“Hey Mr. Pious Playa,” Erik said bitterly. “If you’re so anxious to carry something, why don’t you carry this freakin’ dish for a while? Bobby’s having a contest to see what he can kill first: the batteries in the TV or me.”
“Oh, quit being such a drama queen,” Bobby muttered. “You’ll thank me when this TV finds the emergency broadcast that ends up saving your ass. I’m gonna give it another try.”
He propped the satellite dish against the side of the fountain and began hooking it up to the camping lantern. Erik slumped down on the ground and did his best to look miserable. Sherri plopped down heavily on the edge of the fountain and hung her head nauseously between her bony knees.
“Man, I am still hung over as shit,” she moaned. “I didn’t drink enough last night to still be feeling this bitch.”
“I hear that,” Bobby agreed. “Usually I can just sleep it off, but my guts are all a-tingle today. The puke has been burning up and down the pipe all day like a barf barometer.”
“Me too,” Erik moaned. “I wasn’t even drinking last night and I still feel like I’m gonna hurl. It’s like the air is just crawling in my stomach. ”
“Okay, I don’t know what y’all are talking about,” Trent said proudly. “I drank responsibly, and I feel right as rain. Nothing is sexier than somebody who knows when to say when, right Vivi?”
Vivian didn’t hear him. She was still preoccupied with what Erik had said. She had been feeling the same thing all morning but hadn’t been able to express the sentiment so succinctly. She too felt like the air was crawling in her stomach. Not only crawling in her stomach, but in her lungs, and bladder, and in her toes and fingertips. It was as if the piercing reek of the pink fog was so thick and inescapable that it was invoking a physical madness. She felt like the vapor was not only assaulting her burning nose, but her entire body, soaking into her chilly, exposed skin and saturating it with a ripe, cabbagey stench. She knew this feeling could only be one thing, and it wasn’t a hangover.
It had to be the preliminary effects of radiation poisoning.
“Vivi?” Trent repeated. “You okay, sweetness? You look like you’re about to give greetings and salutations to your old friend Ralph.”
Vivian held her tingling abdomen nervously. There was no point in telling them what was really making them sick. It was better they didn’t know. There was nothing they could do about it if they did. As this helplessness wrenched down on her stomach, Vivian realized that Trent’s assessment of her expression was about to become disgustingly accurate.
“No no, I’m okay. I feel fine,” she lied. “I just have to um … go to the bathroom or something.”
Trent swished his sword into the air and offered Vivian his arm.
“Please, allow me to escort you to a discreet location,” he said with a bow. “I shall be honored to be your humble bodyguard whilst you take care of business.”
“Ha!” Sherri laughed. “Or with the bullshit filter on, ‘The thought of peeping on you squatting with your panties around your ankles gives me a hard-on.’” Vivian glanced at Trent. He looked about as innocent as a barbecue at Jeffrey Dahmer’s house.
“I think I can keep an eye on myself,” she said, disgusted. “Could somebody else please keep an eye on Trent?”
“Oh, that’s cold,” Trent said guiltily. “A guy tries to look out for a lady, and look what happens. That’s just cold.”
With an annoyed glance, Vivian wandered away from the group to find some modicum of privacy in which to lose her lunch. She limped in her cruel shoes around the back of the nearest remaining building. All of the detail had been ripped from the face of the groaning structure, leaving no way to tell what it had been in its past life. Reduced to its most rudimentary elements, it was little more than a monolithic stack of crumbling concrete slabs extending five stories into the burnt sky. She leaned against the cracked cement wall and felt her body cells rolling in a cold boil. It was like thousands of insects were running across the inside of her skin, scuttling around her limbs, scurrying up her back, and burrowing into her face. Her stomach convulsed and her mouth jerked open, yet it produced nothing. Not even a gag or cough. Finally she wrapped her arms around her trembling body and slouched nauseously against the building.
Through her cracked glasses she could see that she was in the midst of a grim automobile graveyard. Chunks of vehicles lay slammed into the ground, as if some gigantic monster had taken bites out of them and cast them aside. To her right, half of a BMW leered at her with its broken grille. To the left, a Lexus was driven nose-first into the hard earth, standing perpendicular to the ground with its rear tires slowly rolling against the stale air.
As Vivian crouched anxiously against the chilly concrete wall, the pink vapor oozed over the derelict automobiles, seeping through their broken windows and pouring out of their forgotten tailpipes. Slowly. Sickeningly. She imagined the fog curling into a mass of radioactive tentacles, creeping toward her vulnerable position-ever closer, ever more solid, twisting across the ground like tongues of rancid cotton candy, sliding out to lick her chilled skin. She could almost hear it breathing: inhaling and exhaling in a heavy stroke, crackling like a bonfire. A jingle of broken glass against cement roused her from her trance. In a flash she had retrieved her senses and launched to her feet. She turned in place uneasily, her eyes stabbing into the once again inanimate fog. She had heard someone breathing.
“Trent?” she squeaked. “Damn it, Trent. Leave me alone! Give me some privacy for a minute!”
She closed her eyes and listened, trying to locate the source of the noise. The heavy breath was definitely coming from behind the vertical Lexus. With a sudden fury she rushed around the automotive wall, her own thumping footsteps eclipsed by the heavy pounding of the retreating voyeur.
“Trent? Trent! Yeah, you better run, you pervert!” she yelled. “Is it too much to ask for you to just leave me alone for a minute so I can-”
Vivian stopped short and her words fell into empty air. There was nothing on the other side of the car but a broad, yawning hole in the side of the concrete monolith.
“I found something!” Bobby said excitedly. “Turn left … left … stop! We got it!” With Erik rotating the dish, Bobby had finally managed to get a picture on the lantern’s screen. The crackle of the tiny speaker drew the boys into a huddle around the bluish-white flicker. Even Sherri leaned in with casual interest. The televised transmission was a simple animation drawn in sketchy watercolors. It depicted an ape-like man shambling across an empty white screen, holding a blunt rock. The hominid shortly froze at the left of the frame, and a stout, upright-walking Homo erectus emerged from behind it wielding a crude hand axe. After two steps, the primitive man froze, and a caveman in animal skins emerged holding a sharpened spear, and so on until the screen contained a simplified representation of the evolution of Man. The lineage culminated in the thin, tall form of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens, holding a glowing, oversized atom in his outstretched hand. A soft voice echoed the text that faded onto the bottom of the screen.
“Realize your potential. WOPR - Liberty Valley, Pennsylvania.”
“Hey!” Trent said. “That’s not the Zoo Crew! You found something else!”
“Naah. It’s the Zoobles all right,” Bobby said with irritation. “This is just a PBS
station bumper at the beginning of the show. I saw it this morning too.” Sure enough, as soon as he had said the words, the promo dissolved into the upbeat opening theme of Zoobilee Zoo . Bobby punched the “scan” button and watched with diluted optimism as the screen rolled through channel after empty channel.
“Wait, wait,” Erik said. “Are you telling me that with this big dish and all the satellites on the horizon, all you can pick up on this thing is one station? ”
“So far,” Bobby said.
“And instead of any news about what’s going on, that one station is playing nothing but a Zoobilee Zoo marathon?!”
“Not exactly a marathon,
” Bobby said. “It’s actually the same episode. At the end it goes to black for about thirty seconds, then bars and tone, the promo, and then back to the start. I think the tape is stuck in a loop.”
“Hello, my little Zoobaroos!” Mayor Ben cackled. “It’s zoo-pendous to see you again for another zoo-riffic adventure!”
Erik rubbed his forehead with his fingertips.
“That’s it. Forget it,” he said. “I’m not going to carry this heavy-ass dish another inch just so that I can bask in the nightmarish glow of Ben Vereen in cat makeup.” Sherri shrugged casually.
“When I was a kid I always thought that makeup was kinda hot,” she said.
“There’s something sexy about a dude with animal parts.”
“Okay, fine,” Erik muttered. “From now on, let’s make the furvert carry the dish. She’s the only one who’s going to get anything out of it.”
“Hey!” Sherri snapped. “I’m not a furvert just because I’d fuck Mayor Ben!”
“Perhaps not,” Bobby shrugged. “But that fact does open up a whole new slate of potential psychological problems.”
“Oh, screw you and your satellite dish,” Sherri murmured. “What do I need TV
for? I’m fucking blind.”
“Jeez, what is with you people?” Bobby huffed. “I can’t believe you just want to just abandon our only chance of ever seeing an emergency broadcast!”
“It’s not that we don’t want to keep scanning the satellites for news,” Erik explained. “We just can’t keep carrying that two-ton dish on our backs! We’d all be totally gung-ho about keeping it if we had a car!”
“And if ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were fruits and nuts, every day would be Christmas,” Bobby smirked. “Fine, just forget it then. We’re never gonna find a working car in this wasteland.”
From out of the fog, Vivian ran up to the fountain and slid to a stop on the dusty pavement in a pair of ruby-red Airwalk sneakers.
“Good news, everybody,” she said cheerfully. “I think I just found our ride out of here.”
“This way! In here! Come on!”
Holding aloft the camping lantern, Vivian plunged intrepidly through the garage-door-sized hole in the disintegrating concrete cube. A dusty concrete ramp, wide enough for a car, stabbed upward into the heart of what had previously been the parking garage of the Banyan Terrace. Up the ramp she hiked, and her four companions followed warily.
The heavy structure had buckled against its own framework, shearing story after story of concrete floor from its moorings and piling the fallen levels in sedimentary layers. The ruined floors sagged over the massive support pylons of the lowest levels, forming a broad, straight tunnel through the center of the wreckage. The lantern light played eerily over the crumpled remains of luxury cars smashed within the collapsed walls. Between the mangled fenders, narrow, shadowy cavities opened off of the main shaft like tunnels in an ant farm. After about a hundred feet, the ramp terminated in a short cross of perpendicular roadway, creating a squarish chamber of dark, stale air twenty feet wide. The building groaned and squealed under its own pressing weight, dropping a powdery snowfall of pulverized concrete on the five survivors as the light of the entrance slipped into the distance behind them. Erik shuffled to Vivian’s side and whispered urgently.
“Vivian, are you crazy?!” he squeaked. “I thought we were going to stay out of condemned buildings from now on! What are we doing here?!”
Vivian stopped as she reached the end of the inclined tunnel.
“We’re here to get the Rabbit out of its burrow,” she answered. She lifted her lantern toward the wall, throwing its yellow light over the nose of her rusted convertible sticking out of the debris. It was nearly buried, but apparently unharmed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Bobby sighed.
“Damn, Vivi,” Trent quipped. “God may have given women all the sugar and spice, but he sure didn’t give y’all any skillz when it comes to parking an automobile.”
“I didn’t park it,” Vivian muttered. “I paid a guy seven dollars for this exclusive VIP space.”
In the truest sense of the word, the space where Vivian’s Rabbit was parked was not, in fact, a space at all. For those to whom this was not readily apparent, the floor had been painted with a series of tight, parallel lines and stenciled letters reading “NO
PARKING!”
The convertible had been backed, as the valet had promised, under the access ramp to the next level of the garage. To each side of the vehicle stood a titanic pair of concrete pylons straining to hold both the massive ramp and the several collapsed floors that were now piled brutally upon it. Their buckling weight had come to rest against the fenders of the Rabbit, barring access to its doors and, in fact, making it impossible to get around the sides of the vehicle at all.
The ramp of the groaning ceiling ran parallel to the length of the car’s windshield, pressed harshly on its rollbar, and continued downward to meet the ground ten feet behind its rear bumper. This slant allowed one and only one access point to the Rabbit’s interior: an eight-inch gap between the crumbling ceiling and the top of the windshield.
“What are we supposed to do with that?! ” Erik whined. “It’s crushed! Let’s get out of here before we are too!”
“It’s not crushed; it’s just trapped,” Vivian said. “And it’s the only car in the whole building that’s still intact. All we need to do is pull it out of there.”
“Uh uh. No way, Viv,” Bobby said, eyeing the crumbling ceiling. “That car is probably the only thing holding up the roof in here. And even if we do get it out, it’s not like we could start it.”
“Come on, Bobby,” Vivian pleaded. “The keys are right there in the ignition!”
“It doesn’t matter,” Trent argued. “We punched a key into every car at the bar and we didn’t even get as much as a car alarm to go off, yo.”
“It’s the EMP-you said it yourself,” Erik agreed. “The ignition circuits are gonna be fried. Keys or not, we’ll never get that little car running. It wasn’t shielded with metal.”
“Yes, that might be true,” Vivian growled. “It wasn’t completely enclosed in metal, but there sure was a lot of metal trapped in the hundreds of tons of automobile-laced concrete that it was enclosed in!”
“Yeah, exactly,” Erik chirped. “The same hundreds of tons of automobile-laced concrete that are going to crush us to death as soon as we start messing with it! Let’s just get out of here already!”
“So that’s it? We’re not even going to try?” Vivian asked, frustrated. “It’s not even worth the chance? ”
“The chance of what? ” Sherri barked. “Of getting our asses killed trying to save a car that barely ran before the apocalypse?”
Vivian pushed up her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She took a deep breath of the stale, claustrophobic air, and a low, menacing crackle emanated from the overstrained walls of the garage.
“Fine. You can all just leave if you want,” she said sternly. “I’ll pull that car out all by myself if I have to.”
“Oh, come on, Vivian,” Erik pleaded. “Be reasonable.”
“I tried being reasonable,” Vivian said. “Reason says that the ceiling will collapse if we disturb the car. Reason says that the EMP destroyed the ignition. I’m not getting anywhere using reason.”
“So what are you going to do?” Bobby asked.
“I’m going to believe in myself,” Vivian said. “And I’m going to drive that car out of here.”
With that, Vivian set down the lantern and sprang onto the hood of her car. She squeezed her arms and shoulders through the gap and came to a struggling stop, her body pinned between the windshield and the deteriorating ceiling above. This was exactly how far she had managed to get in her previous attempt, when she had snatched her sneakers from the dashboard. She couldn’t even reach the keys from here, let alone the shifter or pedals. Yet she clawed her feet into the sun-faded hood, trying futilely to shove herself through the opening
as bits of gravel and silt flaked off of the ceiling and rolled down her back.
Bobby and Erik exchanged exasperated glances. Sherri stared blindly into the sound of the scuffle. Trent just gazed hungrily at Vivian’s wriggling backside. Finally he turned on the group and spoke with the command of a man who changed the course of history, as portrayed by a washed-up actor in a made-for-TV movie.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen. What kind of pathetic creatures are we? For real, yo?” he declared. “Whilst we stand here all scaredy-catted up, that woman is risking her fine neck to score some wheels for us cowering and lowly wretches. Listen up, dawgs: If the lady wants her car, we shall help the lady get her car. It is our duty as men to fulfill our women’s every wish.”
“I wish you’d decide if you’re a poseur intellectual or a poseur gangsta,” Sherri muttered.
Bobby and Erik looked at each other and shrugged.
“We’re not leaving without Vivian,” Erik frowned. “And I guess Vivian’s not leaving without her car.”
“So by transitive axiom,” Bobby sighed, “we’re not leaving without Vivian’s car.”
“Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Trent beamed. “Come on, let’s give the lovely lady a hand.”
He leapt to the Rabbit’s fender and slid his hand down Vivian’s long calf. Vivian kicked at him distractedly.
“What’s the word in there, Vivi?” Trent said. “You all good?” Vivian’s muffled voice came back.
“I’m stuck. The gap is too narrow. My chest won’t fit through it.”
“Here, let me help,” Trent said, stepping forward. “If I hold down your girlie bits all Janet-Jackson-style, you’ll be able to-”
Bobby put a heavy hand on Trent’s shoulder, stopping him in his tracks. He slowly wagged his index finger in the air scornfully.
“Damn, homes, don’t be like that,” Trent said bitterly. “I’m just trying to look out for the greater good here, yo!”
The Oblivion Society Page 20
