The Oblivion Society

by Marcus Alexander Hart

  “But, Vivian,” Erik pleaded, “hope doesn’t keep gamma radiation from destroying brain tissue! We’re still going to lose our minds, one by one, and have to be put out of our misery! When the time comes, you’ll have to respect our final wishes, Vivian.” Vivian let go of Sherri and took a sharp step toward Erik, balling her hand into a fist before flicking out a finger and pointing it furiously toward his face. When she spoke, however, her voice was as cool as ice.

  “Okay, fine, Erik. Fine. You want to change your mind about the homicide pact? Fine. Because you know what? I change my mind too. I’m out. I’m out because I know the agreement is pointless. I may not know why, but I’m absolutely certain that there are two kinds of survivors out here in this atomic wasteland, and Priscilla and Bobby prove it. There’s the kind of survivor that devolves into a brain-dead zombie, and then there’s the kind that evolves into a hero.”

  She looked down at the bodies and continued.

  “Just as surely as the apocalypse changed Priscilla for the worse, it changed Bobby for the better. I loved him with all my heart, but let’s be honest here. Before the bombs dropped, Bobby Gray was a lazy, sarcastic, self-centered jerk. But today, when he sacrificed his own life to save Sherri’s, Bobby Gray became Atomic Bob, post-apocalyptic mutant hero.”

  Sherri wiped the wet streaks from her face with her palms and nodded in silent agreement. Erik shuffled his feet noncommittally while Trent just stared at the dirt as if afraid to let out whatever demons were haunting his mind.

  “So what’s it going to be, people?” Vivian demanded. “Are you going to just sit around and wait to see if your brains collapse, or are you going to suck it up and be heroes like Atomic Bob? I’ve made my choice. From now on I’m going to be Vivian Oblivion, and I can’t get through this without the help of an Erik the Barbaric, and a Scary Sherri, and a … and … well, Trent.”

  She winced at her clumsiness, but she continued.

  “My point is, we’re not zombies now, and we never will be. You just have to have faith in that fact and … uh … believe in yourselves.”

  After a tense pause that seemed much longer than it actually was, Trent broke the silence with a slow, insincere clap.

  “Oh, that speech was aces all the way, Vivi. For real,” he said. “But all the motivational speaking in the world isn’t going to make any difference when our brains all turn into Jell-O pudding. You can pull Biology 101 guesstimates out of your derrière all day long, but you just don’t have any proof. ” Vivian’s mouth fell open. She blurted out the start of a word, then started another word, then just cackled in disbelief.

  “Proof?! You want proof?! The one time I ask for you to have faith, and Mr. Bible-Knows-Best wants proof! Okay, you know what-fine! If every piece of logic and reason that I can knit together into solid scientific hypotheses aren’t good enough to make you believe me, then it’s up to God.”

  She raised her arms upward and shouted into the sky.

  “Excuse me, God? Science isn’t cutting it down here-could you please give us some heavenly sign that we’re going to be okay?!”

  The moment the words left her mouth, a drop of ashy black water streaked down her new glasses. Then another, and another. In a matter of seconds, the tar-black clouds above had torn themselves open, dropping the char of a thousand burnt cities in a grimy deluge. Trent silently screamed, “I told you so” with one raised eyebrow before gently shaking his head and shambling off for the cover of the ruined overpass. Erik and Sherri followed him without a word, slouching though the precipitating filth as if it was melting away their will to live.

  Vivian did not take cover. She just stood like a crumbling statue in the black rain, letting its cold embrace her. As dirty as the water was, it was still cleaner than her, and as it ran across her skin and down her wings it streaked away layer upon layer of blood and grime. She dropped to her knees at Bobby’s side and spoke to his still remains.

  “I’m sorry, Bobby. I tried. I know you told me to keep fighting, but how am I supposed to keep fighting if nobody else will? I did just what you said. I used my brain. I used logic. I even resorted to telling them to believe in themselves! But nothing worked. I know that she’s different from the rest of us, but I just can’t make the pieces fit together. Even God is against me!”

  She closed her eyes and rocked back on her heels, taking a deep, wet breath. Tears of frustration ran down her face, but the streaming downpour effectively obliterated them. In the darkness of her eyelids, she could hear the heavy drops pounding a mournful drum solo out of the remains of the satellite dish nearby. She remembered the looping episode of Zoobilee Zoo and wished that they had taken its advice about not talking to strangers.

  “Why don’t you glow, Priscilla? What’s the missing piece?” she muttered.

  “Everything would click if you would just glow!”

  She opened her eyes and looked at Priscilla’s dead body in some kind of desperate, foolish hope that it would somehow give her the answer to her question. Which was, in fact, exactly what it did.

  Through the dark sheets of rain, Vivian could see Priscilla’s twin mandibles glowing with a more intense blue than a temporary price reduction at the Smurf Village K-Mart. The exposed teeth and bones of her shattered jaw all emitted the same sparkling blue light, as did the chitin shafts of the insect legs that hung limply from the clawed holes in her mangled skin.

  “You … you’re glowing!” Vivian gasped. “Why are you …” The answer ran down her body in cold, wet streaks.

  “The rain. The rain! It’s the water!”

  In a flash, the filing system of her mind screamed into action, unshelving the memories of each of the zombies they had encountered. Erik had said that the rat’s teeth had started to glow after he killed it and threw it into the puddle of street runoff. She remembered Twiki’s bony remains glowing out of the dirty pool of the Port Manatee fountain. Each of the bugs in the igloo hadn’t started to glow until she had smashed them open, splashing their fractured exoskeletons with gobs of their own clear, wet viscera.

  “That’s it! That’s the missing piece!” Vivian shouted. “It’s not dead zombies that glow! It’s wet zombies!”

  She looked at Bobby and reached out for his face, then flinched at what she was about to do, and then leaned in with a muttered apology.

  “I’m sorry, Bobby. But I have to know.”

  She took his stiffened lips in her fingers and peeled them back from his teeth. As the cloudy rainwater splashed down into his open mouth, his teeth retained their normal hue of dull, non-illuminated yellow stain.

  “I knew it! We are different! Only the glowing mutants grow and lose their minds! I have proof! I have a test!”

  She turned her head to the sky and bared her teeth in self-examination, but when she turned her eyes downward she saw nothing but her own cheeks. Without thinking, she turned her head to the ground and tried the same, as if that would make any difference. Finally she scrambled to her feet and sprinted off toward the remains of the overpass. When she got there she did not enter its umbrella of shelter but yelled to those huddled within.

  “Look at my teeth!” she grinned, hopping up and down with her chin thrust forward, jaw clenched. “Look at them! Look at my teeth! Look at my teeth!”

  “Knock it off!” Sherri barked. “You’re freaking me out!” Vivian stopped dancing, barely containing herself. “My teeth,” she said again, pointing to her manic grin with both hands. “Are they glowing?”

  “What, you mean like a Crest kid?” Erik asked.

  “No, I mean like a wet zombie!” Vivian beamed crazily. “Look over there!

  Priscilla is glowing! She glows in the rain! I don’t know why, but the zombies’ teeth and bones glow when they’re in water!”

  The landscape was obscured behind the curtain of rain, but everyone could clearly see two distinct, curved blades of bright blue light shining from the darkness like an angel’s hedge clippers.

  “Wait, I’ve heard of t
his,” Erik said, scratching his forehead as if to coax forth the memory. “They call it Cerenkov radiation! When highly radioactive particles move faster than light, they glow blue! I read all about it in a Lost in Space fanzine!”

  “That’s unbelievable!” Sherri cried.

  “It’s true!” Erik squeaked. “I mean, it’s impossible for anything to move faster than light in a vacuum, but it can happen in something dense like water!”

  “No, I mean a Lost in Space fanzine? You seriously read that shit?”

  “Hey! Look at me!” Vivian interrupted. “Look at my teeth! Are they glowing with Cerenkov radiation or not?!”

  “No!” Erik beamed. “They’re not! They’re not glowing! You’re okay!”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” Vivian exclaimed happily. The heavy blanket of lethargy and doom was suddenly whipped off of Sherri’s shoulders like a magician’s tablecloth as she sprang to her feet and out into the splashing rain.

  “What about me?” she snarled through bared teeth. “Can you see anything through the nicotine stains?”

  Vivian grabbed Sherri by both cheeks and turned her tanned face into the rain. The drops pelted off of her teeth without a hint of light.

  “You’re good!” Vivian cheered. “You see?! No need to kill yourself!” Trent hobbled out of the shelter of the bridge and turned his head to the sky. The cold water ran in rivers down his face as he grinned his huge, toothy grin into the clouds.

  “Ooo, what about Trent?” Sherri said excitedly. “Can we kill Trent?” Vivian took Trent’s chin in her hand and glared into his mouth. Despite his holiday from toothpaste, his teeth remained perfect squares of unblemished, non-glowing white.

  “Sorry, no such luck,” she smiled. “Trent is okay.” In the exhilaration of the moment, she leaned in and gave Trent a celebratory hug around his neck, which he reciprocated with a two-handed squeeze of her behind. Vivian leapt backward and wagged a shameful finger at him, but even Trent’s hornball antics couldn’t take the wind out of her exuberant sails.

  “Come on, Erik,” she called. “Let’s see those pearly whites!” Erik stepped slowly into the rain, but he did not open his mouth.

  “I’m scared,” he said. “What if I’m the only one who glows?”

  “You’re not going to glow!”

  “But what if I do? Do you promise that you’ll honor the pact?”

  “Oh come on, Erik,” Vivian groaned. “Stop being so melodramatic. Yes, if your teeth glow, which they won’t, I promise I’ll blow your zombie head off. Okay?” Erik nodded.

  “Okay.”

  He slowly leaned his head back and bared his teeth to the heavens, allowing the water to pool up between his lips.

  “You see!” Vivian said. “Your teeth are-oh.”

  ” Oh?! ” Erik squeaked, taking in a spluttering mouthful of black water. “Why

  ‘oh’? What ‘oh’?!”

  “Nothing,” Vivian mumbled. “I’m sure it’s nothing.” She pulled the last remaining shotgun shell from her pocket and held her hand out to Trent, whispering out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Ivegay me the otgunshay.”

  “Oh my God!” Erik wailed. “Oh my God, I’m one of them! I knew it! I’m one of them, aren’t I?”

  Vivian dropped the shell back into her pocket with an explosive burst of laughter.

  “Erik, you’re fine!” she cheered. “Lighten up-I was just messin’ with ya.” As the grim joke slowly sunk in, Erik blinked, waiting to feel his heart beat again. Suddenly his lips pulled back from his non-glowing teeth into a fierce grin. He rushed forward in the rain and threw his human hands under Vivian’s arms, grasping her around the waist with his mutant paws and lifting her off the ground for a single joyous orbit around his twirling body.

  “Your brother must have left you his sick sense of humor,” he said.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You know that somewhere he’s watching this and laughing his head off,” Vivian smiled. ” Now do you believe that we’re going to be okay?”

  “I’ll never doubt you again,” Erik blushed. “You’re right. We are different from the others. But I still don’t understand why. ”

  “There’s only one answer,” Trent said, saluting the sky. “We are the chosen ones after all.”

  Sherri groaned.

  “You know what? At this point I’m willing to accept that answer if it means that I’m not going to get so fucked-up that I think blowing you is a good idea.”

  “Okay, okay,” Erik conceded. “Vivian, you may not have all the answers, but you sure have enough to let me sleep at night.”

  With a shy smile, he leaned in and gave her a tiny kiss on her broad, wet lips. When he backed away, Vivian grabbed his ears and pulled him in for a big wet kiss of her own.

  “Damn, E, don’t bogart our heroine!” Trent said, wiping his dirty lips on the back of his sleeve. “The T is cookin’ up a big batch of congratulatory action for you too, Vivi girl!”

  He leaned in toward Vivian’s face with puckered lips, which she deflected with a gentle push of her open palm.

  “All right, settle down, you,” she said, half smiling. “If we’re going to survive, we’re not going to do it by standing around here. I say we wait out the storm under this bridge and then keep moving first thing in the morning. All right?”

  “Moving toward what?” Erik asked. “Washington is gone. We don’t have any idea where to go from here.”

  The rain seemed to pelt down harder on the heels of Erik’s plaintive words, driving an almost calypsonian beat from the steel drum of the wrecked satellite dish. Vivian nodded to it with a smile.

  “I have an idea where to go,” she said. “We’re going to Pennsylvania.” The others looked at her quizzically.

  “The satellite broadcast,” she explained. “It was coming from a PBS station out of Liberty Valley, Pennsylvania. It’s not much, but it’s the closest thing we’ve had to making contact with other survivors.”

  “Pennsylvania?” Sherri burst out. “How in the hell are we supposed to get to Pennsylvania without a car?”

  Vivian looked into the distance with a flash of hope in her eyes.

  “Get a good night’s sleep,” she said. “We’ve got an awfully long walk ahead of us.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It rained.

  It rained a rain so thick and black that it was as if the very night was melting. It had been like this for weeks.

  Billions of sooty drops the size of licorice jelly beans pounded relentlessly onto the pavement of a forgotten country road somewhere in central Maryland. Tiny slivers of silvery white moonlight began to slice through the ashy clouds, lightly sketching out the forms of four figures staggering single-file through the downpour.

  “Are we there yet?” Erik moaned.

  “Are we where yet?” Vivian asked.

  “Anywhere.”

  Vivian shook her head solemnly.

  “No.”

  The harsh weather and rough terrain had taken the wind out of the group’s collective sails, slowing their forward progress to a battered, limping crawl. Vivian was leading the refugees toward a destination too far away to even seem real. The water pelted against the flattened copper curtain of her drenched hair, flowing over her face and into her saturated Mountie coat. Her soaked wings hung limply from her shoulders, dragging on the ground behind her like a pair of drowned animals. She could feel the rivulets of wet grime trickling off her polyester dress and through the fair red fur that now covered her bare, unshaven legs. Yet the filth and the rain didn’t bother her nearly as much as the hunger that clawed at her stomach.

  She gently shook her head and nearly lost her balance. It was like her neck was made out of an old sponge, and her skull out of lead. With a stumbling, splashing step she caught herself, leaving her vision swimming with the pink and blue fireworks of a starved delirium. It hardly mattered. Between the darkness, the rain, the water stains on her lenses, and the veil of drizzling
red bangs hanging over the front of her glasses, she could barely see where she was going anyway.

  Erik sloshed along behind her. The gash in his thigh had long since resolved into a ragged scar, but its pink bandages still hung loosely around his leg. Hunger and exhaustion had taken their toll on his physique. Thin as a skeleton, with a few weeks’

  worth of scraggly beard sprouting from his bony face and the 5-in-1 camping lantern hanging dimly in his knotty mutant hand, Erik was beginning to look like a prop from a cheap Halloween hayride.

  Sherri dragged herself along behind Erik. The curls of her yellowed hair lay in soiled, waterlogged clumps over her scarred skull and her heavily lidded eyes. Her formerly white princess jacket was stained with long vertical streaks of rain-deposited soot, giving her the appearance of a crumbling brick smokestack looming over some abandoned Victorian factory. Behind Sherri, through the continuous, almost deafening clatter of the driving rain, an uneven measure of rhythm repeated itself over and over again in an erratic loop.

  Zip. Clunk. Zip. Zip. Clunk. Zip. Clunk.

  At the rear of the parade of drowned souls, Trent hobbled painfully upon the scraped barrels of his shotgun crutch, clunking it heavily into the ground with every other step. In an attempt to keep the filthy rainwater out of his injuries, his legs were now wrapped in thick dressings of scavenged plastic tarpaulin bound with varied lengths of twine and cord. With each step that he took, his swollen wrappings rubbed together like the thighs of a husky boy in corduroy pants.

  Zip. Zip. Clunk. Zip. Clunk. Zip. Zip.

  Trent’s peripheral vision had been lost to the overstuffed pillows of his black eyes, and the narrow corridor of his forward gaze was now fixed steadfastly between Vivian’s wings and upon her soaked behind. Like a carrot on a string in front of a cartoon mule, her skirted bottom seemed to be all that kept him moving through the haze of his famished delirium.

  Clunk. Zip. Zip. Zip. Splash!

  With the roar of the rain and the mental cloud of their own starvation, it took the others a full ten seconds before they realized that Trent was no longer following them. Vivian and Erik stopped, but Sherri just kept walking.