“It’s okay, girl. It’s all right,” he cooed. “You know that God has a plan for all of us. Maybe Big B’s purpose for being on this earth was to protect you, because you have the most important purpose of all.”
“Important purpose? Trent, I don’t have any purpose! I’ve never had a purpose besides giving assholes somebody to point at when they make their itty-bitty-titty-committee jokes. Now I don’t even have that going for me anymore.” Trent put his mocha fingers under Sherri’s chin and pushed her head upward until her wet pink eyes met his own dull brown smolder.
“I know, Goldie. It’s all part of His plan,” he smiled. “And I’m here to help you serve your divine purpose.”
With that, he leaned in and pressed his chapped lips against Sherri’s tiny pink mouth. His tongue probed into her narrow jaw, flooding her palate with a stale taste of neglected oral hygiene. Almost before his advance had even started, it was ended by a knobby, fishnetted knee delivered swiftly to his groin. As Trent staggered back with a coughing groan, Sherri leapt away from him, frantically wiping her tongue with her fingertips. Finally she drew a massive wad of contaminated spit into the back of her throat and deposited it with a wet thump on Trent’s chest.
“You horny asshole cockbag dipshit motherfucker!” she spat. “What the fuck are you doing?!”
“Isn’t it obvious?! It’s your purpose!” Trent moaned. “You just said it yourself!
You spend your whole life built like a carpenter’s dream, and then just when we need to repopulate the earth, you suddenly bust out all over like some kind of freaky tiki fertility idol! How can you not see what you’re supposed to do next?!”
“What? What?! What the fuck, Trent?! Just because some asshole conned me into overdosing on old-lady hormones it doesn’t make me your goddamn baby oven!”
“Aww, that’s bullshit and you know it! If there was a magic pill that just slapped on hips and tits like a Beverly Hills surgeon, don’t you think that every sixteen-year-old girl in the country would be all hopped up on that shit? This isn’t a side effect of bad drugs, girl! This is the work of a higher power! It’s time to accept and carry out your purpose. You’re the new Eve. You’re going to be the new mother of mankind!”
Sherri crossed her arms over her swollen chest and glared at Trent with a fire in her eyes.
“That is the most desperate and clumsy attempt at getting a girl into the sack that I have ever heard in my entire life. Did you ever stop and think that if God was so gung-ho about the survival of the human race that maybe he wouldn’t have killed everybody on Earth?! ”
Trent shook his head.
“It worked out okay for Noah,” he shrugged. “Look, I know you think I’m some kind of superfly slick playa, but I’m being honest with you here. For real. With Prissy gone, you and Vivi are the only ones left who can carry on the human race. Why can’t you see that, girl? Prissy wasn’t all uptight about it. She understood what we needed to do if we didn’t want to be the last bookend on God’s mighty shelf.”
“Um, I don’t mean to speak ill of your noble attempt to propagate the species,” Erik interrupted, “but to put it delicately, if you were trying to reproduce with Priscilla you were using the wrong end.”
“Damn, E! The T doesn’t steal home on the first date! There is still such a thing as chivalry, you know!”
A high, mirthless laugh clucked out of Sherri’s throat.
“What is the matter with you?!” she shouted. “Listen to yourself! You’re trying to write off date raping a retard as fulfilling a biblical mandate! She didn’t want to fuck you any more than the rest of us do, but she was just too goddamn stupid to say so!”
“To say so?” Trent growled. “You know she couldn’t talk! She had a gash in her throat the size of the San Fernando Valley!”
“Even if she could talk, I’ll bet she wouldn’t have said shit, ” Sherri argued. “I’ve seen guys passed out under pool tables with better communication skills than her!”
“Stop it!” Vivian screamed. “All of you stop it! You’re unbelievable! This is supposed to be a funeral! Do you think that Priscilla would have wanted her memorial service to consist of a bunch of strangers arguing about her sex life?” The others hung their heads in acknowledgment of their disgraceful behavior.
“Well, what the hell are we supposed to say about her then?” Sherri growled.
“She was a giant evil bug bitch that murdered your brother. End of story.”
“That’s not the end of the story,” Vivian insisted. “She wasn’t always like this.” She pulled the old photograph of Priscilla and Lee from her coat pocket and looked at the smiling face of a girl who no longer existed. She held the picture up to the others and continued.
“Don’t demonize her, Sherri. This creature lying in front of us isn’t Priscilla-I mean, the real Priscilla. The real Priscilla was just an average girl, just like you. Just like me. She lived in an average little tourist town. She worked an average job selling average junk to average people. And just like us, I’m sure that she dreamed of something better than that average life. The real Priscilla wasn’t an atomic monster, Sherri. She wasn’t a murderous mutant. She was just an average girl. Just like us.” The group observed a short moment of silence as the force of Vivian’s words slowly sank in. Finally Sherri grabbed the hood of pink bandage on her head and threw it to the ground with a growl.
“What are you doing?” Vivian said. “Your cuts are going to get infected.”
“So what?” Sherri spat. “A few germs aren’t going to make any difference once I turn into a giant ogre, are they? Somebody just kill me right now before I change into a freak like her.”
“Change? You’re not going to change!” Vivian said doggedly. “Just because this happened to her doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen to us!”
“Not going to happen to us my ass!” Sherri roared. “You just said like, ten times that she was just like us before all of this atomic shit went down! But by the time we met her all she understood was ‘eat,’ ‘fuck,’ and ‘don’t die.’ I don’t want to live like that! I don’t want to live with the brains of a fucking cockroach!” A short stuttering of rebuttal tumbled from Vivian’s lips, but it quickly fell apart before it could form.
“You’re right,” she said thoughtfully. “She was just like a cockroach.”
“Oh, that’s great, Vivi. That’s real nice,” Trent grumbled. “You complain that we’re doing a bad job eulogizing Prissy’s memory, and then you step up here and start calling her a cockroach.”
“No no, I’m not saying that Priscilla was a cockroach, Trent,” Vivian defended.
“I’m just saying that’s what she had been reduced to in the end. The mind of a cockroach. I mean, I saw her drive an eight-inch metal spike into her leg just because she lacked the simple cognitive skills to pull it back out! It was like the evolved parts of her mind had been shut off, leaving her with nothing but the most basic fragments of human instinct.”
“We already knew that,” Erik said. “The stress of being stuck in that igloo with all of those killer bugs broke her brain.”
“That might have had something to do with it,” Vivian conceded. “But I don’t think that’s really what happened to her.”
Her eyes seemed to flicker with thoughts working themselves into logical clusters in her mind.
“I have a theory,” she continued. “We think that Priscilla’s cells multiplied so rapidly because her DNA was damaged by the radiation, right? If her body absorbed that much radiation, imagine the damage it must have done to her brain! It must have been like getting hundreds of skull x-rays at once.”
“But she couldn’t have lived without a brain,” Erik contended.
“No, you’re right,” Vivian said, raising a finger. “But she could have lived with only part of one. What if the radiation only damaged the lobes of the brain that handle reason and cognizance, leaving nothing but motor function and basic instinctual behavior?”
“Dam
n, Vivi, that’s a whole heapin’ helpin’ of the what-ifs,” Trent said dismissively. “If all that brain-damage jive is true, then why didn’t the exact same thing happen to anybody’s brain but Prissy’s?”
“It did,” Vivian said. “It hasn’t happened to any of us, but it’s completely consistent with every one of the other mutants we’ve come across. Think about it. Those bugs in the igloo seemed to be attacking us, but what did they do, really? The bees were defending their hive, and the spiders were capturing prey. That’s what bees and spiders do! Erik, what about the rat that scratched you in the storm drain? Did it chase you down and attack you?”
“No, I picked it up,” Erik said with embarrassment. “It didn’t claw me until I tried to … uh … hug it.”
“You see?” Vivian said. “It was probably just acting in self-defense! What if all this time we’ve been mistaking rudimentary animal instinct for aggression?”
“But what about the cat?” Sherri said. “That bitch was definitely out for blood.”
“She was,” Erik agreed thoughtfully. “But Twiki always tried to kill anything that moved. She had some serious aggression issues.”
“It all makes some kind of sense now,” Vivian said. “What if none of those mutants was evil, but just brain damaged?”
Erik’s glance drifted to the thin tangle of wildflowers that did a poor job camouflaging a ragged, fleshy hole bored deep into Priscilla’s chest. His eyes began to pool as his lips trembled in a suddenly amplified remorse.
“Oh my God,” he whispered. “I executed a retarded girl. With a shotgun! I’m worse than the governor of Texas!”
As the words came out of his mouth the sentiment behind them suddenly became concrete, and Erik broke down into a flood of horrified tears.
“I … I didn’t know!” he wailed. “I didn’t realize that she was just brain damaged! I thought she was some kind of savage monster!”
“But she was a monster! That’s what I’m trying to say!” Vivian explained. “I’m not talking about the Special Olympics here-I’m talking about a walking brain stem!
Her personality and humanity were completely destroyed with her dissolving gray matter! That thing that you killed was not a retarded girl, Erik. It was just a completely mindless shell. It was a … it was a zombie. ”
“She was not a zombie!” Erik sobbed. “Zombies are the walking undead who kill people and eat their brains! She did not come back from the dead, Vivian!”
“Didn’t she, Erik?” Vivian shouted.
She held up the creased photograph and planted her long forefinger on Priscilla’s tiny smile.
” This girl was dead long before we ever met her.” Her finger slashed downward to Priscilla’s mutated body.
” That girl was a thoughtless bundle of burned-up neurons parading around in a human body! She may not be an according-to-Romero zombie, but the person who was once Priscilla died, and this creature was born. Priscilla, the real Priscilla, was already dead before you shot this body, Erik. You are not a murderer. She was no different from any of the other monsters that we’ve had to defend ourselves against.” Erik tipped his head to the ground in a pained resignation.
“You’re wrong, Vivian,” he said. “She’s not like the other atomic monsters at all.”
“How can you say that?” Vivian asked irascibly. “Every single fact that we have says that she was exactly like them!”
“No, it doesn’t,” Erik muttered. “All of the other mutants started glowing as soon as we killed them. Look at her, Vivian.”
All eyes turned curiously to Priscilla’s inert form. The long, grotesque black mandibles still jutted from her fractured jaw and shoulder, and dozens of horrible legs stuck from her body like a mad entomologist’s pincushion. A lot of words could be used to describe how unnatural she looked, but “glowing” was definitely not one of them.
“She’s not glowing, and neither is Bobby,” Erik continued. “She may have been mentally handicapped, but she wasn’t some kind of undead atomic freak like the others. She was still a human, Vivian. Just a mutated human. Just like Bobby. Just like us.”
“But … but that’s just one little insignificant incongruity!” Vivian stammered.
“Whether or not she glows is irrelevant in the face of all of the other evidence!
Priscilla suffered gigantism, just like the others. She acted on instinct, just like the others. All she had left in her head was fight or flight, eat or starve, live or die.” Erik threw a finger toward Trent and spoke with snapping aggression.
“Well, if she didn’t have any higher thought, then why did she try so hard to defend this idiot that she thought was her boyfriend?”
Vivian’s eyebrows knitted and she spoke with a trembling clarity.
“Because the only human instinct stronger than survival is love.” Erik searched Vivian’s face mournfully. She was gravely serious and steadfastly hopeful. He gazed into those green eyes for a long moment before he spoke.
“I want to join the pact.”
“What?”
“Your homicide pact. I’ve changed my mind. I agree with Sherri on this one. Growing extra limbs is one thing, but if I go completely brain-dead like Priscilla, I want you to kill me.”
“Damn it, Erik! You won’t go brain-dead!” Vivian shouted. “None of us will!
We’re still sharp and alert! Just the fact that we’re able to have this discussion proves that we’re going to be okay! There’s something different about us!”
“No, there’s not,” Sherri moaned. “There’s not jack shit that makes us different from Priscilla.”
“There’s so much that’s different! We went through so much without her!” Vivian argued. “What about … what about that pink vapor back in Stillwater? Every one of us breathed that vapor except for Priscilla! What if there was something in that cloud that’s protecting us?”
“It’s no good, Viv,” Erik said, shaking his head. “Both the rat and Twiki were exposed to that fog too, and they both went brain-dead in a matter of hours.”
“Yes, a matter of hours,” Vivian said desperately. “Both of them turned into zombies in a matter of hours. We don’t know how long it took Priscilla, but she was changed by the time we got here. It’s a quick process! If it was going to happen to any of us, it would have happened by now!”
“I’d like to believe you, Vivian. I really would,” Erik said morosely. “But biology doesn’t follow a neat and orderly time table. I mean, look at us. Bobby’s cuts got splattered with spider goo and he grew legs the next afternoon. Twiki cut Trent and he didn’t grow a tail for days. Things effect everyone’s body differently. We’re not machines, you know. We’re not going to fall over in rows.”
“But we’re all going to fall over eventually,” Sherri mumbled. Erik stared at the shotgun shell as he turned it over and over in his fingers.
“I’ve already committed one murder out of ignorance,” he said. “I don’t want to ever do it again. When I lose my mind, I want you to take this last shotgun shell and blow my brain-dead head off. I deserve it for what I’ve done. Will you do that for me, Vivian?”
“No!” Vivian screamed. “Cut that out!”
Erik’s hypnotic stare was broken as Vivian snatched the shell out of his hand and stuffed it into her coat pocket.
“Nobody is going to be blowing anybody’s head off! Do you understand me?” she barked. “We’re all going to get through this! We’re all going to survive!”
“I’d rather put a gun in my mouth right now than survive riding the short bus to Hell,” Sherri grumbled.
Vivian turned fiercely on Sherri with a fire raging in her eyes.
“Sherri, just a few minutes ago you were furious because Bobby sacrificed himself to save you, and now you want to kill yourself? He thought your life was important enough to die saving, and now you just want to throw it away?” Sherri’s teeth ground together as if trying to dam up the flood of emotion building in her throat. She lowered her gaze and spoke s
oftly.
“I’ve been throwing it away for years,” she whimpered. “If he thought that saving me was worth killing himself over, then he was already brain damaged.” Her jaw broke into a quiver that quickly burst into a sobbing cough.
“Bobby, you idiot,” she choked. “Never waste your heroics saving a smoker!” Vivian stepped forward and put her arm around Sherri, holding her tortured body in a comforting embrace. Sherri put her head against Vivian’s chest and wept.
“We’re doomed. It’s just a matter of time now,” Erik said morbidly. “It doesn’t matter how far we go-we can’t outrun biology.”
Vivian closed her eyes and took a deep, steadying breath. Even if she couldn’t prove it, she knew that they were all wrong. She knew that they weren’t going to turn into mindless zombies. She knew that there was a safe haven waiting for them somewhere. She just knew it. But somehow she had to make the others know it too. She opened her eyes and turned to Erik.
“Do you know what the last thing Bobby said to me was?” she asked him.
“If I know Bobby, he ended on a joke.”
Vivian slipped her hand under her glasses and rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger.
“Okay, do you know what the second-to-last thing Bobby said to me was?” she amended. “He made me promise to never stop fighting. As he was lying there bleeding to death on that roof, just as sure as he knew that he wasn’t going to make it, he knew that the rest of us were. You know what separates him and us from Priscilla and those creatures? It’s hope. We can look beyond our immediate situation. We have the mental capacity to transcend this moment of desperation and see a time in the near future when we’re all clean, and fed, and safe. If you give up hope, then you may as well just lay down and die right here, because without hope, you’re no better than a brain-dead zombie.”
The Oblivion Society Page 44
