The Oblivion Society

by Marcus Alexander Hart

  Or rather, its absence did.

  As she looked over each tiny ruined element of her demolished town, she felt no heightened emotion for Nick whatsoever, and that fact disturbed her. It was as if he was just another wrecked building or another crumbled street. Set within the epic scale of her loss, Nick’s last shadow was reduced to nothing more than another gray, cold cog of Armageddon imagery that silently meshed in the machine of her numbed mind. She could hardly describe the ache that was churning her gut.

  “I’m hungry,” Erik said.

  Vivian jumped at the sound of his voice. She had retreated so far into herself that the sudden break in the silence was like a splash of cold water across her consciousness. As she processed the words, she realized that her own stomach was cramping into an empty knot.

  “I … yeah, I guess I am too,” she said emotionlessly. “Maybe it’s time for …

  breakfast?”

  She looked at the unyielding black clouds above. The sky offered very little hint as to what time of day it was. Erik looked at his watch.

  “More like lunch,” he said. “It’s already … 11:51? Still?”

  “What do you mean, ‘still’?” Vivian asked.

  Erik shook his wrist and listened for ticking.

  “I think my watch stopped,” he said. “It was 11:51 when I looked at it like, two hours ago.”

  Vivian shrugged.

  “Maybe the water damaged it when you were in the drain.”

  Erik shook his head.

  “I doubt it. It’s supposed to be waterproof up to a hundred feet.”

  “Well, maybe you just smashed it into something in the dark.”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Erik said, rubbing his finger on the dial. “It doesn’t have a scratch on it.”

  “You probably just forgot to wind it.”

  “Uh uh, it’s got a battery,” Erik said. “I may be retro-chic, but I’m not a primate.”

  “Look, Erik, forget about your stupid watch, okay?” Vivian said irritably. “Let’s just find some food.”

  She looked around at the crumbling neighborhood. Ordinarily she would have known exactly where she was, but looking through the surreal lens of the post-apocalypse, Vivian found herself lost. She scanned the area, trying to find some small kernel of familiar reality upon which to latch.

  An expanse of empty blacktop. A corner of white concrete.

  It meant nothing to her.

  A section of collapsed blue roof. A giant “B.” An overturned … wait. The “B” stood out against the records of her memory. Suddenly, the meaningless details snapped together in her mind’s eye and rippled outward, forming a complete picture that overlaid the desolation of reality.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered. “It’s Boltzmann’s Market.” The ruins before them were, in fact, all that remained of Boltzmann’s Market. The shockwave had beaten the store’s concrete shell from the shape of an elongated cube into a pathetic, slanted heap. The left side of the store still stood more or less intact, dangling its “B” menacingly over the dusty parking lot, but from there the roofline plunged through a pile of collapsed concrete debris until it touched the ground on the right.

  Vivian stood petrified, covering her gaping mouth in silent shock. Erik looked at the building, then at her.

  “Hey, isn’t this that sucky place where you work?” he said. Vivian nodded grimly. Erik continued.

  “Wow. Be careful what you wish for, eh?”

  In the crushingly bleak absurdity of it all, Vivian choked out a guilty laugh in spite of herself.

  “Come on,” she said. “There’ll be food in there.” They walked briskly across the parking lot and up to the front door. Vivian had repeated this trek a thousand times under the blazing oppression of the Florida sun. Today she shivered under the shadow of a massive, lazy whirlpool of smoke and scorched stratosphere. The sun managed to smuggle some light through the cloud but couldn’t deliver heat.

  When they reached the door, they found only bent metal frames holding teeth of shattered glass. Erik made a motion to step through the opening and into the darkness, but Vivian put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Wait; hold on,” she said. “I’ve got a light.”

  She unslung her purse from her back and dug inside it, producing her flashlight. The tiny switch clicked under her thumb, but the bulb did not illuminate. She tried again, then pounded the flashlight against her palm and tried again.

  “What’s the matter?” Erik asked. “Batteries dead?”

  “No, they’re fine,” Vivian said. “I just used this yesterday.”

  “Huh. First my watch and now your flashlight,” Erik shrugged. “I guess it’s just a bad day for electronics.”

  Vivian’s forehead wrinkled as she pondered how both devices could have failed at once. She quickly shook her head as if to keep her first paranoid hypothesis from jelling. It was probably just a coincidence.

  “Forget it. It’s not even that dark in there,” Erik said. “Let’s just go.”

  “I’m not going into a collapsing building in the dark,” Vivian said firmly. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Oh, it’ll just be for a minute,” Erik said dismissively. “Come on, I’m too hungry to be afraid of the dark today.”

  With that, he bent down and climbed through the jagged mouth of the doorway.

  “Erik, wait!” Vivian called.

  But it was too late. Erik had completely disappeared into the darkened bowels of Boltzmann’s Market. Vivian frowned. There was no way she was just walking blindly into a demolished building, no matter how hungry she was. She snapped the switch of her deceased flashlight on and off impotently.

  “Find another way,” she muttered to herself.

  She dropped the inoperative flashlight back into her purse and looked around the parking lot. An uprooted palm tree lay across a scorched blue sedan still flickering with tiny points of flame in its upholstery. The car’s trunk had been blown open by the impact of the tree. Vivian went over to investigate. Inside were a spare tire and an L-shaped tire iron. With an industrious shuffle of her hands, she snapped off a long, dry palm frond and tied it into a ball around the crooked end of the tire iron. She held the leafy end of the assembly in the dim flames, igniting her makeshift torch. She knew it wouldn’t burn for very long, but it would at least cut through the store’s darkness long enough for her to safely gather some provisions. Torch in hand, Vivian returned to the blasted door and stepped through it cautiously. From within the cloud of pink and gray smoke she could hear a wet, muffled crunching sound.

  “Erik? Where are you?”

  “Mmnn!” he replied through a full mouth. “M’mover here! D’ritos!” Vivian stepped cautiously through the charred interior toward the sound of Erik’s voice. A fire had obviously gutted a good portion of the store before growing weary and shrinking into a handful of flickering embers. The smoky air smelled overwhelmingly of burnt sugar, with undertones of barbecued meat and brine. The tiled floor was both slippery and sticky. Vivian held the torch low and saw a river of stagnating cola, marbled with artificial purples and oranges. Apparently the collapsing roof had crushed the soft-drink aisle. She kicked a misplaced bottle of gin out of her path and turned her gaze back into the smoky darkness.

  “Erik?” she repeated. “Come on, where are you?”

  “Over here,” he called.

  “Where?!”

  Vivian raised her torch and squinted into the disorienting fog. At the edge of her vision she could pick out a silhouette examining the warped shelves. She let out a sigh of tense relief.

  “There you are. Come on, let’s just grab some stuff and get out,” she said, lifting her torch toward the shadow. “This place is freaking me-”

  Vivian’s thought was disrupted by her own bloodcurdling scream. The shadowy figure wasn’t Erik at all, but an unfortunate county health inspector who had been in the wrong place at a very wrong time. The buckling shelves had sent a metal support strut springing out li
ke a harpoon, impaling him through the chest and holding him to the ensuing blaze like a marshmallow over a campfire. One entire side of his body had been reduced to a charcoal-black mass of brittle carbon, and a thin trail of silvery gray smoke gently vented from his empty eye socket. His remaining eye was opened wide and fixed unblinkingly on Vivian.

  At the sound of her screams, Erik came sprinting from the next aisle, clutching a half-eaten bag of Doritos 3Ds.

  “What?! What’s going aaaugh!”

  As his feet hit the slick of spilt soda, Erik’s sneakers kicked out from under him and dropped him flat on his back. He slid across the aisle, knocking out Vivian’s legs and slamming into the corpse’s dangling ankles. With the force of the impact, the metal spear made a crumbling slice through the ashy flesh and dropped the remains on top of Erik’s startled body.

  “Aaaaaugh! Shit! Holy shit! Get it off! Get it off!”

  Erik flailed under the torched cadaver, tearing its desiccated limbs from its body in his frantic struggle. Vivian clambered to her feet, slipping and sliding in a breathless panic. She grabbed the disintegrating health inspector and threw him off of Erik’s spastic body. In the dim torchlight, Erik’s cheese-powder-stained face was as white as hotel linens.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” he shrieked.

  Their appetites effectively ruined, the two terrified survivors bolted out of the aisle and toward the front of the store.

  “Where’s the door?” Erik panicked. “It’s too dark! I can’t find the front door!”

  “It’s over here,” Vivian said, holding up her torch. “Come on! And watch your ste-”

  Before the words had come out of her mouth, Vivian’s foot caught on the cable of a fallen fluorescent light, yanked itself out from under her body, and sent her smashing down again on the cracked tile. Her torch flew out of her hand and skidded across the floor, slamming to a stop against the remains of checkstand two. Its flames licked at an intact heap of paper grocery bags, quickly igniting the whole pile.

  Vivian pulled her face from the puddled floor and began wringing the slime from her hair. It flowed out of her red locks with an unnerving, clotty sort of warmth. The smell of it was familiar and organic. Vivian froze in the slowly increasing firelight. Erik slipped to her side and grabbed her by the elbow.

  “Oh God, are you okay, Viv?! You went down hard and-oh shit, you’re bleeding!”

  “No,” Vivian said numbly, looking at the dark red substance on her hands. “I’m not.”

  Her eyes rolled numbly toward the blaze enveloping the checkstand, landing upon the ghastly white flesh of Verman Boltzmann’s drained carcass. The blubbery heap of his earthly remains was draped over the smoldering conveyor belt like a whale beached on a breakwater. His skin was riddled with a network of gruesome splits and tears, as if the blast had finally driven his substantial innards to rupture his overstuffed hide. As the hot flames began to lick the sides of his body, stinking yellow bubbles of molten fat oozed from his lacerations like lava from a volcano that really needed to work out more often.

  Erik’s legs went weak and buckled beneath him. Almost before he had landed on his knees, he had already thrown up half a bag of nacho chips.

  Vivian just stared. Frozen. The warm blood of her late boss dripping from her pointed chin.

  “Come on! Let’s go!” Erik screamed, staggering back to his feet. “Dead things, Vivian! Dead things!”

  He grabbed her by the arm and yanked her toward the pale, foggy pink glow of the door as the fire quickly spread through the unburnt debris. They stumbled out into the parking lot and collapsed on the dusty pavement, forcing the stench of smoke and nausea out of their bodies with sharp, phlegmy coughs and bitter dry heaves. After a long moment, they fell silent.

  Vivian stared into the black smoke that was now pouring from the entrance. The spreading fire threw orange flickers of dancing light across the lenses of her glasses as it consumed the remainder of Boltzmann’s Market.

  “All right,” she whispered. “Let’s not ever do that again.”

  “Alright, let’s do it again,” Bobby said dismally. “Turn it right. Right. Right. Stop!

  No, left, leeeeft. Stop! Come on! Baby steps!”

  The 5-in-1 camping lantern sat on the roof of the Alpha Beta Gamma station wagon, surrounded by the broken plastic of several D-cell battery packages. Bobby fiddled with the on-screen menu of the five-inch television built into the lantern’s face. Sherri lounged across the back seat of the vehicle, nursing her third beer.

  “This is bullshit, yo,” Trent said. “Why don’t you just use the antenna?”

  “I did use the antenna, genius,” Bobby said. “I tried the TV and radio bands. It doesn’t pick up anything on AM, FM, UHF, or VHF. It’s just a cheap-ass camping lantern; it’s not Ted Turner’s limo. I’m amazed this piece of shit actually has a built-in satellite receiver. Now turn the dish to the left, slowly. ” Trent grumbled and shuffled in tiny steps, scraping the edge of a stained satellite dish into the pavement. The Bikini Martini’s new digital mini-dish had been blown to atoms with the rest of the bar, but its obsolete one-and-a-half-meter analog forebear had survived inside the steel Dumpster. Trent was now struggling to hold its awkward girth up to the southern horizon.

  The tiny black and white screen crackled to life as the signal bar suddenly leapt to maximum strength.

  “Stop! Stop!” Bobby ordered. “We got something!”

  “So come on with us now, and discover the wonder of youuuuuu! Welcome to Zoobilee Zoo!”

  “God damn it!” he barked. “Zoobles again. Turn right.”

  “No way. Uh uh. I’m done,” Trent said, leaning the heavy dish against the Dumpster. “I’ve gone all the way around seven times and you ain’t found nothin’ but that kiddie show. Are you sure you’re working that thing right, B?” Bobby flipped through the thin instruction book.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure,” he said. “I don’t get it. Even if we can only find one satellite through this shitty cloud cover, we should be able to get more than one non-subscription feed off of it. This TV sucks ass.”

  He threw the book back into the box and slumped against the wagon’s fender in frustration. Trent squinted at Mayor Ben’s face chirping on the tiny screen.

  “Hello, my little Zoobaroos! It’s zoo-pendous to see you again for another zoo-riffic adventure!”

  “Does he actually talk like that for the whole show?” Trent asked.

  “Shhh!” Bobby hissed. “Turn that off!”

  “For real,” Trent agreed. “This guy is as irritating as underwear with a zipper.”

  “No no, listen!” Bobby continued. “I hear it again! The crackling! Listen!”

  “Ah shit, not this again,” Sherri muttered.

  Trent turned down the tiny volume knob and once again listened into the thick, heaving silence. Somewhere a piece of metal banged against another, echoing dimly across the distance. Then nothing.

  “Hello out there!” Bobby yelled. “Hey! Is anybody there? Sunny?” His words echoed off of the buildings and evaporated into quiet.

  “Give it up,” Sherri said darkly, curling up in the back seat of the wagon. “There’s nobody coming for us but the reaper.”

  “Stop it! I’m serious!” Bobby snapped. “There’s something out there! Listen!” He stood up and yelled into the pink fog.

  “Hey! I know you’re out there! I can hear you! Say something!” His words decayed and died in the air. He cupped his hand to his ear and concentrated on the direction from which he had heard the crackle, but there was nothing. Nothing. It must have been his imagination after all. He drew a breath to say as much but was interrupted by a tiny voice that returned from the opposite direction.

  “Bobby? Oh my God-Bobby!”

  Bobby blinked in startled surprise, then whirled around and ran into the fog. He barely recognized the voice, as he wasn’t accustomed to it sounding happy to see him.

  “Holy shit!” he yelped. “Vivian?!”
/>   The blood-and-soda-streaked forms of Vivian and Erik emerged from the obscurity of the vapor, both running to meet Bobby in the open street. The two redheaded siblings caught each other in a tight embrace.

  “Oh Bobby!” Vivian sobbed. “Oh God! I’m so glad you’re alive!” A tear formed in the corner of Bobby’s beady eye.

  “Right back atcha,” he said with a smile. “After all, I do still need a place to crash.”

  Vivian choked a laugh through her sobs and punched her brother in the arm.

  “What the hell have you been doing to Erik?” Bobby continued. “He looks like shit.”

  “Oh, ha ha,” Erik said, pointing at Bobby’s face. “You’re not looking so great yourself. You’ve got a whole ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield’ thing going on there.”

  Trent stepped in front of Erik and bowed ceremoniously to Vivian, planting a kiss on her hand.

  “And who is this lovely creature that has graced us with her presence?”

  “This is Vivian. My sister, ” Bobby said menacingly. “So whatever you’re thinking, just stop.”

  “Enchanted to meet you, Vivian,” Trent oozed. “Thank the good Lord. I was beginning to think that the last woman on Earth was an angry little goth girl.”

  “Hey!” Sherri snapped. “When you label me you negate me, you preppie fuckwad!”

  “Sherri?” Vivian gasped, peering into the dim back seat of the station wagon. “Oh my God, Sherri, is that you?”

  She ran to the side of the car, leaned down, and poked her head through the back door. Although she managed to squelch the first words that her brain conjured, her gasp at the sight of Sherri’s fiercely sunburnt flesh was quite audible.

  “Go ahead and stare,” Sherri shrugged, her useless eyes peering gruesomely through Vivian’s shoulder. “Doesn’t bother me. I’m fuckin’ blind.”