by Eirik Gumeny
Queen Victoria XXX narrowed her eyes.
“VIKINGS!” she shouted, charging toward the center of the mobile laboratory.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
It Tastes Like Fury and Tequila
Chester A. Arthur XVII stood inside what used to be a mobile zero-gravity laboratory, surrounded by the mutilated bodies of post-Second Civil War pre-enactors and neo-Vikings. Behind him, a number of residents of Bruce ran around with hoses and buckets, frantically attempting to put out a number of small fires.
Chester A. Arthur XVII knelt down next to a small pool of blood on the floor. He looked at it for a moment, then ran a finger through it and brought it to his tongue.
“It’s Vicky’s,” he said. “She was here.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Fail-Safe
“So you know how I’m about to annihilate everyone? You’re part of everyone! How crazy is that?” shouted Andrew Jackson II, covered in the shadows of two shattered bridges and running through the thick, green, barely ankle-high waters of the Potomac River. Ahead of him were East Potomac Park and the Jefferson Memorial. Beyond that was what the Gorilla Liberation Front and their orbital laser had left of Washington, D.C.
It wasn’t much.
As Andrew Jackson II climbed the shore, he could hear Queen Victoria XXX splashing less than fifty feet behind him.
“What do you think Charlie’s up to now? You think he has any idea he’s about to die again?”
“Do you want me to murder you?!” yelled the queen in reply. “You’re talking like you have a death wish!”
“Maybe I do, Vicky! I lived in a cement box for four years! That does things to a man, it changes him. Maybe, when I look in a mirror, I don’t like what I see anymore, maybe the crushing weight of existence is bearing down on me and I don’t know what to do. Maybe I long for the only thing I know for sure anymore, to be confined under the earth in solitude once again!”
Queen Victoria XXX hurled a rock at the president’s head in reply.
“Jesus, lady,” continued Andrew Jackson II, sprinting across the lawn behind the memorial. “What’s your heart made of, ice?”
The cloned politician ran down the sidewalk at the memorial’s side, toward the tidal basin, before pivoting and bolting up the stairs two at a time, leaving the water at his back.
Queen Victoria XXX followed him up the crumbling steps of the Jefferson Memorial three at a time. She was less than ten feet behind Andrew Jackson II.
“Balls.”
He was well aware of it.
As Andrew Jackson II neared the portico at the top of the stairway, Queen Victoria XXX grabbed his ankle and pulled. The president went horizontal before falling and catching his jaw on the marble floor. There was an unhealthy crack, and then he lay there motionless, his neck twisted in a way no god or chiropractor would ever have intended, in a slowly growing pool of blood and teeth.
“Andy?” said Queen Victoria XXX, one foot on the top stair and one on the portico. She grabbed the president by his shirt. His body hung limply. He didn’t appear to be breathing.
“Huh,” said the queen, dropping Andrew Jackson II’s body back onto the steps. “That really wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped.”
Queen Victoria XXX rubbed the back of her neck. It was covered in a crusty film consisting of personal lubricant, butter, and dinosaur blood. She looked around at the monument, pausing at the sign that said RESTROOMS hanging above a door in the marble wall of the portico. It was then that both Vicky and her bladder remembered exactly how many gallons of water she had just drank.
Two. Two gallons.
“God, I hope they still work,” said the queen, hurrying toward the door.
***
Queen Victoria XXX returned from the bathroom emptier, cleaner, and feeling better about everything. She was even considering replacing vigilantism with knitting as her hobby.
Then she saw Andrew Jackson II typing into a computer terminal lodged into a secret compartment in the base of the bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson at the center of the memorial.
In an instant, Queen Victoria XXX was across the monument floor, grabbing Andrew Jackson II by the back of his shirt and tossing him across the rotunda.
Andrew Jackson II, eyes wide and blood flooding down his chin, shook his head and scurried backward until he was pressed up against one of the columns surrounding the monument. Queen Victoria walked towards him slowly. Standing at her full height and with the midnight sun at her back, she looked far more intimidating than her frame would normally suggest.
“Do you want me to cave your skull in here or would you rather I drowned you in the tidal basin? It’s your choice.”
And her frame was a filthy liar to begin with.
“You fucked your jaw up pretty hard, didn’t you?”
The reconstituted president nodded his head quickly and often.
“You hoping that’ll make me feel bad for you?”
Andrew Jackson II raised a shoulder and an eyebrow simultaneously.
“Yeah,” said Queen Victoria XXX coldly, her eyes appearing to turn black, “it doesn’t.”
The queen lifted the president by his neck and slammed him into the column. Her hands began to tighten.
“You ... may have thome therious anger ithueth,” sputtered the cloned president.
“Do you have any idea what you put me through?” snarled the queen.
“Yeth!” he barked, specks of blood flying forward. “I put you through it!”
Queen Victoria XXX dug her nails into Andrew Jackson II’s throat. Blood began to trickle down her fingers.
“You’re not walking away this time.”
Suddenly, calliope music started blaring, and two large video monitors with Nikola Tesla’s laughing face emerged from the walls of the rotunda. Purple lightning began jumping sporadically across the outer columns of the memorial.
“OK, what the fuck is this?” asked Queen Victoria XXX.
“I’m going to dethtroy everything you’ve ever loved, or even jutht given a handjob to,” said Andrew Jackson II. He placed what appeared to be a tiny flare gun – retrieved from the monument compartment – against his temple.
“Thee you in hell, bith.”
Andrew Jackson II pulled the trigger and his head exploded.
“Oh my fucking god,” yelped the queen, dropping the president’s corpse and wiping an assortment of blood and brains from her eyes. She began spitting. “It’s in my mouth.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
And Preferably Flipping the Bird to Armageddon
Chester A. Arthur XVII charged into the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial, the cannon in his chest primed, crescent-shaped blades unfolded from his right wrist.
“If you so much as touched her,” bellowed the president over the calliope music, “I swear I will ...”
Charlie trailed off and stared at the slumped, headless corpse of Andrew Jackson II.
Queen Victoria XXX turned from the computer terminal to look at the steel- and tungsten-reinforced Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“It’s a long story, and I’m not sure Thor was entirely truthful about a lot of it, but I’m about sixty percent robot now. Maybe seventy,” said the president, still staring at the bloody mess that used to be Andrew Jackson II and the mini-grenade pistol still in his grip. Charlie retracted his wrist-knives. “Did he kill himself?”
“Yeah,” said Queen Victoria XXX with a sigh. “He was an asshole right to the end. I kicked the corpse a little, but it didn’t feel the same.”
The queen looked hollowly at the dead body she had violated. Andrew Jackson II’s legs resembled strands of over-boiled spaghetti.
“I ... I may need some psychiatric help, Charlie,” continued the queen. “Also, a doctor. I’m not sure what my radiation level is, but I’m pretty sure my pulse isn’t supposed to hurt.”
“That’ll go away in a few days,” said Chester A. Arthur XV
II. “Though you may start glowing around the ninety-six hour mark.”
“I’m glad you’re OK, Charlie,” said Queen Victoria XXX, tears forming in her eyes. She ran over and hugged him. “I am so god damned tired of avenging your death.”
Chester A. Arthur XVII embraced her back.
“I missed you too,” he said.
Another round of lightning circled the rotunda as Tesla’s video restarted and the dead scientist began laughing maniacally again.
“That’s not good, is it?” asked Charlie.
Queen Victoria XXX shook her head and pointed a finger in the air, indicating that Chester A. Arthur XVII should listen to the recording for himself.
“My name,” began the old man in the video, “is Nikola Tesla. If you are watching this audible/visual transcription then you are still alive. Congratulations.
“Don’t get too attached to that state of being, though.”
The recording continued with Tesla making vague allusions to an assumed alien invasion, expressing his distaste that the Earth was round and covered in dirt, and then cackling until he cried about the end of all life as it was known. The video concluded with Tesla wishing everyone a happy ten to fifteen minutes of continued existence, followed by a close-up of his crotch while he turned off the camera. The screen blacked out for a moment, then flickered back to the scientist’s laughing face again.
Queen Victoria XXX hurled a chunk of floor through one of the video screens. It detonated in a spray of sparks, while the other one quietly turned itself off.
“I’m assuming the controls here are connected to that giant dome that came out of the basin ...” said the queen, pointing past the steps to the giant whirling hemispherical machine that had risen in the center of the tidal basin. “I can’t make heads or tails of it, though.”
“I don’t even know what language these keys are in,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, studying the terminal’s keyboard. “Some variation of Cyrillic that I’ve never seen before.”
“Maybe we should just smash it,” suggested Queen Victoria XXX.
“We don’t know what that’s going to do, though. There could be some kind of a dead-man’s switch that –”
The calliope music ended abruptly as a loud klaxon sounded and the entire rotunda was bathed in a red light. The sporadic purple lightning jumping between columns intensified, wrapping the entire rotunda in a wall of electricity. The mechanical dome in the tidal basin began spinning faster and rocking from side to side, drawing a line of purple electricity from the memorial.
“OK, let’s smash it,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
The president lined himself up directly across from the computer terminal in the statue’s base. He flexed his arms at his sides slightly and fired a large projectile from the cannon in his chest. The terminal exploded upon impact, the base of the statue cracking and crumbling. A bronze Thomas Jefferson toppled to the ground.
The machine in the tidal basin continued to spin and rock.
“Well, that didn’t work,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“What did you shoot at it?” asked Queen Victoria XXX, cocking her head and examining the hole in Charlie’s chest. “Do you have to, like, eat bullets or something now?”
“I don’t get what that dome is even supposed to do,” said Charlie, turning to stare out at the whirring machine in the middle of the tidal basin. “If it was going to explode shouldn’t it have done it by now?”
“It’s spinning, right?” said Vicky, turning her attention toward the dome. “Maybe it’s trying to create some kind of vortex, y’know, like a weather-controlling machine?”
“I don’t know,” began Chester A. Arthur XVII. “I’ve seen one of those and –”
The dome began spinning and rocking faster. The earth began rumbling. Small wisps of dust rained down on the cloned politicians.
“Earthquake machine,” they said simultaneously.
“That’s not so bad,” added Queen Victoria.
The Jefferson Memorial began shifting violently. Columns tumbled to the ground as large chunks of marble fell from the fracturing rotunda roof.
“I take it back,” said Queen Victoria XXX, struggling to maintain her balance, “this is very, very bad. I think we made it angry.”
“Maybe we can take out the mechanism in the basin ...” began Chester A. Arthur XVII. He approached the wall of purple lightning and was immediately hurled twenty feet backwards. A number of his newfound circuits began sparking wildly.
“God damn it,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, shaking his head rapidly. “We did need Thor.”
“We could try calling him,” offered Queen Victoria XXX, helping the president up.
“I don’t have a phone.”
“There was a payphone by the women’s room,” said the queen. “Assuming you remember the hotel’s number, that is.”
“Of course,” said Charlie, mildly offended.
The duo began wobbling towards the door in the side of the memorial, only to watch it collapse in a cloud of dust and shattered dreams. But, as the saying goes, when a mad scientist’s doomsday machine closes a door, it cracks a neighboring wall in two. The queen and the president squeezed through and into the restroom foyer.
“I hope it works.”
It worked. Sometime before the twelfth end of the world, the major telecommunications corporations had upgraded their pay phones with free-standing hydroelectric converters in an effort to cut-down on power consumption. They had initially intended to harvest rainwater, but it turned out that orphan tears worked just as well. And there were a lot of orphans.
“Mark, it’s Charlie.” The president spoke into the mildewed handset. “Charlie. I live there. Look, is Thor – That’s great, Mark. Sure. Yes, I love you too.”
Queen Victoria XXX laughed derisively in the background.
“Can you find Thor and tell him to meet us at the Jefferson Memorial in D.C.? There’s a situation and we need him.
“Yeah, that was ... that was us. Nikola Tesla’s earthquake machine.
“Really, all the way up there? How much of the hotel? Huh. She’s not going to be happy.
“We’re trying, Mark, but our hands are a little tied. Unfortunately this predicament is going to require some divine retribution to get out of. Can you get Thor and send him down here? OK. OK, thanks.”
Chester A. Arthur XVII hung up the phone.
“So?” asked the queen.
“He said he’d do it,” said the president, “but I’m pretty sure I heard him vomit onto the phone.”
“Sounds like we’re gonna die here then.”
“Sounds like.”
“Can we at least head back to the rotunda?” asked Queen Victoria XXX. “I’d rather my corpse not be found this close to the toilets.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Some Flies Are Too Awesome for the Wall
Queen Victoria XXX and Chester A. Arthur XVII leaned into one another and stared out through the impenetrable wall of purple electricity, across the doomsday machine in the tidal basin and the ruins of Washington, D.C., behind it, into the lime green early-morning sunset.
“Green’s a really good color for the sky,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “I think it’s my favorite.”
A large slab of the ceiling slammed into the ground next to the duo, enveloping them in a large cloud of marble dust.
“Hey, so, uh, since we’ve probably only got minutes to live,” began Chester A. Arthur XVII, “there’s, uh, there’s something I should tell you.”
“If you gave me an STD I swear I will make an extinction level event look like a lovely picnic.”
“No, it’s not that,” said the president. “Although I think it does beg the question of why you immediately jumped to an STD. Is there something going on that I should know about?”
“What? No,” said the queen dismissively. “It’s a figure of speech.”
“The only time I’ve ever heard people joke about STDs was when someone was
genuinely concerned they had an STD.”
“And how many times has someone spoken to you genuinely concerned they had an STD?”
“I hang out with Thor a lot.”
“Uh huh,” replied Queen Victoria XXX incredulously.
The entire floor of the memorial pitched to the side, throwing Chester A. Arthur XVII off balance and into the arms of Queen Victoria XXX. The president smiled at the queen. A column toppled into the wall of electricity and exploded.
“Anyway,” began Chester A. Arthur XVII, straightening himself up as pieces of vaporized column rained down on them, “uh, well, I’ve been thinking and, uh, I suppose, maybe, uh, I’d like to, kind of, uh ...”
“That is a lot of stammering.”
“This isn’t easy for me. I mean, the thing itself, what it is that I’m trying to elucidate, that’s easy, I don’t think anything’s been easier, but explaining it, telling you, that’s ... that’s new.”
“It sounds like someone’s giving up.”
“Please don’t take advantage of this.”
“You’re just lucky I can’t make you bake me a pie.”
“Vicky,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, turning to face the queen and taking her hands in his, “you are more than a fuck buddy to me.”
“You’re more than a fuck buddy to me, too, Charlie,” said Queen Victoria XXX, both of them visibly awash in feelings that were totally similar to, but semantically different from, at least in their eyes, love.
A significant portion of what was left of the memorial ceiling plummeted to the ground, taking the last two columns with it and pelting the couple with large chunks of broken marble.
Queen Victoria XXX looked up at the pieces of stone roof still hanging precariously above them. The field of purple lightning was visible beyond it.
“We should probably move,” she said. “Preferably somewhere that’s already collapsed so we don’t get clobbered.”
