by Eirik Gumeny
Towering over the waitress, the mountain of a man, a massive shadow blocking out the moon, pulled his arm back to strike again. The cyborg, inching backward along the ground, fired a laser from her eye, straight through the clone’s shoulder. The president clobbered her anyway, knocking loose several circuits. And a couple teeth.
To the mayor-king’s right, Catrina had staggered back to her feet, hauling the mighty hammer beside her. She and William H. Taft XLII stood there, hunched, heaving, backlit by the night sky, hate radiating out of them like summer off the hood of a car.
Catrina hefted Mjolnir into the air and, together, the cloned president and the human girl beat the cybernetic woman into a literal pulp. When they were done – and it took a good damn while – the waitress looked like a person Slurpee spilled across the lawn.
“Holy shit, you guys,” said Queen Victoria XXX, her eyebrows reaching for the sky.
“I’m ... I’m feeling a little sick,” seconded the devil, swallowing back bile.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Scenes From an Italian Restaurant
Elizabeth Báthory pulled her Hummer into the empty interstate rest stop and threw the gearshift into Park. Through the windshield, she could see Vulcan kneeling next to the ice machine, attempting to construct a vehicle out of ancient vending machine parts and crap he found in the garbage.
“Sic ‘im, boy,” said the erstwhile Hungarian countess.
Throwing open the passenger door, Set, the red-furred dog-man and former Egyptian God of Chaos, leapt from the vehicle with abandon and began loping on all fours across the cracked parking lot toward the fallen Roman.
Vulcan, seeing the snarling, angry deity approaching him, said: “Hey, man, think you could give me a jump?”
Set tore the old man’s head off.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
Hell Hath the Fury
“Now ...” began Catrina, still holding Mjolnir and pointing it back and forth between Satan and Loki. She and the weapon were both dripping with pinkish globs of waitress. “... which one of you assholes fucked with the ghost spectrum?”
“Uh ... yo,” replied the devil, timidly raising a finger into the air.
“Why are you answering that?” hissed Persephone.
“Why would you do that?!” shouted Catrina. “Why would you ruin my one chance of seeing Ali again?”
“Because I didn’t know anything about him? I’m only after the middle-aged robot and the chipmunk. When I get revenge, I get motherfucking revenge. I didn’t want the two guys who ruined my life pulling any shenanigans from the hereafter.”
“He’s a squirrel,” said Mark.
“What?”
“You called Timmy a chipmunk. He’s a squirrel.”
“OK, sure. That’s the point you should be arguing here.” Satan shook his head. “Look. I have no grievance with the lightning god and the cloned presidents-slash-trained assassins. And the girl with the magic hammer that just liquefied a cyborg. You guys seem like more trouble than you’re worth. Let me just kill ... It’s Timmy, right? And you, guy, I don’t remember your name, so I can get my job back at the Walt Sidney Company, and Loki can get his stupid, scrawny, meddling ass fired. It’s win-win-win,” he explained. “Well, except for Loki, and the Cylon and the capybara.”
“Squirrel,” said Timmy.
“It’s like your purposely being a Belgium about it,” added Queen Victoria XXX.
“Language, lady,” lilted Loki.
“You really think we’re not going to get involved with your trying to murder our friends?” asked Chester A. Arthur XVII, his bloodied bandages speaking volumes.
“Maybe?” said Persephone, shrugging her shoulders slightly.
“We don’t know your situation,” explained the devil. “Maybe you guys don’t get along that well or someone slept with someone else’s someone and there’s still issues.”
“Man, I wish,” muttered Thor.
The tiny Filipina woman who had been shaking slightly for the last few moments was once more overcome with righteous fury. Her knuckles were white around the hammer. Thunder rumbled overhead.
“She shouldn’t be able to do that,” said Thor, looking up.
“Oh, shit,” said Persephone.
Catrina ran screaming toward the devil, Mjolnir hefted over her head. Before he had a chance to react, the woman brought the hammer down on Satan, cracking his skull and sending the fallen angel’s body sprawling to the ground. She hit him again, and again, and then, somehow, struck the devil with a tremendous bolt of lightning. The devil’s body spasmed from the strength of the electrical discharge, twitching violently on the grass, as Catrina stepped backward, catching herself by surprise.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Was that me?”
“Verily,” replied Thor, knitting his brow. “How do you keep doing that?”
“I don’t know, dude. It’s your hammer.”
Persephone, standing beside the bleeding former demon, rage and grief churning beneath her face, began to glow slightly, her heavy coat and dark hair fluttering, the grass surrounding her withering and dying. Catrina stumbled quickly backward, barely a step ahead of the greying vegetation.
“If that’s how you want to do this,” said the goddess coldly, raising her hand toward the woman with the hammer. Catrina dropped Mjolnir and fell to her hands and knees, suddenly struggling for air.
“Not a fucking chance, lady,” thought Timmy the super-squirrel, grabbing the chestnut-haired woman with his mind, pinning her arms, and lifting her several feet into the air.
“Catrina!” shouted Mark, running across the lawn to help her.
Loki, knowing a good distraction when he saw one, turned on his heel and started slowly back down the walkway, whistling quietly, his hands behind his back, away from the mansion and the gasping Greek goddess.
Thor bounded forward and grabbed the trickster god by the back of his suit and shirt.
“Yeah, no,” he said, yanking his brother backward. “We’ve got way too much shit we need to rectalize and –”
“Rectify?”
“That cowboy show?”
“That’s Justified.”
“What’s justified?”
“The show, with the guy ...”
“Why are you talking about TV?”
“I’m correcting your vocabulary.”
“Which is stupid and obnoxious and one more thing we need to ratify.”
“Rectify. The word is rectify, you brain-damaged cow sodomizer!”
“That was one time, man! And it wasn’t even a real cow, it was Sif in a costume.”
“Until I turned her into a real cow.”
“Yeah, you did,” sneered Thor, grabbing Loki by his lapels and dragging him closer, “while we were mid-doing it.”
“You’re the one who didn’t stop.”
“I didn’t know!”
“She mooed, Thor.”
“I thought she was just really into the costume!”
“You are remarkably stupid.”
“This is exactly what I’m talking about: We’ve got centuries of beef that needs to be wrangled, and not just the stealing my hammer part, although I am super cheesed about that. I’m not about to let you hoof it on out of here without dealing with it. Not this time.”
“Are you hungry or something?”
“Well, you started talking about cows ...”
“Hey, look behind you.”
“Really? That’s your best move?”
“No, I’m actually very serious.”
Thor looked at his brother, his face inches from his own, and watched Loki’s eyes widen in terror. He felt the trickster god’s skinny frame start to shake slightly.
“This is a weird time to start getting scared, dude.” A warmth began to seep into his crotchular area. “For the love of cheeseburgers ...”
As Thor released his grip on his brother and took a step back, he caught something unexpected out of the corner of this eye.
&nb
sp; Satan, recently deceased, appeared to be alive after all. And standing. And super pissed off. As Thor watched, the bloody, bespoke devil doubled in height, tearing through his fancy clothes and turning into a twelve-foot-tall monstrosity with pointed black teeth and leathery wings, his skin the color of strawberry Twizzlers. His horns grew and twisted, like a particularly metal ram. His eyes were pitch.
“Boo,” said the devil, his voice cavernous and dark.
“That’s not good,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“Shit,” echoed William H. Taft XLII.
“I guess we should probably do something now,” added Queen Victoria XXX, getting up from the steps on which she had been sitting.
“Heimdall’s herniated discs,” muttered Thor. Then he called down an enormous bolt of lightning, straight through the devil’s skull.
Satan knit his brow and casually raised a hand. Thor went sailing backwards into a bush of man-eating roses on the far edge of the lawn. The roses immediately began eating the man.
“Why do you even have these?” shouted the Norseman, punching flowers in the teeth.
“For security,” shouted William H. Taft XLII in reply. “Sorry!”
Satan looked to his right and saw Persephone still struggling against the squirrel’s psychic embrace. He squinted his eyes and stared at Timmy. Timmy squinted his eyes and stared back.
Then Persephone exploded.
“Lando crappin’ Calrissian,” grumbled Queen Victoria XXX, turning her head as bits of Greek goddess rained down over her.
Timmy the super-squirrel attacked the devil with the full power of his chemically-experimented-on-brain, lifting and twisting and pulling and pushing, but all he managed to do was tear off one of the devil’s arms.
The archfiend did not look impressed.
“That wasn’t very nice, hamster,” grumbled the devil.
“I. Am. A. God. Damned. Squirrel!”
Staring at the psychokinetic rodent – and having only newly appropriated his own arsenal of superpowers – the devil could only then, in that very moment, fully appreciate how terribly shitty his life had been without them. The agony of going from everything to nothing, to depending on being a subordinate to Walt Sidney for even a taste of his former glory.
“Yes,” snarled Satan, “yes, you are.”
The Prince of Darkness snapped the fingers on his severed arm. Timmy the super-squirrel was just a normal squirrel again.
“Timmy?” asked Mark, kneeling over Catrina as she lay on the steps, slowly de-greying, but still breathing shallowly.
The little animal flitted his head back and forth, then scampered up the steps past Mark and Catrina and into the mansion, the hand-towel cape falling from his shoulders.
“You uncircumcised dick!” shouted Mark, storming from the girl’s side, grabbing a flail mace from the corpse of something unidentifiable at his feet, and charging headlong at the demon.
Satan snapped his fingers again and suddenly Mark Hughes, the cybernetic war veteran and bed-and-breakfast owner, was also just a normal squirrel. The creature ran around in a few circles and then also scampered away. The devil looked at the politicians, the way a sociopathic tiger looks at an underfed tourist lost on a safari.
“Shit,” said Queen Victoria XXX wearily.
“Hey, Thor,” called William H. Taft XLII, “buddy ...”
“I’m working on it,” replied the thunder god, nearly out of the rose bushes, but still with some teeth in his leg. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of busy with these fucking plants ...”
“I said I was sorry!”
Chester A. Arthur XVII took a deep breath and exhaled, then stepped forward from his contemporaries. “Satan,” he began, pulling loose the bandages around his mouth, “Mr. Scratch – sir – if I may?”
“Knock yourself out.” The devil shrugged.
“Given this recent turn of events,” orated the mangled president, straightening his bathrobe like it was a suit, and gesticulating in a way meant to indicate both the horns and the squirrels, “I think it’s safe to assume that your value as an employee to Walt Sidney has risen dramatically in these last few minutes. I’m sure you and your former colleague, Loki, could work out some kind of arrangement wherein you are brought back into the Walt Sidney Corporation fold with full benefits and the like, wouldn’t you agree?” He motioned toward the mischief god.
“I am one hundred percent on board with that,” said Loki, still shaking in his urine-soaked pants.
“And as that was your primary goal, along with the squirrelification of my friends, I see no reason why –”
“Fuck Walt Sidney,” snarled the devil.
Jets of hellfire burst through the ground. A pair burst on either side of Loki, forcing him to find new sources of liquid to excrete. Chester A. Arthur XVII took a column of supernatural flame directly in the face – and chest and groin and inner thighs. He screamed in agony and collapsed to the ground.
“You fucking ... prick,” murmured the president, trying to stand, his torso and face bubbling or altogether seared away, muscles and bone exposed. Again. Parts of his skull glinted in the moonlight. “That was brand new skin.”
Satan hit him with another jet of hellfire. Internal organs became visible.
“We weren’t even ... going to do anything with the WANG/Sidney information,” he sputtered, struggling again to his feet. “We were ... willing to just let things –”
The cloned politician was interrupted by another blast of hellfire.
“This ... was ... exactly ... why I ... didn’t ... want to get ... involved ...” He collapsed fully into the scorched earth.
This time Chester A. Arthur XVII didn’t get up.
Queen Victoria XXX, having watched her boyfriend die several times before, wasn’t terribly worried or even all that upset by this current turn of events. Then she remembered that all the scientists of Las Máquinas were dead. Then she got angry. Then she saw Catrina, nearly her own age again, stumbling to retrieve Mjolnir, and suddenly sympathized with her loss, which made her angrier. Then the queen realized she had been acting like kind of a tool to her friend and got even angrier. Then she realized how angry she was and figured, fuck it, and leaned into an absolutely apoplectic fury.
The queen’s fists were balled so tight that her nails cut into her skin. Her teeth were grit so hard that a few were beginning to crack. William H. Taft XLII grabbed the cloned monarch by the waist, throwing his substantial weight backward and struggling to keep her from stomping forward to her own death.
Wrestling against the mayor-king, Queen Victoria XXX stared at the devil with a wildness that almost intimidated him.
“Let’s make this fun,” roared the devil in response.
“No,” said Thor, finally pulling himself free from the rose bushes. “Let’s not. Let’s just fucking fight.” An interstate map of lightning tore through the night, merging and bottlenecking straight into the boogeyman. Satan ignored it.
Across the yard, the piles of dead demons and spirits began to twitch and reassemble and rise.
“Benedict Cumberbatch,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “You can raise the dead?!”
As if in reply, a gaggle of zombie mobsters and their victims began crawling out from under the grass, a hundred years of top soil and sewage sliding down their rotting – yet stylishly dressed – frames.
“Seriously, Billy?” asked Catrina, slightly woozy but nonetheless hefting the enchanted hammer onto her shoulder.
“I didn’t know they were there,” he replied with a shrug.
“Yes, you did.”
“Yeah ...” The fat man sighed. “It’s Las Vegas. Those assholes are buried literally everywhere.”
“This is bullshit,” grumbled Thor, watching as everything he had worked so hard to murder just hours before reassembled in front of him.
The massive devil shrugged, a shit-eating grin on his gnarled face.
“I hate you fucking sandbagger gods,” said the Nor
seman.
“Technically, he’s not a god,” offered Loki, raising a finger. Thor, stomping past, immediately punched him across his stupid mouth.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
The Hurt Locker
Catherine the Great LXIX was hunkered down beside the rear left tire of the rented SUV, finessing what passed for a spare tire back onto the studs.
“Hand me the lug nuts,” she said to Artemis, the former Greek goddess, one hand out and open, the other holding the wheel steady.
“Are those the things in the dish or the dish itself?”
“Look, I get that you don’t know much about cars, but come on.”
“Cut me some slack, Cathy,” said the goddess, “I am a lot older than I look. Certainly older than this automobile fad.”
“What? This isn’t – It’s not a car thing, Artemis. That’s just basic life right there.”
“Knowing the difference between nuts and ... the other thing?”
“Yes!” replied the Russian replicant. “‘Nuts and bolts’ is literally a term people use every day!”
“I wouldn’t say every day,” countered a voice.
Without a second thought – or even a first one, really – Artemis grabbed the bow slung across her chest, wheeled around, and fired three arrows directly at the sound. The woman who made the sound – tiny, wearing a red trench coat and tilted fedora, and with three arrows sailing straight for her face – did not seem concerned. And for good reason. The arrowheads lodged themselves deeply into the chest of a large, furry man-dog in a leather thong and not much else, who stepped in front of the woman.
“Damn, girl,” said Catherine the Great LXIX.
Set, the furry former Egyptian god, looked down, confused and unimpressed. He grabbed the arrows and snapped the shafts, leaving the pointed heads fixed in his chest. Elizabeth Báthory stepped out from behind him, drawing two axes from within her trench coat and spinning one in each hand.
“That was a bit of an overreaction, don’t you think?” said the Hungarian serial murderer. “I mean, ‘nuts and bolts’ is common, sure, but every day? Come on. I’m not wrong here.”
