She leapt forward and threw out her arms and wings with a yelping squeal. The two hens exploded into the air with a heavy blast of flapping wings and flying dirt before scampering away in a clucking frenzy down the driveway. The rooster also leapt backward at the noise, but he did not flee. He spread his massive wings out to his sides and pointed them toward the ground as the undersized red feathers of his neck began to puff out with a menacing crackle.
“Go on!” Vivian yelled, waving her arms. “Get out of here! Scram!” The rooster rose up on his toes and flapped his wings as an earsplitting crow trumpeted out of his throat. His beak whistled through the air, pounding into the ground just inches from the ends of Vivian’s toes. Vivian leapt back, flattening herself against the farmhouse next to her three companions, who were already doing likewise.
“What’s it doing?!” Erik squeaked. “I thought they weren’t supposed to be aggressive to people!”
“They’re not!” Vivian agreed. “Maybe these zombies don’t act on instinct after all!”
“Make up your mind, Powderpuff!” Sherri barked. “This is not the time to be making new shit up!”
The rooster made another lunge at Vivian’s feet, and she pressed herself harder against the wall. As she forced her back to the shingles, her wings squashed out from her shoulders, prompting the rooster to spread his own wings with a screaming cluck. Vivian looked down at the dirty red front of her Mountie coat and then back at the rooster’s pathetic crimson plumage.
“Wait! The wings-the red coat!” she realized. “That stupid bird thinks I’m another rooster!”
“So it’s trying to kill you?!” Sherri yelped.
“No! It’s just trying to be dominant! It’s trying to establish our places in the pecking order!”
“So what do we do?” Erik squeaked.
Vivian grabbed a stout stick from the ground and spread out her intimidating twelve-foot wingspan assertively. “We put ourselves at the top of the pecking order.”
With an aggressive hop forward and a growling shout, Vivian poked the rooster in the chest with her stick. The mutant bird made a motion to counterattack, but Vivian quickly rapped it on the beak, causing it to stumble backward with a frightened squawk. She stepped forward with purpose, forcing the rooster to back up in unsurrendering little hops of retreat. As Vivian’s strides grew longer with each jab, her friends peeled off of the wall of the farmhouse and fanned out to follow behind her.
“What’s the matter?” Vivian jeered at the rooster. “Chicken?”
“Ouch,” Erik grumbled. “That joke was a cock-a-doodle- don’t. ”
“If you ask me,” Sherri said, “you’ve both got fowl mouths.” As soon as the words passed her lips, Sherri slapped her palms over her mouth and gasped.
“Oh, Jesus Christ! What have you lame-ass fuckers done to me?!” Vivian kept pushing the rooster back across the yard with firm jabs of her blunt stick, but he just kept hopping back and forth, refusing to abandon his machismo. Vivian fully extended her wings, throwing a midnight-black wall of intimidation between her friends and the crackling rooster.
“Go on-get out of here!” she growled. “Leave us alone! Vivian Oblivion is the top of the pecking order around here now.”
The rooster jumped backward and hit the ground with a thud that sent a numb little quake rumbling up Vivian’s legs.
“What the …”
A second tremor rattled through Vivian’s knees, prompting the rooster to relinquish its pride, turn, and run in a frantic flapping sprint across the yard and around the side of the old windmill. Before Vivian could form a guess as to the cause of the sudden seismic activity, a third quake revealed its source in the form of a gigantic black hoof stepping out from behind the corner of the drooping red barn.
“What the hell was that?” Erik squeaked.
“It’s the top of the pecking order,” Vivian whispered in awe. Vivian’s shoulders slumped as her arms fell to her sides, dropping her outstretched wings like a curtain and revealing to the rest of the group what she could already see.
It was a bull. A bull the size of a cement truck.
The creature took another pounding step and breathed a blast of steaming air from its cavernous nostrils. It slowly raised its head and stretched with the thunderous crackle of an old-growth forest being violently shoved to the ground. Its massive legs were like the sooty concrete pylons holding up an elevated train track in some angry gray cityscape. Two impossibly large horns sprouted from its skull in twin curves of pointed yellow keratin.
Even in a post-apocalyptic world of hideously deformed animals, the bull’s mutations stood out as particularly gruesome. The forces that had caused its cells to explode into an uncontrolled orgy of growth concentrated their effort upon bone more than flesh, pushing the glowing plates of its exaggerated skeleton through the hairy folds of its thick hide. Meaty curtains of flesh licked fresh blood over the exposed blades of glowing blue pelvis, ribcage, and scapula that protruded from the bull’s mangled body as it stepped into full view. Yet even with its internal organs hanging like hammocks from its lacerated sides, the bull didn’t look like it was suffering.
It just looked angry.
“Don’t … run,” Vivian whispered urgently. “If you run, he’ll be driven by instinct to chase you. Whatever you do, don’t … run. Okay, guys? Guys?” With the most conservative movement possible, Vivian glanced over her shoulder to see her three friends racing off in different directions as fast as their legs could carry them. In the bull’s black, empty eyes the farm suddenly became a Lilliputian Pamplona. A hot snort blasted out of its trickling nose, followed by a bellowing cry of such powerful and resonant bass that it shattered the windows of the farmhouse. Before Vivian’s skull had stopped ringing, the bull lowered its head and charged across the farm.
Vivian took three long, bounding strides of retreat, pounding her wings desperately against the air in an effort to take flight. The force of gravity kept her aerodynamically challenged physique on a short leash, granting her nothing but a single enhanced leap over the hood of a derelict pickup truck. She landed awkwardly on her feet, twisting her ankle with a loud pop.
“Aaagh! Damn it!” she hissed.
She tumbled against the truck’s rotted fender and rubbed her wrenched bones as Trent hobbled up to her side. His face twisted into a lusty grin as he threw his beefy arms around her and pulled her against his body.
“That’s right, girl,” he said. “You’re safe here with the T.”
“I know I’m safe!” Vivian spat impatiently, slapping Trent away. “It’s not me that the bull was after! Look!”
Far across the yard, Sherri’s blunt leather boots rapidly clipped the ground in a blurred haze of speed. Her butterfly wings sliced through the air, flapping frantically against her skull as if begging her body to eke out enough thrust to lift her off the ground and carry her to safety. But even at this seemingly superhuman pace, the earthquake of the bull’s pounding hooves thundered up behind her as if she was standing still.
“Sherri, run!” Vivian screamed. “Run!”
Sherri could see the pointed tips of the long yellow horns coming up on either side of her as she clenched her teeth and leaned forward, throwing herself at the only thing standing between herself and certain death. She could feel the rancid heat of the bull’s breath enveloping her as she flung out her arms and kicked her feet off the ground, sailing like an arrow through the air and straight through the open rear door of the Grocery911 ambulance.
Before she had even hit the steel floor, the pile driver of the bull’s skull had already smashed into the back of the vehicle, crushing it like an empty beer can against a biker’s forehead. The force of the impact sent the ambulance into a squealing spin on its treadless tires, flinging a fan-tailed wake of flying foodstuffs across the driveway.
The bull staggered backward on its barrel-sized hooves and shook its monstrous head. The edge of the open door had left a jagged slice down its forehead, and the b
lood running into its darkened eyes seemed to only anger it further. With another bellow, it charged the ambulance again, collapsing the passenger side and nearly knocking it off its wheels. From inside the vehicle, a blue streak of screamed profanity proved that Sherri was still among the living, if only for a limited time. Vivian helplessly watched the horror unfold from behind the swooping green buttock of the pickup truck’s classically styled fender.
“Think, Vivian! Think!” she begged herself. “You’ve got to do something!” Trent’s oily hands slid around her waist and gave her a gentle tug.
“Why so tense, girl?” he oozed. “Come here and let the T soothe some relaxation into your tight little body.”
“Stop it, Trent! This isn’t the time!” Vivian screamed, wrenching his hands from her hips. “Sherri’s going to die if we don’t think of something!” Vivian pounded her fists on the fender in frustration, sending an impact tremor tinkling through three glass bottles resting on its curved surface. Their inexplicable presence pulled Vivian’s gaze away from the bull long enough for her to notice that the rusted steel fender was riddled with small-caliber bullet holes.
“Target practice,” she thought.
A flash of inspiration streaked across her mind as she patted the bulge in her pocket that represented the last shotgun shell. She hoped that she would be a better marksman than whoever had been shooting at these unbroken bottles. If she was going to save Sherri from that bull, she was literally only going to get one shot at it.
“Trent, give me the shotgun!” she ordered, throwing out her hand. “Quick! Before it kills her!”
With an unexpected swiftness, Trent grabbed Vivian around the wrist and yanked her body toward his, slapping her chest against his own.
“Let it kill her!” he growled. “I ain’t interested in dat skank ass! I want you, Vivi!”
” What?! Trent, have you lost your mi-”
Vivian’s question was broken in half as Trent grabbed her around the waist and shoved her against the side of the truck, forcing her wings through its broken window. He pressed his stout body heavily against hers, pinning her down as he ran his thick hands down her slender hips. The stinging stench of his body burned in Vivian’s nose and eyes as his hands clumsily slid up her thighs and under the ragged hem of her skirt.
“Stop it!” Vivian choked. “What are you doing?!”
“Don’t play like you don’t know,” Trent snarled. “You know I been ready for this for weeks! This ‘hard to get’ shit ain’t cute anymore, girl!”
“Stop it! Trent, stop it!” Vivian shrieked. “Stop it!” With all of the fury that boiled through her body, Vivian’s foot launched from the ground, driving her bony knee into Trent’s crotch like a sledgehammer into a railroad spike. The impact was so hard and so solid that it made an audible pop and sent a tingle of pins and needles down Vivian’s calf. Yet Trent barely even seemed to notice. The air squeezed out of Vivian’s chest as he leaned harder against her, dragging his ragged fingernails against her skin as he clumsily attempted to liberate her from her cotton underpants.
“Trent!” she gasped. “Stop! Get off of me!”
Vivian scrambled to escape, but even fueled by adrenaline her narrow frame and captured wings were no match for the pinning weight and dedicated strength of Trent’s hulking body. Her hands clawed urgently at the sides of the truck as a cold breeze blew up her skirt and through her stretched-out panties, tingling across the exposed warmth of her chaste flesh. Her searching fingertips connected with something solid, and in a blind lunge she grabbed it and swung into the side of Trent’s head. The butt of a tall orange bottle connected with a heavy crack and exploded into shards. Trent stumbled away from her with a yelp, shielding his face with his hands.
Vivian pried her wings from the window frame and hobbled away from the truck on her twisted ankle, thrusting out the remnant of her shattered bottle like an unarmed cowboy in a spaghetti western bar brawl.
“Stop it!” she exploded with rage and embarrassment. “What’s the matter with you?!”
Trent lowered his bloodied hands and turned on Vivian with a savage snarl on his lips, revealing a fresh gap where one of his enormous front teeth had once been. He spit out a mouthful of hot blood, and his displaced tooth bounced across the dirt to Vivian’s feet. Even slicked in blood, its flawless face retained a perfect, unblemished whiteness. But from behind a coating of filthy saliva, the yellowed enamel of its long, rotten root glowed an electric shade of radioactive blue.
“Trent!” Vivian gasped. “Your tooth! It … it’s …”
“Oww, shit,” Trent moaned, rubbing his jaw. “You busted up my grill! I just got that enhanced, bitch!”
Knocked from the safety of his gums, Trent’s tooth betrayed the secret to his perfect smile: a shroud of dental-grade porcelain, recently installed by Ben Affleck’s dentist.
Vivian thrust her makeshift weapon toward Trent and glared down the length of her sleeve, across the jagged orange teeth of her shattered bottle and into Trent’s blood-slicked maw.
“You … you glow! You’re one of them! ” she hissed. “But how?! ” At that moment, the constant shifting of the clouds threw a flickering slice of sunlight down Vivian’s arm and across the bottle, glimmering through the prism of its shattered orange face. The glare stung Vivian’s eyes, temporarily burning the image of a spongy sort of molecule into her corneas, followed by five extreme words. Fusion Fuel - Load and lock!
A wildfire of sparking synapses blazed through Vivian’s brain as her face took on the expression of one who had just finished the last page of an Agatha Christie novel.
“That’s it! ” she shouted. ” That’s the key! I get it!”
“Girl, you’re about to get it,” Trent said savagely. “And you’re gonna get it good, yo!”
He leaned sideways on his crutch and began to fumble with his fly. A dark, wet stain spread across the front of his filthy trousers as his cat tail went into a series of stiff, spastic convulsions.
“No! Stop! Trent, listen to me!” Vivian said firmly. “This isn’t you! Your brain is damaged! Fight it, Trent! You’re better than this! You’re better than your animal instincts!”
Trent continued to trudge toward Vivian with no apparent interest in her impassioned plea. He finished wrenching down his zipper just as the front of his soiled khakis exploded outward in a blast of torn flesh and dried blood!
Horror saturated Vivian’s psyche so completely that she didn’t even think to scream. Her heart rate did not bother to elevate. Her body just froze with cold comprehension as three words of explanation clicked together in her mind. Priscilla’s infectious saliva.
Between Trent’s bandaged legs there now stood the rippling, fleshy white stalk of a scorpion tail the size of a bodybuilder’s arm. A scrap of urine-dappled jockey shorts hung impaled from an eight-inch black barb of razor-sharp stinger slicing from its tip. Trent leaned back on his crutch and flexed his curved member with a look of Christmas-morning awe on his cloudy face. More horrifying than the fact that Trent’s genitalia had been completely obliterated in his grotesque mutation was the fact that he didn’t even seem to realize it.
“How you like me now, Vivi?” he grinned. “I’m hung like Godzilla, yo!” Vivian’s face went pale as Trent turned his nightmare phallus in her direction.
“Are you woman enough to take a man like Long Dong Trent?”
“I’m not!” Vivian screamed. ” Nobody is! Use logic, Trent! Reason! You can’t possibly have sex with that … thing! It’s a physical impossibility!” The look of cock-sure self-satisfaction on Trent’s face showed no trace of comprehension as he continued to plod forward amorously on his smashed legs. Vivian hurled her bottle at his blackened eyes, but his throbbing stinger smashed it harmlessly out of the air with one mighty swing.
Vivian furiously limped away from the truck, her twisted ankle sending snapping rockets of agony up her leg with every hobbling step. She forced herself through the pain, carrying herself away from h
er assailant and through the debris field of the yard. Her mind was ablaze with the image of Trent’s mutated body, but when she reached the center of the driveway, she was suddenly reminded that he was not the only monster in the barnyard.
“Oh, right,” she muttered hopelessly. “There’s that too.” At the end of the driveway, the zombie bull stiffly nudged the wrecked ambulance with its blood-soaked head. From the lukewarm prodding that it was now giving its automotive victim, Vivian could tell that the beast felt it had satisfactorily completed its work. The sound of Sherri’s voice had been extinguished behind the snarled, blood-slicked walls of the ambulance, and the silence rang out like a funeral knell in Vivian’s ears.
“Oh no!” she whimpered. “I’m too late!”
The bull’s ears pricked up at the sound of Vivian’s squeaky voice. She could see the ropes of muscle in its enormous neck pulling under its ruined flesh as the bull turned its head and locked its eyes on her vulnerable body. Vivian sucked a sharp breath of air between her teeth and stood completely and utterly still in the shelterless, wide-open space of the driveway. After what seemed like hours, the bull turned away and continued lazily prodding the side of the destroyed ambulance with its twisted horns.
Letting out a tight sigh of relief, Vivian turned and ran, sprinting only two steps before nearly impaling herself on Trent’s mutated phallus!
She leapt backward as the thick, segmented stalk of throbbing muscle swung up from between the zombie hipster’s legs. The onyx blade of his stinger whistled through the air, slashing the thick fabric of her coat in a long slice that ran from waist to shoulder. Vivian toppled over backward, sprawling across the ground and grabbing at the blood-soaked gouge in her eviscerated chest.
But there was no blood. No gouge.
She quickly sat up and pulled her hands apart to find her coat hanging open in two slashed flaps, revealing a thin diagonal slice in her cocktail dress that exposed the pale skin of her completely intact midsection.
The Oblivion Society Page 49
