by Eirik Gumeny
“Sure are,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII. “Fire up the grill, fatty.”
“The nearest functioning liquor store is four hours away.”
“Then Charlie and I ‘ll be back in eight hours,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “Give you time to carve that bitch up.”
“That’s the spirit,” said the cloned genetics of Chester A. Arthur.
“Aw, come on guys,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“We should probably get more cigarettes, too.”
“No, uh-uh,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “You said you were going to stop.”
“Well, I was, but…”
“I’m not having this discussion again, Charlie. If you buy cigarettes on this trip, I’m hitting you with the car.”
“Fine, no cigarettes,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII with a sigh.
“Good. Now let’s get going.”
“Later, Billy,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“Shotgun!” shouted Queen Victoria XXX, prancing her way out of the kitchen.
“Hall closet,” replied Chester A. Arthur XVII as he grabbed the car keys from the counter.
Six: Quetzalcoatl Hates Clocks
Quetzalcoatl stared at the clock. The digital representation of the time stared back.
Quetzalcoatl stared even harder at the clock. The time did not blink.
Quetzalcoatl stared as hard as he fucking could at the clock. The clock burst into flames.
Granted, this didn’t stem so much from the staring as it did the clock’s position on top of a lit stove, but Quetzalcoatl didn’t care. He hated that clock.
Quetzalcoatl was not well.
While most deities had eventually accepted the demise of religion, grudgingly or otherwise, Quetzalcoatl just kind of went insane instead. In his defense, it had been hard enough being the winged serpent god of a people that died out five hundred years prior. He didn’t need to be told he didn’t exist on top of it.
This isn’t to say that he didn’t at least try to adapt.
In fact, “can’t argue with science,” was Quetzalcoatl’s first thought upon finding out he was no longer him.
“Well, you can, but then you get murdered by robots in your sleep,” was the second.
“Fucking robots. I bet I can take ‘em,” was the third.
Quetzalcoatl single-handedly fought off six hundred platoons of science-enforcing murder-drones in a stunning battle that wiped out all of Central America and most of Mexico. Land, people, llamas, everything. Still, victory was victory. Quetzalcoatl climbed atop the mountain of broken machinery and re-claimed his godhood, shouting his intentions to the heavens.
Of course, at that point, Quetzalcoatl was half a mile underwater. Lifting one’s head up and shouting from that depth is a pretty good way to drown. Which is precisely what almost happened.
Quetzalcoatl eventually made his way to the surface, his face blue and his lungs saturated with water, motor oil, and llama blood. Grabbing a piece of flotsam, Quetzalcoatl floated in the unnamed body of water he had just created for days on end, the sun beating down on him while sharks gnashed repeatedly at his ass. By the time he made it to New Orleans, he wasn’t really sure what was who or why was where anymore, for no good no way.
Between the lack of oxygen, the loss of blood, and the dementia, the doctors were amazed any of his organs still functioned. They said it was a miracle he was even alive.
The bartenders said the same thing, only they meant ‘cause of all the bourbon.
Quetzalcoatl spent the better part of the next year drinking. By the time he sobered up, he had somehow managed to secure himself an apartment, a car, three girlfriends, and a paternity suit. That launched another year-long bender. By the time he came out of that one, he was down to just the apartment.
“And that, my good sir,” he said to the refrigerator, “is why mustard tastes purple.”
Quetzalcoatl bowed to the appliance and walked out of the building.
Seven: Baked Spit and Broken Glass
“I’m just saying,” said Thor.
“Saying what?” asked Catrina.
“What?”
“Huh?”
“What was I talking about?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“OK, right.”
“Are you OK, Thor?”
“No? Maybe? No. I think there might have been something in the pancakes.”
“I wasn’t aware seething hatred had a physical form.”
“I think it has a lot of the same attributes as spit and flecks of broken glass.”
“Shouldn’t you have noticed that?”
“How was I supposed to see baked spit?”
“I meant the glass.”
“Oh. Yes. It was crunchy.”
“And yet you ate all four of them anyway.”
“I thought… I’m not really sure what I thought.”
“It is utterly amazing that you’ve survived this long on your own.”
“Verily.”
“Well, I’m not carrying you. Think you can make it back to the hotel?”
“As long as it’s not the building that’s on fire behind you.”
Catrina turned around.
“Uh, no. No, that’s the Dunkin Donuts. And it’s not on fire. The guy who works there is waving at us.”
“Is he on fire?”
“No, he is not on fire.”
“Then, yes, I think I can make it back to the hotel.”
Eight: Midgets! Midgets! Midgets!
Thor laid himself down on the couch in the lobby of the Holiday Inn.
“When did we repaint the ceiling with bats?”
“OK, I’m pretty sure eating broken glass doesn’t make you hallucinate,” said Catrina, kneeling next to him. “What the hell is wrong with you, Thor?”
“He was poisoned,” said Mark, emerging from his office. “He’s got a mix of PCP and battery acid coursing through his veins.”
“Dude,” said Thor, lifting his head slightly, “I told you not to x-ray me without asking. It’s weird and, as my boss, I’m pretty sure I signed something saying you’re not allowed to do it anyway.”
“You think my eye can detect poison? It’s an ocular implant, not magic, jackass,” replied Mark, walking toward them. “I was a medic in the war. I saw this kind of thing all the time.”
“The Hybrid War?” asked Catrina. “I thought all the cyborgs that fought in that were turned into calculators and belts.”
“Robot War.”
“Which one? There were, like, seven.”
“Oh, right,” said Mark. He began counting on his fingers and said, “The… fifth.”
“You sure? I thought the hybrids sat that one out.”
“They did,” he replied, arriving at the couch and kneeling next to Catrina. “I was still human then.”
“Oh,” said Catrina. “Sorry.”
“You should be. I’m not one of those Mark I cyborgs that volunteered to have their skin grafted onto a robotic skeleton ‘cause they were too chicken-shit to keep fighting. I’m a good, old-fashioned human, forcibly joined with an x-ray eye and a pneumatic penis because I was too stupid to stop fighting.”
“Not the damn penis again…” said Thor, writhing on the couch.
“What? I’m proud of it, Thor. I can lift a god damned Volkswagen.”
“Christ, Mark, now I’m picturing it. And there’s a midget watching you for some reason.”
“That… that sounds all kinds of unpleasant,” said Catrina.
“It is, Catrina. It is! But I can’t stop! There’re two midgets now and they’re… they’re dancing!”
“Wow, OK,” she said. “I was actually talking to Mark.”
“It’s not so bad,” said Mark. “You get used to it, really. And besides, now I can sex up a vending machine if I get bored.”
“What? Vending…? Is that why there’s a hole…” Catrina trailed off. “Oh god.”
“Yeah…” said Mark. “Don’t use the ven
ding machine on this floor if you can help it.”
“I don’t really feel so bad about disliking you anymore.”
“I call her Sheila.”
Nine: Bananabilism
“Are we there yet?”
“Does it look like we’re there yet?”
“I… I honestly can’t tell,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “Between the bleached wasteland and the engorged, white-hot sun, I’m not really sure what I’m looking at anymore. I think I may have gone blind.”
“You’re not blind,” replied Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“OK, well, I think I may have become bored. Like, catastrophically.”
“That’s a distinct possibility. Have you tried not being bored?”
“Yes. It didn’t work.”
“Maybe you were doing it wrong.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I followed the instructions in the pamphlet note for note.”
“What pamphlet?”
“The one I wrote on the back of this napkin.”
Chester A. Arthur XVII took the napkin from Queen Victoria XXX and held it against the steering wheel.
“This is completely unintelligible. I’m pretty sure most of it isn’t actually English.”
“Well, no. Step two is create your own language. I’ve got seventeen words that mean ‘oh my god, can’t you drive any faster.’”
“It’s not my fault you forgot to charge your iPod.”
“I’m hungry.”
“How many words do you have for that?”
“Six. One sounds an awful lot like ‘no Chinese’ and two of them rhyme with ‘cannibalism.’”
“Only two?”
“I don’t really feel like driving.”
“Well, we’ll be stopping soon, I’m going to have to refuel anyway.”
Queen Victoria XXX scanned the vast, empty space between their car and the horizon.
“Define ‘soon.’”
“That would be roughly equivalent to the length of time it takes us to move through this impenetrable nothingness and into a someplace that actually houses something of use and, preferably, isn’t populated by homicidal atomic mutants.”
Queen Victoria XXX returned her eyes to the horizon. She searched for any signs of civilization, any signs of life, but, instead, found only her sanity lowering a rusty razorblade to its wrists, weeping and inconsolable, desperate for some kind of a release from the incomprehensible, never-ending void that lay before it.
“So, what, twenty minutes?”
Ten: Twenty Minutes Later
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“You are aware that the controls for your window are available to me, and that opening said window will immediately flood the interior of the car with enough radiation and heat to boil your skin from your bones in a matter of moments, right?”
“Yes.”
“OK.”
“Are we there yet?”
“Seriously, Vicky, I’m not above killing us both to get you to shut up.”
Eleven: Happy Fun Breakfast Time
“Come on, babe,” said Josh, one hand on his coffee, the other upon his wife’s hand. “The city isn’t that bad.”
“I know,” said Jennie, one hand under her husband’s hand, the other on her pregnant belly. “I like it enough, I just don’t know that I want to raise a child here, is all.”
“Hey, I grew up here, and I turned out fine.”
“I know…”
“The schools are good, crime is down…”
“That’s true,” said Jennie, shifting in the wrought iron seat set up outside the café. “It’s just… I don’t know. Maybe… maybe you’re right. Maybe it isn’t so terrible here after all.”
Josh smiled at his wife. Jennie smiled back as her husband leaned across the matching wrought iron table to kiss her.
It was at this point that Quetzalcoatl ran down the street making extraordinarily loud whooshing noises, one arm raised as if in flight, the other holding a baby like a football.
“That…” said Josh, shaking his head, “that probably wasn’t a real…”
It was at this point that an irate mother dragging an empty carriage and screaming, “Give me back my baby,” a taxi driver hopping on one foot and screaming, “Give her back her baby,” and three policemen—two of whom appeared to have been hit in the face by an apple pie—screaming, “You god damned son of a bitch, give her back her baby,” ran down the street after Quetzalcoatl.
“OK, yeah,” said Josh, still positioned uncomfortably over the table and not quite kissing his wife. “I’ll put in for a transfer tomorrow.”
Twelve: The One Reserved for Ponies
Chester A. Arthur XVII and Queen Victoria XXX sat with their backs against the closed, locked doors of the liquor store, staring out into the alternatingly bright and pitch-black dawn.
“We probably should’ve checked the hours before we left,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“Yeah,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, leaning his head against the door. “In hindsight, our actions were rather rash.”
“We were out of beer,” explained Queen Victoria XXX, shrugging.
The pair watched as the horizon turned purple, then black, then blue, then purple again, within a span of seconds.
It had been doing that a lot lately.
After the world was ended for the twenty-first time, every single governing body on the planet collapsed in what was described as “the greatest, most confusing game of dominos ever witnessed.” During the brief vacuum of political and military power that followed, an orbital cannon was hijacked by a giant lizard that was, in turn, being controlled by a giant ape and, well, hijinks ensued.
“The sky’s kind of pretty, though.”
“In that ‘science can’t explain how it hasn’t killed us all yet’ kind of way, sure.”
It was all very complicated.
“Well, yeah,” replied Queen Victoria XXX. “What other definition of ‘pretty’ is there?”
Society was handling it fairly well, all things considered.
Thirteen: Classy
Thor and Catrina sat on opposite sides of her kitchen table. Two half-empty cups of coffee grew cold between them. Neither one had spoken a word for the better part of twenty minutes.
“Look,” said Thor, “I think we should…”
“I really don’t want to talk about it, Thor.”
“We can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Yes,” said Catrina, “yes, we can.”
“You and I both know that’s a lie.”
Catrina began swirling the coffee in her cup, averting her eyes from Thor’s.
“What happened last night…” he continued.
“No,” she said, snapping her head up. “I said no, Thor.”
“For fuck’s sake, Catrina. We’re friends, we work together. We have to talk about this.”
Catrina swiftly gathered
up both coffee mugs, emptying their contents in the sink and turning her back to Thor.
“I appreciate you taking me back to your place after I got poisoned, I do,” continued Thor. “You were looking out for me and… I mean, I’d like to think I’d have done the same thing if it had been you, but, I don’t know, maybe, in hindsight, maybe it wasn’t the smartest… especially given the circumstances…”
“You should leave.”
“Look, neither of us could’ve known… I mean, alright, I wasn’t really surprised it happened. And I don’t think you were either, if you could just be honest about it…”
“I said go. Now.”
“Damn it, no, Catrina. We need to get this out of the way.”
Catrina turned to face him, rage in her eyes and a knife in her hands.
“What happened last night…” she said, her voice barely controlled.
Catrina was only holding a butter knife, so she wasn’t actually as menacing as she thought she was, but it was still pretty clear she was pissed. Thor got that much.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Catrina softened, the murderous fury drifting from her face. She tossed the knife back into the sink.
“No,” she said, “don’t apologize. You don’t need to. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know,” said Thor, “but I feel responsible. Let’s face it, if I wasn’t here it wouldn’t… hell, it couldn’t have happened.”
“I know, Thor. I get it. I just… I don’t want to talk about it. I know it wasn’t your fault, but, at the same time, you’re right, if you… If I hadn’t… Look, we can’t change what happened.”
“I know. And I know it’s weird, uncomfortable. But I don’t get why you’re so upset about it. Hell, I’m kind of… proud. All things considered, it was pretty fucking impressive.”
“Jesus, Thor,” said Catrina, her face turning red. Then she started laughing. Thor joined her.
“I’m sorry I defiled your bathroom, Catrina.”
“It’s OK, Thor, I forgive you. But, please, can we not talk about this ever, ever again? That was… the single most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”
