The Oblivion Society

by Marcus Alexander Hart

  “Give me that!” Vivian yelled, wrenching the sword from his hands. “Make yourself useful and get those two off the floor!”

  “Your wish is my command, sweet-”

  “Just do it!” Vivian barked, shoving him toward the gluey mass of her friends. Trent braced with one foot on either side of the squirming pile of humanity and slid his hands under Erik’s arms.

  “Up and at ‘em, freak,” he growled.

  With that, he threw his head back and strained upward with all of his strength. Erik’s vertebrae each popped clearly and distinctly in sequence.

  “Ow-Jesus!” Erik squealed. “Stop it! Stop it before you break my back!” With a smug grin, Trent pulled again, but this time slightly more aggressively. Vivian clutched the sword in both hands and watched the diminished swarm as it regrouped at the ceiling. There were seven bees left. She sprinted to Bobby’s side and kneeled down near his head, keeping her eye on the airborne insects.

  “Bobby, come on, Bobby,” she said urgently. “Can you move at all? Can you help me lift this?”

  Bobby blinked one slow blink as his head shook negatively.

  “I can’t lift it by myself! I’m not strong enough!” Vivian said tensely, grabbing his hand. “What do I do now?!”

  “Kill the bees,” Bobby whispered hoarsely. “Come back for me later.” Before Vivian could protest, the swarm turned, slicing out of the air with a screaming buzz and hurtling straight toward them. She didn’t take her eye off of the lead bee as she sprang to her feet and swung her sword in defense. Crack! The hideous bee split apart upon the blade, splattering into glowing stains on the walls. The blade flashed the other direction. Crack! Another set of stains. Vivian didn’t hear the noise of Trent and Erik’s struggle. She didn’t see the piles of debris or smell the hot blood that still trickled from her own brother. Her entire world had been reduced to one task that she could not fail. All else vanished outside of her arms, her blade, and her five targets. Crack! Four targets. A bee with long green pincers landed on the bent metal wreckage that held her brother captive. Bobby threw a protective arm in front of his face just as his sister’s blade exploded the overstuffed insect, showering him with a spray of its glowing innards.

  “Ugh!” Bobby moaned.

  Apparently giving up hope on ever reaching Bobby, the remaining bees swarmed back to the vaulted ceiling and dove toward Trent’s broad back instead. Without so much as a shouted warning, Vivian had bounded up behind him, sword at the ready. With a stabbing thrust, the blade penetrated the lead bee’s thorax, threading it neatly over the end of the sword, leaving its legs twitching with its last dying impulses. The remaining bees changed direction, and Vivian darted across the igloo in pursuit. Her next swing resulted not in a cracking split, but in a dull thump as the bee still on her blade impacted with the one in the air. The clubbed bee sailed toward the ceiling like a baseball, disappearing into the darkness and reappearing as a wet impact of blue glow a half-second later.

  “Trent!” Erik sobbed. “Stop! Stop pulling! You’re killing me!” Trent released his grip on Erik’s shoulders, letting him drop on top of Sherri.

  “Fine, forget you then, freak!” he said bitterly, grabbing a coffee mug off the shelf and storming away. “I’ve got more important business to attend to!”

  “Coffee?!” Sherri squealed. “You’re leaving us stuck here for coffee?! ” Vivian stuck the point of her sword into the floor, sliding the impaled carcass from the blade with the sole of her foot. The single remaining bee buzzed high into the vaulted ceiling, disappearing into a haze of darkness. Vivian couldn’t see where it was, but she could hear its crackling buzz circling, circling, circling overhead. She followed it with her ears as she ducked for cover behind a shelf and waited for her chance to strike.

  Finally the bee made its move, plunging directly toward her. She pounced out of her ineffective hiding spot, neatly bisecting her final foe in the air with a clean slash of her blade. As the wet, glowing remains of the bee fell out of the air, its absence immediately revealed another shape, slowly turning, rapidly becoming larger and larger. A split second later a flying coffee mug nailed Vivian square in the forehead. The last thing that she saw was Trent, standing across the room with his pitching arm hanging out in front of him, wearing an expression that quickly changed from smarmy satisfaction to mortified guilt. Her vision dissolved into red and white static as she dropped heavily to her knees. Trent rushed to her side, grabbing her around her collapsing shoulders.

  “I’m sorry, Vivi!” he blathered. “I’m so sorry!”

  “You … idiot, ” Vivian breathed.

  “That was supposed to hit the bee! I didn’t see you there! For real, yo!” Trent’s confession was interrupted by the sound of tinkling glass from the other side of the open door leading into the bug zoo.

  “Close the door,” Vivian whispered.

  “I’m not leaving you here,” Trent said. “A man must take responsibility for his actions, and this man just-”

  “Close it!” she hissed.

  Trent held Vivian’s barely conscious body for a long moment. Finally a loud crash roused him from his melodrama. He dropped her on the floor and sprinted to the open steel door, frantically pounding the locked-open mechanism with his palm in an attempt to dislodge it.

  “Close, you bitch!” he muttered, striking harder. “Close! Close! ” With a superhuman blow, Trent broke the rusted old elbow clean off its hinges. A mighty yank on the push bar slammed the door shut without opposition, but it stopped an inch short of the latch. He yanked it open and shut, but the door simply would not fit into its frame. Then suddenly BANG!

  The explosive vibrations shook the door, traveling up Trent’s arms and through his skull. Something was pounding on the other side, and it wanted to get in. He yanked the door again, but it refused to close.

  BANG!

  Trent looked desperately at the edge of the door. At the floor, he found the answer to his frantic, unspoken question. The broken metal angle of the pneumatic elbow lay pinched in the doorway. The only way to close the door would be to first push it open enough to kick the debris out of the way.

  BANG!

  Which was not something he was about to do.

  He leaned back and braced himself against the floor, his knuckles white against the cold gray steel of the long push bar. He fearfully anticipated the next pound from within, but it never came.

  And the universe went silent.

  He waited for what seemed like a lifetime before finally working up the nerve to let even the smallest bit of slack into the door. His forearms burned from the tension of grasping the awkward push bar so tightly in his fingers. Finally he made his move. With a tiny push against the bar, he opened a gap wide enough to kick away the elbow, slamming the door shut and immediately retreating to Vivian’s side.

  “I did it, Vivi! Did you see that? I did it,” he told her unconscious body. “You’re safe now.”

  “Trent!” Erik yelped. “Trent-the door!”

  “It’s okay, Little E,” Trent said. “The T saved your skinny ass. It’s locked.”

  “It’s not locked!” Erik screeched. “Look!” With a chill, Trent turned toward the door, which was now hanging completely open.

  “It didn’t latch!” Erik yelled. “You slammed it too hard! It just bounced open again!”

  Trent launched toward the door, but halfway there he stumbled over his own feet as they reversed direction.

  It was too late to close the door.

  The entire room beyond the steel doors seemed to emit a sinister blue glow, outlining the edges of an enormous black silhouette nearing the doorway. The shape approached the threshold. Limping. Lurching. Dragging its massive form toward Trent and his pounding heart.

  Trent scrambled away from the door and grabbed the sword from where Vivian had dropped it. His broad chest heaved in terrified anticipation. The blade glinted in the dim lantern light as his strong fingers steadied their grip on its handle. His eyes flicked
to Vivian, lying behind him, a thin trickle of blood running from her nose. To Bobby, no longer moving under his glass and steel prison. To Erik and Sherri, locked to the floor, watching him without words. He turned back to the bug zoo door with a tremble in his blade.

  “O-okay, I’m warning you,” he shouted in a vague approximation of bravery. “I already s-s-sent all your friends back to Hell, and I’ll d-d-do you too, bitch!” The creature disregarded the threats, shambling closer and closer to the door. Trent’s breath caught in his throat. At that moment his world shrank to two things: himself and the shape. He didn’t care about anything or anyone else. He had to escape, but his horrified brain couldn’t issue the order to move his paralyzed legs.

  “You b-b-best not be messin’ with the T!” he squeaked. “You hear me?! I’ll m-mess you up!”

  At that moment, the creature limped through the door, its form becoming clear to his petrified eyes in the dingy light of the lantern.

  “Oh … my … Lord.”

  His terror flipped inside out, turning into awestruck confusion. The figure that emerged from the darkness was not a grotesquely deformed insect beast, but a young woman. Trent’s jaw dropped as she moved into the light. The girl was built like an Amazon goddess: a six-foot-tall statue carved from long feminine muscle. Her short, ragged skirt and torn belly-shirt gave her the titillating appearance of a shipwreck victim on the cover of a cheap erotic novel.

  She didn’t speak, but as she staggered from the confines of the bug zoo, her appearance told her story as well as any words could. Her flesh and clothes were riddled with scrapes and cuts, many of them crusted with dried blood, others still glistening and fresh. In her bloody hand she clutched a formidable shard of glass, glistening with wet slime and glowing hunks of mutilated exoskeleton. A plastic nametag covered in glittery foil butterfly stickers was still pinned to her torn shirt. Insect Igloo - Priscilla

  She staggered through the doorway, stumbling over her own feet and falling into Trent’s arms with a heavy slap. He dropped the sword and caught her weight with an awkward, steadying step, embracing her in his muscular arms.

  “Don’t worry, girl, it’s okay,” he said, stroking her hair. “The T is here to protect you.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A crackling campfire threw a flickering orange light over a small yard that had become a makeshift hospital ward outside the North of the Border Insect Igloo. The ashy remains of crumpled park maps floated on the flame’s hot updrafts like disintegrating gray ghosts.

  Vivian blew a hot, cloudy breath into her cupped hands. Her icy fingers had numbed almost beyond cooperation in the frigid night, but she was determined to finish her work. She stiffly ripped her Swiss Army Knife through the grinning cotton face of a cartoon Mountie, turning another useless souvenir T-shirt into desperately needed bandages. An outsider had suddenly joined their ranks, and with her had come an exhaustive back catalog of wounds to be treated.

  The igloo’s liberated prisoner lay flat on her back on the cold, hard earth, unconsciously accepting all of the medical attention that Vivian could improvise. The girl’s breath was restful, but deep and hoarse, like a snore that didn’t quite have the ambition to happen. Kneeling by her side, Vivian carefully bandaged each of the cuts and scrapes that perforated the girl’s heavy limbs, picking out shards of glass and shattered ceramic curios where necessary.

  Although she was not one who judged by appearances, Vivian’s logical subconscious couldn’t resist putting together the backstory of this mysterious newcomer. With her long, well-built limbs, the girl looked like she was no stranger to athletic competition, and no stranger to victory at that. Her breathtaking body was built like a Greco-Roman sculpture: solid and muscular, but distinctly feminine in shape and curve. Judging by the shortness of her skirt and the tightness of her red uniform shirt, Vivian deduced that this girl was not at all shy about flaunting her physical assets.

  With a gentle stroke, she carefully brushed the girl’s long brunette mane away from her grimy face. The thick braid of hair to the left side of her head was still bound in a pink scrunchie, but the right had come undone, sticking in matted, dust-smeared clumps to her neck and chin. Vivian ran her slender fingers over the girl’s pale cheek, gently peeling up the sticky locks with a crackle of dried blood. A wince of disgust gave way to a startled gasp as the hair slowly came away from the girl’s filthy throat.

  During some savage accident that was best left unimagined, Priscilla, if the name on the nametag was to be believed, had suffered a long gash across her neck, starting from the right corner of her jawbone and extending all the way across her left shoulder. Fortunately this cut was too superficial to have severed anything vital in her throat, but, like her other wounds, it was caked with a slurry of congealed blood and fallout ash.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” Vivian gasped. “Let’s get that cleaned up.” She took a T-shirt-turned-rag and gingerly wiped it through the exposed carnage, exhuming sedimentary swatches of stringy hair, crumbing dirt, and wet, sticky pus from the inflamed scar. Vivian’s stomach heaved into her throat but, having nothing to push back up, expelled little more than a wash of cabbage-flavored acid across the back of her tongue. When the injury was as clean as it was going to get, she tied one last bandage snugly around Priscilla’s neck, knotting it raffishly to the side like a rayon scarf on a 1960s fashion model.

  With the last wound addressed, Vivian sighed and rocked back on her knees. She detached the sticky plastic nametag from the girl’s ample bosom, wiped it clean on the torn hem of her own dress, and then pinned it back on.

  “You just rest up, Priscilla. You’re safe now. You’re not alone anymore.” She put her slender hand on top of Priscilla’s limp fist and smiled.

  “None of us are.”

  At this moment, that simple fact was burning like a wildfire in Vivian’s suddenly optimistic mind. After countless miles of unbridled carnage, they had finally found another survivor. If there was one other survivor, there would be two others. If there were two, there would be ten. Or fifty. Or a hundred. By doing nothing more than stumbling out of the darkness barely alive, Priscilla had given Vivian and the members of her oblivion society a great gift: the gift of hope.

  Vivian climbed to her feet, and her malnourished body reeled dizzily. She took one stumbling step and steadied herself, shaking her head as if to dislodge the cloud. She pushed her glasses up over her forehead and mashed her palms into her eyes. A moment later she regained equilibrium, and she slowly pulled her hands away from her face. As she flexed her numb fingers in front of her eyes, she saw that each reedy digit was bathed in a pale red bloodstain. The stains had been earned in her duties as an improvised nurse, but the blood was not Priscilla’s.

  Bobby lay asleep on the other side of the fire, slouched against the remains of a round wooden fencepost. The color had completely gone from his already pasty complexion, giving his skin the soapy pallor of a tombstone. From his hips to his armpits, his pudgy torso had been mummy-wrapped in canvas bandages that squeezed his flesh into a doughy ring at each end. In its past life, the enormous bandage had proudly proclaimed “Family fun from ‘Eh’ to ‘Zed,’” but now its message was obscured by the blood soaking through its heavy layers.

  Sherri sat cross-legged in the dirt to Bobby’s side, nervously tugging and twisting at the gentle curl of her scorched yellow hair, watching her friend’s chest rise and fall with each struggling breath. During the melee in the igloo, the last flaky remains of her burnt skin had rubbed off, revealing the dark, healthy-looking layer beneath. Had she stopped to think about it, she would have been mortified-her ghoulishly pale skin had been replaced with the perfect cinnamon tan of a Malibu surfer girl. But Sherri wasn’t thinking about herself at the moment. Her visage had twisted into a configuration that it had never tried before, drawing out an all new, never before seen expression.

  It was an expression of concern.

  Drool appeared on the lower lip of Bobby’s slack jaw, then spilled
onto his scruffy orange goatee. Sherri sat up on her knees and gently wiped it with the cuff of her inherited gray hooded sweatshirt. She gently moved a clump of stray red hair out of Bobby’s face, tucking it behind his ear with her delicate fingers. As her fingertips brushed his cheek, he awoke with a snort.

  “Gnaagh! Wha? Whassa?” he grumbled hoarsely.

  “Oh! Um, Bobby!” Sherri stammered, yanking her hand away and stuffing it guiltily in her pocket. “I … uh … hello!”

  Bobby’s eyes slowly focused on Sherri’s tanned face, outlined by a flickering aura of yellow fire filtering through her golden hair.

  “Are you an angel?” he asked dreamily.

  “Am I an … now what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Bobby blinked.

  “You look like an angel.”

  Sherri looked at Bobby’s deathly pale, disconcerted face and let an irritated little smile cross her lips.

  “Okay, shut up,” she grumbled. “You’re just lucky that you’ve got one foot in the grave, or I wouldn’t take that kinda shit outta you, Gray.”

  At the sound of her brother’s groaning voice, Vivian immediately rushed to his side, falling to her knees a little harder than she had planned. As soon as she hit the ground, her wings swung forward on her shoulders and clapped against the back of her head.

  “Bobby! Ow! You’re awake!” she cried, slapping away her wings. “I was so worried! How do you feel?”

  “I feel like I just got a tattoo of Charlie Brown’s shirt,” Bobby moaned. Vivian’s arrival seemed to bring him around a bit. He tugged at the edge of his massive bandage. “Get this shit off; it hurts like a son of a bitch.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Vivian said, arresting his hands. “That bandage stays on until we’re sure the bleeding has stopped. You can’t afford to lose any more blood than you already have.”

  “Come on, Vivian,” Bobby implored. “There’s still broken glass stuck in there!”

  “No there isn’t,” Vivian said comfortingly.

  “Don’t give me that crap,” Bobby moaned. “I can feel it! How would you know if I’ve got broken glass in my cuts?”