by Eirik Gumeny
Gingerly, Queen Victoria XXX rested an arm across her bare and bruised abdomen. “I am in tremendous pain, Charlie.”
“And I’m not?” countered the non-plush cloned president.
“I’ve got more,” said Jesus.
“Wha’s going on?” asked Thor, shaking his head and looking up from his sneakers.
“Holy shit,” boomed a voice. “Are you guys for real?”
“What was that?”
“Who said that?”
The group spun around, turning their heads back and forth, looking all over the empty expanse of dried-up grass and scrub brush and rocks for the mysterious voice. Queen Victoria XXX looked straight up. Jesus looked behind a prickly pear cactus. William H. Taft XLII placed Chester A. Arthur XVII on the ground, then they both began twirling like dogs trying to smell their own farts. Thor crawled down onto the dirt and, dragging his cheek over a number of burr-bearing growths, checked underneath the camper.
“You guys did hear that, right?” he asked, lifting up his goathead-covered face. “I didn’t jush hallucinate someone kind-of insulting us?”
“No,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, “we heard it. Thought that was obvious.”
“Are you on something else you’re not sharing?” asked the queen.
“Only the weed,” answered the thunder god. “And the alcohol.”
“I’s really good weed, though,” clarified Jesus.
“I can’t believe we let you guys drive,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“We drove somewhere?”
“Jesus Christ,” exclaimed the mystery voice.
“Yes?” replied Jesus Christ, spinning around like a slowing dreidel.
“Found it,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, raising an adorable arm. Everyone turned to where the stuffed moose was pointing.
Just in front of the group was a shining, white mechanical exoskeleton, ten-stories of post-space-age circuitry and highly-polished nano-diamond thermoplastic polymer, blocking out the sky. The robot suit stood like a hulking rock giant, nearly as broad as it was tall, with wide-set, stubby legs, an obtuse triangle of a torso, and rounded shoulders looming well above its head. All of the suit’s angles were clean and curved, with dense ethylene rubber covering the exposed joints. Somewhere near the upper middle of the suit, in the squared head compartment, hidden behind bulletproof glass, inside a jar of cloudy preservation fluid, the group could just make out the bespectacled visage of Walt Sidney.
“How did we not see that?” asked Queen Victoria XXX in awe.
“Cloaking device,” explained Walt Sidney.
“OK, yeah, that’d do it.”
“You know, all things considered,” said William H. Taft XLII, staring up and up some more at the enormous mech-suit, “this isn’t so bad.”
“I know, right?” said Thor. “You guys made it sound like he ... had an ... army ... or some ...”
At that moment, three thousand heavily-armed special ops dragoons and Louseketeers in full riot gear were fanning out from behind the Sidneytron 5000™, taking up the rest of the horizon on either side. At the forefront of the gathered ground forces were Elizabeth Báthory, Ukko Jumala, and Sidney’s special security team of Attila the Hun CXI, Genghis Khan XII, “Bloody” Mary LXX, Isabella I LII, and the former demons of the actual Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Mary I of England, and Isabella I of Spain. Clearly-experimented-upon werewolves being dragged by chains could be seen lumbering through the ranks, snarling and shoving stormtroopers to the side. Several dozen blood-red imps – like fat babies with pointed ears and ineffectual wings – squeezed their way past armored calves and stood before the army. In the distance, overcrowded cages full of feral zombies were being wheeled forward.
“OK, this is more bad,” corrected the president.
“Ukko,” growled Thor, shoving his way past his friends to the front of the pack. He grabbed Mjolnir from his hip, only to discover he had left his hammer in the camper, and, instead, pointed an empty hand at the other god of storms. “You fucking Finnish copycat!”
“You don’t have a monopoly on thunder-godding!” shouted the beefy, bearded Finnish deity.
“Oh, right! And the hammer thing is just a coincidence?!”
“Lots of people have hammers!” he shouted, hefting Ukonvasara, his enchanted stone mallet, into the air. Lightning flashed in the distance.
“Name six!”
“Well, there’s you and me and carpenters, and Kathy Bates in Misery, and Ben Carson –”
“Who the fuck is Ben Carson?!”
Ignoring Thor and Ukko’s ongoing verbal pissing contest, William H. Taft XLII, backing up slowly toward his ATV, said, mostly to himself: “Well, it’s not like it can get any ... any ...”
An enormous dragon-squid stomped into view from nowhere and everywhere all at once, approaching Walt Sidney from what seemed like a great distance away but never changing size as it neared. The creature roared, something audible and physical and theoretical all at the same time. Bladders emptied involuntarily.
“God damn it, Billy,” the clone muttered.
“‘scuse me,” said Cthulhu, shaking his head, “the dust is getting caught in my throat or something.” Then: “All the cars are parked, Walt.” The Elder God nodded toward a field of shining vehicles a safe interval behind the militant horde. “You do know there are, like, I don’t know, a million better uses of my time, though, right?”
“Not now, C,” grumbled the frozen head in the giant robot suit, eyes locked on Thor and Jesus and the clones, trying to keep up his intimidating stare.
“For the love of Sonya Blade, boss, it’s Cthulhu! Cthulhu!”
“This is not the time for this,” snarled Walt Sidney. “Do you see what we’ve got going on here?” The frozen head swiveled to look at the squid-dragon while the mechanical suit gestured toward the amassed army and the cowering clonefolk. “I am trying to destroy my enemies. And, besides, we’ve been over this: no one from this plane of reality could ever possibly –”
“Hey, Cthulhu,” Queen Victoria XXX shouted, with perfect pronunciation, waving from where she was standing.
“Oh, hey, Vicky,” replied the Elder God, squinting and looking down at the cloned monarch. “How, uh, how’s it going?”
“Pretty good,” she replied with a shrug, “other than your boss trying to murder us all into oblivion.”
“Yeah, he does that sometimes.”
“You guys know each other?” asked William H. Taft XLII.
“We were sleeping together for a while,” explained Queen Victoria XXX.
“What? When?” asked Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“And ... how?” asked the other cloned president.
“You said you’d never bone a god!” shouted a visibly hurt Thor, turning from where he was arguing with the former Finnish deity.
“I said I’d never bone a thunder god.”
“What the hell do you have against thunder gods?” shouted Ukko.
“Stay the fuck out of this, Ukko!” answered the Norseman.
“Oh, what? Now you have a monopoly on conversations?!”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED
Here Comes My Girl
“Billy,” Chester A. Arthur XVII stage-whispered, waving over William H. Taft XLII. The man-mountain knelt down next to the animatronic moose and leaned in conspiratorially.
“I know it may not seem like it,” the plush toy explained, “but I think we have the tactical advantage here. If Sidney’s been sitting on this beep boop searching thesaurus boop exterior protective or supporting structure instead of actually using it, there’s a more than good chance that his strategies are subpar compared to ours. He’s a businessman, after all, right? Not a soldier. If that beep boop searching thesaurus boop robot-thing was actually functional –”
“Well, it’s not exactly inconspicuous now, is it?” boomed the frozen head of Walt Sidney.
“What?”
“You, uh ... you heard that then?” asked William H. Taft
XLII, turning and craning his neck upward.
“He can hear everything,” replied a nearby Louseketeer, his voice dripping with regret and amazement and at least one demotion.
“Yes, I can. Larry.” Then: “The cost to run this suit, Mr. Taft,” the jarred CEO continued, “even for a short while, is simply astronomical. Even by my standards. And do you have any idea how long it takes to assemble this thing?” He had the giant, trillion-dollar suit perform an extravagant arm wave to show off the exoskeleton’s fluid ranges of motion. “We arrived two solid hours before you did, just to set up the Sidneytron 5000™. I lost three men assembling the left leg alone.”
The cloned presidents looked at Sidney’s army – most were standing around, waiting; some were sitting, some, turning their stun batons on and off, a few were lifting up their helmets and picking their noses. The Genghis Khans were playing living mirror. They were, to a Louseketeer, clearly not in a rush.
The cloned presidents looked at one another, then back to Walt Sidney.
“OK, sure,” said William H. Taft XLII, “but –”
“Trust me, gentlemen. If you’re going to go through the trouble of hauling the Sidneytron 5000™ a thousand miles across swamps and fields and ravaged infrastructures then you are damn well going to make it worth the while.”
“So ... why aren’t you doing that?”
“Well, it does take the suit a while to power up,” said the CEO.
“You’re stalling,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, having something like an ephiphany.
A number of dim red lights on the right forearm of the exoskeleton flicked to green.
“I was,” spat the frozen head of Walt Sidney.
He raised the robot’s arm. A series of plates ejected and unfolded from the wrist, sliding forward and forming a seamless, massive cannon around the hand. The mouth of the cannon glowed red, then orange, then white, then, with a deafening blast, fired a laser as wide as Jesus’s camper directly into Jesus’s camper, turning the camper into a pile of glowing cinder collecting in the bottom of a small crater.
“What the –” said Jesus Christ, roused from his third or fourth sudden-onset stupor that hour. “That was my house, you pendulous –”
A dozen smaller lasers pew-pewed from the robot’s arched shoulders; several compartments, along what could best be termed the exoskeleton’s collarbones, slid open, raining a plethora of spiked grenades across the ground. Bare patches of dirt and soil exploded everywhere, generally just inches behind someone’s fleeing feet.
That apparently being the cue they were all waiting for, Walt Sidney’s armed forces pulled their fingers from their orifices, corrected their armor, and, with a scream, as one – the werewolves unshackled, the zombies uncaged, the genocidal leaders unhinged – began storming forward. Everyone on the receiving end, meanwhile, muttered a series of obscenities and started scrambling and running and diving for cover.
The moose-ified Chester A. Arthur XVII, not yet used to his tiny, stuffed-animal legs, quickly found himself caught up in the dozens upon dozens of stormtroopers rushing past; he tripped and stumbled and fell directly onto a cactus. Struggling to pull himself free, he rolled onto his back and suddenly found a spiked grenade – like a tiny souvenir baseball bat with nails hammered through it – stabbing into his chest.
“Not again ...”
Chester A. Arthur XVII exploded.
“Motherfucker,” grumbled Queen Victoria XXX, shoving Louseketeers to the side and watching as the severed head of her animatronic boyfriend sailed through the air.
“It’s OK, Vicky,” he said, “I’m still –”
Another laser ripped through the air and obliterated what was left of Chester A. Arthur XVII. Queen Victoria XXX looked quickly behind her, toward the cooler strapped to the back of one of the ATVs. Then she pulled her phone from the pocket of her duster and set a timer for thirty minutes.
Fighting through the neverending surge of Louseketeers and dragoons, pushing and punching and seemingly not getting any closer, the cloned monarch jostled her way forward toward where the sizzling, steaming chunks of her boyfriend were falling into the dirt and getting stepped on. People screamed and shouted all around her, things exploded, but the replicated royal’s attention was laser-focused on the stuffed moose remains. She blocked an electric stun baton with her arm, then stole it, then started smacking dragoons around with it. She kicked an imp in its tiny testicles, moving ever forward. Stepping into a throng of stormtroopers and finding several assault rifles pointed at her, she quickly grabbed a passing dragoon, used him as a shield until he turned into an unappealing block of Swiss cheese, and then shoved the corpse at the gunmen, rushing past them while they reloaded.
That’s about when she was stabbed through the gut by a longsword.
Queen Victoria XXX staggered backward, her hands clutching feebly at the blade. She looked up with surprise.
Elizabeth Báthory was driving her sword deeper into the make-believe monarch. The Attila the Huns, the Genghis Khans, and the four other queens, all of them smiling cruelly, gathered behind the late Hungarian countess, a variety of medieval weapons drawn. The nearby dragoons and Louseketeers stopped, looked at one another, and then cleared the hell away.
“I don’t think so, lady,” said the former demon, twisting the sword.
“No, you don’t think, do you?” Queen Victoria XXX punched the executive-level serial killer in the face. Elizabeth Báthory keeled backward, blood spurting from her nose, releasing her hold on the sword. The cloned monarch pulled the blade from her abdomen.
“I don’t ... have time for this!” she shouted.
The clone swung the bloodied blade with both hands, trying to take off the demon’s head. Elizabeth Báthory ducked sideways, the sword slicing through her auburn hair. Then, standing again, she pulled a second sword from a sheath on her back.
The queen sighed. “Of course you had another fucking –”
The Hungarian countess swung wildly at Queen Victoria XXX, hefting the sword from one side of her body to the other. The queen dodged, leaning backwards; the blade continued on its path, spinning Báthory around and accidentally slicing open “Bloody” Mary I’s jugular vein. Swearing, blood spurting, Mary I put a hand to her neck and dropped to her knees. Mary I LXX scrambled to her original’s side.
Queen Victoria XXX raised an eyebrow. Elizabeth Báthory looked at the Marys, then at the queen with the sword, and then, with a roar, began swinging again. The cloned queen blocked and parried each attack easily, pushing forward with each deflection, driving the demon backwards, step-by-step. Enraged, the Hungarian woman brought her sword down over her head with both hands. Queen Victoria XXX caught the blade against her hilt. The weapons locked against one another, the clone kicked a boot into Báthory’s midsection.
The former demon, gasping for air, stumbled backward – just as Genghis Khan XII rushed forward, screaming and swinging a sickle. Queen Victoria XXX made a face and then stepped to the side, pulling a small, fixed-blade hunting knife from her duster and stabbing it deep into the back of the clone’s skull as he ran past. Then, for good measure, the dark-haired double pulled another knife and threw it into the face of the original Genghis Khan, burying it between his eyes. The Mongolian emperor fell dead to the ground, toppling like a squat tree.
Isabella I, already running toward the copied queen with a warhammer over her shoulder, was not prepared for the felling of a Khan, and, almost certainly, not for it to occur directly in front of her. Despite her best efforts, the former monarch tripped over the stout and bearded corpse. Unable to regain her footing, and the top-heavy hammer throwing off her balance, the Spanish demon fell face-first into the dirt; she slid forward until she was resting at the feet of Queen Victoria XXX.
Without even looking down, the raven-haired clone stepped on the former Queen of Spain’s neck until she heard a crunch and a pop. Then, practiced and easy, almost as if she’d done this kind of thing before, she picked up the woman�
��s warhammer.
Hefting the enormous cudgel over her shoulder and holding the longsword in her other hand, Queen Victoria XXX, eyes dark as a storm on an endless night, stared at her remaining adversaries. Her long jacket fluttered behind her. Her Misfits t-shirt, a large white skull, was stained red, saturated to the point of dripping. She spit a mouthful of blood to the ground.
“We doing this or what?” she asked, her teeth stained red.
Isabella I LII, Attila the Hun CXI, and the original, demonized version of Attila the Hun were standing opposite the clone, unconsciously huddling closer together. The trio looked to one another; then to the bodies of the Genghis Khans; then to the Queen Marys, the blonde-haired monarchs covered in blood and desperately trying to shove at least some of it back into the original queen’s neck; then to Elizabeth Báthory, still struggling to get back on her feet; and then, finally, back to Queen Victoria XXX.
“You know what?” said the actual Attila, scrunching up his face, “I’m out.” He tossed his katars to the ground. “The back half of my fee is not worth this kind of trouble.”
“You pussy,” spat the other Attila, shouting over Isabella I LII.
“Eat me, Xerox,” the first Hun replied, also shouting over the queen.
“What was that?” He pushed closer.
“You heard me.” He also pushed closer.
“Guys,” grumbled Isabella I LII, wriggling out from between the two men.
The cloned Attila grabbed the demon by his furry lapels. “You really think I’m going to let you –”
But the real king of the Huns headbutted his unlicensed copy before he could finish, knocking out a few teeth and dropping the clone into the dirt. Then, after shooting the man a withering scowl and raising his fist just to make the facsimile flinch, Attila the Hun turned and began shoving and pushing past the onlooking crowds of dragoons and Louseketeers. Then he paused, turning this way and that.
“Where the hell’s my car?” he muttered.
As the warlord walked away once again, Queen Victoria XXX could see the cannon hand of the Sidneytron 5000™ glowing. There was another deafening boom, and then the ATVs – and the cooler – exploded into microscopic confetti.
