by Eirik Gumeny
“No!” shouted the queen. “You asshole!”
“What’s wrong?” asked Queen Isabella I LII, walking over to the other clone, genuinely confused. “Was your iPod in there or something?”
The thirtieth clone of the last Hanoverian English queen, dropping her longsword, grabbed the fifty-second copy of the genocide-endorsing Spanish queen by her sandy hair and pulled her closer.
“ow ow ow”
“Listen,” hissed Queen Victoria XXX, “I’m running out of time. A detachment this big, you’ve got to have supplies or something, right? Or at least, like, a craft services tent with water and granola bars?”
“Yeah, there’s –” But the queen was interrupted by a snarling, spitting Attila the Hun CXI running towards them with an enormous double-bladed battle axe in his tiny, furious hands.
“For the love of Raiden,” mumbled Queen Victoria XXX, releasing her hair-hold. “Can you ...” She waved her hand, motioning for the other queen to step to the side.
Queen Isabella I LII took a few steps to her left.
“Thank you.”
Then, putting her full weight and all of her considerable rage into it, Queen Victoria XXX swung the massive warhammer into the entire side of Attila the Hun CXI’s head, crushing his skull like a cracker and sending his corpse spinning back into the dirt.
“So,” began the first cloned queen, shouldering the hammer, “about those coolers?”
“Right, they’re –” But Queen Isabella I LII was interrupted again, this time by a laser through her brain, as well as, obviously, the associated skull and muscle and skin. For a horrifying moment, the clone staggered and twitched, arms flailing, and then, a smoking disaster where her head should have been, the clone’s body, finally, fell to the ground.
Queen Victoria XXX, a fine spray of liquified Spanish queen on her face, turned, slowly, toward the Sidneytron 5000™. “What is wrong with you?” she shouted.
“Why is no one attacking her?” boomed Walt Sidney. “There are at least three battalions of expendable muscle here. What am I paying you people for? Beth? Elizabeth? Where the hell are you?”
“Sorry. On it, boss,” said Elizabeth Báthory, hunched and holding a hand to her ribs. She was standing a few hundred feet to the left of the Sidneytron. More importantly, she was tossing an empty water bottle to the side.
“Where the hell did you get that?!” shouted Queen Victoria XXX. Dropping the warhammer, she began rushing toward the freshly-hydrated former demon – only to be grabbed around the ankles by Queen Elizabeth I LXX, the other clone lunging from where she’d been mourning the slow and agonized death of her genetic original.
Queen Victoria XXX fell face-first to the ground, then immediately spun onto her back. She tried to kick her feet free, but the frantic Elizabethan facsimile was clawing at her legs, pulling her closer, closer. Soon enough, she had her hands on the other queen’s duster, then her skirt and shirt, always pulling. Then Queen Elizabeth I LXX reeled back and punched the other monarch in the boob.
Queen Victoria XXX kicked her in the face.
“What the actual fuck, lady?” shouted the clone, hand on her chest, wincing and awkwardly crab-walking backward a few steps.
The Walt Sidney employee screamed incomprehensibly in reply, picking herself up and charging like a bull at Queen Victoria XXX.
“I’m not even the one that killed her!” she shouted, staggering to her feet. “You know that, right? I know you were there.”
Over her shoulder, Queen Victoria XXX saw lights flashing – another volley of lasers and grenades preparing to launch through the air. In front of her, Elizabeth I LXX was closing the distance between them. She’d have to time this perfectly.
Frothing and covered in blood, the Elizabethan queen dove at the Victorian one. Queen Victoria XXX twisted sideways, her duster sailing, and then the dark-haired clone kneed the blonde one in the throat, mid-tackle. Elizabeth I LXX staggered, fell to her hands and knees. Then, grabbing the double-over woman by her shoulders, Queen Victoria XXX threw herself backwards, rolling and heaving the other queen over her.
Elizabeth I LXX landed on her feet, as surprised as anyone. Then the seventieth clone of Shakespeare’s favorite monarch took a laser straight through her armpit, and then out the other side of her torso. Gravity did the rest, and the queen fell to the ground in two barely-connected pieces.
“This is why we were never friends,” said Queen Victoria XXX, wiping another layer of blood off her face as several grenades exploded around her. “You don’t punch another lady in the boobs.”
The dark-skinned clone turned around and was immediately kicked in the chest by Elizabeth Báthory.
“Who taught you people how to fight?!” she shouted, once more coddling her tits.
The queen took a few uncomfortable steps backward, before realizing there was, thanks to all the corpses dropping things and all the explosions moving those things around, a veritable armory littering the ground. She picked up a longsword, turned it in her hand. The clone was pretty sure this was the same one she’d had earlier.
“Huh.”
Looking past the blade, she found Elizabeth Báthory, her own sword drawn. Behind the Hungarian countess, her white riding blouse stained with sweat and defeat, her piled hair an unraveling mess, was a squad of black-clad special ops dragoons. Each one was carrying an officially licensed Lindsey Louse Merry Medieval Murd’rer Morningstar, fashioned from stainless steel, the spiky bits dipped in a variety of fatal poisons. Most of them also had handguns strapped to their waists, while two had flamethrowers hanging off their backs.
Queen Victoria XXX couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “You guys must really be scared of me.”
“I just want to be thorough,” replied Elizabeth Báthory, narrowing her eyes. “I have a performance review coming up.”
“Well –” The queen’s extremely loud alarm began beeping. She turned to look toward the brains of Chester A. Arthur XVII, then turned again, only to realize she no longer knew where they were.
And in that moment something inside of her broke.
“‘Well’ what?” taunted the Hungarian countess. “Run out of quippy things to –”
Queen Victoria XXX, crossing the distance betweent them in less time than it took a methed-up grasshopper to blink, had grabbed Elizabeth Báthory by the throat and lifted her a foot off the ground. Then, while actively choking her, while continunually crushing and collapsing the tiny woman’s trachea in her fingers, feeling the warmth of her blood dripping down her arm, the clone used the demon’s body to beat the entire squad of armored dragoons to a painful and messy death.
The replicated royal threw the former serial killer’s lumpy, disfigured body – or what was left of it, anyway – to the ground. As dust briefly billowed up around the mangled torso, the single attached arm, the clone thought she could see a few hunks of plush stuffing, of brain – of Chester A. Arthur XVII – scuffed up and filthy and useless.
Queen Victoria XXX fell to her knees.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ONE
You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can’t Tuna Fish
Cthulhu, standing silently beside the Sidneytron 5000™, watched with a dismayed look on his giant, tentacled face as an already-injured William H. Taft XLII, hiding behind a couple of medium-sized rocks and an upturned ATV, was fired upon by dragoon after dragoon after Louseketeer. As a clearly stoned Jesus Christ was being chased around, Benny Hill-style, by a horde of speed-walking, brain-starved zombies. As a mourning Queen Victoria XXX had a pot of beef stew dumped on her before being pounced upon by a scarred, two-headed, cybernetically-enhanced werewolf.
“No, this isn’t right,” the eldritch horror muttered. Then, louder, from everywhere at once, “Guys, Vicky, there’s a weakness in the –”
Cthulhu was interrupted by a laser the size of a camper in the general area of his face.
“Great, now I’m going to have to wait another fifteen minutes,” said Walt Sidney with a sigh,
looking forlornly at his smoking cannon hand.
“What the hell was that, boss?” shouted the Elder God.
“I’m not paying you to betray me, C.”
“It’s Cthulhu, you arrogant prick, and, you know what? You’re not paying me enough not to betray you.”
“The time to bring that up was before we got to the battlefield.”
“Fuck you. I quit. Eat my transdimensional poop, Walt.”
“You can’t qu–” began the head inside of the giant, mechanical exoskeleton, before getting sucker-punched across his bulletproofed face by an extradimensional colossus. The Sidneytron 5000™ toppled sideways, onto more than one hundred and eighty-two dragoons. Cthulhu stared down at the rest of the stormtroopers, driving at least half of them into a full-on, gibbering madness with his mere gaze.
The loss of over sixty percent of their handlers was more than enough of a distraction to break the non-human ranks. The werewolves turned on their captors. The imps started demonically humping every leg in sight, armored or otherwise. The feral zombies splintered apart, leaving Jesus be as they chowed down on a buffet of helpless Louseketeers and dragoons.
As chaos swiftly took over, a few of the shuffling dead began clawing and biting at the otherworldly toes of Cthulhu. The interdimensional god furrowed his lizardy brow and stomped down on them like cockroaches, causing a minor earthquake in the process and ruining card houses for hundreds of miles. Then the dragon-squid lifted his foot into the air and began shaking it.
“Ew,” he said, shrinking down to a more manageable size and trundling away, dragging his clawed foot against the ground.
“The weakness!” shouted William H. Taft XLII, holding his good hand on the head of an imp with a knife. Somewhere on his left, an explosion exploded all explosion-like and suddenly Queen Victoria XXX came rocketing through the air above him. The cloned president turned after her, but then, hearing the high-pitched whir of high-end servos, he turned back and watched hopelessly as the Sidneytron 5000™ began picking itself back up. Slumping his shoulders, the former mayor-king muttered, “But what about the weakness?”
“Give it up,” said a dead-eyed Queen Victoria XXX, slowly getting up from where she had landed. She shook her head and watched the titanic eldritch terror disappear into the distance. “He’s very temperamental,” she explained, dusting off her duster.
“Well, this still gives us a better chance, right?” asked Thor, rising from underneath a nearby pile of dead and maimed Louseketeers, corpses sliding off of him like Hi-C off a freshly waxed car.
“What were you doing under there?” asked the queen, emptying stew meat from her pockets.
“Hiding from Ukko,” explained the thunder god, stripping off his soiled hoodie and standing before her in a sweat-stained tank top. “He spent twenty minutes hitting me with a hammer, then things got all spinny so I fell down and pretended to be dead. Next thing I know there’s a bunch of bodies on top of me.”
“Was the spinning from the drinking or the hitting?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. Which, speaking of, does anyone know where Mjolnir is?”
“Can’t you just Jedi it with your brain?” asked William H. Taft XLII, raising an eyebrow at Thor while simultaneously – and awkwardly – snapping the imp’s neck.
“Not without my gauntlets.”
“You mean the bracelets you’ve been wearing since we met you?”
“Oh, right.” Thor held out his hand and Mjolnir, his magic hammer, flew, unscathed, from the ash heap of Jesus Christ’s trailer, through a crowd of Louseketeers and dragoons fighting off an atomic werewolf – literally through them – and squished into his hand, dripping with a hodgepodge of innards.
“Right, so, like,” began a winded Jesus, stopping next to the group and hanging his head, his hands on his knees, “what d’we do now?”
“We should ask Charlie,” said Thor, looking around. “Where is Charlie? Vicky, you know where he –”
“Dead,” said Queen Victoria XXX, shaking, holding back tears and a scream that would terrify a Bengal tiger, despondent and furious and heartbroken and lost and homicidal and kind of hungry, all at once.
“What do you –”
“Dead.” This time there was a lot more of the furious and homicidal in her voice.
“OK. Sorry,” said Thor softly. Then: “Does this mean that I can be in charge now?”
“No.”
“No.”
“Not a chance, brother.”
“But I’ve got a really good plan,” whined the thunder god. “Come on, guys ...”
William H. Taft XLII sighed. “OK, fine, what’s your plan, Thor?”
“Take down the guy with the murder ray?”
William H. Taft XLII looked around at the scattered army of Walt Sidney employees surrounding them. Those that weren’t fending off tortured monsters, or already dead, were busy fighting with each other, or crying, or curled up in the fetal position. A few appeared to be slowly and deliberately pooping themselves. A handful looked like maybe they were thinking about continuing the assault against the clones and the god and the son of a god, but then they had noticed all the horrible wounds and second-degree burns that the clones and religious icons didn’t seem to be noticing, and were deciding that maybe it would be better to give up entirely and find new jobs.
Walt Sidney, meanwhile, waiting for his weapons to come back online, looked angrily down at his army, occasionally barking commands or threatening to fire someone, but mostly just scowling with disappointment.
“Seems like a good a time as any,” said the cloned president with a shrug. “Knock yourself out.”
Storm clouds oozed across the lime green sky like spilled bacon fat into a paper towel. A skyscraper of electricity lit up across the heavens and then collapsed into the Sidneytron 5000™. Nothing happened. Thor knit his brow and tried again, dropping several more buildings of lightning on top of the CEO. Still, the robot suit kept functioning. Walt Sidney, inside the exoskeleton and still trying to remuster his troops, didn’t even seem to notice.
“Huh,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“Oh, wait, I’ve got another idea,” said Thor, snapping his fingers. “He’s a robot, right? Robots hate water.” Before he’d even finished talking, a squall of biblical proportions erupted from the gathered storm clouds. Even more immediately, the downpour stopped.
“What the shit?” asked the thunder god, squinting up at the receding clouds.
“God of Storms too, remember?” said Ukko Jumala, throwing off a crazed dragoon or two as he marched toward the Norseman.
“By the balls of Loki,” muttered Thor. “I thought you went home!” Then, hammer raised, he charged at the other deity.
“Bigger picture, Thor!” shouted William H. Taft XLII, watching as their best hope at stopping the massive, getting-more-murdery-by-the-minute Sidneytron 5000™ got into a hammer fight with a Finnish god.
“Don’t worry, brother,” said Jesus, putting a tie-dye-clad arm on the president’s back, “I got this.”
Waving his hands like a vaudeville magician, Jesus Christ turned one of the exoskeleton’s nano-diamond plastic arms into an enormous grouper. The cold-blooded aquatic invertebrate fell thunderously to the ground, where it flopped and flipped and gasped and knocked over a few stormtroopers. Above the fish, almost as if Walt Sidney had been expecting this kind of thing to happen, another robotic arm unfolded from inside the exoskeleton.
“Holy mackerel,” said Jesus, grinning at his own joke.
Queen Victoria XXX, covered in stew and burns and a lot of other people’s blood and generally not having a very good day, slapped the Son of God across the face. “No,” she said.
“Wha–”
“No.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWO
We’re Havin’ a Party
Amen-Ra and Ted Turner, hiding behind a large and conveniently placed purple sage bush on the far side of the field, stage-right of the burning vehicles, wa
tched as the righted and recharged Sidneytron 5000™ released another volley of technological death on Jesus Christ and the clones, all kinds of things exploding behind them as they ran, while Ukko and Thor danced and tumbled across the dried-out grass, raining hammer blow after hammer blow on one another. In the distance, several more platoons of reinforcement Louseketeers were running to join the fray, while those already in the fray were slowly returning to a less insane state of being.
Ted Turner took a deep breath. “We doing this?” he asked.
“Let us,” said Ra, cracking his knuckles, the sun visibly flaring behind him. “With reckless abandon.”
“All right,” said the media mogul, “but I’m going to need a minute.” He ducked away from the shrub to go and gear up.
The Egyptian god, meanwhile, stepped forward dramatically from his hiding place – fists clenched, chin slightly raised, a sneer worthy of song upon his face – just in time to see a trio of arrows come tearing across the sky, stabbing through the bulletproof shielding of the Sidneytron 5000™ and lodging themselves firmly into the jar holding Walt Sidney’s frozen head. The surgically-sharp tip of the third arrow was millimeters from the CEO’s eyeball.
“What is this?” barked Walt Sidney, shaking the robotic head like a windshield wiper on High. “What’s going on?”
“You, uh, you got an arrow in your face,” a dragoon shouted up to him. “Sir.”
“Why is there in arrow in my face?!”
“Nobody ever bothers to make things arrow-proof,” mumbled a disappointed Artemis, shaking her head and striding up beside Ra.
The creator of everything turned to find the former Greek Goddess of the Hunt and the sixty-ninth clone of Catherine the Great standing next to him, armed to the teeth and ready to rumble.
“You just ditched us, you asshole,” said the cloned empress, shoving Ra backward into the purple sage.
“I did not ‘ditch’ you,” explained the bald Egyptian man, climbing out of the plant. “I simply did not think you were any longer invested in this endeavor.”
