“In other words, the Bible always says what suits your needs, even when you change your mind,” Bobby retorted.
“My faith is strong enough not to get hung up on the Lord’s words, but to just trust the gist of it.”
Priscilla closed her eyes and rubbed the end of Trent’s tail over her tongue.
“Oh yeah, Prissy, that feels good,” he groaned. “Baby, don’t stop. Mmm, don’t stop.”
The tip of Trent’s tail disappeared into Priscilla’s mouth, but before he could appreciate it, her teeth slammed shut like a steel trap.
“Yeeeeaaaaaghhh!” Trent wailed.
His whole body recoiled, slamming his knees into the bottom of the dashboard and sending the car careening back and forth across the dusty highway. He quickly regained his composure, pulling the car back into its lane and yanking his tail away from Priscilla.
“Ow! Bad girl!” Trent shouted, rubbing his crotch. “Bad girl! How many times do I got to tell you! Lips and tongue! No teeth!”
“Trent!” Bobby barked. “For Christ’s sake, she’s a human being! If you don’t start treating her with a little bit of respect I’m gonna start smacking you around!”
“She’s the one who’s down on a brother like the jaws of life, and you’re telling me to treat her with respect? I think that shit just busted my kneecaps, yo!”
“Well, why don’t you just move the seat back, you retard?” Sherri asked.
“I tried, Strawberry Shortlegs,” Trent said sarcastically. “It doesn’t move. You got it all jammed up here when you did the push start.”
“Oh, I didn’t do shit to your stupid seat,” Sherri growled dismissively. “Maybe it’s all just a sign from God that you should pull over and let somebody else drive for a while? Did you think of that?”
“Like who?” Trent asked. “Last time I checked, Vivi and Little E were in the other car, and none of you other clowns can drive stick. Excluding Prissy of course, but I don’t think that she’s in any condition to drive in her diminished capacity.”
“Oh, now she’s got a diminished capacity!” Sherri laughed mirthlessly. “Now that it’s beneficial for you , suddenly she’s got a diminished capacity. Tell me, Trent, how did you get so detached from reality? I want to smoke some too!”
“You can spin it any way you like,” Trent mused, “but the simple truth is this: The T is always going down that righteous path, yo.”
Trent put his hand high on Priscilla’s thigh and gave it a gentle caress.
“Isn’t that true, Prissy?”
As Trent’s oblivious hand squeezed her painfully wounded leg, Priscilla pitched violently away, banging her head on the window with a dull clunk.
“Jesus, give it a rest, Trent!” Bobby spat. “You’re not even touching me and I still have this image in my head of Webster telling me to say no, go, and tell someone I trust.”
Trent bent his elbows and returned both hands to the cramped steering wheel. He cast a glance at Bobby in the rearview mirror.
“It’s important to give your girl constant physical contact, dawg. I know somebody like you wouldn’t be familiar with how to treat a lady, but I call that the first T.”
“The first T?” Bobby asked. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s the T’s three Ts,” Trent grinned. “If you can successfully execute the three Ts on a woman, it’s a fast lane, all-access pass to her heart.”
“Oh please, good sir,” Bobby said sarcastically. “Please educate my poor pathetic soul on the matter of these three Ts of which you speak, so that I too may find true love as you so obviously have.”
Trent slipped his hand off the wheel and ran his knuckles gently across Priscilla’s cheek. She leaned into his touch and closed her eyes.
“The first T is touch,” Trent said calmingly. “If a girlie ain’t gonna let you touch her, then there’s no point in even continuing the application process, yo.” In the passenger seat of the open convertible, Vivian struggled to hold down a road map against the raging whirlpool of turbulence that lashed out of the cold air.
“Here, let me help with that,” Erik said.
Leaving his two left hands on the wheel, he reached over with both of his right and grasped the edge of the map. With his eyes still on the road, his human hand inadvertently landed on top of Vivian’s. It lingered there for a pronounced beat before departing with a tiny squeeze and catching the raging paper corner.
“Thanks,” Vivian said.
She held the map’s other two corners with her own hands, finally securing it well enough to get a good look at where they were going. The wind whistled through a long, otherwise silent pause. Then Erik spoke.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Vivian said. “It was just a little touch.”
“No, not for that,” Erik said guiltily. “I’m sorry about before in the parking lot. The thing with Bobby.”
In the Reliant, Bobby shook his head disgustedly.
“Alright, I’ll humor you,” he said. “So in the unlikely event that you can touch a girl without her immediately vomiting or knocking you unconscious, then what?”
“The second T stands for ‘tell,’” Trent said smoothly. “If the lady is interested in your sweet touch, then she almost certainly is in the market for something more. Just tell her whatever she wants to hear.”
“So let me make sure I’ve got the steps straight,” Bobby smirked. “It’s manhandle first, and then lie?”
“I didn’t say lie-I said tell her what she wants to hear, ” Trent corrected. “The second T works even better when it’s true blue and from the heart, yo.” Vivian tipped her head down toward the blue grid of her map. Her hair thrashed over her drooping face.
“That did hurt my feelings a little,” she said. “When Bobby showed up you practically knocked me over trying to deny what was going on.”
The cold wind seemed to blow straight through Erik’s chest and into his stomach.
“So … what was going on, exactly?”
“You were helping me with my wings and we, you know … we kind of had a moment. ”
Erik smiled as the cold wind blew back out of his chest as a hot breath.
“We were having a moment!” he smiled. “Bobby thought that I was on crack when I said that.”
“Well, you shouldn’t care so much about what Bobby says,” Vivian replied. “You know that he just says things to get a reaction out of you. He does it to everybody. It’s his thing.”
“I know that,” Erik said guiltily. “But the thing is, this time he was actually … well, he was sort of right.”
Vivian looked at Erik with surprise.
“He was right? ”
“Sort of right!” Erik backpedaled. “Don’t get me wrong, he is the best friend that I ever had in my life, and I love your brother like he’s my own, but … well, let’s just say that I’ve been a lot more eager to come and hang out with him ever since he moved in with you.”
Vivian’s cheeks flushed the same vibrant hue as her hair.
“But … but in all the time we’ve known each other you’ve barely even spoken to me other than to regale me with pop culture trivia.”
Erik’s face suddenly began sprinting toward its own shade of red.
“Well, I’m … I was too intimidated to really talk to you.”
“What?!” Vivian laughed. “Why in the world would I intimidate you? You do realize that I was just a minimum-wage-earning peon at Boltzmann’s Market, right?”
“Well, yeah,” Erik said. “That’s how everybody else sees you. To me, you were always like some kind of super heroine. The befuddled stock clerk was just your mild-mannered secret identity. Then, by night, you turn into the savvy intellectual who clears Jeopardy! boards without even trying. That’s the real Vivian. That’s the one that kept me from ever listening when you told me to go home. That’s the one that I always wanted to spend a lot more time with.”
> He gave her a shrugging little smile.
“I guess that wish came true in a big way, huh?”
A fuzzy pink warmth spread outward from Vivian’s chest and poured into her face like a hot cup of tea.
“And the third T?” Bobby said with only the most marginal interest.
“The third T is for ‘take,’” Trent said. “Take her on her dream date. It doesn’t matter if she wants you to fly her sweet ass to the moon -you take her wherever she wants to go. If you’ve got through ‘touch’ and ‘tell’ and the girl is still all into you, then ‘take’ will get you into the boudoir every time, guaranteed or your money back.”
“Well, it looks like you’re almost there,” Vivian smiled.
She pulled her finger over her map, tracing the line of Interstate 67 straight into Washington D.C.
“I’ve always wanted to go to the capital and experience it all,” she said dreamily.
“The Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian. I hope at least some of it is still standing.”
“We’ll have a chance to see everything there is,” Erik said decisively. “If there’s survivors here like you think, then we’ll be staying for quite a while.” He turned to her with a hopeful smile.
“I think we’re almost home, Vivian.”
Vivian put her hand on top of Erik’s and gave it a squeeze.
“Go home, Erik,” she smiled. “And take me with you.” Erik looked at her with a twinkle in his eyes.
“Vivian, you know I’d take you anywhere.”
Vivian shifted in her seat but Erik’s eyes stayed on the road, curiously squinting into the distance. She leaned toward him and whispered warmly in his ear.
“Erik, what would you say if I told you that I was about to kiss you?” Erik’s eyes shot wide open as he furiously clenched the wheel.
“Holy shit!”
Before Vivian could respond, Erik had slammed the clutch and brake pedals to the floor, locking all four of the Rabbit’s tires in a squealing scream. He grabbed her with his two right arms and held her as tightly as he could against his own body as the speeding car began to fishtail.
“Hold on!” he screamed, wrestling the wheel. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it under control!”
With two hands on the wheel and two trying desperately to protect Vivian, Erik managed to keep the front wheels pointed straight ahead by his sheer will to survive. For the briefest second, Erik did indeed have the situation under control. But only for the briefest second.
For days on end the tiny rubber donut of the Rabbit’s temporary spare tire had shown admirable grace under fire, outperforming its specifications for speed and endurance without complaint. To force this little trooper into an unexpected stop at seventy miles per hour, however, was simply asking too much. After leaving a suicide note of black skid mark down one hundred feet of pavement, the little tire blew, peeling off of its narrow rim like an exhausted roll of tape.
The driver’s-side corner of the Rabbit dropped onto the bare rim, immediately snapping it off at the axle and bringing the front end of the car crashing deafeningly onto the pavement. A fountain of hot white sparks flew from the unsupported corner of the frame as it scraped fiercely across the interstate. Despite Erik’s efforts, the forces of physics almost immediately threw the car into a leftward arc, forcing the rear tire of the passenger side to take the lead.
Behind the grinding shower of sparks, the dragging front fender wrenched free from the Rabbit’s steel body. It bounced off the pavement and skipped over the car, turning end over end in the air until it crashed down in a disorienting blast of beaded safety glass on the windshield of the pursuing Reliant.
One second later, friction had ground the Rabbit to a stop, but it wasn’t until three seconds later that Trent had the clarity of mind to step on the brake pedal. Able to see nothing but the remains of a gray fender slammed lengthwise across his windshield, Trent plowed the Reliant directly into the front corner of the spun-out Rabbit, immediately silencing the roar of both utterly devastated engines. The momentum of the collision carried both cars scraping across the scorched pavement until they came to an eerily silent stop at the lip of a ten-mile-wide atomic crater that had once been Washington D.C.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Washington D.C. was not destroyed. It was not in ruins. It was simply gone. Interstate 67 had literally become a road to nowhere, ending in a crumble of blacktop pouring over the side of an abyss where the nation’s capital had once stood.
Just twenty feet from the edge of the crater, Vivian’s Rabbit lay in a posthumous slouch on its three remaining wheels. The front end of the Reliant was smashed against the gray convertible’s side, its hood thrown open, its engine hissing steam and dripping fluids.
Vivian coughed a dry, choking cough as her eyes swam in and out of focus. Her chest was resting across the top of the passenger-side door, spilling her head, arms, and wings limply over the side of the car. She could feel the dull stripe of pain from the worn weather-stripping pressing against her chest, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. Her brain wrapped muddily around a sound behind her, which resolved into a voice.
“Oooouch,” it groaned. “Vivian, you okay? Viv?”
Erik’s hand tugged gently on her shoulder, and with a cascade of tumbling wings and arms she fell back into her seat. Her glasses had slid down her nose. She pushed them back up, bringing the devastation that surrounded her into sharp focus. To her left, all she could see was the steaming ruins of the Reliant; to her right, there stretched a mile-deep atomic crater; to the front, there lay an Archimedean screw of bent satellite dish that had been thrown thirty feet from the road.
“Ooowww, shit,” Erik hissed, pulling himself upright in his seat. “Vivian, are you hurt?”
“No,” she answered, peering dismally upward. “I’m fine.” It was a lie. She wasn’t injured, but she was not fine. Not in any way. Once again, everything in the world had been taken away from her. Their transportation had been taken away. Their only communication link to the rest of the world been taken away. Even their destination had been taken away. But what bothered her most was what had been left behind.
A rusty green overpass soared over her head. It left the ground a hundred feet to the left of the highway but never returned. It extended outward over the void, terminating in a club of withered metal and scorched blacktop. The sight of it instantly slapped a dormant memory to the front of Vivian’s mind.
On that first terrible morning, the unfolding atomic nightmare had asserted its reality in the form of the ruined Skyshine Causeway bridge. Now here she was, on the other side of countless days and unknown miles, facing an almost identical vaporized bridge. To her it was more than just another piece of urban wreckage. It was the start of an endless, tragic film loop coming back through the projector of her life a second time. It was a stinging reminder that no matter how long or how far she ran, she would never find the end of this merciless atomic wasteland. The sight of it made her do something that she had managed to keep herself from doing for the entire hellish journey.
It made her break down and cry.
“Oh no. Come on, don’t cry, Viv,” Erik whispered. “Don’t give up. We’re going to be okay.”
Vivian ran her hand sadly along the destroyed dashboard of her car.
“It’s over,” she said weakly.
“There’s got to be other towns out there,” Erik said encouragingly. “We’ll find them, Vivian. It’s not over till it’s over.”
“It’s over, Erik!” Vivian sobbed. “There’s nowhere else to go! I give up! I just give up.”
She buried her head in Erik’s chest, weeping with a passion that stung the back of her throat and boiled into her sinuses. Her last tenuous dam of hope had finally been ruptured, and she let loose a torrential flood of long pent-up emotion: all the stress, horror, and despair poured out uncontrollably. She cried so hard it seemed her tears were turning to blood.
Her eyes shot open. Blo
od?
With her head pressed against Erik’s chest, Vivian found herself gazing directly into his lap. The worn blue fabric of the driver’s seat was completely saturated in fresh red blood. One of the Reliant’s square yellow bumpers had plowed deep into Erik’s side of the car, buckling his door into a serrated wedge of torn plastic and snapped steel. The jagged wreckage plunged through Erik’s ripped jeans and into his thigh.
“Oh my God, Erik! You’re hurt! Why didn’t you say something?” Erik shrugged painfully.
“You didn’t sound like you could take any more bad news right now.” Vivian regained her composure shamefacedly. The whole time that Erik had been trying to convince her that everything would be okay, he had been quietly bleeding out into her seat cushions.
“Erik, I’m so sorry! I didn’t know!”
“Don’t worry. I’m gonna be fine, Vivian,” he said stoically. ” I’m not giving up.” Just then the cold air was sliced open by a piercing scream from the direction of the Reliant. Vivian’s eyes flicked toward the other car, then back to Erik desperately.
“Go help them,” Erik nodded. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine-you’re hurt!”
“I’m fine! Go!”
Vivian leapt out of her car and sprinted to the Reliant. She yanked open the back door and leaned inside. Bobby and Sherri were sprawled across the seat, looking dazed but unharmed.
“What’s going on?” Vivian yelped. “Are you guys okay?”
“Yeah, we’re okay back here,” Bobby moaned.
“Aaaaaauggh!” Trent screamed. “Ooooww! Shit! Get it off!”
“Hold on!” Vivian squeaked.
She pried open the damaged driver’s-side door, and it fell off its hinges and smashed to the ground. Her heart leapt up and stuck in her throat at the sight of all the blood. Blood was dripping from the steering wheel and running off of the vinyl seats. Blood was collecting in pools in the floor. Blood was splattered across Trent’s shirt and running in thick rivulets down Priscilla’s frenzied face. The collision had forced the dashboard into Trent’s lap, and the displaced steering wheel now clamped his legs against the seat. What was once the instrument panel had transformed into a gnarled rake of jagged steel and sharp plastic that sliced mercilessly into the tops of his bloody thighs.
The Oblivion Society Page 40
