by Eirik Gumeny
“But I got stuff for me in here, too,” whined the thunder god, lifting the bags to his chest forlornly.
The Krampus roared in agony, clutching at its own chest. “The sheer selfishness! The refusal to part with material goods even in a time of crisis!”
Queen Victoria XXX started looking around. “Bo!” she ordered. “That box, with the candy cane wrapping paper, underneath the gremlin spine and the ... lung? That’s for you! Open it!”
Boudica IX did as instructed, rushing over and tearing at the paper and cardboard. In a matter of seconds, she was holding an ornately detailed snow globe paperweight.
The Christmas beast doubled over. “Such a completely unnecessary bauble! She ... doesn’t even ... have any papers that would need ... weighting!”
“Here!” shouted the red-haired queen, throwing a present toward the dark-haired royal. “It’s a CD of the same Holiday Day Week music that’s always on the radio and all the streaming stations that we get for free!”
“So ... pointless ...” The Krampus fell to the ground, frothing at the mouth.
“You got Vicky something?” asked Thor, his blood rising.
“Oh, for ...” growled the reindeer-monster, pulling its knees tight. “He’s ... he’s genuinely upset about ... the thing, not the thought!”
“You can’t play with thoughts, man.”
“Charlie,” shouted Queen Victoria XXX, “pull out your receipts!”
Pulling his wallet from his back pocket, and a dozen receipts from his wallet, the cloned president began reading off an itemized list of everything he’d purchased over the past eight hours.
“A dress that I’m less and less sure will fit correctly!” he yelled. “Sixty-nine ninety-nine!”
“Socks with a Holiday Day Week wreath on them! Twelve even!”
“A diamond necklace!” he continued. “Way more than it should have been!”
“You got me jewelry?” asked the queen quietly, a whole mess of emotions sneaking out from inside her.
“Jewelry ... is the worst ...” grimaced the creature.
“I got Catrina the same pair of sandals she already owns!” shouted Thor, pulling a shoebox from one of his bags. “And hers are still in great condition, and we’re in the middle of a nuclear winter! Plus –” He rifled through another bag. “– I got Bo sexy underwear that, let’s face it, is really a gift for me!”
“Whyyy?” murmured the monster, convulsing slightly. “Sexy underwear ... takes ... forever to put on ... and no time ... at all ... to take off ... and the whole point is to take it off anyway ... and it’s so expensive! And how ... how often do you ... do you even really wear it ...” The beast began gibbering incoherently.
“I got Charlie,” Queen Victoria XXX thundered, holding up a terrifically thin, wrapped box, “a gift card to Starbucks!”
“Noooooo!” screamed the Krampus.
With another disgusting series of plops and gurgles and contortions –
“What, uh, what’re we looking at here?” asked Thor.
– the murderous reindeer-beast changed back into Santa Claus.
“Whew,” said the fat man, pulling himself to his feet and wiping prodigious sweat from his prodigious brow with his prodigious hand. “Thank you, ladies. Gentlemen. I am ever so ... ever so ...” Father Christmas looked around at the destroyed hotel, at the Holiday Day Week decorations in tatters, at the gremlin guts dripping from the ceiling tiles. He raised an eyebrow.
“I’m, uh, I’m going to go,” he said, pointing a thumb toward the door.
“For real, man?” asked Queen Victoria XXX.
“You’re not going to help clean this up?” asked Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“Is that what you really want for Christmas?” chuckled the fat man in the sullied red outerwear. “I’d go bigger if I were you. I do owe you, after all.”
“I don’t know, we’re pretty lazy,” said Thor.
“What I want,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, “is an explanation.”
“For real, Charlie? That’s what you’re wasting your wish on?”
“I suppose you deserve that much,” said Santa Claus, dragging a coffee table through the gremlin sludge and resting his behemoth buttocks on top of it. “I take it you all know Dasher and Dancer and –”
“The reindeer, yeah,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “What about ‘em?”
“Well, the ones I flew with obviously weren’t the only reindeer I kept around, and Rudolph ... well, he wasn’t the only mutant in the bunch, either.”
“So the Krampus ...”
“Is Rudolph’s brother, yes,” said the fat man grimly. “But unlike Rudolph, Krampus was born evil, slaughtering elves and other reindeer almost as soon as he was able to walk. Mrs. Claus, God rest her soul –”
“Which god?” asked Thor.
“– wanted to put Krampus down, but, well, I thought – naively, in hindsight – that he could help me, the way his brother did, that he could put a scare into the naughtier children. I did so hate delivering coal.”
“Awww,” cooed Boudica IX.
“Oh, no, not like that. It was just heavy and dirty and damaging to the planet.”
“Aw.”
“Krampus,” continued the enormous old man, “well, he was good at his job, maybe too good. As years passed he started hurting the children, kidnapping them, selling them to various devils and demons when I wasn’t looking. Cults sprang up in his name across what used to be Europe, doing the same things. So, seeing no other options, I locked up Krampus in the deepest sub-basement of the toy factory.”
“You could have killed him,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“And maybe I should have,” said Santa Claus, his cloudy eyes distant, “but ... that’s not who I am, I didn’t – I don’t – have the capacity for killing, justified or not, in me. And after Mrs. Claus passed ... I was in a dark place. I – I had my own more metaphorical demons to fight, and I forgot about the very real one in the basement.”
“OK, with you so far, but why does he live inside of you?” asked Thor.
“Is that why you’re so giant?” asked Boudica IX.
“You seem really fixated on my weight, Bo,” said Santa.
“Well, there’s really a lot of it.”
“The weight, the ... blubber ... that was a survival mechanism, Boudica, a natural evolution over the centuries, a way to survive in the Arctic.” Santa Claus exhaled through his nose. “But I still had to ... maintain that weight. And given my line of work, who I am ... I ... I became addicted to cookies, dangerously so. There was a point where I was genuinely worried that I was going to eat myself to death. But no matter what I did, what I tried, I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t find any help that actually helped. So when the opportunity came to blow it all up, to stop being Santa Claus, to distance myself from the cookies and the cold, I did. The Torrent Wars were raging and I realized, if I detonated my workshop, if I got everyone out and blew the reactor, I could stop them, I could end the siege of the Torrenters and my own existence in one fell swoop.
“But ... but I messed up,” he continued, eyes on the floor. “The nuclear core of the workshop ... I – I didn’t build it, I’m not a scientist, never have been.” He shook his head, small. “The explosion was a lot bigger than I’d anticipated. I ... I ending up burning down half the world, mutating the elves into those maniacal gremlins, and ... and I didn’t die. I can’t die. But, apparently, I can get fused with reindeer mutants, with Krampus, my figurative demons merging with the literal.
“Depressed and despondent and falling back on old habits, I soon discovered that cookies were the way to release the monster inside of me.
“So, I went into hiding, locked myself away. But then those Snow Goons found me, drove me out of my home, trying to kill me because of the Krampus inside.”
“Whoa,” said Thor.
“Whoa, indeed, thunder god.”
“So ... what now?” asked Queen Victoria XXX.
“I go b
ack into hiding,” said Santa Claus, lifting his bulk from the now-damaged coffee table. “Maybe retreat to the Whole Foods Wilderness, where there are no cookies, or at least not good ones, with sugar and lard and ... and ...”
He shook his head. “I should get going. Thank you, all of you, again.”
“But mostly me and Vicky, right?” asked Boudica IX.
The man built like a pair of walruses smiled and waddled outside, snow falling across the plaza. The man in the red suit laughed heartily, then put out his tongue.
“Santa?” asked Queen Victoria XXX, barefoot and hugging herself against the cold.
“Yes, my dear?”
“That’s radioactive fallout.”
“I literally just said that,” said Thor.
“Oh.” The fat man spit a few times. “Right. I knew that.”
With a trilling whistle, the cloaking shield surrounding Santa Claus’s sleigh dissolved, revealing a sled with nine reindeer parked neatly on the brick of the plaza just past the hotel’s doors.
“Is he –” asked Rudolph.
“He’s OK,” said Santa Claus, scratching behind the reindeer’s ear, “but we need to make sure he won’t be coming back for a while.”
Rudolph nestled his glowing nose into the fat man’s shoulder.
And with that, Santa Claus climbed into the sleigh, pulling the reins into his hands. The reindeer stretched and stamped. Then, before he drove out of sight, the man in the red suit turned toward his newfound friends and bellowed, “HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL –”
“It’s merry, dude,” said Thor.
“And it’s Holiday Day Week,” added Boudica IX.
The fat man lowered his eyes. “Just turn around, you dopes.”
They did. The lobby was decorated as all get out: the Pagan Celebration Tree was ornamented and lit, tinsel garlands and lights surrounded the room. Nutcrackers and stuffed bears and poinsettias stood on tables. There were no gremlin guts, no shattered furniture to be found. And, beneath the tree, all their presents were boxed and wrapped again, along with a few new ones.
“Huh,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“Well, that was easy,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “Maybe we should guilt a magic fat man into doing our decorating every year.”
“I wonder if he refilled the bar,” said Thor.
CALAMARRHEA
the twenty-sixth apocalypse
“I’m home,” Jorge Reyes called into the house, closing the reinforced door behind him. “I think the nuclear winter’s stopping.” He put the grocery bag he was carrying on the nearby table.
“Well, it’s about time,” Erin McCafferty called back, from the other part of the house. “But I think the power just went out.”
The man, sliding off his coat, grumbled. “Of course it did.” Instinctively, he began looking across the daylit living room, an almost painfully bright grey spilling in, for a clock or a lamp that wasn’t working.
“Can you go check the breakers?” Erin asked. “I’m ... busy.”
“Still? And, sure,” he replied, half-shouting as he brought the groceries to the kitchen. “Where’d you put the flamethrower?”
“It’s in the hall closet,” the woman yelled from the bathroom. “Do we still have those danger-mice down there? I thought you got rid of them.”
“I thought I did, too,” he said, putting the milk in the fridge, “but, well, here we are.”
“I’ll be down in a second,” Erin replied, “once I’m done in here.”
“Yeah, speaking of ...” said Jorge, pausing outside the bathroom door on his way to the closet. “... are you OK? It’s been, like, an hour, at least. You were in there when I left. Your legs are going to go numb.”
“Do not trust seafood from a taco truck, let me tell you,” she grumbled. “Even if the guy running the truck is a squid monster who says he worked for a Michelin-rated restaurant before the politics got to him. It’s all lies, Jorge. Prolific, painful, runny lies.”
PROLOGUE
For Those of You Just Joining Us ...
“Hello, baby I just gave birth to, and welcome to the WGN Chicago six o’clock news. I’m your mother, Alison Glover, coming to you live from the fringes of my own burgeoning insanity.
“Our top story tonight is the neverending blackout that seems to have swallowed our city-state – and presumably the entire planet – whole. Sources are still vague as to what caused the power outage, and witchcraft has not been ruled out. It should, of course, be noted that ‘sources’ are limited to this reporter and this reporter alone, as she has been hiding in the WGN building for nearly two weeks now, ever since the elevators stopped working and everything outside was transformed into rioting and waywardness.
“This, baby, is why I was recently forced to expel you, a tiny human person, from my vagina – without drugs, assistance, or any idea of how to actually do that. This reporter is talking to you now because professional detachment and a monotonous summarizing of recent events are all she knows and there is a good chance she’s only moments away from losing her already tenuous grasp on reality. She hasn’t seen another human in days, not since your father went out for milk and was immediately mauled by a roving pack of cannibals. This reporter has since barricaded all the doors and windows and has been living entirely off coffee, powered creamer, and stale Pop-Tarts.
“This reporter would have liked to think that after twenty-six and a half apocalypses society would have been prepared for this kind of calamity, but this reporter was apparently very, very wrong. Despite seemingly perpetual asteroid strikes and unstoppable wildfires and at least one invasion of giant space lizards, we’ve figured out ways to rebuild from nothing but ashes and bones literally dozens of times. And yet, somehow, we can’t figure out how to turn the frigging lights back on.
“I mean, for Hiroshi’s ever-loving sake, our scientists have cured cancer, figured out how to run cars off trash, and disproven religion! Religion! And then some of those very same fallen gods went ahead and disproved science, hiring themselves out to work miracles at hourly rates. We have pills that nullify radiation, we can clone a lost arm or an entire lost person, and we regularly get into wars with robots over civil freaking rights! Ghosts walk the motherflipping earth, along with zombies and werewolves and sentient god damned toasters, so why the fuck am I still living in the soul-crushing windowlessness of this godforsaken motherfucking shithole of a news studio?!
“Ahem.
“This reporter would like to apologize for that outbreak, baby. She’s beginning to forget what actual food and human interaction are, she’s diapered you with a dead cameraman’s underpants, and she fears she’s starting to turn you into an even more messed-up person than this world is already going to make you. With a little luck, though, I’ll be dead before you’re old enough to understand what I’m saying and blame me for being terrible.
“On the other hand, my ranting appears to have lulled your slimy, adorable countenance to sleep. Maybe you’ll be able to handle this world after all, small child that lived inside of me for nine months.
“In any event, this is your mother, Alison Glover, for WGN Chicago, signing off. You nap here while I go and eat the rest of the baking soda I found in the back of the fridge this morning.”
CHAPTER ONE
Benjamin “Motherfuckin’” Franklin
Benjamin “Motherfuckin’” Franklin, a hulking mass of bones, dirt, worms, and faded wool long johns, stood on the far side of the entrance ramp to the Samuel Adams brewery. The walking corpse was hurling fireballs recklessly and roaring toward the heavens.
“Oh, come on,” grumbled Thor, the fallen Norse God of Thunder, exiting the brewery and discovering the rampaging, incendiary cadaver. “This wasn’t here when we got here!”
“Maybe there’s a back door,” suggested Boudica IX, clone of the Celtic revolutionary, poking her wild mane of red hair through the doorway.
“Yeah, but it’s all the way on the other side of the brewe
ry. And this place is huge.”
Benjamin “Motherfuckin’” Franklin bellowed incoherently in reply.
Unlike the other Revolutionary War-era politicians running around, Benjamin “Motherfuckin’” Franklin was not a clone. Shortly after a thermonuclear pissing contest between Canada and Switzerland ended the world for the eleventh time and transformed Philadelphia into a burned-out husk of crime and cheesesteak stands[i], Benjamin Franklin’s exhumed corpse was moved to Copp’s Hill Burying Ground below the tree-city of Boston[ii] where he could, presumably, rest in eternal pieces.
Almost immediately, though, the Charles River running beneath the city overflowed from an excess of feces and Yankees fan corpses during a particularly raucous St. Patrick’s Day riot-parade. The green dye and Bostonian excrement seeped into Franklin’s grave, waking him from the afterlife and transforming him into a monstrous, super-powered nightmare version of himself.
Benjamin “Motherfuckin’” Franklin had been roaming the forest-metropolis of New England ever since, terrorizing anything and everything that crossed his path, or, really, got anywhere within his peripheral vision.
“I think you’re going to have to take him out, honeybutt,” said Boudica IX, ducking back into the brewery lobby as a fireball exploded above the doorway. “Or we could go back inside and get drunk and hope he goes away.”
“No, the only thing they have ready right now is light beer,” replied the former Norse god, “and I will never drink light beer. Stay back.”
The sky darkened and thunder rumbled, shaking dust from the brewery facade and sending the empty beer bottles littering the tree-borne walkway into a tiny jig. Benjamin Franklin looked up at the roaring sky just in time to take a bolt of lightning squarely between his rotting, hollowed eye sockets.
The colonial inventor giggled.
“OK,” said Thor, raising an eyebrow, “that’s not supposed to happen.”
“Ben Franklin discovered electricity!” shouted a brewery employee, popping his head through a nearby window. “Lightning won’t have any effect on him, he’s been struck by it too many times!”
