The Oblivion Society

by Marcus Alexander Hart

  “Oh, Sherri. I … I’m so sorry,” Vivian stammered. “I mean, you … your skin is all …”

  “Yeah, the sun’s a bitch,” Sherri said coldly. “Lucky I was wearing SPF 90.” Vivian bit her lip. Blinded or not, being captured in Sherri’s bloody gaze was unnerving. She stood up and pulled her head from the doorway, coming face-to-face with the muted camping lantern on the roof of the vehicle. Her brow wrinkled.

  “So we meet again,” she said irritably. “Haven’t you already caused me enough trouble?”

  “What is that thing?” Erik asked.

  “5-in-1 camping lantern,” Bobby said. “Radio, TV, satellite receiver, flashlight, and lantern. All the conveniences of home in a smaller, shittier package.”

  “You’re such an addict,” Erik sighed. “You can’t even stop watching TV for five minutes in the middle of a disaster.”

  “Hey, get offa me,” Bobby grumbled. “We were just trying to find some news. We couldn’t get a single radio working in the shitmobiles on this street. Every last one is dead.”

  Vivian’s face clouded as she looked up and down the street at the disabled vehicles.

  “So do you guys know what the hell happened last night?” Sherri asked.

  “We got our asses kicked by a hurricane,” Erik said.

  “Okay, so we’ve got Y2K in August, wrath of an angry God, or a hurricane that made an unannounced, exclusive, one-night-only appearance,” Sherri muttered. “For fuck’s sake, you people couldn’t identify your own asses if somebody didn’t give you a hint.”

  “It wasn’t any of those things,” Vivian agreed. “I think …” Her throat closed against the words, as if saying them would make them true.

  “I think …”

  “Oh, just spill it,” Sherri snapped. “What do you think it was?” Vivian looked at the rest of the group with solemn eyes.

  “I think it was a nuclear bomb.”

  The group fell silent for a long moment. Everyone who was able looked at everyone else, trying to discern some sense of whether Vivian was serious and, if so, whether she was right. Finally Bobby broke the tension with a fit of derisive laughter.

  “Oh, come on, live in the now, Viv! This is 1999! The Cold War is over. We won. There are no nukes anymore.”

  “Bobby, be serious!” Vivian said coldly. “All of the signs point to a nuclear explosion.”

  “Alright, girl. I’d buy the bomb if we were someplace that mattered, like Hollywood,” Trent said incredulously. “But do you think somebody would actually waste their big badda-boom on a Podunk whistle-stop like Stillwater, Florida? ”

  “They didn’t bomb Stillwater,” Vivian snapped. “They bombed Songbird Key.” Sherri shook her head.

  “Ohhh, of course,” she said sarcastically. “Everyone knows that commies hate condos.”

  Vivian rubbed her eyes.

  “Okay, I can’t explain the whys, ” she said affrontedly. “But if you apply Occam’s Razor to the circumstances, the only reasonable how is a nuclear detonation.”

  “Apply the octo what? ” Trent asked dumbly.

  “Occam’s Razor,” Vivian repeated. “It’s methodological reductionism. It basically states that for any given problem the simplest answer is the most likely solution.”

  “If I had Occam’s Razor, I’d apply it to my throat,” Sherri said wistfully.

  “Just look at the facts,” Vivian continued. “Songbird Key is gone.”

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’?” Bobby snuffed. “Everything I’ve seen all day is gone.”

  “No no. I don’t mean ‘burned up’ gone,” Vivian said. “I mean ‘underwater crater’

  gone. This wasteland of overpressure and fire damage we’re standing in would be consistent with a blast at that range. And what about this?”

  She yanked the flashlight out of her purse and rapidly clicked its non-functional switch on and off.

  “So what?” Trent questioned. “Homegirl’s got some dead batteries.”

  “It’s not dead batteries,” Vivian corrected. “The EMP did this.”

  “This is all because of a fucking ambulance driver?!” Sherri shouted.

  “No, the EM P. Electromagnetic pulse. Nuclear detonations temporarily electrify the atmosphere and wreak havoc with electronics,” Vivian explained, pointing up and down the street. “Don’t you see? Electric ignitions. That’s why you couldn’t start any of these cars!”

  She grabbed Erik’s arm and wrenched him around, showing his watch to the group.

  “That’s why Erik’s watch is stopped,” she continued. “Look, it’s stopped dead at nine minutes to midnight. That’s got to be the exact time the bomb went off!” Vivian’s frantic explanation echoed into cold silence in the crumbling street. An examination of their own memories of the previous night eerily validated Vivian’s last point.

  “Alright, Vivian, I don’t mean to interrupt your ‘50s-era duck-and-cover flashback,” Bobby said, gesturing with his thumb, “but I think Mayor Ben here would disagree with your batshit EMP theories.”

  Vivian looked at the picture on the tiny television screen and blinked.

  “Where did that come from?” she asked.

  “Right here,” Bobby said, kicking the cardboard box by his feet. “It was in the frattiewagon there.”

  Vivian bent down and looked at the packaging. Inside the shipping foam was a static-protection bag made of shiny metallic foil.

  “Well, this explains it,” she said, holding up the bag. “It was encased in metal. Anything completely shielded by metal would be protected from the effect.”

  “But what about the satellite dish, yo?” Trent said. “It came out of the Dumpster.” Vivian crossed the street and knocked on the metal top of the solid steel Dumpster.

  “And the Dumpster is made of whaaaat? ” she asked rhetorically. The wheels of rebuttal spun frantically in the minds of Vivian’s companions. Some of them wanted to be right for the sake of being right, others for the sake of proving Vivian wrong, others just out of a refusal to accept the horror of her increasingly convincing argument. But in the end, nobody could contest her hypothesis, and by the virtue of Occam’s Razor, it became a chilling fact.

  “It’s just like I said,” Trent nodded quietly. “God is cleansing the earth with fire.” Erik shook his head and gently crossed his arms over his slashed midsection.

  “This isn’t nearly as fun as Damnation Alley led me to believe it would be.”

  “So, what now?” Sherri asked.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Vivian said. “This place has got to be buzzing with radiation right now. We need to get as far away from ground zero as possible, ASAP.”

  “Whoa, whoa, not so fast,” Bobby said. “We’ve got to search for other survivors first!”

  He pulled the bloodstained scrap of sarong from his pocket and squeezed it sadly. Vivian understood.

  “I’m sorry, Bobby,” she said softly. “There are no other survivors in Stillwater. Believe me.”

  She reached into her purse and pulled out a gold ring fused to a broken door handle. Bobby had never met Nick, but somehow he understood as well. Vivian continued.

  “Nobody is leaving this town but us.”

  She dropped the handle on the ground and patted her brother on the back.

  “There’s nothing we can do here,” she said. “We’ve got to go.”

  “But how?” Trent asked. “We told you, girl. None of these cars work. What are we supposed to do?”

  “Well, the way I see it we have two choices,” Vivian said.

  She sat down on the pavement, kicked off her broken shoes, and pulled a pair of a deceased frat boy’s tube socks onto her blistered feet.

  “We walk,” she said, “or we die.”

  Erik’s oversized Adam’s apple twitched as he swallowed hard.

  “You say that as if it can’t be both,” he whimpered.

  “For real,” Trent said. “If the Almighty is layin’ down the smack, there ain’t nowhe
re to run.”

  “No, Vivian’s right,” Bobby admitted. “We need to grab our shit and get the hell out of here before we all end up like …”

  He dropped the scrap of sarong and watched the breeze carry it away. “We just need to get out of here while we can.”

  With muttered agreements, the five survivors gathered anything of potential use from the debris. Bobby unhooked the camping lantern from its cable and slung it over his back by its shoulder strap. He grabbed the edge of the dish and hefted it toward Erik.

  “Give me a hand with this, man.”

  “Oh, come on, Bobby,” Erik said. “I don’t care how addicted to TV you are. I am not carrying that.”

  “I know it’s a load, but we’ve got to take it,” Bobby argued. “We’re bound to pick up a news feed if we keep scanning the satellites. Plus once we get back to civilization … hey, free Skinemax.”

  Vivian picked up the discarded Army backpack and began stuffing it with the loose rolls of toilet paper.

  “What’s up with that?” Trent asked. “You gonna get revenge on your math teacher on the way out of town?”

  “I don’t know how long it’ll be before we find safety,” Vivian said. “And I, for one, don’t want to be without this when we need it.”

  “Good thinking, Vivi,” he grinned, picking up the chain of condoms. “And in the spirit of preparedness …”

  Vivian smirked and pulled the bag’s drawstring tightly shut.

  Erik helped Sherri out of the station wagon, holding her hand gingerly and guiding her blinded steps. Vivian stuffed her purse into the Army backpack and then hung the olive-colored bag over her slender shoulders. She looked at her brother, and he gave her an acknowledging nod.

  “All right, ramblers,” Bobby said. “Let’s get ramblin’.” With that, the tiny caravan of unlikely survivors left the ruins of the Bikini Martini and set off down the long and lonely road out of Stillwater, leaving its downtown in a foggy silence.

  Five minutes later, another set of feet quietly crackled through the abandoned street.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Five survivors trudged down the road in a ragged, exhausted caravan. It had been hours since they had left Stillwater’s city limits, yet the acrid pink fog still followed them, covering the wasted earth in ethereal sheets.

  Vivian walked awkwardly in her broken shoes. With the high heels severed, their stiff toes curled unnaturally upward, making each step a conscious exercise in balance. Even so, in these streets full of broken glass and crushed gravel, they were better than nothing.

  She kept her eyes fixed on the dusty pavement as she walked. The scenery had not improved during their trek, and she couldn’t bear to look at any more gray desolation swaddled in a blanket of noxious pink vapor. Her lingering hangover and the reek of the fog kneaded a growing nausea into her stomach. She yearned to step outside of reality for a minute, if for nothing else than to get a breath of fresh air. Trent walked just in front of her, carrying his found sword with an air of masculine authority. He sliced the blade through the fog with thick, whooshing strokes, thrusting it aggressively into the shadows. He flung the tip of the sword dramatically around a vacant corner with a swaggering leap.

  “Who goes there?” he demanded.

  He cast an expectant glance at Vivian out of the corner of his eye. She wasn’t paying any attention to him. He continued addressing the empty alley anyway.

  “Yeah, you best not be there,” he said commandingly. “Don’t be messin’ with my ladies unless you’re looking for a beat-down from Big T. I protect my girls 24/7, yo.”

  He glanced back at Sherri. She also wasn’t paying any attention to him. He pranced ahead and continued his protective posturing nonetheless.

  Sherri’s bleached-white hair and shredded black coat fluttered in the breeze, making her look like a shipwrecked ghost. The tattered leather no longer produced any sensation of pain as it brushed over the char of her skin. In fact, it no longer produced any sensation at all. Her scorched nerve endings had completely given up, leaving her blistered flesh soaked in a thick red numbness.

  Her blindness had begun to fall away, and she could now sense shapes and movement in the dark sea of her vision. Still, unable to properly see the road before her, Sherri clenched the drawstring of Vivian’s backpack for guidance. Her bloodstained eyes narrowed as her ears pricked up.

  “Hey, Powderpuff,” she whispered, “do you hear that?”

  “Yeah, don’t worry,” Vivian said. “It’s just that guy Trent acting like a freak.”

  “No, not that,” Sherri said. “Believe me, I’ve heard enough of that to be able to identify it. It’s like this weird crackling.”

  Vivian listened. All she could hear were five sets of feet crunching on the wrecked pavement and broken glass of the street.

  “I don’t hear it,” she shrugged. “I’m sure it’s nothing to be concerned about.” Behind the girls, Bobby and Erik struggled to carry the awkward, burdensome load of the satellite dish. They each had their hands hooked under the lip of the parabola; Bobby in the rear, Erik in the front. After a morning of torture the likes of which he had never before experienced, Erik was moving slower than Bobby could tolerate. He was reminded of this fact regularly by none-too-subtle jabs of the blunt dish into the small of his back.

  “Ow! Jesus, Bobby,” Erik whined. “Take it easy back there, will ya?”

  “Well, pick up the pace already,” Bobby snapped. “You’re slower than a Kermit download.”

  Erik stopped walking and dropped his end of the dish with a clang, whirling angrily on Bobby.

  “Oh, well excuse the shit out of me! I don’t need a break or anything!” he cried.

  “After all, I did get a good night’s sleep and a complete breakfast! Oh wait, I’m doing that thing again where I confuse eating Cap’n Crunch with bleeding to death from a near-fatal mutant attack! ”

  “Mutant attack?” Bobby snorted. “Erik, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “In the storm drain!” Erik chirped. “I got attacked by some kind of mutant!”

  “You said you got scratched by your cat!”

  “I thought it was my cat, but now I know better!” Erik squeaked. “Vivian was right, this was an atomic bomb! I was attacked by a radioactive mutant!” Bobby let out a single, derisive laugh.

  “You’re imagining things,” he said dismissively. “This is exactly like when we were kids and you saw Poltergeist for the first time. Remember that? That same night you thought a ghost was attacking you in your bedroom.”

  “That was totally different,” Erik said defensively. “I was just-”

  “Remind me, how many stitches did your grandma end up getting that night?”

  “Look, shut up about that, okay?!” Erik squeaked. “This was totally different!”

  “There were no ghosts then, and there are no radioactive mutants now,” Bobby said calmly. “It’s just your overactive, movie-freaked imagination.”

  “My imagination?!” Erik squealed. “My imagination?! Oh, I suppose these are my imagination too?!”

  He grabbed the bottom of his shirt and yanked it up over his chest. The skin surrounding his injuries had become ghoulishly swollen and inflamed, and unidentified protrusions pressed menacingly against the back of his soiled dressings. Bobby’s eyes went wide behind his glasses.

  “That’s messed up,” he said reverently. “It looks like you’re smuggling Klingon foreheads under there.”

  “I’m going to die! I just know it!” Erik panicked. “I had a mid-life crisis when I was thirteen years old!”

  Vivian looked at Erik’s sides with a diagnostic squint.

  “I’m sure you just need a few injections of antibiotics. You’ll be fine as soon as we find an emergency shelter,” she said. “In the meantime, I think we could all use a break. Let’s just sit down for a while and rehydrate ourselves. I see a fountain up ahead.”

  “Good thinkin’, Vivi,” Trent agreed with a showy twirl of his
sword. “Sit your weary body down and let the T soothe your parched throat with some cool, gentle water.”

  With that, he bounded up to the nearby fountain and sprung lightly onto its green and sea-foam blue edge. Not long ago it had almost certainly been a beautiful work of art, but today it was little more than a knee-high ring of concrete and cracked tile about ten feet in diameter. The granite nub of a fluted column extended abortively from the center of the pool, terminating in a mass of broken stone and bent pipe. Trent looked into the stagnant bowl and winced.

  “On second thought, maybe we best keep moving until we find some cocktails instead.”

  He probed the tip of his blade into the fountain and swirled it around. The pool’s spoiled surface was thick with fallout dust and rainbowed swirls of oily condensation. Vivian limped over to the fountain and sat wearily on its edge.

  “Okay, so forget the rehydration,” she muttered thirstily. “How about we just sit down long enough for some skin to grow back on the soles of my feet?” She pulled off her mangled shoes and rubbed her swollen feet and ankles. Trent quickly knelt in front of her and gracefully brushed her hands away, taking her blistered foot in his fingers and massaging it gently.

  “Hey Vivi, those pretty little shoes aren’t really appropriate for walking this kind of long haul.”

  Vivian glared at him with an expression that clearly stated, “No shit, Sherlock.” Trent continued. “So what do you say you let Big T carry you on his back for a while?”

  Vivian shook her head.

  “I don’t think so. Just give me a minute. I’ll be fine.”

  “Come on, girl, just spread those long legs and jump on,” Trent grinned, breaking into song. “Come on, ride the Trent! Hey ride it! Wooo-wooooo!” He turned his back to her and pointed his sunburnt arms at his swinging backside. Vivian raised an eyebrow.

  “Let me explain something to you right now,” she deadpanned. “I wouldn’t ‘ride the Trent’ if he was the last lifeboat on the Titanic, all right?”

  “Aww, it’s not like that, sweetness,” Trent smiled, putting his hand over his heart.

  “It’s my duty as a good Christian to give you the piggyback, girl. It’s right in the Bible. ‘During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints in the sand, it was then that I carried you.’”