The End of Everything Forever

by Eirik Gumeny

  “We were fighting a werewolf and he threw us into a cooler full of champagne,” added the thunder god.

  “We were saving that!” shouted a dragoon. Thor punched her.

  “And then, like, while we were drinking it –”

  “Because a bunch of the bottles had opened and we didn’t want it all to go to waste,” added Thor.

  “– I found more weed in my pocket.”

  “If you two were sober this would probably be over by now,” grumbled William H. Taft XLII.

  “Oh, I highly doubt that,” said Walt Sidney, firing his extraterrestrially-powered cannon into their midst. The heroes dove to the side as a dozen stormtroopers were vaporized.

  “Damn it,” said the frozen head, pulling a face.

  “Wait, I want to go back to this super-saiyan thing ...” said Artemis, picking herself up. “I don’t know what the hell a saiyan is, but the super part ... What exactly were you talking about?”

  “There’s two levels of godding,” explained Thor, kicking a Louseketeer into the smoking crater. “The first one, where you can do some of your stuff and take a lot of abuse –”

  As if on cue, the Greek goddess was elbowed in the nose. She grabbed the man responsible, twisted his arm behind his back, and then snapped the dragoon’s wrist in several places. Then she tossed him into the crater too.

  “Right, OK ...” she said.

  “– and then, when you really hit your old-school groove, there’s the next level, where you get everything back.”

  “Everything?”

  The thunder god smiled as lightning zipped down the sky like a hooded jacket in the springtime, then split and snaked through the crowd around Thor, electrocuting a hundred and twenty stormtroopers, but precisely zero of his friends. Seeing a clearing, a baker’s dozen of dragoons on the opposite side of the crater unslung their rifles and opened fire on the blonde man, the bullets bouncing off Thor’s chest like spitballs.

  “Everything,” he said.

  The barefoot Norseman chucked his hammer across the crater, taking out the gunmen like bowling pins.

  “Well, I want to do that,” said Artemis, watching as the Norseman’s hammer returned to him. Then, “So, uh, how exactly do I ...? Do that?”

  “Well, what was your, y’know, thing?” asked Thor, approaching the goddess as more of Sidney’s army approached them.

  “Women’s rights, treating animals with respect ...”

  “Well, Sidney’s probably a dick about that stuff, right?”

  “Hey,” boomed Walt Sidney from his giant robot. “That’s not fair. I take workplace equality extremely seriously.”

  “Oh, blow it out your –”

  “Actually, he really is pretty great,” said a lady Louseketeer wrestling with Catherine the Great LXIX. “On-site day care, extended maternity leave, equal pay and promotion opportunities. The Walt Sidney Company and its subsidiaries are consistently rated a great workplace for women.”

  “Shit,” said Thor.

  “Well, there’s the animals then, right?” suggested Jesus, turning a trio of truncheons into trout. “Look at those guys –” He pointed toward a scarred, chemically-altered werewolf, broken shackles hanging from its wrists. “– there’s no way that’s on the level, sister.”

  “Actually ...” said another dragoon. The armored adversary nodded back toward the werewolf. The creature stopped and, throwing back its head, howled with murder and fury and, unmistakably, glee.

  “Oh, no way, man. They ... they actually like being experimented on?”

  “Sorry.” Then the dragoon punched Jesus across the teeth.

  “If it helps,” shouted Catherine the Great LXIX from behind the goddess, “I’m a woman and I am being severely mistreated right now.”

  Artemis turned to find three imps crawling all over her friend, like kindergarteners on Arnold Schwarzenegger. The goddess fired an arrow straight through each of their eyeballs. Then she looked at her hands.

  “That didn’t do anything,” she said. “Can you get in more trouble?”

  The clone was shot in the shoulder. “Shouldn’t be a problem,” she said, wincing.

  “Wasn’t hunting your thing too?” asked Queen Victoria XXX, tossing her helmet into the face of an advancing zombie.

  “Yeah, but I don’t see how –”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Seriously.”

  “All right ...” Artemis closed her eyes. While she wasn’t looking, the cloned queen grabbed a white-armored Louseketeer by the neck and scrawled a big ol’ X on his helmet with her bleeding palm. Then she told him to run. The Louseketeer did not need to be asked twice.

  “OK, open your eyes.”

  Artemis opened her eyes. “I don’t see anything.” She began scanning the crowd, looking for anything out of the ordinary. “What exactly did you do?”

  “Somewhere in this crowd,” began Queen Victoria XXX, “is a terrible young man with a red X painted on his helmet. See if you –”

  “Found him.”

  Immediately, the Greek Goddess of the Hunt pulled an arrow from her quiver and fired it through the teeming crowd, sailing the pointed projectile past countless suits of armor and zombies and werewolves, without so much as nicking a shoulder or wobbling a millimeter off course. The arrowhead planted itself dead center in the X, exactly as the man turned his head to face her, dropping the Louseketeer to his back and sending him skidding through the dirt.

  “Oh,” said a very surprised Artemis, “I feel ... tingly.”

  “Downstairs, right?” said Thor.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I think you’ve figured out your thing.”

  Artemis, smiling broadly and trying not to jump up and down with joy, closed her eyes. “Do it again, Vicky.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

  I Am Iron Man

  From high atop the Sidneytron 5000™, as he waited once again for his weapons to recharge, the frozen head of Walt Sidney saw the tide seemingly turning in his opponents’ favor. Thor was electrocuting vast swaths of stormtroopers a single thunderbolt at a time. Artemis was hunting down his scientifically-enhanced werewolves while blindfolded. The heavyset empress dual-wielding swords and the dark-haired queen wearing his dragoon’s armor and the massive man-mountain with the cudgel had apparently turned into horror-movie villains. Jesus Christ appeared to be selling marijuana to some of Sidney’s employees in exchange for their treason. And Set, meanwhile, well, Set was living up to his title.

  “Set? Set!” called the jarred CEO. “What the hell are you doing? Elizabeth said you were dead.”

  “Well, Walt, it looks like she lied.” The Egyptian God of Violence dug his claws through the armor of a Louseketeer, disemboweling the woman where she stood.

  “Fine,” said the cryogenically preserved head, looking once again at the two women who also were not killed by Elizabeth Báthory. “But why are you on their side? Did you hit your head?”

  “Why are you asking about that now? You didn’t see me fighting Ukko before?”

  “I thought that was a small werewolf.”

  “Benedict Cumberbatch, Walt.”

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to see from up here, Set? Nevermind the arrows, I’m wearing glasses in a tank full of cloudy liquid. I’m lucky I know what any of you people look like when I’m sitting across a desk from you.”

  “Sorry ...?” replied a confused Set.

  “I’m not looking for sympathy,” rumbled Walt Sidney.

  “Then what are you looking for? In case you hadn’t noticed –” The dog-man tore out a dragoon’s throat. “– I’m kind of in the middle of some stuff.”

  “What I’m looking for, Set, is your letter of resignation.”

  “What? Are you fucking serious?”

  “Do you want your severance package or not?”

  “Honestly, boss ...” A Louseketeer came at the Egyptian god with a machete. Set sidestepped
the blade and ripped out the soldier’s spine. “I’m pretty good without it right now.”

  “This is incredibly unprofessional, Set.”

  Set, blushing in as pronounced a manner as a massive, furry dog-man could, explained: “Look, Mr. Sidney, there were extenuating circumstances. One of the gods you had me hunt down with Beth was Amen-Ra and, I mean, he’s the creator of the universe and my great-grandfather. That’s very clearly a conflict of interests, boss. I wasn’t not going to follow him here. A lot of this is on you.”

  “Ra’s not dead either?!” boomed Walt Sidney. “So nobody died in that explosion where everyone was supposed to be dead?” He paused. Then, sadly, shaking his jarred head, “I had so much faith in Beth ...”

  “That is because you are an idiot, Sidney,” thundered Amen-Ra, former Egyptian God-King, stepping out from behind the magic purple sage bush and clotheslining a clearly lost zombie.

  “Next time,” mumbled the frozen head, the lights on the cannon changing color, “I’m hiring nothing but atheists.” Walt Sidney fired his giant murder laser at Set. The laser hit, but not nearly with the force he intended. The Egyptian god looked down at his smoking, slightly singed stomach confusedly.

  “What the hell?” Walt Sidney lifted his robotic cannon-hand and looked at it quizzically.

  “Solar flares, Walt,” said Ted Turner, smiling as he stepped out from behind the sage, piloting his own giant robot, transformed from his war machine. “You never did take the environment seriously.”

  “Ted?!”

  “In the flesh. And the metal.”

  Turner sprinted across the trampled field toward the Sidneytron 5000™, his mechanical exoskeleton – less autonomous than Sidney’s, functioning more as an extension of Ted Turner’s own body – a huge, honkin’, steam-powered pile of spikes and sharp edges and repurposed steel. The converted war machine wasn’t as big as Walt Sidney’s exoskeleton, or as pretty, but it was faster, and more nimble, and, more importantly, the Turner Eco-Suit was completely unaffected by the solar flares Ra was calling forth from the sun.

  The TES leapt toward the Sidneytron 5000™. Walt Sidney’s alien exoskeleton took a careful step forward and then backhanded Ted Turner’s robot across the face.

  “So that thing can move,” said William H. Taft XLII.

  The TES reeled backward for a moment, then, locking its legs into the dirt and twisting back-and-forth at the waist like a power-walking mall grandma, the machine drove fists like meat tenderizers into Sidney’s plastic torso over and over again. The Sidneytron 5000™ farted out laser dust from its shoulder-guns and vomited a chunky rain of spikey grenades onto the TES.

  Ted Turner, bathed in explosions, raised a highly illegal piece of ordinance from his back and fired a laser directly into Walt Sidney’s face.

  “This is so fucking awesome,” said Thor, throwing a Louseketeer to the side and sitting down on top of a fallen dragoon to watch.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

  Half-Baked

  The Turner Eco-Suit caught the ill-proportioned leg of the Sidneytron 5000™ and flipped the enormous plastic behemoth onto its back. Then Ted Turner extended a serrated blade the size of a large sedan from the back of his hand and pounced on Walt Sidney. The Sidneytron 5000™, rocking like a turtle with terrible luck, did the same, swinging a gleaming ceramic sword through the side of the TES and unleashing a cloud of steam into the air. Ted Turner screamed furiously and unloaded all twelve of his guns into Walt Sidney’s robotic face.

  “Shouldn’t we keep –” began William H. Taft XLII, walking over to his friends and covered in fresh blood, an assembly of armored assholes still marauding behind him.

  “ShhhHHHhhh,” hissed Queen Victoria XXX, passing the glowing joint back to Jesus.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

  Let’s Use Teamwork!

  The robot fight continued as it had for the last hour, the sounds of burning ozone and cracking plastic and rending steel drifting into the background like the white noise of a satellite radio left on after a high atmosphere EMP. Somewhere along the line, the last of Sidney’s stormtroopers had simply shrugged and given up, and now everyone on both sides of the fight was sitting on the sidelines surrounding the warring exoskeletons, catching their breath and stitching up their wounds.

  Most of the former Louseketeers had stripped into their underthings, as Ra had briefly increased the intensity of the sun ninefold to dry up the zombies and give heat stroke to the armored dragoons that had remained loyal to the Walt Sidney Company. Queen Victoria XXX sat with some of the soldiers, smoking the last of the holy weed and thoroughly entranced by the battling ‘bots. Set was curled up at Ra’s feet, taking a well-earned nap. William H. Taft XLII and Catherine the Great LXIX were raiding the Louseketeers’ first-aid tent. And Artemis was popping popcorn over the smoldering ashtray of Jesus’s camper.

  “This is the perfect temperature,” she explained to the former dragoons sitting nearby, shaking the chestplate she was using as a makeshift pan. “You want a nice even heat, not a lot of flames changing direction all the time. You’ll never burn a kernel.”

  “Hey, Ra?” called Ted Turner, his suit picking itself up from the dusty ground, laser holes smoking across the front and side of his robotic exoskeleton. “Buddy?”

  “Oh, right ...” said Ra through a mouthful of popcorn. He absentmindedly raised a hand and called forth more solar flares.

  “Isn’t that gonna fuck up Turner?” asked William H. Taft XLII, walking over with an arm and sling full of Band-Aids and gauze.

  “No, he’s built dampers into his robot.”

  “What about the rest of the world?” asked one of the dragoons.

  Ra shrugged.

  “Oh, come on, man,” said the dead president. “We just fixed the continental grid.”

  “Six months ago just,” said Queen Victoria XXX.

  “Yeah, but how many times a year do you really want to repair a continent-spanning electrical grid? In Montana?”

  “It’s highly localized,” said the sun god, “I promise.”

  As they were talking, the Sidneytron 5000™ lumbered up behind the TES, raising both of its massive arms into the air. Walt Sidney brought them down like a crashing satellite, Ted Turner falling out of the way before the arms slammed into the ground and rocketed up all kinds of dirt and dust and small cacti. The Sidneytron 5000™, standing back up, clumsily turned back and forth, waving an arm and trying to look through the cloud now surrounding it. The TES – equipped with heat, electromagnetic, and homicidal douchebag sensors – sprang forward and tackled the other robot by what passed for a waist.

  Just then, Thor Odinson and Jesus Christ returned from behind another conveniently placed purple sage, zipping up their flies.

  “Did you guys pee together?” asked Queen Victoria XXX.

  “It’s only weird if you make it weird,” said Jesus.

  “Anyway, we broke the seal,” added Thor, “we’re feeling a lot better now. Do they still need our help?”

  Walt Sidney walloped Ted Turner with both hands, sending the reinforced cage surrounding his head spiraling around like an astronaut training module. “Yes, please,” shouted the former media mogul.

  “You got it then.” Tearing off his undershirt and stepping forward dramatically, the wind blowing back his golden mane, Thor was immediately shot in the face by a laser.

  “That’ll wake you up,” said the thunder god, shaking his head.

  A few more lasers fired recklessly into the crowd, perforating a couple of Louseketeers and taking off Catherine the Great LXIX’s hand at the wrist.

  “MOTHERFUCKER!” she shouted, pulling the cauterized stump to her chest, the irony of dropping her much-needed medical supplies in the action completely lost on her.

  The sky suddenly resembling a thick stew, thunderbolts burped forth and wove bibulously through the air, down the aluminum shafts of the arrows sticking out of the plastic robot’s head and into Walt Sidney’s jar.
Jesus started turning smaller parts of the exoskeleton into fishsticks and wine bottles. Enough to mildly incapacitate the mech-suit, but not set off its replacement protocol.

  “I thought you said you guys were sober,” groaned Catherine the Great LXIX.

  “Sobererer,” replied Jesus.

  “You A.D. amateurs,” scoffed Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the Wild, glowing slightly and shaking her resplendent head of hair. In a single movement, she grabbed her bow from the ground and fired an arrow into the exoskeleton, the projectile tearing through the plastic and rubber like paper and pushing out the main joint support of the shoulder. The entire weight of the gargantuan arm now pulling down on a missing cylinder, gravity jumped feet first onto all the circuits and plastic shielding, severing the entire arm. Acting quickly, Thor snuck a bolt of lightning into the armhole, electricity flooding through all the exposed wires and shorting out the entire left side of the robot. Jesus, meanwhile, turned all the uncovered ends and innards into catfish, before the suit could regenerate another arm.

  The Turner Eco-Suit got in on the action and tore off the other arm of the Sidneytron 5000™.

  “I cannot believe this is working,” said William H. Taft XLII, staring slack-jawed.

  But it was. Artemis was taking out mechanical supports and major control boards left and right, Thor was electrocuting the ever-loving shit out of the exoskeleton, and Jesus had Walt Sidney’s suit literally falling apart, fish product by fish product.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TEN

  The End(ish)

  Everyone stood around the jarred head of a half-boiled, clearly brain-damaged Walt Sidney, ten-foot piles of fish and wine as far as the eye could see.

  “So ... what now?” asked William H. Taft XLII, staring at the blinking, twitching head.

  “We kill him,” said Artemis, stepping forward, Ukko’s hammer over her shoulder.

  “Where did you get that?” asked Thor.

  “No, man,” said Jesus, arms spread, stepping between the goddess and the frozen head. “Hasn’t there been too much killing already?”