by Eirik Gumeny
thunk
The metal frames of the doors were starting to rend and splinter, the panes of tempered glass, deformed, stretched to their breaking points, were starting to dislodge from the frame.
thunk thunk
A harsh wind whipped in through the gaps, snow blowing through the lobby.
thunk thunk thunk
“There’s no time.” Santa Claus grimaced, gritting his grubby teeth, his gargantuan girth pressed against the door, his arms spread and black boots digging into the carpeting.
THUNK THUNK THUNK
His belly jiggled like a stagnant swamp after a plane crash.
THUNK THUNK THUNK
The fat man was being pushed forward.
“I can’t – I can’t hold –”
The doors finally had enough. Scores upon scores of Abominable Snowmen began flooding into the Secaucus Holiday Inn, towers of massive snow balls, stacked three and four and five tall, bouncing forward like cartoon tigers and hurling snowballs like Major League pitchers.
Santa Claus screeched in terror and began waddling to safety, shoving his way past the Snow Goons surrounding him, chasing him. Snowballs sailed through the air, one after another after another. The onslaught was relentless, snow spattering against the fat man’s back and soaking into this jacket, or, sometimes, hitting something small on the hotel’s counter, or an end table, and knocking it down.
“Really?” said Queen Victoria XXX, her eyebrow arched. Snow whipped past her, almost ruffling her hair. “This is what your scared of?”
“Sometimes they put ice inside the snowballs!” he yelped.
“Dude,” said Boudica IX, shaking her wild red mane in disappointment. The woman calmly walked over to the wall and spun the thermostat up to ninety, several snowballs splattering harmlessly against the faux woodgrain as she did. A few hit the floor, or broke apart in midair, long before they made it that far.
Within moments, the furnace could be heard warbling, and within a few more, heat could be felt rushing out through the ceiling vents. The Abominable Snowmen began panicking and fled toward the exits.
“In my defense,” said Santa Claus, poking his head out from behind the counter, “I’m very old and I’ve been homeless for a very long time.”
***
“Wait,” said Thor, stopping on the sidewalk and looking at the window display beside him, “is this the holiday with the socks?”
“Stockings?”
“Yeah.”
“Then yes,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“OK,” said Thor, looking into his bags, “then we need to make one more stop. “Would they be in the underpants section, or ...?”
“Different kind of stocking, buddy.”
***
The women stood in the lobby of the Secaucus Holiday Inn, a small pond of melted Snowmen splashing against their ankles. Slushy piles of Snow Goons were dragging themselves toward the door, their whittled fingers clawing against tile and carpet, desperate to make their way to the nuclear winter outside. Half of the room’s lights were out, the other half flickering, the water soaking into the many, many strings of holiday lights laid out on the floor.
“Wonderful job ... gi– ladies,” Santa Claus wheezed, leaning against the hotel counter and kicking halfheartedly at passing slush monsters.
“Thank you, Santa Walrus,” said Boudica IX.
“Santa Claus.”
“Are you sure? None of the Coca-Cola cans at the art museum ever had anything that looked like you on them.”
“Artistic license,” he explained. “I promise.”
“When did you go to an art museum?” asked Queen Victoria XXX.
“Someone spray-painted an F on the sign,” said the redheaded queen. “We thought it was something else.”
In a dark corner of the hotel lobby, against an exterior-facing wall, half an Abominable Snowmen raised his knobby, stick hand.
“Don’t ... don’t trust him,” the ice creature burbled.
“No,” roared Santa Claus, springing to life suddenly, “don’t trust him!”
“That was awfully defensive,” said Queen Victoria XXX, cocking an eyebrow.
“He’s not ...” A huge chunk of the Snowman’s face fell to the ground. “He’s no’ what he sheems!”
“So he is a walrus!” accused Boudica IX.
“No,” gurgled the Snow Goon. “He’s not – Ther’sh – bomefing wiiiii ...” The snowman was reduced to a slushy puddle, his carrot nose jutting upward.
“Why were those snowmen hunting you?” asked Queen Victoria XXX.
“Because they were evil,” answered the fat man. “No more complicated than that. I’m Santa Claus, girls. Would I lie to you?”
“You did fake your death for fifteen years.”
“That was ... different. Extenuating circumstances. I wasn’t –” Something flashed in the old man’s eyes, something dark and primal. “Ooh, are those cookies?” The bloated sack of a person waddled toward the table of treats like a penguin that had swallowed a series of bowling balls.
“Those are for the customers,” said Boudica IX.
“Surely,” said Santa, licking his lips, “you can make an exception –”
“Don’t let him eat the cookies!” shouted the Snowman, his face packed back together like a Picasso painting.
“– for me?”
“Nooo!” The Snow Goon was clawing frantically, his brittle stick fingers tearing through his melted comrades, snapping against the floor.
Shoving cookie after cookie into his face, Santa Claus began laughing jovially, his belly shaking like a defective atomic bomb moments before detonating.
“Are these gingerbread?” he asked, flecks of sugary dough flying. “You can really taste the – Oh. Oh no.”
In a grotesque – and gross – display of contorted physics, Santa Claus, the full two tons of him, erupted in a series of implosions and ballooning fat pustules, his body squishing and popping and warping in an orgy of innards and skin, like David Cronenberg directing the end of Akira. A lean, lengthy, leathery arm shot out from the twisting fat ball, followed by another, by a pair of gnarled legs. What was left of the hellish anatomy lesson transmogrified into a ragged and elongated torso, into the horned head of a malevolent reindeer-beast.
“– DOOM!” roared the creature.
“Well, fuck,” said the Snowman.
“What? What did we do?” asked the dark-haired queen. “What are we even looking at?”
“The Krampus!” shouted the half-formed ice creature, pieces once again sliding off of him. “The anti-Shanta, a being of purr evil that exshists only to wreak hav’c and feed on joy! We were trying to shtop him, been trying for yearsh, only –”
The Abominable Snowman exploded like a pint of ice cream with an M80 tucked inside, an immense, dark hoof where it’s head had just been.
“Thank you for freeing me,” snarled the Krampus, its voice like boiling molasses. “Prepare to die.”
“No thank you,” said Boudica IX.
The beast was nearly ten-feet tall, hunched forward and rasping, thick tufts of fur covering its chest and shoulders, its chin, its bathing suit area. The rest was a calloused hide, stretched tight over angular bones. Intimidating antlers rose and twisted from its temples; its eyes glowed red.
Staring at the two women, the Krampus snapped its long fingers, its charcoal-colored skin sparking like flint. A dull chittering rapidly grew louder and louder, and louder still, until a horde of gremlins poured through what was left of the doors, climbing over one another, leaping and charging into the lobby and immediately wrecking shit up.
“God damn it,” mumbled Queen Victoria XXX.
Gremlins, despite popular notions and a couple of wildly inaccurate movies, were nothing more than mutated North Pole elves. The immense amounts of radiation released during the explosion of Santa’s Workshop had turned the pointy-eared workers into feral monsters, boiling and burning their skin, elongating their teeth and nails
, and melting their bones a little. They were every bit as angry as they had previously been jolly, a direct one-to-one inverse ratio.
And Santa Claus had only employed the jolliest of elves.
The Krampus whistled, and shouted, and called his gremlins by name: “Now, SLASHER, now, CANCER! Now, STABBER and HELLCAT! On, VOMIT! On PUTRID! On JEFFREY DAHMER and BLITZKRIEG! To the top of the counter! To the top of the wall! Now smash away – bash away! Crash away all!”
“Except the tree!” shouted Boudica IX, putting her hands out. “Don’t crash away the tree! That was the last one they had and –”
The gremlins crashed into the tree, the two-foot-tall lizard-skinned monsters hurling themselves bodily into the douglas fir and knocking it to the ground, shattering ornaments and undoing literally minutes of hard work by the two queens.
The red-haired clone of a Druidic warrior queen shouted something primal and unintelligible and maybe a little Celtic. Then, seeing nothing but puzzled looks on the gremlins’ faces, she clarified: “Prepare to die yourselves, jerkholes!”
“Now you’ve done it,” said the other queen, wrapping a cord of shattered Holiday Day Week lights around her knuckles.
***
“Crap,” said Thor, stopping on the brick pathway, the smashed up doors of the Secaucus Holiday Inn just out of view. “I gotta get a card for Jesus. It’s his birthday this week, too.”
“I thought he hated you,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, turning with his friend and heading back towards the car.
“He does,” said the thunder god with a shrug, “I think. He still sends me a Holiday Day Week card every year.”
“Even after –”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.”
***
The Krampus stood, snarling, in the center of the hotel lobby, clawed hands out, one foot on the Pagan Celebration Tree. The beast was surrounded by broken furniture, jagged shards of ornaments and lights, lukewarm puddles of former snowmen, and an ever-growing pile of dismembered gremlins. The lights flickered like a haunted house. The reindeer-monster snorted, then howled, shaking the handful of shattered frames still hanging from the walls.
“We gonna do this or what?” asked Queen Victoria XXX, standing opposite the creature, glass-wrapped fists raised.
Dropping to all-fours, the Krampus charged at Queen Victoria XXX.
Boudica IX threw a gremlin into the anti-Santa’s evil, furry face.
The Krampus skidded to a stop and looked around.
“Where did –”
A gremlin skull collided with the back of its head. The beast spun around.
“How is she –”
The creature was clocked by a severed arm from the right, an armless torso from the left. Legs started to rain down on the beast from all sides. The Krampus turned around again, and again, and found only Queen Victoria XXX, unmoved.
She kicked it in the face.
Reeling backward and wiping blood from its snout, the creature growled. “I can’t be stopped by violence,” it snarled. “I AM VIOLENCE!”
“You sure? You’re pretty bad at it.”
“VIOLENCE!”
The beast charged again. It got kicked in the face again. Then Boudica IX dropped from the suspended ceiling onto the Krampus’s back, looping Holiday Day Week lights around its neck.
“Hey, since you mentioned it,” she asked, choking the reindeer-monster Princess Leia-style, “how can you be stopped?”
“Like I ... would ... tell ... you!” The Krampus heaved forward, throwing the queen from its back. “Prepare to ... to ...”
A sickening look crossed the beast’s face. Suddenly, its fur-covered leather skin twisted inward, then bulged, a fat, saggy arm shooting out from within. More twisting, more bulging, another arm, and then Santa Claus emerged – well, most of him anyway.
The morbidly obese man in the tattered red coat drooped, deformed and listing, from the waist of the Krampus, the reindeer-monster’s reindeer legs wobbling this way and that.
“The Krampus,” shouted Santa, “can only be defeated by the true power of Christmas!”
“But, uh, Christmas doesn’t exist anymore, Santa Walrus,” said Boudica IX, pulling herself back to her feet from the watery pile of gremlin she’d landed in.
“Like fun it doesn’t!” he spat. “You can call the holiday whatever nonsense you want, but the spirit of Christmas ... the spirit ... Oh, balls.”
Through another series of twisting grotesqueries, the Krampus reasserted dominance over its shared body.
“I hate it when he does that,” grumbled the monster.
“Yeah?” asked the red-haired queen, covered in gremlin puree. “And how much do you hate it when we do ... this!”
Boudica IX hugged Queen Victoria XXX hard, harder than she’d ever hugged another person before, pressing her cheek against hers, gripping her own wrists behind the dark-haired woman’s back and pulling the other queen so tight that Vicky’s bones started to bend a little.
“What is this?” asked the Krampus, tilting its head and arching a massive and wild eyebrow. “What am I looking at?”
“That’s an excellent question,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“Love!” squealed the Britannic warrior queen, closing her eyes and scrunching up her face to achieve Ultimate Affection.
“You, uh, you think ‘love’ is the true meaning of Christmas?” asked the beast, scratching its cheek with a claw.
The queen opened an eye. “It’s not?”
“Nope.”
“Not even platonic girl love?”
“What does that have to do with Christmas?”
“Well, poop,” said the queen, releasing her friend.
“OK, what about ...” Queen Victoria XXX pulled her phone from her pocket. “Shit,” she said, scrolling feverishly. She turned to Boudica IX. “Do you have Jesus’s number?”
“Fools! Again!” bellowed the Krampus, laughing, its taut belly not jiggling at all. “Jesus is not the true meaning of Christmas!”
“Oh, right,” said Boudica IX, “because Christmas, as it was celebrated, was largely based on stolen pagan rituals, right?”
“Well, yes, but no, not –”
“Because Jesus’s birthday was probably actually in the spring?” asked the other queen. “I mean, dude wouldn’t have survived a winter in an unheated barn.”
“No, that’s –”
“Is it because Jesus was Jewish and never actually celebrated Christmas?”
“All excellent points, but you’re not closer to –”
Santa Claus’s face exploded out of the beast’s chest, their skins merged and stretching. It looked more than a little like a cow halfway through being born.
“Search your feelings, queens!” shouted the jolly fat man. “The true meaning of Christmas is obviously –”
The Krampus punched itself in the chest.
“And stay in there!” it rumbled.
“Good cheer?” asked one of the replicated royals.
“Christmas carols as sung by Darlene Love?” asked the other.
“Amazing sweaters?”
“Terrible sweaters?”
“Hot chocolate?”
“Nope, nope, nope, nope, and nope,” said the Krampus.
“Is it Starbuck gift cards?” asked Boudica IX.
“What? Who – How – Uh, no, I mean,” said the Christmas monster, suddenly looking shifty. “Definitely not that last one.”
“Oh,” she replied, slumping dejectedly.
“He’s, uh, he’s obviously lying, Bo,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“Oh!”
The dark-haired queen patted her hands along her jeans. “Do you have a Starbucks gift card?” she asked, leaning in conspiratorially.
“Upstairs,” replied Boudica IX, “I didn’t think I’d need my wallet while we were oooh no he’s charging again.”
The queens dove to the side as the gargantuan reindeer-beast charged bet
ween them, antlers first.
***
Timmy the Super Squirrel turned fitfully in his, quite frankly, unnecessarily enormous king-size bed, trying to enjoy a long winter’s hibernation with his family.
His wife stirred beside him, chittering the squirrel equivalent of: “Can you tell your friends to keep it down? I’m trying to sleep.”
“Mrh,” he replied, rolling over and pulling his blanket tighter.
***
“Huh.”
Queen Victoria XXX and Boudica IX were standing behind the Krampus, arms crossed and brows furrowed. The massive reindeer-monster, having charged full speed and missed, appeared to be stuck in the wall – and not just a little. The beast was twisting and pulling and pushing with its sinewy arms and getting nowhere.
“So do we just let him starve to death in there, or ...?”
“What the hell,” asked another voice, “happened in here?”
The women turned to discover that Thor Odinson and Chester A. Arthur XVII had arrived back at the hotel, dozens of shopping bags in their hands, like they were auditioning for a Sex in the City reboot.
“Oh, are we doing presents?” asked Boudica IX.
“I, uh, I thought so,” said Thor, suddenly unsure of a lot of things.
With a sound like a landslide, the Krampus wrenched its head free of the wall and spun around, pointing a clawed finger at the queens. Dust billowed around it as drywall continued to slide to the floor.
“You –”
“Over here, buddy,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
The Krampus knocked some sheetrock from its face, turned slightly and pointed again. “You two –” Out of the side of its eye, it caught sight of the god and the president. “No!” the monster roared, backing up into the same wall it had just escaped. “The true meaning of Christmas!”
“Boy parts?” asked Boudica IX.
“No!” shouted Queen Victoria XXX, a light bulb going off both metaphorically and literally, the hotel’s electrical system finally getting its shit together. “The shopping bags! Charlie! Thor! Throw them at this thing!”
