The Oblivion Society Read online

  Vivian looked into the model’s flawless, powdery complexion as a drop of sweat fell from the tip of her freckled nose.

  ” I’m the kind of girl you’re looking for?”

  “You know it!” the salesmodel boomed. “Look at you-you’re dead on your feet!

  Luckily for you, I’m here to kick a full-throttle recharge into your tired body battery with a hardcore blast of Fusion Fuel!”

  Vivian pushed her glasses up her nose and frowned.

  “Ah. I see. Well, I’m here to work a meaningless minimum-wage job in order to feed the hungry little mouth back home.”

  The model blinked in surprise.

  “Whoa! You have a kid? ”

  “I don’t,” Vivian sighed, “and that just makes the situation all the more pathetic, doesn’t it?”

  Without further explanation, she stepped around the salesmodel and made her way across the steaming parking lot toward the front entrance of the store. A quick series of gazelle-like leaps landed the model in front of his Hummer five steps ahead of Vivian. She tried to keep her head down and steamroll past him, but he was too quick for that. This was, after all, his job.

  Vivian dodged right, then left, but the salesmodel had become an unyielding orange-and-black barrier.

  “Look, Heathcliff, I’m late for work,” she said.

  “That’s cool; that’s cool,” he smiled, raising his hands in a show of innocence.

  “But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I let a superheated little fox like you into my store without passing off an ice-cold free sample of Fusion Fuel! Load and lock, baby!” He pulled a bottle out of a cooler next to the Hummer and tossed it straight up into the air like a spinning juggling pin. With a well-rehearsed swing of his arm, he caught the bottle by the neck and pitched it under his knee, tossing it in a slow, easy arc at Vivian’s chest. She instinctively caught it. It was a tall and slender club of orange glass with a graphic of a spongy sort of molecule branded in bas relief on its face, identical to the dozens that littered the parking lot. She took the bottle by its neck and held it out toward the model.

  “I don’t drink energy drinks.”

  “Energy drink?” the salesmodel said with disgust. “It’s not an energy drink! It’s so much more than that!”

  He put his large, square hand on the butt of the bottle and gently pushed it back toward Vivian before continuing.

  “Fusion Fuel is a diet enhancer that makes your food work harder for you! It uses the hidden power of lignite and sulfated castor oil to increase absorption of nutrients by up to 110% for maximum power and stamina on and off the field!” Vivian smirked.

  “I don’t drink snake oil either.”

  An overheated and red-faced old woman shuffled past the Hummer. The salesmodel rushed to her side, multitasking marks without missing a beat.

  “Stop staring-they’re free! Haha! Just kidding with ya! Fusion Fuel piledrives vitamins into your hard-working muscles with an intense super-reactive catalyst-altered power punch!”

  The way he said “catalyst-altered power punch” seemed to hang a tiny superscripted “TM” in the air.

  He shoved a bottle of the citrus beverage in the woman’s direction. She took a quick, panicked step backward and bumped against the Hummer’s gleaming chrome grille. His prey cornered, the salesmodel shoved the bottle into her trembling hands, then reached into the cooler for a six-pack.

  “Take a sixer to pound down with your whole team! It’s an energy absorption explosion!”

  Vivian took advantage of the model’s temporary distraction to attempt escape into the store, but before she had taken two steps he was done with the flustered oldster and back on her again.

  “Seriously though, Red,” he said with a rich, velvety smoothness, “why don’t you take this bottle of Fusion Fuel now, and I’ll take you out for proper drinks when you get off work. I really think we ought to get to know each other better. Whaddya say?”

  Vivian’s cheeks flushed as red as her hair.

  “If I say I’ll think about it, will you get out of my way?”

  “Now that wasn’t so hard, was it, Red?” the salesmodel grinned, stepping aside with an overblown sense of chivalry. “The name’s Nick, and I’ll be out here all day. Promise you’ll come back out and see me later, okay?”

  Vivian opened her mouth to make an excuse, but before any words came out, another customer caught the attention of the ever-vigilant Nick. He pounced on the wrinkled old man like a cheetah taking down a Shih-Tzu.

  “Fusion Fuel loads up on nutrients and locks them into your hard-working body cells! Load and lock, baby!”

  Vivian was a quick study, and this time she didn’t waste a second leaping over the red-faced woman’s already discarded six-pack and bolting to the entrance. Her feet squeaked onto the worn rubber pad that opened the automatic doors, blasting her with a gale of industrial-grade air conditioning. No matter how fetid the hot, humid sponge of the outside air became, the interior of Boltzmann’s Market remained cool, dry, and filled with the sweet scent of dead fish.

  Vivian sniffed curiously. “Dead fish?”

  Adjacent to the front entrance was a display that had not been there the day before, composed of a pile of soggy wooden crates filled with ice. She stepped up to the crate and looked inside, and a foul smell seared through her sinuses. The beds of ice were populated with the corpses of the most pathetic selection of fish that she had ever seen. There was not a matching set of species-mates to be found among the ranks of intact bodies, and the remainder of the lot was little more than hastily butchered chunks of pale, sickly meat oozing a pink, briny gravy that reeked of rotting cabbage. Vivian covered her nose and looked at the chalkboard sign that hung over the massacre.

  Today’s fresh catch - Any 2 for $5!

  “Fresh catch, my foot,” she muttered. “There are parts of the fossil record that are fresher than this.”

  She closed the first crate’s waterlogged lid, sealing off the heap of marine compost with a wet slap. She then closed the second. Before she could close the third, a squeal of audio feedback preceded a growling voice from the store’s public address system.

  “Vivian, please come to the office. Vivian, to the office immediately.” Vivian grimaced as she cast her eyes skyward. From the ceiling, a pair of motorized security cameras shook their heads at her disapprovingly. She looked past them and into the dark windows of the enclosed loft that loomed over the store like an Alcatraz watchtower. The management office of Boltzmann’s Market didn’t seem designed for clerical work as much as total, unblinking surveillance. She dragged herself up the narrow stairway to the office and pushed open its heavy steel door, which in turn banged into a large wooden desk, settling into the gouge that it had formed from years of inadequate opening space. The boxcar-sized piece of furniture was covered in a thick, tattered layer of multicolored carbon copy forms and free promotional mugs, full of free promotional pens and tchotchkes. To its side sat a bank of mismatched black and white security monitors, each snitching on some tiny corner of the store below. The air of the claustrophobic office hung heavy with the stench of body odor and failure.

  Behind the desk sat the store’s owner and general manager, Verman Boltzmann. Boltzmann was grotesquely, morbidly obese, and to see his enormous girth packed behind his desk was like looking at a water balloon pinched under a brick.

  “God damn it, Vivian! What the hell are you doing to my seafood display?! You come waltzing in here four minutes late, and the first thing you do is start vandalizing the place!”

  “More like sterilizing the place,” Vivian said. “I think you’re going to have to send that shipment of fish back to the supplier. It spoiled in transit.”

  “Ha!” Boltzmann barked dismissively. “Spoiled in transit my ass! Those fish came straight off the beach this morning!”

  Vivian raised an eyebrow.

  “Off the beach, sir?”

  ” From the beach! Off the docks! ” Boltzmann blustered guiltily. “For
Christ’s sakes, it’s not like I hired some goddamn wetbacks to pick the carcasses out of the sand! Those fish are fresh out of the bay!”

  Vivian shook her head knowingly.

  “Of course I wouldn’t think to doubt you, Mr. Boltzmann,” she said condescendingly, “but you do know that there’s a fishing ban in effect. Even if these fish came out of the bay, which they certainly did, you couldn’t legally-”

  “Who the hell do you think you are, coming in here and telling me what I can and can’t do in my own goddamn store?!” Boltzmann wailed. “Don’t forget, you work for me, missy!”

  Vivian rolled her eyes. “Only until the county health inspector comes and locks you up.”

  Boltzmann waved his hand dismissively.

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about him. That guy’ll approve a dogshit casserole for a hundred bucks and a bottle of gin.”

  Vivian slipped her fingers under her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

  “You are a shining paradigm of business ethics, boss.”

  Boltzmann leaned forward in his chair with a movement like tectonic plates grinding together, shoving a yellow carbon-copy invoice across the desk at Vivian. She pulled her hands from her face, picked up the paper, and squinted at its blurry dot-matrix print.

  “Listen up, smart-ass,” Boltzmann growled. “We just got in another shipment of those bodybuilder vitamins. The Beta Burns. Tag ‘em $10.99 and get ‘em stocked as fast as your dainty little hands can. For some reason that shit is selling like hotcakes. We can’t keep it on the shelves!”

  Vivian pointed to a row of smudged numerals on the invoice.

  “Well, here’s why,” she explained. “That’s a six, not a zero. Retail price is supposed to be $16.99. ”

  Boltzmann ripped the paper from Vivian’s hands and slapped it face-down on the desk without a glance.

  “Look missy, I’ve been running this store since before your mommy bought you your first bra,” he snarled. “There’s a pecking order to this business. I’m at the top because I know what the hell I’m doing. You’re at the bottom because you don’t know doodly squat. Somebody like you couldn’t make a management decision to save her life.”

  Just hearing the words “your” and “bra” coming out of Boltzmann’s mouth made Vivian feel somehow dirty, and she crossed her arms over her chest defensively.

  “Well?” Boltzmann snapped.

  Vivian blinked.

  “Well, what? ”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, Vivian! Get your head out of your ass! I asked you a direct question! If you think it’s so goddamn easy, then make a management decision!” Boltzmann barked. “This is just what I was saying! You’re all talk and no walk!” Vivian scowled.

  “Okay, fine. How about this price-tag situation. The checkouts were updated to bar code scanners years ago, yet your store policy still requires that each individual item be marked with a price tag. It’s a pointless relic of a bygone era. It would make more sense to post a single sign on the front of each shelf clearly displaying the price. That way your stock people could get a lot more work done in a day, plus the larger numbers would be easier for the retirees to read. Everybody wins.” Boltzmann’s loose, jowly face quivered, turned red, and knitted itself into a laugh of the purest, unadulterated condescension.

  “Har har har hardee har har!” he laughed. “Listen to cute little Vivian pretending she’s a goddamn businessman! I bet you think if you had a dick you’d be running the place!”

  Vivian’s face blossomed a prickly red as she spoke through a clenched jaw.

  “Sir, you just asked me to suggest-”

  “Haaaaar har har har!” Boltzmann wheezed. “Just get out there and tag all those new pills $10.99 before I shove a pink slip up your sweet little ass.” With an understated scowl, Vivian stepped out of the office and quietly closed the door. Years ago she probably would have slammed it in rage, but she had grown beyond such theatrics. An overextended stay in the realm of meaningless retail jobs had worn the sharp edges off of Vivian’s spirit like a river smoothes a jagged rock. She was just happy to have been pardoned from Boltzmann’s office, no matter how the pardon had been issued.

  As Vivian quietly padded down the stairs she could hear an altercation brewing at checkstand two.

  “Back when I was your age,” a dried-out old voice crackled, “potted meat used to cost ten cents a tin! And the tins were bigger back then!”

  “Gee, history is really swell,” a sardonic voice answered. “Today it costs $2.99. Same as your suit.”

  “That’s too much,” the first voice replied shrilly. “I’ll give you a dollar for it.”

  “Look, this is not Mexico. We do not haggle prices here.”

  The cynical voice belonged to Sherri Becquerel, the queen of friendly customer service. Slouched behind the register of checkstand two, Sherri looked about as out of place as a vampire at a beach party.

  Although she couldn’t have been long out of high school, Sherri’s pale, translucent white skin was pulled tightly over her bony skull, making her look as if she had gone through one too many discount facelifts. She was short, flat-chested, and waiflike, and her gaunt figure made her average-sized head appear larger than it really was. Smudges of black eye shadow punched in her dramatically oversized eyes, and a smear of black lip gloss blotted out her small narrow mouth. Her appearance and demeanor had earned her the nickname “Scary Sherri” among her co-workers, though nobody dared say it to her face.

  For that matter, her co-workers rarely dared to say anything to her face. The enraged senior slowly counted change from his pocket onto the stained black rubber of the checkstand’s conveyor belt.

  “A dollar and fifty cents. A dollar and seventy-five cents. A dollar and seventy …

  six cents.”

  Sherri idly brushed some lint from the front of her blood-red Black Rain concert tee. The under-laundered heavy-metal T-shirt was in blatant violation of the employee dress code, so she tried to emphasize its presence whenever possible. Where there should have been a powder-blue uniform vest, Sherri wore a black leather trench coat that was shaped more like a girl than she was.

  “Two dollars and eighty-nine cents. Two dollars and ninety-nine cents. There.” The old man grasped the plastic bag in his desiccated fingers and pulled it off the counter.

  “Whoa there, Gramps,” Sherri said. “Where’s the rest?” The old man’s face twisted into the look of distrust that all Stillwater wage slaves knew all too well. It was the look that said, “I know about your scam, you whipper-snapper. I saw it on 20/20, and I’m not giving you my Social Security checks.”

  “You said two dollars and ninety-nine cents!” the old man snapped. “That’s two dollars and ninety-nine cents right there. Do you want me to count it again? I can count it again for-”

  “Jesus H. Chri … Sales tax,” Sherri interrupted, rotating the register’s display toward the man’s thick bifocals. “It’s this new thing you might not have heard of. It was introduced somewhere around the dawn of time. I need another twenty-eight cents, Methuselah.”

  The old man looked at the display, as if trying to resolve the discrepancy with his eyes and then with his mind. He looked up into Sherri’s eyes, and his confusion seemed to melt away into troubled indifference. He reached into his heavy, jingling pocket in surrender.

  “Three dollars and nine cents. Three dollars and ten cents …” Sherri slouched behind the counter and dropped her head into her hands. The dense spangle of metal bracelets and leather cuffs on her arms clinked pitifully, punctuating her motion and ensuring that it was not overlooked by anyone nearby. When he had finally piled enough warm, dull coins on the belt to complete his purchase, the old man snapped up his bag of potted meat and turned on Sherri.

  “This store is too expensive. I’m never coming here again.” Sherri rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah. See you tomorrow, you senile old fart. If you don’t die first.” The man looked into Sherri’s eyes again, blinked, then
shambled away in creaky, awkward steps.

  Vivian watched with a jealous smile. She had spent long hours wondering what gave Sherri this license to speak her mind to the customers without consequence, and she had only been able to come up with one theory. It was because of her eyes. Her vast, expressionless eyes.

  Sherri’s eyes were a whispered shade of blue so pale and empty that she looked as if she could be an alien, or a heroin addict, or both. Something about them masked any hint of a living soul beyond their glassy surface, and when she insulted you, it felt like the television had just called you a crazy bastard, and to argue would only prove it right.

  Sherri leaned back on her register and took a long, hard swig from a half-empty bottle of Fusion Fuel. She noticed Vivian looking at her and gave her a nod.

  “I heard the Verminator taking a big hunk out of your ass up there, Powderpuff.” Vivian frowned. She hated it when Sherri called her “Powderpuff,” but she had long since given up on trying to get her to stop. Even so, she still found Sherri to be the most pleasant of her co-workers, a fact that didn’t speak well of Verman Boltzmann’s hiring practices.

  “Working here makes me want to slit my wrists,” she moaned. “Sherri, you’ve been in here day in and day out longer than I have, yet you never go homicidal. How do you do it?”

  Sherri reached into her coat and pulled out a flat silver hip flask. She unscrewed the skull-shaped stopper, held it up in silent toast to Vivian, and dumped the remainder of its intoxicating contents into her already polluted energy drink. Vivian just rolled her eyes and gestured irritably at the leaking fish crates.

  “I mean, can you believe that?” she continued. “He’s trying to sell the maritime equivalent of roadkill.”

  Sherri nodded.

  “This country is seriously messed up. You can sell toxic meat and nobody gives two shits, but you let someone go down on your toxic meat and you’re public enemy number one.”

  Vivian opened her mouth, but no words came out. She closed it again and squinted at Sherri. Sherri gestured with her eyebrows at the wire rack behind Vivian.