The End of Everything Forever

by Eirik Gumeny

  Ultimately, though, all this boning was for naught, as the Reality Regime’s ratings tanked – everyone was too busy humping each other to watch TV – and they were cancelled and removed from office before a president could be elected.

  Giving up, however, was something Queen Victoria XXX and Chester A. Arthur XVII were never any good at. Thanks to the sex-off, they had it in their heads that only one of them could be in charge of their relationship and, damn it, they were going to find out who it was. Sadly, sitting down and speaking honestly to one another like reasonable adults was not an option, as Charlie and Vicky were never any good at that either. The president and the queen viewed emotional intimacy as weakness and had made it a point to ignore the frillier aspects of their attraction to one another, focusing instead on the ugly-bumping. As such, rather than talk about their burgeoning and overpowering feelings, they chose to continue nailing everything that moved, hate-fucking their way up and down the eastern seaboard and trying to quantify a winner in their relationship.

  It was proving to be more difficult than they had anticipated.

  “Remember last week?” continued Queen Victoria XXX. “It took all of two seconds to talk you into doing me in that laundromat. I barely had to ask, much less try.”

  “That’s because it was you.”

  “It’s because I took my shirt off.”

  “No, honestly, it was because it was you,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII somberly. “I’m getting tired of this competition, Vicky. I don’t want the most anymore, I ... I want things to go back to how they used to be.”

  “But then you’d basically be admitting defeat,” explained Queen Victoria XXX.

  “Yeah ...” replied the cloned president with a sigh.

  Scores of scorched, ashen trees whipped by, rapping against the side view mirror as Chester A. Arthur XVII slipped the car off-road to avoid a collapsed overpass.

  “You guys do know I’m here, right?” asked Thor, leaning forward in the back seat.

  CHAPTER SIX

  That’s Not a Knife

  Thor, Chester A. Arthur XVII, and Queen Victoria XXX pulled their armored Volkswagen Beetle off the battered highway and arrived at the small town of Joe, a few miles west of their hotel and the metropolitan haven of the Meadowlands.

  Joe was the last of a ragtag group of suburbs sprawling out from Secaucus, surrounded on three sides by barren wastelands, on two sides by a desolate, burned-over forest, and, finally, on the remaining side, by another suburb, hexagons having been the favored layout of town planners in the post-Robot War residential renaissance.

  The town itself was mostly comprised of blocks of tents, shacks, and a disproportionate amount of abandoned cars. Joe did, however, contain two paved streets, a farmer’s market, three lovely Colonial-style manors, a string of empty strip malls along its western edges, the state’s largest pornography store, six gourmet cupcake trucks, a camping supply store, and a bank.

  A bank currently being danced upon by a giant mechanical senior citizen.

  “Is that ... the Hustle?”

  “I think that’s the Hustle.”

  “Why is he dancing the Hustle?”

  “What the hell is the Hustle?” asked Thor.

  “It’s a kind of dance,” explained Queen Victoria XXX, “favored by people who don’t actually know how to dance.”

  “Why is he doing it on top of that bank?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “Why is there a bank here in the first place?”

  The planet Mars, seemingly tired of doing what physics told it to, decided one day that it was no longer going to orbit the sun and, instead, raced headlong into it. The result was what local and national news networks termed “a massive solar death wave” that washed over the Earth and ended the world for the seventeenth time. In addition to searing the planet’s crust, boiling two oceans, and setting a solid third of humanity on fire, the solar death wave also caused most of the paper currency in existence to literally go up in a puff of smoke. As most people were living off of credit cards and, at that moment, trying not to be immolated, very few people batted an eye. With very little effort on anyone’s part, the societies of the world soon switched to either entirely intangible credit-based monetary systems or, as a large number of people were living in shacks and cardboard houses after the world had tried to kill them the first sixteen times, barter systems that tended to rely heavily on stray cats and sexual favors.

  “We should probably try to talk to him,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.

  “Can’t we just hit him?”

  “Soon, Thor. Soon.”

  “Fine,” said Thor, before shouting, “Hey, grandpa! What’s your deal?”

  The robot continued to dance.

  “I don’t think he heard you,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII. “OLD MAN! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!”

  The giant robot spun on one foot, then waggled what could best be termed its ass at them. The trio stood and stared, watching the metal butt-plate, unsure if the old man inside the robot was still simply dancing or if he was trying to taunt them somehow.

  “YOU! IN THE GIANT ROBOT!” yelled Chester A. Arthur XVII. “WE’D LIKE TO TALK TO YOU!”

  There was nothing but shimmying robot rump in reply.

  “This is stupid,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “You’re stupid.”

  “I’m throwing something at him,” said Thor.

  The reborn thunder god grabbed the largest slab of sidewalk he could find and frisbeed it at the robot’s dome. It shattered on the glass without leaving a scratch. The collision did get the old man’s attention, though.

  “Who are you?” he asked through the robot’s loudspeaker, swiveling inside his dome to face the trio.

  “You first, old man,” said Queen Victoria XXX.

  “That’s hardly well-mannered etiquette. I asked a question. You should really respond to mine before asking one of your own.”

  “You’re dancing on the flaming ruins of this heretofore prosperous town and you tried to murder one of our friends,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII. “We really don’t feel the need to make an effort to be polite.”

  “Tried to murder your friend?” the old man retorted. “I haven’t tried to murder anyone in days. Everyone that was supposed to be dead died. Unless ... Are you friends with that antagonistic squirrel?”

  “Yes,” answered Queen Victoria XXX. “And you really messed him up with that black lightning bullshit. We’re about two seconds away from returning the favor, so maybe you should tell us what your fucking problem is while you still can.”

  “My, she’s a saucy one.”

  “Saucy?” said Thor. “Who the hell says saucy? How old are you?”

  “Closing in on two hundred, give or take a decade. Time tends to lose some meaning over, well, time.”

  “You’re not, like, a god or someone, are you?”

  “Oh, no, no, my boy,” said the old man. “Although, there were some, back in my day, who said –”

  “Yeah, that’s great,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “Who are you and why are you dancing poorly on that bank? Two answers, two sentences. Or we crack that dome of yours like an egg and make an omelet with your insides.”

  “Wow,” said Thor, turning to face the cloned Queen of England.

  “My name,” boomed the old man in the robot, stamping towards them, “is Nikola Tesla. And I am here, dancing ‘poorly’ on this bank, as you say, because my employer paid me a significant amount of money to create a ruckus.”

  “Your employer?” said Thor.

  “Now, I ask again,” continued the old man, his mechanical exoskeleton beginning to crackle with purple lightning, “who might you three be?”

  After the world was ended for the sixteenth time, the Aussichtslos Drogensucht Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, a frozen sausage corporation out of Germany, manufactured an absolutely absurd number of genetic reproductions of political leaders from across the globe, hoping to land a profitable contra
ct with the United States government, either as a steady source of on-demand experienced political minds or as a supplier of a new kind of lunch meat. They weren’t picky. America, however, wasn’t havin’ none of it.

  Faced with crippling debt and warehouses full of ethically-questionable livestock that they couldn’t unload, the AD GmbH forced each of the clones to battle his or her re-created brethren to the death in televised Pay-Per-View matches. The winners were promised freedom, a change of clothes, and a month’s supply of bratwurst.

  These morally-dubious and savagely-violent blood feuds went swimmingly for quite a while, actually, to the point that the AD GmbH considered growing a whole slew of new clones and hosting televised deathmatches of historical icons as a full time endeavor.

  Then the Andrew Jacksons got free.

  “It’s a trap,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.

  “What do you mean a trap?” replied Thor. “Who’d try to trap me?”

  “It’s not for you,” said Queen Victoria XXX, scanning the strip-malled horizon.

  “Yeah, OK,” said Thor. “I’ll believe that when –”

  The sound of a gunshot echoed over the town. Thor’s shoulder was pushed back, then began bleeding.

  “All right, what the hell?”

  “There,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, nodding toward a figure on the roof of the adult video warehouse.

  Thor turned to look, but he was knocked backward, catching the business end of a particle beam with his chest.

  “Oh, right, this guy.” Queen Victoria XXX dove for cover behind a conveniently placed sedan as purple lightning leapt spastically from Tesla’s robot, filling the air.

  “You young turks never did answer my question.”

  “Let it go, old man!” She grabbed a rock and threw it at the robot. Lightning vaporized it halfway along its trajectory.

  “I don’t know why I expected that to go differently.”

  A rocket fired. Queen Victoria XXX bolted from the sedan as it exploded behind her. She slid across the hood of the nearest intact car, falling to the ground on the far side and finding Chester A. Arthur XVII.

  “He’s still up there,” said the cloned president, pointing toward the blinking neon ADULT sign on the roof of the pornography superstore.

  “You think it’s him?” asked Queen Victoria XXX.

  “Who else would it be?”

  An explosion on the opposite side of the car sent the vehicle flying over their heads.

  “Fuck!” shouted Queen Victoria XXX. “Why do we keep hiding behind these things?!”

  Through the dust and lightning, the president and the queen could see Tesla’s robot stalking toward them. Queen Victoria XXX patted her hands across her heavily-belted waist, her tattered petticoat, and her surprisingly knife-free thighs, then turned to Chester A. Arthur XVII.

  “Do we have any weapons?”

  “In the car.”

  “In the car?!” snapped the queen. “Why are the weapons in the fucking car?”

  “We had Thor. Generally you point him at something and it gets broken. He’s like a wrecking ball fueled by frozen pizza.”

  “I remember your plans being a lot more nuanced than that.”

  Half a pickup truck caught the robot square in the dome. The machine stumbled, then fell to its side. The lightning field died. Thor jogged over to Queen Victoria XXX and Chester A. Arthur XVII.

  “See?” said the president. “We’re fine.”

  “How we do–” began Thor, only to be unceremoniously cut off by another gunshot. This one caught the thunder god in his charred and still-smoking chest.

  “For Christ’s ...” he mumbled, before shouting, “Would you fucking quit that?!”

  The former god ripped the door off the nearest burning car and threw it towards the porn store. It crumpled against the facade of the building, then fell to the sidewalk and crumpled again. The figure disappeared from the rooftop.

  “If he’s your enemy, why’s he keep shooting me?” asked Thor, wiping blood and clumps of skin from his torso. “Oh, that is just wonderful.”

  “Andy’s never been that great at a distance,” replied Queen Victoria XXX with a shrug.

  “You mean you know this guy?”

  “Yeah, he’s one of us, a political clone.”

  “He’s an asshole is what he is,” grumbled Chester A. Arthur XVII.

  “Well, yeah. That too.”

  Behind them, gears whirred and lightning began sparking again as Tesla’s robot righted itself. Thor hung his head.

  “I’m going after Andy!” shouted Chester A. Arthur XVII, breaking into a sprint and heading toward the adult video warehouse.

  “Charlie, wait!” shouted Queen Victoria XXX. A particle beam struck the ground directly in front of her, sending asphalt and dirt flying. She turned and covered her face. “Damn it!”

  The dome of Tesla’s robot spun as it launched a trio of rockets toward Chester A. Arthur XVII. They were immediately struck down by a large bolt of white lightning.

  “What in the ...” began Tesla.

  “My name is Thor,” bellowed the former Norse god, striding manfully toward the robot, “son of Odin and desk clerk at the Secaucus Holiday Inn.”

  Tesla’s robot turned, the old man inside staring incredulously.

  But not so incredulously that he couldn’t fire another rocket directly at Thor.

  The thunder god caught it with one hand.

  “We’re ending this now,” said Thor, the sky beyond him darkening, “you fucking dick.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

  The Andrew Jacksons – clones of the duel-prone, bank-hating, cheese-loving seventh president of the United States – had been pitted against one another in a warehouse fabricated to resemble an Old West settlement. While most of the AD GmbH’s battles to the death took only a few days, the Jacksons had been locked inside for more than two weeks with no clear winner. Not that the presidents weren’t trying. There was more blood on the walls of the warehouse than in the bathroom stalls of a cutters’ convention.

  Soon, though, with attempted homicides vastly eclipsing actual ones, the surviving Jacksons unanimously decided to stop trying to murder one another, the prevailing opinion being that it just wasn’t fun anymore. It was then that Andrew Jackson II convinced his reconstituted brethren to turn their bloodlust outwards.

  The Andrew Jacksons – having stacked barrels of gunpowder and tequila in a corner and then thrown an ignited Andrew Jackson XLIX onto the pile – broke free from their warehouse, swarmed the corporation’s campus, and immediately set upon anyone and everyone in an AD GmbH uniform.

  The Jacksons killed fifty members of the security team with forty-seven bullets. Then they set the tech support department on fire. Andrew Jacksons XXV, XXVI, and LXII broke from the pack and stabbed their way through a cafeteria full of biologists and genetic engineers, while Andrew Jackson LXXX single-handedly defeated the cleaning ladies.

  It didn’t take long before the Andrew Jacksons made their way to the campus’s perimeter, and then through it, leaving behind them whatever the corporate employee equivalent of genocide would be.

  The board of directors of the AD GmbH, safely locked in the conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of the tower in the center of their now blood-soaked corporate headquarters, was nonetheless soiling themselves at the thought of what the Andrew Jacksons might do to them should they ever leave their increasingly feces-filled office. Thinking quickly, and covering his nose with his shirt, the Chief Human Resources Officer combed through the files of the already freed clones, found the six least likely to join the Jacksons’ murderfest, and contracted them to go after the rampaging presidential replicas.

  Along with a camera crew.

  ***

  It didn’t take long for Chester A. Arthur XVII and the Five Lincolns to find the surviving Andrew Jacksons. They had left a trail of assaulted ATMs; burning, bombed, or otherwise bloodied banks; a
nd criminally collied credit unions in their wake – a trait they all claimed was left over from the original Andrew Jackson.

  The six non-homicidal presidential clones confronted the significantly more pro-murder ones in a field behind what had once been an elementary school. The Lincolns urged the Jacksons to lay down their arms – and their legs, and their tire irons, and their shivs, and their makeshift cannons – and end their killing spree, before even more innocent blood was spilled, or, by the looks of it, bathed in.

  The Jacksons, after a quick huddle, politely declined the offer. They were going to continue to fight for their freedom. They were going to kill for it. Some of them were even willing to dry-hump the corpses if that would help.

  Chester A. Arthur XVII and the Five Lincolns countered that the Jacksons were, in fact, already free, having escaped from the AD GmbH several days ago, and no longer needed to fight for anything.

  The Andrew Jacksons pointed at the cameramen, threw knives at the cameramen, and then said everybody else everywhere could go fuck themselves.

  It was at this point that a melee broke out. With the crew dead, but the cameras still recording, and the combatants not leaving the playground, Chester A. Arthur XVII and The Five Lincolns engaged their adversaries in a three-day-long free-for-all until only one Andrew Jackson remained breathing.

  The AD GmbH made enough money to buy the moon.

  ***

  Despite repeated and increasingly terrifying efforts to end Andrew Jackson II once and for all – including forcing him to watch all three extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movies and the entire Hobbit trilogy without a bathroom break – Chester A. Arthur XVII and the Five Lincolns ultimately reconciled themselves to simply burying the reconstituted president alive, deep, deep underground in the atomic backwoods of Romania, where he would surely not harbor a grudge, and even more surely never bother anyone ever again.