The Oblivion Society
Page 46
“What happened?” Erik mumbled.
“Trent ate pavement,” Sherri muttered. “Just keep going.” Despite Sherri’s suggestion, the others turned to find Trent lying face-down in the road behind them. With what seemed like a great physical effort, Vivian returned to her fallen companion, kneeling by his side on her wobbly legs.
“You okay?” she said dully.
Trent grabbed onto the leaking fabric of her coat and laboriously pulled himself upright, leaning against her and pressing his stubbled cheek into her soggy chest.
“I can’t do it, Vivi,” he groaned. “I can’t keep going, yo. I ain’t gonna make it.”
“You are going to make it,” Vivian said. “We’ll find Liberty Valley.” Trent pressed his face tighter against her bosom and moaned.
“The T can’t keep walking, girl! We ain’t never gonna get to no Liberty Valley without a ride! It just ain’t gonna happen, yo!”
“We don’t need a car,” Vivian said curtly. “We can do this. We just need to stay strong and keep moving.”
“Girl, you’re out of your mind!” Trent cried. “How’s a brother supposed to keep moving his busted ass without any food in his belly? I’m done, Vivi! I’m spent! For real!”
Vivian pulled off her glasses and slicked her overgrown bangs over her forehead with her palm. She rubbed the lenses clean with her pruny thumbs as she stalled for a rebuttal. Trent was right. If they were ever going to get to Pennsylvania they needed at least one of two things: a car, or a reliable source of food. But she wasn’t about to give up.
“We don’t need a car,” she repeated, slipping her glasses back onto her nose.
“When pushed to its limits the human body can adapt to even the most adverse conditions. We can make it on foot. All we need to find is-”
“A car!” Erik yelped.
“I just said we don’t need a car!” Vivian snapped.
“No,” Erik squeaked. “A car!”
Vivian turned to Erik, then to where he was pointing with three excited hands. Barely visible through the sheets of falling black water was the shape of a heavy-duty pickup truck shimmering in a moonlit silhouette of ricocheted droplets.
“A car!” Vivian gasped.
Sherri’s eyes grew wide before she turned and bolted toward the vehicle, leaving one shouted word hanging in the air.
“Shotgun!”
Vivian and Erik tucked themselves under Trent’s arms and took off in a dizzy, lightheaded trot toward the vehicle.
“We’re saved!” Trent grinned. “We gonna drive all up out of this bitch, yo!”
“You see!” Vivian said vacantly. “I told you we’d be okay!”
“Girl, you said we could get there without a car!”
“I lied,” Vivian admitted. “There’s no way we could have made it to Liberty Valley on foot. Not without food. Not in this rain. No way. But now we won’t have to worry about it.”
The three huddled friends stumbled excitedly to the truck to find Sherri already standing before it with a scowl hanging on her face. A flood of emotions welled up in the hearts of all who now laid eyes upon the vehicle, but Sherri managed to capsulate everything they were feeling in a single word.
“Fuck.”
The lonely pickup truck looked like a toy that had been hit with a lawnmower. Each tire was completely flat and turned upward at the axle. Between the bed and the cab, the body frame was bent at a shallow angle, touching the center of the vehicle to the cold, wet pavement. This truck had clearly taken an unscheduled flight for which it had been totally unprepared.
The crush of the disappointment, coupled with the weight of Trent on her shoulder, sent Vivian’s head into a spin that threatened to relieve her of consciousness.
“What … what do we do now?” Erik whimpered.
“We’ll be fine,” Vivian backpedaled meekly. “Like I said, we just need to find food and we’ll be fine.”
“Food my ass!” Trent said. “Unless the Lord starts servin’ up a heapin’ helpin’ of chocolate manna, we are done and done, girl! For real!”
The group stood in the pouring rain and stared at the broken truck, but in reality, they were staring at a broken charade. The charade that they could actually walk all the way from Washington D.C. to the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. The charade that they were going to find safety. The charade that they were going to be all right in the end.
The doomed survivors were speechless for a long, wet moment before Sherri finally broke the tension with a casual shrug.
“Fuck it, dude,” she said. “Let’s go bowling.”
Without another word, she disappeared behind the pickup and stalked across what the others suddenly realized was a small parking lot. As the boiling clouds shifted above them, a patch of moonlight fell across a sign depicting a sassy-looking cowgirl with breasts as large and round as the bowling ball she held in her weathered steel hands. Directly beneath her was a western lasso scrawl of broken light bulbs spelling out the words “Calamity Lanes.”
For lack of a better option, Vivian and Erik followed Sherri’s blond head through the pounding downpour, dragging Trent’s shuffling body between them. As they moved closer, the sheets of black rain revealed a small brick building at the edge of the parking lot. Its face had been slapped off by the indiscriminate hand of some distant atomic overpressure, creating a life-sized shoebox diorama of blue-collar recreation.
The four soaked survivors climbed over the low debris field and through the massive hole in the side of the bowling alley. Finally sheltered from the driving rain, their skin tingled eerily as if phantom drops continued to pelt their overstimulated nerve endings. Erik’s rodent paws clicked on the lantern’s flashlight and swept its beam across the darkened interior.
In life, Calamity Lanes had been an intimate sort of place, sporting only four lanes of oiled pine boards. A western theme was in evidence on the faded cinderblock walls in the shapes of cactus and cow skull graphics rendered in peeling latex paint. The smooth, dull sheen of ancient chrome and linoleum dominated the interior surfaces, curving over benches and swooping through the spoon-shaped arcs of jet-age-inspired ball returns. Even with a hole blown in its side, the bowling alley was still quaint and inviting, but its current visitors were not interested in being charmed by the décor.
Vivian smudged her lenses clean, and this time they actually managed to stay that way. Even in her excitement, her weary eyelids barely managed to get above half-mast as they scoured her surroundings.
“Look!” she said breathily. “There!”
Erik swung the flashlight’s beam in the direction of Vivian’s pointing finger, revealing a modest cocktail bar built into the far end of the room-so modest, in fact, that it didn’t even have shelves of liquor bottles behind it. Or beer taps. What it did have, as Vivian’s hungry eyes had spotted, was a heavy, art-deco-styled refrigerator that looked straight out of a Tex Avery cartoon.
“Food!” she gasped.
Sherri’s head was throbbing from hunger as she took off across the bowling alley, leaping over the loose balls that had fallen from their tubular chrome racks. The others pursued with a gait like a three-legged race times two, and a moment later all four of them were behind the bar. The smooth white face of the monolithic refrigerator was blemished only by a smattering of promotional magnets in the shapes of little ambulances. Each one bore the same promising message in a block of red text.
Buy groceries online @ Grocery911.com
“It’s like I tried to tell you,” Vivian grinned weakly. “We’ll be fine. We don’t need a car as long as we have food!”
“I should have never doubted you, Vivi girl,” Trent smiled.
“Let’s eat already!” Erik groaned. “Before I black out!” Sherri grabbed the long steel handle of the fridge door and unlatched the old-fashioned lock. The door swung wide open on its hinges, revealing an interior full of absolutely nothing.
“Well, that’s just swell,” she whispered defeatedly.
“Get up, Waffleface,” she greeted. “It’s happy hour.” Erik pulled himself upright and dragged his fingers across the sunken red gridlines on his face where the floor mat had temporarily imprinted itself on his skin. Once he had regained his bearings, he found that one of the cardboard crates had been sliced open and half of the bottles were missing.
“How long was I out?” Erik muttered.
“Six hours? Ten hours?” Sherri shrugged. “How should I know? I just woke up too.”
She thrust a bottle toward him with a smile.
“Here-breakfast is served.”
Erik wrinkled his nose.
“I don’t drink beer for breakfast.”
“Fine. Think of it as a toast soda.”
Erik climbed nauseously to his feet and plunked himself down on the tall stool behind the bar. On the other side of the bowling alley he could see a small fire crackling from the end of lane three. Its broad chrome ball return had been filled with debris and turned into a makeshift fire ring, throwing out a warm yellow light and wafting smoke across the slanted ceiling and out through the blasted-open front of the building. Vivian and Trent sat on the semicircle of creamsicle benches that flanked the fire, each holding their hands to the flame and drinking their own bottles of warm beer. A Mountie coat, a varsity jacket, and a white nylon parka hung on chairs around the warmth of the fire, slowly drying. A clammy chill gripped Erik as he peeled off his own drenched sweatshirt and hung it over the long steel push bar of the back door.
“What is there to eat in this place besides beer?” he asked sluggishly.
“That’s it,” Sherri said. “The fridge is empty. This shitty bar doesn’t even have any of the hard stuff. Just a coupla cases of beer on the floor. Not that I’m complaining.”
She held up her half-empty bottle with a toasting waggle of her eyebrows before downing the remainder. She punctuated her achievement with a thunderous belch and a wipe of a tanned forearm across her pouty pink lips. Erik twisted the cap off of his bottle.
“Well, I guess this is better than nothing,” he said. “At least my stomach will have something in it for a change.”
“It’s best to drink on an empty stomach,” Sherri nodded. “You get shitfaced twice as fast. Every scumbag who ever tried to get a girl drunk knows that.”
“You drink up on that beer, Vivi,” Trent said. “You haven’t had any food, so those fluids will do your body good, yo.”
“Actually, it won’t,” Vivian said. “Alcohol is a diuretic. Drinking beer will only accelerate my dehydration.”
She held her bottle up to the crackling firelight and blinked at the warm suds within.
“But at this point, I can’t bring myself to care.”
Vivian put the bottle to her lips and took a long swig. Whether it was good for her or not was irrelevant. She relished having a taste in her mouth besides her own cruciferous saliva. Her tired eyes blinked without synchronization as she set the bottle down on the bench and stared at the fluttering bits of ash that rose hypnotically on the hot updrafts of the fire.
“I just hope they have something a little more nutritious than beer waiting for us in Liberty Valley,” she said dismally.
Trent smiled at Vivian’s long, tired body huddled in the gentle firelight. With her coat, shoes, and socks drying by the fire, she wore only her brutalized cocktail dress, giving her a wild, untamed sort of allure. He slid across the bench and put his hand on her damp arm. Vivian’s nose wrinkled against the rank musk of body odor that poured off of his wet skin.
“You need to quit foolin’ yourself, Vivi,” he said smoothly. “This Liberty Valley is just a fairy tale. For real.”
He smiled his huge white smile and winked.
“Give it up, girl. You don’t need to go chasing rainbows when the pot of gold is right in front of you.”
Vivian ignored that last remark, taking a sip of her beer.
“You’re wrong. Liberty Valley is real,” she said firmly. “All of the available evidence suggests that there are still intelligent, reasoning people there. Look at the facts. If WOPR is still broadcasting, that indicates that there’s an operational TV
studio and a satellite dish that’s still capable of putting out a signal. That means that they still have electricity as well. Most power plants would have been wiped out in the disaster, and with the unbalanced load the regional power grid would have almost certainly collapsed without intelligent human supervision. Applying Occam’s Razor proves that we’ll find some kind of civilization once we get into Liberty Valley.” Trent chuckled condescendingly.
“That’s some pretty convoluted shit for Occam’s Razor to prove, isn’t it?” Vivian shrugged, then stared into space.
“It’s better than believing the alternative.”
Trent put his hand on Vivian’s furry thigh with a misogynistic smile.
“If you’re so keen to apply Occam’s Razor to something, maybe you ought to hit those bushy stems of yours, girl. The T ain’t down with that Parisian flair.” Vivian’s cheeks burned as she threw Trent’s hand off of her lap and stormed across the crumbling bowling alley without a word.
“Hey, give me some credit, Vivi!” Trent laughed. “It’s not like I told you to apply a razor to liberty valley!”
“Seriously, Erik,” Sherri said. “Don’t you think this Liberty Valley thing is total bullshit?”
Erik leaned back on his stool and finished his first bottle of beer.
“No, I really do believe that there’s something there,” he said. “Don’t you remember Woops!? ”
“Now, what in the hell is Woops!? ”
“It was a short-lived sitcom,” Erik explained. “It was about an accidental atomic disaster that destroyed the entire world.”
“No wonder I don’t remember it,” Sherri said. “Any comedy about a nuclear apocalypse is guaranteed to suck.”
“It did suck,” Erik continued. “The show was a really shitty Gilligan’s Island rip-off where six unlikely survivors found this farmhouse that was the last livable place on Earth.”
“So?”
“So the farm was in a deep valley that protected it from the surrounding blasts. I think Liberty Valley must have survived the same way.”
Sherri blinked.
“You seriously believe that lame sitcom bullshit?”
Erik shrugged and stared into space.
“It’s better than believing the alternative.”
Sherri shook her head and opened another beer.
“Well, it doesn’t really matter if there’s anything there or not. We’re never going to get there without a car anyway.”
Vivian stood at the edge of the blasted wall and peered at the wrecked pickup truck in the parking lot. With her clean lenses, she could now see that the license plate read “LV2BOWL.” She could hear Trent’s clanking shotgun crutch over the sound of the rain crackling on the tarpaper roof as he approached her from behind.
“It’s another abandoned building with a single car in the parking lot,” Vivian muttered thoughtfully. “After Boltzmann’s and the igloo, I’m starting to understand that this is a very bad sign for us.”
Just as the words came out of her mouth, two large hands grabbed her firmly around the waist from behind.
“Forget about the bad sign, girl,” Trent cooed playfully. “You know we’ll have a lot more fun if we just obey the good one.”
Without f
urther explanation, he pulled her tightly against his body, lewdly grinding her backside into his swollen groin. Vivian’s shoulders clenched as she lurched away, clapping her massive wings together like a pair of giant hands swatting a fly. Trent tumbled dazedly from between the leathery sails and onto the puddled hardwood floor. Vivian whirled around and glared at him furiously.
“Trent, what’s the matter with you?!” she barked. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
Trent shook his head clear and pointed angrily at the splintered front door lying on the ground to his side.
“Damn, Vivi! I was obeying the sign! It was just a joke, girl! You need to lighten up! For real!”
Vivian’s narrowed eyes shifted toward a small gold-colored plaque mounted on the door, reading “Make all deliveries in the rear.”
“Oh, ha ha. Very funny,” she smirked. “Seriously, Trent, can’t you ever stop thinking about sex for five seconds?”
Trent slowly climbed to his feet, shaking his head with an unsettling crackle of displaced vertebrae. He leaned on his crutch and shrugged with a rakish grin.
“Oh, quit frontin’, Vivi,” he smiled. “You make it out like knockin’ da boots is some kind of dirty sin. It ain’t like that. The good Lord made sex feel good for a reason, yo. It’s just natural instinct for a man and woman to want to get their groove on. It ain’t nothin’ but a beautiful natural high, girl.”
“Well, it’s a lot more than that to me,” Vivian scowled. “Most girls don’t have such a cavalier attitude toward sex as you do, Trent.”
Sherri lay on her belly across the length of the bar, knees bent, feet playfully swaying in the air. She leaned on her elbows, arching her back and framing the tanned spheres of her ample cleavage between her two slender arms. As her pointed tongue suggestively circled the smooth glass neck of her beer bottle, her smoldering pink eyes cast a seductively invitational glare at Erik. Erik didn’t notice. His attention was focused upon a dead laptop computer that sat on the far end of the bar.
“Hey Four-Arms,” Sherri growled. “What do you say you quit poking around with that laptop and start poking around with mine?”