by Eirik Gumeny
“Nevermind, I’m sorry I asked,” replied the queen, getting up and tossing her plate into a nearby trashcan. “Also, we don’t use that word anymore. We haven’t for, like, fifty, sixty years, at least.”
“Are you trying to censor me?”
“Oh my fucking –” She rested her fingertips on her forehead. “You about ready?”
“Sure,” said Andrew Jackson II. Standing, he wiped his hands on his pants and began walking away from the breakfast stand.
“Hold on, we still have to pay,” called out Queen Victoria XXX, pulling her credit card from a butter-filled pouch on her belt. She poked the paper plate with his half-eaten burrito with her toe. “And throw out your trash.”
“What? Why?” asked Andy indignantly. “They’re little girls. What’re they gonna do?”
“You want me to help you kill Susie, right? Don’t be a dick.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Half Man, Half Owl, All Adorable
A half-dozen forks were launched from the window of the Chili’s, striking three Verizon Wireless employees, possessed by infamous pirate queen Anne Bonny and two of her mistresses, in four of their eyes. One of the girls went down immediately, while Anne Bonny and the other one, screaming, hands pawing at the cutlery stabbed into their faces, turned to run.
They didn’t get far.
Nowhere, in fact.
Timmy latched onto the face of the still-standing mistress, scratching and clawing until she fell to the ground. Anne Bonny, removing the fork from her eye, and another from her forehead, looked frantically up and down the sidewalk, along the storefronts, trying to ignore all the blood. She saw a number of fallen – or actively falling – comrades, and a slightly greater number of angry shop owners. From behind her, she heard the terrified murmurs of her dilapidated and dwindling crew, huddled together in the parking lot.
The pirate queen didn’t like it, but she knew what had to be done.
“Retre–”
Anne Bonny was knocked to the sidewalk by a very large fist. She looked up to find Alexa Kostopoulos, owner of the pile of ash previously known as the Olympia Diner, standing over her with a large club of meat on her shoulder.
“This is for my restaurant!” she shouted. Then the Greek woman proceeded to beat the ever-loving shit out of the pirate-possessed salesperson with a giant leg of lamb.
***
The balloon basket tilted and pitched as the thunder god and the man from Dunkin Donuts danced across its base. The flamingos squawked. Catrina tried not to vomit again. Honest Clark of Honest Clark’s Aerotorium had, long ago, fallen over the side of the basket, was gripping a fraying rope for dear life. Chester A. Arthur XVII lay dead in the bottom of the basket, duct-taped to one side of the wicker in an effort to create some counterbalancing ballast.
“Get this thing the hell off of me!”
Thor spun around wildly again, the tiny, brown owl-cherub still latched onto his head. Ali, holding the fire extinguisher like a baseball bat, continued trying to find a clear angle from which to smack the damned thing. The bird-baby flapped its wings and dug its itty-bitty fingernails into the thunder god’s scalp.
“Stop moving, Thor!” shouted Ali.
“Then get it off me!” shouted the thunder god.
“I’m trying!”
“Get it off me!”
“He’s so cute!” shouted Catrina.
“His little baby junk is in my ear!”
“Hold still!”
“I can feel him inside my head!”
“Stop thrashing, damn it!” demanded Ali.
“Screw it!” replied Thor, rushing across the basket, “I’m gonna jump!”
“Shit,” said the donut maker, spinning, “there’s another one.”
“Another one?!” squeaked Catrina.
“Where are they coming from?!” the Norseman roared.
“More on the way, fellas,” shouted Honest Clark. “Looks like a whole herd of the buggers.”
“No!” Thor screamed. “No! I have too many face holes for that to be OK!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Ride the Lightning
The balloon basket bounced off a dying cottonwood tree, spun around, bounced off another tree, then hit the barren forest floor with a colossal thud, before exploding into a thousand flaming wicker splinters. A half dozen electrocuted flamingos crashed through the tree canopy and into the ground not long after, followed almost immediately by Thor, Catrina, Ali, and the corpse of Chester A. Arthur XVII.
A flock of very lost and very dead seagulls rained down on top of them.
“What the hell, Thor?!” asked Catrina, lifting herself from the dirt. Though it was really more of an exclamation than a question.
“What?” countered Thor, though, again, it wasn’t so much a question as a brush-off.
“I’m pretty sure I broke my ankle,” replied Ali, near tears, rolling over and grabbing at his foot. His reply was exactly what it sounded like.
“Walk it off, donut guy,” said Thor.
“That’s the exact wrong way to treat a broken ankle,” said Catrina, kneeling next to Ali and examining the injury.
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“Why would you even do that?” demanded the hotel clerk.
“You told me to!” the thunder god replied.
“I did not! I asked if anyone knew how to land a flamingo-powered basket and, next thing you know, every bird in a hundred yard radius was simultaneously being struck by lightning!”
“We landed, didn’t we?”
“We fell from several hundred feet! And we’re still a good two miles from the volcano!”
“You said you wanted an adventure,” remarked the burly Norseman with a shrug.
“No, I didn’t.”
“That was me,” said the donut merchant, still in pain and still clutching at his shattered ankle. “I wanted the adventure. I’m kind of regretting that now.”
“I’d wait to start regretting stuff if I was you. I’m sure it’s going to get worse from here,” said Thor, looking into the distance, toward the volcano looming over the forest. The sunset was painting the sky a dark orange. “Can you walk?”
“I can’t even stand.”
“Is that a no?”
“Yes.”
Thor exhaled loudly. “I suppose you expect me to carry you and Charlie to the volcano?”
“Yes,” said Catrina. “This is your fault.”
“This is gravity’s fault.”
“Seriously? I suppose you’re going to blame the ground, too.”
“You don’t think it feels unnaturally hard?”
“That is unbelievably stupid, Thor.”
In Thor’s defense, the forest floor was composed of dense igneous rock covered with a single, thin layer of cheap mulch, so it was a lot harder than a forest floor had any right being.
“I am dangerously close to pissing my pants right now,” said Ali. “This is unbelievably painful and I don’t remember seeing Vicodin in any of our provisions.”
“I don’t remember having any provisions,” said Thor.
“Can you pick him up?” asked Catrina. “You’re the one with the strength of a million men or whatever.”
“It’s only two hundred and eight and none of them want to get pissed on again.”
“That owl-baby-thing really did a number on you, didn’t he?”
“I will never be OK again.”
“And Honest Clark ...”
“Poor bastard,” muttered Ali.
“I’ve never seen anyone spontaneously implode before,” said Catrina. “I didn’t know it was even possible.”
“You never get used to seeing it,” said Thor quietly.
The man from Dunkin Donuts attempted to stand, but immediately fell back down, face first into the mulch. “Nope, still in tremendous agony,” Ali said through clenched teeth. “Can we get going?”
“Sure,” said Thor, shouldering the increasingly less li
felike corpse of Chester A. Arthur XVII. “Let’s go deliver our dead friend to a supervillain.”
***
A mile and a half later, the god, the girl, and the gimp heard a noise.
While hearing a noise in the middle of a dense forest of cottonwoods normally wouldn’t be a cause for concern, this was in fact the first and only noise the trio had heard since they crashed, other than Ali’s continued whinging. The reason for this was that this particular forest was not naturally occurring. The trees had been imported from the Rio Grande flood basin and planted in the middle of the most arid chunk of what was then the New Mexico desert, many, many miles away. The trees did not enjoy this as much as one might imagine.
As such, the forest was supplemented by a number of fake cottonwoods, made either from steel or the bones of non-believers, or sometimes both, which were then spray-painted and Lysoled to look and smell like a real forest. The scientist who originally built it – a disgruntled hybrid of man and marlin by the name of Sir Scales – opted not to add the piped-in ambient sounds of the woodlands as he deemed it too extravagant an expense. The end result was that standing in the middle of the forest sounded less like being in the middle of the wilderness and a lot more like being alone in the center of a vast, uncaring universe. Any noise, no matter how insignificant or harmless, was going to be surprising.
The noise in question, sounding neither insignificant nor harmless, and, in fact, sounding suspiciously like a very big and very angry grizzly bear, was therefore really, really surprising.
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Catrina.
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” replied Thor. “Whatever it is, it’s probably more scared of us than we are of – Shit.”
A very big and very angry grizzly bear appeared in front of them. It had two very big and very angry laser guns mounted on its back.
“This was unexpected,” said Catrina.
“I’m actually surprised there aren’t –”
“More of them!” shouted the donut merchant, slung over Thor’s shoulder and looking in the opposite direction. “There’s more of them.”
“How many?” asked Thor, still staring at the first laser-wearing grizzly and the two equally laser-wearing bears that were now standing behind it.
“One rhinoceros, four alligators, and a dozen chipmunks.”
“Chipmunks?”
“They could be anorexic squirrels. Or large mice, I guess. I’m basing all of this on an animal encyclopedia I read as a child. I’ve never seen actual wildlife before,” continued Ali. “Do they always have lasers?”
“Not always,” said Thor, sizing up the encroaching fauna. “You read an entire encyclopedia?”
“Growing up poor in the ruins of a war-ravaged Colorado wasn’t as fun and action-packed as one might imagine. My family couldn’t afford an e-reader so we had to make do with what we could steal from the ashes of old libraries.”
“What’s a library?” asked Catrina.
“We’ll explain later,” said Thor, matching the first grizzly bear’s steely gaze. “Right now we have to not die.”
The thunder god unloaded the donut merchant onto his co-worker. Catrina, being fairly tiny and completely unprepared to take the weight of a twenty-something retail associate in her arms, promptly fell over. Ali landed on top of her.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi,” said Ali. “Ow.”
The alligators inched forward.
“You two go hide,” said Thor. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Sounds like a pla–” began Catrina. She was cut off by a roll of thunder and the half of the forest that was made of metal crackling with electricity.
“Huh,” said Thor, looking around at the sparking trees. The animals did the same. “You guys ... probably shouldn’t touch anything,” he said.
“You could not do that,” suggested the donut guy.
“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”
Thunder cracked again, louder, and bursts of white lightning leapt between tree branches.
“Right,” said Thor, adjusting the mostly rigor-mortised body of Chester A. Arthur XVII so that he was holding it by the ankles and brandishing it like a baseball bat, “time to send you to the zoo.”
The three grizzly bears lumbered toward Thor.
“Zoos keep live animals,” yelped Catrina, huddled with Ali in a small nearby clearing, both of them trying very hard not to touch anything. “Try something else!”
The thunder god swung the dead president at the nearest bear, catching it upside the head. The bear wasn’t hurt, but it was clearly kind of freaked out about being hit by a cadaver. So were the other two, for that matter. They all looked confusedly at one another.
“Prepare to be mounted!”
“That sounds really terrible out of context, Thor.”
One of the laser-wielding chipmunks jumped onto a nearby tree, its goal being to scurry up the side and get the drop on Thor. Instead, this particular tree being made entirely of recycled steel and currently carrying the full charge of Thor’s electric wrath, the chipmunk’s internal organs were fried, while its laser-pack shorted out and exploded. The rodent’s smoking corpse fell to the ground, crushing a cluster of tiny-knife-wielding spiders that no one had seen.
Thor turned at the sound of the tiny bang. An alligator lunged forward and snapped its massive, pointy mouth at him. The thunder god kicked it, hard, in the side of the face. The alligator died immediately, thoroughly regretting its actions.
“I’m going to kill you and stuff your corpses!”
Thor dropped Chester A. Arthur XVII and jumped into the remaining chipmunks, squashing two on impact and kicking another one into a tree where it burst into a hundred furry bits. The others began gnawing on Thor’s shins.
“That’s better,” said Catrina, “but it still sounds really creepy when you say it.”
The rhinoceros snuffled, then lowered its head and charged. The chipmunks scattered as it neared, one accidentally electrocuting itself on the same tree as the first one. Thor sidestepped the rhinoceros, grabbing its horn with both hands and slamming its head into the ground. Both lasers mounted on the rhino’s back whirred and turned towards Thor. The former Norse god grabbed the first barrel with one hand and yanked the entire turret free. He hurled it into the forest.
Still holding the rhino down, Thor growled, “I’m going to put my fist so far up your –”
“They’re animals!” shouted Ali. “They don’t need to be demoralized by taunting!”
“Every enemy needs to be demoralized,” said Thor, absentmindedly letting go of the rhinoceros. It staggered backward, away from him. “What if I wiggled my thumbs at them?” Thor turned and wiggled his thumbs at the grizzly bears. Immediately, all of the bear-mounted lasers were fired at him.
“Oh, crap.”
Thor ducked, one laser hitting him in the shoulder and another burning the hair off one side of his head. The other animals took this opportunity to open fire.
The ensuing lasers hit, in chronological order, the ground, Chester A. Arthur XVII’s foot, a tree, the ground, a chipmunk, another chipmunk, a bear’s face, a tree, another cluster of spiders no one saw, the ground, a different bear’s testicles, the ground, the ground, a tree, and the already dead alligator. The chipmunks, the spiders, most of the alligator, and Chester’s foot were all vaporized on impact, as were the bears’ respective face and balls. Since there was still a lot more bear behind them, though, a single laser blast wasn’t going to be enough to kill either of them, not even the one shot in the junk.
Or, at least, that’s what the bears thought.
Each of the ursine assailants managed to take a few steps towards Thor before the universe made a point of reminding them that the almost instantaneous blood loss associated with losing a large chunk of flesh was actually plenty harmful to not just bears, but all life, regardless of its size. The bears, summarily educated, fell to the ground, the one that took the nut shot maki
ng a stupid face as he did so.
They both died pretty quickly after that.
The remaining alligators and chipmunks, the last bear, and the still dazed rhinoceros decided, independently of one another, that this fight was over. Collectively, the menagerie booked it back into the forest and far, far away from the former Norse god.
“I don’t think so, critters,” said Thor.
There was a crack of thunder so loud the ground shook, toppling at least two trees. Everything went white. The air itself seemed to be burning.
Almost immediately, the lightning subsided, everything returning to whatever definition of normal encompassed a man-made forest surrounding a volcano in the middle of a mad-scientist-infested subsection of what used to be the American Southwest. Except that all the trees were still sparking, everyone’s hair was sticking out in a thousand directions, and the entire forest now smelled like a Brazilian churrascaria.
Catrina and Ali, wrapped around each other out of fear, as well as a couple other burgeoning emotions, blinked a few times and stared at one another. Then they stared at Thor.
“We talked about the almost killing us, Thor,” the girl reminded him.
“I really liked my last haircut,” he pouted. “Those stupid animals messed it all up.”
“You are a horrible example of humanity sometimes,” said Ali.
“Thanks,” said Thor, without even a trace of sarcasm. “Anyway, the forest should be empty of pretty much everything now.”
“Well, that’s good,” said Catrina, getting to her feet. Ali was hopping along at her side, his arm draped over her shoulders. “Let’s get going. I really have to pee.”
“There’s more than enough forest ...”
“It’s all been electrified, Thor.”
“Oh, right. ... Right.”
The trio continued toward El Mal Muerte.
“Just a head’s up, I may have gone blind,” said the donut merchant, blinking furiously. “Everything is still white.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Soylent Frankfurter