by Eirik Gumeny
“Well, we’re not walking,” countered Mark, slipping his mask back on. “Em eesing I owls eff.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology ...
A koala with the head of an acid trip rushed into the sitting room of Dr. Joselin Gonzalez’s volcano lair and began hopping up and down, gesticulating wildly.
“What the hell is that?” said Queen Victoria XXX, a look of disgust sprinting across her face.
“I don’t know and therefore I think I should step on it,” said Thor Odinson, manfully wiping away tears after his girlfriend’s latest round of serum-induced interrogation. The thunder god moved toward the creature. Boudica IX held up her hand.
“I think he works here,” explained the Celtic leader slowly. “If I’m understanding correctly, and I think I am, Joselin sent him. He’s saying, ‘The doctor needs the blonde guy who craps lightning.’ Is that right, little guy?”
The little guy shook his plant head vigorously, the curled fungus bouncing up and down and shaking loose a small cloud of pollen.
“Please don’t do that again,” said Thor, waving the dusty spores away from his face. “I’m getting less and less respectful of Bo and her wishes and I can’t guarantee that I won’t squish you next time you bother me, just so I can bother her.”
“Ooh,” said Boudica IX, a slight chill running through her. “I like it when you threaten harmless little animals.”
The thunder god raised his eyebrows. Then, looking at the mad scientist’s henchthing, he cocked his head and said, “Things aren’t looking good for you, little guy.”
The koala with an abstract sculpture for a head backed out of the room slowly.
“I take it back,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “You’re not too good for Thor, Bo.”
***
“He’s crashing,” said Dr. Joselin Gonzalez, motioning toward the motionless figure of Chester A. Arthur XVII, “and my defibrillator just shit the bed. Can you zap him back into something resembling life?”
“Not if you want this room to stay standing,” said Thor.
“What?”
“I don’t make thunder,” he explained, “I call it down from the heavens. I’m not some kind of weather balloon.”
“That’s scientifically impossible,” replied the neurobiologist. “You’re clearly an anomaly of some kind, capable of manipulating nearby electromagnetic spectrums to your will. Also that’s not even remotely close to how weather balloons work.”
“I’m scientifically impossible. That’s kind of my whole deal.”
“Your friend is in several barely connected pieces right now and we’re not going to be able to get him out of this room without him losing at least one of those parts permanently,” she said.
“As long as it’s his left arm, he’ll be fine. He barely uses the thing.”
Dr. Gonzalez exhaled and rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. Then she said, “Do me a favor, Thor. Close your eyes and pretend that ‘the heavens’ are, I don’t know, six inches above your head.”
“Uh, OK, sure.”
“You there? You picturing it? Wherever it is that you do your thing from, right above your head?”
“Yep.”
“OK, good,” she said. “Now bring the thunder.”
“Are you –”
“Don’t think, Thor, just do it.”
“OK.”
Thor’s brow furrowed slightly and a thin, dark cloud materialized across the operating room, stretching from wall to wall and obscuring the overhead florescent lighting. The faintest rumble of thunder echoed from all corners. A bolt of light the size of a baseball bat seared the air between the thin cloud and the exposed cerebellum of Chester A. Arthur XVII.
Thor opened his eyes just in time to see Chester A. Arthur XVII gasp back into consciousness. Around them a number of small screens and devices were sparking and resetting.
“Well I’ll be damned,” said the thunder god. “I would have bet donuts to more donuts that was going to kill you both.”
“Congratulations,” said the doctor. “You’re not magic after all.”
“I don’t think that’s the lesson here.”
“Did I just die again?” asked Chester A. Arthur XVII, staring at the large blonde man who hadn’t been there seconds earlier.
“Only for a couple minutes,” Dr. Gonzalez stated. “It’s kind of standard when you’re Frankensteining someone into a new body.”
“Frankensteining?” said Thor, suddenly interested in his friend’s rehabilitation. “Is he going to have giant, ropy stitches and neck bolts?”
“Don’t be stupid,” said the mad scientist. “I’m a professional.”
“What about patches of different colored skin?”
“It depends on who I have in the freezer.”
“Can you give him bear arms?”
“You can go now, Thor.”
“I’m actually OK with bear arms,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“No you’re not,” replied Dr. Gonzalez. “I left a scalpel in your neocortex.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Animal Farm
Dozens upon dozens of farm animals ran from the barn as an enormous foot crashed into the structure. Behind the fleeing horses and cows and pigs, a decomposing space lizard, the size of a large office building, roared and stomped the barn into the slushy ground.
“All right, Lizzie. Your point has been made,” said the ghost of “Typhoid” Mary Mallon, standing with her ethereal arms crossed as the last of the livestock stampeded past. “We can possess the corpses of extraterrestrial reptiles. I was wrong.”
“That is all I wanted to hear,” replied Lizbeth “Lizzie” Borden from within the deceased husk of scales and spikes. She dispossessed the space lizard and let the rotting corpse crash to the snowy ground
“That was quite the show of excess, my dear. I had my comeuppance the moment you forced that beast to lumber up from his shallow grave. You did not need to assault the barn as well.”
“My hatred of horses is unparalleled, Mary. You are well aware of that.”
“Then why did you kill only three?”
“Because terror is a finer punishment than death. Those asinine equines will now be scarred for the rest of their hopefully short lives. The horses will live in fear of space lizards forevermore.”
“Everything already lives with that fear, Lizzie, all the time.”
“Yes, but horses are notoriously slow-witted and now they have something visceral to draw from.”
“If you say so, darling,” Mary acquiesced, shaking her head. “Now come on, we have dillydallied enough here. There are energy concerns that need ending.”
“That richly-dressed man is not paying us, Mary. We are receiving no recompense for assisting him,” explained Lizbeth. “He simply requested that we tailor our cross-country killing spree toward the businesses and hobbyists on his list. We are not indebted to him in any way.”
“I am aware. But we gave the man our word, and I shall not go back on a promise. Besides, I do not get as much glee from terrorizing livestock as you do. I find it somewhat juvenile, if you would care for my honest opinion. I much prefer the maiming and murder of actual humans.”
“You are no fun sometimes, Mary.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Twilight Bark Won’t Save Them This Time
The grey-haired man in the thrift store suit was en route to a convention of mercenary deconstruction workers when he saw it: a small, square building, churning out an almost endless stream of exhaust and surrounded by several whirring turbines. A dozen electrical lines stretched from the rotor apparatus to a factory off in the grey, slushy distance. The man in the suit pulled his red Hummer off the main road and drove the vehicle straight through the ice-covered chain link fence surrounding the structure. Neither the smaller building nor the factory was on his list of known energy concerns, but the man wasn’t about to take any chances.
Shovi
ng open the door – marked Property of C.D.’s Fine Furs – the man strode onto the latticed power station floor, high on his own indignation. He stopped almost immediately. At least a hundred filthy, rusting cages lined the walls of the building; in each one was a small dalmatian, a running wheel, and a dangling dog biscuit. Frayed, sparking wires ran along the walls, connecting the cages to the turbines outside.
The dogs scampered in the wheels frantically, incessantly, nearly perpetually. Should one of the dogs stop, either to pant or poop or because it tripped, a howler monkey walked over to the cage and smacked the dalmatian in the head with a newspaper until it started running again. If the dog didn’t run fast enough, the monkey lit a cigarette and then put it out in the puppy’s hindquarters.
“Holy shit,” said the man in the suit.
“Can I help you?” crawled a low voice sounding of cigarettes and tranquilizers.
“I don’t think so,” replied the man in his own unpaved timbre. He turned toward the voice and found himself face-to-face with an ancient crone in a nightgown made of extra sheer snakeskin. She exhaled a mouthful of mentholated smoke into his leathery face.
“Then I would politely ask you to leave.”
“In a moment,” he said, putting up a hand. The man turned to look at the dogs again, then back to the woman. He shook his head in admiring disbelief.
“I’ll be honest with you. I came into this establishment with every intention of convincing you to burn your own building to the ground. I work for a concerned party looking to get a monopoly on the energy supply to this continent and your self-sufficient electrical generators caused me some alarm. But, quite frankly, after coming in here and witnessing this puppy mill firsthand, I feel strangely compelled to leave you and your customers alone.”
“Customers don’t concern me,” drawled the woman. “All the electricity generated here is carried directly to my coat factory. The coats are made from the slower puppies.”
“You are a truly depraved individual.”
“That is what I’m told.”
“What are you doing for dinner this evening?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
No Worse for Wear
Thirty-six hours after they started, Dr. Joselin Gonzalez and a newly re-humanized Chester A. Arthur XVII emerged from her operating room into a small white waiting room. The cloned president was almost entirely covered in gauze and neon self-adhering bandages – as well as some small spots of paper towels and masking tape – and still a little gimpy, limping heavily and clutching his side as he exited. He inched forward, his brightly-wrapped feet shuffling over the linoleum.
Turning his unaltered head and neck stiffly from one side of the room to the other, the re-re-reconstituted politician found nothing but empty taupe chairs.
Queen Victoria XXX, perhaps the most appreciative of this miracle of science, was not there to witness the momentous event, as she and Thor, the sodium thiopental still not entirely out of their systems, had locked themselves in the doctor’s library, lest they accidentally be honest with someone. Boudica IX, bored with knocking on the library door and shouting invasive personal questions at her friends, was taking a nap on the sofa in the sitting room.
“I was expecting more fanfare,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“It’s really not that big a deal,” said Dr. Gonzalez. “Sometimes I do this twice a week.”
“It’s a big deal to me.”
“OK, Charlie, OK,” replied the doctor, patting him on his neon green shoulder with a practiced mix of consolation and condescension.
In the other room, Boudica IX shifted on the couch and farted loudly.
***
Meanwhile, at the other volcano lair, Catrina Dalisay and Ali Şahin returned looking not particularly dissimilar from shit, their hovercart loaded down with industrial transformers and dredging a deep valley across the glacial desert. Snow and ash were falling heavily all around them.
“Why do you two look like the worst part of a bad burrito?” asked Dr. Lee Arahami, sporting a new, shiny leg and meeting them at the loading gate in the rear of the volcano. “I gave you guys the easy task.”
“There was a bomb, Lee,” Ali explained slowly, rigidly stepping from the hovercart. “Some kind of singularity. Engulfed the entire warehouse and then just collapsed into nothing.”
“OK, sure.”
“Before that there were raccoons, a powder that blinded me for several hours, gigantic radioactive spiders.”
“So many spiders ...” added Catrina softly, her face empty of anything.
“Oh, the booby traps,” said the scientist. “I didn’t tell you guys about them earlier?”
“They bit us, Lee,” said Ali.
“Everywhere ...” Catrina whimpered.
“The raccoons or the spiders?”
“Then, as we were leaving, we triggered some kind of perimeter defense,” continued the donut merchant, his eyes vacantly staring past the scientist. “We drove through a wall of fire that burned our parkas, and most of our eyebrows, clean off. We had to drive back without them, without coats. Through a snowstorm. In a hovercraft without heat.”
“It was so cold ...”
“So we decided to cover ourselves in mud for insulation. ... We had to dig through a foot of snow to find it.”
Ali fixed his gaze on Dr. Arahami. Catrina shuddered violently, remembering what happened next.
“There were scorpions in that snow, Lee. Giant fucking scorpions.
“We had to fight them off,” he continued. “I lost a shoe. And most of the leg it was attached to.”
Ali pulled up his ragged, sopping pants leg, revealing a makeshift tourniquet and harness binding a large, broken pincer to his bloodied calf. His leg fit almost perfectly into the concavity of the cracked claw. His balance was impeccable.
“And then,” said the brown-skinned man, his voice dropping the better part of an octave, “then it started to get windy.”
“Why couldn’t you have just added heaters to the fucking hovercarts?!” screamed Catrina, emotion suddenly flooding back to her. Emotion that was mostly seething rage.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was necessary,” said Dr. Arahami, staring at Ali’s leg with clinical detachment. “It doesn’t get cold out here.”
“Yes, it does!” shouted Ali, rushing to the doctor and grabbing him by his lab coat with his good hand. He pressed the scientist against the frame of the loading gate. “You’ve lived out here for years, Lee! You know that’s a god damned lie! DESERTS GET COLD!”
“At night, sure,” stammered the doctor. “But who goes out at night?”
Ali released the roboticist and began stamping awkwardly around in a circle, swinging his arms spastically and mumbling incoherently. His girlfriend joined him.
“I’ll unload the transformers myself,” said the scientist. “You two go take a shower, have some hot chocolate. Calm down a little.”
“I’m going to do the first two, and probably at the same time,” said Catrina, fixing the doctor with a stare that would have turned coal into diamonds and then melted them, “but I make no promises on the third.”
The couple stomped across the receiving area toward the stronghold of the mad scientist, trailing muddy foot- and clawprints behind them.
“Can you guys wipe your feet before you –”
“Fuck you!” was the stereophonic reply. Multiple middle fingers were raised.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The Doctor Had an Exclamation Point Over His Head
Several hours later, after a long and therapeutic shower that used up most of Dr. Arahami’s hot water, Catrina and Ali made their way to the lounge. They found their friends returned from the other mad scientist’s volcano lair, the “How exactly are we fixing the world?” meeting already in progress. Dr. Arahami was hunched over the coffee table, a map and an indecipherable notepad laid out before him. Queen Victoria XXX and Chester A. Arthur XVII stood on either side of him, while Thor and Bou
dica IX sprawled on the couch opposite the trio.
Ali and Catrina, still slightly soggy, flopped down into the empty purple armchair in a tangle of legs and odd angles.
“Can’t you just use your right hand?” Queen Victoria XXX was asking.
“That’s what she said,” added Thor.
“No,” continued Dr. Arahami, unabated. “The fasteners are extraordinarily thin and purposely made to be fragile. You have to be delicate when you’re screwing.”
“That’s also what she said.”
“What the hell are you guys talking about?” asked Catrina.
“Left-handed spork-head screwdrivers,” explained the exasperated roboticist. “I need one to swap out several processors and about a half dozen cables in the regulator units. The spork-heads were custom made for the APSCAM government, so no civilians could go around messing with government equipment. Any other tool – and even the right tool misused – will shatter the screws. Only a few manufacturers were licensed to make them, and only one of those manufacturers made them left-handed, a lefty boutique in Fisherman’s Wharf.”
“Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco? Where all the souvenir stores and chocolate shops were?” asked Ali.
“Exactly,” replied the doctor. “APSCAM had a habit of hiding things in plain sight. They didn’t think too highly of the people that voted them into office.”
“Wasn’t San Francisco burnt to –”
“What else do we need?” demanded Chester A. Arthur XVII abruptly, standing with arms of varying thickness and pigmentation crossed over his lopsided chest. The reconstructed president was still crusty and a little smelly-looking thanks to Ali and Catrina’s monopoly on the shower. “We’ve been on this damn screwdriver for nearly ten minutes.”
