“Trent!” Erik screamed. “Get back here, you wuss!” But it was too late. Trent was already halfway to the exit. Erik grabbed the discarded sword and leapt to his feet as Twiki emerged bloodily from the scar in the wall. The mutant’s fierce, gurgling breath rolled into an earsplitting screech as the matted orange fur of her back rose up into angry spikes.
“I tried to tell you that killing is wrong,” Erik said shakily, “but I guess you’ll have to learn the hard way!”
With all the grace of a man who had never played an organized sport a day in his life, Erik took an awkward step forward and swung the sword in a clumsy, girlish arc. The blade not only failed to hit Twiki by a wide margin, but also managed to slip out of his hands and sail through the air in a helicopter-like spin, clipping the sloped ceiling and dropping hilt-first into the Rabbit.
“Ouch! What the hell?!” Sherri screamed. “Quit throwing shit at me, asshole!” Erik’s shoulders bunched.
“Sorry!” he cried.
He turned back to his former cat with a nervous smile.
“Ah, yeah, so about that whole ‘trying to kill you’ thing. I was just-” Twiki didn’t want Erik’s excuses. She just wanted Erik out of her way. Without a second glance, she plowed past him and down the ramp. Trent was still a good thirty feet from the end of the tunnel when the mutated beast caught up with him. With a screaming leap, he launched himself between two ravaged automobiles and back into the catacombs of the groaning walls. A second later, Twiki disappeared into the opening behind him.
Erik climbed onto the hood of the car and thrust his hands into the ceiling, trying to push the convertible out of its grave as he had seen Vivian doing before. He slipped in the puddle of fresh blood and dropped to his knees with a painful bang. With a wincing hiss he was back on his feet, pushing as hard as he could while increasingly large chunks of the building splintered off around him. He slipped again and his chin hit the top of the windshield, slamming his jaw shut and sending a shockwave through his skull. Fist-sized clods of jagged concrete pounded down upon Sherri inside the car.
“Ow! Ow! Shit!” she thrashed. “Will somebody get me out of here already?!”
“Shut up! I’m trying!” Erik wailed. “I can’t move the car!”
“Well, stop throwing shit at me!”
“I’m not! The ceiling is coming down!”
“The ceiling is what?! ”
Erik didn’t have to explain. At that very moment the building let out a groan like a constipated elephant, dropping the thousand-ton ceiling. With a shower of liberated debris, the sloped roof came down in a massive wave, starting from its fulcrum in the darkness ten feet behind the Rabbit. The cascading concrete slab fell like the arm on a movie director’s clapboard, pinching the back end of the trapped vehicle and launching it out of its cell like an unwilling Tiddly Wink.
“Shit, we’re moving!” Sherri yelped. “Where’s the brake?!” Erik threw out his long arms and desperately grabbed the corners of the windshield as gravity quickly pulled the liberated Rabbit down the ramp.
“Don’t hit the brake!” he screamed.
Not known as one who worked well with others, Sherri punched her free hand into the brake pedal. She pumped it furiously, yet the car just kept picking up speed. Had she retained the gift of sight, Sherri would have realized that she was actually pumping the accelerator.
“The brake is broken!” she wailed.
“Don’t hit the brake!” Erik repeated.
Sherri made a motion to lift her hand from the pedal, but before it had moved an inch it came to an abrupt halt. In her frenzy, the looping shreds of her right sleeve had become entwined around the accelerator.
“Oh, come on! ” she groaned.
As tons of tumbling steel and concrete squeezed in all around him, Erik looked at the single point of light in the distance and suddenly understood what it felt like to be toothpaste. The Rabbit sailed down the ramp with building speed, but the walls were coming down faster than the dead hulk could possibly accelerate. In a matter of seconds the last thing that Erik would ever see would be the light of the approaching exit snuffed out by the same toppling concrete that would crush him into a wet meat pancake.
“Fuckshit O’Fuckery!” Sherri cursed.
Her constrained arms thrashed madly in their bonds. Clutch, gas. Clutch clutch, gas.
From the other side of the windshield, Erik couldn’t hear Sherri’s curses over the frenzied squeaking of the pedals, the thunder of the splintering garage, and the roar of the Rabbit’s engine as it suddenly sprang to life!
Before Sherri realized that all of her weight was resting on the gas pedal, the tires ripped against the dusty floor, spinning madly with the motor’s awakened fury. As if trying to save its own miserable life, the Rabbit bucked forward with a blast of speed, tearing its way down the ramp and out the exit just as the last remaining supports of the building came down, blasting a volcanic eruption of dust and gravel against its rear fenders.
Sherri struggled to push her face off the floor, grinding her back into the steering wheel. The Rabbit careened in a mad, squealing arc across the empty street and around the side of the building.
“Bobby!” Erik screamed. “Look out!”
Under the weight of his lacerated sister, Bobby stumbled out of the path of the flailing Rabbit as it tore past him.
“Brakes, Sherri! Brakes!” Erik wailed. ” Now you can hit the brakes!” Sherri’s left arm was now tightly bound to the clutch, her right to the gas. There was only one thing to do.
“Hold on to your ass!” she screamed.
With a craning lurch of her neck, Sherri slammed her sunburnt forehead down on the brake pedal, locking the Rabbit in a spinout. The bald tires skidded across the fallout-dusted pavement, not coming to a full stop until the front bumper rammed the side of the fountain. Erik slipped off the slick hood like a puck on an air hockey table, landing in the filthy water with a dramatic splash. Having served its purpose, the Rabbit’s engine shuddered, wheezed, and promptly stalled itself out. Erik scrambled out of the water and dropped with a wet plop onto the dusty concrete. An out-of-breath Bobby quickly arrived and gently set Vivian down on the fountain’s edge.
“Erik, you okay, dude?” Bobby puffed.
“I’m okay,” Erik nodded. “You?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” Bobby nodded gravely, touching his bloody shirt. “None of this is mine.”
“I’m okay, you’re okay, everybody is fucking okay,” barked a tiny voice. “Now will somebody fucking get me the fuck out of this car for fuck’s sake?!” Bobby waddled to the side of the convertible and pulled open the creaky door. Sherri’s narrow hips were still wedged in between the front seats, her legs thrown across the back, both arms tied down to the pedals. Bobby grabbed the dusty sword from where it lay across her back.
“Stay still for a second,” he ordered.
With a few sawing thrusts of the blade, he cut the knotted strands of leather from Sherri’s wrists. He dropped the sword in the street with a clatter before pulling Sherri’s thrashing body from between the seats and doing likewise to her.
“Ouch! Oh, real chivalrous, dickwad.”
“Sherri, you started the car!” Erik said. “How did you do that?”
“I don’t know-it was rolling and I just mashed all the pedals,” Sherri shrugged. “I told you I don’t know how to drive stick.”
“She did a push start,” Vivian mumbled.
Erik leaned in with a squint.
“She did what?”
“It’s a trick to turn over an engine with a bad starter,” Vivian whispered. “You just get it rolling and pop the clutch.”
Erik blinked twice, then snapped his fingers.
“That’s right! Just like in The Karate Kid! ” he exclaimed. “Remember, Viv? Daniel’s mom’s car would never start, so they always had to pop the clutch, and when he went on that date with the rich girl-”
“Erik,” Vivian whispered, “not now.”
Viv
ian’s face had turned a pale, floury white as two streams of blood leaked down her back and into the squalid water of the fountain. Erik’s face collapsed guiltily. He sat down at Vivian’s side and gently took her hand.
“I’m sorry, Viv,” he said tenderly. “You were right: The car works. We’re going to find a hospital. We’re all going to be safe. All five of us.” Bobby’s eyes popped open.
“Holy crap,” he gasped. “What happened to that other idiot?” Erik’s eyebrows raised helplessly as he looked at what was left of the garage. It no longer retained the shape of a cube, but had fallen into a classic heap. The pulverized cement dust hung heavily in the moist pink vapor, threatening to reconstitute itself into a statue of a cloud.
“Oh my God, he didn’t make it out,” Erik said softly. “He was still inside when the building collapsed!”
Vivian and Bobby looked reverently at the slabbed pile. Sherri shrugged emotionlessly.
“Serves him right,” she said. “Cowardly prick bastard.” Erik scowled at Sherri. She was right-Trent was definitely a cowardly prick bastard-but he deserved a better eulogy than that. It was wrong to speak ill of the dead, even if they had it coming.
“He technically saved our lives in there,” Erik said truth-bendingly. “Sherri and I probably wouldn’t have made it out alive if he hadn’t been … distracting Twiki. He may have had his shortcomings, but we have to at least thank him for doing that.” The others nodded and grunted noncommittally.
“Compliment accepted,” a smarmy voice replied. “Now y’all know, when the goin’ gets tough, you best step back and leave the heroics to the T!” Four heads snapped toward the voice that emerged from the dust cloud from behind two rows of gleaming white teeth.
“So he’s alive then,” Sherri smirked. “Gee, that’s swell.”
“Alive and kickin, yo! That wild pussy was all up on me, but the Lord guided me to safety just before the walls came a-tumblin’ down.”
Bobby looked at Trent skeptically.
“Yet you somehow managed to get out without so much as a scratch.”
“Not hardly, Big B,” Trent said. “That escape was tight, yo. I’m talkin’ ‘door hit my ass on the way out’ tight.”
He turned and stuck out his hip, gesturing over his shoulder at his trophy: Just below his beltline, a single, pathetic slash of blood cut across the back of his khaki trousers. Erik leapt to his feet and shot out a furious finger.
“You cowardly prick bastard!” he screamed. “We could have all died in there because of you!”
“Little E, you’re straight flippin’ like a dolphin at Sea World,” he said innocently.
“I saved all y’all and you know it. You had nothin’ but good things to say about the T a minute ago.”
“That was because I thought you were dead!” Erik snapped.
Trent shook his head.
“You thought the cat was dead too,” he said. “It’s a good thing you’re not a medical professional, Dr. Gravedigger.”
“Look, I killed whatever attacked me in that sewer!” Erik defended. “So maybe it wasn’t Twiki after all!”
Trent waved his hand dismissively.
“That’s right, E. You best change your story. Only one man had the stones to kill that savage beast, and it was yours truly, Terence Trent DeLaRosa. I used my mad skillz to mess that girl up, yo.”
“She’s not the only girl you messed up!” Erik shouted. “You almost got Vivian killed!”
Trent brushed Erik aside and knelt down next to Vivian’s hunched, bloodied form.
“Vivi girl, I offer you my humblest and most sincere apologies,” he said ingratiatingly. “You know what they say about the best-laid plans. For real. You know that I wasn’t jumpin’ out the way up in there! I was tryin’ to lure that foul creature away from you. How was I to know it would be too stupid to take the bait?”
Vivian pushed Trent away and wobbled to her feet, making her way to her brother and leaning heavily against him without a word.
“Leave her alone, Trent,” Bobby growled, gently embracing his wounded sibling.
“I saw your distraction technique, and it looked to me like the only thing you were trying to save was your own ass.”
“Save my ass? Save my ass?”
Trent turned and thrust out his backside, pointing to his single scrape.
“Hello? I tore myself a new asshole trying to save you ungrateful clowns. For real!” he squealed. “Vivi, you know I’m bein’ straight with y’all! I was just tryin’ to get that thing away from you so that I could properly dismantle it without soiling your pretty green eyes with the spectacle.”
Vivian turned her dizzy head away from him and rested it on Bobby’s shoulder. Trent continued.
“Come on, girl! I killed that monster! I killed it for you! Once I knew you were safe I ripped that bitch apart, yo! With my bare hands! I was all smashin’ in its grill like ‘Bam! This one is for my homegirl, Vivi!’ I ain’t lyin’, girl! And you know what? If that freaky freak was here now, I’d do it all again just so you could see it. For real. That’s the gospel truth, y’all.”
Just as Trent raised his right hand and unsheathed his winning smile, a familiar crackling sound ripped from the settling cloud. The particulate-laden vapor seemed to curl away from the monstrous, screeching form of Twiki as she came barreling into the street at full speed. Torn to shreds by the collapsing walls of the garage, the ragged net of her filthy fur barely managed to contain a spill of pulsating organs, their moist surfaces coated with clinging concrete powder.
Trent turned to run, but his heels knocked against the side of the fountain. There was no time to consider another direction. There was no time to even scream. Everything in the universe disappeared in Trent’s consciousness as Twiki launched off of the ground, reducing his entire world to two flying rows of blood-slicked fangs.
The next thing Trent experienced was a whoosh of cold air and steel and a face full of hot, stinging viscera. Before he knew what hit him, the full force of a flying, headless feline connected with his chest, splattering him with liberated organs and knocking him backward into the murky water of the fountain.
The tip of the sword smashed into the shattered tile, completing a whistling arc that had carried its blade cross-sectionally through the middle of Twiki’s mutated neck. The force of the impact sent a tremble through the hilt and into Sherri’s skinny arms. Through the blood-red midnight of her vision, she had cleanly decapitated the monster in mid-air with one mighty swing.
Trent frantically thrashed his way out from under the draining carcass and flopped with a gruesome, soggy splat onto the sidewalk.
“I … I … you … you …” he gasped, collapsing to the pavement. “You … you
…”
“Yeah, yeah, shut the hell up,” Sherri said. “I know what I did. I’m regretting it already.”
She drove the tip of the blade into the sidewalk inches from Trent’s ear.
“Now could you all stop freaking the fuck out for a second and tell me exactly what it is that I just saved your asses from?”
“It was my cat!” Erik squealed. “She mutated into an atomic monster! It’s the radiation from the bomb!”
“Erik, you’re insane, ” Vivian muttered. “Radiation doesn’t turn house pets into monsters!”
“Vivian, for cryin’ out loud, look at it!” Erik chirped, pointing toward the fountain.
“It’s glowing like something Homer Simpson brought home from work!” Everyone glared at the decapitated remains of the beast resting on the bottom of the fountain. The murky water obscured its form, but they could still make out the sinister shapes of claws and teeth radiating from the pool with an eerie blue glow. Erik continued.
“Whatever it was that attacked me in the sewer did the exact same thing after I smashed its head. These things glow when you kill them! Now tell me that’s not a classic indication of a radioactive monster!”
Bobby scratched his chin.
“I suppo
se it’s not impossible, ” he said doubtfully. “I mean, after the Chernobyl meltdown they had all kinds of freakish mutant animals being born with too many heads and not enough anuses.”
“That’s the key word,” Vivian muttered, ” born. Radiation is not a toggle between
‘normal’ and ‘B-movie.’ Those mutants had their DNA damaged while their cells were still forming.”
“Who are you-Mr. Fucking Wizard? Who fucking cares?!” Sherri said, exasperated. “Cats are turning into hellspawn here! Does it really matter what caused it?”
“You’re right. It could have been anything,” Erik said nervously. “Who knows what kind of atomized toxins we’ve been exposed to today. Asbestos, mercury, olestra! I mean, just smell that air, for Christ’s sake!” With those words, everyone’s acclimated nostrils were suddenly reminded of the acrid stench of the pink vapor burning their sinuses. Trent blinked with sudden realization.
“Hold up; hold up. We’ve been huffin’ on that air all day too,” he said. “If that’s what turned pretty kitty into a stone-cold killer, why isn’t it happening to us?”
“Who says that it’s not?” Bobby said grimly. “Maybe it is happening to us. Maybe it just hasn’t started to take effect yet because we’re so much bigger than Twiki is. Er … was. ”
A long moment of silence passed.
“Well, it’s not going to happen to me,” Sherri said sternly.
“How can you be so certain?” Trent asked.
Sherri whipped the sword from the ground and set it against her neck.
“Because I’ll kill myself first.”
Everyone stared at Sherri as her grisly words splattered against their ears.
“Oh, that’s such a poseur goth answer,” Erik sneered. ” I’m not going to mutate, I’m just going to commit suicide. I’m so dark and tragic. Why don’t you just kill all of us too, while you’re at it?”
“Who says I won’t, smart-ass?”
Sherri’s bloody eyes rolled over the shadows of her friends disquietingly. She stabbed a blistered finger toward the fountain and spoke with menace.
The Oblivion Society Page 22
