“Get back! Get back offa me, you freak! Freak! You fugly demon freak! ” Puzzled, Priscilla raised a hand toward him, but he kicked it away. Her remaining lip began to quiver, and her dull eyes filled with a perfect expression of complete and utter heartbreak. A single oversized tear rolled out of the corner of her eye, sliding down her cheek, over her lip, and in a quick, racing sprint down the curve of her newly formed mandible.
A second later there was crack of wood against flesh, and Priscilla fell forward on her knees. Behind her, Sherri stood with her hands wrapped around the barrels of the shotgun, its walnut stock held high in the air, ready for another punishing swing. Through it all, Priscilla never took her pleading eyes off of Trent.
“Don’t you ever hit me when I’m not looking, bitch!” Sherri wailed. “I’ll kick your bloated fucking ass!”
Sherri landed another mighty wallop on the monster’s back, but outside of a gentle sway, Priscilla did not react.
“Sherri! Stop! Don’t hurt her!” Vivian screamed, clambering unsteadily to her feet.
“She doesn’t know what she’s doing! She doesn’t understand!”
“Well, let’s see if she understands this!”
Sherri wound up and took a third swing, but this time her blow ended with a slap against an outstretched palm. Priscilla yanked the shotgun from Sherri’s hands and threw it aside as she climbed to her feet. The mutant girl towered over her petite attacker, a foul ichor dripping from her glistening mouthpieces. Sherri’s head tipped back, back, back, as Priscilla rose to her full height in front of her. Far from fear, Sherri’s bloodshot pink eyes narrowed into a defiant glare.
“Come on, bitch!” she said, spreading her arms. “You want a piece of me? Come get some!”
Priscilla took one charging step forward, throwing her arms around Sherri’s tiny body and clasping her tightly against her own mountainous chest. As she struggled for her freedom, Sherri’s thrashing blond head hovered dangerously close to the razor-sharp teeth of Priscilla’s shoulder mandible.
“Put me down!” Sherri wailed, kicking and clawing. “Put me the fuck down!” Sherri’s boots scraped over Priscilla’s legs, peeling and tearing off the bandages to release a sprawl of mismatched insect limbs from her hideous gashes. The mutated legs scrambled against the air, creating the nightmarish illusion of a swarm of enormous bugs clawing their way out of Priscilla’s body.
“Sherri! Stop fighting! Don’t fight her!” Vivian screamed. “Priscilla! Look at me!
Look at me right now! ”
The commanding tone of Vivian’s voice drew a temporary truce between the struggling combatants. Sherri fell momentarily silent in Priscilla’s arms as the giant turned to see Vivian standing before her with the sword drawn menacingly in front of her body.
“Priscilla, I don’t want to hurt you,” Vivian boomed. “I’ve never wanted to hurt you. But if you don’t put down Sherri and behave yourself, I promise, I will hurt you. Do you understand me?”
Priscilla’s bulbous eyes glared right through her.
“You’re confused,” Vivian continued compassionately. “That guy is not your Lee. Lee is dea-”
She bit her lip, then continued.
“Trent doesn’t love you like Lee does. Look at how he runs away from you. That’s not love.”
Priscilla gave a long, lingering blink, as if waiting for something-anything-to make sense. Finally her eyes narrowed with sorrow and incomprehension, and she violently turned her head away from Vivian’s intense glare. This simple movement had consequences as tragic as they were unintentional.
As Priscilla’s head turned, the mandible curling from her fractured jaw closed against the one fixed to her shoulder, clamping down like a pair of scissors on Sherri’s tiny skull. A wave of blood gushed from two fresh cuts in Sherri’s scalp, saturating the golden waves of her hair. With a tortured scream, she went into a brief spasm of resistance, but Priscilla’s panicked arms squeezed her until she fell limp and silent.
“Sherri, no! ” Vivian screamed.
She rushed forward, preparing to deliver a disabling strike to Priscilla’s legs. Priscilla quickly retreated from the blade, lumbering backward until she reached the overpass, where she pressed herself into a corner against one of its concrete pylons. Vivian lowered her sword away from the utterly cornered mutant with one last plea.
“Please, Priscilla,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Just put Sherri down. Please, just put her down and I promise I won’t hurt you.” Priscilla’s terrified ears didn’t seem to understand or acknowledge Vivian’s final appeal. She pressed her back against the smooth concrete slab and held out her free arm, desperately clawing at the wall for an escape route. To her surprise, her arm didn’t slide over the wall, but stuck to it. The collection of highly adapted insect legs dotting her flesh gripped the tiny cracks and fissures in the cement, holding fast. Her scrambling human legs affixed themselves by their own barbed additions, and with a few lurching thrusts, Priscilla had climbed six feet up the side of the pylon.
“No!” Vivian gasped. “Come back! You’ll drop her! Stop! Please, stop!” She threw down her sword and rushed at Priscilla hopelessly, but it was too late. In a motion like a clumsy, one-armed backstroke, Priscilla raced up the side of the support and adhered herself to the underside of the overpass. She hung there with her back to the steel girders, facing downward, with Sherri’s unconscious body dangling limply over her giant forearm.
Vivian’s long fingers clawed at the smooth, featureless pylon in desperation. She jumped against it, planting her rubber toes into the wall again and again, only to slide back down with tiny squeaks of failure. She whirled on her heels and looked up at Sherri’s inert body bleeding onto the two cars below.
“No, no,” Vivian sobbed. “Priscilla, please come back down! Please! ” Vivian knew that there was no way Priscilla was coming down and that there was no way she herself could climb the pylon. There was simply no way to reach Sherri. She turned her back to the concrete and slumped against it in anguish, the folded mass of her massive wings cushioning the impact.
Her drizzling eyes popped open as Plan B became immediately clear.
Vivian stepped away from the wall and flexed her knees, springing up and down in anticipation. She didn’t think about moving her wings. She just moved them. In perfect synchronization, her four-foot-long wings unfurled majestically from her back. She closed her eyes and sent a silent command, and her wings obeyed, coming down in a broad, powerful flap that blasted a cloud of dust and gravel from the ground. She opened her eyes, backed away from the bridge, and fixed her sights squarely on the captive in the curve of Priscilla’s arm.
“Hold on, Sherri,” she said through gritted teeth. “I’m coming.” Vivian broke into a heroic sprint that burned through her legs. She could feel the long muscles of her wings pulling all the way down her back as the fleshy sails forced two massive scoops of air into the dirt. She flapped again, and her feet left the ground, not coming back to earth for a good two yards. A feeling of weightlessness grasped at her as she continued to run and flap, run and flap. She flapped as hard and as fast as she could, but to her utter disappointment discovered that all she was doing was increasing the length and height of her strides. She could cheat the law of gravity, but she just could not break it. Soon her explosive efforts exhausted her malnourished body, and she slumped into a gasping, lightheaded heap.
“I’m … sorry … Sherri,” she heaved. “I … can’t …” While Vivian was struggling to rescue Sherri, Erik and Trent had been helping Bobby. Erik kneeled at his best friend’s side and carefully pulled the broken ends of Priscilla’s shattered insect legs out of his plump belly.
“Oh God, Bobby, oh God,” he chattered. “Are you in a lot of pain?” Bobby’s face was ghostly, and he spoke in a panting, crushed-lung rattle.
“It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt at all,” he said dully.
“Well, hold on to that happy thought, dawg,” Trent said, “‘cause
this is gonna hurt like a son of a bitch.”
He grabbed onto a particularly heinous-looking beetle leg and yanked it free of Bobby’s flabby side. Its jagged spikes snagged the fibers of his slashed canvas bandages, tearing the final strands that held the banner intact. The instant the restrictive girdle was cut, Bobby’s swollen gut ballooned outward, unleashing a pair of gigantic spider legs! Their blunt, hairy tips pounded Trent in the face, bowling him over. By the time that he had righted himself, Bobby was holding his arms in the air, his beady eyes wide and glistening with surprise at the enormous, auburn-red tarantula limbs that now encircled his midsection. There were five in all: two in front, one on each side, and one in the back.
“Holy shit,” Bobby said with awe.
“Bobby,” Erik squeaked. “Are you okay?”
“I am! I’m better than okay!” Bobby grinned. “Dude, I’m Spiderman! ” With Erik’s help, Bobby struggled onto his sandaled feet. The spider legs sprawled out in an awkward, arm’s-length circle around him, their tips lying sideways against the ground like giant stuffed socks. His gut hung over the top knuckles of the two that branched from his front, and his shirt and bathrobe hung in shredded ribbons over an equator of purple, blistered flab.
Vivian rushed to Bobby’s side and grabbed him by the hand.
“Bobby,” she cried. “Oh God, Bobby, what happened?! Does it hurt?”
“No, it doesn’t hurt!” Bobby snapped with annoyance. “Come on, people, you know it doesn’t hurt! It’s not like this has never happened to you before!” His three mutated friends looked at each other and nodded in acknowledgment. Suddenly a shrill scream came from the overpass above. All eyes snapped to Sherri, who was regaining consciousness in a place that she did not expect to find herself: dangling fifty feet off the ground. Her tiny hands clamped onto Priscilla’s arm as they hung together in the center of the wrecked span.
“Oh shit!” Erik yelped. “We need to get up there and help her!”
“We can’t climb it! It’s too slick!” Vivian cried. “Priscilla could only climb it because she’s got those clingy insect legs!”
As soon as the words came out of her mouth her eyes popped wide as if an idea had goosed her. She looked at Erik, and in turn both of them looked at Bobby. Bobby wiggled his eyebrows and grinned.
“Whenever there’s a hang-up, you call the Spiderman. ” He grabbed the spider leg in front of him and pulled it from its leaning slouch against the ground, balancing it upright on its furry tip. The others quickly righted the rest of his sagging limbs, setting them in bowing arcs like a series of knotted, hairy buttresses around his portly waist.
“Okay, now what?” Bobby asked anxiously.
“Now go get her!” Vivian yelped.
“Wow! Great idea!” Bobby barked sarcastically. “I mean, how do I make them work?!”
“Oh God, there’s no time for this!” Erik winced, slapping his palm against his forehead. “Okay, crash course in mutant limbs-ready?”
“Ready!”
“First, do they work with your real legs? Stand on your toes!” Bobby stood up on his toes, and his spider legs all rose in the air like a Can-can dancer’s skirt.
“They bend when you stretch out. It’s a mirror!” Erik realized. “Try bending your legs instead!”
Bobby started to kneel down, and as his human knees bent, each spider joint extended. When his butt was halfway to the ground, his arachnid legs landed on the pavement. He continued to bend his knees, and the weight of his body was lifted completely off the ground on the flex of his new limbs. Inside the cage of spider stalks, his human legs were bunched beneath him in the air, the backs of his heels pressed against his husky buttocks.
“That worked!” Bobby beamed. “Now what?!”
“Now go! ” Erik screamed.
Bobby’s folded legs swung in a abbreviated shuffle against his sagging belly, and immediately his spider legs launched into action, running him backwards across the road.
“No no! They’re mirroring your real legs!” Erik yelled. “Run backwards! ”
“Get offa me! I’m new at this!” Bobby growled.
He stopped and reversed direction. This time his spider legs danced forward, racing him to the side of the concrete pylon. When he reached it he just kept running, and his hairy arachnid feet slammed into the cement, sticking to its slick surface and climbing the wall.
“Am I strong, listen bud,” he sang to himself. “I’ve got radioactive blood …” When he reached the top of the pylon his legs charged onto the steel, turning him upside-down and hanging him from the bottom of the overpass. His limp ponytail and bathrobe hung toward the ground like Spanish moss as what blood he had remaining flowed to his head.
“Whoa, shit,” he muttered dizzily, pounding his palms into his forehead. “Ow, dude, head rush.”
Priscilla saw the human spider creeping across the bottom of the bridge and turned on him with a shrieking hiss. When his disorientation cleared, Bobby could see the glistening cuts in Sherri’s head trickling blood down her pale, delirious face. As Priscilla postured menacingly toward Bobby, the pink ladybug purse slipped off of Sherri’s shoulder, plummeting fifty feet to the blacktop and exploding in a blast of split plastic seams.
“Whoa whoa! Alright lady, take it easy,” Bobby said diplomatically. “I see you don’t want to keep Sherri. I understand where you’re coming from. She’s a royal pain in the ass.”
“Fuck you too,” Sherri muttered dimly.
“And she speaks with such vulgar language,” Bobby continued. “So why don’t you just hand her over and we’ll all be cool, okay?”
Bobby took a lurching step forward on his untrained legs and held out his arms.
“Okay? Priscilla? Hello?”
Looking deep into Priscilla’s eyes, Bobby could see nothing but a most rudimentary psyche brimming with fear and confusion. He could see his own horrifying reflection in her wet, glistening irises, and it sent a chill up his spine. His wickedly jointed red spider legs sprawled out of his bloodied midsection like the fingers of a gigantic, gnarled hand tearing him apart from the inside out; from her upside-down perspective, his matted hair and mangled clothes seemed to stand straight up in an intimidating display of dominance; his hands were reaching out for her with disquietingly ambiguous purpose. He suddenly realized that in her bulbous, twitching eyes, he was nothing more than another mutant demon come to kill her. For all of these reasons, Bobby was not at all surprised when Priscilla suddenly pitched forward in a misguided attempt at self-defense.
He was, however, surprised when in doing so she uncurled her arm, unceremoniously dropping Sherri.
“Sherri, no!” he wailed.
He took a clumsy, skittering step forward and threw out his arm, but he was too far away from her. In a sort of tragic slow motion he could see Sherri’s shapely body slide through the air less than ten inches past the ends of his outstretched fingertips. Almost faster than he could see her pass, he was looking at the top of her quickly shrinking head, her golden hair seeming to wave goodbye to him as she plummeted to her death.
He could not reach her. She was gone.
“No!” he screamed.
In the heat of the moment, every fiber of his body chose to ignore reason and continue to stretch out impotently toward the lost cause. He could feel the muscles in his arm striving to bridge the rapidly growing chasm of inches to save Sherri’s life. Though it had gone strangely numb, he could feel his forearm seem to swell and burst with the strain of its extension.
And half a second later, that’s exactly what it did.
The sleeve of Bobby’s bathrobe exploded into a flap of slashed terry cloth as the mohawk of knobby green teeth erupted from the straining flesh of his forearm. Three segments of green exoskeleton swung outward from his elbow, revealing the double-hinged span of a gigantic praying mantis foreleg!
With an extraordinary precision that strained the very boundaries of luck, the tip of his new appendage hooked into the back of S
herri’s hood, tearing to a sudden stop at the ruffle of synthetic fur lining its edge. Her fall completely arrested, Sherri’s traumatized body swung in a broad arc beneath the bridge on the end of a four-foot green pendulum anchored to Bobby’s shoulder. She raised her head dizzily to look up at him with gratitude in her cloudy eyes.
“Th … thanks, Bobby.”
Bobby opened his mouth to reply but was rudely interrupted by a huge, bony fist hammering him in the jaw. A flash of lights and color swirled before his eyes as he stumbled backward, still clinging to the bottom of the overpass. His rear leg darted upward to find a girder upon which to plant itself, catching nothing but the open air beyond the bridge’s edge. The unexpected loss of support threw him into an off-kilter swing, but his hanging weight quickly found equilibrium between the stalks of his four other legs. He pounded his palm into the top of Priscilla’s head and viciously shoved her away. She retreated toward the bridge’s center by two skittering backstrokes.
On the ground, Erik and Vivian stood petrified next to Trent’s injured body sprawled on the pavement. All three sets of eyes were fixed unflinchingly on the struggle above.
“She’s going to kill them!” Erik said hysterically. “Oh my God, she’s going to kill them! We have to stop her! We have to help them!”
“We can’t stop her,” Vivian said tearfully. “There’s no way to get up there. No way.”
“Yes, there is!” Erik pleaded. “Come on! We can go up the ramp!” With that, he hobbled off the left shoulder of the road and furiously limped toward the level beginning of the overpass in the distance. Vivian watched the thin splatters of blood flick out of his cut and across the wilted grass every time that his lacerated leg hit the ground. She could hear the agonized grunts choked back in his determined throat without a second thought.
The Oblivion Society Page 42
