“Ingloo boo,” he thought. “Inner igloo … bamboo? Internet igloo broadband … hullabaloo? Insanity igloo brain shampoo?”
He stared at the blank spot and blinked.
“I got nothin’,” he admitted.
Vivian stomped down a decimated aisle of bent steel and broken glass. When she felt that she had put adequate distance between herself and the boys, she slumped against the concrete wall, sliding her winged back down its curve until she was sitting on the floor with her knees bunched up to her chest. She was tense and aggravated, and although she was directing her rage toward Trent, she knew it wasn’t really because of him. He was merely a catalyst. He was the drawstring on the garbage bag of horror and chaos that was enveloping her entire life.
She slipped her fingers under her glasses and wiped her slightly pooling eyes, focusing blankly on the shelf in front of her. It was conspicuously empty. Slightly to her side, a large cardboard box sat in the aisle. The heavy-duty staples of its top had been wrenched free by unknown fingers, and its top was hanging open as if in anticipation. She lifted one of the flaps curiously and read the label. SIX (6) - NOTB II MOUNTIE FRIENDS - #4 MORTIMER.
“NOTB II?” she thought. “This is North of the Border two? I wonder where the original one is.”
Her mind wandered as her fingers slid over the rough corrugation of the cardboard flap. The tactile sensation of this box of unstocked merchandise instantly flashed her back to her old life. It reminded her of Boltzmann’s Market and the mundane grind of mindlessly stocking shelf after shelf of this or that, day after day. She pushed herself away from the wall and knelt down in front of the box; in so doing she noticed something else on the floor. It was a small pink flip-flop. The sandal was typical, made of cheap foam and injected plastic. The only thing noteworthy about it was its covering of telltale bloodstains. The empty shelf again caught her eye, and her lip started to quiver. She knew that this sandal had come from someone just like her. Someone who wasted her entire life working for minimum wage. Someone who would never return to unpack this box of unstocked merchandise.
She set the flip-flop on the floor respectfully and reached into the abandoned box. Three aisles away, Erik found a ball of gray fabric lying atop a shelf of otherwise colorful T-shirts. He picked it up and shook it, revealing a hooded sweatshirt with the words “North of” embroidered to one side of the zipper and “the Border” to the other. He slipped it on and held out his arms in appreciation. It was a good fit, and if he didn’t zip it up, his extra limbs hung unmolested through its open front. Bobby wandered up to his friend, muttering to himself, obviously deep in thought.
“Inbred igloo birth taboo?”
Erik turned to him with a questioning blink.
“What did you just say?”
“Wha? Oh, nothing, nothing …”
Sherri wandered up behind Bobby and barked through barbecue-scented-worm breath.
“Man, it’s cold as a polar bear’s ass in here. Haven’t you clowns found anything that I can wear yet?”
Trent swept in out of nowhere, pulling open the front of his oversized varsity jacket with a grin.
“You just need to learn how to share the wealth, my dear,” he said greasily.
“There’s more than enough room in here for both of us.”
Sherri squinted hard into the dim light, tracing Trent’s form with her weakened eyes.
“If I wanted that baggy-ass preppie shit I’d have already killed you for it,” she muttered. “I’d rather wear my own piece of shit coat than look like I’m fucking a high-school quarterback.”
Erik pulled off his sweatshirt and handed it to her.
“Here, take this,” he said apologetically. “You need it more than I do.” Trent snatched the hoodie from Erik’s hand and threw it to the ground.
“And shroud this pretty young thing in ill-fitting cotton with mutant juju on it?” he said. “Have a little bit of chivalry, Little E. For real! I can do better than your raggedy ‘ol hand-me-downs.”
He plucked the tiny white jacket from the shelf where he had deposited it earlier, giving it a single, showy flap in the air.
“You can’t deny that it’s your size, petite princess,” he said with a grin. “And, excluding yours truly, it’s got to be the warmest thing in the house!” Sherri looked at the dainty white coat hanging from Trent’s hands as the cold of the sarcophagus-like room sliced through her bones. As she reached out and touched the furry cuff of the jacket, the mangled sleeve of her own useless leather coat fell away from her skinny arm, exposing its peeled, flaky surface to the frigid air. Though she could barely see the white jacket in the dim light, she could feel its quilted nylon sliding warmly between her trembling fingertips.
Her shoulders slumped with a resigned sigh.
“Nahh, I’d rather freeze to death than wear that Gymboree bullshit,” she said. “I’m just gonna go outside and set something on fire.”
With that, she stomped to the corner of the room, planted her palms into a pair of stainless steel push bars, and disappeared through an unknown exit. Erik squinted at the hidden metal doors as they were automatically pulled closed by a pair of old-fashioned pneumatic elbows.
“But the exit is … that … way?” he said with bewilderment, pointing behind him at the cement tunnel through which they had entered.
“Hey, cool!” Bobby beamed. “Sherri found the entrance door!”
“To what?” Erik asked.
“Damned if I know,” Bobby said.
Vivian pulled a heavy statuette from the box and set it on the empty shelf with a sentimental gleam in her eye. The figure was a six-inch praying mantis dressed in full Mountie regalia, cast in solid pewter in a rounded cartoon style. Like its bumblebee counterpart that guarded the door, the miniature Mountie stood at attention, bulbous eyes fixed on an unseen flag, clawed hand to his head in salute. Vivian saluted the figure gravely.
“In memoriam,” she whispered, “of the fallen clerks of the …” She squinted at the text engraved on the figure’s bulky wooden base-“North of the Border … Insect Igloo Bug Zoo?”
Before she could wonder what these words meant, her attention was shattered by the sound of tiny fists and heavy boots pounding frantically on steel doors.
“Shit! Shit! They’re on me! They’re all over me!” Sherri’s muffled voice shrieked.
“There’s no fucking handles on this side! Open the fucking doors!” The words barely had time to hit Bobby’s ears before he had run to the door and slammed his palms into the steel release bar. As soon as the swinging door had cleared the entryway, Sherri exploded into the igloo like a screeching missile.
“Fuck! Fucker fuckshit!” she cried in revulsion. “Get ‘em off! Get ‘em off!” In the murky light of the camping lantern, clinging to the thrashing strands of Sherri’s coat were eight monstrous, crackling spiders, each spinning a silken web around a different part of its fresh, flailing prey. One specimen the size of a basketball clung heavily to her back, slipping and clawing against the remains of her jacket. Another the size of a severed hand scurried nimbly around her head, wrapping it with a dense, sticky blindfold of webbing. As if their size didn’t make them horrible enough, each rampaging spider sported an assortment of extra limbs so erratically placed as to guarantee that they were never a part of nature’s blueprint.
“Do something, you fuckers!” Sherri wailed. “Help me!” The others stood frozen in shocked terror. Vivian grabbed the first weapon that she could find. Wrapping a fist around the torso of Mortimer, the Mountie mantis, she leapt to her feet.
“Sherri!” she screamed. “Stand still!”
Vivian bounded to her friend’s side and swung the square, wooden base of the figure through a grossly oversized arachnid abdomen, throwing a heavy spatter of clear innards across the wall. The shattered spider immediately fell to the ground with a piercing shriek and a heavy splash of discharged viscera. The glistening chunks of its freshly broken exoskeleton glowed a bold, ghostly blue. Viv
ian turned frantically to the others.
“Get over here!” she squeaked. “Help me!”
Erik jumped toward Sherri and raised a palm over his shoulder in preparation of a fierce slap. The spider on her arm seemed to look directly at him with eight beady black eyes. There was a row of jet-black ant legs running in an uneven row down its back, each one of them clawing against the air as if scurrying against a ground that wasn’t there.
Erik put down his trembling hand with a girlish whimper, then raised it again. Holding his breath and biting his lower lip, he slapped at the crackling spiders with his four bare hands, knocking them willy-nilly off of Sherri’s frantic body. Bobby jumped around in a kind of grotesque Irish jig, stomping on each bloated creature that Erik knocked free. With each step, he left behind a puddle of crunched, glowing remains; with each new victim, his footing got less and less steady on the slicked linoleum floor.
“Ack! Ack! Nasty!” he grimaced.
Bobby could feel the slimy innards of the smashed mutants splattering over his Tevas and onto his exposed toes. Another frantic slap landed a spider the size of cantaloupe upside-down in front of his gooey feet. It righted itself with a surreal-looking undulation of its legs and started to scurry across the floor.
“Oh no you don’t,” Bobby grunted.
As he leapt to smash the spider under both feet, his sandals, lubricated with mutant arachnid guts, slipped on the floor, twisting his ankle with a pop. Swallowing a scream of pain, he tried to catch himself on his other leg, failed, and slammed into the broken remains of a glass shelving unit.
He made up for the scream that he had swallowed before with an agonized wail as a plate of shattered glass shelving sunk its jagged teeth into his doughy abdomen. In a flash of pure reflex, Bobby slammed his palms into the metal frame of the shelf, tipping it backward and extricating its blades from his gut with a sound like boots being pulled from mud. He made a move to retreat, but his greased feet went out from under him, dropping him flat on his back. He landed on the retreating spider, destroying it with a wet, splintering crack.
Bobby’s head swam through a sea of shock and pain, but he still could see the fruits of his actions coming to bear. When he had shoved the damaged shelf it had rocked sharply onto its back legs, and it was now swinging forward again toward an equilibrium that it would never find. Bobby managed to flip over onto his knees and make one slippery surge against the floor before the cracked shelf of the toppling unit slammed into his back.
“Bobby!” Vivian wailed. “No!”
She ran to her brother’s side and fell on her knees next to the wrecked shelves, dropping the slimy statuette by her side. The display unit’s heavy steel frame pinned Bobby to the ground, and its broken shelves had carved bloody gashes into the soft pink flesh of his back.
“Bobby!” Vivian sobbed. “Bobby, are you okay?”
Bobby lay with his cheek against the floor, barely moving. The blood from his back soaked through his spider-slime-tainted shirt and mingled with the pool created by the cuts in his belly.
“It burns,” he groaned. “It burns like a son of a bitch!” Vivian looked up to find Trent wrestling with the steel doors in an attempt to close off the unholy depths of the bug zoo. He had successfully shut one of the doors, but the other was still stubbornly wide open.
“I gotta close that shit up!” he wailed. “I can’t close it! It won’t close!” Even in the frenzy of the moment, Vivian could see that the pneumatic elbow of the door had been locked into its “open” position during Sherri’s explosive flight.
“Forget it!” Vivian screamed. “Get over here and help me!” Trent obediently scrambled to Vivian’s side, his feet sliding in the pool of blood and dimly glowing spider guts that spread from beneath her brother.
“Grab the other side of the frame!” Vivian ordered, grabbing one side herself.
“We’ve got to lift this off of him!”
Without a word, Trent did as he was told, and after a quick three-count, the two began to lift the heavy shelving off of Bobby’s wounded back. At that moment, an aimless blow from Erik’s continuously slapping hands detached an eleven-legged spider from Sherri’s shoulder, landing it directly on Trent’s straining chest. Trent immediately let go of the shelves in a screaming paroxysm of shock.
“Aaah! Aaaaagh! Shit!”
Bobby howled in pain as the suddenly unbalanced shelving unit slipped from Vivian’s grasp and crashed back down on his bloody back, but Trent didn’t even seem to notice. His terrified hands clawed frantically at the air in front of him, as if they were primed for action but had no idea what they were supposed to do.
“Lord Jesus Mary and Joseph!” he chattered in horror. “Shit shit shit!” In a reaction too quick for thought, Vivian wrapped her long fingers around the Mountie mantis and planted its blunt wooden base into Trent’s chest with a spider-shattering crunch. Trent’s gasping mouth dropped open as Vivian drew back her weapon, stretching out a gooey hammock of glowing innards and segmented legs. Barely acknowledging this grisly interruption of her rescue effort, Vivian threw down the statuette and returned to Bobby’s side.
“Now get over here and help me!” she demanded furiously. “And don’t drop it this time, you idiot!”
Trent croaked out a single, unintelligible word of argument before slumping into a wheezing pile on the floor, having had the wind completely knocked out of him. Erik slapped the last spider off of Sherri’s head and grabbed her by her thrashing shoulders. His mutant arms reached out and gently steadied her at the waist.
“Whoa whoa!” he said, stomping the retreating arachnid. “You’re okay! Stop fighting!”
He peeled away Sherri’s blindfold of moist webbing and swept it off her head. He tried to fling it to the floor, but it stuck to his fingers.
“It’s okay!” he assured her, shaking his entwined hand. “See? It’s okay! We’re safe! We’re safe.”
Sherri looked into Erik’s kind blue eyes and fell into his four arms, squeezing him in a trembling embrace.
“I … I … it …” she sobbed. “Thank you.”
“Whoa,” Erik said with surprise. “Are … are you crying? ”
“Shut up,” Sherri said, wiping a tear from her pink eye, “before I make you cry.” Before Erik could reply, the air was filled with a dense, crackling buzz. His head shot up in surprise, falling upon a mannequin dressed as a bee dressed as a Mountie.
“Oh shit,” he whimpered. ” Now I get it.”
“Erik!” Vivian screamed. “Behind you!”
Erik’s eyes flicked over his shoulder just in time to see a swarm of disgustingly swollen bumblebees burst through the door of the cursed bug zoo.
“Sherri!” he screamed. “Run!”
He turned to take his first fleeing step, stumbling into Sherri’s clinging body.
“Let go!” Erik screamed.
“I can’t!” Sherri cried.
She wrenched her arms in every direction, but her unwilling grip on Erik remained fast. The sticky strands of oversized spider webbing had adhered the arms of her mangled coat to his sides, effectively gluing the two of them together. Before either of them could realize what had happened, their opposing steps entwined their legs, dropping Sherri on her back and pulling Erik down on top of her.
“Get off! Get off!” Sherri coughed.
“I can’t,” Erik shrieked, clawing at her arms. “Let go!”
“I told you I can’t let go!” Sherri snapped.
Sherri and Erik flailed their limbs to no effect, like an eight-legged overturned turtle. Not only were Sherri’s arms stuck to Erik, but her back was now glued to the floor. She had become human flypaper.
Erik’s head flipped back and forth on his shoulders as he tried desperately to see the impending doom that he could hear buzzing and bearing down behind him. His glances afforded him only flashes of nightmarish deformity. A fleshy white scorpion stinger protruding from the side of a furry yellow thorax. A knotted green antenna sprouting from an
exploded black eye socket. A pair of pincers arcing sickeningly from a black and yellow back. Although each bee was a unique abomination of genetics, they all had one thing in common: a six-inch stinger poking menacingly from each backside.
The swarm turned in unison in the air, swirling into the high, darkened ceiling, then diving toward Erik’s vulnerable back. Pinned to the ground, Sherri could see the whole thing unfold and responded accordingly.
“Shiiiiiiiiiit!” she shrieked, screwing her eyes shut and squeezing the last breath out of Erik’s bony ribcage.
The next thing the immobilized pair heard was the squeak of rubber against linoleum, followed by the sound of ten softballs hitting the padded tarpaulin wall of a batting cage. Sherri opened her eyes to see Vivian standing astride their bound bodies, her wings a forming a protective canopy at their full, majestic extension. Dazed bumblebees piled in heaps on the floor around them, struggling against their own mutated forms to right themselves and return to the air. Vivian leapt up and came down with each foot crunching through the brittle shell of a confounded bee.
“Get up, you two!” she commanded, stomping another wriggling foe.
“We can’t!” Erik and Sherri howled in unison.
Vivian grabbed Erik by the shoulders and pulled him upward, but it was to no avail. Her friends were effectively welded to the floor, and the savage bumblebees were quickly righting themselves and buzzing back into flight. One landed on Vivian’s struggling shoulder with a pinch of bristly legs. She quickly threw a reedy fist into the insect’s furry face, knocking it into a broken heap on the floor.
“Trent!” she screamed. “Help me!”
Trent scrambled to his feet with a stagger, clutching his chest and gasping a breath into his bashed lungs. He pulled his sword from the ground and raised it above his head.
“Don’t worry, Vivi! I’ll save you!”
With a leap like Peter Pan, Trent slashed his sword through the swarm, completely missing every one of the oversized bees. Two more prancing swings yielded identical results, and a third nipped the edge of Vivian’s wing with the tip of his blade.
The Oblivion Society Page 33