by Eirik Gumeny
“So you’re just ... leaving?” asked Abraham Lincoln XVI. Judy heard him rustling in the bed behind her.
The woman turned around, her face pinched. “Yeah ...” she said. “I had a great time, don’t get me wrong, but ... I didn’t want you to get the wrong impression or anything. I just ... I don’t really see a future between us?”
The cloned president knit his brow. “I mean, OK, that’s fair, but ... You do remember that there’s no future for any of us, right?”
“Oh,” Judy replied, “right.” She shook her head. “Completely blanked on that.” The slight scientist in the t-shirt shrugged. “So, like, coffee and donuts and then we keep going at it, intercourse-style, until were atomized into nothing?”
“That was always my plan,” said the Abraham Lincoln, throwing off the covers. “I’ll get the coffee started.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Stars You Never Could See
Parker Petersen and Mary Anne Holmes had, like so many others, felt a need to actually see the supermassive extradimensional black hole that would soon be killing them. After all, they’d made it through the panicking, and the rioting, and the ugly-crying until they were dehydrated. They’d thought long and talked hard and resigned themselves to Earth’s impending erasure from existence.
The least the universe could do now was make it worth their while.
The universe, for its part, seemed to agree.
Microwaving some popcorn and unbarricading the door, Parker and Mary Anne were greeted by a sight to end all sights – literally. Taking up most of the western sky, the pitch black singularity, the empty heart of the black hole, was ringed by swirling, admiral blue tendrils of interdimensional radiation, crackling and effervescent like a neon sign, a kaleidoscope of stars caught in their wake. Add in some reds and oranges from the occasional floating city paying the price for its hubris, and the imminent end of everything may as well have been a van Gogh painting, albeit from his oft-forgotten Doomsayer Period.
Sitting down on the rickety wooden steps of Parker’s apartment, barefoot and cold, the two twentysomethings were struck appropriately dumb by the magnificence of nature, frozen by the awesomeness of science barreling down on them, their mouths open, popcorn not quite there. Facing, for the first time and absolutely without question, the vastness of the universe and their own paltry insignificance, the couple couldn’t help but feel something stir within their very souls.
And then, after that got boring, their pants.
Letting the popcorn fall and spill across the sidewalk, Mary Anne and Parker hurled their bodies together, his hands in her hair, her hands on his thighs, their mouths never separating. Fueled by adrenaline and abandon and still-being-in-their-twenties, this particular encounter was shaping up to be something special.
This, after all, was no mere hook-up, no last gasp Hail Mary. No, this – though neither of them was entirely sure about it yet – was true love.
Which is precisely why what happened next, happened next.
With a brilliant flash and the horrendous crashing sound of physics breaking in half, a flying saucer – shiny silver and lined with blinking lights, on the smaller side as far as these things went – appeared over the street before the young lovers, hovering twenty feet above the pavement.
“Whaaat the hell,” inquired Mary Anne, looking at the ship.
Within a matter of moments, the air directly in front of the couple fizzled and popped, then settled down again in the shape of two aliens. They were short and green, with heads like upside-down scrotums. Their species didn’t appear to have discovered clothes yet.
“Yo,” said the first one, holding something that looked like a mobile phone up to something that looked like its throat.
“You guys want to live or what?” asked the second, doing the same.
“Whaaat ...” parroted Parker.
“Do. You. Want. To. Live.” The alien removed the translation contraption and grumbled something unintelligible – though obviously insulting – to its partner.
“What my friend here is trying to say,” said the first alien, “is that we’re a little pressed for time, yeah? I mean, you guys are aware of the scientifically-impossible singularity gobbling up your atmosphere, right?”
“We are,” replied Parker.
“That, somehow, is the only part of this that makes any sense,” added Mary Anne.
“OK, good. Then let’s start there: You’re planet is screwed. Screeewwwed. As such, someone sent out a distress beacon. We found it, and now we’re here to rescue you. And by you, we mean you two, specifically.”
“I’m confused,” said Parker.
“Yeah, no shit,” said the second alien. “Thankfully we’re not here for your brains.”
“Q’en, come on,” said the first one. Then, turning back to the humans: “OK, let’s try this again. I’m Fr’r and this is my partner Q’en. We’re from the planet ... Well, it doesn’t have a great translation into any Earth consonants, but, for the sake of argument, you can call it F’t Blottogr’ls. Our planet – and, again, this isn’t a direct equivalence – is powered by love. Pure, untarnished love.”
“Powered by?” asked Parker.
“Like batteries?” asked Mary Anne.
“Yes ...” Fr’r hesitantly agreed, “but not like you’re thinking. You’re not plugged into anything or shoved inside of something.”
“We’re nowhere near as primitive as your outdated human prisons,” added Q’en.
“So, then, what?” asked the young human male. “Like, zoos?”
“And you siphon off our ... feelings?” asked the human female.
“More like a wilderness preserve,” said Fr’r, raising its knee, the F’t Blottogr’lian equivalent of a shrug. “Lot of room.”
“Huh.”
“It’s not as bad as you’re making it sound, I promise.”
“Besides ...” Q’en tossed a thumb-like appendage towards the swirling vortex of annihilation over its shoulder.
“That is an excellent point,” said Parker, getting up from the stairs. “You in?” he asked his girlfriend, holding out a hand.
“Are you kidding me?” said Mary Anne, taking it and pulling herself up. “I worked retail. Let’s get the hell off this craphole planet.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Q’en.
“Great,” added Fr’r. “Now let’s get going. We’ve still got, like, a hundred more couples to collect and the clock is ticking.”
“Only a hundred?” asked Parker.
The aliens cocked what passed for their eyebrows.
“No, right,” said the young man, “my bad. Heard it as soon as I said it.”
“Honestly,” said the second alien, “it is just like Earth to kill itself and destroy the entire fucking galaxy along the way.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dream to Me
“Can’t sleep?” asked Jesus Christ, on his back, his hands behind his head.
“No.”
“Worried about the end of the world?”
“Yes,” said Mary Magdalene, rolling closer and laying her head on his chest. “Is it too late to start praying for a miracle?”
“Can’t hurt,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Just for One Day
An enormous, rattletrap Winnebago materialized out of seemingly nowhere. After a moment, and with unnecessary force, the door was thrown open, clattering against the side of the motor home. A woman in a tweed sport jacket leaned out, one hand still gripping the interior handle. Another woman in a hoodie leaned out behind her.
“Right,” said the first woman, “we need to –”
“Where’s the ground?”
“What?”
“The ground,” said the second woman, looking down at the absolute nothing on which the vehicle was perched. “Where the hell is it?”
“Benedict Cumberbatch.”
Carissa Romero-Patel ducked back inside, rushing to the rear of the clutt
ered RV and frantically inspecting the cobbled-together time-teleporter that took up most of the bedroom. She hurried from connection to connection, reactor to reactor, lifting this and sliding that and, in a moment of deep thought, leaning her palm against one of the overworked processing towers.
“Ow, fuck,” she groaned, pulling her hand away. Then, eyes darting across the machinery, she called to the front: “What are our planetary coordinates?”
Her wife, Amber, grabbed the control tablet from the stained Formica counter and tapped it a few times.
“We, uh, we don’t have any,” she said, violently poking the screen some more.
“You’re sure you’re reading that right, right?”
“Yes!” Amber shouted. “I have a Ph.D. too!”
“I know, but it took you seven years, and it was in art history.”
“Let it go, lady!”
“I don’t get it,” said Carissa, brow knitted like a wool hat, making her way toward the front of the motor home. “Why are we in space? We’re supposed to be in the Consolidated Phukital parking lot, six hours before their asinine plan to set off a hydrogen bomb and kill us all.”
“Did you forget to adjust for the Earth’s position in space when you made the jump?” asked Amber, somewhere between gently and condescendingly. “Its orbit and rotation?”
“Of course I adjusted for those,” replied her wife with a sneer.
“Then why, my love, my sweetheart, are we already inside of the black hole we came here to stop?!” shouted Amber, hurling the tablet through the doorway and into the endless void surrounding the Winnebago. “We’re basically sitting on the event horizon!”
“I don’t know, honey,” snarled Carissa. “I don’t know why we’re – Oh, wait, wait. I do. I know what happened.”
“You didn’t account for the black hole, did you? The increased gravity, the strange effects it has on time?”
“I did not.”
“God damn it, Carissa,” groaned the other woman, slumping onto the tattered couch.
“That’s kind of an overreaction, isn’t it, babe?” said the woman in the blazer, placing a hand on Amber’s shoulder and squeezing gently. “We’re in a time-teleporter. We’ll just, you know ...” She hopped in place.
“We can’t do that, you dumb dummy,” growled her wife, shoving the other woman’s tweed-covered arm away. “For one thing, I just threw the control tablet into outer space, and, for another, it takes, like, thirty minutes to reprogram the destinations and get everything running, and that’s after a mandatory thirty-minute cooldown.”
“And we don’t –”
“No, not even close.”
“Huh.” Carissa scrunched up her face, sat down on the sofa beside Amber. The windows behind them were black as pitch. “Guess we really fucked this one up then.”
“You. You fucked this one up,” corrected Amber, leaning her head back, her eyes closed.
“Well, whoever may or may not have been at fault here, let me ... let me just say thank you, Amber, for being my companion on this –”
“I am your wife, lady,” roared the woman in the hoodie, springing back to life. “Don’t come at me with this companion shit like I’m some kind of sidekick.” Amber gasped, like a put-upon assistant on a British sitcom. “Or a dog?! Do you think of me like I’m your pet?!”
“Not ... all the time ...”
“You unbelievable bitch!”
“You’re the one that was always saying Cleo was an equal part of the family!”
“Because she was!”
“She was a Shih-Tzu!” Carissa snapped. “And if she’s so equal, why is it such an insult if I referred to you as a dog?”
“So you were!”
“I said ‘if’!”
“Oh my God!” shouted Amber, rising angrily and stomping in front of Carissa. “You know what, babe? That’s it. This is the last friggin’ time! Why don’t you,” she began slowly, calmer than she’d been expecting, “take a running leap and go fu–”
The Winnebago disappeared into the black hole – although, to any outside observers, it merely stretched infinitely, a streak of beige and burgundy slowly thinning and dissipating into nothing.
In a sense, the two women never actually died.
Amber Romero-Patel simply screamed at her wife forever.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Drinking Whiskey and Rye
Something that sort of looked like something that might actually do something was beginning to take shape on the workbench. William H. Taft XLII, drenched and dirty, grabbed a small sledgehammer, began slamming it against a metal plug.
Outside the warehouse, the wind was picking up, the windows rattling. The lights above the table flickered.
The big man continued hammering, methodical and determined.
The wind began to howl, like a werewolf after being stood up. The building began to rock, like a teenage band without any self-awareness or ability in a bar without a stage or any patrons. Things began to topple off tables, like a drunken pole dancer.
But the clone kept hammering, the clanging tattoo ringing out faster and faster. Then, more and more frantic, uneven. Before the big man finally just screamed and started throwing tools everywhere.
“Fuck!”
Lifting the blood engine over his head, he hurled the compressor to the floor, then kicked it so hard it dented, slid, and slammed into another workbench.
“FUCK!”
William H. Taft XLII fell to his knees.
“I can fix this,” he whimpered. “I can fix anything.”
“Not this, man,” said Leonardo da Vinci XXIV, eyes red and wet, “I’m sorry.” He put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Come on. Everyone else is in the lounge. Stefani’s worried sick.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Judgement Day
Amen-Ra, Egyptian God-King of the Sun and creator of the universe, was watching television. A Wheel of Fortune rerun, specifically.
“The Fast and the Furious,” he mumbled. “The solution is very clearly –”
The screen turned black. The power went out.
With tremendous effort, Amen-Ra removed himself from his armchair and, tying his bathrobe tight around his waist, shuffled over to the window. He pulled up the blinds.
The world – his world – was coming apart at the seams. The planet he’d so meticulously built, from the burning core to the abundant wildlife to the thinning air, was being ripped apart and turned to nothing before his very eyes.
He shrugged. “Maybe next time.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
No One Sings Like You Anymore
Erin McCafferty and Jorge Reyes, hands clasped and hearts heavy, sat on their couch, wide eyes on the widescreen across from them. The local news – cycling through every anchor and set the station had ever had over the past twenty years – was airing clips of the world’s tallest cities being warped and smudged and erased, like someone learning how to use Photoshop for the first time. The floating cities were already gone, said the newswoman, and, obviously, the mid-size buildings were next, followed by the regular ones. Citizens were advised to try to find a basement, or a gutter, or a fallout shelter, and press themselves flat against the floor.
This wouldn’t actually do much, however, explained the newsman, given how utterly and completely fu–
Erin turned off the television, tossing the remote onto the coffee table. She pulled her husband’s arm tight, nestling her greying head into his chest. Jorge laid his head on hers. Around them, their walls flickered and fell and reappeared, clean and brand new, like when they’d first purchased the house half a lifetime ago.
“We had a good run,” she said.
“We did,” he replied, kissing the top of her head.
“I’m glad it was you.”
Jorge Reyes pulled Erin McCafferty closer, holding her tightly.
He never let her go again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The End, Forever
&n
bsp; Thor Odinson, the Norse God of Thunder; Queen Victoria XXX, the last extant clone of the last ruler of the House of Hanover; and a time-displaced Chester A. Arthur XVII sat on the elaborately manicured Rainbow House lawn, watching as New New York, D.C. was sucked away into the ravenous maw of the extradimensional black hole bearing down on them.
Red, white, and blue federal buildings twisted and unraveled, the color draining out of them along the way. Slate and chrome and glass shattered and spun and stretched, like funhouse mirrors reflecting a quarry caught up in a tornado.
The horizon – or what passed for it – was yanked upward in the middle, like the mouth of a fish on a hook.
Everything else was black, utter and complete. The black hole was so close and so wide, no one could see the edges, the spinning blue tentacles of otherdimensional energy surging and grabbing.
And the wind, full of sound and fury, howling, carrying screams and cries and rending metal, signifying the all-encroaching nothing devouring everything.
It was only a matter of minutes now.
“I guess this is goodbye,” said Thor, raising his voice above the din. He held up a half-drunk bottle of champagne. The clones did the same.
“For Bo,” he said.
“For Ali,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“For Billy,” said the queen, “wherever he is.”
“For Mark and Timmy.”
“For Jesus and Artemis and Cathy.”
“For Sheila,” said Thor.
“For Marty,” the clone added wistfully.
“For Charlie,” said Queen Victoria XXX, crashing her bottle into the others.
“For Catrina,” said the thunder god.
Guzzling the last of the alcohol – the very last on Earth – the trio braced for impact, clenching their butts, hands digging into the soil, wondering how it would feel to be torn apart atom by atom.
