“No, not human flesh,” Erik sneered, fixing Trent with a glare. “Quit putting words in my mouth!”
“I think we all know what you want in your mouth,” Trent said, grasping his own arm like an oversized turkey leg and pretending to take a bite.
Bobby stepped forward and put his heavy palm on Trent’s face, shoving him away.
“On Get Smart, ” he asked, “what was Agent 99’s real name?”
“Barbara Feldon.”
“Wrong! That’s the actress’s name! I want the character’s name!”
“That’s a trick question!” Erik protested. “Agent 99 had no real name!”
“He’s right,” Bobby nodded.
“If I asked if you liked smelling little girls’ used underwear,” Sherri interjected,
“would your answer be the same as the answer to this question?”
“No!” Erik shouted. “Er … yes! I mean … you’re disgusting!”
“What does it feel like?” Vivian blurted.
“It’s humiliating,” Erik blushed.
“No, I mean … the arms. Are they hurting you?”
“They’re not. It doesn’t hurt at all,” he admitted. “It doesn’t even feel like they’re a part of me. I can’t control them, but I can feel them.” He paused.
“When they grabbed the bottle, I could feel the glass, but … but it was like I was feeling it in my real hands. They’re like … it’s like they’re my real arms’ evil twins. It’s like having unwelcome guests in my own body. It’s … it’s weird.” Vivian stroked back the mop of Erik’s beer-soaked bangs and looked into his eyes. He could feel the warmth of her breath on his cheeks and smell the old cabbage on her skin.
“You poor thing,” she whispered solemnly.
Trent looked at Vivian gazing sympathetically into Erik’s sorrowful blue eyes and scowled angrily. He jealously stepped to the front of the rocker, gently nudging Vivian away with a protective shove of his forearm. Turning to Erik, he lightly slapped his right cheek, as if challenging him to a duel. He continued to slap the left, then the right again.
“Trent, stop it,” Vivian spat.
“Yeah, knock it off, jerkbag!” Erik winced.
“Make me, freak, ” Trent smirked, slapping him again.
“I would if my arms weren’t tied behind my back, you cowardly prick bastard!”
“But they’re not, are they, bro?” Trent said coolly. “Not all of them.” Erik’s mutant arms lay flaccidly across his lap like the empty sleeves of a gorilla costume.
“I just told you,” he seethed, “I can’t control them!”
“Well, somebody’s controlling them, and I have a pretty good idea who it is,” Trent said, pointing dramatically downward toward the pits of Hell. “So, you can’t control them, right? Well, what part are you going to lose control over next, E? Your legs? Your brain? Who are they going to attack next? Are they gonna be all up on me again? Or on your boy B here? Or what if they take a savage interest in the defenseless blind girl’s fragile feminine form? Then what?”
Erik cast his eyes helplessly to the stony pavement.
“I … I really don’t know,” he admitted.
Bobby intervened, thrusting Trent aside with his hip and clapping his hands distractingly.
” Duh-nuh nuh-nuh-nuh! Fresh air!”
” Duh-nuh nuh-nuh-nuh . Times Square,” Erik returned pathetically.
“Yep, this is Erik alright,” Bobby said conclusively. “No self-respecting zombie would watch Green Acres. ”
“Be serious, Bobby!” Vivian snapped, losing all patience. She squatted down in front of Erik and leaned in, putting her hands on his bound knees.
“Erik, do you feel like … do you feel like you’re going to hurt somebody?”
“No!” Erik said defensively. “I don’t! I absolutely don’t! Vivian, please! How could you even think that I could-”
In the middle of his sentence, the sharp, yellow-clawed fingers of his mutant hands raised ghoulishly from his lap and extended toward Vivian’s soft, freckled cheeks. With a squeak of terror, she slapped them away, lost her balance, and fell on her behind.
“I’m sorry!” Erik yelled frantically. “Vivian, I’m sorry! I didn’t-” Vivian scrambled to her feet.
“I’m sorry, Erik! I didn’t mean to-”
“I’m sorry!” Erik repeated. “I wasn’t going to hurt you! I’d never hurt you!”
“I know, it just … they just …” Vivian murmured quietly. “I know you wouldn’t, Erik.”
Trent watched the tense affection sizzle back and forth between Erik and Vivian, and a new line of questioning suddenly popped into his greasy head. He nudged Vivian aside and spoke with a sudden airiness.
“Little E, have you ever been in love?”
Erik’s distressed gaze broke from Vivian and landed on Trent.
“What?”
“You know. The big one. The three little words,” Trent said smoothly, coming to stand in front of the rocking chair. “I’m guessing that you’ve never made love to a woman, but nonetheless, tell me, have you ever really, really, loved a woman?”
“What are you getting at, Bryan Adams?” Erik said defensively. “Are you trying to say that I’m gay or something? Just because I don’t try to stick it in every girl I like doesn’t mean that I-”
“Whoa whoa! Easy, E. So maybe you’ve loved a woman. Maybe you even still do,” Trent said pointedly, leaning in toward Erik’s face without coming into claw range. “Let me ask you this, friend. This woman that you love. Think about her. Imagine her beauty. Think about the way that her eyes glimmer in the moonlight or the way that her hair hangs across the silky skin of her neck. Think of the soft curve of her body where the small of her back melts into her perfect derrière. Are you picturing her?”
Erik glared at Trent without saying a word. Trent continued.
“Would you leave this woman you love alone and unprotected with a thing like you? A creature so far removed from God’s great design that he can’t even account for the aggressions of his own body? Would ‘I’m sorry, I can’t control them’ cut it when you’re standing over her laying in a pool of her own sweet blood after you’ve done the unmentionable? Would it?! ”
Erik turned his head and looked at the stony faces of his friends, gathered in the driveway to his left. Tears rolled from Vivian’s eyes as they darted to the ground to avoid his glance. When Erik looked his way, Bobby quickly took off his glasses and guiltily pretended to blow dust from them. Sherri was the only one who didn’t look away. Her reddened eyes just stared straight through him with a kind of visual shrug that suggested neither accusation nor compassion.
“Last question, E,” Trent said. “Do you realize that this is not just going to get better? Do you recognize, in your heart, that you are no longer one of us, and you never will be?”
Erik’s friends didn’t look at him. Erik didn’t look at any of his friends. He didn’t look at Trent or the sword in his hands. He just looked down at the bony, hairy arms and the hooked yellow claws hanging impossibly from his own abdomen. They looked so harmless lying across his lap, but even he didn’t know how long they, or he, would stay that way.
“I … I can only say what I know,” Erik stammered, his eyes welling up. “I don’t know what’s happened to me, but I know in my heart that I would never hurt you guys. I’ll always be your friend. I just wish that I could show you all how much I-” Erik’s tearful speech was cut short by the sound of Trent’s blade cutting through the air with a shrill swish, terminating in a muffled, organic crack and a guttural choke.
With a startled leap, the red-headed twins’ averted eyes shot toward the grisly noise and then seized in horror. They saw Erik in grim profile, his mouth hanging frozen in a silent scream. Trent stood before him with both hands wrapped around the hilt of the blade that was now buried in the top of Erik’s wretched skull. Vivian’s icy terror melted into a scream as a wave of anguish emptied her strangled lungs and dropped her to her
knees in the dust. Sherri, for once speechless, rubbed her shocked eyes and squinted at what she was sure she had not just seen. Bobby just stood and stared in a stunned paralysis, his round, pasty face blossoming red with rage.
“No … no! ” he choked. “Trent, you savage son of a bitch!” His trembling legs began to carry him toward Trent as his flexing arms prepared to perform some act of barbarism yet to be fully conceived. Before Bobby laid a hand on Trent, however, Erik’s jaw began to quiver at the corner of his ashen face, then came alive with a hysterical scream.
“Aaaahaaahahahahaa!” Erik wailed. “Shit shit! Help me! Holy shit, somebody stop this idiot! Shiiiit!”
As he screamed, Erik’s tightly bound body went into spastic convulsions, thrashing the chair around in a scraping quarter-circle on the pavement until it faced his friends. The new perspective revealed Trent’s sword to be wedged firmly in the wood of the rocking chair, six inches from the side of Erik’s intact head.
“Sit still, you freak!” Trent screamed, yanking to free his captured blade. “The power of Christ compels you, beotch!”
With a blast of dry splinters, the sword broke through the wood, freeing the blade and splitting the old chair nearly in two. Erik continued to scream and thrash, forcing the weakened structure of the chair to completely give way around him, leaving him flailing on the ground tied to nothing but shattered debris. Bobby grabbed his best friend by his bindings and hauled him out of the way just as Trent’s blade smashed into the blacktop.
“Trent, are you out of your mind?!” Bobby screamed. “Put that down, you idiot!”
“Step aside, B! I cannot allow this perversion to live!” Trent cried. “Go back to Hell, where you came from, demon!”
Trent raised his sword over his head to finish the job. With a burst of sneakers against blacktop, Vivian launched at Trent, throwing him off-balance with a bony shoulder to his chest, aborting his deadly swing but failing to return him to the ground.
“Trent, stop it!” she screamed, punching and clawing at his sunburnt skin. “Stop it! Leave him alone!”
“I have to protect you!” Trent wailed. “That whiny bastard is a blasphemy on legs! Ouch, shit! You’re not safe with a half-breed freak like him around! None of us are! Thou shalt not suffer a mutant to live! Stand back, Vivi! I said stand back! ” With a fiery flash of his eyes, Trent threw out his muscular arm, planting the heel of his palm into Vivian’s bandaged chest with a powerful, resounding thump. The blow hit Vivian like a shot from a cannon. Her eyes dilated as the wind was completely knocked out of her, and she felt herself suddenly drowning in open air. It was as if Trent’s hand had plowed all the way through her body, pushing her organs through her back in a gooey clump.
As she stumbled back, unable to draw breath, she could feel a cold, splitting wetness pour from her shoulders to her waist. Her corset of canvas bandages shredded and exploded from her body as a pair of grotesque limbs erupted from the gouges in her back. Two unfolding expanses of black flesh stretched across a framework of thin, bony struts, forming a hideous pair of bat wings! The sails billowed out to Vivian’s sides in a four-foot span that threw a sinister shadow over the crouching form of Trent’s petrified body. A single flap of their leathery mass filled the air with a thrown-off mist of clotted blood and oily pus.
“Don’t you touch him,” she growled menacingly.
Without breaking her steadfast glare into Trent’s unbelieving eyes, Vivian inhaled a deep, full breath into her suddenly unconstricted lungs, took one shaky step, and promptly passed out in his arms. Her head tipped back over his thick forearm, throwing the soft warmth of her hair cascading across his cold skin.
Bobby, Erik, and Sherri stared at them, all motionless, all with their jaws hanging open, limp as wet laundry on a clothesline. None of them spoke. None of them even blinked.
Vivian’s mutant wings hung placidly from her unconscious shoulders, their tips collecting dry dust as they dragged on the ground. The shredded polyester of her abused cocktail dress hung low across her bosom, affording Trent an ample view of her apple-pie tanned cleavage heaving in the newly afforded freedom of respiration. Trent looked for a long, introspective moment at Erik’s arms, then back at the curves of Vivian’s warm, mutated body. He dropped the sword and took Vivian tightly in his arms.
“Okay, I’ve decided,” he said. “Little E is okay after all.”
CHAPTER NINE
The refueled Rabbit shattered the silence of the thrashed Carolina pine forest as its overloaded engine screamed up the abandoned interstate. Trent was gangsta leanin’ in the driver’s seat, with his left arm resting on the crumbling doorframe and his right hand hanging in a limp curl over the top of the wheel. In his own mind he was driving a slammed ‘69 Buick full of hoochies down the Sunset Strip, and nobody bothered to tell him otherwise. Vivian sat in the passenger seat, and the others were packed in behind them. A tangible feeling of claustrophobic annoyance had been piling up in the tiny car like sand in the bottom of an hourglass as the hours trickled into the past.
Erik’s bored eyes scanned the shoulder of the road for the next installment of a running gag that had been running for hundreds of miles.
“So much maple, you won’t want to leaf, ” he moaned in a parody of comic delivery. “North of the Border, one hundred and thirty-two miles.” As he said the words, the car blasted past a faded billboard depicting the thirty-foot-tall cartoon Mountie wielding two oversized jugs of maple syrup.
“Get it? Maple? Leaf? ” Erik continued. “Because he’s Canadian, you see …” Trent scowled into the rearview mirror.
“Seriously, y’all,” he muttered. “I can’t be the only one having second thoughts about not killing him.”
“Give it a rest, Trent,” Sherri growled. “You’re lucky we don’t kill you. After all, you’re the only one who’s gone batshit and started attacking people.”
“Aw, now that ain’t fair,” Trent smoldered. “You know I was just tryin’ to protect all y’all. How was I supposed to know that Little E was okay?”
“You could have taken my word for it,” Erik spat bitterly.
“God, will you two shut up already? You’ve been at this for hours,” Bobby moaned. “Yes, we let paranoia get the best of us. Yes, it got out of control. Yes, we all screwed up. Especially Trent.”
“Hey!” Trent snapped. “All I did was-”
“So let’s just forget it and move on,” Bobby continued. “No harm, no foul.”
“No harm?” Erik squealed. “That asshole tried to put a sword in my-”
“Erik, please, ” Bobby interrupted, rubbing his eyes with frustration. “For the love of God …”
Erik smirked and leaned heavily on the side of the convertible without another word. To his left, Sherri grouchily shifted her weight between his abundance of knobby forelimbs on one side and Bobby’s unforgiving girth on the other. Her vision had mostly cleared, yet her ability to see color had been completely lost, replaced with a monochrome haze of pinkish tones. Where her ghostly blue irises had once been, there now remained only two cotton-candy-colored rings of bloodstain to serve as a permanent reminder of her temporary flash blindness. Her brutally sunburnt skin hung from her body in a thinning, feathery layer of dry, peeling flesh. As the worn fabric of Bobby’s overstuffed T-shirt rubbed up against her, brittle curls of dead epithelial cells flaked off her arm, revealing dark patches of bronze lurking beneath.
“God damn it,” she complained, slapping Bobby’s relaxed flab with her tiny, crumbling palms. “I swear, the next time we stop I’m going to slice you open and let the lard pour out until you fit in a car seat like a normal person. When was the last time you got any exercise, Tubby?”
“Well, let me see,” Bobby said gruffly. “If I recall correctly, I think it was this morning when I carried thirty pounds of gas up the highway for five hours while your lazy ass sat around the convenience store eating chewing tobacco.”
“Hey, screw you,” Sherri shot back. “While you a
nd Trent took your sweet-ass time bringing the car back, I was kneeling next to Jeeps and sucking like the head cheerleader on prom night. You think all those gas tanks in the trunk filled themselves? My lips are swollen up like an anorexic supermodel’s and my breath smells like the ass end of a go-cart!”
“Yeah?” Bobby challenged. “Well, I had to spend five hours alone with Trent. ” Sherri folded her arms in a huff.
“Fine. You win.”
Oblivious to the constant, frustrated bickering around her, Vivian sat in a silent denial in the passenger seat. She was focusing all of her energy on ignoring the fact that a pair of leathery black wings were currently folded over her icy shoulders like a bony vampire cape. In an attempt to distract herself from her own physique, her green eyes scoured the side of the darkening interstate for any sign of life. All she could see, however, was another lonely green highway marker leaning by the roadside like a tombstone.
Kickapoo - 14 miles
Baneberry - 27 miles
She glanced up through the cracked windshield. Fourteen miles ahead, the gray sky was split in two by a five-mile-wide tongue of charcoal-black smoke lapping the ground on the right side of the road. Another thirteen miles beyond that, a second streak billowed upward menacingly from the left. With a long, silent blink, Vivian crossed the cities of Kickapoo and Baneberry, South Carolina, off of the map in her mind. This was a ritual that she had been repeating with an increasing sense of despondency ever since the identical black funnel of a destroyed Stillwater had disappeared in her rearview mirror.
Vivian hunkered down into her seat and petulantly yanked the thick blanket of her wings around her head for warmth. As long as they were there, she may as well make the most of them, she reasoned. Although reason was now more foreign to her than ever.
There was no valid reason for her to have grown bat wings. It was biologically impossible. Yet there they were. And just as Twiki’s twisted body had done before, these wings were growing at an alarming rate. It had only been a matter of hours since the mutant limbs had erupted from the slashes in her ragged dress, yet her wingspan had already expanded by at least two nightmarish feet.
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