The Oblivion Society

by Marcus Alexander Hart

  A tingle of inspiration boiled up through Vivian’s own shameful resignation. The start of the ramp couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet away from the highway, but for Erik, getting there would be an agonizing marathon. And even when he was on top of the bridge, there was no way that he could reach any of his friends hanging from its steel bottom, let alone help them fight or pull them to safety. It was a hopeless, pointless endeavor. Yet there he was, charging through his pain, completely unwilling to give up hope.

  “Erik, wait,” Vivian called. “Stop. You can’t get to them like that.”

  “But there’s no other way!”

  Vivian’s eyes were fixed on the bottom of the bridge as if in fevered calculation.

  “Yes, there is,” she said bravely. “I can get up there. I know I can.”

  “How can I help you?” Erik asked frantically.

  Vivian flapped her wings with a single, billowing snap.

  “You can’t. I have to do this one on my own.”

  She turned away from the bridge and sprinted away down the dotted center line of the interstate. Erik watched her leap over the scattered remains of Sherri’s ruptured purse as she bolted into the distance. A small bird skull and seventy cents worth of change stared back at him from the road, slowly drawing a memory to the front of his mind.

  “Whoa, wait a second,” he said excitedly. “I can help! I can stop Priscilla!” He hobbled over, dropped to his knees, and pawed through the debris with all four hands.

  “What the hell are you doing, E?” Trent exclaimed. “There’s nothing in a lady’s purse that’s gonna save our peeps from that freaky freak!”

  “Yes, there is,” Erik yelped. “It was in Sherri’s coat when I emptied her pockets!

  … There!”

  He found what he was looking for at the side of the road, grabbed it, and ran off, leaving Trent baffled.

  “Black lipstick?”

  High above, on the bottom of the overpass, Bobby looked down the extended green shaft of his arm at Sherri.

  “Grab my arm,” he ordered, “er … hook!”

  Sherri raised her hands to comply, and her thin body immediately slipped downward through the slick nylon lining of her jacket. With a gasped expletive, she bent her elbows and wrapped her arms over her head, catching herself before she could completely slide free of her makeshift harness.

  “Aaagh! Shit!” she snarled, clutching her coat for dear life. “I can’t reach you!” As Sherri struggled, Bobby could see the fur trim starting to rip away from the quilted fabric of her hood, detaching stitch by stitch like a sudden death countdown.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he groaned.

  Bobby could hear Erik screaming at him from the ground below.

  “Bobby, move!” he wailed. “Get away from Priscilla, now!” Before Bobby could respond, a pinching, tearing pain sailed up his human leg. His head whirled around, throwing out a scream in a broad, circular arc of sound. Priscilla was clinging to the bottom of the overpass in front of him with her head pressed against her shoulder and an enormous severed spider leg twitching between her plier-like mandibles. From his inverted perspective, a drizzle of blood fell upward toward the ground from the stump of a missing leg sticking out of his belly.

  “Aaaaaghh! Priscilla, no!” he gasped. “For the last time, I am not your enemy!

  Leave me the hell alone!”

  The mutant girl spat a sharp hiss, and Bobby’s remaining legs took another staggering step backward, plunging a second hairy foot off the edge and toward the charcoal clouds above. The bristles of his two remaining spider feet suspended him from both sides like a playground swing, tenuously grasping the rusty surface of the steel. As his arachnid legs started to slowly lose their grip, a strange sensation tingled across the bottom of his human feet. It felt like the sound of Velcro being pulled apart.

  “Ah shit,” he growled. “Now what? Think, Bobby, think …” Bobby looked back over his shoulder at the edge of the overpass, then down at Sherri hanging helplessly from his pointed mantis arm, then back up at the bridge. He nervously flexed his mutated right arm and sighed.

  “Well,” he sighed. “Here goes nothin’.”

  With a mighty flex of his thick bicep, he swung his arm away from the edge of the bridge, drawing Sherri up in a long, graceful arc beneath the cold green steel. When she had reached the top of her backswing, Bobby yanked with all of his might in the opposite direction, sending Sherri’s slender body whistling through the air beneath him, all the way around the edge of the bridge, and slamming it with a bony clang into the tubular steel railing of the sidewalk above. The weight of her heavy boots carried her legs over the top of the bar, folding her in half at the waist and hanging her over the top rail like a wet towel.

  The wrenching force of Bobby’s desperate swing completely detached his last two wall-walking legs from the steel girder. His pudgy body dropped toward the ground, and his spine made a painful, crunching pop as he came to a swinging rest, hanging from the broad concrete lip of the bridge by the last hinged segment of his mantis arm.

  As his full weight hung by one narrow, brittle hook of mutated chitin, Bobby could suddenly feel every cheeseburger he had ever eaten still sitting in the enormous gut that was slung around his waist. He could feel every Big Gulp and every all-you-can-eat barbecue session yanking at the tendons of his shoulder like a gluttonous game of tug-of-war. He could feel every corn chip and pork rind wedging themselves like salty knives through the sweating meat of his strained back. A wet drop of heavy black goo splashed against his cheek. His head rolled skyward to see Priscilla stuck to the steel above him, wrapping her gnarled pincers around the spiny green shaft of his mutant arm.

  “Oh no. No! No, Priscilla, no!”

  “Bobby! Move!” Erik wailed. “Get your fat ass away from her, God damn it!”

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?!” Bobby screamed. Against all of the advice he had ever heard about dealing with heights, Bobby looked down. The first thing he saw was not Erik, but Vivian, sprinting at full speed up the long, straight runway of the abandoned interstate, wings fully extended and flapping in gigantic, powerful strokes.

  Her lean, elongated legs didn’t seem to be running as much as throwing her body forward, harder and harder past the blur of the dotted center line. With each flap of her wings, her strides got longer and longer, faster and faster. The wind whistling around her glasses and into her ears didn’t seem to be resisting her anymore. It seemed to be embracing her, guiding her, pulling her forward.

  “Hold on, Bobby,” she growled. “I’m coming.”

  She closed her eyes and threw her arms gracefully in front of her like a ballerina, extending her long legs and launching herself into the sky.

  One and a half flaps of her wings later she was ten feet away, face down in a battered heap on the cold, hard blacktop. A searing collection of fresh road burns bleeding from her palms, knees, and elbows reminded her that human beings were not designed for flight. She pounded her bloody fist into the ground and wailed.

  “No! Damn it! Not now!”

  She looked up at the bottom of the bridge just in time to see Priscilla’s head swing down against her shoulder, bisecting Bobby’s brittle mantis arm with a splash of clear viscera and hard green splinters. There was a complete and deafening silence as he plummeted fifty feet through the cold air, landing with a fleshy bass note as he caved in the roof of the Reliant.

  “No!” Vivian shrieked.

  A fraction of a second later the air over Vivian’s head ignited in a massive burst of air and noise and fire. Almost before her blasted eardrums had registered the sound, she saw Priscilla’s chest tear apart in an explosion of flesh and blood. The mutated girl slammed into the bottom of the overpass and then seemed to peel off, sailing through the air with a kind of tragic grace, landing in an upside-down, broken heap in the back seat of the destroyed Rabbit.

  Vivian turned with a deafened, heart-pounding lurch to see Erik st
anding behind her, holding the shotgun in his trembling hands. He tipped the weapon to the ground, clicking open the breech and ejecting a spent, lipstick-shaped shell. His eyes were dilated as he stared at the carnage.

  “I tried … I tried to stop her, b-but … I … he … he just kept getting in the way,” he chattered numbly. “H-he wouldn’t get out of the way …”

  His chest began to convulse in heaving sobs until he finally fell to his hands and knees and violently threw up. Trent just stared at the two bodies lying in the automotive wreckage, his face as white as his teeth.

  Vivian clambered to her feet, launching herself up the highway and onto the roof of the Reliant, collapsing on her knees at Bobby’s side. His glasses had been lost in the fall, and his unobstructed eyes still showed a dancing spark of life. She clenched his hand between her two and squeezed it hard, as if trying to force the life back into his broken body.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Vivian sniffed. “You hear me? We’re going to get you to a hospital! There is still time, brother!”

  Bobby shook his head and coughed.

  “I know there isn’t,” he grumbled acceptingly. “I don’t need you to blow sunshine up my skirt.”

  Vivian bit her lip guiltily.

  “I’m so sorry, Bobby! This is all my fault! I tried so hard to use these stupid wings, but the aerodynamics are all wrong! I knew it wouldn’t work! But I thought

  … I thought if I just believed in myself that I could do it!” Bobby shook his head.

  “That’s just Full House monologue bullshit, and you know it. Believing in yourself doesn’t change the laws of physics.”

  Vivian’s lips quivered and pursed as they struggled to hold back a tide of sobs. Bobby tugged gently on the edge of her leathery wing and continued.

  “Vivian, you’re never going to fly with these …”

  His arm swung upward, tapping his sister’s forehead with his stumpy finger.

  “… unless you fly with this first.”

  Vivian squeezed her brother’s hand as the tears poured down her grimy face.

  “You’re going to be okay, you hear me?” she choked. “I’m not leaving without you, Bobby!”

  Bobby shook his head weakly.

  “Knock it off,” he muttered. “You know you have to leave. The rest of those dumb-asses will never survive without you. Promise me you won’t ever stop fighting until you’re all safe.”

  “But-but I can’t-”

  “Don’t argue with me, Vivian!” he coughed. “I’m dying here!” Vivian’s eyes clenched and her head launched into a frantic little nod.

  “I promise.”

  Bobby blinked a long, slow blink before he spoke again.

  “Good. Now promise me one more thing,” he breathed.

  “Yes, Bobby?” Vivian whispered. “Anything.”

  “From now on, don’t let Trent pick up any more chicks.”

  With that, he smiled, squeezed Vivian’s hand, and quietly closed his eyes for the last time.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In a nondescript plot of yellowed grass, two lifeless bodies lay with their hands crossed over their chests in tranquil repose near the shoulder of Interstate 67. A scraped Volkswagen fender and the few clods of rock-hard dirt it had chipped from the earth told the tale of a foiled attempt at burial.

  On the other side of the road, Vivian was kneeling next to a small, pathetic patch of wilted purple wildflowers. Glassy trails of tears ran from the corners of her otherwise sober eyes. She could see the others hovering around the bodies, each paying their respects to their fallen friends in their own way.

  Trent stood at the head of the above-ground graves with his eyes closed, muttering some piece of scripture that he almost certainly found relevant for all the wrong reasons. He was wearing the bloodstained varsity jacket and holding himself upright on his wounded legs using the shotgun as a crutch.

  Erik stood to the side of Priscilla’s body, brooding sulkily. He held the last remaining shotgun shell in his hand, turning it over and over again in his fingers without looking at it. The sleeves of the pink sweater discovered in Priscilla’s trunk had been recruited to tie off the bloody gash in his thigh, leaving him looking like a grisly parody of a Bananarama fan. The remainder of the sweater was wrapped in a tight hood over Sherri’s wounded scalp, tied in a sugary bow under her pointed bronze chin. In a surprising display of emotion, she was kneeling at Bobby’s side with her head buried in her arms over his bloated belly, sobbing uncontrollably. Vivian picked a handful of the dismal flowers from the ground and noticed something stuck in the tall grass beyond. She pushed aside the withered foliage and discovered Bobby’s lost glasses. A choked sniffle launched out of her throat and lodged itself somewhere behind her nose.

  For a set of twins, Bobby and Vivian shared very little in the way of physiology, but their eyeglasses were absolutely identical: the same style, the same frames, even the same prescription. She picked them up and looked at them through her own cracked lenses. From the bold black outline of his plastic frames, she could almost see Bobby’s face ripple outward in an imaginary haze, the split of her left lens bisecting the phantom into two vertical slices that didn’t quite match up.

  “I should give these back to him,” she thought. “He would want them.” She stood up and began walking toward the rest of the group, flowers in one hand, glasses in the other. She knew that he couldn’t see without his glasses any better than she could, which was not very well at all. Returning them to him seemed like the right thing to do. As she crossed the street, however, the ghost image of Bobby rolled his eyes disgustedly.

  “You’re such a sentimental wiener,” it seemed to say. “What the hell am I supposed to do with glasses now? I’m all dead and shit.”

  “But what if you … you know … need them?”

  “What, in the afterlife? Give me a break, Vivian. I think Valhalla will have an optometrist. How are you supposed to get these chumps to safety if you can’t even see where you’re going? Be reasonable; don’t be superstitious.”

  Vivian pulled her own glasses off of her face and replaced them with the unbroken pair. The smooth black plastic was cold against her ears and nose but quickly warmed up to meet her body temperature as her vision adjusted to the clarity of the intact lenses.

  “Okay, logic over sentimentality. That’s what you would have wanted,” she said.

  “But how about we compromise?”

  With that, she knelt down by her brother’s head and placed her own broken glasses on his cold nose. She could see the reflection of Trent’s face in the split lens as he limped to her side. He put his heavy hand on her shoulder with a long, lingering rub of support.

  “You okay, Vivi?”

  “I’ve said my goodbyes,” she nodded. “We should get away from this terrible place before it gets dark. There’s nothing else we can do here.”

  “But … but what about them? ” Erik mumbled, gesturing to the bodies. “We can’t just take off and leave them here by the side of the interstate like roadkill, can we? It just seems so … wrong. ”

  Vivian stood up and shook her head.

  “I’m sorry. We can’t take them with us, and you know we can’t bury them. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “No, Little E’s right,” Trent said. “If we can’t give them a burial we can at least hook them up with a proper funeral to guide their souls to the pearly gates. It’s the least we can do.”

  “All right,” Vivian nodded. “If nothing else, it might give us some sense of closure. Go ahead.”

  Trent cleared his throat and boomed, “Almighty God, we commit these bodies to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless them and keep them, the Lord make his face to shine upon them …”

  Vivian’s mind drifted sharply away as Trent’s stony delivery of the time-honored prayer dredged up the celluloid memories of every depressing funeral that she had ever seen in the movies. In her own mind, the four of them wer
e now standing on a rainy green hill amid a crowd of mourners dressed in sharp black suits and veils, each holding an identical black umbrella. Most of them were content to stand with a pensive look on their gray faces, but there was that one old lady wailing uncontrollably at the graveside. Wailing, wailing, wailing. Vivian opened her eyes not to the phantom of a grieving widow, but to a very real Sherri, hot tears streaming down her reddened, sobbing face.

  “Uh, Trent,” Vivian interrupted, “I … we all appreciate the sentiment of what you’re saying, but … honestly, Bobby was never one for sentimentality. I know he wouldn’t want to go out with us all huddled around and weeping over him like this. Don’t you know another passage that’s more, I don’t know, uplifting?” Trent thought for a moment, then cleared his throat and spoke with a metered passion.

  “Dearly beloved … we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Electric word, life. It means forever, and that’s a mighty long time.” Erik shook his head.

  “Okay, do you know anything that’s uplifting and isn’t out of a Prince song?”

  “This is pointless,” Vivian muttered. “Look, if you want to say goodbye to Bobby and Priscilla, just do it. Don’t recite canned speeches that you think you’re supposed to say at a time like this. If you’re going to say anything, just speak from your heart, okay?”

  Sherri nodded and stood up, drawing a long, wet breath of air into her lungs before finally speaking.

  “Bobby Gray was a stupid motherfucker.”

  “Sherri!” Vivian snapped.

  “Well, it was from the heart-you’ve got to give her that,” Erik shrugged.

  “You’d be alive right now if you didn’t come after me, you stupid asshole!” Sherri sobbed. “Why did you get yourself killed to save me? What were you thinking?! I never did a goddamn thing for you! I never did a goddamn thing for anybody! I didn’t ask for this, you asshole! You stupid … asshole! ” Sherri’s eulogy collapsed under the weight of a gratitude that she was ill-equipped to express, degenerating into a tearful, shuddering sob. Drowning in the sea of her own frustrated emotions, she didn’t protest when Trent offered his conciliatory embrace, but actually returned it, rubbing a cheek full of tear-activated grime across his shoulder. Without a hint of subtlety, Trent’s cat tail straightened out and stood as upright as a flagpole.