When the crimson washes from our eyeballs and we look around, all is as before.
At first glance anyway. Because closer observation reveals that everything outside the drive-in, the highway, the trees, the tops of houses and buildings that had been visible above the surrounding tin fence, are gone. There is only blackness, and we're talking BLACKNESS
here, the kind of dark that makes fudge pudding look pale. It's as if the drive-in has been ripped up by the roots and miraculously stashed in limbo somewhere. But if so, we are not in-jured in any way, and the electricity still works. There are lights from the concession stand, and the projector continues to throw the image of Tool Box on the screen.
About this time a guy in a station wagon, fat wife beside him, three kids in the back, pan-ics, guns the car to life and darts for the EXIT. His lights do not penetrate the blackness, and as the car hits it, inch by inch it is consumed by the void. A moment later nothing.
A cowboy with a hatful of toothpicks and feathers gets out of his pickup and goes over there. He stands on the tire-burst spears, extends his arm… And never in the history of motion pictures or real life have I heard such a scream.
He flops back, his arm gone from the hand to elbow. He rolls on the ground. By the time we get over there the rest of his arm is collapsing, as if bone and tissue have gone to mush.
His hat settles down on a floppy mess that a moment before was his head. His whole body folds in and oozes out of his clothes in what looks like sloppy vomit. I carefully reach out and take hold of one of his boots, upend it, a loathsome mess pours out and strikes the ground with a plopping sound.
We are trapped in the drive-in.
Time goes by, no one knows how much. It's like the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories about Pellucidar. Without the sun or moon to judge by, time does not exist.
Watches don't help either. They've all stopped. We sleep when sleepy, eat when hungry.
And the movies flicker on. No one even suggests cutting them off. Their light and those of the concession stand are the only lights, and should we extinguish them, we might be lost forever in a void to match the one outside of the drive-in fence.
At first people are great. The concession folks bring out food. Those of us who have brought food, share it. Everyone is fed.
But as time passes, people are not so great. The concession stand people lock up and post guards. My friends and I are down to our last kernels of popcorn and we're drinking the ice and water slush left in the coolers. The place smells of human waste, as the restrooms have ceased to function altogether. Gangs are forming, even cults based on the movies.
There is a Zombie Cult that stumbles and staggers in religious mockery of the "dead" on the screen. And with the lack of food an acute problem, they have taken to human sacrifice and cannibalism.
Bob takes down the shotgun. I take down the baseball bat. Dave has taken to wearing a hunting knife he got out of the glove box.
Rape and murder are wholesale, and even if you've a mind to, there's not much you can do about it. You've got to protect your little stretch of ground, your automobile, your universe.
But against our will we are forced into the role of saviours when a young girl runs against our truck while fleeing her mother, father and older brother. Bob jerks her inside the truck, holds the family-who are a part of the Zombie Cult and run as if they are cursed with a case of the rickets-at bay with the shotgun. They start to explain that as the youngest member of the family, it's only right that she give herself up to them to provide sustenance. A chill runs up my hack. Not so much because it is a horrible thing they suggest, but because I too am hungry, and for a moment they seem to make good sense.
Hunger devours the family's common sense, and the father leaps forward. The shotgun rocks against Bob's shoulder and the man goes down, hit in the head, the way you have to kill zombies. Then the mother is on me, teeth and nails. I swing the bat and down she goes, thrashing at my feet like a headless chicken.
Trembling, I hold the bat before me. It is caked with blood and brains. I fall back against the truck and throw up. On the screen the zombies are feasting on bodies from an exploded pickup.
Rough for the home team. Time creeps by. We are weak. No food. No water. We find ourselves looking at the rotting corpses outside our pickup far too long. We catch the young girl eating their remains, but we do nothing. Somehow, it doesn't seem so bad. In fact, it looks inviting. Food right outside the truck, on the ground, ready for the taking.
But when it seems we are going to join her, there is a red light in the sky. The comet is back, and once again it swoops down, collision looks unavoidable, it smiles with its jagged teeth, peels up and whips its bright tail. And when the glow burns away from our eyes, it is daylight and there is a world outside the drive-in.
A sort of normalcy returns. Engines are tried. Batteries have been unaffected by the wait.
Automobiles start up and begin moving toward the EXIT in single file, as if nothing has ever happened.
Outside, the highway we come to is the same, except the yellow line has faded and the concrete has buckled in spots. But nothing else is the same. On either side of the highway is a great, dark jungle. It looks like something out of a lost world movie.
As we drive along-we're about the fifth automobile in line-we see something move up ahead, to the right. A massive shape steps out of the foliage and onto the highway. It is a Tyr-annosaurus Rex covered in bat-like parasites, their wings opening and closing slowly, like contented butterflies sipping nectar from a flower.
The dinosaur does nothing. It gives our line of metal bugs the once over, crosses the highway and is enveloped by the jungle again.
The caravan starts up once more. We drive onward into this prehistoric world split by a highway out of our memories.
I'm riding shotgun and I glance in the wing-mirror on my side. In it I can see the drive-in screen, and though the last movie should still be running, I can't make out any movement there. It looks like nothing more than an oversized slice of Wonder Bread.
Fade out.
That's the dream. And even now when I go to a drive-in, be it the beat up LUMBERJACK
here with its cheap, tin screen, or anywhere else, I find myself occasionally glancing at the night sky, momentarily fearing that out of the depths of space there will come a great, red comet that will smile at me with a mouthful of sawblade teeth and whip its flaming tail.
Postscript The part of this article dealing with my continuing dream, eventually became my novel, The Drive-In: A B Movie with Blood and Popcorn, and later led to a sequel, The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, and a third is in the mill, due whenever I get around to finishing it.
As to another matter, I have to reveal how poor a prophet I was concerning matters per-taining to the drive-in.
Almost immediately after I wrote my article, Joe Bob Briggs (John Bloom), was fired from The Dallas Times Herald. This was due to a scathing bit of inspired satire he wrote in his column. Satire that was taken literally, and led to him branching out on his own to become even more popular and successful than ever before, not only column-wise, but in books, and as a film-host. He also got a few bit acting parts out of it. So, sometimes, there is justice.
But for the drive-in, alas, there was no justice. Not even in Texas.
It wasn't making a comeback after all. It was merely screaming a death scream so loud I thought it was the voice of triumph. Video and cable gave it the coup de grace, and I have not driven past a drive-in m years that isn't closed or has been turned into some other enterprise, like THE REDLAND DRIVE-IN near me. It tried to hang on by showing porno movies, then finally, just said "the hell with it," and became a metal scrap yard. Probably best. It lost the spirit of the drive-in long before it ceased being one.