by Eirik Gumeny
“Stop setting shit on fire or else we’re going to hurt you.”
“Yeah,” said the kid, “good luck with that, honky.”
“You’re whiter than I am!” shouted the former Norse God of Thunder.
The teenager ignited himself again, his lanky body covered by a writhing mass of flames. Slowly, the blaze began to spread outward, his fake frame of fire growing an inch every second.
“Right, we need to stop this now,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
The scrawny, burning fifteen-year-old started running toward the president and the displaced god, shouting, “I’m gonna burn you bitches! With fire!”
“Take a step back, Charlie,” said Thor, the very confused and tired clouds darkening once more. “I’m gonna electrocute his ass.”
“We don’t want to kill him, Thor, he’s just a kid.”
“Yeah, but he’s a complete tool.”
“No killing kids, Thor.”
“Can I punch him?”
“Gently.”
The flaming teen reached the duo, shouting incomprehensibly, and then launched himself, spread eagle, at the thunder god.
Thor lightly tapped the teenager with most of his fist, sending the boy flying ten feet backward. The fifteen-year-old crashed to the ground, snuffing out most of the flames on his back.
The human torch stood up almost immediately, his exoskeleton of fire doubling in size. Thankfully, the kid was kind of short, so the crackling mass of flames was only, like, eight feet tall, instead of twelve or something, but, still. It was a lot of fire and it was moving towards Thor and Charlie again.
“His fire manifestation seems to be directly linked to his ire,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“So ...” began Thor.
“Don’t make him angry.”
“I don’t think that’s even possible.”
“I’ve got an idea,” said the president, jogging towards the car.
“What should I do?” called the thunder god.
“Keep him busy.”
“OK, sure,” said Thor with a shrug.
Chester A. Arthur XVII grabbed a blanket from the trunk/hood of the Volkswagen Beetle. He ran to the passenger door window and looked in at the cupholder and the two empty bottles of water in it.
“You don’t have any kind of beverage on you, do you?” shouted Charlie from the far side of the car.
Thor, dodging fireballs, replied, “Nope.”
Chester A. Arthur XVII furrowed his brow. He tossed the blanket on the ground, hopping to sop up some of the earlier flooding. Sadly, though, between the heat from the teenager who kept setting things on fire and the truck stop’s truly remarkable drainage system, there wasn’t much moisture left on the ground.
“Well,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII to himself, undoing his fly, “I guess we’re doing it this way.”
***
Thor was knee-deep in the Denny’s ruins, tossing eggs at the teenage inferno, hoping they would flash fry on impact and he could make himself a sandwich. He neglected to realize that, even if this worked, the fried eggs would fall to the ground before he could catch them. But, then, given where he found the rolls ...
Chester A. Arthur XVII tossed a urine-soaked blanket to Thor.
“Here, wrap the kid up in this before he gets bigger.”
“Why does it smell?”
“I don’t know,” lied the president. “Hurry up, before it dries.”
“All right, all right,” said the thunder god, hurling one last egg at the fifteen-year-old before racing toward him with a wet blanket. The fifteen-year-old, for his part, began fleeing.
“Stop running!” Thor barked.
“Up yours, cracker!”
“Let me hug you, damn it!”
***
Thor carried the teenager over his shoulder, the pyrokinetic fifteen-year-old wrapped in a urine-soaked blanket and now only slightly warmer than room temperature, like a burrito from Taco Bell.
“This smells like pee, yo!”
“I’m not enjoying it any more than you are,” said the thunder god, the wet blanket rubbing against the side of his head. “Quit squirming.”
“Hell no, bro. I ain’t gonna not try an’ not gets loose. I’m gonna get out this and all up in your ass and then I’m gonna set your world on fire!”
“Are you ... hitting on me?”
“What? No,” stammered the teenager. “I ain’t no AC/DC, motherfucker!”
“It’s OK if you are, you know.”
“Man, fuck you, homeslice.”
Thor dumped the teenager unceremoniously on the ground in front of an ever-expanding group of disgruntled truck drivers, then grabbed the bumper from the nearest ruined tractor-trailer and tied it around the fifteen-year-old.
“I called his mom,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII. “She’s on her way.”
“My moms?! You bitches be trippin’ grade school! That is some low-ass cow plops.”
“If you didn’t want yer mother called then you shouldn’t’a burned down the truck stop, Jimmy,” a truck driver in a cowboy hat said sternly, crossing his arms over his chest.
“You shoulda just given me a job, ass-butt!”
“We can’t give you a job as a truck driver when you don’t know how to drive a truck,” said a burly trucker in faded flannel. “It’s a poor business decision.”
“Yo’ momma’s a poor business decision!”
“I know,” said the truck driver sadly. “For the amount she charges, you’d think she’d be a better prostitute.”
“You’re going to have to keep him wet,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII. “At least until someone is able to diagnose how he was manifesting and controlling the fire and extracts or counteracts it.”
“My cousin’s a scientist, I can give him a call,” said a third truck driver, this one much tinier than the rest and appearing to be running entirely on amphetamines.
“Well, there you go,” said the president. Then: “When was the last time you slept?”
The skinnny trucker shrugged. “What year is it?”
“Don’t I gets a say in any of this, yo?” said the teenager.
“No,” said everyone.
“The showers are on the far side of the truck stop,” said the first truck driver. “That’s a good thirty minutes walking. Will he keep that long?”
“Probably not,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII. “You’re going to have to, uh, improvise.”
“Is that why he smells like pee?”
“Yes.”
The trucker in the cowboy hat shrugged. “You’re the heroes.”
“You heard the man,” said the very large and very angry driver of a very expensive and very burnt truck, undoing his very large and very angry fly. “We’ll have to take shifts. I’m first.”
“This ain’t right, yo!” shouted the teenager, the trucker’s stream catching him on the side of the head. “You’re gonna be hearing from my lawyer!”
“There’s no lawyer on this planet I can’t clobber,” replied Thor.
“Well, it looks like you’ve got this under control,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, assessing the line of truckers circling the fifteen-year-old. “Now there’s the matter of our getting paid.”
“Yeah, uh ... I don’t think that’s going to happen,” said the burly, flannel-wearing truck driver, scrunching up his face. “Russ was the one who called you, but, well, he’s dead. He was in the Denny’s when it exploded.”
“Huh.”
“The rest of us don’t carry cash much, and those that do usually leave them in safes in the trucks, which, well ...”
The cloned president furrowed his brow in reply.
“Anyway,” said the trucker, “we managed to pool together three dollars and fifty-two cents in cash, a live chicken, and a coupon for a free fill-up at Johan’s Rest Stop out in Wyoming.” Another trucker walked up beside him with the aforementioned goods. “It’s literally all we have thanks to this jerk-off.” He pointed a th
umb toward Jimmy, currently being dragged across the parking lot.
“Well, then, thanks, I guess,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, staring across the warped asphalt at the ocean of incinerated trucks and collaterally-damaged fast-food restaurants. “At least we were able to help.”
“Kind of,” added Thor, taking a bite of a ham-and-egg sandwich.
THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE LIZARD
or, If Ignorance Is Bliss Then Knowing Things Is the Absolute Pits
A big and bearded man sat cross-legged in dirty cargos on a rocky outcropping, staring east over a hazy city, toward a line of distant mountains. The man’s name was Phillip Milhouse Thompson, though he, mostly, went by Phil. He was a philosopher, once, and a revolutionary, and then accidentally a terrorist, and then a hero.
But right now he wasn’t much of anything at all.
Phil had been sitting on the outcropping since just after breakfast – a meal that had consisted solely of the last of his CLIF Bars and coffee brewed with three-day-old grounds – staring and thinking and wondering, pondering all there was to ponder in the universe. Alas, he was no closer to an answer than when he had started his retreat, weeks earlier – though his skin did have the healthy glow of an overripe tomato now, so that was something.
Inching through the scrub brush and sandy soil behind the man, crawling along the red-orange rock, a small and horned lizard, like a pancake with a head and legs and a tail and speckled the colors of the Mojave, slowly made its way towards the philosopher. Step by gnarled and interminably slow and tiny step.
When the lizard, finally, got within a few feet, Phil cast a casual glance sideways, over his shoulder, to make sure he wasn’t about to be mauled by a mountain lion or violated by a drifter, but otherwise paid the desert dweller no mind.
Then the lizard started talking.
“Something,” said the lizard, in a deeper baritone than one would think possible, “seems to have gotten you down, son.”
“Yeah ...” the man replied, still staring forward absently.
“What’s wrong?”
Phil sighed, shaking his head slightly. “The world.”
“The world,” echoed the lizard.
“The world.”
“The whole thing?”
“The whole thing.”
The lizard hesitated a moment, knitting its scaly brow, then asked: “Could you, maybe, be more specific?”
The philosopher turned to face the reptile. “Are you sure,” he asked, cocking an unkempt eyebrow, “that’s a question you want to ask?”
“I mean, I ... I thought so?”
“You’re sure?”
“Well, now I’m not so –”
“My roommate,” explained Phil, “moved out. My rent, understandably, went up. I’m unemployed, and not for the first time, my toilet is broken, and my girlfriend recently left me for a cop who has made it a point to explicitly explain how overjoyed he becomes when he beats up on drunk people. I’ve no one to talk to, about any of that, or anything else, because I watched my best friends die, one-by-one-by-one, at the hands of a regenerated Aztec god that I, most likely, played at least some part in resurrecting. And then my new friends – or, at least, the men and women and homunculi I thought were my friends – got me fired from my job in Las Vegas, all because I defended them, to another friend, because I am a naïve and unadulterated idiot that truly did not think they were capable of the degenerate and opportunistic acts that, it turns out, they not only excel at but in which they actively revel. And then there’s the man who did the firing, William H. Taft XLII, the mayor-king of Las Vegas, who is most assuredly on his way to becoming some kind of autocrat – which I may have, again, by my employ, enabled in some way – and what do you even do with that information? How do you reckon with a penchant for consistently abetting aspiring megalomaniacs? And then, of course, there’s the fact that I talk like this now, fast, without stopping to breathe every forty seconds, because I recently had a sinus surgery – the bills for which are another issue entirely – and while the procedure itself was, unequivocally, a good thing – who, after all, doesn’t like breathing? – the results so fundamentally altered what I thought was an eternal fact about my own being, and that ... that’s hard to consider, lizard, to absorb, to understand that something you thought was so true and unequivocal about yourself was bad and is gone forever and yet still know that that is a good thing, even if it feels strange and unnatural. And, honestly, apropos of nothing – well, nothing except the Henry Cavill retrospective on one of the classic movie channels a few months ago – I think I might be into dudes now? At least a little? Which, again, coming to terms with your own bisexuality this late in the game, especially after half a lifetime spent – squandered – in quiet introspection, is confusing, to say the least. And all of that is to say nothing of the fact that cows are sentient now, and full of malcontent toward humanity, nevermind the merpeople, who are so obviously caught up in a dangerous and regressive dogma – and, I know, who am I to judge – but they’re up to something, something terrible, and no one is doing anything about it, not even Billy, no matter how many times I tried to warn him or at least get him to look into them. And – and – to top it all off, thanks to my dire financial state, I had to end my cable subscription, which, aside from no longer being able to partake in the classic movie channels that spurred such an awakening within myself, I’m now missing South Park, which, let’s be honest, is having a renaissance, and who wants to be out of the loop on that?”
“Oh. I, uh ...” replied the lizard. “Shit, man. That’s a ... that’s a lot.”
“I know.”
“Do you know what might help?”
“No,” Phil practically shouted, “not at all. That’s why I’ve been sitting here staring forlornly at mountains for the better part of a month.”
“Lick me,” said the lizard.
The man in the cargo pants made a face. “I thought you were trying to help.”
“I am. Lick me. Head to tail, really get in there.”
“I ... really don’t want to.” Aside from the obvious reasons – lizards were notoriously untrustworthy, Phil had been taught from an early age not to lick strangers, etc. – the reptile, slightly larger than a small chihuahua, appeared to be covered in small spikes, with a valley of even larger ones running down its back. The man couldn’t imagine that putting his tongue against any part of that would be pleasant.
“I understand, all of that,” explained the reptile, reading the man’s thought via his visibly contorted face, “and, since we’re sharing, I really don’t want you to either. But I’m a magic lizard, licking me will help.”
“Magic.”
“You have a better reason why a lizard can talk?”
“Science?”
“Same thing,” the lizard dismissed with a shrug. “Lick me.”
“Lick you?”
“Lick. Me.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Taking a deep breath and considering all the implications implicit in this act – and then realizing that considering all the implications was precisely why he was here in this predicament in the first place – Phil picked up the lizard, holding it in one hand.
He stared at the goggle-eyed creature.
The goggle-eyed creature stared right back.
Then Phillip Milton Thompson licked the lizard, slowly and heavily, dragging his tongue from one end of the scaly, spiky creature to the other.
He gagged almost immediately afterward, coughing and spitting as he put the animal down.
“You feel better?” asked the lizard.
“No, I don’t feel – Oh. Oh, wait,” said Phil, blinking furiously. Time, it seemed, was slowing; he was viewing his surroundings, the desert, the mountains, the reptile, as if through a bowl of color-changing gelatin. He could taste his own heartbeat, hear the odor of a coyote sleeping. The man rubbed his hands along the back of his sunburned neck – or, at least, he thought he did. H
e pulled his fingers away, stickily, probably, and then stared at them, smelling them with his eyeballs.
“Holy crap,” he said.
“But you feel better though, right?” asked the lizard.
The philosopher laughed, short. “I can’t feel anything.”
The horned lizard smiled. “You’re welcome.”
PROLOGUE
The Sequeling
Erin McCafferty and Jorge Reyes, hands clasped and hearts light, strolled through Sinatra Park, looking out over the Hudson River and the perpetually churning water above the remains of what was once New York City.
The couple was old enough to remember when the city was an actual, sprawling metropolis – a rarity now, on both counts, they knew – instead of simply a toxic swamp of concrete and hot dogs and tourist bones. Still, they’d spent some good times there when they were younger, and it was going to take more than a couple dozen apocalypses to erase –
“Do you hear that?” Erin asked.
“Hear what?” Jorge answered. “The water?”
“No,” replied his wife. “That.”
Jorge stood still. He listened intently. He didn’t hear anything.
“I don’t hear anything,” he said.
“Huh.” Erin shrugged, and she and Jorge resumed their lighthearted hand-holding.
For a moment, anyway.
“Seriously,” she said, looking around, “you don’t hear that? It’s getting louder.”
Jorge paused again and listened furiously. “Sorry, babe,” he said. “Nothing.”
Erin put her finger in her ear, hoping to dislodge ... something. A tiny gnat maybe. “It’s this weird, indistinct ... sound,” she explained.
“That’s helpful,” said Jorge, “but I still don’t hear it.”
“Is it getting dark?” added Erin, looking up at the purple sky.
“I honestly don’t know,” said Jorge, also looking up. “I’m not good with shades of purple.”
“No, not dark dark, more like ... shadow dark.”
Jorge continued to scan the sky. “Probably a cloud,” he said. “Or, you know, that meteor.” He pointed to the small black dot rapidly getting less small.
