The Oblivion Society

by Marcus Alexander Hart

  Vivian stood dumbfounded as the two massive, muscular hinges of Trent’s blossoming limbs pounded into the dry dirt, launching him into the air and straight toward her. His shoulder rammed into her chest, knocking the wind out of her and throwing her body in a sprawling tumble across the wooden floor of the windmill. In the fraction of a second before her head hit the ground, a single remembered image flashed through Vivian’s analytical mind: Priscilla’s slashed palms spilling a stream of contaminated blood down the wrecked dashboard of the Reliant and into the open wounds of Trent’s crushed legs.

  This thought was immediately obliterated by the ear-numbing, steel and flesh cacophony of a speeding ambulance crushing itself to death against a mutant bovine’s collapsing skull. In the seconds following the collision, the wail of the diesel engine fell into a steaming hiss that seemed understated next to the bull’s thousand-decibel scream.

  The enormous creature staggered backward on its butcher-block hooves, shaking its crushed and deformed skull back and forth in a slow, drooling denial. One of its rear legs folded against the ground, initiating a domino effect that dropped the animal to its knees with a rumble like two oceanliners colliding. With a final snort of atomized blood, the bull capitulated, keeling over and dropping its five-ton mass against the creaking windmill.

  Vivian regained her wits just in time to see the bull’s ribcage plummeting toward the open door, slamming it closed and buttressing it with the full load of its collapsing weight. A sharp, rattling creak echoed through each weary wooden joint of the tower, dropping a sepulchral sprinkling of dust from the shadows of its thick rafters.

  With the doors suddenly and permanently closed, the only light that reached the octagonal floor of the windmill was a single shaft of sunlight that fell from an open vent in the roof, sixty feet above. Long, nightmarish shadows chewed at the walls as the dusty sunbeam filtered through the club-like teeth of a series of massive wooden gears slowly grinding together, still driven to work by the lazy motion of the turning sails outside.

  Just inside of the buckled doors, Trent ground his shotgun crutch into the floor and pushed himself up onto the stiff cradle of his new insect limbs. His human legs had been all but obliterated in the mutation, leaving nothing but a few ragged ropes of glistening meat hanging from the bottom of his pelvis. The sleek shafts of his grasshopper legs cut in swift angles out of his hips and behind his back, angling at the knees behind his shoulders and returning on barbed stalks to the floor beneath him.

  Vivian scrambled to her feet and turned in a quick circle, searching for an escape route. She was surrounded by eight intimidatingly thick stone walls punctuated by a few twenty-foot-tall aluminum storage silos tucked into their obtuse corners. She completed her futile turn to face Trent’s towering, blade-phallused form standing menacingly in front of the solitary exit, which was now barricaded by enough beef to feed an army.

  “Well, that could have gone somewhat better,” she muttered sarcastically. Trent rocked his weight ghoulishly back and forth, pushing his narrow, hairy feet into the floor. Whereas Vivian had been required to trick her own mind into acknowledging her wings, Trent’s damaged brain didn’t even seem to notice that his natural legs had been replaced with a foreign set. He dropped his shotgun crutch on the floor next to the doorway and took a confident, pounding step forward on his armored stalks. Vivian’s sweaty hand fingered the shell in her pocket as she eyed the discarded firearm longingly.

  “You don’t have to keep up the good-girl act anymore,” Trent said, fixing her blankly in his swollen eyes. “We’re all alone now, girl. Just you and me. It’s time to get freakay. ”

  Trent’s two clawed toes dug into the splintery wood as he leapt into the air, landing with a crack directly in front of Vivian. With a darting shuffle of her feet, she made a move to bolt around his right side toward the abandoned shotgun. The floor creaked as he effortlessly bounded in front of her, cutting off her path. She clumsily retreated and made a break around his left, but another swift leap put him directly between her and the weapon she so desperately needed. Vivian suddenly came to the horrible realization that Trent now had the upper hand in size, strength, and agility. Yet she narrowed her eyes defiantly.

  “Find another way,” she thought.

  She quickly backed away, keeping a careful eye on Trent. For every three limping steps that she retreated, Trent closed the gap with one clomping stride of his powerful, backwards-hinged legs. As he moved into the sunbeam, the gold cross hanging from his swollen neck glimmered, catching Vivian’s eye.

  “Trent, what would the Bible say about this?” she said accusingly. “What kind of Christian assaults helpless girls?! What would God say if he saw you trying to rape me to death?!”

  Trent’s pulsating stinger shrieked through the air in front of Vivian’s face.

  “Forget God,” he said coldly, flexing his hulking, dripping shaft. “I’m bigger than God now.”

  Vivian jumped back as the tensed stinger howled in front of her chest, clipping the flags of her torn-open jacket and throwing a tangle of coarse red fibers into the air. She stumbled backward until the tips of her wings bumped against a barrier of dense, solid wood, stopping her dead in her path. Flashing a quick, desperate look over her shoulders, she quickly spread her wings out to her sides as her face drained in terror.

  “Oh please, Trent, oh please,” she sobbed in surrender. “Don’t hurt me, Trent!”

  “I’m not gonna hurt you, girl,” he said in a low, salacious growl. “But I am gonna make you scream.”

  He grinned lasciviously as he bent on his misplaced knees and slid his segmented stalk across Vivian’s cheek, over the hammer of her heart, and down the inside of her fuzzy thigh.

  “I give up, Trent! I’ll kiss you. I’ll touch you. I’ll do anything you want. Anything!” Vivian begged. “Just please, please keep that stinger out from between my legs!”

  Trent’s cracked lips pulled away from his remaining teeth in a grin of carnal anticipation. Ignoring Vivian’s pleas-or perhaps even driven to new heights of arousal by them-he launched the bulging shaft of his bayoneted phallus between her soft white thighs! To his surprise, instead of a smooth embrace of warm flesh, his thrusting assault was rewarded with a grinding agony.

  The pathetic, terrified expression on Vivian’s face instantly curled into a mischievous grin.

  “Aww, Trent,” she cooed. “I’m so sorry to disappoint you after you got all geared up!”

  With that, she dropped the curtain of her muscular wings with a gigantic flap, launching herself off of Trent’s arrested stinger and revealing a pair of enormous vertical gears. A scream too voluminous for the confines of the windmill tore out of Trent’s throat as two sets of brutal wooden teeth rotated upward, pinching his distended member at the bottom of their mesh and drawing it into their crushing bite. Vivian’s bruised ankles collapsed as she hit the floor, sending her into a tumble that landed her at the door of the windmill. She grabbed the shotgun, fed the last black shell into its cold steel chamber, and snapped it shut with a commanding flex of her long arms. Planting the battered stock against her shoulder, she squinted down the barrel and into the back of Trent’s skull.

  “You are not bigger than God, Trent,” she growled, slipping her finger into the trigger guard. “But I’ll let Him explain that to you in person.” The shotgun’s recoil sent a teeth-rattling punch through her shoulder and down her spine as a load of red-hot lead spat from its muzzle and toward Trent’s greasy head. A splinter of a second before the gunpowder explosion tore through the air, however, the mechanical jaws of the windmill’s gears had completed their monotonous cycle, pushing Trent’s abused shaft from the top of their meshed snarl. In that most urgent of seconds, his insect legs extended, launching him across the darkened mill.

  The streak of burning buckshot screamed past the tip of Trent’s nose and punched a fist-sized hole in a nearby silo, releasing a thin, mocking spout of finely milled grain from within.

  Trent
landed with a pounding clatter of chitinous feet on thick wooden planks. A roar bubbled up deep within him and spilled out from between his giant square teeth. Brimming with anger and pain, it sounded more animal than human. He spun around to face Vivian, throwing a spatter of thick, black blood onto the wall as his phallus swung out in front of him like a shredded fire hose. Its flesh was now split and torn like an overcooked hot dog, spilling quarts of his toxic, infectious blood like a sinister venom down the glistening blade of its still-attached stinger. Vivian didn’t find the sight of his mutilated appendage nearly as chilling as the pure, primal rage in his beady eyes.

  “Aaaagh! God damn it! You cocktease whore! ” he seethed. “You’ll pay for that with your ass, bitch!”

  Vivian dropped the spent shotgun and snapped her wings together, blasting out of the way as Trent’s pointed feet pounded into the floor where she had been standing. Her agonized knees buckled clumsily as she landed, and Trent’s long, hard legs threw him effortlessly over her head. She spun around just in time to leap clear of his swinging blade, falling flat on her back as an arc-shaped wave of noxious blood flew right over her body. To Vivian’s surprise, instead of hitting the hard planks of the floor, she landed on a cushiony heap of spilt flour.

  The jagged teeth of the silo’s puncture wound were being forced farther and farther apart by the pressure of the escaping grain, turning the original trickle into a surging fantail of white powder. Vivian choked and coughed as pounds and pounds of flour beat down upon her body, filling the sails of her wings and pinning her to the ground. As the fine grain sifted over the lenses of her glasses, she could see Trent stepping menacingly to her side. She thrashed her anchored shoulders against the floor as he bent over her and held the remains of his drizzling shaft over her body.

  “I can do anything I want to your virgin ass now,” Trent hissed evilly. “Girl, you’re gonna get your cherry popped by a real man.”

  “Thanks for the offer,” Vivian groaned, “but I can de-flour myself!” With a surge of strength that started deep in her back and raged all the way to the tips of her mutant extremities, Vivian threw her wings forward in a mighty snap, launching twelve cubic feet of blinding white powder into Trent’s face! Trent grabbed at his burning eyes and stumbled backward as Vivian leapt to her feet with a kick of her reedy legs. She leaned forward and pounded her wings against the broad waterfall of flour again and again, beating it into a stifling, opaque cloud that quickly filled the room.

  Vivian could hear Trent gagging and thrashing through the thick, silty haze as she pulled her coat over her face and blindly retreated to the perimeter of the windmill. She crouched down behind the aluminum belly of one of the undamaged silos, stared blankly into her smokescreen, and thought very, very hard.

  A supreme irony bit into her mind: Trent was the one who had been reduced to the basest level of human instinct, yet she was the one with her options reduced to fight or flight.

  The cloud of slowly drifting flour had obfuscated all details of the windmill’s interior from her stinging eyes, save for one. All that remained was a single, solitary beam of heavenly sunlight breaking through the open vent at the top of the tower. Vivian’s palm settled on a lump in her coat pocket as she suddenly saw her only option for survival.

  Fight and flight.

  Just on the other side of a mountain of unprocessed hamburger, two six-foot hens pecked sleepily at the hard, dead earth of the driveway. To the chickens, with their limited memories, both the deceased bull and the deceased Grocery911 ambulance had become little more than irrelevant bumps on the landscape.

  “Scram!” a squeaky voice shouted. “Get outta here! Go write a love letter to Gonzo!”

  The two hens retreated with a squawk and a flying of feathers as a dazed Erik stumbled between them, waving four threatening arms in the air. He thumped dizzily against the door of the wrecked ambulance and wrenched it open.

  “Sherri? Hello? You okay?”

  Inside the crushed cab of the ambulance, Sherri lay unmoving, hunched over the bent steering wheel with her arms hanging flaccidly at her sides. Erik took her gently by her bony shoulders and leaned her back against the seat. At the sight of her wounds, a single explosive heartbeat hammered out of his chest, creating a vacuum that pulled a gasp of air into his lungs.

  “Oh God, oh no. Oh God, Sherri, no!”

  Sherri’s lifeless head and arms hung limply over the back of the broken ambulance seat, forcing her battered chest to jut out of her coat like some kind of bloated mammalian hood ornament. The thin fabric of her blasted T-shirt had been all but ripped apart during her conflict with the bull, and its slashed neckline now plunged in a horrific décolletage. Blossoming from where she had violently impacted the steering wheel, a single, contiguous purple and black bruise spread out over her swollen chest and gruesomely across her shoulders, lapping with pointed, flaming tongues into the tanned skin of her slender neck.

  The goose egg growing on Erik’s recently clubbed skull beat like a drum as his heart began to race with helplessness. He stared at her purple chest in horror, and his disoriented eyes imagined it to be slowly expanding and falling. He leaned in for a closer look, and Sherri’s head rolled over on the seat.

  “I’m not dead,” she rattled hoarsely. “Quit staring at my tits.” Erik’s back wrenched upright as his embarrassment was completely eclipsed by joyous relief.

  “Sherri!” he chirped. “You’re alive!”

  “Yeah. No shit, Sherlock.”

  Wincing and sucking in a hiss of air between her teeth, Sherri pulled her winged head forward onto her shoulders. Her bent wings fluttered pathetically as she blinked her eyes into focus over the wrecked, blood-streaked hood of the ambulance.

  “Did I hit Trent?” she asked dizzily.

  “I don’t know,” Erik admitted. “It doesn’t look like it.”

  “Damn it all!” Sherri seethed.

  Through the hole where the windshield had once been she could see the bull lying against the door of the mill, bleeding into the dirt from its wrecked skull.

  “Well, at least I killed that mad-cow megafreak.”

  “Forget about what you killed!” Erik yelped. “Sherri, how are you still alive?! How did you survive that crash without collapsing your lungs?!”

  Sherri’s tiny thumbs thrust weakly toward the bruised cushion of her enhanced bosom.

  “Dual airbags, motherfucker.”

  Inside the windmill, Vivian clawed her way up the deep corrugated ribs encircling the grain storage silo like a ladder. She drew in a breath of fresh, clean air as she hoisted herself out of the swirling dust cloud and onto the container’s gently domed top. On the ground below her, she could see Trent’s dark form stalking furiously through the floury haze, stirring the slowly settling cloud into the air with every fierce slash of his bladed stalk.

  “You can’t hide from me, you dirty whore!” Trent roared. “Where are you?!”

  “Way above your head,” Vivian said. “As usual.”

  At the sound of her voice, Trent looked up through the chalky haze to see Vivian staring him down from the top of the silo. A flick of her thumb knocked open the lid of Sherri’s Zippo lighter with a steely click. Trent’s palms slapped the floor as his grasshopper legs folded deep into a preparatory crouch.

  “You’re goin’ down, bitch!”

  Vivian sparked a tall flame out of the lighter with her slender thumb.

  “To the contrary,” she said calmly. “I’m goin’ up.” With that, she bent her knees and leapt into the air, spreading her twelve-foot wingspan out to her sides like a leathery black hang glider. Trent’s powerful legs simultaneously launched him off the ground and toward her soft, lean belly hanging in the cloudy air. As the two bodies sailed toward each other, Vivian tossed the lighter between the extended goalposts of Trent’s grasping arms and into the thick, folding swirls of airborne flour.

  The open lid of the lighter caught the air like a rudder, twisting its descent into a tight, foo
tball-like spiral as it plunged through the cloud. In a flash of time too fast for the human eye to detect, the yellow-blue flame ignited a single flour particle, instantly wrapping fire around its combustible surface bathed in the oxygen-rich air. The combustion spread to another suspended particle, and another, and another, slicing a millisecond-long cone of flame through the dust. Before the already-scorched steel of the lighter had even hit the floor, every particle of flying grain in the enclosed windmill had near-simultaneously caught fire, pushing a thunderous explosion against its thick cobblestone walls.

  For the briefest of seconds, Vivian could actually see the expanding fire wrap its clawed fingers around Trent, igniting the stinking, oily flesh of his mutated body into a demonic pillar of red and yellow flame. His mouth opened to scream, but only a forked tongue of crimson fire and black smoke rolled out of his throat as the unforgiving hand of gravity wrapped around his rapidly charring body, yanking it back into the depths of the hellish blaze.

  Before Vivian could plummet to the same horrible fate, the spontaneous detonation punched a blast of heated air into the sails of her outstretched wings like a giant invisible fist. The explosive thermal updraft had already thrown her thirty feet into the air before she could give her wings a single, majestic flap, launching herself further skyward by pushing the almost tangible thickness of the hot air back toward the ground. As she rushed toward the high ceiling, Vivian folded her wings straight back toward her toes and threw out one heroic fist. Her willowy body swished gracefully through the center of the open vent as she shot from the top of the burning tower like a bullet from a rifle.

  The bright, fresh air of the farm whistled over Vivian’s face as the eruptive force of her launch fell away from her flapping and tattered clothes, slowing her ascent to a gentle, weightless standstill nearly a hundred feet from the ground. Without panic, she bent in half at the waist and pointed her fingers to the ground like an Olympic high diver. As she began to fall back toward the earth, her powder-covered wings unfolded effortlessly from her shoulders, feeling out the gentle currents in the air and carrying her gracefully across the sky.