by Eirik Gumeny
“Sometimes they are, but sometimes they’re extraordinarily cold, especially at night. Or during whatever the hell this is,” explained Ali, looking up at the blanket of clouds smothering the atmosphere. “On normal days, there’s little to nothing to trap the ambient heat. Meaning if the sun’s not out, it gets cold fast. And if the sun’s been forcibly removed from the equation for whatever reason, you might as well burn all your t-shirts. For warmth. So you don’t freeze to death.”
“That’s dumb.”
“That’s nature.”
“Nature’s dumb.”
“Nature’s angry, and it hates us,” said Ali. “Of course none of that explains why Arahami didn’t put any heaters in this thing.”
“Maybe he hates us too.”
The temperature rapidly dropped another few degrees and the couple began shivering. Ali pulled his hood up awkwardly with one hand. Catrina squatted down into a wind-free corner of the hovercart and pulled her knees into her parka.
“Did you learn all that desert stuff from your encyclopses, or whatever you called them?” she asked. “Those weird giant books you talk about sometimes.”
“No. I grew up out here, a few hours north of Los Alamos, in what used to be Colorado,” explained Ali, kneeling next to Catrina and rubbing one of her arms. “Our desert was a little different, though. During the Community College Wars, all the sand was melted into glass. Just an endless ocean of it. Got hot as hell when the sun was out, and it was always out.”
“And you lived there on purpose?”
“Hey, so there’s another fun fact about the deserts out here,” he continued, sitting down and wrapping his one functioning arm around his girlfriend. “They’re all a mile above sea level.”
“Is that so?” replied Catrina, leaning into him. She craned her neck to kiss him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Truth or ... More Truth, I Guess
Chester A. Arthur XVII sat strapped into a surgical chair, connected to a number of beeping, blinking machines. His skullcap had been removed and was lounging in a bin at his side.
“How do you have power?” he inquired. “Did your solar panels survive the mass ejection? And then ignore the eternal night?”
“No, I lost all solar inputs during the geomagnetic storm,” replied Dr. Joselin Gonzalez, standing over him and poking at his brain with assorted tools of varying pointiness. “Thankfully I had already devoted an entire sub-basement to composting, using the output of the anaerobic bacteria to fuel a number of backup generators. And of course there’s all the chimps in the basement hooked up to electroencephalographs. I can run most of the day-to-day operations off their brains’ electrical activity alone.”
“You’re not kidding about that are you.”
“I am not.”
“Huh,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII. “Is there a lot of upkeep?”
“Not really. They crap right into the compost sub-basement.”
“You are by far the maddest scientist I have ever met. And I’m friends with a guy who gave me a jackhammer for genitalia.”
“Thank you,” said Dr. Gonzalez, blushing. “Lee’s a good guy, but he’s really more pathologically obsessed than ‘mad.’ He doesn’t even have any henchmen.”
“Neither do you, though,” said the aerated president, knitting his brow – or at least the portion of it that was left attached to him.
The mad neurologist clicked her tongue twice and a walking nightmare tottered around the chair and into view of Chester A. Arthur XVII. From the neck down Dr. Gonzalez’s sidekick was a koala, adorable and cuddly and wearing a tiny white lab coat, but that all stopped at the head. Instead of a face there was a mass of octopus stinkhorn – a large, fleshy fungus that erupted into a cat’s cradle of curled, red tentacles upon maturity. The fungus arms twitched and coiled wanly with every breath the creature took.
“Holy shit.”
“I know, right?”
***
Queen Victoria XXX rested her arm across the wooden back of a thinly-padded, brightly-striped sofa. She was staring vaguely across a sitting room that appeared to have been furnished entirely by IKEA as some kind of promotional stunt. This was, of course, impossible, as all IKEAs were burned down during the Torrent Wars[xv], but the resemblance was uncanny.
“I’m torn,” she said. “On the one hand, she’s giving me Charlie back the way I prefer him, non-electrical and slightly less likely to injure me if I accidentally hit him while we’re sleeping. On the other, she and Charlie can talk about all his science bullshit without translation and that threatens me in the tiniest way, not because she’s smarter than me, but because she gives a shit. I both want to hug this doctor bitch and hit her, and part of me wants to sleep with her because god damn those breasts.”
“I would sleep with you or her or anyone with a vagina,” said Thor, sitting beside her on the couch and hunched over the cocktail table. “And the vagina isn’t actually the sticking point I make it out to be.”
“I am well aware of that and that is precisely why I do not and cannot take you seriously and why I have a hard time understanding why Boudica is with you. Your lack of standards make her appear to have no standards. And, her spontaneous anarchic episodes aside, she seems lovely and like she could do better.”
“That was hurtful, but I understand completely.”
“What is wrong with you two?” asked Boudica IX. She was sitting on the floor on the far side of the coffee table staring at them with mild horror.
“I think there’s something in this vodka,” said Thor, lifting a clear glass bottle from the tabletop. Boudica IX took the bottle and gulped down a mouthful of the liquid.
“It’s not vodka,” she said, “it’s refined sodium thiopental with ...” The Celtic queen ran her tongue over her teeth. “... methylphenidate.”
“Neither one of us knows what that means,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“Truth serum and Ritalin.”
“Oh fuck,” barked the cloned Victorian royal.
“Who the hell just leaves that laying around their refrigerator in an unmarked bottle?” barked Thor.
“Why were you drinking unmarked liquids, dummy?” replied Boudica IX.
“Because I’m not very smart and I really wanted a drink and even though I thought it might have been some kind of poison I didn’t really care if it was and I died because I still haven’t entirely gotten over being stranded here on Midgard with all you insignificant mortals! Sure, getting my powers back helped, and most of you seem nice enough, especially you, Bo, but I really want to go back home!” shouted Thor. He stood and then he screamed indiscriminately. “Odin’s sparsely shaven scrotum, make it stop!”
“You and your father are too close!” shouted Queen Victoria XXX, rising and pointing at Thor.
“Thousands of years of reverence and nigh-omnipotence were yanked out from underneath me! My father is the only one who understands that and is actually willing to talk to me! All the other gods I’ve been able to find hate me!”
“That’s because you’re very arrogant! You need to work on your personality! And your hygiene! When you sweat you smell like a locker room toilet!”
“I am well aware of that!”
“This is awesome,” said the wild-haired warrior queen, bouncing up and down where she sat. “Hey, Vicky, how often do you poop?”
“Every other day! I don’t get enough fiber!”
“Do you pick your nose?”
“Ferociously!”
“How much do you love Charlie?”
“More than I will ever adequately be able to describe! There aren’t words in the entirety of all the world’s languages to express my feelings for him, and I suck at music and I think art is dumb! Sometimes I lie awake at night worried that he doesn’t truly know how much I care for him, but I’ve never been able to tell him because my feelings for him are so deep and eternal and ridiculous that I am literally physically paralyzed any time I stop and dwell on it with anything
more than a glancing thought!”
“Holy crap.”
Queen Victoria XXX screamed and slammed the bottom of her fists against the wall. She fell to the couch, sobbing. “I love him so god damned much.”
“I think you crossed a line,” said Thor, “although I’m not really sure what line. Catrina just told me it’s bad to make a woman cry and when you do it’s crossing a line.”
“It’s OK,” sputtered Queen Victoria XXX. “She’s not the one making me cry, it’s these stupid feelings.”
“Speaking of Catrina,” said Boudica IX, narrowing her eyes and looking at Thor, “if she and I were both about to get mauled by a pack of rabid yeti, who would you save first?”
“Catrina,” said the thunder god with heavy resignation. “Although if it was only the one pack of rabid yeti, I’d go ahead and save you both.”
“How did you beat all of us in Scrabble that one time?”
“I roofied your coffees.”
“Why wouldn’t you let me move into your hotel room?”
“You fart in your sleep. A lot.”
“It smells and sounds like you shit your pants,” added Queen Victoria XXX.
“Those lacy pink underpants in your dresser,” continued the redhead, unabated, “did you really buy them by accident?”
“No.” The fallen deity spoke through gritted teeth. “I saw them and I kind of wanted to know what they felt like and so I tried them on and they made me feel even prettier than usual and they were on sale, so I bought them and I wore them a bunch and they are my favorite underpants.”
“Who would win in a fight,” yelped Boudica IX, “Bruce Lee or Robocop?”
“Robocop,” Thor answered begrudgingly.
“Superman or Batman?”
The thunder god clenched his fists and bit down on his lower lip. With every ounce of the near-limitless strength he had, Thor fought the urge to answer. But the sodium thiopental was vehement and he had put away a lot of it. Finally, he blurted out: “Superman! Are you happy?! Superman would win in a fight against Batman! It wouldn’t even be close!”
The Norseman punched a massive hole into the wall, then slumped against the wood paneling and slid to the floor.
“Why are you doing this to us?” he asked, near tears, his head hanging between his knees.
“An abundance of curiosity and a lack of empathy, mostly,” replied Boudica IX. “I’m gonna go see if there’s any popcorn in the kitchenette. Does anybody want anything?”
“Charlie,” sniffed Queen Victoria XXX, laying across the couch and burying her head under several pillows.
“For you to forget I said something bad about Batman,” said a dead-eyed Thor.
“I meant, like, a soda or something.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
One of the Classic Blunders
After the First Robot War ended the world for the ninth time, Los Alamos, in what was then the state of New Mexico, was rechristened as the capital of the United States of America, its scientists ruling as democratically-elected kings and queens. Billions of dollars were funneled into technological research and, in short order, cancer was cured, global warming was reversed, and electric cars became commercially viable and less ridiculous-looking. Everything – literally, everything – that scientists had spent years toiling over and hypothesizing about, hamstrung by shoestring budgets and time-travelers from the eighteenth century using the Bible as legal precedent, became a reality.
Los Alamos rose shimmering into the stratosphere, a soaring, glittering cityscape of chrome skyscrapers, high-speed monorails, and no fewer than two Thunderdomes.
Catrina and Ali stood in front an unmarked warehouse, several dozen nearly identical warehouses surrounding them, the plain of storage centers dwarfed on all sides by shining towers of abandoned architecture. Knee-deep in filthy snow, the couple sized up the large retractable door of slatted aluminum before them. Hunching down and each grabbing a handle, the hotel clerk and the donut maker, with an enormous heave and some small grunting, threw the door open.
The door slid upward with remarkable ease, despite being almost a hundred feet long, rattling up and then back and disappearing into the interior of the warehouse. The grey daylight of the volcanic winter flooded weakly into the pitch blackness inside, an overflowing toilet of dirty sunshine. Ali and Catrina could just make out tower after tower of stacked electrical equipment, the smallest components the size of compact sedans.
“Are these the transformers?”
“Why does nobody label anything here?”
When the Kingdom of Los Alamos was deposed – the former rulers chased out of their city by heavily-armed helicopters – the scientists did what they had to do to survive. Some took jobs with private companies, some with the government’s new Department of the Biggest Gosh Darned Explosion You Ever Saw. Most, though, retreated to the surrounding volcanoes and underground laboratories littered across New Mexico, waiting and plotting, stewing in their resentments until they boiled over and became full-fledged supervillains and mad scientists.
Still standing in the gaping maw of the building, Catrina and Ali examined the warehouse before them suspiciously, looking in corners and near the rails of the door for motion sensors or laser cannons or any other signifier of an alarm system. Not finding anything, the couple looked at one another and then tentatively took a step inside.
Lights flickered on overhead. The donut maker and the former hotel employee instinctively ducked. Looking around and realizing they hadn’t exploded, Ali and Catrina unfolded and headed onward.
“If anything moves,” began Ali, walking slowly forward, “run away. Run away screaming if you can so that I can hear you and run away too.”
“This isn’t the first mad scientist’s supply closet I’ve broken into, babe.”
This was, in fact, the sixth warehouse that Ali and Catrina had found a way into. Each and every one had been unmarked and unlocked, but heavily fortified in some other terrifying way once they got inside. There had so far been man-eating raccoons, nuclear spiders, two powders that were almost certainly poison, confused and elderly armed guards, and several roadrunners the size of professional basketball players. Catrina and Ali had survived them all with aplomb, despite several close calls and a large number of scrapes and scratches.
The lack of any kind of horrible defense system on this most recent warehouse, however, they found particularly unnerving.
Upon leaving, all the former kings and queens made a gentleperson’s agreement to leave Los Alamos as it was, a veritable candyland of expensive equipment and technological resources. They had built themselves a utopia of reason and science and they would continue to take advantage of that achievement for as long as they could.
An email was sent around and the scientists vowed to use the resources of Los Alamos wisely and efficiently, taking only what they needed when they needed it.
Catrina hopped from the forklift, limping toward Ali. She found her boyfriend staring with head aslant at a green-marbled bowling ball hidden between two sets of now vacant shelving.
“Why are you staring at a bowling ball?” she asked.
“Why is there a bowling ball in a warehouse full of transformers?”
The tiny Filipina woman tapped a boot against the ball, spinning it slightly. She quickly pulled her foot away.
“Why does that bowling ball have a clock?”
“Why is the clock counting down?”
“Njörd’s moldy toenails.”
“We should probably run. Away. Screaming.”
Which isn’t to say anyone actually made it easy to do that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I Am the Night
Mark Hughes and Timmy the super-squirrel crouched atop the roof of the ancient apartment building, staring out over the crisscrossing streets of downtown Secaucus. From behind the hovering comforter of dark grey ash, a bright orange moon could only barely be seen, brilliant lunar light banging furiously on the cloud cove
r and screaming to be let in.
The former hotel owner waited patiently along the edge of the building, vaguely silhouetted by the infinitesimal glow of the grey-orange moonlight. There he knelt, watching, brooding, a gargoyle made of meat and a large faux fur-lined snowsuit. His squirrel friend waited, watched, and brooded beside him, his cape fluttering dramatically.
“Er ee oong es ite?” queried Mark, turning his head toward the rodent.
“What?” replied Timmy, scrunching his tiny brow. “You told me not to read your mind without permission. What are you saying? Why are you wearing that mask?”
“It’s cold,” explained Mark, pulling down his fleece face mask. “And I don’t have a thick layer of fur to protect me like some animals I know.”
“That sounds like a personal problem to me.”
“Are we doing this right? We’ve been up here for hours and we haven’t seen a god damned thing. We haven’t even seen a person who could do a thing.”
“You have to give it time, chief.”
“I’m about to give it all my extremities. I can’t feel my fingers or my toes. I think this new ice age is really shitting in our crime-fighting cereal.”
“Ice age seems strong,” replied the squirrel.
The cyborg pointed across the street to another building. Each and every window was frozen over; icicles the size of evergreens dangled from the building’s eaves.
“I still think you’re being a little hyperbolic.”
“I think it’s time to pack it in, buddy.”
The super-powered rodent sighed.
“We’re going to have to go somewhere else,” said Timmy, shaking his whiskered head, “somewhere where the criminal element isn’t such a bunch of shriveled wangs. Somewhere more terrible. Somewhere horrible. A desolate, blighted place, where morals have been kneecapped and left for dead, and people will do anything for a dollar, regardless of the frozen wasteland outside. Somewhere like Detroit. Or that island infested by Kardashians.”
