a decidedly retro thing to do, he supposed—Shane’s always coming out so perfect while his came out looking like the mix-matched Bondoed vehicles they often saw in Hillyard, gluey messes beyond hope.

“I think we ought to at least talk about it.” —Thomas again, more from the projection room than the speaker on the wall.

“Pick up those jars of gasoline, Thomas.”

The Kid stares at the door to the projection room, which hangs ajar. He walks toward it.

“You’re gonna kill us....”

The rattling of the projector intensifies as he nears, going tat-tat-tat....

“And open the front door!”

He pauses outside the projection room, brilliant green-white light flickering through the door crack, painting his shirt and arms and hands. The TAT-TATTING of the projector is louder than he expected. A posted sign reads: NO SMOKING IN THIS AREA. He nudges the door enough to see partially into the room—feels a wave of heat wash over his face. Because of the angle he sees nothing complete, only the side of the projector which resembles a phaser cannon he saw on Star Trek once: a great, gunmetal gray thing, with cables coming out of it and lights along its side, and beneath those, huge horizontal film platters, grinding slowly, heavily, like the greased stone rollers in The Ten Commandments—when Pharaoh’s obelisk is risen in Cairo—and above all that, dryer hoses, only bigger, snaking up from the machine like tentacles, boring into the ceiling—itself made of stained wooden planks, like the sauna at the YMCA, to combat all the heat, he imagines. The sound of the projector and the sounds of the movie merge to create a cacophony of clicking, whirring machinery and discharging shotguns, of shattering glass and splintering wood, of the screams of men and women and rats killing and being killed.

That’s when he realizes, quite suddenly, that the sounds are not isolated to the movie and the projector. That something else is happening ... a man is grunting and crying out somewhere in the little room. Nor is that room as he first observed it (or perhaps he had only observed it incompletely), for he now sees that it is full of trees—trees—not just any variety but prehistoric-looking ones, cycads, the fronds of which quiver and steam. And he sees, too, that moving amongst those trees ... are tails.

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HIS VIEW IS BLOCKED by someone’s face—which fills the crack in the door, trains an empty eye socket upon him. In the space of an instant it is gone—drug away by a group of snarling animals (which look for all the world like velociraptors out of Jurassic World). He jolts away, staring dumbly, then bolts from the snack bar, shoving through the glass door with both hands, turning and wheeling on the boardwalk, looking for his brother. Surely he could not have gone far; surely he must still be visible, walking toward the truck, his stupid white pants glowing, his feathered hair trailing, his clam-shell necklace glinting. He looks at the screen and sees poor Mrs. Skinner—who reminds him of his mother now that his mother wears only baggy shirts and sweats and has lost most her hair; now that she seems so passive and resigned and carries the leather-bound Bible everywhere—in a death duel with one of the rats. The huge rat has crashed through the window of her kitchen and locked its jaws about her neck, is thrashing its head violently as she punches and struggles and kicks. She grabs hold of a meat cleaver and starts hacking the rat’s face—but is knocked to the floor, shrieking, blathering, begging. “Oh, God—oh, God!” Until her windpipe is severed and blood gushes everywhere; her hands letting go, the cleaver clattering against the tiles—her eyes becoming black glass while blood spreads like spilled ink across the floor.

He begins trembling violently, turning this way and that, knowing he cannot find the truck, knowing that if he did it would not make any difference, it would not stop the ground from rolling or the terrorists from coming or Tiangong-1 falling or Mt. Kilauea from erupting. It would not stop the transmission from bleeding or the windshield from cracking. It would not stop the projector from burning out, from leaving them all in blackness, to shiver and die alone. It would not stop time, either from marching forward or “flashing back”—nor the T. Rex and triceratops from appearing among the parked cars and continuing a fight begun 65-million years ago. It would not stop the strange storm front from rolling across the sky, or the mysterious lights within it—nothing could.

He is incoherent as he stumbles around to the side of the building, pauses against the wall. He looks at the screen even though he knows he shouldn’t: sees Lorna the good-looking biologist holding her head—Lorna who has been so cool and determined and unbreakable, who also reminds him of his mother, his old mother, like the Unsinkable Molly Brown on the Titanic. That Lorna is holding her head, cowering just as he is, mewing, “Oh, no, no, no...” as the rats eat through the ceiling and wood splinters and glass showers; as Rita goes into labor, sweating, cursing, pushing in spite of everything. As the truck swims into view suddenly and the Kid bolts toward it.

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“JESUS, WHAT’S HAPPENING?” cries Shane as they careen out of the theater, everyone breathing heavily as their headlights sweep the screen. The Kid remains silent as they exit the gate—the tires of the truck clanking over the ‘no entry’ spikes—peers behind the screen at the rusted iron girders, like the ribs of some giant carcass, and the scaffolding covered in pigeon shit, where a nattily-dressed man and woman have taken refuge. The Kid doesn’t know what the hell is happening, exactly, but as they motor up the hill overlooking the drive-in he sees the place with fresh eyes, viewing it as a kind of graveyard, its speaker stands like tombstones and its cars like black, shiny coffins, waiting to be returned to the earth, and so also with the concessions stand, its painted wood mutating, fossilizing, and the neon lights, their gas and their filaments breaking down, becoming something else, while the gnats and mosquitoes and stick-bugs and dinosaurs have it their way, multiplying and dividing out of control, as cycads push up through the cracks and the people who are but shadows bleed silently back into shadow. He doesn’t know what is going on, other than he’d had a sudden premonition that something terrible was going to happen—to the drive-in, to Mirabeau Park, to all its people, to his mother and father and brother and himself. They were all going to die, just go away.

Eventually.

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The End