The Oblivion Society

by Marcus Alexander Hart

  One: This vehicle was, in fact, a fully armored, military-surplus HumVee. Two: She and Nick would not be driving it across the country.

  “Nick?” she called desperately. “Nick, are you there?” There was no reply but eerie silence.

  “Is anybody out there?”

  Erik shivered in his sleep. He rolled over to grab a blanket and dunked his face in four inches of murky street runoff somewhere beneath the streets of Stillwater. With a spluttering gasp, he rolled over onto his hands and knees.

  “Bllghg! Ack! What the-”

  He leapt to his feet, bashed his head into the tunnel’s low ceiling, and fell back into the puddle with a splash. His skull vibrated from the impact, and bright white flashes of pain seared the backs of his eyeballs.

  “Agh! Gaaah dammit!”

  He climbed to his feet, cautiously this time, and blinked his tingling eyes up and down the cold passageway of the cramped drainage pipe in which he had lain unconscious. In one direction was nothing but a velvety blackness. In the other, a whisper of dim light spilled over a mountain of pulverized earth and pavement that had collapsed into the drain.

  What was happening? How long had he been here? Erik held his watch up to the faint light to find Mr. T’s arms pointing at nine minutes to noon. His eyebrows arched in surprise. Twelve hours!

  He looked back at the narrow sliver of light pouring over the mound of debris. A hazy pink fog rolled eerily through the opening like something out of a low-budget horror movie. Erik climbed onto the pile and pulled himself as close to the crack in the street above as he could get.

  “Hello?” he called. “Hey?! Hey!”

  He started to claw at the crack with his bony fingers.

  “Hey, what’s going on?!” he screamed. “Is anybody there?!” His mind raced as he dug frantically at the debris. What had happened to the Stokes family? Were they still there? Did they go for help? Help for what? Several increasingly frenzied minutes and two broken nails later Erik stopped digging and fell into a panting slouch. It was futile. He couldn’t have cleared this heap of rebar-laden concrete if he had a bulldozer, let alone with his soft, girlish hands. Given no other options, he reluctantly rolled his pant legs up to his knees and waded into the shin-deep water in search of another way out.

  Just then a distant splash echoed out of the darkness. It was followed by a sort of dull crackling, like stalks of celery being ever so slowly bent in half. Then another splash, followed by a flat, quiet kind of moan.

  Erik suddenly realized that he was not alone.

  “Hello? Debbie? Harry?” he called hopefully. “Hey! Who’s there? Who’s in here?” As he waded down the pipe, the sparse pink light tucked itself away between the ribs of the corrugated steel walls, and soon he was splashing through the low tunnel in complete darkness.

  “Hel … hello?” he called nervously.

  He held one arm in front of him and shuffled cautiously through the murky water. The splash of his waterlogged sneakers echoed back and forth between the curved metal walls, growing louder and louder and drowning out all other sound. He stopped. When the ripples of his own footsteps had faded into silence, he again heard the strange crackling sound. It was getting louder. Closer. His heart pounded in his chest.

  “Is … is somebody there?”

  He slapped himself on the forehead. Is somebody there?! Did he really just say that? This was suicide! Never in his life had he seen a movie character tiptoe into the dark unknown shouting “Is somebody there?” and live to tell the tale. If he were watching this from the safety of his couch, he would be furious with himself right now. This was exactly the kind of idiotic behavior that infallibly ended in bloodshed. He stood there for a long, terrified minute, listening to the crackle echoing louder and louder up the tunnel. Something was coming, but the obfuscating acoustics of the pipe made it impossible to discern its speed or proximity.

  What was he supposed to do now? To keep walking would be to deliver himself straight into the arms of a psycho, that much was certain. But he couldn’t turn back either. No, the second he got too scared to move forward and turned around, the killer would somehow be right behind him. One nerve-shattering orchestral blast later and he’d be nothing but a red slick in the water.

  His eyes began to pool as his lip quivered helplessly. In his realm of experience there were two and only two possible outcomes to this situation, and neither one would see him live another day. The echo of the approaching splash grew deafening. The hideous crackle reverberated back and forth, louder and louder until it sounded like bacon frying in his skull. He peered into the darkness, trying desperately to see, but he could see nothing. But something was there!

  This was it. This was the end. There were no other options.

  Suddenly, miraculously, a thought flashed from the back of his mind.

  “No, wait!” he remembered. “There is a third option!” Just when the tension is cranked up to the highest level possible, just when you think the killer is about to spring machete-first out of the shadows, just when you draw in your breath and cringe in anticipation of a bloody evisceration, what leaps out of the darkness with a howling screech?

  The cheapest trick in the horror book. The cat scare.

  As soon as the idea had crossed his mind, Erik felt a familiar texture brush against his exposed and trembling leg. It was rough, wet fur. He felt a clawed foot step on his own. Erik relaxed and let out a relieved breath.

  “Twiki!” he beamed. “You scared me to death, you little creep! Come here!” The grimy animal made a leaping attempt at escape, but Erik’s experienced hands grabbed her in the utter darkness. He picked her up and pressed her tightly against his chest in a loving embrace.

  “Oh, you had me so scared, Twiki!” he sobbed. “I thought you were going to kill me!”

  Erik’s furry captive thrashed in his passionate cuddle, but he didn’t care. He was accustomed to her playing hard to get. But as he struggled to contain the writhing beast, Erik realized that Twiki was not only heavier than he remembered, but also much, much stronger.

  “Twiki? Twiki, stop it!” he chirped. “Hey! Hey, what’s got into-” Erik’s bewildered query broke into a shrill, piercing shriek as two paws’ worth of razor-sharp claws sliced deeply into his sides. The oversized talons tore through his flesh like rusted daggers, carving ragged gouges into his doughy love handles.

  “Aaaaaauuugh!” Erik wailed. “Stop! Stop it!”

  Fueled by adrenalin, Erik instinctively ripped the attacker from his shredded body, inadvertently slamming it into the low steel ceiling of the pipe. He heard a brittle crack and felt a quick blast of hot blood on his face.

  “Augggh!” he gagged. “Oh God!”

  The body went limp and slipped from Erik’s agony-weakened hands with a heavy splash. He tumbled backward into the rounded wall. The jagged rips in his sides burned with a ferocious intensity, like canals of boiling, scalding grease. He clutched his wounds and drew strangled breaths through clenched teeth.

  “Twiki!” he seethed. “Bad kitty!” Blood gushed through Erik’s fingers as his unfocused eyes fell upon the carcass lying in the polluted water. All he could see was a pointed jaw of gnarled teeth pushing a soft blue glow against the utter blackness, as if the murdered creature was grinning at him from the afterlife.

  Erik slid down the wall, collapsed into a bloody heap, and closed his tearful eyes. Bobby opened his eyes. He closed them again. Then he opened them.

  There was no difference either way. Open or closed, his eyes could discern nothing but one flat shade of black inside the tiny submarine. He turned to his other senses for backup.

  Smell reported a heavy and oppressive scent of stale nicotine and bad breath. Hearing came back with the sounds of shallow respiration.

  Touch told him that he was lying on his back with varying loads of dead weight distributed over his body, the most egregious being a sharp elbow digging painfully into his chest. He grabbed the elbow to push it away, and his thumb sank into
a hot, fleshy wound! Before he could recoil, the gash slammed shut, crushing his thumb between hard, bony plates!

  “Aaaaaaaaargh!” he screamed.

  He yanked back his hand and the grip on his thumb released, followed by the sound of a sputtering cough and gasping breath.

  “Blaagh!” a voice choked. “What did you put in my mouth, dawg?! I thought I told you, T-Money don’t swing that way, yo!”

  Bobby shoved Trent off of his lap and sat up.

  “Relax, dumb-ass,” he said. “It was just my thumb. Your heterosexuality is still intact.”

  Trent shifted in the darkness. After a pause, he spoke softly.

  “Hey B, can we turn the lights back on? I don’t mean to be insensitive to those of alternate lifestyles, but I just want to make it clear that I personally don’t-”

  “Oh shut up,” Bobby snapped. “It was an accident. I thought your chin was an elbow.”

  “Sure sure, okay. No harm, no foul,” Trent said consolingly. “But seriously, now, hands off the family jewels.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I’m not touching you.”

  “Look, I told you, homes. The T don’t play this game.”

  Trent grabbed the offending hand from his lap, finding it limp, bony, and hot to the touch. The second he made contact, the fingers slipped out of his grasp and a pained shriek and unbridled string of obscenity flooded the cabin.

  “Aaaaaaaugh!

  Fuck!

  Fuck!

  Jesus

  H.

  Fuck!

  Fuckerall

  Fuckington

  McFuckerberry!”

  Trent and Bobby scrambled blindly into the steel walls as Sherri’s wild, thrashing fury wound to a sobbing conclusion.

  “Jesus Harold Christ, what did you just do? Burn me with a fucking cigar?” she whimpered. “Try that when I’m not asleep and see how funny it is when I shove that shit up your ass, motherfucker!”

  In the perfect darkness of the Sawfish, Bobby and Trent exchanged uncertain glances.

  “I … I’m sorry-my bad,” Trent stammered. “I apologize if my tender touch is too hot for you to handle, love, but-”

  “Wait, wait, where am I?” Sherri spat. “Who the hell is that?”

  “It’s just little ol’ me, Terence Trent DeLaRosa. We’re in the submarine of love.” There was a tense silence as Sherri worked over Trent’s words.

  “Holy shit,” she whispered. “You and me didn’t-”

  “Don’t worry,” Bobby reassured. “You didn’t.”

  “What the … Bobby Gray, are you in here too?”

  “Yeah. Hi Sherri.”

  “Shit, you and me didn’t-”

  “No, no,” Bobby said impatiently. “Relax, you didn’t do it to anybody.” A long moment passed before Sherri spoke again.

  “So did the two of you-”

  “No!” Bobby and Trent barked in unison.

  Sherri blinked vigorously.

  “Holy shit, I’m fucking blind!” she gasped, waving her hand in front of her eyes.

  “How much did I drink last night?”

  “Last night?” Trent laughed. “Do you think they just closed up and left us in here or something? ‘If the sub is a-rockin’ don’t come a-knockin” only goes so far, right?”

  “Okay, so my memory is a little cloudy,” Sherri admitted, “but the last thing I knew I was shitfaced on Schlitz, and now I wake up and I’ve got the mother of all hangovers. You do the math, Pythagoras.”

  “Look, you’re not blind. The lights just burnt out,” Bobby said gruffly. “I’m not drunk enough for this much fun. Trent, gimme my hundred bucks. I’m outta here.” With that, he found the door and pushed it open, flooding the tiny chamber with a cold, moist blast of pinkish light and stinking vapor.

  “Ain’t no way I’m payin’ out, dawg!” Trent argued. “You just said that she didn’t do it to anybody! The bet was-”

  “To get her in the submarine; nothing else,” Bobby interrupted, bending over and stepping through the low hatch. “Look, I’m done with this stupid bet if you are, but for what it’s worth, I still beat your sorry-”

  Bobby stopped dead, his giant backside framed in the narrow doorway.

  “Uh uh, no way, homes,” Trent argued, shoving Bobby out of the way. “It was implied! There was an explicit implication for explicit content, and once again you holy Jesus, Mary, and Joseph …”

  Trent trailed off as he took in the same apocalyptic nightmare that had frozen Bobby in his tracks. The Bikini Martini had all but evaporated around them, replaced with a few steaming bamboo poles and the empty, smoking hulls of the surrounding buildings. Where the barroom had once stood there was now nothing but a brittle framework of blackened beams and bent plumbing, offering an unobstructed view of the fire-gutted cars in the street beyond. The ground was littered with mementos of civilization ripped from the buildings of downtown Stillwater. All of it was blanketed in a damp cloud of pink fog, reeking like a mountain of rancid sauerkraut.

  “What … what did …” Trent stammered. “I mean, seriously, I’m supposed to be on vacation here, dawg! I … I’m just here for a little bit of personal enhancement!

  What kind of place … I mean, has this ever happened here before?!”

  “Shhh,” Bobby said quietly. “No, no. Shut up.”

  They stepped out of the sub and silently wandered into the field of random, broken souvenirs of humanity. A bent filing cabinet leaned against the curb, transforming once-important documents into meaningless fluttering debris as it released them gently into the swirling breeze. A refrigerator door lay in the street, followed by a toaster and half a dozen smashed television sets of varying size and color. The gutter was littered with Planet of the Apes toys and a stuffed Mogwi with a knife and fork rubber-banded to its hands.

  “Whoa, your face!” Trent gasped suddenly. “You got your burn on, homes! For real!”

  Bobby rubbed his hands across his cheeks. On the right he felt nothing but a night’s accumulation of skin oil and stubble, but the left triggered a hot, dull burn upon contact. He held his arms out and investigated them. The right was of its usual couch-potato pastiness, but the left was glowing with an angry red sunburn. He glanced back at Trent.

  “Looks like you got a piece of that too,” he said, pointing. “The back of your neck and arms have gone all Red Lobster.”

  Trent’s eyes widened as he gently probed the back of his blistering neck.

  “Wait, I remember now!” he said. “I was talking to you in the sub and some asshole threw a pot of hot coffee down my back! Next thing I know, I’m in the dark and homeboy’s violating me!”

  “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” Bobby said, shaking his head. “Number one, it wasn’t coffee. I remember now. There was a fire. It was like the whole bar exploded. That explains the sunburns and the, well …”

  He gestured around at the neighborhood of smoking carnage.

  “And number two,” he continued, “I didn’t violate you. Shut up about it already.” He bent down to investigate the remains of the heavy plank boardwalk. The wood had been imprinted with a series of shadowy stains that looked almost human in a Rorshachian way. A scrap of fabric was pinched between the boards in the center of a long hourglass of char. He picked it up and immediately recognized the pattern from Sunny’s trademark sarong.

  “Well, all I know is that somebody up there must have been looking out for us,” Trent said gratefully, flicking his finger skyward. “We got off lucky, homes. If we weren’t in that sub when this shit went down, we’d have been royally messed up, right?”

  Bobby didn’t answer. He was staring over Trent’s shoulder, agape.

  “Right? Hey, B-Dawg. What are you looking at over oh daaaaamn! ” The boys stared with chilled horror at Scary Sherri clinging limply to the side of the submarine’s hatch, looking like she was ready for the grave … or had just returned from it. Whereas the submarine’s walls had shielded Bobby and Trent from the s
earing energy of the flash, Sherri’s pale, unprotected skin had taken it full-on. Like a decade of damaging sunlight focused into the blink of an eye, the flash had faded Sherri’s burgundy skirt and blood-red T-shirt to flaccid shades of pink. It had bleached her coarse black hair to a soft, wispy mass of angelic white. But the damage the blast had done to her clothes and hair was nothing compared to what it had done to her unshielded ivory complexion. In one scalding instant, the milky white pallor of Sherri’s skin had been replaced with a crispy, sunburnt palette of flaming reds and sickly purples.

  “I … I didn’t think it was possible,” Bobby stammered, “but your eyes are more horrible now than they were before!”

  Sherri blinked blindly and turned toward the sound of Bobby’s voice. Her ghostly blue eyes had vanished, replaced with two bloodstained spheres of a deep, visceral red. She had made the mistake of looking directly into the flash, instantaneously bursting thousands of tiny capillaries in her wide, empty eyes. Her pupils were completely lost in the sea of dark blood, giving her a vacant, otherworldly gaze. As if to punctuate the ghastliness of it all, long red streaks of dried blood ran down her cheeks from the corners of her sanguineous eyes.

  “Is it nighttime?” she whispered.

  “No,” Trent answered quietly. “You were right. It’s morning.” Sherri blinked slowly, glaring into blank infinity.

  “Shit!” she spat. “I told you I was fucking blind!” She slowly lowered herself to the ground and leaned her charred body up against the doorframe.

  ” Sssssst! Owww!” she winced. “Jesus, somebody get me a drink and explain what the hell just happened to me.”

  The boys looked on with shock and pity, not quite knowing how to respond.

  “Judgment Day happened,” Trent said dramatically. “Revelations 7:12. I looked and behold there was a great earthquake, and the sun became as black as sackcloth, the moon like blood.”

  Sherri blinked.

  “Okay, you shut up. You’re useless. Bobby, get me a drink and tell me what’s happening.”

  “I don’t really know,” Bobby admitted. “But I’m placing my money on Y2K.”