“Get it off!” Trent wailed. “Oh Lord, get it off!” Vivian’s stupefied gaze followed the line of the broken gauges across Trent’s mutilated thighs and into Priscilla’s immense hands. She was trying to lift the wreckage off of his lap, with minimal success. The shattered instruments dug into her thick palms, making ragged cuts that drained a stream of her own blood into the hot, syrupy puddle congealing in Trent’s lap. She didn’t speak, but her terrified, desperate eyes screamed out for help.
“Bobby! Sherri!” Vivian shouted. “Get over here and help me!” The two back-seat passengers scrambled dizzily out of the car and rushed to her side. Vivian curled her fingers under the safely rounded edge of the dashboard and braced, looking to Priscilla for cooperation.
“Okay, Priscilla! Lift!”
Groaning through clenched jaws, the two girls raised the shattered dashboard away from Trent’s lap. He screamed a deafening shriek as the gnarled edge pulled from his flesh, leaving a deep red channel of gore in its place.
“Bobby!” Vivian grunted. “Get him out of there!”
Her brother quickly did as he was told, maneuvering behind Vivian to take Trent’s arm over his own thick shoulders. As Vivian and Priscilla strained to hold up the dashboard, Bobby started to haul Trent out of the car. Trent’s continued scream turned hoarse and dry as his dragging heels cleared the door frame and his feet fell harshly to the pavement. With uncharacteristic compassion, Sherri quickly squirmed under Trent’s other arm, helping Bobby to pull him from the wreckage and lay him down safely in the abandoned road.
Vivian and Priscilla dropped the heavy dashboard with a crackle of snapping steel and plastic. Priscilla immediately began to crawl toward the open driver’s door, but halfway across the front seat she caught her leg on a pike of twisted steel. Her face contorted in pain, but her eyes remained fixed on Trent, whom she could see squirming hideously on the cold pavement beyond. With a stuttering intake of breath, she pushed herself forward, digging the wreckage deep into her calf. Vivian planted her palms on Priscilla’s broad shoulders and pushed her back toward the passenger side.
“Priscilla, stop!” she squealed. “Go the other way!” Priscilla’s eyebrows folded in a mixture of agony and devotion. Her heavy feet pushed against the side of the car, forcing her inches closer to the door and driving the steel spike further into her bloody leg. A well of tears began to trickle from a set of glistening brown eyes that never looked away from Trent’s battered form lying in the street.
“Priscilla, stop!” Vivian wailed. “What are you doing?! Stop!” At that moment, the passenger-side door creaked open and Erik leaned into the car.
“What’s going on?” he asked frantically. “Is she okay?”
“Erik, stop her! Her leg!” Vivian yelled. “She’s impaling herself!” Erik immediately saw the metal spear digging into Priscilla’s leg, and he grabbed her stubbly ankles with two hands each. She struggled against him, but he quickly pulled her off of the glistening metal point and out of the open door. Vivian came around to the passenger side as Erik lay Priscilla gently in the street. She knelt down and affectionately brushed the wild hair away from Priscilla’s face, which seemed to be drowning in a sea of confusion and rage. The mute Amazon struggled to stand up, but her protectors held her down, gently cooing reassurances that she showed no signs of comprehending.
“Oh my God,” Erik gasped. “She’s got blood all over her. She’s hurt really bad!”
“I don’t think it’s as bad as it looks,” Vivian said. “She’s only cut on her hands and on her leg. Most of this blood is Trent’s.”
“No,” Erik argued, “it’s not. Look!”
The makeshift bandage around Priscilla’s neck was completely saturated with fresh, hot blood. Her old neck wound had been torn wide open. Vivian pressed her fingers against it, and a gush of blood came from the top and bottom of the fabric in a disquieting little wave. Priscilla coughed, forcing a glut of blood out of her mouth and down her round chin.
“Oh no. No no no no,” Erik panicked. “This isn’t happening. What do we do?” Vivian stared in horror as the thin blood ran down Priscilla’s neck and dripped onto her already soaked shirt. She watched as a pool of blood formed in the dust by the side of the girl’s slashed leg. She could see the blood still running down Erik’s torn thigh. Everywhere she looked all she saw was blood.
“Vivian!” Erik screamed desperately. “What do we do?!” For once in her life, Vivian’s mind went totally blank. It was as if all of the stress and gore had tripped its circuit breaker, leaving her in a total mental darkness.
“I … I don’t know,” she stammered. “We need a doctor! A real doctor!”
“We don’t have a doctor!” Erik shouted. “We don’t even have a first-aid kit!” Vivian blinked and looked at Priscilla’s car.
“We don’t,” she agreed. “But hopefully she does!” She sprang to her feet and threw open the Reliant’s glove compartment. A bundle of stained road maps and a pile of hair clips fell with a splash into the grisly puddle on the floor.
“Damn it!” Vivian spat, pounding her fist into the roof. “Think, Vivian, think …
Check the trunk!”
She leaned in and plucked the dripping keys from the ignition. Scrambling to the back of the car, she unlocked the trunk with a creaky pop that was barely audible over Trent’s renewed screams.
“Aaaaagh! Ah, shit, it hurts!” he wailed.
“I know! I’m sorry!” Bobby yelped. “Just shut up! This is gonna hurt even more!”
Bobby grabbed the lime-green hem of his bathrobe and threw it across Trent’s bloody lap. He planted one of his meaty palms on each of Trent’s thighs and leaned on them, compressing the wounds under his body weight. Trent shot upright from the waist in agony and started slapping Bobby wildly about the chest and face.
“Ow! Ow! You asshole!” he shrieked. “Get off! Get off!”
“I’m sorry,” Bobby growled, turning his face away from the hail of blows. “We need to put pressure on it to stop the bleeding!”
” You’re going to be bleeding in about two seconds if you don’t get offa me, bitch!”
Trent’s blood quickly soaked through the thick cloth of Bobby’s bathrobe, squishing into hot puddles between his fingers.
“Sherri!” Bobby barked. “We need to make him some bandages! Quick, take off some clothes!”
“Screw you! I’m not getting naked for this jackoff!”
Bobby rolled his eyes indignantly to Trent.
“I meant take off his clothes.”
Sherri blinked.
“I don’t see how that’s any better!”
The hinges squeaked as Vivian pushed open the trunk lid, pouring shadowy gray sunlight over a sprawl of random junk. A dirty pink sweater hung over a rusted gas can in one corner. A half-empty two-liter bottle of cola lurked in another. She pawed through the mess in a frantic attempt to find a little white plastic box with an iconic red cross. She carelessly threw a tattered Chemistry 101 textbook into a corner. As its pages fluttered in flight, they loosed a slip of paper that landed on top of the pile. It was a card: homemade, heart-shaped, and cobbled together from pink and red construction paper.
Happy Valentine’s Day, Prissy. I love you to the ends of the Earth. -Lee Vivian blinked once and snapped her attention back to her search. This was no time to get sentimental.
“AaaaAAAAaAAggh!” Trent screeched.
“Shut up! Shut up! ” Sherri commanded with breathless frustration. “Stop being such a pussy!”
Bobby rested on his knees on the blacktop with Trent leaning back against his belly. Trent squirmed and thrashed, but Bobby’s husky arms were wrapped around him, holding him tightly in place so that Sherri could straddle his left knee, pulling a black bandage that had once been half of his own silk rockabilly shirt tightly around his wounded thigh.
“Aaaaghh!” Trent seethed. “Get your bitch ass off of me, B! I told you I don’t swing that way!”
“Sit still!” Bob
by grumbled. “I don’t like it any more than you do! Now be a man and let Sherri finish!”
“Just one more knot in this one,” Sherri said.
“Do it tight enough to stop the bleeding,” Bobby ordered, “but be gentle, alright?” Sherri nodded emptily and fiercely yanked the two loose ends of her knot in opposite directions as hard as she could. At the sound of Trent’s most tortured scream yet, Priscilla bolted upright with a fire in her eyes. Erik quickly took her by the shoulders and gently pushed her back to the ground.
“It’s okay; it’s okay,” he said reassuringly. “Don’t worry; they’re taking good care of him over there. Now stay still!”
Priscilla’s mouth moved silently as a huge, glistening teardrop rolled out of the corner of her eye. She struggled to stand up, forcing a renewed gush of blood from her gruesome throat. Erik shouted over his shoulder.
“Um, Vivian. I need some help over here. Like, now! ” Vivian didn’t hear him. Her head was buried deep inside the open trunk as she sifted through the accumulated debris of a life. There was nothing in there that would be of any medicinal use whatsoever. It was all just junk. The insignificant refuse that packed the corners of a teenaged girl’s existence. Yet each dog-eared fashion magazine and crumpled receipt that she sifted through helped form, in the shadows of Vivian’s mind, a picture of a girl that she had met but did not know. At the very bottom of the trunk she unearthed a small blue shoebox and yanked it from the debris anxiously.
“Be first aid,” she pleaded. “Please be first aid!” She slipped her fingertips under the box top and tore it off with a desperate kind of optimism. It was not full of medical supplies, but photographs.
“Damn it!”
She started to throw the useless box back into the trunk in frustration, but her hands froze as her eyes hooked into the first snapshot sticking out of the stack. She plucked the photo out of the box and looked at it curiously.
It was a picture of Priscilla wearing an oversized flannel shirt. Slightly out of focus. Wholly unremarkable. That is, except for one thing. She was smiling. Her clear brown eyes were sharp and alive, glistening with a vivacious spirit that they no longer possessed.
In spite of herself, Vivian flicked to the next picture. It was Priscilla again, dressed in a modest pair of overalls and sitting behind a table at a fast-food restaurant. Her face was lost under a gigantic paper crown, beet red in the throes of intense laughter. In the foreground of the picture a boy was facing away from the camera and kneeling on one knee. He was holding out a rose in one hand and flourishing with the other, as if delivering an overly dramatic Shakespearean sonnet. Vivian flipped the picture over and read a bubbly cursive caption scrawled in blue ink.
Lee = Sir Romance! Valentine’s Day ‘97
Just as she was about to stop wasting precious time snooping through the catacombs of Priscilla’s life, she noticed a single oversized print poking out from the otherwise uniform stack of snapshots.
“Alright, just one more,” Bobby said.
“Come on, Goldie,” Trent pleaded. “Easy this time, a’ight? Please. Please?” Sherri slipped the wide bandage of torn silk under Trent’s leg and crossed it over the top.
“Alright,” she said, glancing up at Bobby. “Give the crybaby something to bite on. This is gonna sting.”
“Oh no. No, girl, come on. No. No. Come on, girl-”
“Stay with me, here,” Bobby muttered, giving Trent’s shoulders a manly shake.
“One more little bandage and you’re done. One more little squeeze. Are you ready?” Trent whimpered incoherently.
“Alright, deep breaths,” Bobby continued. “Sherri, count of five. Ready? One, two …”
Vivian pulled the wrinkled photograph from the shoebox. It was a five-by-seven enlargement that had been folded in half to fit into the stack, protruding by an enticing inch over its three-by-five companions.
It was a picture of Priscilla standing in an athletic field, towering over a band geek with a battered trombone in his hands. She stood behind him, slightly hunched over, with her arms wrapped around his shoulders and her cheek pressed lovingly against his. The face of the trombone player sent a shock through Vivian.
It was Trent!
She held the picture to the dull light and gave it a good look, and her initial reaction quickly dissipated. It wasn’t Trent at all. It was a gangly teenage boy. He had the same haircut as Trent, and the same gigantic toothed smile-even his nose was similar-but his eyes were entirely different. They were large, bright blue, and wide with a certain indescribable aura of innocence. Vivian was suddenly struck by realization. She flipped the picture over and unfolded it, revealing the curly inscription on the back.
Priscilla + Lee 4 ever!
Her hand slapped over her mouth as a myriad of open questions slammed shut in her mind.
“Oh my God,” she gasped. “She thinks Trent is her boyfriend!” She turned the picture back over, as if hoping that another look would change her mind. Not only did the second glance reaffirm her theory, but unfolding the print had revealed its bottom half … and another terrible secret.
Lee was standing on the grass. Priscilla was standing on the team bench. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall.
“Five!” Bobby shouted.
Sherri’s arms flew to her sides, slamming a knot of silk down on Trent’s destroyed thigh and forcing a pealing scream from the very bottom of his being. On the other side of the Reliant, his cry of pain burrowed into Priscilla’s ear. She shoved Erik away and clambered to her feet with a determined fury.
“Priscilla, no! Lay down! Lay down!” Erik chastised. “How many times do I have to tell you not to get-”
Erik’s orders were silenced by a fist thumping into his stomach. He took one gasping breath and fell to his knees, clawing at the bottom of Priscilla’s varsity jacket in an effort to slow his fall. Priscilla just kept striding forward, seemingly unaware of his scrawny body clinging to her side. Two steps later the coat slipped off her broad shoulders, dropping Erik into a gasping pile in the road.
Vivian snapped her eyes away from the photograph of the petite Priscilla just in time to see the seven-foot giant that she had become rounding the rear fender. An inadvertent scream chirped from Vivian’s throat. The bandages up and down Priscilla’s enormous arms had ruptured beneath her jacket, sprouting a menagerie of insect legs that scuttled madly against the air. Vivian took one staggering step backward and threw out a hand, holding the old photograph in front of Priscilla’s face.
“Priscilla, stop! Listen to me!” she said firmly. “You’re confused! Trent is not Lee! He’s not your boyfriend! He’s a creep!”
Priscilla didn’t take her eyes off of Trent as she grabbed Vivian’s outstretched hand and threw her out of the way. Vivian’s knees banged harshly into the Reliant’s bumper, dropping her to the ground, but she quickly sat up and screamed a warning to the others.
“Bobby! Sherri! Get away from Trent! Now!”
Bobby and Trent were both facing Priscilla as she came around the corner of the car, but from her reversed perch on Trent’s knee, Sherri never saw her coming. She didn’t even have a chance to see the boys’ startled expressions before a swollen palm smashed into her shoulder, sending her sprawling. Her tiny blond head hit the blacktop with an explosion of fireworks that only she could see.
“Aaaagh! Shit!” she hissed.
Sherri dragged herself to her hands and knees, clawing her escape across the empty road while a fresh scrape on her forehead poured blood down her face. Before Priscilla could deliver a sucker punch to Bobby, he was already on his feet and shoving the confused giant away from his crippled patient.
“Get back! Get back!” Bobby snarled, slamming his hands into her shoulders. “I know Trent’s been a dirtbag to you, but you don’t have to kill him!”
“Bobby, she doesn’t want to kill him!” Vivian squealed. “She’s protecting him!
She thinks she loves him!”
Bobby’s e
yebrows arched.
“She loves him?”
Bobby’s disbelief dropped his guard just long enough for Priscilla to strike. She lurched forward and threw her mutated arms around his body, giving him a bone-crunching bear hug around his slashed midsection. She lifted him off the ground, turned her back on Trent, and held his perceived attacker away at a safe distance.
“Aaagh! Uggh!” Bobby gasped. “Can’t … breathe! ” Suspended, he pounded his fists into Priscilla’s back and kicked madly. A lucky swing of his foot planted his toe into the fresh gash in her leg, and she dropped him with a sucking wince of pain. Bobby hit the ground with a hard, wet slap. His bandages had been cut to ribbons and were quickly turning red with fresh blood-the procession of sharp insect legs that lined the inside of Priscilla’s arms had pierced his doughy flesh and broken off inside his body. Before he could even form a scream, an explosive crackling sound issued from Priscilla’s throat and a shower of mucus and tissue splattered over his face.
“Trent,” Bobby gasped. “Get … away … from …”
Even before Bobby could get out his warning, Trent was already busy trying to scuttle away from the terror that loomed before him.
“Sweet Jesus! That ain’t cool! That ain’t right! Prissy, that ain’t right!” Having rescued Trent from his assailants, Priscilla turned and dropped happily to her knees in front of him, paralyzing him with fear. Her top lip was smiling with a beam of enamored relief, but her bottom lip had been reduced to nothing more than a string of slack and lifeless meat hanging from a detached jawbone that swung slowly from the right side of her head by one strip of intact skin. In the place where her tongue had once been, an eighteen-inch beetle mandible curved in a serrated, jet-black hook. An identical piece of insect anatomy arced out of her left shoulder, clicking arrhythmically against its mate like a pair of hellish wind chimes. She put her enormous hand on Trent’s leg and leaned in lovingly toward his once-receptive face, her thick blood oozing out of her destroyed jaw and down her heaving chest. Before she could get anywhere near him, however, Trent was already screaming a louder, more bone-curdling scream than he had ever screamed before. He crab-walked backward, a terrified sense of self-preservation enabling him to ignore the pain blasting from his legs.
The Oblivion Society Page 41