by Eirik Gumeny
“Oy, boyo,” shouted the grizzled bartender. “No women allowed. Git yer vazey tarts on outta here.”
“What did you just call us?” roared Queen Victoria XXX. “And I’m legitamately asking. I don’t know what those words meant.”
Several patrons – large, snaggletoothed, and presumably part of at least one of the then-flourishing Irish mobs – stood up slowly from their tables and barstools.
“Ya got ‘til the count o’ three,” said the barkeep, “unless ya be wantin’ trouble.”
“Trouble?” repeated the thunder god, cocking an eyebrow.
“Gentlemen,” said Abraham Lincoln XVI, stepping to the front. He smiled. “We would like nothing more.”
***
Flames were rising from the collapsed frame of McSorley’s Ale House.
“Maybe if we wait a while, we’ll transport back a few more years and we can burn it down again,” said Thor, picking snaggled teeth out of his knuckles.
***
The cloned queen climbed on top of the thunder god, her mouth all over his. She started pulling at the buttons on his shirt.
“Yes!” shouted the scientist, twisting in the passenger seat to get a better look. “I knew it!”
Queen Victoria XXX threw her shoe at her.
“Guys,” said Abraham Lincoln XVI, looking into the rearview mirror. “Come on.”
Thor threw his shoe at him.
The car swerved across two lanes before righting itself again.
“That was a boot, man,” grumbled the president. “Not cool.”
***
“Yeah, give me four Death in the Afternoons.” The clone turned toward her friends. “What do you guys want?”
***
“Hang on, guysh,” slurred Judy Lin, wobbling toward a coffee vending machine. “I just wanna ...” She fell hard against the machine, leaning on it with her shoulder as she fished around in her pocket for change.
Finding a couple dollars instead, she inserted the cash and pressed a couple buttons.
“Beep, boop, boop,” she said.
“Come on, Judy,” called Queen Victoria XXX, wobbling a little further down the street. Her hair was jutting out in all directions. She, the air around her, seemed to be glowing alongside the neon storefronts. There were either in future Los Angeles or ancient Tokyo.
“One friggin’ minute!”
“JuuUUuudddyyy,” sang the queen.
The machine clanged and hissed. A paper cup slid onto the tray.
“Come to mama,” mumbled the scientist.
Coffee began sputtering out of the nozzle, then stopped, then turned into the clawed hand of a gremlin. The rest of the feral lizard-monster followed soon thereafter, chunks of machinery falling to the woman’s feet as the creature pulled itself free.
“You’re not coffee,” said Judy, stumbling backward. She called up the street: “Hey, Vicky, this thing’s not making coffee, it’s making gramlins, d’you want a gramlin?”
***
“Yeah, gimme, like, three Long Island Iced Teas.”
***
“I’ll have two Scorpion Bowls, th’nk you.”
The queen guffawed. “Remember that time we – with the –”
“Veril-ly,” said the god, hiccuping.
***
“Nuclear Rainbow.”
***
“Stormbringer, an’ make it a double.”
***
“What d’you mean yer outta whiskey?!”
***
Flames were rising from the collapsed frame of Tierney’s Pub.
“Thish one’s on me,” said Judy Lin, raising a finger unsteadily into the air. “My bad.”
***
The scientist climbed on top of the cloned president, her mouth all over his. She started pulling at the buttons on his shirt.
“Do it!” shouted Queen Victoria XXX from the passenger seat. “DO IT!”
Judy reached for her foot.
“Hey, where’sh my shoes?”
***
“What’d’ya mean yer outttta vokka?”
***
“GIVE ME ALL YOUR HOT DOGS!” roared the burly blonde man, hefting the hot dog cart over his head.
***
“Hey,” barked the conductor, sliding open the door, “you can’t be out here when the train’s moving.”
“Sorry,” slurred Abraham Lincoln XVI, pressed up against the edge of the alcove at the back of the subway car, “eshtenu – eshtenuitting circumshtances.”
“I don’t give a crap. You two can’t be between the cars when –”
Judy Lin, gripping the handle, pivoted sideways, aiming for the tracks, and hwarfed up, like, sixty percent of what she’d put away that evening. It took a while.
“Uh, yeah, OK,” said the train operator, watching her go. “Just ... try not to die.”
***
There was a ... dragon? Maybe?
But she was a good dragon and everybody ended up just playing cards together?
***
Thor Odinson and Queen Victoria XXX were standing around in their underwear in a laundromat. The clone was sitting on an idle dryer, while the thunder god was throwing clothes into a washing machine.
They both seemed very surprised by this.
“Where’d did everybody go?” asked Thor.
“Is this ‘cause of the drinking or the time jumping?” asked the queen.
“More ‘portantly,” began the god, holding up his shirt, “who’s brains is these?”
“It’s whose,” mumbled the clone. “W-H-O-S-E.”
“What? How –”
“Yer not seeing the actual words you’re speaking?”
“No.”
The queen squinted, for a while.
“I probably shouldna drank that ayahuasca,” she eventually mumbled. There was a loud, wet rumble from the general vicinity of her midsection. Her eyes went wide. “Oh no. Is ... is there a bathroom in here?”
“I ‘ve no idea,” said the swaying pale-skinned man.
“Prob’ly not gonn’ make it anyway,” said the dark-skinned woman, lifting the lid of the dryer next to her. “Don’t look.” She added: “Or do. I’m not yer mom.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Tangled Up in Blue
Sometime the next something, Queen Victoria XXX, Thor Odinson, and Jesus Christ woke up on the White House lawn.
“I feel ... like there’s a joke here ...” mumbled the god.
“No. No talking,” rasped the clone, clearly in the anguished throes of several different hangovers. Pulling herself into a sitting position, she looked down at her legs, then her arms and hands, and so on. She appeared to be wearing her faded black duster, over leather pants and a Kevlar-lined top. She had on a pair of reinforced, half-fingered gloves.
“What’s ... This isn’t what I was wearing last night. These are my hero clothes.” Something like hope rose in her chest. “Did I change the past?”
“If you did, you didn’t do a great job,” said Thor, pointing toward the black hole tie-dyeing the horizon. “I think we just changed clothes.” He turned his arm, stretched his legs, taking in one of a half dozen combinations of the only things he wore: boots, jeans, and a flannel shirt.
“Or maybe we had them changed for us?” he added, thinking causing more of a headache than usual. “I don’t remember much after, like, the fourth bar we burned down.”
“That’s dumb,” grumbled the queen. “You’re dumb.”
“I’m not the one who fucked me.”
The clone stared at the god, squinted. Then, deflating: “I deserve that.”
Beside them, Jesus Christ moaned indistinctly and rolled over onto his back. The world was spinning around him, and he had no idea if it was vertigo or if the world was actually spinning, faster and faster, endlessly, like a busted carousel.
“I’d like to get off now,” he mumbled.
“That’s what she said,” said Thor.
“That is what I sa
id,” added Queen Victoria XXX.
The god’s face fell. “Now I feel bad.”
“You should.”
“Hey,” said Jesus, pointing, “what’s that?”
Across the yard, a blurry shape approached them, gradually getting less and less blurry as it neared, eventually revealing itself to be William H. Taft XLII. The big man knelt down next to the trio.
“I take it,” said the Benevolent Dictator of FARTSSS, “that you were unsuccessful.”
“Sorry,” said the thunder god.
The cloned president shrugged.
“Hey, uh, Billy,” began Queen Victoria XXX, head still swimming, “we saw Bo. Briefly. Didn’t exactly get to talk much.”
“Yeah? That’s been happening,” said William H. Taft XLII. Then: “How, uh, how was she doing?”
“She was doing really good, Billy,” Thor gently answered.
“I got sassed by my younger self, too,” added Queen Victoria XXX.
“Huh,” said the president. “History seems to have its eyes on you.”
“What?”
William H. Taft XLII stood up, his watch chain, the brass buttons on his military tunic catching the sunlight. He nodded his head toward the White House. “Something else showed up for you last night.”
“OK ...” said the queen.
“Inside.”
“OK.”
“Where we should go? Now?”
“For real, Billy? Can’t you just bring it out here?” she asked, leaning forward and rubbing her temples. “Moving seems like a lot right now.”
“I mean, I guess so,” mumbled William H. Taft XLII. “We had, like, a whole thing set up for you, but, sure, if you just want to shit all over –”
“It’s fine, Billy,” said a voice. A very familiar voice.
Queen Victoria XXX looked up, crippling migraine be damned.
Standing a short distance in front of her was Chester A. Arthur XVII. Reasonably tall and ruggedly handsome and heavily sideburned and in the flesh – his real, actual, original flesh. Not a cyborg, not a Frankenstein, not a hallucination or a hologram or a stuffed moose.
“Charlie?”
“Hey, Vicky.”
The cloned queen stumbled to her feet and ran to him, throwing herself into his arms. The president grabbed her and swung her around.
“Charlie!”
“You know there’s a giant black hole devouring the Earth, right?” he said, his gaze darting toward the giant black hole devouring the Earth. “Should we –”
“I don’t care, baby,” she said, tears in her eyes, his face in her hands.
“Then I don’t either,” said the president.
They started kissing, and they didn’t stop for a good long while.
Meanwhile, twenty feet away ...
“Harsh,” said Jesus Christ, struggling to sit up. “Weren’t you two ... y’know ...”
“Warm bodies on a cold night, buddy,” answered the thunder god, smiling. He clapped his hand on his brother’s back. “Come on, let’s go find some coffee. You can tell me what you got up to after you left us last night.”
“Oh, man, man,” said the Middle Eastern man, stooped and unsteady on his feet, “you’re not gonna believe it. As soon as I left the bar, like, immediately, I ran into Buddha and Shiva, and then we all piled into a cab and ...”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Now Comes the Part of Our Story That Gets a Little Bit Sad
The workshop – more like a warehouse, really – was uncharacteristically silent. Empty, too. Benches and tables were cluttered with equipment, with half-built conductors and motors, unfinished teleportational transponders and transmogrifiers and all kinds of other space-age shit.
But there was no one there doing anything with them.
William H. Taft XLII, a hemoglobic compressor engine in his arms, walked a few steps farther inside.
“Hello?” he called.
“Yeah,” called a voice, low and sullen and from the shadows. “In the back, Billy.”
Taking the engine with him, the cloned president walked the length of the warehouse, to the last workstation at the back. He found a man slumped forward, small and lean, covered in grease and scabs, his elbows on the table before him, his long hair falling forward.
“What’s going on?” asked William H. Taft XLII, dropping the engine on a nearby bench. “What happened since you called?”
The man swiveled around on his stool. His eyes were red and dry.
“Why are we doing this, man?” asked Leonardo da Vinci XXIV.
“What do you mean, why? Because we have to.”
“This isn’t going to work, Billy,” roared the inventor, slamming his fist onto his workbench. “That’s the hemoglobic compressor, right? The fucking blood engine? We’re so far past science this is basically witchcraft. How fucked do we have to be that we’ve turned to god damned witchcraft?!”
“You know full well there’s a –”
“Oh, for – Shove it out your ass, man!” shouted Leonardo da Vinci XXIV. “Even if we could get the – and I repeat – blood engine connected to the quantum core, which itself, by the way, still won’t connect to the vacuum torpedo, which itself is already heavily reliant on ancient fucking runes, it’s not going to do shit. We have no way of getting it airborne high enough and fast enough, and the singularity’s too far gone anyway.”
“Fuck you, Leo,” snarled William H. Taft XLII, rage suddenly consuming him. He’d been through too much, seen too many of his friends die in his arms, to let things end this way, to watch anyone else he cared for be destroyed by a heartless and haphazard universe. He’d put too much of his own blood and sweat into rebuilding this world from dust and ash, chased away too many wives turning humanity into something actually worth saving.
And, by god – any of them, all of them – he’d save it again. Through sheer force of will if he had to.
“We can fix this,” said the president, his voice a cracking glacier.
“We can’t, Billy,” pleaded the small man. “We physically can’t.”
“Maybe you can’t –” The big man shoved past the clone of the Italian painter. “– but I can. I can fix anything. I can fix this.”
“You can’t, man! Are you even fucking listening?! We – all of us – Archimedes and Albert and Grace and Franklin and fucking Marie – Marie! – we’ve tried literally everything and –”
“I can fix this!” he exploded. Then William H. Taft XLII grabbed the blood engine and hefted it onto da Vinci’s workbench.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Till You All Just Disappear
The sky had been varying shades of dark purple for a while now, save for the parts that were black and blue and dematerializing. Only with tremendous difficulty was Chester A. Arthur XVII, reloaded from an earlier save point and currently sitting on the roof of the Rainbow House, able to discern where the sun was supposed to be.
He was, as far as he could tell, watching it set for the last time.
“Fuck.”
There was a knock on the skylight next to him. He turned, found Queen Victoria XXX climbing onto the roof.
“How you doing?” she asked, settling in beside him. “Come to terms with oblivion yet?”
“Getting there,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII. “The sky’s pretty, though.”
“In that ‘science can’t explain how it hasn’t killed us all yet’ kind of way, sure.”
He smiled. “What other definition of ‘pretty’ is there?”
“Come on,” she said, taking his hand. “Inside.” Her eyes flashed. “We’ve still got a few hours and I’m damn sure gonna make ‘em count.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
If I Had a Hammer
The forty-second clone of America’s twenty-seventh president was hunched over the worktable, sweating through his undershirt; his hands, his arms, a blur of activity. He measured this and mathed that, punching numbers into a tablet, into his phone, scratching down others on scrap p
aper. He pulled out lengths of wire, clamps and couplings, screws and bolts, ransacking the other stations. The big man drilled and welded, and, when that didn’t work, shoved things together, cramming gears and outlets into one another through brute force.
“Billy,” said Catherine the Great XLIX.
“Leo send you in here?” he replied, not looking up.
“He’s worried about you,” she said. “I’m worried about you.”
“That seems like a gross misuse of your time.”
“You’re talking like there’s any left.”
“Where’s Artemis?” asked the president, and not gently.
“Trying to do what you’re doing,” the cloned empress explained, “the impossible. She thinks she can move the moon.”
“Maybe she can.”
“Maybe. Won’t do any good, though. Not now.”
“So you left her?” William H. Taft XLII put down his tools, turned his head.
“She turned into an eighty-foot-tall ethereal being and started walking on the air,” said Catherine the Great LXIX. “Wasn’t a whole lot I could do after that.”
“I’m ... I’m sorry,” he said, slouching forward. The benevolent dictator breathed deeply, his shoulders rising and falling. He swiveled toward the other clone for a moment, then abruptly returned to the workbench.
“But either help me,” he growled, “or get out.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
All I Need Tonight
Judy Lin slid out from beneath the covers and began creeping around the bedroom, looking for her clothing. She was currently wearing socks and someone else’s t-shirt and nothing else. The task was proving more difficult than anticipated; there was, she realized, a very real possibility that she was still drunk.
