Erik watched Vivian’s cold, vulnerable body shivering against the frosty ground for several long minutes as an ill-conceived notion formed within his muddled head.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Vivian lurched into consciousness with a gasping, coughing breath. Her aching lungs felt as if she had slept with a set of encyclopedias stacked on her chest. She sat up and found herself wrapped in a blanket of Day-Glo yellow Mylar emblazoned with an enormous “3.” She blinked hard, letting her poorly rested eyes sponge up her surroundings.
Directly to her side was the pile of sticks that she and Erik had collected, still intact, still unburned. In the dim gray light of this perversion of morning, the pile looked exactly as it had in the last vestiges of twilight. Exactly the same, that is, except for the shredded bark.
And the blood.
Vivian’s mind reeled in horror as she kicked her way out of her impromptu sleeping bag and stumbled to her feet. Once the blanket was off, she could see that it too was smeared with broad swaths of dried blood.
As her heart began to pound against her compressed lungs, Vivian gave herself a quick examination. A tiny relieved sigh escaped her lips as she realized that the blood was not hers. Her eyes flashed frantically around the sketchy campsite. Bobby and Trent were still exactly where she had last seen them the night before, unconscious and vigorously snoring. Sherri lay on her back in the middle of the road with her limbs splayed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Vivian couldn’t hear her snoring but could mark the swells of her healthy, dreamlike respiration with the rising and falling of her frigid chest. They were all unharmed.
In a panic, Vivian’s head swiveled so quickly that she passed right over what she was looking for three full times before she spotted it by the side of the vandalized billboard. Erik’s body lay crumpled in the tall grass, leaning against the edge of the sign, showing no apparent signs of life.
“Erik?” she squeaked. “Erik, are you okay?”
She scrambled over to where he lay, and her hand shot to her mouth to stifle a scream. Erik’s chest was soaked in a pool of dried blood, covered only with the palm of his limp right hand.
“Erik?” she gasped, dropping to her knees. “What happened? Erik!” She pulled his hand off of his bloody chest and let out a relieved breath. There was no massive chest wound. There wasn’t even a rip in his shirt. But the blood? She turned his hand over to see his slender palm torn open and fringed with ragged skin. A quick investigation showed his left hand to be wrapped around her Swiss Army Knife, also soaked in the blood of a mangled palm and twisted with tiny fibers of yellow plastic.
With Vivian yanking at his arms, Erik roused groggily.
“Erik! Your hands!” she exclaimed. “What happened?” Erik blinked dimly and looked Vivian in her trembling green eyes.
“Rubbin’ sticks didden work,” he mumbled sleepily. “Can’t makea fire. Made a blanket insead.”
With that, he closed his eyes wearily and slumped off the side of the billboard into the dusty gray dirt. Erik’s muttered words unraveled the previous night’s sequence of events in Vivian’s mind. He must have rubbed those sticks for hours before giving up and devising a Plan B.
“Oh Erik,” she said, “why did you do this to yourse-” She squatted down next to Erik’s collapsed body, but before she could right him, she suddenly noticed something beyond the edge of the billboard. She blinked hard to clear what must have been a mirage, but it remained steadfastly in position, not a hundred yards behind the tower of tourist trap advertising. Nestled off the highway, on a loop of blacktop that could only be called an offramp in the most liberal of definitions, sat a sleepy little mom-and-pop gas station surrounded by a rusted platoon of old green military Jeeps in various states of decomposition. Vivian grabbed Erik by the shoulders and shook him from his dozing.
“Erik,” she whispered reverently. “Erik, you found it!”
“Wha?” Erik said, rubbing his bleary eyes. “Whadd I find?” Vivian stood up and turned toward the others, gleefully ecstatic.
“You guys! Wake up! Wake up and come here!”
She could hear the sounds of interrupted snoring, muffled stirring, and coughed complaints coming from the other side of the massive sign. A moment later, Bobby, Trent, and Sherri had assembled at her side.
“A gas station!” Vivian pointed. “Look! Erik found it!” Trent looked at Erik and frowned irritably.
“Little E didn’t find anything, oh ye of little faith,” he muttered. “It was the sign, yo. The sign led to our salvation. Just like the T told you it would.”
“Yeah, great work,” Bobby said sarcastically. “We could have slept on something soft inside that building last night if God hadn’t put this giant comforting sign in our way.”
“Or we could have walked past it in the dark and never found it at all,” Trent countered.
Sherri interrupted the argument with a rasping, trachea-blistering cough.
“Are you all right?” Vivian asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” Sherri croaked. “I just need my wake-up smoke. Man, I’d give anything for a cigarette right now.”
“A lot of good it would do ya,” Erik said, raising his shredded palms for display.
“Even if you had one, you couldn’t light it.”
Sherri turned to him with a squint of incomprehension.
“And why not?” she asked.
With that, she whipped out a silver Zippo lighter and produced two inches of dancing yellow-blue flame with a snap of her finger against the flintwheel. Erik folded his clotting palms under his arms with a scowl.
“Never mind,” he moped.
“Well, I don’t know about you good folks, but I’m starvin’ like Lee Marvin,” Trent said, thrusting out a genteel elbow. “I know we skipped the step that traditionally comes before, but could I escort you to breakfast anyway, Vivi?”
“Go to Hell, Trent,” Vivian growled.
“I’d go anywhere for you,” Trent said. “But I won’t go there.”
“Jesus, I’ve only been awake for five seconds, and you people are already annoying the piss out of me,” Sherri grumbled. “Let me at that gas station already. I need a pack of cancer sticks to complete my balanced breakfast.” Following Sherri’s lead, the group stretched the remaining sleep out of their weary bodies and took off at a somewhat refreshed pace for the nearby filling station. The gas station was what some would describe as “quaint.” The building was outfitted in a worn-down clapboard siding that had once been a dull maroon color but was in the process of weathering itself down to a previous coat of a dull mustard that it seemed to prefer. A Confederate flag fluttered limply in the slow breeze from a flagpole jutting from the side of the building, and over the door hung a weathered wooden sign bearing the words “The South will rise again!”
The hulks of the Jeeps that crouched near the building were overgrown with weeds and were leaking various unpleasant fluids into the dirt. Whoever had accumulated these rusty derelicts had obviously been trying to cobble them into one working specimen but had utterly and completely failed.
In the driveway sat two square, stainless steel gas pumps from a time in history somewhere after “antique” but before “modern,” just skirting the edge of “obsolete.” The front of the building featured a homey porch, haunted by a wooden rocking chair and a chunky red cooler that whispered “Enjoy Coca-Cola” from under a heavy blanketing of filth.
“All right!” Erik exclaimed. “The pause that refreshes!” He scrambled onto the porch and yanked open the antique cooler. Inside he found six glass bottles of cola floating in a pool of lukewarm water. He pulled one out, wrenched off the top with the cooler’s built-in bottle opener, and dumped the whole thing down his dry throat without coming up for air.
“Ahhh,” he said with a satisfied belch. “Can’t beat the real thing.”
“It’s about time,” Sherri said, stomping onto the porch and sticking out her hand.
“Gimme one!”
Erik fished a
wet bottle out of the cooler, popped it open, and slipped it into her slender fingers.
“Catch the wave,” he smiled.
Sherri plugged the bottle into her lips, took an impressively long swig, and then spat out the soda like a carbonated volcano.
“Aaaugh! This isn’t beer!” she gasped, foam dripping from her tiny chin. “Why didn’t you say this was Coke?”
“Didn’t I?” Erik asked with confusion.
“This is bullshit,” Sherri declared. “I’m going to find some real food.”
“I’m with you,” Bobby said. “Let’s eat already. I feel like somebody did an ‘rm star’ on my stomach.”
He grabbed the handle of the sagging front door and pulled it in a scraping arc across the plank floor. The second the door had cleared the jamb, an overwhelming stench of putrid meat poured from the interior of the general store. Everyone on the porch took a stumbling step backward and interjected their personal favorite expletive.
“Good Lord,” Trent muttered, holding his nose. “What crawled all up in there and died?”
“It smells like everything in the meat cooler has spoiled,” Vivian said. “This place has probably been without power for about two days now.”
“Fuck it,” Sherri sighed, pulling her T-shirt over her nose. “I’m starving. I don’t care what it smells like-I’m getting some breakfast.”
With that, she marched boldly through the door’s dark outline in the strawberry jam of her vision.
“You gotta do what you gotta do,” Bobby shrugged, pulling his own shirt over his face. “C’mon, let’s go shoplifting.”
Vivian stood on the front porch, looking into the shadowy darkness on the other side of the door. Although the smell of rancid meat was almost physically overpowering, all she could smell was a non-existent aroma of burnt soda and spilt blood running down her chin. While her nose tingled with phantom odors, her freshly carved scars burned up and down her back. Her paralyzed mind was trying to tell her that it had detected a pattern.
Every time she went into a building something very bad happened to her.
“I … I’m not actually that hungry. It’s … you know, the smell and everything,” she said with affected nonchalance. “Erik, could you please just grab me something for later?”
Two steps to the right of Vivian, a frozen Erik stared into the darkened doorway. Just inside the entrance, a shaft of faint daylight fell across a rack of Doritos 3Ds. He remembered the circumstances surrounding the last time that he had seen that red foil bag, and an imaginary reflux of nacho-cheese-flavored stomach acid burned in the back of his throat. He shook his head, and in his mind the Doritos became the walls of a parking garage coming down around him like clods of earth into a grave. Independently reaching the same conclusion that Vivian had, he opened his eyes and took a nervous step backward.
“Nuh-uh. No. No way,” he stammered. “Forget breakfast-I wouldn’t go in there for all the gold in Scrooge McDuck’s vault.”
Trent shook his head disgustedly, then bowed before Vivian and kissed her hand with a smarmy grin.
” I’ll bring you something, sweet Vivi,” he said heroically. “We real men exist only to serve the fairer sex. I would be honored to bring you whatever tasty treats your little heart desires.”
Vivian turned her eyes to the ground shamefully.
“Thanks, Trent,” she muttered. “I’m not picky. Just bring me something that’s not spoiled and has some nutritional value, please.”
“Your wish is my command,” Trent cooed, holding his nose and sweeping himself into the store.
“God, what a tool,” Erik grumbled. “Bobby, could you just grab something for me too while you’re in there?”
“Ha! Do I look like I want to get into your pants?” Bobby laughed. “Get your own food, wussy.”
“Come on, Bobby,” Erik whimpered. “I don’t care what it is-just grab me something, okay?”
“God, you are such a pain in the ass,” Bobby grumbled.
He stepped into the store and grabbed the first thing he could reach. It was a flimsy wire rack that held an assortment of three-foot-long plastic tubes hanging from cardboard tags. He planted it on the planks of the front porch like a climber who had just reached the summit of Mount Everest.
“Thaaya. Guurly men get Pixie Stix,” he bellowed in a comical exaggeration of an Austrian accent. “Eat uup, flabby man.”
Erik’s face fell.
“Thanks, man,” he muttered disappointedly. “That’ll … that’ll be okay. I guess.” Bobby rolled his eyes.
“Dude. Don’t be so sensitive, I was just messin’ with ya,” he sighed. “Don’t worry, I’ll find you guys something good. But if you aren’t coming in here, you have to find some way to get the gas back to the car. Deal?”
“Okay, yeah. Right!” Erik said with a sheepish smile. “Okay, deal. Thanks, Bobby.”
With a nod, Bobby took the Army backpack from Vivian and disappeared into the store. Erik pulled one of the huge Pixie Stix from the rack and dropped heavily onto the front step. He pulled the cardboard top off of the enormous straw and tipped a pile of blue sugar onto his tongue. Once it started flowing, the column of powder exploded from the straw and slammed against the back of his throat. He jerked his head forward with a gagging cough, pouring a mouthful of wet blue crystals down his chin and through his slashed hands.
“Ow! Ow! Shit!” he coughed, wiping his bloodied palms on his shirt. “That stuff smarts!”
With each downward stroke on the destroyed fabric of his polo shirt, the holes in its sides stretched open like two diseased mouths gnawing at his infected skin. Vivian could see that his bandages were fouled with grime and pus. With each explosive cough of Pixie Stix dust, the scars seemed to leap against their sheath, pressing nightmarishly shaped lumps against the thin barrier.
“Erik,” Vivian asked cautiously, “are you, you know … okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he gagged. “I hate these mutant-sized Pixie Stix. Every time I put one in my mouth I end up almost choking to death.”
“No no,” Vivian said, casting her eyes at his gnarled belly, “I mean, are you …
okay? ”
Erik narrowed his eyes at her, then nodded in understanding.
“Ohhhh, right,” he said, looking at his torn-up palms. “Yeah, I’m okay. I just wish I’d thought of cutting a blanket out of the billboard before trying to make a fire. I guess my hands have never really done anything more rugged than playing ColecoVision.”
Vivian rolled her eyes. She couldn’t tell whether Erik was intentionally dodging her question or not. Either way, she did owe him some gratitude.
“Thanks for trying to make a fire for me, and for the blanket,” she said softly.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Eh, you know. It’s no big deal,” Erik said shyly. ” I couldn’t sleep last night anyway. Let’s just say that I don’t exactly feel okay.”
Vivian’s eyes opened wide.
“So you don’t feel okay?” she said nervously. “How so?” Erik’s eyes darted with embarrassment.
“Well, uh … to put it discreetly, I feel like I haven’t taken a dump since Mork and Mindy was on the air.”
Vivian closed her eyes tightly as if to shut out that imagery.
“Well, thank you,” she muttered. “Just … thanks again, for everything.”
“Hey, it’s no problem,” Erik smiled.
Vivian knew it was just the candy, but it still bothered her that his teeth had been turned a bright, glistening blue.
Bobby, Sherri, and Trent fanned out between the blue steel shelves of the tiny, foul-smelling convenience store. The peculiar architecture of the interior suggested that this gas station had once been a private residence that had been retrofitted for retail. Although most of the walls had been knocked out to make the space more commercially friendly, a seemingly random scattering of load-bearing structures broke the store into a circular labyrinth of at least four
semi-autonomous rooms. Without power to the clumsily dispersed fluorescent shop lights above, the store’s windows were too small and ineffectively placed in the building’s current configuration to allow more than a dusty gray veil of light to pour across the shelves and against its walls.
“Whoa, it’s like if Rambo moved to Hazzard County,” Bobby quipped. “Look at this place!”
Above the shelves of expired snack foods and warm sodas, the upper perimeter of the store was encircled with a mishmash of framed plaques, pictures cut from magazines, and old girlie calendars. From where he was standing, Bobby could see a picture postcard from Stone Mountain Park (“The Mount Rushmore of the South!”), a torn poster of a Camaro painted up in camouflage, and half a dozen sleazy pin-ups of melon-breasted bikini models holding oversized firearms.
“Disgusting,” Trent said. “Women are not objects.” With a glance to make sure he wasn’t being watched, he snagged a picture of a voluptuous redhead with a flamethrower and stuffed it in his pocket.
“Hey, B-Money,” he continued, “what delicacies would tickle your fine sister’s discriminating palate? As her knight in shining armor, I intend to bring her back a meal that’s fit for a princess, such as she is.”
Bobby sighed deeply and ran his hand over his stubbly face.
“Look, Trent, I’m going to level with you here in an attempt to save us all a lot of headache. You are not going to sleep with Vivian. Ever. Trust me, I’ve seen her reject guys that were only one-quarter as disgusting as you.” Trent shrugged.
“Just you watch, dawg. Once the T turns on the charm, the ladies always-”
“Dude! Seriously,” Bobby interrupted. “Give it up. Your bullshit is not going to work on her.”
“Come on, B. We’re pals!” Trent nudged. “Give me the inside scoop. What’s it gonna take to win her over?”
Bobby blew a long breath through pursed lips and shook his head.
“Okay. How can I put this so that you can understand it?” he brooded. “The only way you would even have the slightest possibility of a chance with Vivian is if every single other guy on the planet was dead. Do you get that?”
The Oblivion Society Page 25