“Ugh!” Bobby gasped. “Gross!”
“I’m okay,” Trent said, climbing to his feet. “Forget it. S’all good.” Despite his assurances, Trent’s face had already swollen into a red puffy mess from the impact of Vivian’s powerful wings. His punched-in eyes were rapidly blackening as a small cut leaked more blood down his left cheek than it had any right to. Determined to uphold his masculine pride, Trent swallowed the pain and acted as casual as he could manage under the circumstances.
“Ha haa!” Sherri laughed. “The big man just got the shit beat out of him by a girl!”
“I said it ain’t nothin’ but a thang!” Trent shouted, wiping away the blood. “Just drop it, a’ight?!”
“You see, Bobby?” Vivian said angrily, tugging at her wings. “All these things are good for is getting people hurt! I can’t fly with them! I can’t even control them!”
“Enough with this ‘I can’t control them’ shit!” Sherri snapped. “I’ve been watching both of you freakjobs, and those mutant parts do everything that you want them to!”
“What are you talking about?” Vivian said. “I can’t control them at all!”
“Neither can I!” Erik chimed.
“Bullshit!” Sherri declared. “Sievert, I saw you use your rat arms to grab the powderpuff’s wing in the car! And both of you have planted mutant punches into Trent’s face! Tell me that that’s not controlling them!”
“Well, I mean, I can’t control them, as such,” Erik admitted, shaking his head,
“but sometimes they just do what I want them to.”
“Wait, hold up!” Trent snapped. “When you punched me right in my grill you swore up and down that you didn’t make them hit me!”
“I didn’t make them hit you!” Erik confirmed. “But I never said that I didn’t want them to hit you.”
“Man, that’s a load of semantic buuullshit, ” Trent scowled, hands on hips.
“But what about me?” Vivian asked defensively. “My wings don’t do what I want them to at all. I couldn’t even get them to flap!”
“No,” Erik agreed, “but you’ve got to admit, they did just beat the shit out of Trent.”
“It’s just a scratch, a’ight?!” Trent said angrily. “Damn!”
“Wait, I think I get it!” Sherri said brightly. “This is just like this guy I know who got his arm ripped off in a motorcycle accident!”
“How so?” Vivian winced.
“If you licked the guy’s flesh stump, he could feel you licking his missing hand.”
“Eww!” Erik cringed. “So what?!”
“So what?! So this! ”
Sherri grabbed Erik’s left rat paw and painted a long, wet stretch of saliva up its palm with her pointed pink tongue.
“Eeeaugh!” Erik gasped, instinctively wiping his human right hand on his pants.
“God, you’re so disgusti-whoa.”
He held up his dry, untouched right hand in shocked bewilderment.
“See? That’s what I’m saying,” Sherri gloated, dropping the moistened left paw.
“The connections to that guy’s brain got all fucked up and made him think that there were still parts there that weren’t. Maybe your brain is all fucked up because there’s parts there that shouldn’t be. ”
“So what does all that mean for us?” Erik asked.
“How the hell should I know?” Sherri shrugged. “I just wanted an excuse to lick your rat hand.”
The cold wind licked the sides of the Rabbit as it plunged farther down the dusty interstate. The sky turned from a dismal, cloudy gray to an inky black as the sun set on the other side of the lingering atomic cloud. Inside the car, the passengers had reluctantly resumed the same seating arrangement from earlier in the day. Another blasted billboard slid into view from the darkened roadside, revealing the ever-present Mountie wearing a bib and holding a knife and fork over a plate piled high with cartoon food. Erik read the sign hungrily.
“Don’t miss North of the Border’s ‘All Yukon eat buffet!’”
“Man, a buffet sounds good about now,” Bobby said, licking his lips. “A mile of steamer trays piled high with scrambled eggs and fish sticks and greasy bacon and chicken nuggets and French toast.”
“That’s disgusting,” Sherri objected. “The buffet line is a symbol of why our whole food-based culture is bullshit. It’s America sticking its big, fat, overfed middle finger right in the face of starving people all over the-”
Her tiny stomach rumbled like thunder rolling off a Category Five hurricane.
“Alright, I don’t care,” she admitted. “I’m fucking starving.” She leaned back in her seat and Bobby’s sagging gut rolled against her peeling side like a manatee desperate for affection.
“Alright, this is getting ridiculous,” she protested, shoving an elbow into the fleshy pillow. “Isn’t it Lard Lad’s turn to drive for a while?”
“Can’t drive stick,” Bobby shrugged.
“But isn’t it about time you learned?! ” Sherri stressed. “Trent can’t even see where the hell he’s going anymore!”
Trent’s hideously swollen eyes peeked into the rearview mirror. His bloated eye sockets were already beginning to melt from a swarthy olive-tan into a massive yellow-purple bruise.
“It’s not like all that, yo,” he said. “I can see everything I need to see to guide us safely.”
“Why?” Sherri sneered. “Because God is your co-pilot? Please tell me that you weren’t about to say because God is your co-pilot.”
Trent’s puffy eyes blinked sheepishly and returned to the road.
“Seriously,” Sherri continued, “how long are we going to keep this shit up? We don’t even know where the hell we’re going!”
“Maybe we don’t,” Vivian allowed. “But we do know where we’ve been.” She cast a poignant glance into the rearview mirror at the miles upon miles of charred landscape that lay behind them. She turned back to the windshield and continued.
“There’s got to be better things up ahead.”
“Oooh, that’s so inspirational!” Sherri smirked. “Get a clue, Powderpuff. There’s nothing for a thousand miles in any direction but burned-up cities full of burned-up assholes. Everyone knows mankind has been trying to wipe itself out since the dawn of time. Now it finally happened, and somehow we missed the boat.”
“For real,” Trent agreed. “Man got too big for his britches, tried to play God, and got the atomic smackdown. Now we’ve got to start the whole show over again all by ourselves.”
“Stop it! Both of you!” Vivian reproached. “Nothing says that we’re by ourselves!
Just because we haven’t found anybody else yet doesn’t mean that there is nobody else.”
“Your optimism is refreshing,” Bobby frowned, “but seriously, we’ve covered at least five hundred miles already, and every major city has been a Terminator-2- style dystopia of flame and skulls. It’s not even worth pretending that there were survivors in any of those hellholes.”
“Yes, major cities,” Vivian said sternly. ” Major cities. If we’re dealing with the war to end all wars, and I’m beginning to think we are, of course all the major cities are gone. What we need to do is stop in some sleepy little town that has no strategic importance.”
“I used to live in a city like that,” Sherri said dryly. “They bombed the living shit out of it.”
“She’s right,” Bobby said. “Stillwater was nothing but beaches and old people, and that got totally wiped out.”
“All right, all right. You’re right,” Vivian sighed. “My point is that there’s got to be someplace so insignificant and pointless that nobody in their right mind would bother destroying it. If only we had some clue where it was.”
She crossed her arms and slumped in her seat as a colossal pair of wooden antlers emerged from the darkness.
Straight ahead, you can’t moose it! North of the Border. Next exit.
CHAPTER TEN
The Rabbit slowly chugged up a cracked d
riveway and between the blasted steel legs of a seventy-foot-tall cartoon Mountie colossus. In his rusted hands was an enormous sign, emblazoned with a broken neon message: “Welcome to North of the Border!”
The tired convertible came crunching to a stop next to the only other vehicle in the graveled parking lot, as if seeking safety in numbers. The car that was there first was an undistinguished, squarish affair from the mid-‘80s, but its heavy, undisturbed covering of fallout ash gave it the aura of an ancient archeological relic.
“Well, I guess we’re here,” Trent said skeptically.
“It’s about time,” Sherri grumbled. “Let me out of this crapmobile.” As the others made their way out the doors, she stood up on the crowded back seat and hopped over the side of the open convertible. Before her boots could hit the ground, the tangled strands of her dilapidated coat caught on the broken roof hinges, yanking her out of the air mid-leap. Thrown off-balance by the unexpected anchor, she landed awkwardly on one foot and was pulled backward into the fender with a muffled clang, falling to her knees in the gravel.
“Ow, God damn it!” she seethed, climbing to her feet and rubbing her scraped knee. “I hate this piece-of-shit coat!”
She grabbed the knotted leather strands and yanked with both hands, snapping off the broken hinge with a sad little squeak of rusted metal.
“That coat is spent, for real,” Trent said. “Why don’t you just get rid of it already? You’d look better without it anyway.”
“Oh, sure. Okay,” Sherri said bitterly, clutching the remains of her coat around her chest. “I’m willing to freeze to death as long as it makes me look good to a poseur asshole with a load in his diaper.”
Trent put his hands over the conspicuous lump on the back of his coarsely bandaged pelvis.
“It ain’t like that. The only load here is the load of bills in my fat wallet. ” Sherri shook her head with disinterest.
“Whatever, Mr. Poo Poo Pants.”
At the far end of the parking lot, a break in the artificially snow-flocked perimeter wall framed a leaning parody of a customs house flying a thrashed Canadian flag over a set of turnstiles. A cold breeze blew through its shattered windows, picking up stacks of glossy red and white coupons from within and distributing them over the area like fallen leaves. Vivian took it all in with a hopeful look straining against all logic to reach her face.
“Of course, I am not one to doubt the wisdom of the fairer sex, Vivi,” Trent said,
“but we drive straight on through all no-nonsense for a million miles, and this is the first place you want to stop?”
“Seriously,” Sherri nodded. “What a shithole.”
“You’re right-it is,” Vivian agreed. “Exactly. That’s my point! What nation would want to bomb a place like this?”
“Probably Canada,” Bobby said thoughtfully.
“Well, let’s not just stand here, you hosers. Let’s check it out, eh? ” Erik said, still stuck in his billboard-reading delivery. “What do you Saskatchewan-na do first?”
“Let me at that buffet,” Bobby said hungrily. “I hear they have four pounds of back bacon, three French toasts, two turtlenecks, and a beer.”
“Hold up, Hungry B,” Trent said, popping the Rabbit’s trunk. “We can’t just go charging in there unprotected. There might be something in there that wants to take a bite out of us. ”
He pulled out the shotgun and clapped it to his shoulder like a square-jawed hero in a bad war movie.
“Oh jeez,” Bobby said. “Put that away before you hurt somebody.”
“My aim is to see that nobody gets hurt,” Trent said melodramatically, offering his elbow to Vivian with a greasy smile. “May I provide secure passage to your feast, my lady?”
Vivian’s wings twitched against her shoulders as she looked him menacingly in the eye.
“You know, you’re still bleeding from the last time you tried to help me.” Trent’s hand shot to his face, wiping a fresh smear of blood off of his cheek. Without waiting for a rebuttal, Vivian crunched across the driveway and pushed through the rusted turnstile. Unfazed, Trent wiped his hand on his pants, turned, and offered it to Sherri instead.
“Alrighty then, Goldilocks,” he said without shame. “How would you like an armed guard to escort you safely to the ball?”
Sherri scowled as she pushed back the dark yellow straw of her stained hair.
“I’ve got something to escort to your balls right here,” she said, clenching her hand into a fist. “That gun’s not even loaded, you tool.”
Trent squinted at Sherri, then at the shotgun. He cupped his hand over the end of the barrel, surreptitiously peeked inside, and shrugged ignorantly. He bent into the trunk and returned the shotgun, digging out his trusty old sword instead.
“I best keep it old school then,” he said with a swish of his blade. “Tried and true is the way to be, right, B?”
As his words fell unheard in the empty parking lot, Trent realized that the rest of the group had abandoned him. He rushed to the turnstile and planted his free hand on its cold steel top, leaping over it with his sword in the air like a medieval commando.
“Hold up, y’all,” he shouted, rejoining the pack. “The T doesn’t want to be the last one to get at those tasty … aw, hell no.”
Although none of them had expected much from a seedy tourist trap buried in the sleepy pine forests of North Carolina, North of the Border still managed to be a disappointment. Where there had once stood an entire log cabin village of stilted Canadian stereotype, there now remained little more than a field of ravaged debris punctuated by a few leaning piles of snapped logs and weathered roofing shingles. A banner hung from a faux-snowy concrete pillar on the left side of the path, its other end buried in the debris of a collapsed restroom on the right.
“North of the Border,” Bobby read. “Family fun from ‘Eh’ to ‘Zed.’”
“Who’s Zed?” Trent asked.
“Zed’s dead, baby,” Erik said dimly. “Zed’s dead.”
“I don’t get it,” Trent said. “Who would up and bomb some skeezy interstate tourist trap, yo?”
Vivian’s eyes were fixed and glassy, staring at everything and nothing at once.
“It wasn’t bombed,” she muttered. “There’s no fire damage here.”
“Well then, what happened?” Erik asked. “It looks like Godzilla stomped on this place.”
Vivian turned in a slow circle until she spotted what she was looking for in dim silhouette against the blackening sky. A few miles away, a column of black smoke folded darkly into the night.
“It was that explosion,” she pointed. “A nuclear detonation causes a disc-shaped hydrodynamic front of radially expanding gases in the atmosphere.” The others looked at her skeptically. She rephrased.
“The static overpressure creates dynamic pressures.”
The group continued to gaze at her blankly. She blinked.
“The bomb makes it really windy.”
Everyone nodded and made general sounds of acknowledgment. Vivian pulled off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
“Well, this place was a dead end,” Erik sighed. “I guess we should get going.”
“No, we might as well stay here for the night now,” Vivian said. “It’s getting too dark to drive without headlights. Maybe if we look around we can at least find a shelter to sleep in.”
“No way, no how,” Trent said firmly. “This place got the K.O. all the day-o. I’m not letting you lay your pretty head down in some busted-ass cabin just to wake up with it smashed under a ton of logs in the morning.”
Vivian took a few steps down the blacktop path, peering into the grid of shattered lumber heaps that had once been a quaint neighborhood of shops.
“Just take a look around, all right?” she said, striding around a corner. “There must be something still standing that we can take shelter in. Maybe there’s some kind of utility shed, or shuttle bus, or-”
She stopped in her tracks, turning back to the
group with a smile.
“… igloo.”
In front of Vivian was a dome of coarse cement towering fifty feet into the air. It was apparent that its outside shell had been painted a bluish white many decades ago, but today brittle curls of paint revealed broad gray patches of the poured concrete beneath. A loose grid of dark blue lines delineated the edges of imaginary ice blocks, making the dome look like an igloo, but only to one whose familiarity with igloos did not extend beyond the realm of Chilly Willy cartoons. A series of thick iron bolts riddled its weathered side, vomiting rusty red stains down the curved slope of its wall. Although the circular structure had put up a much better fight than its fallen comrades had, it still bore the scar of a large irregular hole that had opened across the apex of its dome.
“What is that thing?” Bobby asked.
“It’s an igloo,” Erik said. “Haven’t you ever seen a Chilly Willy cartoon?”
“Well, I know it’s an igloo,” Bobby said impatiently. “But what is it?”
“I don’t know,” Vivian said, pointing to the sheared bolts. “The sign is missing.” An arched entryway of crudely formed cement extended twenty feet from the base of the dome, ending in a pair of broken glass and steel doors. A plastic sign hung from a chain in the empty doorframe.
Sorry, we’re closed!
Vivian peered into the inky darkness and her stomach contracted nervously. She remembered Boltzmann’s Market, the Banyan Terrace parking garage, and the gas station convenience store. They were now three for three with innocuous spaces transforming into chambers of horror. She glanced at Trent holding his blade aloft in his broad fist.
“Hey, Trent,” she said casually. “Why don’t you go scout it out while we keep looking around out here?”
Trent shook his head.
“You know that I live to make your every wish come true,” he said, “but I can’t go in there and leave you here unprotected.”
“Don’t worry,” Erik assured him. “I’ll be here to protect her.”
“What do you think I’m protecting her from? ” Trent muttered.
“Okay, fine,” Vivian said, rubbing her eyes. “Bobby, will you please go in there and check it out?”
The Oblivion Society Page 31
