“Hey, did you see this? Proper cleaning and maintenance of your Remington firearm, ” he said, looking up from the booklet. “Huh. That’s a weird thing to find on the floor of a-” He gasped in sudden shock. “Holy shit! ” Sherri recognized this behavior by now. She pulled her cigarette from her lips and crossed her arms with an expression of resigned hopelessness.
“It’s another killer mutant, isn’t it?” she said dryly.
“M … my … my … God …” Trent stammered.
Sherri flicked her smoldering butt toward the sound of his voice. The hot ember bounced off his forehead, breaking him from his trance.
“No, no … not a mutant,” Bobby said at last. “Just a redneck who couldn’t follow simple instructions.”
“It’s easy,” Vivian said. “I’ll show you how it works.” She had both hands wrapped around the empty Pixie Stix tube, which was planted into the gas tank of one of the rusty Jeeps like an oversized straw in an olive drab malt. Erik watched her demonstration as she continued.
“The trick is to get a column of gasoline in the tube without sucking it all the way into your mouth. Watch.”
She took a few preparatory breaths, wrapped her small pink lips around the end of the tube, and gave it a gentle suck. Almost immediately her lungs felt like they were being sat upon by a Brontosaurus. Her head began to pound, but she kept at it, sucking with all of her diminished might.
Erik watched silently. Through the translucent sides of the plastic tube he could see a tiny percolation of fuel inching into the bottom of the hose, then slipping away like a shy earthworm. Watching Vivian’s lips work the top of the shaft clenched in her petite fists reminded him of a magazine that the older kids had once shown him at summer camp, and his face flushed with embarrassment.
Vivian’s vision crumbled into a mosaic of green and black distortion. With each renewed pull she could feel the air being crushed into paper-thin sheets as it was squeezed through the rollers of her lungs. The front of her brain started to throb like it was being poked with the butt end of a pool cue. She stumbled against the side of the Jeep, catching herself against the door before she could fall to the ground.
“I … can’t … do …” she gasped, wiping the sticky, sugary drool from her lips.
“It’s okay; it’s okay,” Erik said quickly, shifting his weight in an attempt to hide the erection that had appeared against his will. “I get it. I can do it. You just relax.” He took the tube in one hand and grabbed a handful of his shirt to wipe off the end. Remembering everything that his filthy shirt had been through, he thought better of the idea and just put the sticky tube into his mouth as it was. Even through his tongue’s coating of blue sugar, he could still taste the warm, rotten cabbage of Vivian’s saliva, and it gave him a fluttering feeling in his stomach.
“My stomach’s gonna go inside out, for real,” Trent muttered. “That shit ain’t right.”
Sherri blinked blindly.
“What? What shit ain’t right?”
She turned toward the checkout counter and squinted into a scarlet-splattered darkness. Of course, all she could see were the shadows of her own blood-soaked corneas, but had she retained her sight, the view would not have been very much different. Just over the register, a narrow wire brush was embedded in the wall, encrusted in a thin, cobwebby layer of dried gore. The brush angled toward the ground, directly into the cold chamber of a double-barreled shotgun that leaned innocently against the front of a wooden rocking chair. Between the end of the barrel and the strangely placed brush was a gangly gas-station clerk, outfitted with gray camouflage fatigues and with a rather sizable hole that started in his chin and went clean through the back of his mullet. The wall behind the counter was covered by a huge, blood-splattered Confederate flag with the words “DIXIE MILITIA” written across it in uneven black brushstrokes.
“Congratulations, Sherri,” Bobby said dryly. “You found the source of the smell.”
Trent pulled an old field radio from a rusty nail at the side of the counter. The knob was turned to the “on” position, but it was silent. He clicked it back and forth a few times but failed to bring it to life.
“Come on, speak to me,” Sherri coached. “What are we looking at here, people?” Trent returned the radio to the nail and made the sign of the cross.
“This poor bastard must have got the 411 about the bad-ass shit going down out there and decided to bust a cap in his own ass before somebody else could.”
“So it’s a guy who Kurt Cobained himself?” Sherri asked.
“Not a chance,” Bobby said. “This wasn’t suicide. This is Darwinism at work.” He flipped open the cover of the blood-sprinkled instruction manual.
“Always make sure that your firearm is unloaded before cleaning!” he read.
“Page one, fifty-point font, bold print. He probably heard some emergency broadcast and got so excited about his chance to mow down some Yankee tourists that he lost his head. No pun intended.”
Trent’s stomach violently heaved, but as it was empty, nothing came out of his mouth but a grotesque wretch of noise and bad breath. He covered his mouth with both hands, but he didn’t stop looking at the body.
“Alright, show’s over,” Bobby mumbled, dropping the manual. “Let’s get the hell out of here before Trent loses a lung.”
Sherri reached behind the counter and grabbed as many packs of cigarettes as her mangled pockets could hold.
“Fine by me. I got what I came for.”
Before Sherri and Bobby could take two steps, Trent held out a hand for pause.
“Wait, wait,” he said thoughtfully. “We should take it.”
“What for?” Sherri said. “To give it a proper burial and a headstone that says
‘Dumb Redneck Asshole - Died 1999 - Good Riddance’?”
“No, no,” Trent said. “Not the body. The shotgun. Next time we run into one of Satan’s fun-time freakouts, I’d like to have a little bit of phat firepower in our corner.”
“You know, that’s actually a good idea,” Bobby nodded. “Go grab it and let’s go already.”
“I ain’t tryin’ to hear that, homes!” Trent passionately refused. “I’m just the idea man here. You go get it.”
“Nuh-uh. I’m not touching that shit,” Bobby said. “It’s got redneck blood all over it. I might get infected and suddenly like listening to Billy Ray Cyrus.”
“Oh, come on, Big B,” Trent whined. “If I get any closer to the reek on that freak I’m going to make a big ol’ pot of rerun stew-you said so yourself.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Sherri exclaimed. “I’ve been in a girls’ shower room and I’ve never been surrounded by so many pussies. I’ll get the fucking gun.” Feeling her way along the now-familiar countertop, she found her way through a saloon door at its side marked with a swatch of duct tape labeled “Employes
‘Only’!!!!” For a fraction of a second she lost her balance as her boots slipped on the blood-slicked linoleum, but she caught herself with determined dignity. She held out her hands and swept them across the open air of the small space.
“Come on, people, hot or cold?”
“Warm,” Trent said, peering over the counter. “Getting hotter … a little to the left.”
“Here?”
Sherri took a step to the left and her heavy boot came down on one of the chair’s wooden rockers. With a stiff lurch, the corpse slumped forward in the seat, forcing the cold steel barrel of the gun all the way through the hole in its skull like some kind of grim Halloween novelty. When the scrape of the walnut stock shifting on the floor reached Sherri’s ears, she immediately zeroed in on the firearm in the darkness and grabbed the end of its barrel with a swing of her hand.
“Got it! Now let’s go!”
With a satisfied flash of her teeth, she turned toward the boys and took a step, but with the stock of the gun firmly anchored in the blasted-out skull of its owner, it refused to move an inch.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” sh
e said peevishly. “Hold on, it’s stuck on something.”
“No no! Just forget it,” Bobby gagged with revulsion. “Forget it! Just let it go and come on.”
“Get off me. I got it; I got it,” Sherri spat. “Just give me a second.” With a frustrated dedication, she wrapped both hands around the barrel and started yanking up and down against the inert human blockage, looking something like an unspeakable version of an old-fashioned butter churn maid. The stock banged into the floor with each thrust, throwing up crowns of drained blood from the floor and splattering Sherri’s ragged legs. With each thunderous bang, the clerk’s empty head slid up and down the barrel like a hairy meat yo-yo.
“God, what’s this thing stuck on?” Sherri muttered. “It’s like pulling teeth!” Trent gasped, choked, and then finally released the meager contents of his stomach onto the floor. Executing an awkward lurch that suggested that only half of his brain was in on the idea, Bobby rushed through the saloon doors to stop the inadvertent desecration.
“Stop! Sherri, stop!” he yelled. “Just stop! You don’t know what you’re doing!” Before Bobby’s words had reached her ears, the wet gun slipped out of Sherri’s hands, hammering its bloody stock into the ground with just enough force to drive the clerk’s cracked jawbone into the cocked trigger. With an explosion that rattled the windows and sent Sherri reeling to the floor in a convulsive shock, the second barrel of the shotgun blasted its load into the air, eradicating the end of a hanging fluorescent shop light.
Spitting out a half-realized expletive, Bobby threw his arms in front of his face just in time to catch the full brunt of the mangled shop light as it swung in a graceful arc from its one remaining chain. The jagged teeth of the torn metal sliced the backs of his arms from elbow to wrist bone before smashing a bloody gash out of his poorly protected forehead. His face was already coated with the hot flow of his own blood before his unconscious body hit the floor with a ground-shaking thud. The cold flow of gasoline slid halfway up the hose as Erik sucked gently upon its sugary end.
“Good, good,” Vivian said. “You’re just about-”
Just then, the sound of the shotgun blast from inside of the store smashed through their skulls like a slaughterhouse hammer. Vivian’s hands shot to her ears. Erik’s startled diaphragm made a convulsive spasm that pulled enough gasoline into his stomach to start a moped.
The burn hit him in slow motion, like a liquid fire spreading from the back of his throat, raging down his tongue and up in two tendrils of acid that scorched his sinuses right behind his eyeballs. With a sputtering choke, a glut of fuel exploded from his nose, got sucked back into his gasping mouth, and rolled back down his scalded throat. He fell to the ground in a violent fit of spitting and coughing, both hands clawing at his burning face.
“Erik!” Vivian screamed. “Erik, no!”
She fell to her knees next to him and struggled to hold him upright. His eyes had turned a screaming shade of bloodshot red, and his nose leaked a noxious trickle of sugary blue petroleum. He vomited a thick, flammable goo onto his filthy shirt and fell limp in her arms.
“Erik!” she screamed.
She quickly lay him down on the ground. His eyes stared without focus into the sky.
“Erik! Erik! Come on, Erik!”
Vivian’s mind raced. Erik wasn’t breathing. Time seemed to go by at ten times normal speed. She didn’t know what to do, but she knew that if she didn’t do something immediately, he would be dead. Her brain screamed through its medical files, but the only thing she could seem to remember was a faded yellow instructional poster from some long-forgotten food service job. A second later she had wrestled Erik to his feet and was standing behind him, arms wrapped around his belly, frantically thrusting her clenched hands upward.
“Come on, Erik, come on,” she gasped. “It’s the Heimlich maneuver! Come on, breathe!”
As Vivian repeatedly pumped her fists into Erik’s stomach, dark blood began to spill from the top of his snarled abdominal bandages. She was obviously reopening the wounds in his sides, but she didn’t have time to be gentle. She would apologize later.
“St-” Erik choked. “Sto-”
“It’s working!” Vivian screamed. “Cough it up! Breathe!” Erik’s brain swam in a pool of fumes and burning disorientation. He didn’t know what was going on. All he knew was that somebody was trying to kill him, squeezing him around his tortured middle. Squeezing, squeezing, squeezing on his stomach. His knees buckled, but the squeezing arms held him upright. In his stupor, he clawed at his assailant’s hands but couldn’t force enough strength into his fingers to pry them apart.
“That’s right, Erik,” Vivian said, still pumping. “Hold on! You’re going to be okay!”
Erik’s foggy brain couldn’t decode the words; all he could feel was the pounding wrench of the squeezing arms. Squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. Squeezing him to death! The squeezing had to stop, and it had to stop at any cost.
“Stop,” he choked. “Stop it. Stop it! Aaaaarrrngh! ” With a rippling strain of his abdominal muscles, Erik’s frayed bandages tore to shreds as his wounds exploded outward. The hardened spines of his infection burst from his scars on stalks of hairy flesh, clamping two fistfuls of gnarled fingers around Vivian’s wrists!
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaah! Aaaa! Aaaaaa! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Sherri’s blighted ears were pierced by a high and frantic shrieking.
“Shut up! Shut up! ” she screamed, clamping her hands down on the sides of her head. “Tell me what the fuck just happened!”
The shock of the gunshot coupled with the sight of Bobby’s near decapitation had sent Trent over the edge. From his position on the other side of the counter, his feet were locked to the floor in sheer, primal terror, and he could do nothing but scream like a chorus of police sirens rushing to the scene of a quadruple homicide.
“Shut up!” Sherri repeated. “Trent! Shut the fuck up!” She scrambled her hands across the floor until they hit the stock of the shotgun. Following the accidental discharge, the clerk’s badly damaged neck had been wrenched almost all the way around, and he now lay on the floor with the cold barrel threading his reamed-out skull. Still blindly oblivious to the repercussions of her actions, Sherri grabbed the gun and sprang to her feet, finally disconnecting the redneck’s pulpy head with a snap of tendons that was never heard over the piercing stab of Trent’s continued scream.
“Trent, if you don’t stop screaming, I swear to God I’ll blow your fucking face off!”
To drive her threat home, Sherri shouldered the weapon and swung the muzzle up toward the sound of his wail. As the barrel swished through the air, the disembodied head slid down the slick metal and launched across the room, hitting Trent in the chest with a wet and understated thunk .
The next thing Sherri heard was Trent’s silenced body hitting the linoleum in a shock-induced faint, followed by nothing but the ringing in her own ears.
“That’s better,” she said, lowering the shotgun and lighting a cigarette. “Now, Bobby, could you please start at the beginning and tell me what the fuck is going on? Bobby? Trent? Helloooo?”
From outside the store, Vivian’s bloodcurdling screams reached Sherri’s tired ears.
“Fuck me,” she muttered. “What now? ”
Vivian screamed with such intensity that her fillings rattled in her skull. She could feel consciousness slipping from her body as her tortured lungs seemed to fill with a cold, liquid pain. This was no hallucination. Her thrashing arms were being held firmly by two clawed hands, their knotted fingers twitching erratically against her skin, dripping with ropes of thick, clear fluid. In a powerful motion, the claws ripped her arms from Erik’s battered waist and flung them aside. She stumbled backward, tripped over the empty gas cans, and tumbled to the ground.
Freed from Vivian’s crushing embrace, Erik staggered forward with a hacking cough, wiping the last vestiges of sugary fuel from his lips. Vivian scrambled backward and looked at him with terror. Erik’s pouchy
love handles had unexpectedly sprouted a monstrous set of black rodent forearms. He looked down on his own body with complete incomprehension, holding his human arms out to his sides as if to protect them from their newly formed brothers.
After a second of silence that seemed to last an eon, Erik tipped his head back and released a roaring scream. In spite of herself, Vivian joined in on the scream and didn’t stop screaming until Sherri kicked open the door of the convenience store with a splintery bang.
Sherri’s bloody eyes focused into the dim light and picked out two shapes. From the scream, she knew that the one crumpled on the ground was Vivian, but even through her blasted corneas she could see that the one looming over her had two arms too many to be Erik. She brought the shotgun to her shoulder and slipped her finger into the trigger guard.
“Hey! Freakshow!” she barked, cigarette hanging from her lips. “Paws off the powderpuff!”
Erik turned toward the sound of Sherri’s voice and instinctively put his human arms over his face, as if that would do anything to protect him from a blast of red-hot lead.
“Sherri!” Vivian screamed. “Wait! Don’t!”
Sherri’s finger squeezed the moist trigger, firing off nothing but an impotent click.
“Fuck!” she spat. “It’s empty!”
Erik clasped his hands over his throbbing heart and turned back to Vivian.
“Oh thank Go-”
Before he could finish expressing his relief, Erik was silenced by the resounding clang of an empty five-gallon gas can hitting him square in the face.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Vivian sat in a hollow-eyed slump on the worn wooden steps of the convenience store. Although she barely moved, her breath came in a shallow, nervous pant. She held an open bag of Cheetos in her left hand, but the barely orange fingers of her right betrayed her lack of interest in it. The rocking chair had been moved from the porch to the driveway, and Vivian watched Bobby and Trent hovering busily around it.
The Oblivion Society Page 27
