by Eirik Gumeny
#
As Shannon and Wei Leber-Zheng left the store, they could hear the after-walker grumbling softly while Steve rummaged through the drawers of the front counter. Walking parallel to the dripping, serrated storefront, Wei watched as the clerk spread a map across the countertop, the draugr looming over his shoulder. The last thing he heard was the fabric store employee saying, “OK, so, Dallas is about twelve-hundred miles southwest of here ...”
DON’T GO ‘SQUATCHING MY HEART
from the personal archives of William H. Taft XLII
My dearest William,
I am afraid that I have a confession to make: I am in love with Bigfoot.
Not a bigfoot, as the colloquialisms have bastardized his name, but the Bigfoot.
The matter is something, I admit, I have known for a some while, though only recently have I felt confident enough to act on those feelings.
To wit, I have written a letter, one that fully and finally encapsulates my desires, one that lays my heart bare for my large-footed darling.
Here it is, in its entirety:
Dear Bigfoot:
I love you. Do you love me too? Y□ or N□?
He sent it back, William. With the Y box ticked.
Though I doubt not your ability to tick my boxes – and I mean that in both the metaphorical and the much more low-humoured versions of the phrase – I nonetheless feel the time has come to part ways. Ours, dearest, was always like a flame, burning bright – but brief.
This, though, is not to say that you are entirely faultless here, William. Your boundless infatuation with this Boudica IX is evident, to all of your wives, and I for one am no longer comfortable with my diminished share of your heart. I am similarly less than enchanted by the mad and unbroken nature of “Bo,” the anarchic energy that emanates from her being, the constant threat of danger that trails the woman like a shadow, there even as she sleeps.
Plus, she never cleans up after herself in the shower we share.
While I understand the appeal of such a creature – at least for a night or two – and I did so look forward to raising a family with you, I simply cannot, in good conscious, bring up our one-year-old in that kind of environment, one wherein she is a permanent fixture.
As such, I am, today, with the help of my faithful guide dogs – I am also taking Lando and Satine, my heart – trekking into the wooded wilds of the Pacific Northwest to be one with my adorable ape-man.
They say that love is blind, I know, but rest assured, William, I am not. I am well aware that our relationship is not without its problems, its questions. Though I know my own heart, I nonetheless, like every contestant that has ever graced a version of The Bachelor, find myself asking: Does he love me? Can Bigfoot see past my almost hairless exterior? My mere six-foot, two-inch frame?
I may believe in him, with all my heart – but does he, truly, believe in me?
I will know soon enough.
I do not wish this separation to be one of contention and acrimony, William. While I do not, truthfully, understand how a man such as yourself could ever love a wild-headed agent of chaos – one who, you should know, seems to constantly be trimming her netherhairs, to the point that I am genuinely concerned, if, albeit, scientifically, curious – as wholeheartedly as you seem to love Boudica IX (especially when it seems to be at my expense), I nonetheless wish you and Bo the best. I can only hope that you will do the same for me, and my Bigfoot.
This was not an easy decision, William, and I hope that you can respect the thought and worry and risk I have, already, put myself through. I did not make this choice lightly.
Choice ... I am laughing at that, William. As if I actually had one. As if this was anything more than a simple fact, an indelible part of my very being.
I believe in Bigfoot. I believe in love.
And I believe in us.
(Bigfoot and me, not you and me; I hope that was clear.)
Yours, once,
Cherri Dakkuiri
PART ONE
The End of the End of the World as We Know It
CHAPTER ONE
And I Feel Fine
“So, let me get this straight ...”
“OK.”
“What I’m pretty sure you’re saying is that the blackout, the one we all went through, everywhere, six months ago, was caused by the sun wigging out and blowing up all of the world’s electricity.”
“Right.”
“So you and your friends here teamed up with a mad scientist –”
“The maddest.”
“– to steal a bunch of technobabble nonsense-sounding supplies and go to the state-sized electrical grid in Montana to fix the, and these are your words, ‘shiny, computery stuff’ that powers North America, meanwhile completely ignoring the problems of the rest of the world.”
“You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”
“And while you guys were doing that, buttloads of mythological creatures, hired by someone somewhere for some reason, were running around, wrecking up any alternative power sources and trying to keep the world in the dark, while you, yourself, had to fight the killer ghosts of two elderly women, who showed up in Montana expressly to keep you from repairing the electrical grid.”
“That’s what they said.”
“And so, in order to do that, one of them possessed a gorilla you knew and proceeded to beat the ever-loving shit out of you, until a friend of your friends showed up and threw a handful of salt in their faces and re-killed the ghosts. Or whatever it is you do to ghosts.”
“Bust.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You bust ghosts. That’s the technical term.”
“OK, sure. This friend of a friend shows up and busts the ghosts, at which point you somehow electrocuted just everything, jump-starting the engine of the power grid and turning the lights back on across the entire continent.”
“Verily.”
“And because of all that,” continued the waitress, her eyebrow raised in what one could conservatively call a skeptical fashion, “you want free pancakes?”
“Yes,” replied Thor Odinson, former Norse God of Thunder, sitting in the booth before her.
“No.”
“What? Why the hell not? Weren’t you listening?”
“Well, for one thing,” explained the gelatinous young woman, “I don’t believe you. And, for another, you’re not wearing pants.”
Thor looked down at his boxer-clad crotch.
“I eat better like this,” he said with a shrug.
“If you’re not going to wear pants, you shouldn’t even be in the diner. That’s what I came over to tell you.”
“I thought you were here to take our order.”
“No.”
“But you brought coffee ...”
“You had your pants on when you ordered the coffee.”
“Coffee doesn’t fill me up like pancakes do.”
“Put on your pants.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Then please leave.”
“What if I get my pancakes to go?”
“You’re not getting any pancakes.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“I think I liked the old waitress better,” mumbled the thunder god.
“You said she tried to poison you,” explained Dennis, a burly urban lumberjack type, sitting across from Thor and furrowing his brow.
“Well, yeah, sure, but she put the poison in the pancakes, so at least I got the pancakes.”
The waitress, a jellylike blob, took a deep breath and undulated what passed for her shoulders backward. “Please either put your pants back on, or get up and get out,” she demanded. “Now.”
“Fine,” huffed the bearded blonde man, sliding out of the booth. He grabbed his worn-out jeans from the duct-taped vinyl benchseat and slung the pants over his shoulder. Nodding toward the man who had been sitting across from him, Thor said: “Let’s go.”
“You still owe me
for the coffee,” said the waitress, slowly and obviously putting the bill down on the table.
“You’re kicking me out and making me pay?”
“You’re kicking yourself out, Donald Duck.”
“If you really want to eat in your underwear,” said Dennis, sliding out of the booth and putting a meaty hand on the Norseman’s shoulder, “we can go to Denny’s. They have zero standards.”
Thor narrowed his eyes and gave the other flannel-clad man a look. Then he began searching for his wallet, his hands wandering from his underwear to his jeans to his shirt pocket and then back to his butt.
“Shit. Hey, man, can you –”
“You’re supposed to be paying me to be here, remember?”
“Oh. Right.”
“You’re not going to, are you?”
“Uh ...”
Dennis the Lumberjack, a strictly platonic male escort hired at an hourly rate from FRIENDS – For Rude and Inimical Entities Needing Dinner companionS, Inc. – bit his lower lip and shook his chiseled, perfectly scruffy head.
“I thought you were cool, man.”
Dennis the Lumberjack walked out of the diner.
The former Norse god, watching the man he paid to be his friend leave, sighed heavily, as if he were deflating. Somewhere, a sad song began playing, something dramatic and orchestral with heavy piano. Somewhere else, a movie was being filmed, and the camera pulled back for a long crane shot, leaving the hero starkly alone in a restaurant incredibly similar to this one.
The waitress, moved by the pathetic scene, slithered over and put a tentacle on Thor’s shoulder.
“That was terrifically sad,” said the jellylicious young woman, “honestly one of the most tragic things I’ve seen here – and that’s saying a lot – but you still owe me for the coffee.”
“Yeah ...” Thor stood quietly for a moment. Then he asked: “How are you guys on electricity?”
“Self-sustaining. Sorry.”
“Shit,” he said. “Do you need anybody hurt?”
“Me or the diner?”
“Whichever gets me off the hook for the coffee.”
Slowly, the waitress picked up the check. “Like, anybody anybody?”
CHAPTER TWO
Little Pink Houses
Nothing of any import was going on in the world.
Initially, this lack of any terrible happenings had been, in and of itself, terrifying. After twenty-seven-and-a-half apocalypses, half a lifetime of nothing but disaster on the daily, everyone everywhere was anxious all the time. But without a reason to be, without a justified outlet for that anxiety, the world kept piling up that unspecified worry, until most of society was a twitchy, half-delusional mess. Destruction had become the status quo and its six-month sabbatical had folks crapping their pants in abject, crushing boredom.
Cities had long ago become things that just went away sometimes. But now they were standing, and thriving, and, apparently, they required maintenance. Traffic lights needed to be repaired, garbage needed to be collected, sewers needed to be emptied of crocodile-men and hulking reanimated corpses. The days of setting an apartment on fire because you were tired of the paint color and then blaming it on rampaging mutant moths had come to an end.
Slowly, hesitantly, society had begun building itself back up again, the notion that everything was out to kill them all the time cautiously slinking back into the recesses of the collective consciousness where it belonged, festering as mild paranoia and traumatic memory instead of a primary survival tactic.
Crime rates had dropped across the board – vandalism, robbery, murder, double parking, supervillainy. People even stopped swearing so much.[xxxi] Instances of crazy shit no one could explain were minimal at best. Sales of cigarettes and guns and Hot Pockets had plummeted, while drug stores found themselves having to order more and more condoms and birthday cards to keep up with demand. Shuttered gyms and La-Z-Boy outlets had reopened. Vegan restaurants had suddenly become viable. The prevailing opinion was that the endless armageddons had ultimately served some good, culling the herd as it were, and removing all the undesirables from society.
Except for the vegans, obviously.
People were even looking into purchasing honest-to-goodness real estate since it was starting to look like houses might have a real chance at still being houses come the end of the year. People like Queen Victoria XXX and Chester A. Arthur XVII, the last surviving clones of their respective namesakes, created by a German sausage manufacturer for bloodsport entertainment, before earning their freedom and becoming mercenary heroes. They’d even managed to save the world a couple times.
“Do you really think we should buy a house?” asked the raven-haired royal replica, standing in a purple sweatsuit before a two-bedroom ranch house in the lovely residential neighborhood of Edgar, a suburb of the mighty metropolis of Secaucus, New Jersey.
“We haven’t had a real home since the Holiday Inn burned down,” replied Chester A. Arthur XVII, taking her hand into his, his broadening, heavily-scarred belly barely held in by his polo shirt and khakis, the universal uniform of a guy who has given up giving a shit. “We can’t keep living like hoboes forever.”
“I don’t know,” countered Queen Victoria XXX, “some of those hoboes are pretty old. Murray seems to be doing all right for himself.”
“He’s missing his entire lower half and gets around in a shopping cart.”
“Yeah, but it’s a nice shopping cart. It’s got a horn.”
“This place is right down the street from Ali and Catrina.”
“Is that a selling point? I know they’re our friends, but they are some of the most boring people I’ve ever met. Can’t we move to Las Vegas with Billy?”
“Do you have any idea what the property taxes are like out there?” replied the patchwork president. “I mean, good for Billy, but there’s no way in hell we can afford that. Especially now that the ‘hero-for-hire’ business is all but done.”
“We could always cause problems and then get people to pay us to fix them.”
“Like common con artists?”
“We would be exceptional con artists.”
The queen leaned her head against her boyfriend’s shoulder. They stood there silently, looking at the house and contemplating their future together. After a few moments, a track-suited, greying couple, somewhere between forty- and a hundred-years-old – the clones weren’t great with ages – power-walked past the couple, waving genially and saying hello.
“Ugh,” scoffed the replicated monarch, watching as the older folks turned the corner. “That’s going to be us, isn’t it?”
“More than likely.”
“I really thought I’d have died in a chemical fire by now.”
“Sorry, honey,” replied the president, leaning over and kissing her forehead.
CHAPTER THREE
It’s the Artisanalest
“Have you found anything?” asked Satan, the former Judeo-Christian boogeyman, wearing a wrinkled suit and sitting on a hand-carved milk crate, drinking terrible coffee in a pretentious café on the outskirts of the city-state of Atlanta.
“Well,” began Steve Careers, former Director of Operations for WANG and even more former demon, hunched over a laptop, the light reflecting in his glasses, “I managed to pull up the security footage of the attack, but the recording was damaged in the ensuing collapse, and it wasn’t the greatest to begin with ...”
After a bunch of mathematicians belonging to a variety of different churches got tired of arguing amongst themselves and used hard numbers to accidentally disprove all religions everywhere and end the world for the eighteenth time, all of the former gods and angels and demons and whatever became mortal and had to find some way to fill their newfound time. Some went on murderous rampages. Others turned to alcoholism. And still others, like Satan, found their calling as high-ranking employees of large corporations.
The devil, along with just a shitload of other erstwhile evil deities, was hired by t
he Walt Sidney Company and put to work. In short order, Old Scratch was made director of the Sidney subsidiary Worldwide Atlanta Natural Gas and Electric, with eyes on moving farther up the corporate food chain.
Then, six months ago, after a geomagnetic superstorm blanketed the world in darkness, Satan, tasked by Walt Sidney himself with keeping it that way, finally saw his opportunity.
The devil failed. He failed so hard.
Partly because of Thor and Chester A. Arthur XVII and their friends, but mostly because of his own hubris, Satan did not succeed in keeping the lights turned off. The god and the clones, and some other clones and a couple scientists, repaired the North American electrical grid, thwarting the devil’s plans. As an insult to this already grievous injury, WANG’s corporate campus was then destroyed by assailants unknown. The Father of All Lies was summarily called into Walt Sidney’s office and fired.
On his way out of the office, Satan got into a spat with his direct supervisor, Loki Laufeyjarson, the former Norse God of Mischief and current COO of the Walt Sidney Company. Entertained by their bickering and not exactly a fan of Loki’s, Walt Sidney made a deal with the devil: If he could find out who destroyed the WANG headquarters and exact his vengeance, without tying the Walt Sidney Company to the endeavor, he’d get his job back.
Satan threw everything he had into the effort.
“What are you saying?” asked the devil.
“The information is inconclusive at best. All I can tell with any authority is that it was a white guy. And a rat. I think,” explained the man in the turtleneck.
“A white guy and a rat?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“We’re never going to figure this out, are we?”
“It’s not looking great, no.”
The fallen angel rubbed his fingers against his forehead.