by Eirik Gumeny
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Trigger Warning
Mark Hughes and Timmy the super-squirrel sat in a booth held together with duct tape and hope, in a roadside cafe two hours north of the city-state of Atlanta. After twelve nonstop hours in the RV, the friends needed a break from driving, food that didn’t come from cans, and pie. They desperately needed pie.
“So we’re agreed then,” said Mark, leaning forward across the table. “We get as close as we can to WANG, see what’s up, and then we come up with a new, better plan.”
“Yes.”
“OK.”
The waitress returned, her arms laden with coffee, eggs, hash browns, toast, and at least six different pieces of pie. She deftly slid the plates onto the table, everything ended up exactly where it should with nothing spilled, the way Mary Poppins would deal cards. A small dish of toast spun and stopped perfectly before the super-squirrel.
“Do you have any jelly?” asked Timmy.
“Oh, no, I’m sorry, sir,” said the young woman politely, “we only have butter and margarine. But there may be some almond butter in the kitchen if you’d like me to –”
“You take that almond butter and you shove it up your ass!”
“Timmy!” scolded Mark.
“I’m sorry, Mark. Miss,” said the squirrel solemnly, nodding his tiny head toward the affronted waitress. “It’s just ... I’m not completely over the peanut butter yet. I know I put on a brave face, but I can ... I can still feel it. It’s in my blood.”
“It’s OK, buddy,” Mark said quietly, “I get it.”
“Peanut butter’s actually why I wanted to do this whole hero-ing thing again,” continued the squirrel, staring vacantly at his toast. “To distract myself from the memory of it, the cravings. I ... I can’t sleep. I dream about it at night, constantly. Jars and jars of Jif, or Skippy, or Peter Pan, laid out endlessly before me. Fancy restaurants that serve nothing but the finest hand-harvested gourmet brands. Catrina, wearing nothing but peanut butter and calling to me from her bedroom.”
“Catrina?”
“Don’t tell her.”
“I dreamt of Sheila in nothing but cottage cheese a few times,” Mark muttered absently. “Oh, god, Sheila ...”
The man and the squirrel both began stifling tears, trying to keep their bodies from shaking, fighting to keep their broken-down spirits intact.
“We, uh, we have a lovely Jack Daniels waffle platter if either of you are interested,” said the waitress. She quickly added: “I can have them hold the waffles.”
“Yes, please,” replied the pair of friends.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
Boudica IX was hip-deep in the remnants of Fisherman’s Wharf, digging through charred boxes of magic tricks, bags of ten-year-old Ghirardelli chocolates, and stacks upon stacks upon stacks of “I Left My ♥ in San Francisco” magnets. All the while an olive-skinned fat man with shoulder-length hair was digging along with her, sometimes feet away, sometimes half a mile. They both kept stealing glances and squinting at one another, trying to place the other’s face. Boudica IX was sure she recognized him, though whether it was because he delivered a pizza to her once or she saw him in a toothpaste commercial or she blew up his family while in the employ of Andrew Jackson II she didn’t know.
After nearly a full day of this, when they were once again within a few feet of each other, Boudica IX finally asked, “Don’t I know you?”
“I think so,” replied the man. “But I’m not sure from where.”
The queen knit her brow intensely, staring the man down. He was heavy, but spry, and wore a heavily-buckled vest over a linen shirt, a large leather belt holding up the pinstriped slacks tucked into his strapped boots. The man was looking right back at Boudica IX – at her face, of all places – an act that threw the queen off her game slightly, as she expected him to be staring at her miniskirt or the gash across the front of her sweater.
“You’ve never worked at Roosters, right?” she eventually asked.
“The restaurant where none of the waiters wear pants? No,” the man stated, somewhat emphatically. “You were never a prostitute, were you?”
“Not in the way you’re asking about,” answered the redhead matter-of-factly. “Did we meet on that octopus spear-hunting trip?”
“Can’t say that we did. Are you an actress or a model or something?”
“No, but thank you,” she said, blushing slightly – though on her it was still pretty pronounced. “Are you a member of Weight Watchers? There was a while where I used to run into their meetings with a shopping cart full of fried chicken and biscuits.”
“No, I’m not, and I’m not sure I like the implications there either,” said the fat man. “Maybe you’ve seen me on the news?”
“I’ve made it a personal goal to never watch the news. Were you on Jerry Springer? Do you have a secret wife?”
“No, my wives get along fine. Do you go to Las Vegas a lot?”
Boudica IX shook her head. “Were your grandparents ever viciously attacked by a delusional, homicidal clone of the seventh president of the United States in an attempt to draw you out into the open and exact his revenge?”
“Sorry,” said the man, shaking his head. “I don’t actually have any grandparents. I was –”
“Cloned in a vat!” yelped Boudica IX.
“How did you ...” The long-haired man trailed off. “Boudica?”
“Billy!” squealed the cloned Celtic warrior queen, before awkwardly rushing through the debris and hugging the man. “What are you doing here?”
“Same as you I’m guessing,” said William H. Taft XLII, mayor-king of Las Vegas and cloned contemporary of Boudica IX. “I’m looking for a left-handed spork-head screwdriver.”
“What are the odds?” said Boudica IX, shrugging slightly.
“Pretty good, actually,” explained the hefty president slowly. He looked at the redhead with concern. “The North American electrical grid is still down, alternative energy sources are vanishing left and right, more and more riots are breaking out every day the economy is offline[xxvi], the grid can’t be repaired without a spork-head screwdriver, and all the right-handed ones were sacrificed into a volcano a couple years ago by a sect of neo-cavemen.”
“Oh. I knew maybe a quarter of that,” the Celtic queen replied. “Charlie hasn’t really been very good at being Charlie lately.”
“You really thought you guys were the only ones doing this?”
Boudica IX shrugged. “Kinda, yeah.”
“We had a double apocalypse going for a few weeks there ...”
“Oh, right, with the thing and the other thing.”
“Shit’s getting downright nightmarish in some places.”
“Like when you dream you’re taking a midterm and everyone’s naked except for you? So you start taking off your clothes to fit in, only it turns out you’re on your period and also you’ve been sleepwalking the entire time and now you’re standing in a pretzel factory with your hoohah just hanging out? And then that turns out to be a dream on top of a dream and really you’re standing in a supermarket piling on pair after pair of discount old lady underpants?”
William H. Taft XLII shook his head. “Come on, let’s keep digging through this crap.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Love the One You’re With
After having a hand in the twenty-third end of the world, William H. Taft XLII chose to stay in the god-ravaged ruins of Las Vegas, rather than venture back to Secaucus with his verbally abusive friends Chester A. Arthur XVII and Queen Victoria XXX. This was partly because William H. Taft XLII knew how important Las Vegas was to the world and saw the sparkling promise of rebirth in its ashes, but mostly because he had saved the lives of several prostitutes and they were all very, very thankful.
With the help of his hobos – and a few other political clones – William H. Taft XLII got Las Vegas up and overindulging again in no t
ime. He was elected mayor, and then mayor-king shortly thereafter, declaring Las Vegas its own sovereign nation in light of the continued absence of a national government. He married three of the prostitutes he had saved, began a family, and they all lived happily ever after.
At least until everything went to hell in a handbasket woven out of colossal explosions and subsequent failures of infrastructure, that is.
“We didn’t even notice the grid failure at first, since Billy had the whole city-state running off hydroelectricity from the Hoover Dam,” explained Martin Van Buren XCIX. “But then someone went and blew up the dam and everything fell onto the sin-powered backup generators. We held out for a little while, working off the sin reserves the city had accumulated, but they got depleted quick, and then people started getting dehydrated and exhausted. We couldn’t transgress antiquated morals fast enough to meet demand. The generators were meant for maybe one casino at a time, never the whole city-state. That’s when Billy decided we had to get Montana back online.”
Martin Van Buren XCIX, still dressed in a tight white t-shirt and leather jacket like a greaser from the 1950s, was piloting the long-range cargo helicopter across the only occasionally wet Atlantic Ocean, the trivection cooling unit stowed safely in the rear hold. Chester A. Arthur XVII sat in the cockpit next to him, similarly attired, while Queen Victoria XXX sat behind them, staring out the windows of the passenger hold and drifting in and out of consciousness, depending on how much ennui the presidents’ conversation was assaulting her with.
“Why would someone blow up the dam?” Chester A. Arthur XVII pondered aloud. “With the grid down, you’d think everyone would want as many alternative power sources online and functioning as possible.”
“You’d think,” replied Martin Van Buren XCIX.
“I take it the damage was beyond repair?”
“If we thought we had a snowball’s chance at an ice fetishist’s convention, I sure as hell wouldn’t’ve flown my ass all the way to New London. The gremlins did a hell of a job on it. It’s almost like the dam was never there in the first place.”
“Gremlins?” asked the Frankensteined president. “In Las Vegas?”
“Dollars to dingoes, someone put them up to it. It doesn’t make sense for them to suddenly leave the Midwest, ignore the cryptid armistice, and then dismantle the entire dam for nothing but shits and giggles.”
“No, it doesn’t,” agreed Chester A. Arthur XVII, creasing his brow.
“We didn’t have time to look into it more thoroughly. As soon as the dam went down, Billy shifted priorities to getting the grid back online,” said Martin Van Buren XCIX. “What took you guys so long? This seems like something you should’ve been on top of.”
“The short version is, I was incapacitated and brain damaged.”
“That why you look like a jigsaw puzzle of human skin?”
“Pretty much.”
“Are you guys going to keep ignoring the fact that you fucked each other?” asked Queen Victoria XXX, leaning into the cockpit. “Even after Tyrone turned the cameras off?”
“Yes,” replied Chester A. Arthur XVII and Martin Van Buren XCIX in unison.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Don’t Stop Believin’
“Typhoid” Mary Mallon and Lizbeth “Lizzie” Borden arrived at the eastern edge of the continental electrical grid that was Montana, staring across the gleaming, endless skyline of defunct machinery before them. Rows and rows and rows and rows and rows and rows and rows and rows of neatly aligned and stacked transformers, each the size of a mid-sized automobile, glinted in the sunshine and patiently awaited the chance to be useful once again.
“My goodness,” said Lizbeth, “this is positively gargantuan.”
“Look at the sheer enormity of the place,” said Mary, snarling, “I do hope our friend did not leave out any other facts.”
“If he expects this entire grid to be inoperable we are going to be here for days.”
“I dare say a week or more, my dear Lizzie.”
“He had better have been correct about the scores of armed guards.”
Mary sighed with steely resolve. “There is only one way to tell.”
And with that, “Typhoid” Mary Mallon and Lizbeth “Lizzie” Borden, each possessing a brain dead giant sloth, gamboled into the outermost substation of the electrical grid and began fucking shit up.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
B.J. and the Bear
Bio-Evocative Technologist X1211MR, affectionately referred to as Bex by her friends, was leaning against the outer doorway of the primary control room of the North American electrical grid with her arms crossed, tapping her foot impatiently. She was five feet and eleven inches of steel, circuitry, and curves, with the whole of the world’s knowledge uploaded into her cybercortex and the personality of a regional weathergirl on her day off.
Bex was used to getting what she wanted.
The android had already repaired as much of the grid as she could, swapping out wires and motherboards in the control rooms and sending her gorilla sidekick back and forth across hundreds of miles installing new macro-transformers and ultra-voltage connectors. She had even gotten all of the substations operational, repairing the bus distributors with the synthetic isotonium she whipped up in the control room toilet. All that remained to fix were a few of the regulator units and the perpetual motion engine at the heart of the grid.
Unfortunately, her friends were taking their sweet-ass time bringing her the equipment she needed to do that.
Bex sighed – despite her lack of lungs – walking back into the control room and slumping into a nearby chair.
“They’ll be here soon, Bex,” said Tanner, the silverback gorilla sent to help the android scientist with manual labor. She sat in the chair on the opposite side of the control room, a tablet computer in her massive hands.
Tanner was smarter than most gorillas, sure, but she couldn’t tell you what she and Bex had been doing for the past few days. “Lift here and connect that” was about the extent of what she understood. On the plus side, the sitting around and waiting didn’t bother Tanner nearly as much as it did Bex. The gorilla had a poor sense of time, a fully-charged iPad, and a port of the original arcade version of Donkey Kong, though she admittedly never got far. She enjoyed purposely letting Mario get clobbered by barrels far too much.
“This is so boring,” said Bex, spinning the chair slowly.
“Stop thinking about it then,” replied Tanner.
“Stop thinking about it? Stop thinking about it?! Do you have any idea how impossible that is for me? I was built to think! That’s all I do!”
“Oh, Jesus, here we go,” mumbled Tanner, returning to her game.
“Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and you want me to stop thinking and calm down? Stop thinking and calm down! Do you have any idea what we’re doing? What the ramifications are? This is huge! We’re –”
The proximity sensor alarms – hooked up to a diesel generator and brought online earlier by Bex – chose that moment to start going apeshit, no offense to Tanner.
“I told you to calm down,” said Tanner smugly.
“You don’t know that’s them,” said Bex.
The gorilla shook her head in exasperation.
The robot got up from her chair and walked to the doorway. She saw, not fifty feet away, a large semitrailer idling in the parking lot, a smallish Asian man climbing down from its cab and falling to the ground. He began rolling across the asphalt, gripping and pounding his legs, trying to get feeling back into them.
“It’s not them,” said Bex, leaning back into the control room and taking her turn at being smug.
“Damn it,” grumbled Tanner. “Now you’ve got something else you’re always right about.” The gorilla powered down her iPad and joined Bex at the door. A large blonde man had joined the Asian man at the rear of the truck. Neither one had looked toward the control room yet.
“Did Billy outsource something?” asked t
he silverback.
“No.”
“Then who are they?”
“Strangers,” replied the robot, narrowing her ophthalmic shading masks.
“Should we be worried?”
“I’m always worried.”
The gorilla rolled her eyes and hopped out of the doorway.
“I’m gonna go talk to them.”
***
Thor Odinson, hefting an industrial macro-transformer over his head, turned and saw a gorilla in a sundress approaching him.
“Hey, who are you guys?” inquired the gorilla.
“I’m not supposed to divulge our identity to strangers,” said Thor slowly, squinting and thinking hard about what Charlie had once told him. “Although I don’t know what the rule is for monkeys.”
“I’m not a monkey.”
“I’m Dr. Lee Arahami,” said Dr. Lee Arahami, outstretching his hand, “and this is Thor.”
“Tanner,” said Tanner, shaking the doctor’s hand. “What are you guys doing here?”
“Fixing the electrical grid,” said Thor. “We heard you poured Sunkist into your computer. Or something.”
“That’s not what happened and we’re not officially associated with the electrical grid,” said a sexy silver robot, appearing behind Tanner. “We were sent by William H. Taft XLII on our own independent repair mission. Do you have a trivection cooling unit in there? Or a spork-head screwdriver?”
“This is Bex,” said Tanner.
“No,” said Dr. Arahami, shaking his head. “We’re not in possession of either of those at the moment. Our colleagues are out retrieving them.”
“Then you can go ahead and put the transformer down,” replied Bex, pointing her chin toward Thor. “We’ve already repaired as much as can be repaired without the cooling unit or the specialty screwdriver.”
“OK.” The thunder god tossed the industrial machinery to the cracked pavement on the far side of the truck.
