Before she could even release her clenched breath, the black spear slammed down between her awkwardly spread legs, driving through the stretched surface of her skirt and into the ground. With a simultaneous kick of her heels and flap of her wings, Vivian threw herself backward, drawing the blade through the worn polyester with a high, peeling rrriip.
“Sit still, girl!” Trent yelped. “I ain’t gonna hurt you! I just want to make you feel good!”
A second later Vivian was back on her feet and limping desperately across the driveway. Her twisted ankle felt as if it was being crushed in a vice with each agonizing step. There was no way that she could outrun Trent. Her only option was to find someplace to hide. Hopping and flapping her wings like a wounded bird, Vivian made her way to the nearest available shelter: the creaking hulk of the Dutch windmill.
She grabbed the iron handles of the tall, barn-style double doors and yanked with all of her strength, but all she managed to do was make them rattle. Before she could give it a second try, her eyes landed on a pair of thick, U-shaped steel brackets sprouting from the doors, bound together in the loop of a heavy old combination lock.
“Damn it!” she snarled.
Her eyes flashed over her shoulder. The bull had now completely abandoned the ambulance in favor of doing a little bit of grazing, but Trent was not so easily distracted from his prey. He was still coming, forcing his crippled legs to wobble ever forward toward his carnal reward with a sinister zip, zip, zip.
“Y’all act like it’s unnatural!” Trent screamed. “You can’t fight nature, girl!”
“Shhhh!” Vivian hissed, tossing a nervous glance at the bull. “Trent, shut up!” She turned back to the door and took a deep, calming breath.
“Use your logic,” she breathed to herself. “Find a way.” She picked up the combination lock and gave it a quick examination.
“Okay. Only three tumblers,” she mumbled. “Ten digits each.” She blew a frustrated blast of air into her bangs.
“Only a thousand possible combinations,” she grimaced, slamming the lock against the door. “Give it up, Vivian. You’ve got a better chance of unlocking the brackets. ”
Her eyebrows shot up. The brackets! She lifted the lock, revealing two large, exposed mounting screws.
“Yes!” she chirped. “That’s the way!”
With a deft flick of her fingers her Swiss Army Knife launched from her pocket. She snapped out the screwdriver blade, rammed it into the rusted face of the top screw, and started cranking as fast as her swift fingers could maneuver.
“Come on, baby, come on, come on,” she begged.
She twisted and twisted the screw, but instead of coming loose, it seemed to just keep getting longer and longer. The sweat beaded up on her forehead as she looked back over her shoulder to see Trent still limping toward her in his relentless, mad delirium. He couldn’t have been more than twenty quickly diminishing feet away. The screw finally wobbled in its setting and fell from the door.
“One more!” Vivian grunted.
“Saddle up and spread ‘em, girl!” Trent bellowed. “Cowboy T’s gonna ride you like a rodeo!”
At the end of the driveway, the bull’s head rose sharply as its blood-caked eyes squinted at Trent’s shouting form. Vivian could see the monster drawing up to its full, barn-like height in her peripheral vision as she frantically cranked away at the second screw. The bull took a few pounding steps toward them and stopped, tilting its head in curious investigation.
“Work the screw; don’t look at the bull; work the screw,” Vivian chattered nervously to herself.
With a rumble like a sonic boom, the bull released its bellowing moo, lowered its horns, and charged the windmill. Vivian’s pupils dilated as she turned toward fifty tons of beef bearing down on her. Her eyes snapped back to the screw and her hands worked with increased vigor.
“You looked at the bull,” she growled. “Don’t look at the bull; work the screw!” Beyond her flying fingertips Vivian could see Trent’s long shadow sliding across the ground between her legs and creeping up the front of the barn. She could smell the stinging fetor of his body pushing through the uncomfortably narrow barrier of air that remained between them. She took small comfort in knowing that in a matter of seconds, when the bull’s horns hammered into her body, snapping her spine, crushing her ribcage, and forcing her internal organs out of the openings at both ends of her digestive tract, the exact same thing would also be happening to Trent. Her eyes bounced in their sockets as they turned slowly to her right and filled with a stampeding vision of black fur and flying drool. She had always heard that you’re supposed to see your life flash before your eyes just before you die, but all she could see was chickens. Three gigantic, squawking chickens bolting out from around the right side of the windmill and cutting a direct perpendicular to the rampaging bull’s path.
“Go on! Go! Go!” Erik screamed. “Move your McNuggets!” Vivian’s eyes sent the images to her brain, but her brain refused to accept them. Like a rancher from some bizarro universe, Erik was running behind a flock of super-sized chickens, swinging a rusty pitchfork at their giant meaty backsides and herding them into the bull’s path. As soon as the overstuffed poultry crossed the bull’s eye line, their thrashing wings and terrified squawks immediately captured the beast’s full attention, drawing him away from Vivian and Trent as if they had never even existed. With his diversion firmly in place, Erik peeled away from the back of the flock and pressed himself inconspicuously against the side of the windmill. The rooster squawked a shrill, gurgling squawk as a monstrous front hoof slammed down on its back, exploding his patchy flesh like a rotten, meaty grapefruit. Before the flying innards had even settled, a rear hoof finished the job, smearing the now unrecognizable poultry remains into the dirt. The senseless carnage seemed to energize the two remaining hens, bolstering them with enough speed to keep them far ahead of the bull as the trio disappeared around the side of the barn. Erik scampered up to Vivian’s side and threw his arms around her in a loving embrace. She shoved him away with a scowl.
“Not now, Erik!”
“Vivian! What’s wrong? Are you okay?!”
“Yes I’m okay!” Vivian barked, throwing out a finger. ” He’s the one who’s not okay!”
Erik turned toward the sweaty pendulum of Trent’s claw-like phallus swinging in a crackling metronome not more than two staggering meters away.
“Oh shit!” Erik yelped. “What the-”
“He’s a zombie!”
“But his tee-”
“Porcelain veneers!”
“But why did it take such a long-”
“Late bloomer!”
“But how come-”
“Fusion Fuel! That’s why he doesn’t smell like cabbage!”
“What?!”
“Look, there’s no time for this right now, Erik!” Vivian snapped. “We’ll be safe in here! Just hold him back for two more seconds!”
She planted her miniature screwdriver into the screw protruding from the loosened bracket and continued twisting. Erik’s brain throbbed from the barrage of non-information that had just been machine-gunned into his head, but he understood one thing: He had to stop Trent.
He leapt to the side of the driveway, retrieved his pitchfork, and pounced in between Trent’s bladed shaft and Vivian’s soft, unprotected rear end.
“Get back, Ginsu dick!” Erik screamed, brandishing his pitchfork in Trent’s direction. “Get away from her!”
Trent lurched backward, losing his balance and stumbling several clumsy steps on his bandaged legs before righting himself on his crutch. Another stabbing swing of the fork produced the same result, and after another Trent had been pushed just over five cautious yards from Vivian’s back.
“Stand back, little boy,” Trent grinned, flexing his monstrous stinger. “Vivi wants to get with a real man!”
“A real man?” Erik laughed. “Hey, I’m not the one whose testicles fell off!” Trent growled a fierce roar as his sti
nger flew through the air toward Erik’s head. In a lightning-quick maneuver of three coordinated arms, Erik swung the pitchfork into a defensive position. Trent’s bloodstained mouth dropped open in a wailing scream as the force of his own swing inadvertently impaled the soft flesh of his mutant shaft on the pitchfork’s rusted prongs!
“Now that I’ve got your attention,” Erik snarled, “I’d like to raise a few points.” A hot trickle of dark red blood spiraled down the pasty white skin of Trent’s shaft like a barber pole as Erik lifted the fork, elevating the already impossibly high pitch of Trent’s scream to a frequency that would have made dogs howl. Trent’s feet rolled onto their wingtipped toes as his pierced flesh attempted to keep pace with the rising prongs. Erik leaned in and spoke through furiously clenched teeth.
“Number one,” he growled, “I’m not going to kill you unless you make me, alright? So be cool!”
Despite his obvious agony, Trent’s swollen eyes were not looking at his pierced stinger. They weren’t even looking at Erik’s commanding face. As his cat tail stood on its throbbing end, his sweat-soaked gaze was still fixed on Vivian’s rear end as she yanked the last screw out of the lock bracket. Erik noticed Trent’s lusty glare and lowered his eyelids angrily.
“Number two,” he snarled, twisting the fork. “If you ever so much as think about having sex with Vivian Gray ever again, I’m going to Bobbitt your hobbit! You got that?!”
Trent’s gasping, anguished face turned on his captor with a flash of burning rage.
“Get offa my jock, you pussy-ass bitch!”
Trent’s weight wobbled on his toes as his arm swung brutally from his side. The last thing Erik heard was a scrape of tubular steel against dirt and a cold swish of air before two heavy shotgun barrels connected with the side of his head. He was completely unconscious long before his unexpectedly bloodied face hit the ground. Vivian clawed the unscrewed lock bracket out of the ancient wood and let it drop in a clanking chain of hardware that was still locked to the other door. She grabbed the handle and leapt backward, pulling open the massive, creaking hinges of a tall, broad door.
“Erik, I got it!” she screamed, turning toward him. “Come on! Get insi-” The scene unfolding in front of Vivian’s unbelieving eyes grabbed her around the throat and squeezed it into silence. Erik lay flat on his back on the ground, spread-eagled and unconscious in a growing pool of blood that was drizzling through his thick, wild hair and into the thirsty dirt. To his side, Trent stood in a striking silhouette against the yellow sky, holding the bloody pitchfork with both hands, prongs down, preparing to drive it savagely through Erik’s unprotected groin.
“I’ll show you who’s the real man around here, bitch!” Trent howled.
“Trent, no!” Vivian shrieked. “Stop!”
Her words tore through the thin air but didn’t seem to make it to Trent’s enraged ears. With a grunting heave, he hoisted the fork over his head in a momentum-building upswing. Vivian clumsily darted across the driveway with a series of limping hops, but she knew that it was a waste of effort. It would take that pitchfork less than a second to whip through the air and nail Erik’s testicles to the ground. There was no time to physically stop Trent.
She had to find another way.
“Oh God, I’m so horny! ” she moaned breathlessly. “You’re right, Trent! I need a big man to sex me up, and I need it right now! ”
Her eyes clenched shut and her teeth ground together as if she had just been slapped in the face with a jellyfish. She had one chance to save Erik’s life, and that was the best dirty talk she could come up with? It was pathetic.
But it had worked.
The tensed muscles in Trent’s hulking arms went slack as his head turned toward her. If an expression could be read from his swollen black eyes, it was definitely one of cautious skepticism. Vivian’s eyes turned skeptical in return, but she quickly resolved not to waste the moment with overthinking what had worked.
“Yeah you, big sexy sex, uh … man,” she growled, bending over and pulling her palms gawkily up her inner thighs. “I’m all hot and bothered and, um … ready for some big stud to make sweet animal love to me all night long!”
To supplement her awkwardly slung innuendo, Vivian whipped off her glasses, pouted her pink lips, and struck a pose like something out of a Gil Elvgren painting. Trent’s eyes widened as his dull gaze flicked back and forth between Erik’s loins and Vivian’s provocatively arched body.
“That’s right, forget about him,” Vivian growled nervously. “I’ve got what you want right over here, hot stuff!”
She pushed aside the slashed halves of her coat and cupped her hands around her polyester-clad breasts, jiggling her modest endowment as her face flushed in utter humiliation. A red, runny grin spread across Trent’s face as he tossed the pitchfork to the side and dragged himself toward Vivian on his shotgun crutch with a lusty sort of limp. Vivian slapped her glasses back onto her face and slowly backed away toward the mill, not taking her eyes off his crackling stinger.
Now what was she supposed to do? She had rescued Erik, but now her well of ideas had run dry. She could make it back to the open door of the windmill, but locking herself inside would only leave Erik in danger again. She needed to stop Trent once and for all. She needed to find a weapon.
Her eyes darted around her immediate surroundings, but there was nothing of any use. The pitchfork was far behind Trent’s approaching bulk, and the driveway offered up nothing but useless dust. She couldn’t see anything at all that could save her.
She could, however, hear something.
At the far end of the driveway, the cranking, scraping stroke of a retired diesel engine grinding itself to life pounded its way through the cold, still air of the farm. Vivian’s head snapped toward the sound, and her shimmering eyes picked out a petite blond head peering at her from behind the wheel of the nearly totaled Grocery911.com ambulance.
“Sherri!” Vivian gasped.
In the distance, Sherri’s filthy sleeve mopped a trickle of blood from under her nose as her boot pumped the gas pedal, revving the engine. She thrust a finger at Vivian that screamed, “You!” followed by a crank of her thumb that just as clearly said, “Get the fuck away from him!”
Vivian shifted her disbelieving gaze away from Sherri and back to Trent, who was also staring down the driveway with a concerned expression on his swollen face. The roar of the ambulance’s engine exploded across the farm as it launched forward on its bald tires, throwing a spray of loose gravel clattering against its bent wheel wells. Trent’s scorched brain obviously hadn’t worked out all of the details, but Vivian could tell that he knew something very bad was about to happen to him.
“Hey, Boner McGee!” she barked, waving her palms. “I’m still hot and sexy and ready for action over here! Come get a hot piece of this hot girl meat!” She twisted on the balls of her feet and thrust out her backside toward Trent, giving it a sharp, sassy slap and squeaking with a naughty sort of delight. As she struck her bent-over pose, the bisected tatters of her skirt fell to the sides of her legs, exposing a nibble of her panties to the shimmering sunlight. This provocative posturing immediately captured Trent’s full attention once again, wiping the rest of the world from his damaged memory and dragging him toward her soft, slender body.
Vivian clenched her eyes for a brief second of humiliated self-disgust as she whirled back around, putting her assets away. She could hear the scream of the racing engine growing louder and louder, but she did not break her gaze from Trent’s face. His expression was filled with a primal sort of lust, yet his eyes looked hollow and empty in his bloated head.
The ear-ripping howl of the engine grew deafeningly closer as Vivian slowly backed across the open driveway. She could almost hear the individual pounding of each exploding piston as they drove the snarled grille closer and closer to Trent’s hobbling legs. Louder and louder, closer and closer. Trent made a desperate lunge at Vivian, but she jumped backward, throwing herself into the air with
a pounding flap of her wings. She landed on her non-injured leg in the protection of the windmill’s doorframe, leaving her attacker alone and bewildered in the path of the screaming ambulance.
“Uh-oh, Trent,” she yelled. “It looks like you’re having a Grocery911!” Trent’s head snapped to the side with a look of dismay, but, to Vivian’s surprise, in completely the wrong direction. Her eyes blasted open as two enormous, terrified chickens thundered past him with the bull in hot pursuit. The bloody wall of its slashed forehead was now leading ten thousand pounds of mutated beef on a direct collision course for the ambulance.
“Look out!” Vivian wailed. “Sherri, look out! Stop!” Behind the spider-webbed safety glass of the shattered windshield, Sherri’s teeth were bared in a heroic defiance. As the two chickens darted around the front of her thundering chariot, her enraged pink eyes filled end to end with a reflection of black fur, punctuated with a tiny dot of swarthy, crippled man-meat in the center. There was no way that she didn’t see the bull charging straight for her shattered headlights, but nothing in her face suggested that she cared.
“One of us better be wrong about the afterlife, Trent,” she said stoically. “‘Cause I don’t want to see you in Hell!”
The next few seconds drizzled through Vivian’s eyes in a grisly slow motion, as if so many horrible things were happening at once that time itself couldn’t keep up. Trent stumbled forward on bloated legs, bending into a stiff, awkward crouch as he attempted to jump clear of the tons of flesh and steel that were about to compress him into a hairy, wet carpet. As his toes scraped across the ground they twisted outward … and just kept twisting, all the way around to the back. His bandaged legs were instantaneously bathed in a thick, black blood for the most insignificant blip of a second before they exploded outward in a mass of sticky plastic and cotton shreds. In that one horrible moment, the mangled, infected flesh of Trent’s legs seemed to spiral off the bones like ribbons from a party favor on New Year’s Eve as his fleshy thighs blew apart, revealing a pair of colossal, black and green striped grasshopper legs.
The Oblivion Society Page 50
