by Eirik Gumeny
“It’s 11 a.m.”
“Well, yeah. The door was open, though, I thought –”
“No, we’re open. I just wanted to make sure you knew.” The bartender put down his novel, the page he was reading splayed against the hardwood bartop. “It’s a courtesy I supply to all my customers. You don’t look like you’ve been out all night, but I’ve been wrong before.”
“No,” replied the man in the polo, settling into a stool, “I am well aware that it is still morning, but I would like to get drunk nonetheless.”
“OK,” said the bartender, nodding. “Then I will be nothing but supportive.”
“I appreciate that.”
The slight, younger man with the handlebar mustache grabbed a glass and a bottle of Jack Daniels and stepped toward the soda gun. “Rough morning?” he asked as he poured.
“I, uh, I just saw my future.”
“Yeah, you have the look.” He placed the drink in front of Wei. “I’ve actually been getting that a lot. The Prophet’s really taken a liking to that street corner.”
“The Prophet?”
“That’s what we call him,” said the bartender with a shrug. “We being me and a couple of the other store owners in the area. Given, y’know. Think his real name’s Phil or Steve or something else not nearly as evocative as it should be. Honestly, it’s hard to talk to the guy sometimes, especially if all you’re trying to do is make polite conversation and get on with your day.”
“So I take it then,” Wei started, pausing the glass before his lips, “that you’re not the stereotypical barman I can bare my soul to?”
“Oh, no,” said the hipster with thoughtful and appropriate boundaries, throwing a hand towel over his shoulder, “I absolutely am. When I’m in here and on the clock, that is. Out there, I’m just Simon.”
“Well, nice to meet you, Simon,” said the man on the stool, draining his glass and putting it back down on the counter. “Can I get another?”
“He really did a number on you, didn’t he?” asked the bartender, taking the glass.
“You ever get the feeling you were born in the wrong time?”
“Not really,” said the man in the flannel shirt, “but go on.”
“I just ... I don’t know,” said Wei, taking the refilled tumbler. “Life shouldn’t be this hard, right? I mean, I know we’re in a pretty good stretch right now, things haven’t gone catastrophically bad for a while, but –” He shook his close-cropped head. “Literally, I can’t leave my house – my elaborately-secured, radiation-proofed house – without something terrible and weird, and stressful, happening. We’re talking Viking zombies and dinosaurs and fundamentalist merpeople taking you hostage and gangs of radioactive chinchillas with misplaced grudges. I mean, I can’t even go to the diner without being attacked by dragons. I even shared a fence with one of the Vegas Four for a couple of years.” He downed his whiskey. “Shouldn’t things be easier than this?”
“I mean, I grew up trapped in an abandoned mall as part of a cannibal cult and watched both of my grandparents get eaten alive by our neighbors, so ...”
“So you get it,” said Wei.
“Other way, actually,” said Simon, making a face. “I’m saying having commas in your life story, options, is a good thing. Empirically. You’re part of the world. An active participant. And limiting yourself, being consumed and imprisoned by your fears ...” He shrugged. “You might as well be being held against your will and lied to by your closest friends and family. Take it from me: that’s no way to live your life, man.”
“I mean, I know ...” replied the textbook definition of business casual sitting at the bar. “That’s what everyone always says – that’s what Shannon always said, for sure – but ...” He shook his head again. “It almost feels like my ... my brain chemistry won’t let me calm down. That, try as I might, I just can’t accept that this is the world we live in.”
“Do you ... remember a time before this? When things were ‘normal?’”
“No, that’s the weird part,” said Wei, thoughtfully. “There were already robots when I was born, they were already rising up. Japan had already sunk. There was a friggin’ global thermonuclear holocaust on my third birthday. We had the cake inside a fallout shelter. So it’s not like I have an excuse.
“And, I mean, my neighbors – other ones, not Vicky and Charlie – they’re older, old, they were, like, twenty, when the first apocalypse happened. And they thrived somehow, even then. While those meteorites were coming down, while the world was panicking and completely unprepared, they ... got together. Like, biblically. Right there in their boss’s office. With corpses in the parking lot and fire actively falling from the sky. Even now, everything rolls off their backs. I saw them dancing and laughing together in acid rain the other day, their clothes literally burning off of them.
“And ... I don’t know, man. Seeing that, seeing who they are and who I’m not, kinda cements the fact that I’m ... broken. Not meant for this world.”
Wei tilted the glass.
“One more?”
“Sure,” said Simon, taking the tumbler. “This one’s on me.” He began mixing the drink, the soda gun barely fizzing. “So why’d you do it then? See you-know-who? If you’re ‘unfit’ for this world, why see an itinerant psychic who can touch you and let you spy on your own future? Your job make you or something? Insurance? Or are you another grad student writing a thesis on the futility of fighting free will?”
“None of the above,” replied Wei, his third Jack and Coke before him. He ran a hand along his stubble. “My ... wife ... left me a few months ago. Shannon said I wasn’t adventurous or spontaneous enough. And, obviously, she wasn’t wrong. I mean, look, she tried to understand, to help, but ...” He shook his head. “I didn’t want the help. I’d been having a harder and harder time with things, was barely leaving the house by the end. So she did, for good. And ... I was alone. Which, in turn, forced me to face up to all my fears, their consequences. I was, I don’t know, hoping this, seeing the ‘Prophet,’ might ... fix me, I guess.”
He sipped his drink before adding: “Don’t think it’s gonna do the trick.”
“What’d you see?” Simon asked. “If you don’t mind ...”
“I’m going to live to see the end of everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Isn’t that ... good?”
“Why would that be good?”
“Well, for one,” said the bartender, crossing his arms and leaning against the back bar, “if you’re supposed to actually witness the end of everything, then you’re probably going to live for a good long while, right? Until the heat-death of the universe or whatever. Shouldn’t that, like, help? You can stop worrying about the world out there; you can literally know that none of it’s going to matter to you.
“And, for another,” he asked, shrugging, “don’t you want to know how it all ends?”
“Not particularly, no.”
“You’re practically immortal, my dude,” said Simon, cocking a manicured eyebrow.
“No, that’s not – That isn’t –” Wei knit his brow; he hadn’t considered that. “I mean, OK, maybe ... But I could still, like, lose a leg or something. Get stabbed a lot. Be bedridden with electrogonorrhea.”
“Yeah, but there’s pills for almost all of that now. And, I mean, you’re missing the headline here: you’d still be alive. Lotta people don’t get that.”
“That’s kind of an unfair burden, isn’t it?”
“Life?”
“... yeah.”
Simon laughed, short. “Fair doesn’t have much to do with anything,” said the bartender. “I mean, you’ve gotta know that better than anyone. That’s basically why you’re here, right?”
Wei lifted his drink, held it before him, and stared out the window. “How ... accurate is that Prophet?” he asked. “He looked kind of ... crazier than I’d been expecting.”
“You were expecting a street-cor
ner seer to not be crazy?”
“No,” said the man in the polo, “hence my concern.”
“From everything I’ve heard, he’s never wrong,” said Simon, joining his customer in looking out the muntin window at the end of the bar, through the diagonal grid and the diamond-shaped glass. “Or, at least, hasn’t been, yet. Rumors say the dude licked just, like, a ton of hallucinogenic lizards, all different kinds, in search of truth and clarity or whatever, and, well, now he’s a walking conduit to the future.”
“And knowing all that drove him insane.”
“Well, it was probably the lizards that did that, not the knowledge ...”
“Maybe.”
“Or,” said Simon, turning back to Wei, “maybe he’s saner than all of us.”
Wei made a face. “I mean, I get what you’re saying, but ...”
“Yeah, no, I hear it now. I’ve ... I’ve seen his shit bucket; that was almost certainly a little hyperbolic. But he’s not afraid.”
The man in the stool shook his head. “I was always fine with the fear, y’know? Didn’t bother me. I mean, we had cable and delivery, and the internet, it wasn’t like we weren’t living, talking, part of the world ...”
“But it wasn’t enough for her, was it?”
“No,” said Wei, a pall falling over him. “It wasn’t.”
“Is that why you really went to see him? The Prophet? Thought maybe you’d feel better if it turned out all your fears were justified?”
The older man stared at the younger one. “You’re pretty good at being a bartender, you know that?”
“I do, yeah,” said Simon, grinning. “And you seem to be pretty good at avoiding the hard answers.”
“Yeah, well, I was, anyway,” Wei replied, putting away the last of his drink. He stood, slowly, one hand on the counter. “Don’t think that’s going to work this time.”
“Don’t think that’s worked at all,” said the bartender, “if I’m being honest.”
Wei Zheng smiled, pulled a few bills from his wallet. “You take cash?”
“I take anything. You need change?”
“C’mon, man.”
Simon laughed, short. “Thanks.” Then, leaning forward, his elbows on the bartop: “So, what now?”
“I don’t know,” said Wei, looking towards the door. “Is there ... I dunno, like, a flower shop or something around here?”
“Around the corner,” said the bartender, tilting his head, “other way from the Prophet. Don’t think roses are gonna cut it, though.”
“Yeah, but they’re a start,” said Wei, giving Simon a quick, two-fingered salute as he exited. “And, I mean, I’ve got time, don’t I?”
Previously, On Exponential Apocalypse
“There have been,” begins a dark, heavy voice, “twenty-seven-and-a-half apocalypses to date.”
A montage of news clips and shaky cell phone footage flashes across the screen: meteorites slamming into a strip mall; the flaming wreckage of a massive alien warship crashing into Times Square; Santa’s Workshop exploding; zombies; more zombies; a robot ripping the spine out of a human resistance fighter.
“The Earth,” continues the voice, “has been moved ... and razed ... and rebuilt ...”
More stock footage: enormous particle colliders spooling up in the Antarctic wilderness; the chrome-and-carbon steel skyline of the Kingdom of Los Alamos shimmering in the sunlight; the Empire State Building sinking into dark, sludgy waters.
“... a couple of times.”
The scientist-kings of Los Alamos, bank boxes in hands, being forced from their offices at gunpoint; seething hordes of turkeys; massive mechanical cranes and literal boatloads of trash, arriving for the rebuilding of New New York.
“And while there is no known correlation between calamities,” continues the voice, “a surprising number of these Armageddons seem to have either been caused, or kind of caused, and sometimes stopped ...”
A half-naked British Indian woman and a completely naked clone of the sexy version of Chris Pratt punch wave after wave of old ladies in the face. The camera pulls back, revealing a shirtless, caped Australian man holding a cartoonishly large three-pronged plug in one hand and a matching orange extension cord in the other. With terrific fanfare, he puts them together.
“... by the men and woman who would come to be known as the Vegas Four, the heroes of the Las Vegas Massacre.”
A series of ornately-produced shots in quick succession: the Australian man, bare chest glistening, pulls a glowing hammer from his thick belt and points it at an enormous dragon-monster. The British Indian woman, in a short skirt and tight leather corset, pulls a coruscating half-sword from her back and points it a megalomaniacal underwear model. A clone of the fat, stoner version of Chris Pratt punches a frothing cow in the face repeatedly. An enormous blob of a man, folds of fat on top of folds of other fat, sits in an ornate bathtub in an almost infinite field of skulls, laughing maniacally.
Then: an unnecessarily handsome man appears on-screen, walking slowly in front of a dark red curtain.
“Join us,” he says, “as we hear from Thor Oddinson, the former Scandinavian Lord of Thunder; Queen Victoria the Xth, warrior princess; Jesús Herschel Christ, the –” A pair of exaggerated air quotes from his manicured hands. “– ‘Savior of Mankind;’ and President William H. Taft the Extra Large, the actual savior of mankind.”
The man smiles, his teeth glinting. “All this and more, on this installment of ...”
A massive fireball erupts across the screen. A pair of words done up in burnished purple steel slam forward.
“... Exponential Apocalypse!”
CHAPTER ONE
Making Movies
“Hey, hi, I’d like to place an order for delivery?”
“Address?”
“888 88th Street, West New New –”
“Vicky?”
“... no?”
“Vicky, c’mon, you know we can’t sell to yous two any–”
“We said we were sorry!”
“You killed Justin.”
“Yeah, but we paid for the funeral.”
“I dunno if you understand how lucky you are that no one pressed charges.”
“Like they even could’ve. We’re in the penthouse, Sal. The penthouse. That couch was falling for a long, looong time before it hit him. And what was he doing in the dumpster anyway? A lot of this is on him.”
“Justin wasn’t in the dumpster, Vicky. He was running away. The couch was soaked wit’ volatile chemicals and exploded.”
“Well, yeah. Why do you think we were throwing it out?”
The man on the other end of the phone sighed heavily. “Look, we can’t deliver to yous guys anymore, Vicky, full stop. I guess you could ... I dunno, come here and pick it up? I could pro–”
Queen Victoria XXX ended the call.
“Hel’s crusty butthole,” she mumbled. Tossing her cell phone onto the breakfast counter and returning to the living room, the woman in the Cheeto-stained t-shirt announced: “Bad news, buddy. We’re blacklisted from Restaino’s now, too.”
“Damn it,” grumbled her roommate, “they had the best pickles in the district!”
“I’m disappointed too.”
“Why are people even still using humans for deliveries? A robot would have survived that blast, easy.”
“I know,” she sighed.
“This is bullshit,” grumbled Thor.
Thor Odinson, Norse God of Thunder, and Queen Victoria XXX, the thirtieth and only extant clone of the original Queen Victoria, were living on the top floor of a swanky apartment building, built over the charred crater of the Holiday Inn they had, years earlier, called home. The lodging had been a covert and completely untraceable token of thanks from Ah Puch, the former Mayan God of Death, after the pair had helped to murder Ah Puch’s former boss, Walt Sidney, an act that had resulted in the reins – and bank accounts, and gold stores, and goat farms – of Sidney’s massive global entertainment conglomerate
being handed to the Mesoamerican god.
The copied queen and the Scandinavian god had been so appreciative of the gesture, they decided to never leave the apartment – like, ever. Between the lack of mercenary work available and the seemingly unshakeable bouts of guilt and depression, going outside simply hadn’t seemed worth the effort.
More importantly, they were rich and famous legends now and all their undiagnosed mental disorders were written off as fashionable eccentricities. Shut-ins across the globe were suddenly seen as hip and trendy.
That, dear reader, was how Thor found himself sitting in a plush velvet armchair in his own living room while a skinny man in a ballcap and a pretentiously-tied Afghan scarf paced behind him. A small woman with a clear plastic bag of makeup over her shoulder was perched in the god’s lap, working an industrial-strength personal trimmer – the kind usually reserved for show ponies – all the way up the thunder god’s nose.
The tiny machine made an increasingly desperate noise before finally giving up and stopping cold. The woman pulled the smoking hygienic instrument from the Norseman’s nostril.
“That’s the third one this morning,” she grumbled.
“Maybe just leave my nose hairs alone then?”
Marlene Cage-Jones laughed, hard and derisively, then climbed off the big man.
“Sit tight,” she said, patting his knee. “I’ve got something in the truck.”
“Marlene?” asked the skinny man, Alfredo Trabaverga, watching as his makeup woman rushed to the door. “Where are you –”
The door slammed shut behind her.
With a noise that was mostly consonants, Alfredo buried his face in his hands. Around him, the rest of his film crew bustled – though they adamantly did not hustle – setting up lights and cameras, running cables, moving furniture, and kicking the candy wrappers and empty soda cans they were supposed to be cleaning up back under the moved furniture.
“Guys,” he said, to no one in particular. “We need to get this done today. We are so far behind schedule already.”
“That sounds like a you problem,” said Queen Victoria XXX, flopping down onto the matching velvet chaise. Her previously meticulously coiffed hair was frizzy, and flattened on one side. She was wearing ratty sweatpants and one of Thor’s old shirts, covered with her own new stains.
