The End of Everything Forever

by Eirik Gumeny

  As he passed the mammoth crater he had earlier created, though, Thor couldn’t help but smile. He did enjoy examining his own handiwork. And this particular crater was a thing of beauty: a perfect circle, with concave sides as smooth as glass, surrounded by dark, symmetrical scorch marks. The collateral damage was equally stunning. The buildings at the edge of the depression barely even qualified as buildings anymore. And the smoking, mangled robot at the center of it all was ... empty.

  “Suttungr’s unwashed nutsack,” the Norseman grumbled.

  Thor looked around Joe. The townsfolk that weren’t dead or actively engulfed in flames appeared to either be hiding from him or helping those that were dead or on fire. Some were crying. And at least three were in a tent with a not-quite-closed entry flap, getting it on like rabbits. Filthy, filthy rabbits. In any event, these were not the looting kind of people. Or the desecrating a corpse and dragging it through the center of town kind of people. Thor furrowed his brow.

  Warily, the thunder god continued past a handful more tents, through the field of abandoned cars along Joe’s perimeter, and then back up the embankment to where Charlie had parked the car.

  Only the Volkswagen wasn’t there.

  “I mean, come on! Who steals – It wasn’t even that good of a car!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Edison’s Ghost Was Just Floating Around, Laughing

  Timmy, the telepathic, no-longer-telekinetic, no-longer-cape-wearing, space-faring super-squirrel was sleeping soundly on a pillow in one of the nicer rooms in the Secaucus Holiday Inn. Catrina had tucked him snugly into an especially soft and warm hand towel. His leg twitched slightly as he dreamt of the time he threw a tray full of scalpels into the head of the man who had experimented on him. He squeaked happily.

  And then Timmy was woken by a large, building-shaking thud and the sound of breaking glass.

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  ***

  Nikola Tesla was staggering across the hotel lobby, sans robotic exoskeleton but now waving around a large, crackling carbine. In the foyer behind him, Chester A. Arthur XVII’s armored Volkswagen lay on its side in a pool of transmission fluid and shattered glass, half in the plaza and half in the Holiday Inn.

  “What the fuck are you doing, old man?” shouted Mark, bursting from his office and storming past the front desk.

  “Where is the blonde man?” shouted Tesla. “The one who broke my robot.”

  “Who? Thor?” said Catrina, leaning toward the lobby from behind the counter. “He’s not here.”

  “What the fuck did you do to my hotel?!” added Mark, extending his arms sideways and standing in front of the old man. Tesla responded by pointing his electric rifle directly into Mark’s face.

  “He’s not here?” asked the elderly scientist. “But the talking direction-box in the car said this was his home. I assumed he would have come home after an ordeal such as the one he just went through ...”

  “You stole his car,” explained Catrina, pointing at the Volkswagen coughing up exhaust in the entryway. “How would he beat you here?”

  “Oh. Yes. That is a good point you raise,” conceded Nikola Tesla. “No matter! I will simply hold the two of you hostage until he gets back!”

  The two-hundred-year-old scientist gestured with his gun, moving Mark backward toward the front desk. Halfway there, however, Timmy tumbled through the stairway door and skittered across the lobby floor.

  “Do you have any idea,” the squirrel asked, “how much of a pain in the ass doors are when you can’t open them with your mind? I had to throw myself at the god damned push-handle.”

  “You?” gasped Tesla, lowering his rifle.

  “You?!” said Timmy telepathically. “You’re the one who woke me up from my nap?”

  Tesla raised the carbine again, purple electricity snapping along its barrel, and pointed it at the squirrel.

  “I will be doing much more than that in ... in ...”

  It was then that Nikola Tesla noticed the unconscious girl still sprawled on the floor. Then Mark’s cybernetic eye and steely grimace. Then Catrina not so subtly reaching under the front desk counter for something.

  “I ... picked the wrong hotel to threaten, didn’t I?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Mark, tilting his head and cracking his neck. “You really did.”

  Timmy leapt from the floor onto Tesla’s un-roboted face.

  In the process of helping to end the world for the twenty-third time, Catrina Dalisay was nearly murdered several times. Shortly afterward – realizing who her friends were and what the world was like outside the cosmopolitan metropolis of the New Jersey Meadowlands – she asked Queen Victoria XXX for a few lessons in basic self-defense, beginning with hand-to-hand combat. However, after Thor repeatedly and frequently burst in on the two women grappling in skintight outfits, it was decided that Catrina should move on to non-lethal weapons training as quickly as possible.

  Mark Hughes, on the other hand, was a combat medic and veteran of several Robot Wars, forcibly turned into a cyborg and still carrying a grudge. He was also constantly on edge about the financial stability of owning and running a hotel in a post-post-apocalyptic economy with a nearly nonexistent travel industry, and of Irish descent. He needed no training in how to beat a man’s ass. He didn’t even need a good reason most of the time.

  Timmy, for his part, was tired and cranky. Plus, man, fuck scientists.

  Nikola Tesla, bleeding and no longer breathing, collapsed onto the unconscious girl like a poorly-constructed Jenga tower.

  “I don’t even feel good about that,” said Catrina, resting an electric cattle prod over her shoulder. “We beat up an old man.”

  “Shouldn’t that girl have woken up by now?” asked Timmy.

  “Yeah, probably,” said Mark, nudging her with his foot. “Maybe we should call a real doctor.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  From Zero to Invasive in Under a Minute

  “Mark!” hollered Thor, carrying the filthy, battered, semi-clotted corpse of Chester A. Arthur XVII past his still-idling Volkswagen Beetle and into the lobby of the Secaucus Holiday Inn. “Mark! I think Charlie’s dead! Can you do anything?”

  “Holy shit,” said Catrina, racing out from behind the front desk. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.” She looked at Charlie’s body, then turned. Then she began running in small circles, unsure of what to do or where to go. “Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!”

  “Calm down,” said Thor, “you’re being hysterical.”

  “You’ve got Charlie’s lifeless body slumped over your shoulder! Of course I’m hysterical!” Tears began to well in Catrina’s eyes. She started shaking.

  Thor took the hand of Chester A. Arthur XVII and slapped her across the face.

  Catrina stopped crying.

  “What – Why did you do that?”

  “You were hysterical, you said so yourself.”

  “So ...”

  “So you needed to be slapped. That’s how it works, right?”

  “Why in the world would you believe that?”

  “That’s how they do it on TV.”

  “TV isn’t real, Thor.”

  “It worked, though.”

  “Why did you use Charlie’s hand? His ... his dead hand?!”

  She began tearing up and shaking again.

  Thor slapped her with Chester A. Arthur XVII again.

  “Stop that!”

  “Then stop crying!”

  “I’d stop crying if you’d stop hitting me with the hand of a corpse!”

  “Well, I’m not gonna slap you myself! That’s just mean.”

  “What is wrong with you?!”

  “I don’t know, you usually tell me,” said Thor dismissively. “Where’s Mark?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Mark!”

  “Mark!”

  “MARK!”

  “We’ve got a situation, Mark!” Thor shook his head. “You’d think he’d be more concerned about a
dead guy in his lobby.”

  “Two, actually,” said Catrina, sniffling and pointing at the late Nikola Tesla, splayed atop the on time, but possibly comatose, blind girl.

  “When did we get that?” asked the thunder god.

  ***

  “Look, Thor, I want to help, but this is out of my hands,” said Mark Hughes, leaning back in his chair. He was sitting behind his desk, opposite Thor, in the tiny office behind the front counter of the hotel. “I can’t bring someone back from the dead.”

  “Are you sure?” said Thor.

  “Yes, “ replied Mark.

  “Well, with the eye, I thought, I don’t know, maybe you knew some kind of robot magic or something.”

  “My eye isn’t magic,” said Mark. “Robots aren’t magic. And I’m only part robot anyway. We’ve been over this.”

  “I thought maybe you were keeping it secret in case of emergency.”

  Mark lowered his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. He sighed loudly. Really loudly.

  “It seemed like something you would do,” continued Thor. “You don’t really talk about yourself.”

  “I don’t even know how to respond to that.”

  “Well, that’s kind of my point.”

  Mark sighed again.

  “Maybe I could do it myself,” said the thunder god. “I mean, the problem is that his guts are on the outside, right? I should be able to fix that with duct tape or something.”

  “That’s not how humans work, Thor.”

  “I’m really good with duct tape.”

  “No, Thor.”

  “Really good,” said the fallen deity. “I’m gonna do it.”

  “What about your dad? Can’t you call him?” asked the hotel owner. “Isn’t this more his kind of thing?”

  “My dad?” scoffed Thor. “Fuck no. He’s happy being retired. Hasn’t once tried to regain his powers. He told me a band of crazy, disgruntled nuns held him up the other day and he just handed over his wallet! The sad old bastard didn’t even try to smite them.”

  “Well, what about Jesus? Don’t you know him?”

  “Yeah, no. We can’t afford Jesus’s rates. And he doesn’t really like me anyway.”

  “Should I even ask?”

  “You can, but I’ve been advised by my lawyer not to talk about the incident in question.”

  “You have a lawyer?”

  “Court-appointed.”

  “Ah.”

  “Weren’t you a doctor or something in your wars? There were a lot of dead humans in those, right? Didn’t you have to help them?”

  “Sure, but the dead ones stayed dead.”

  “Maybe you were really bad at it. Who trained you? He’s probably pretty good at this stuff, right?”

  “I got my training from an upload directly into my nervous system. I was barely conscious of what I was doing most of the time, it was all instinct and impulse.”

  “What about the guy who did, uh, that, to you?” asked Thor, pointing at Mark’s ocular implant. “Maybe he’d know how to –”

  “First of all, I wasn’t dead when they did this. Second, that guy was a robot and a prick,” replied Mark. “Third, I made sure to disassemble his ass first chance I got. I actually melted him down into a set of steak knives. And these chairs.” He gripped the bottom of his seat, then hopped up and down with it, exhibiting the chair’s durability and craftsmanship.

  “You are a terrifying man, Mark.”

  “You’re the one who wanted me to open up.”

  “And I regret it every time I do,” said Thor, shaking his head. “So what do we do about Charlie?”

  “You try Googling it yet?”

  ***

  “Any luck?” asked Thor, standing over Catrina’s shoulder.

  “Nope,” she replied.

  “You’re ... not actually looking.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You were the one who was all broken-up about him being dead!”

  “Yeah, but then I got sad so I stopped.”

  “And now you’re playing Plants Vs. Zombies?”

  “And now I’m playing Plants Vs. Zombies.”

  “Don’t you get tired of these war reenactment games?”

  “Not really. They’re all different. Sort of,” she explained. “This one’s got a flame-saw.”

  “OK, yeah, that’s ... that’s pretty cool ... But you’re still shooting plants in the face, over and over again. Can’t they come up with any better villains? We get it, plants are evil. Stop being lazy.”

  “You’re remarkably opinionated for someone who once punched a corn field.”

  “It was being a dick.”

  While the Second Robot War was raging in the western hemisphere and ending the world for the tenth time, the corpo-nation of China found itself embroiled in a conflict of its own.

  With zombies.

  Lots and lots of zombies.

  Having one of the oldest civilizations on the planet was great and all, but it also meant that there were a crapload of rotting corpses literally everywhere, just waiting to fuck shit up.

  Vastly outnumbered by several thousand years of angry, marauding dead people, Chinese scientists quickly devised a way to weaponize plum blossom, one of the most common flowers in the country. Cross-breeding the species with a variety of weeds and methamphetamines, the plum blossom trees were able to grow at a phenomenal rate, entangling victims in pink petals and then tearing them apart gleefully.

  Seriously, gleefully. The trees grew mouths, just so they could smile diabolically while they were dismembering people.

  Unfortunately for everyone, though, the plum blossom couldn’t discern between friend or foe. Zombies were being destroyed, yes, but entire orchards full of pickers were also being ripped to pieces. What the flower could do, was spread its superpower to other plants via bees, breezes, and sheer ballsiness. It wasn’t long before China was overrun by a warrior race of vegetation.

  Now trapped between both undead hordes and homicidal flora, the majority of the population took a deep breath, said 他媽的它, and went on an extended holiday, leaving the zombies and plants to figure things out between themselves.

  They did this by murdering the crap out of each other in extraordinarily violent and unnecessary ways. Had any scientists stuck around to watch, they would have witnessed evolution and invention at its finest. Zombies learned to operate backhoes and work flamethrowers. Plants learned to walk and throw Molotov cocktails. It was an angry, fiery, explodey six months.

  In the end, though, the flora proved victorious, leaving China a colorful, sweet-smelling wonderland of smoking cadavers and entrail-strewn trees. As a reward for this heroism, the surviving plants were promptly dug up, steamed, and eaten.

  Vegetables have been holding a grudge ever since.

  “Seriously, though, did you find anything?”

  “Well,” said Catrina, sitting at the hotel’s front desk and tabbing back to her internet search for a cure for death, “there was a guy in Uzbekibekibekibekistanstan who said he could bring someone back to life, but he couldn’t find somebody to try his procedure on, so then he killed himself so he could bring himself back ... and that’s about when the blog stopped updating.”

  “Weird. I wonder what happened.”

  “Yeah ...” said Catrina slowly. “Then I thought maybe Charlie was floating around somewhere as a ghost, but I couldn’t find him on the Internet Ghost Database.”

  “Yeah, I figured. He was created in a vat; he wouldn’t have a soul.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Souls are pretty much the only thing I am sure about when it comes to humans.”

  “OK, well, anyway, I thought maybe we could rent Charlie’s body out to another ghost, y’know, so we’d feel better about him being dead at least? But then I realized the site I was looking at was Charlie’s company and I started thinking that we probably wouldn’t get a timely response. And that’s when I got sad.”

  “He wouldn’
t want that anyway. He always got mad when I touched his stuff without asking. This’d probably be like that.”

  “Probably.”

  Catrina half-heartedly searched the internet for a few more minutes with Thor standing behind her, but they found nothing but kittens, porn, and disappointment.

  “Wanna start going through his things?” asked Thor.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Skeletons in the Filing Cabinet

  Catrina and Thor stood in the hotel room of Chester A. Arthur XVII, ready and raring to start violating his privacy and the trust he had previously instilled in them.

  They were incredibly disappointed.

  “Where’s all his stuff?” asked Thor.

  “I don’t think he has any.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Charlie was based on a real American president and the one thing I learned from watching TV is that owning useless shit is the American way. My room is full of crap I never look at, much less use.”

  “He’s got a filing cabinet.”

  “Filing cabinets are boring.”

  “Well, it’s either that or we go back downstairs and leave his memory in peace.”

  “Fine,” said Thor dejectedly, crossing the room, “we’ll break into his stupid filing cabinet.” With one solid thwack, Thor was able to pop open all three drawers of the aluminum filing cabinet – because the rest of the cabinet cracked in half.

  It only took a few minutes to find out all of Charlie’s deepest, darkest secrets, as he kept them remarkably detailed and organized, even adding black tabs to the files concerning the really sinister stuff. Each of his various borderline-criminal endeavors had its own section and each client had his own folder, the information the client didn’t know Chester had kept track of tabbed in red.

  “Why are our names in here?” asked the former thunder god, sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by stacks of paper.