The others all stared at Trent agape.
“Trent, how … how could you?! ” Vivian stammered. “You know she’s not cognizant of her actions right now! She’s operating with a diminished capacity!”
“Says you! ” Trent laughed. “I’d say she was operating at full capacity last night, if you know what I’m sayin’! Boo yah! Give the T some love!”
Trent leaned toward Erik and Bobby and threw both hands in the air in anticipation of two congratulatory high-fives. Bobby remained a statue with his arms crossed tightly. Erik just stood with his mouth hanging open in troubled disbelief. Trent remained bent at the waist, hands in the air, eyes flicking back and forth between Erik and Bobby, almost pleading.
“Come on, my homies! Don’t leave me hangin’ here, bros!”
As Trent stood waiting for accolades that would never be delivered, Vivian’s disgusted eyes were fixed sadly over his shoulder on Priscilla’s sweet, shell-shocked face. An overwhelming sense of guilt was rising inside of her. Priscilla clearly was not in a state of mind to be making rational decisions, and Trent was just the kind of guy to see that as an open-ended invitation. Vivian realized that she should have known better than to leave him alone with her. This was all her fault. As much as she tried not to, all Vivian could think of when she looked at Priscilla’s broad, slack mouth was where it had been forced to go because of her negligence. All she could see in her mind’s eye was the haunting black shadow of a thick, blunt shaft sliding over Priscilla’s round chin and across her lips. The imagery was so vividly disturbing that she could almost see it …
She blinked hard and gasped a tiny breath.
She could see it!
A thick black serpent covered in oily fur twisted across Priscilla’s chest and over her chin. She craned her stiff neck away from it, but it continued to glide noiselessly up to her ear. Vivian broke her startled gaze to survey her friends’ faces-Erik, Bobby, and Sherri each were transfixed by the snake’s gently curving body.
“Trent!” Vivian hissed. “Step away from Priscilla. Slowly!” She reached into the Rabbit’s open trunk and wrapped her fingers around the hilt of the sword. Slowly and smoothly she raised it and held it in front of her body, preparing to strike. The serpent’s undefined head bumped into Priscilla’s cheek, sliding itself under her nose and across the side of her face. She twisted away from it again with an annoyed grunt.
“Whoa, whoa, Vivi!” Trent said, his eyes growing in terror. He put his arms out to his sides in a weak position of defense. “You just step off of Prissy, a’ight? Nobody gots to get hurt over this. You don’t got to be jealous of her.”
“I’m not jealous. I’m not going to hurt her,” Vivian growled. “Just shut up and step away, before something else hurts h-”
Before she could say another word, the serpent struck! In a lost fraction of a second, the creature tensed its body into a rigid arrow of muscle and rammed its head into Priscilla’s nose.
“No!” Vivian wailed.
Behind Trent, Priscilla took one affronted step backward, seemingly more annoyed than injured. In a flash, her hand swatted through the air, grabbing the snake around its neck and slamming it down on the fender of the Reliant with a resounding bang. Both of Trent’s hands flew to his groin as he fell to the ground with a howling shriek.
“Oooowwww!” he groaned. “Ow, shit! Shit!”
As Trent rolled over in agony, still clutching his crotch with both hands, his backside fell heavily into the gravel toward the stupefied onlookers. From a bloodstained hole in the back of his trousers, a furry black tail thrashed back and forth in the air. The horrific sight of it would have caused stomach-plunging hysteria only days before, but by this point the survivors took it in with little more than a relieved shrug.
“Uuuuhngh,” Trent moaned. “Oooww. What happened to my beaver cleaver?”
“Nothing happened to your … nothing happened to that, ” Vivian smirked.
“You’re just feeling misplaced phantom pain.”
“Bullshit!” Trent grunted. “This pain is too legit to quit, yo!”
“But it’s not where you think it is,” Erik said. “Your brain just hasn’t figured out where to send the pain sensations for your tail yet.”
Trent’s eyes snapped to Erik’s in a flash of incomprehension.
“Hold up-back up. Say what now?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, don’t you even know? ” Sherri said with annoyance. “I’ve never met anyone as clueless as you. And I’ve worked at Circuit City!” She stepped to Trent’s side and grabbed the end of his thrashing tail, thrusting it in front of his face unapologetically.
“Happy birthday! You have a cat tail, idiot.”
Trent’s eyes followed the black rope in Sherri’s hand back to his own injured tailbone. There was a brief pause as his brain worked over the new information, followed immediately by a spasm of denial.
“No … no!” he chattered. “It ain’t like that! I’m one of the chosen ones! It ain’t like that! It ain’t like that!”
He scrambled to his feet and took one fleeing step before Sherri yanked his tail like the starter on a lawnmower. With another wailing clutch at his groin, Trent once again dropped to the ground.
“Ha haaa!” Sherri grinned. “This is more fun than Whack-A-Mole!”
“Oooouuugghhh,” Trent moaned.
“It looks like Twiki got a bite of you after all,” Vivian said grimly. “Serves you right for what you did to Priscilla last night, you creep.”
She raised her heel vengefully over Trent’s limp tail but couldn’t bring herself to stomp it into the rough gravel. She put her foot back on the ground and glowered in disgust.
Trent sat up and pulled his tail around the front of himself with both hands. He glared at the greasy mutant appendage clenched in his fists with a spiteful fury.
“This ain’t right, y’all. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me,” he rattled. “I’m trippin’. I’m straight trippin’! I’m not one of you freaks! I’m chosen! I’m one of His chosen ones!”
Vivian snorted. “Knock it off, Trent,” she said harshly. “It’s just biology. God hasn’t forsaken you.”
“Yeah, quit being so melodramatic,” Bobby chimed. “On the one hand, you’ve got a grotesque physical deformity brought on by exposure to deadly doses of ionizing radiation, but on the other, Jesus loves you!”
“I can’t have this,” Trent said sternly. “It’s got to come off.”
“It will, very soon,” Vivian said. “All of us will have these things amputated just as soon as we get to Washington D.C.”
“No,” Trent said with finality. “Now. This bitch has gotta come off now. I can’t live like this, yo. It ain’t natural. It ain’t part of His plan.”
“Trent, we can’t just cut it off,” Vivian snapped. “We don’t have the proper tools.”
“Bullshit!” Sherri yelled gleefully.
She snatched Vivian’s backpack purse out of the front seat of the Rabbit and yanked out the Swiss Army Knife.
“We’ve got all the tools we need right here. Let’s cut off some of Trent!” She dropped to her knees by Trent’s side and grabbed his tail, pulling it taut and raising the knife into the air with a smile. With her thumb, she flicked open a glinting blade from its side with a sinister-sounding click. Trent could feel her broken fingernails digging into a shaft of soft, sensitive skin that she was not actually holding, and his hands again slapped over his groin.
“Wait! Hold up, girl! I changed my mind. Stop!”
Without hesitation, Sherri slashed the blade through the air in a savage arc of flashing metal. Halfway to Trent’s tail, however, her arm came to an abrupt stop with a sharp slap of flesh against flesh. The knife dropped into the gravel as her tiny forearm was crushed in Priscilla’s powerful fist. Before she could even look at her assailant, Sherri had been yanked off the ground and was hanging limply from Priscilla’s outstretched arm.
“Aaaaagh! Shit!” Sherri wailed. “Let go
of me, warrior princess!” She planted an oversized boot directly into Priscilla’s kneecap. Priscilla threw her to the ground her and stumbled backward, tearfully clutching her already wounded knee.
“Oh my God, Sherri!” Vivian gasped.
With a look of tortured concern on her face, Vivian rushed to Priscilla’s side and put a supportive hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Priscilla! I’m sorry,” she said soothingly. “Sherri didn’t mean to hurt you. You just startled her. She didn’t mean to hurt you. We’re not going to hurt you.”
Sherri sat up with a wince and knocked the gravel out of her hair.
“Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” she said bitterly. “Feel free to kiss Gigantor’s ass.”
“I’m sorry, Sherri,” Vivian said. “You’re going to need to be a little less violent if we’re going to make her trust us. Especially toward Trent. For some reason it looks as if she’s taken it upon herself to protect him.”
“But …” Sherri said angrily. “But he told me to! He actually told me to cut him this time! Didn’t you, Trent?”
Trent snatched his bristling tail and held it protectively against his chest.
“Vivi’s right,” he said. “We best just wait until we get to a hospital.” Sherri’s face collapsed in disappointment.
“But you’ll go to Hell if I don’t cut it off, right?” She frowned. “You don’t want to go to Hell, do you?”
“I’m not keeping it,” Trent established. “But we gotta wait until we can see an M.D., for real. If we just chop it off I’ll still be griddled up with mutant DNA, right? I want a biopsy on that shit so I know it ain’t comin’ back, yo.”
Bobby twisted his head back and then threw it forward, rubbing his eyes in an exaggerated double take.
“What?!” he gasped. ” What?! Did Trent just dismiss biblical mumbo jumbo in favor of a valid scientific theory? Holy shit, we should have started threatening his penis from day one!”
Vivian shook her head and looked at the brightening cloud cover.
“All right, cut it out, you guys,” she said. “If we’re going to be to Washington D.C. by tonight, we need to stop messing around and get on the road.”
“We still need to grab all of our stuff,” Bobby said.
“It’s taken care of,” Vivian replied, returning the camping lantern to the trunk. “I packed up everything before you guys woke up. We’re ready to go.”
“Well, somebody’s a little eager beaver,” Trent said. “I’m surprised you didn’t just leave without us.”
“I second that,” Sherri growled.
“I’m just excited,” Vivian said. “I almost can’t believe that in just a few hours we’ll be back in civilization. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof.”
“For real,” Trent agreed. “Let’s all hop in that little car and get us to a hospital, stat.”
“I call shotgun!” Sherri screamed.
“Sherri,” Vivian chastised. “You know that you’re the smallest and you need to be in the back-”
“Not listening!” Sherri said, planting her palms over her ears. “Not even listening.” Vivian turned away with a sigh.
“That’s fine with me, yo,” Trent said. “Me and Prissy are going to take the back seat with you, Vivi.”
“She’ll never fit in the back seat,” Vivian said. “Her legs are too long.”
“What if she sits on my lap?” Trent said.
“That doesn’t actually make her any smaller, does it?” Vivian muttered.
“I’ll ride in the back seat if I can sit on Erik’s lap,” Sherri grinned.
“Veto!” Erik chirped. “I veto that!”
“This looks like this is gonna take a while,” Bobby grumbled. He plodded over to the Reliant and plopped his wide buttocks down on the hood, exercising the shocks.
“What if I sit in the back and Vivi sits on my lap?” Trent said innocently.
“Or even better, what if I sit in the back, and she sits on my lap?” Erik bristled.
“I can’t sit on anybody’s lap!” Vivian snapped. “Hello? Eight-foot wingspan here!”
“Okay, alright,” Trent said. “I drive. My girl Prissy is the tallest-she rides shotgun. Vivi needs someplace to put her extra gear, so we stick her in the center of the back seat with her wings all stuck out over the back. Goldilocks and Lil’ E stick their scrawny butts in on either side. Is that copacetic with y’all?”
“Sounds great … except for one little thing,” Bobby smirked. “What am I supposed to do, ride in the trunk with Spritle and Chim-Chim?”
“That’s no good,” Erik said. “You won’t fit in there either.”
“This is like the losing end of a game of Tetris, ” Bobby scowled. “It’s physically impossible for all of us to fit into that car.”
“You’re right. We’ll never fit into one car,” Vivian agreed. “We’ll have to take both of them.”
Everyone looked skeptically at the derelict Reliant.
“It’s a good idea, Viv, but how are we supposed to start it?” Erik asked.
“We can push start it, just like the Rabbit,” Vivian said. “It’s just another bucket of bolts from the ‘80s. It shouldn’t have any complex circuitry that would have been damaged by the EMP.”
“Well, yeah, I agree with you there,” Erik nodded. “But the thing is we can’t even push start it unless one of us knows how to hot-wire a car.”
Four pairs of eyes turned simultaneously to one place.
“What are you looking at?” Sherri snapped. “Just because I’m the only one of you white-bread pantywaists who has ever stolen anything it doesn’t mean that I’ve got grand theft auto under my belt. I’m not your one-stop larceny shop, for fuck’s sake.” The others looked at the ground guiltily. Sherri continued.
“Why don’t you just get the Gorgeous Lady of Wrestling here to give you the keys?”
“Wait-you think Prissy has the keys?” Trent asked. “What makes you think that?”
“Christ, I feel stupider just standing next to you,” Sherri moaned. “When they bombed the shit out of this place there was one car in the parking lot and one person still inside. Come on, people, let’s have a little deductive reasoning here.”
“She’s right,” Erik said. “This has to be Priscilla’s car! Check her pockets!”
“With pleasure!” Trent grinned.
He reached out to slide his roaming fingers into the hip pocket of Priscilla’s skirt, but Vivian slapped his hand before it got there.
“Ow!” Trent winced. “Okay, ladies first.”
“Please excuse the intrusion, Priscilla,” Vivian said kindly. With that, she slipped her slender hand into Priscilla’s pocket and came back with a set of keys attached to a pink rabbit’s foot.
“Looks like our luck is changing for the better,” she smiled. Ten minutes later the gang had made short work of dusting off and push starting the butter-colored relic with Sherri’s negligible weight behind the wheel. As soon as the engine had sputtered to life, Sherri took off, doing a donut in the parking lot that showered her friends with gravel. She pulled alongside of them and rolled down the window.
“Alright, losers, I am out of here,” she said. “See you in D.C.”
“Sherri, you can’t just take that whole car all by yourself,” Erik said.
“You’re right,” Sherri agreed. “Get your sexy mutant ass in here.”
“You also can’t drive stick,” he reminded her.
“You know, you are really starting to get on my nerves, Sievert.”
“Come on, Sherri,” Vivian said. “You can ride shotgun in my car.”
“Screw that. Your car is colder than Santa’s sack. I’m staying in the car with a roof.”
“I’m with her,” Bobby said. “It’ll be nice to go somewhere without my snot freezing to my mustache for a change.”
“You can all ride in Priscilla’s car,” Vivian said. “But there’s not enough room in there for me. My wings alone would take up the space of two p
eople. I’ll follow you in my car.”
“Nobody should be all alone,” Erik said. “You know-the buddy system. I’ll ride in the Rabbit with you. I’ll even drive if you want.”
“You do realize it’s going to be cold if you ride with me,” Vivian warned.
“Will it?” Erik asked poignantly.
Vivian looked at his apologetic eyes and gave a soft little smile.
“We’ll see.”
The dull yellow Reliant followed the rattling gray Rabbit in a caravan of two through the cold, smoky ruins of northern Virginia. Erik and Vivian led the way in the frosty convertible, while the rest of the group followed in the relative comfort of the sedan.
Trent sat crushed behind the steering wheel of the Reliant with the seat pushed too far forward and his knees pressed against the underside of the dashboard. Priscilla was by his side in the properly adjusted passenger seat, holding his tail in one hand and stroking it with the other as if it were a soft baby bunny. A broad, toothy grin was spread across Trent’s face, and his eyelids hung in a semi-orgasmic slouch.
“That’s right, Prissy,” he moaned. “Pet the snake. Pet it like you mean it.”
“Um, hello?” Bobby squeamishly called from the back seat. “There’s other people in the car here, you know. Could you please not get a tail job right in front of us?”
“Seriously,” Sherri spat. “You’re so disgusting. You were scared shitless of God smiting you over that thing until you realized that it’s like the big hairy manpole your late-blooming ass never had. Now you’re in love with it!”
“Well, it’s like it says in the first book of Corinthians,” Trent said thoughtfully.
“‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet.’”
“You’re unbelievable!” Sherri yelped. “When Erik mutated, you said he was the son of Satan, but now that it’s happened to you it’s actually written in the Bible?! ”
“Greater theologians than I have misinterpreted His divine word at first,” Trent shrugged.
The Oblivion Society Page 39