“Whatever happened to that cat is probably happening to every one of us right now. I say we make a pact right here and now that as soon as one of us starts to go all Food of the Gods like that, the rest of us swear to take the motherfucker down.” She made a fist and thrust it into the center of the group.
“Who’s with me?”
“Oh jeez, Sherri,” Erik sighed. “Kill me if I turn into one of them? That’s a little From Dusk Till Dawn ian, isn’t it?”
Trent put his hand on Sherri’s and gave it a lecherous squeeze.
“No no,” he said, “she’s right, E. Don’t get me wrong, I consider it an honor and a privilege to know all of you fine people, but if you come at me like that big pussy at the fountain, I’ll send any one of you to the next world in a heartbeat. That’s a promise.”
“Oh, please,” Erik said. “The last guy I saw who dealt with monsters as effectively as you had a goatee and a box of Scooby Snacks.”
Bobby clapped his hand nonchalantly on top of Trent’s.
“I’m in.”
“What?!” Erik squeaked.
“Seriously, look at that thing,” Bobby said. “Take a good look at it, Erik. It’s not Twiki. It’s not even a cat anymore. That thing had an unrecoverable system error on a genetic level. If that shit happens to me, I hope that one of you will have the balls to put an end to it. I’d do it for you. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
“That is so messed up!” Erik argued. “Bobby, I’m your best friend! Vivian is your own sister! Are you telling me that you could just take that sword and murder one of us? Well, we wouldn’t murder you! Right, Viv?”
He threw a fiercely hopeful look at Vivian. She turned her eyes sorrowfully to the ground and dropped her bloody hand on top of Bobby’s.
“I would,” she said quietly. “It’s the right thing to do under the circumstances.”
“Under the circumstances?!” Erik yelped. ” Under the circumstances?! This is crazy! And blatantly illegal! Under no circumstances do the laws of civilized society allow for friends to murder each other!”
“We’re not in civilized society,” Vivian said darkly. “And until we are, the only laws we have are our own. Everything else has been lost to oblivion.” She looked coldly at the glowing remains in the fountain.
“We’re now part of the oblivion society.”
CHAPTER SIX
The push-started Rabbit’s three bald radials hummed a hypnotic bass note over the bleached blacktop of Interstate 67 northbound. Their deep trio was accompanied by the uneasy guest tenor of the temporary donut spare whining from beneath the front fender. Above this quartet, the wind sang a shrill aria as it rushed over the curved surface of the satellite dish. The giant bowl was crudely lashed to the hood of the car with a scavenged rope of colorful, triangular plastic flags, which contributed a continuous round of flappy-slappy applause.
The damp and chilly air took on an absolutely arctic character in the forced wind of the open convertible. Vivian sat, nearly frozen, in the driver’s seat, peering awkwardly over the top of the dish through her fractured glasses and windshield. Logic dictated that someone less injured should drive, but after being attacked by a giant housecat, Vivian was not exactly on speaking terms with logic. In its place, she had fallen back on habit. Her old car was all that was left of the world as she knew it, and she was going to drive it. Period.
She leaned restlessly over the steering wheel in order to keep her weight off her brutally lacerated back. The wounds had been bandaged at the scene of the attack, but the medical know-how involved in the procedure had left something to be desired. For lack of any better options, the survivors of Twiki’s final catfight had patched themselves up with the only fabric they had on hand: the moldy canvas of the Rabbit’s convertible top. Bobby and Trent had easily pried the roof’s steel frame from its brittle, rusted-out hinges, and from there Erik had sliced the sun-damaged fabric into bandages with Vivian’s Swiss Army Knife. The thick, coarse canvas was completely inappropriate for medical dressings, but it was better than nothing, and nothing was the only other thing they had.
In this makeshift clinic of dubious medical prowess, Trent had done up Vivian’s entire torso in a stiff, unyielding wrap as tight as a boa constrictor. He had yakked all the while about stopping the blood flow and the principle of the tourniquet, but when he was done with his handiwork it was fairly obvious to all gathered that he had been trying to improvise a sort of cleavage-enhancing corset. In this endeavor, he had been quite successful.
To Vivian’s right, Erik was slumped, unconscious, in the passenger seat, arms crossed, palms pressed firmly on the soiled polyester bandages of his own injuries. The others were wedged into an awkward compromise in the tiny back seat. Although liberating the convertible top’s hardware had provided a few inches of extra elbow room, the back seat would have been cramped for two passengers, let alone the three it was now forced to accommodate.
Bobby was behind his sister, with his head tipped over the back of his seat, snoring loudly into the wind. Trent was on the opposite side, behind Erik. Between them, Sherri’s slumbering face was buried in Trent’s chest, depositing a puddle of drool on his shirt. Trent slept soundly with one arm around her shoulders, one hand on her narrow thigh, and his cheek resting softly on the top of her white-haired head. Judging by the grin on his face, even in his dreams, he could feel the round nubs of the girl’s hitherto unknown breasts pressing pertly against his side. Despite being nestled against Trent’s amorous body heat, Sherri’s disintegrating skin had taken on an icy pallor of spidery blue in the whistling breeze.
Nobody could say exactly how much time had elapsed since they had left the ruins of the Banyan Terrace parking garage, but it had been long enough to make Vivian feel uneasy that they had not yet reached a destination. Any destination at all. Her dusty eyes scraped the inside of her eyelids as they rolled wearily to the instrument panel. Again, this was not done out of logic, but habit. She knew that no matter how many times she looked at the large, analog dashboard clock, its arms would remain seized at exactly nine minutes to midnight.
In the delirium of her exhaustion, Vivian subconsciously wondered whether the clock was dead, or whether it was functioning perfectly, and reality itself had died. With the exception of the dry, wilted flora of the highway, they had not yet seen a single sign of life on their drive. Perhaps more chilling was the fact that they had traveled through an unknown number of hours and an immeasurable stretch of miles, yet the sky had remained an unflinching gray of dismal twilight. It wasn’t as if time had stopped as much as time had simply got up and left.
If there was one thing that could be considered fortunate about this chronological anomaly, it was the moment at which it had occurred. In the middle of that ordinary Wednesday night, while the Gulf Coast’s retirees and exhausted tourists slept soundly in their beds, its highways lay nearly abandoned as the last atomic traffic light blinked a fiery red.
Vivian started to nod off, then jerked into a caricature of alertness. She slapped herself sharply on the cheeks and blinked her eyes with huge, dramatic squeezes. She was exhausted almost beyond the point of conscious thought, yet she dared not stop. In the monotony of the desolate highway, she could hear Sherri’s words repeating in a haunting echo.
“Whatever happened to that cat is probably happening to every one of us right now.”
This was the fear that had driven a wedge between Vivian and logic. She could come up with no reasonable explanation for it. What did happen to that cat? What if it did happen to one of her friends? What if it happened to her? In her sleep-deprived psyche, her fear of the mutant cat became one with the fear of the unknown itself.
Unable to explain away the feline demons, Vivian had decided that the only course of action was to outrun them. It had been a long time since they’d emerged from the cloud of pink vapor that shrouded Stillwater County. It couldn’t be much longer until they were out from under this canopy of churning black atmosphere and basking in blue sky and
hot Georgian sun. If she just kept driving north on the interstate they’d find civilization, and somebody would give them a simple, logical explanation as to what had happened. Someone would tell them that they were safe. Everything would be okay. She just needed to keep driving.
Vivian’s feverish train of thought was interrupted by a long finger of smoke touching the horizon. She squinted at the form in the distance, and her heart began to beat hard against her sternum in anticipation. The black finger slid over the landscape, ever closer, ever larger in her field of view. She flicked her eyes anxiously to her unconscious companions, but none of them stirred. Her hands instinctively tightened on the sticky steering wheel. Her breathing quickened, slamming her burning lungs against the sides of their canvas prison with each constricted pant. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the shape was upon her, hurling itself at her front bumper. It was a cat the size of a pickup truck, its coat burning with a hellish red flame! The monster’s wide, round eye sockets were five feet apart and devoid of flesh, full instead of a reflective metallic sparkle that stared straight through her. Vivian’s terrified reflexes jerked the steering wheel and the car swerved dramatically, missing the creature’s blazing grimace by mere inches.
The Rabbit’s sleeping passengers launched into abrupt consciousness as it fishtailed across the empty lanes with a heart-stopping squeal.
“Jesus Christ, Vivian!” Bobby roared. “What the hell?!”
“Bobby!” Vivian gasped. “It … it was a-”
She threw a terrified glance into the rearview mirror and saw nothing but a burning pickup truck lying in the center of the road. The smoldering wreck was completely bereft of life, feline or otherwise. Vivian rubbed the residue of the hallucination out of her eyes with her palm.
“I’m sorry; I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I thought it … I mean, the headlights looked like … never mind.”
“Whoa, where are we?” Erik asked groggily. “How long have I been asleep?” Vivian shook her head.
“I don’t know. A long time,” she said. “I think we’re getting close to the state line.”
“Don’t you think we should switch drivers for a while?” Erik asked pointedly.
“No,” Vivian yawned. “I’m fine.”
Before Erik could attempt an appeal, the sound of bony fists pounding into muscley flesh splattered from the back seat.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing?” Sherri shrieked. “Get off of me, you assbag!”
“Ow! Hey hey! Watch the sunburn!” Trent yelped. “We’re all friends here!” He let go of the tiny, thrashing girl and held his blistered red arms above his head in the cold breeze. Sherri gave him one last elbow in the chest for good measure.
“Don’t you fucking touch me again, diaper boy!”
“Ha! Diaper boy,” Bobby laughed. “Classic.”
Trent scowled. The slash in his hindquarters had necessitated a unique bandage configuration, and after being corseted, Vivian had been happy to take her passive-aggressive revenge. Over his trousers, Trent now wore what could only be described as a comically oversized diaper of canvas bandages. He looked at Sherri and smiled innocently.
“You don’t have to be so aggressive, girl,” he said. “These quarters are cramped and you’re chilled all the way to your fine little bones. Why don’t you just snuggle up and enjoy the generous body heat that the T is serving up? My guns are hot, and your honey-barbecued skin is so, so cold. It’s more comfortable for everybody if we get them together, sweetness.”
Sherri’s eyes narrowed menacingly.
“Touch me while I’m asleep again, and I’ll tear your arm off and shove it down your throat until you punch yourself in the balls from the inside. Got it?” Trent fidgeted in his diaper, wrapping his arms around himself and pulling as far away from Sherri as possible.
“Alright, look, I respect and admire this whole ‘punk rock’ thing that you play so delightfully,” he muttered, “but you’re going to have to let down this hostile curtain sooner or later for the sake of humanity.”
Sherri blinked her featureless red eyes.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?!”
“I think you know. ‘Be fruitful, and multiply. Replenish the earth, and subdue it.’” Bobby let out a sudden snort.
“Dude, I think the earth is about as subdued as it’s going to get,” he said.
“Plus,” Sherri added, “I don’t care what your bullshit mythology says, there is no chance of me ever having sex with you. Ever. ”
“Seriously, dude, give it a rest,” Bobby said. “For all we know, we’re all one step away from turning into bloodthirsty mutant monsters, and you still can’t wrap your head around anything bigger than your own wang. You’re pathetic.”
“On the contrary,” Trent said smugly. “I am comfortable expressing my healthy affection for the fairer sex because I know we’re all safe. I’ve figured out the secret.”
“Alright, I’ll bite,” Bobby said sardonically. “What’s the secret, professor?”
“I’ve been trying to think-what protected us? What makes us so special?” Trent said. “What was flowing through each and every one of us that was not in that creature that attacked us? Then it hit me. It’s all about the spirits.”
“Hmm … spirits,” Bobby said, rubbing his chin. “You know, that’s actually a pretty good theory!”
“But of course,” Trent gloated.
“What if it is the spirits? Pure alcohol is a powerful disinfectant, and we were all sauced to the gills with it last night,” Bobby continued. “You and me were going into about round eleven, and Sherri must have had at least twice her body weight in malt liquor.”
“Wait, hold up,” Trent interjected.
“And I had a daiquiri the size of a bowling ball,” Vivian nodded. “Maybe all of the disinfecting alcohol in our blood was enough to kill whatever pathogens caused Twiki to mutate!”
“Then I’m gonna live for-fucking-ever,” Sherri said. “I’ve been pissed since I was fourteen years old.”
“No no, listen!” Trent said irritably. “I’m not talking distilled spirits, I’m talking the Holy Spirit, yo. I’m talking souls. ”
“Nah, I like Bobby’s answer better,” Sherri said. “I don’t have a soul.”
“You do have a soul,” Trent argued. “God created man in His image and endowed us each with a soul. Animals don’t have souls. That’s why that little kitty cat turned into a demon!”
“Oh, shut up, Trent,” Erik said irritably. “My cat had just as much of a soul as I do. Cats are people too!”
“Cats are not people,” Trent said firmly. “Starting today, cats aren’t even cats. They’re the minions of Beelzebub himself. The only thing standing between our warm bodies and his cold puppet strings is that little impervious suit of armor called the everlasting soul, yo. Besides, Little E wasn’t even drinking last night, were you?”
“Shut up,” Erik grumbled.
“That’s right,” Vivian said thoughtfully. “Erik, you weren’t drinking last night.”
“Well, no, not last night, ” Erik replied sheepishly. “But I did have a bunch of Tequizas over at your place before work yesterday afternoon. So, you know, I’m alright. Don’t nobody worry ‘bout me.”
His eyes rolled apprehensively to his swollen bandage and lingered for a long moment before returning to the gray scenery.
“Alright, I don’t care what y’all choose to believe. It will all become clear when He wants it to be clear,” Trent said, pointing skyward. “Vivi, my love, could we please pull over and take a little rest break? If I have to endure this sandpaper seat against my sunburn for another minute, I’m going to go insane in the membrane, for real. Are you with me here, Lobster B?”
“Nah, my sunburn’s fine,” Bobby said, rubbing the flaking side of his face. “But I’d still like to take a break from Sherri’s bony-ass elbows digging into my side for a while.”
“Oh, and let me tell you, it’s a real picnic having your
fat gut all blubbering against me like a horny walrus,” Sherri said, leaning forward. “Can somebody explain to me one more time why I’m stuck back here with fat-ass and the perv while you two beanpoles get to sprawl out all over the front seat?”
“It’s sort of like triage,” Erik said meekly. “Vivian and I shouldn’t be physically traumatized right now. We have the most severe wounds.”
“Where the hell was I when we took this vote?!” Sherri exclaimed. “Because last time I checked, you two pussies had some little scratches and I had a full body sunburn and eyeballs full of my own blood! What makes you think you’re so goddamn fragile up there, Sievert?”
“Never mind,” Erik said darkly.
“Fuck you, never mind!” Sherri snapped. “Get your narrow ass back here; I’m riding in the front.”
Erik looked at the floor sullenly.
“Okay, okay. I didn’t want to show you this, but I guess it’s only fair.” He slowly unbuckled his seat belt and, with a labored and deliberate motion, turned in his seat and stood on his knees to face the back. He moved with an unnatural stiffness in his torso, as if unable to bend anything from his distended waist upwards. His thick, wavy hair thrashed around his skull as his head cleared the protection of the cracked windshield.
“Believe it or not,” he said, pulling up his shirt with dramatic flair, “there are worse things that can happen to you than having to sit next to Trent.” Erik’s twin wounds stared down on the back seat, so swollen and gruesome that they defied rational description. Purple and black swells of infected flesh rolled from the top and bottom of the stretched bandage in four heaving masses, like an old tree trunk that had grown around an unyielding fence post. Masked behind the wrappings, clusters of knobby flesh blossomed from the epicenter of each wound, some remaining contained within the soiled fabric, others poking bony points through its thin surface.
“Oh, hell no!” Trent gasped, putting up a wall of palms between himself and the seething scabs. “That shit is messed up. Seriously, homes, you need to get those filthy-ass bandages changed, and you need to do it yesterday!”
The Oblivion Society Page 23
