The End of Everything Forever

by Eirik Gumeny

  The tall woman stretched out across the lounge, putting her mismatched fuzzy socks on the edge of the armchair, dangerously close to her roommate’s immaculately appareled arm. The wardrobe woman, Kelly Squatchson, swatted her feet away.

  Thor, after all, was in a crisp, white Oxford with a red paisley necktie, both supplied by the production, and both brand new – a state in which Kelly intended them to remain. The big man had refused their offer of slacks, however, opting instead – and only after significant cajoling and bargaining, given that he wanted to do the interview in his underwear – for his own tattered jeans, more holes than pants at this point.

  “Remind me why we’re doing this again?” asked the thunder god, a finger up his nose, massaging his nasal membranes.

  “Because the Neo-GOP’s technomancers have made it impossible to teach history or share ‘controversial’ facts without being eaten alive by a swarm of nanolocusts. Therefore we have to do this entire fucking thing with actor reenactments and non-binding personal recollections.”

  “What thing?” asked the queen.

  “How high are you?” asked the director.

  “So very,” she replied.

  The director puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. “Taft has, in an effort to keep the world from sliding into Trumpian Era levels of stupidity and shortsighted shittiness, commissioned myself and my team to docudramatize all of the world’s known history for a thirteen-part educational Netflix miniseries tentatively titled The Exponential Apocalypses. For reasons that I truly and sincerely do not understand, you two slackers have, somehow, been at the center of at least three-and-a-half of the last five apocalypses, and may have even had a hand in stopping them entirely.” He shrugged, half-angrily and half-hopelessly. “So we’re spending the last episode on you and whichever of your friends are still alive and willing to talk to us.”

  “OK ...” Thor slowly replied. “But why are we doing this?”

  “Because the president,” explained the redheaded assistant director, Harley Brochovich, walking by, “tricked you into signing an ironclad contract saying that you’d cooperate with us in a timely and helpful manner.”

  This was not hyperbole. The contract was literally carved into a slab of iron, locked in an iron box, and guarded by a team of iron men in iron masks. Thor and Queen Victoria XXX hadn’t seen the document since they scratched their names into it with a diamond-tipped pen.

  “Joke’s on you guys, then,” said the unkempt woman who was shortly supposed to be interviewed on camera. “We don’t cooperate with anyone.”

  “Clearly,” mumbled Alfredo.

  “What if, though,” suggested the assistant director, “we got you your sandwiches?”

  “Are you trying to bribe us?” asked Thor.

  “Yes,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

  “OK, good.”

  “We’re listening,” added Queen Victoria XXX. Across the room, the door opened and Marlene reentered the apartment, dragging a heavy, military-issued duffel bag behind her.

  “How many sandwiches,” said Harley, tapping away at the tablet strapped to her wrist, “would it take to get you to do this? To properly do this?”

  “How big’s your budget?” asked the replicated royal in reply.

  “I’m gonna go make some room in the fridge,” said Thor, putting his hands on the arms of his chair and pushing himself up.

  “Not so fast,” said the makeup woman, shoving him back down, her tiny hand nearly lost between the god’s pecs. With a heave, Marlene tossed her duffel bag into his lap, then, digging, pulled out a butane welding torch and a ceramic combat knife.

  “I am getting those fucking nose hairs out of there if it fucking kills me.”

  In Memory Of

  Marlene Cage-Jones, Makeup Woman

  Rest in Peace

  You’re Plucking the Eyebrow Hairs of Angels Now

  CHAPTER TWO

  March of fhe Penguins

  “Guys,” pleaded the director. “Come on.”

  The entirety of his crew was sitting around the gilded slice of redwood that acted as a coffee table, some on various parts of the crushed velvet furniture set, others on the unbelievably plush carpeting. Thor Odinson and Queen Victoria XXX, meanwhile, were seated atop the table, holding court, every one of their guests – except for Alfredo Trabaverga, obviously – hanging raptly on their every word.

  After the tag team of a solar superstorm and volcanic winter had ended the world for the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh times, respectively, the almost annual apocalypses that had been wrecking up the planet kind of just ... stopped. Suddenly faced with a lot more free time, buildings that stayed built, and money that actually meant something, society started relaxing and reading and, counter to almost everyone’s expectations, learning.

  There was, in fact, a resurgent Renaissance, with intelligence and creativity and science and art all actually valued again. Despite the rise of the Neo-GOP and their efforts to keep everyone scared and stupid, the vast majority of humanity got to book-learnin’ and smart-makin’, with the analysis and understanding of the causes and effects of recent history rapidly becoming a cornerstone of the movement. (There had been, after all, only so much one could learn about current events living their life out of a boarded-up basement.)

  Of course, people were still people, and better stories often won out over facts and truth. Comic books and movies riddled with excessive explosions were always more popular than textbooks and dry documentaries. And Thor Odinson and Queen Victoria XXX, effortlessly charming and alarmingly pretty, unafraid to say what they meant and always willing to punch their way out of a problem, made for some great subjects.

  That was how, despite a growing agoraphobia and a complete lack of doing anything anymore, the god and the queen found themselves elevated from respected black-market mercenaries to outright legends, known and loved by everyone.

  “Union rules say you get one lunch,” continued Alfredo.

  “... so then the guy’s all like –” Thor adopted a terrible British accent. “– since the ocean now reaches into the swamps, therefore the swamps and all that is built on top of them are, by royal degree, a part of the sovereign lands of Atlantis.”

  “So, of course,” continued the queen, “I’m all like, fuck that noise, so I start wrapping the bike chain around my knuckles to punch this guy in his stupid face –”

  “– when some crazy-ass radioactive swamp monster thing explodes out of the muck and bites his stupid fish head right off his stupid human body!”

  The miniseries’ crew erupted with laughter.

  “Are you at least filming this?” asked the director. Hector Vanhanen-Vazquez, the cameraman, aggressively ignored him.

  “The monster’s still outside,” continued Queen Victoria XXX, popping open another cherry Dr. Pepper. “His name’s Marv. Fucking Marv. He ended up getting the whole Meadowlands federally protected as culturally significant wetlands or whatever.”

  “And, oh, shit,” said the thunder god, several bites of chicken parm in his mouth, “so this other time –”

  A tremendous kersplosion – bigger than a regular explosion by about half, usually accompanied by a cartoonish fireball – rocked the apartment, the entire western wall reduced to pointy confetti and splintering across the living room.

  “Bragi’s grody razors,” mumbled Thor, shoving the last of his sandwich into his mouth. His soda was soaking through his jeans and into his undershorts.

  “That was my favorite wall!” added Queen Victoria XXX.

  A teeming horde of the world’s most adorable puppies and kittens – accompanied by a legion of piglets and fawns and a couple baby hedgehogs – wobbled through the ensuing dust cloud, bows in their hair and bandanas around their necks, yipping preciously, their tiny legs barely covering any ground at all.

  “Ohhh,” cooed Harley Brochovich. “They’re so cute!”

  “Stinkfarts,” snarled the thunder god.

  “... what?”


  “Stinkfarts,” he rumbled again, the floor around him quaking.

  “That’s not their real name,” explained the queen, standing up and stretching. “That’s what Thor calls them because they’re dirty and smelly and they use a noxious chemical gas emitted from their hindquarters as a weapon. Speaking of, we have a bunch of gas masks in the hall closet. You’re going to want them.”

  Alfredo, poking his head up from behind the sofa and noticing a distinct lack of movement from the burly blonde man and the lean, black-haired woman, asked: “And you ... don’t?”

  “Well, Thor’s a god ...”

  “And she’s been living with me for two years,” added Thor, “so she’s built up an immunity to noxious gas.”

  “Awww, they don’t look so scary,” said one of the production assistants, kneeling down and putting out a hand, “they just need some love and maybe a bath and –”

  The stinkfart farted, stinkily, releasing a cloud of opalescent green vapor that quickly enveloped the woman and began simultaneously choking her and melting off her skin from the inside out.

  “HOLY SHIT,” said basically everyone, the crew erupting into a complete panic.

  “Not yet,” Thor explained grimly.

  “What?!” asked someone, shoving someone else out of their way.

  “This gets worse?!” asked a third someone, backing toward the door.

  “Like you wouldn’t believe,” continued the thunder god, stomping forward, grabbing one of the puppies by the scruff, and hurling it outside. “Stinkfarts are genetically engineered from bonnacons.[l] The gas is just a defense mechanism. The shit is the actual weapon.”

  “They wouldn’t do this on their own, though,” said Queen Victoria XXX, bringing her fuzzy sock-covered foot down on a kitten’s head. “They’re nowhere near capable of handling explosives and surviving.”

  “Then who ...”

  As the dust surrounding the hole settled, the answer to that half-finished question became abundantly clear.

  Penguins.

  Motherfucking penguins.

  At least a dozen, old and grizzled, with bright blue sweatbands around their heads, fully-armed and waddling closer. Behind them, several helicopters were hovering, another one dropping down and lining itself up with the hole in the wall. Two-foot-tall shit golems began pouring out and into the penthouse, seemingly gloating over the fact that they were walking piles of poo.

  “Not the rug!” shouted the clone.

  “That is never coming out,” echoed the god.

  The assortment of tiny terrors – making sure to run across the furniture on their way – laid into the crowd of confused crew members, pouncing and biting and hitting and farting. Immediately, a dark stain spread across the crotchular area of the stoned queen’s sweatpants.

  “Oh, thank God, you’re scared too,” said Harley, cowering behind the armchair. “That makes me feel –”

  “No, not even a little,” replied Queen Victoria XXX, her face like granite. “Fear is for idiots. I just needed to get the drugs out of my system. This was the easiest way.”

  “Isn’t that a little ... gross, though?”

  “We’re fighting dookie demons, lady,” said Thor, his arm outstretched. “This is going to get so much grosser.” Mjolnir, the god’s enchanted hammer, busted through an interior wall and sailed into his hand.

  “Thor,” scolded the queen.

  “What? We’ll tell the insurance company these assholes did it.” He turned to Hector, now fervently filming. “Don’t put that part in the documentary.” The cameraman gave Thor a thumbs up.

  “Docudrama,” added the director, leaning out from behind the cameraman.

  A penguin with spiked nunchucks tottered menacingly toward the retired heroes, swinging his weapons this way and that, whipping the points through the air in a demonstration of his awe-inspiring abilities. Queen Victoria XXX kicked the bird back through the hole in the wall and directly into the rotor of one of the helicopters. The flying machine listed downward and exploded against one of the lower floors, sending a shudder through the building.

  “Whoops.”

  “Also not in the film!” the Norseman shouted. “Here, try again.”

  He grabbed one of the stinkfarts and tossed it to his roommate. She spiraled the hedgehog through the windshield of another copter, the creature rupturing into guts and quills against the pilot’s face. The helicopter reared sideways into another helicopter, which, in turn, got its blades tangled up with those from a third helicopter. All three twisted, smoking, to the ground, erupting in a tremendous fireball.

  “That should be OK,” said the god, “depending on what they landed on.”

  “I hope it wasn’t Marv,” added the queen.

  One of the little shits flooding the room hopped off the boom operator it was teabagging and chirped shrilly. The rest of the golems did the same, then pulled lighters from inside of themselves and, with a ritualistic series of hand movements, set themselves on fire.

  “Balls,” grumbled Thor. “This one’s on me. I recognize these guys now.”

  “From that time –”

  “Yeah.”

  “With the –”

  “Yeah,” confirmed the thunder god. “Maybe I didn’t kill them enough the first time.”

  “Clearly,” said the queen. She nodded her head toward the grip getting beaten about the face by a penguin with a cricket bat. “We should probably get them out of here, right?”

  Thor shrugged. “You do you, Vicky.”

  “Maybe later,” she said, a flash in her eyes. “We’ll see how tired I am.”

  “Well, if there’s anything I can do to help –”

  “Yo, dawg,” screeched one of the penguins, a voice like Styrofoam fingernails being dragged across a Styrofoam chalkboard, “we heard you like saving the world.” The bird pulled an absurdly complicated tangle of wires and circuit boards and glowing tubes from a backpack.

  “Fuck,” said Thor.

  “These aren’t regular evil penguins, are they?”

  “Try saving it from this!” squawked another penguin.

  “OK,” said the thunder god, stomping toward the Antarctic birds, “sure.”

  Immediately, he was swarmed by the flaming poo creatures.

  “Baldur’s ass crack!” The Norseman swung his arms, his hammer, impotently, cutting through the flaming crap demons only to have the golems reform. “Why are you so soft?!” he shouted. “Are you not getting enough iron?”

  Queen Victoria XXX, meanwhile, kicked a baby deer in the face. Then she got smacked in her own face by Alfredo Trabaverga.

  “What the actual fuck,” she rumbled, turning toward him.

  “AAHHaahhAAHH!” cried the director. “AAAHHH!” The skinny man was swaying wildly, his arms flailing weakly, as a pair of penguins tried to, respectively, choke him to death with his scarf and saw through his neck with an expensive steak knife.

  “You’re supposed to be cute and cuddly!” he screeched.

  “And that is exactly why we are doing this!” shouted the first penguin. “No one takes us seriously! We have the technological capacity to melt the ice caps, condense an atomic bomb into a child’s school bag, create a black hole machine, harness the power of undersea magma flows, and talk with perfect human accents, and all you want to do is make documentaries about how great and adorable we are!”

  “We are not cute, you fissured asshole!” shouted the second bird, stabbing the steak knife deep into Alfredo’s trapezius. The director screamed incoherently and fell to the floor.

  “Wait,” said Queen Victoria XXX, grabbing the penguins by the tail and holding them upside down, “you’re here because of the documentary guys? Not us?”

  “They’re documentarians?!” screeched another bird altogether.

  “Docudramatists, actually,” the director wheezed. “We’re not legally allowed to –”

  “KILL THEM ALL!”

  “Why are you saying that like it wa
sn’t already your plan?” asked Thor, grabbing the screeching waterfowl by the head and crushing its skull between his fingers.

  The two penguins in the clone’s hands squawked in horror, wriggling in her grip. Queen Victoria XXX clonked their heads together and then bowled them out of the apartment. She looked back at her roommate.

  Through a disgusting series of trials and errors, the thunder god had discovered that the stinkfarts could damage the shit golems and vice versa, allowing him, via the prodigious misuse of weaponized feces, to successfully defeat both offending parties.

  The apartment, amazingly, was none the worse for wear after the endeavor.

  Thor, however, was another story entirely.

  “You look like –”

  “Don’t, Vicky.”

  “Oh, come on!” she implored, hopping slightly. “When else am I ever going to get to say that and actually literally mean it.”

  “You hate puns,” he countered.

  “I’ll let you watch later.”

  The thunder god raised an eyebrow. “You were saying, then?”

  “You look like –”

  A whir and a sound of distant popping filled the apartment. Across the room, a trio of penguins in white lab coats and giant glasses had finished activating the bomb. The laws of physics started to act kind of weird.

  “Motherfucker,” grumbled Thor, gravity rapidly losing a hold on him. “Any ideas?”

  “Implosion bomb is my guess,” the queen replied, her feet drifting from the floor.

  “So I can –”

  “Go nuts.”

  “Your iPod and stuff in the rubber-reinforced safe?”

  “Yeah,” she replied, backhanding a nearing penguin into two others – and sending herself backwards along the way. “Maybe, like, now, though,” she added, thudding into a decorative column.

  The thunder god turned to the cameraman. “Hope you got a long lens, ‘cause you’re gonna want to be in the hallway for this.”