by Eirik Gumeny
The nurse gave the man a look, then turned and looked back down the hallway. She saw all manner of angry and homicidal sprinting toward her.
“Slow down!” she ordered.
“Screw you!” bleated one of the satyrs, pulling a knife from his bandolier and throwing it at the woman.
The charge nurse caught the knife with one hand and, in a single movement, tossed it back, square into the satyr’s face. The goat-man fell backwards, taking a few of the clurichauns down with him.
“What the hell, lady?” gasped one of the leshy, lifting a log-like leg to avoid the tumbling corpse. “You killed my buddy!”
“No. Damn. Running,” snarled the nurse.
She hurdled the counter of the nurses’ station and stood in the hallway before the demons, one hand outstretched like a very determined crossing guard. The goblins and genies and what-not staggered to a halt, staring incredulously at the woman in the light blue scrubs standing before them. Many brows were furrowed, heads were tilted. Clurichauns turned to jinn turned to asakku, mumbling in confusion. Arawn signaled his hell hounds to sit. Cramped together in the hallway, shoulders to kneecaps to stomachs, the motley assortment of fallen gods and spirits all looked at the single, solitary middle-aged woman standing unarmed before them.
“What the shitting fuck do you fucking think you’re arse-ing doing, you buggering fuckwit?” asked Bamapana, literally as politely as he was able.
The nurse simply lowered her eyes and stared back at them. A few of the smaller asakku and satyrs took a step backward.
“No time this have!” bellowed Asag, hunched, the back of his head and shoulders pressed against the ceiling. He smashed his club into a nearby cart and scattered supplies everywhere.
“Make time.” The charge nurse leaned back over the counter and hit a button. Immediately, a claxon sounded and a recorded voice began repeating “Code Orange” over and over. Orderlies, phlebotomists, and nurses, both registered and technicians, began spilling out of patient rooms and into the hallway – syringes, scalpels, and skin-shredding medical tape at the ready.
“You have got to be the kidding,” said the shishiga.
“I don’t kid,” barked the woman. “I am a motherfucking nurse.” Then she pointed to the cloudy jinn in the back of the pack. “And what the hell do you think you’re doing? You can’t smoke in here. This is a hospital, for Rumpelstiltskin’s sake.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
The Straw That Turned the Camel Into an Unstoppable Killing Machine
Mark Hughes rolled his wheelchair into the living room of William H. Taft XLII, his shoulder aching, his arms burning and his chest heaving. Everyone that wasn’t sleeping face-first on the carpet or moping in the corner turned to look at him.
“How did you get in here?” asked William H. Taft XLII, quite sincerely. “It’s all stairs.”
“We ... need ... help ...” gasped the man with the comatose squirrel on his lap.
The mayor-king of Las Vegas grabbed a tablet from the nearest side table and tapped a few icons. A security feed of his front lawn popped up on the television. A bruised and bleeding horde of ancient ogres and woodland spirits – remarkably thinned out from earlier – were limping their way across his yard, frothing and snarling and stamping on his petunias.
“Oh, come on,” said the clone, “do you have any idea how hard it is to grow those in the desert?”
“This is getting old,” said Thor, shaking his head.
“Is that ... a Sumerian rock demon?” asked William H. Taft XLII, raising an eyebrow and looking intently at the screen.
“Where are these guys coming from?” asked Queen Victoria XXX.
The copy of the United States’ fattest president sighed.
“I guess I’ll call what’s left of my security team.”
“Don’t bother,” said the thunder god, jumping up from the couch and cracking his neck to either side. “I think you were right before. I’ve got some issues I need to work out. Through clobbering.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Queen Victoria XXX, picking up one of the orcs’ spiked whips from the coffee table and snapping it in the air. “Let’s go hurt some motherfuckers.”
“Damn it, Vicky,” said William H. Taft XLII, “careful with that thing. Some of these collectibles are worth a lot of money.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“One-sixth scale replicas of Marty McFly don’t come cheap.”
***
Two clurichauns, one standing on the other’s shoulders, heaved and pulled at the enormous, solid gold front door of the mayor-king’s solid gold mansion.[xliii] The fairy gang flew up to them, latching onto the Irish sprites’ clothing and pulling backward. The door began to ever-so-slightly squeak open, before being kicked down on top of them and squishing them into paste.
“Damn it, Thor.”
“What?”
Standing in the entryway – and backlit by a spotlight William H. Taft XLII had installed for just such an occasion – were Thor Odinson, Queen Victoria XXX, and the cloned man-mountain himself.
“It’s about fucking t–” Bamapana was cut off by a tremendous crash of thunder and then immediately turned into jerky by the fissure of electricity that followed. The Haitian god in the metal suit of armor standing next to him suddenly regretted everything, then fell to the ground, twitching.
The remaining leshy and asakku began lumbering forward, the wraith-like shaytan jinn winding between them. Arawn, smiling beneath his cloak, released the hell hounds. The enormous dogs – built like brick shithouses, with short fur as black as obsidian, eyes like burning coals, and teeth as pointy as a killer rabbit – charged at the trio, snarling and frothing and making it very clear that they intended to eat them.
“Aw, look at the puppies!” lilted the queen, clapping her hands together in front of her chin.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Dave’s Not Here
From deep within the tiny back room of an old barn passing itself off as an art gallery with what was pretending to be a coffee bar, somewhere in some part of the cow-ravaged wastelands that used to be Wisconsin,[xliv] Steve Careers sat on a folding chair, a laptop carefully balanced on each knee. He tabbed through a few screens, then made a face.
“They’re, uh, they’re all dead, boss,” he said.
“All of them?” barked Satan.
“Each and every one of them. They got their asses handed to them. Literally, in one case, actually. A nurse sliced a butt cheek off one of the satyrs and then shoved it down his throat until he choked to death.”
“Holy shit,” said Persephone.
“I know, right? And then the ones that survived the nurses had a run-in with Thor and the clones of Victoria and Taft and, well, things got even more graphic. I’m not even entirely sure how to accurately describe parts of it. Is it still disemboweling someone if it’s through their butthole?”
The devil sighed deeply, with heavy resignation and only slightly less heavy anger, then shook his head.
“Fine,” he growled. “I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves.”
“So, we don’t even get a vote in this?” asked the former Greek queen of the underworld.
“Oh. You don’t ... you don’t want to come with me?”
“No, I do. I’m all for making the robot and the muskrat regret not dying the first time I ran into them. And, by now, their friends should be pretty exhausted. It’s just, on principle ...”
“Well, I figured if the answer was yes I didn’t need to ask ...”
“You should always ask.”
“Honestly that seems like a waste of time.”
“What if I had said no?”
“But you didn’t.”
“You didn’t know that.”
“Clearly I did.”
“I’m, uh, I’m gonna stay here,” interrupted Steve Careers, still watching video feeds of the massacre.
“Are planes still a thing?” asked Persephone. “Can we steal one of those?”
“So, uh, yeah, like, do you guys want a refill to go or anything?” asked the dreadlocked white guy with mysteriously bloodshot eyes standing next to them.
“God no,” spat Satan.
“Are you threatening us?” added the goddess.
“Have you just been listening to us this whole time?” asked Steve Careers.
“What?” replied the counter-monkey, scratching the side of his unshaven face.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
What’s in the Box? What’s in the Booox?!
“Thanks,” said Loki Laufeyjarson, hanging up his phone. With resolve and trepidation, and just a trace of unbridled glee, the trickster god got up from his desk, walked to a white-framed painting of an albino rabbit in a white-walled sanitarium painting a portrait of an albino seal in a snowstorm in Antarctica, took it down, unlocked the safe that was hidden behind it, opened the door, and stared at what was inside.
“I didn’t want it to come to this,” he muttered, reaching into the safe, “but that’s what I get for dealing with amateurs.”
He added: “Plus Mr. Sidney is going to be pissier than a dive bar bathroom if I don’t get this taken care of.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Snuggle Up, Buttercup
William H. Taft XLII, in yet another new suit, walked back into the living room with a pile of blankets in his arms. He began handing them out to his guests.
“Don’t any of your other wives have any clothes?” asked Queen Victoria XXX, trying once again to get one of Boudica IX’s microskirts to actually cover things that needed covering. “Bo did not have an ass, I can tell you that.” She grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around her waist.
“Yeah, you’d probably be better off with Stefani’s stuff,” said the mayor-king, looking over the queen with the impartial eye of an elderly gay fashion mentor, “but she’s in another mansion on the other side of the city.”
“You have two mansions?”
“Four.”
“So each of your ladyfriends has a mansion?!”
“Yeah.”
“Benedict Cumberbatch ...”
“You know, you could just turn the heat up,” suggested Thor, lounging on the sofa in a pair of the mayor-king’s flannel pajamas and taking a blanket from the forty-second clone of the twenty-seventh president of the United States.
“The thermostat’s set to sixty-eighty,” replied the heavyset man.
“That’s it? You should at least be cranking that shit up to seventy-two.”
“You going to pay my heating bills?”
“No,” replied the Norseman matter-of-factly.
“I thought you were a Viking or something,” said Mark, now moved from his wheelchair to an armchair, his robot leg resting on the coffee table, “impervious to cold and discomfort. Didn’t your people invent snow?”
“That was the Vikings themselves, dude. I lived in Asgard. It was a balmy seventy-five and sunny, all day every day,” he explained. “And just ‘cause I can handle the cold doesn’t mean I actually want to.”
“Sixty-eight isn’t cold, Thor,” said the cloned president.
“If I’m not one-hundred-percent comfortable, it’s cold. Or, y’know, hot, depending. There’s no middle ground for stuff like this.”
“There’s warm, chilly, brisk, I need a layer, I don’t need a layer ...”
“You live in the desert,” said Queen Victoria XXX, pulling a second blanket tight around her shoulders. “Why do you even have heating bills?”
“Deserts get cold,” explained William H. Taft XLII, with no small amount of exasperation. “Especially at night and doubly especially since the sun is as unreliable a source of heat and light as Sylvia Plath’s oven. How do you people not know this?”
“Who’s Sylvia Plath?” asked Thor.
“I knew that,” replied Catrina quietly from her corner, a flowery, pink blanket draped over her head like a shawl. Her eyes began getting misty. “Ali told me all about it last time we were out here.”
“Oh, lord, here we go again,” mumbled Queen Victoria XXX.
“Hey, just because you’re incapable of human emotion doesn’t mean you get to rag on Catrina,” scolded Mark. “She lost someone important to her.”
“I’m not incapable of human emotion,” replied the cloned monarch defensively. “I just don’t like them and think they’re a waste of time.”
“Except for the ones that involve sex and violence,” added Thor.
“Well, yeah, obviously.”
“Those ones are awesome.”
“Damn straight.”
The clone and the god high-fived.
“Hey,” muttered Timmy the rejuvenated, but sleepy, super-squirrel from where he was huddled under a hand towel and spooning Chester A. Arthur XVII on the carpet, “can you guys keep it down? Some of us are trying to sleep off near-fatal injuries.”
“Why don’t you use one of the bedrooms?” asked Thor.
“I have, like, six,” added William H. Taft XLII. “On this floor.”
“And they all have doors.”
“Because,” muttered Chester A. Arthur XVII, nestling into the tiny squirrel playing the role of big spoon, “that would be weird.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Flies in the Vaseline
Elizabeth Báthory, former Hungarian countess and psychopathic serial killer, then onetime high-ranking demon, and current Executive Vice President of the Walt Sidney Company, walked into Walt Sidney’s office looking for the frozen head of Walt Sidney, which was in fact resting atop Walt Sidney’s desk, behind a placard that said Walt Sidney. Walt Sidney.
“We have a problem, sir,” she said.
“Did Loki get himself killed already?”
“No, sir. It’s a new problem. Well, an old problem made new, actually.”
“Out with it.”
“Right, sir. Apparently, Vulcan and Ra and Catherine the Great LXIX are all alive and on their way here. And Artemis is with them for some reason.”
“I was told they were dealt with,” he rumbled.
“Yes, well, it appears that diverting their cruise ships to Canada and forcing them all to deal with rental car companies did not, in fact, discourage them into going back to their respective homes and, instead, somehow led to them all meeting up and joining together as one unit,” she explained. “Those responsible are being dealt with.”
“Is that why you’re covered in blood, Elizabeth?”
“Yes, sir.”
The head sighed. “Send me a list of their names. We’re clearly going to need to fill those positions. I’m assuming.”
“No, you’re absolutely right, sir,” replied the former countess matter-of-factly. “I mean, a few of them are still technically alive, but, in a few days ...” She waved dismissively. “Anyway, what should I do about the gods and the clone?”
“Are they attracting the same level of media attention as the ones in Las Vegas? A’s been giving me regular updates. It seems like a god damned circus out there.”
“Well, Satan is involved.”
“You know how I feel about wordplay, Elizabeth,” he thundered, his voice like the beginning of a landslide.
“Right, sir, sorry, sir.”
“Don’t let it happen again,” growled the floating head. “Now, my question? The media attention on this caravan of gods?”
“There’s none, sir,” said Elizabeth Báthory. “Ra, Artemis, and the rest are doing this completely under the media’s radar. In fact, two of them are still legally dead. No one knows about them.”
“Good. Take Set and deal with them.” He added, “Quietly.”
“Yes, sir,” the demon enthusiastically replied, her mouth creaking into a supremely unsettling smile. The erstwhile serial killer skipped out of the office.
“It’s a good thing I pay her well,” mumbled Walt Sidney.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Feces, Meet Cooling Device
“... and then,” said Thor Odinson, lea
ning over the coffee table laden with hot chocolates, “the banana goes, ‘I don’t think this is a tailpipe.’”
Everyone – Chester A. Arthur XVII, Queen Victoria XXX, William H. Taft XLII, Catrina Dalisay, Mark Hughes, Timmy the super-squirrel, and the thunder god himself – burst out laughing. But then, suddenly, mid-chortle, Thor stopped. He seemed to be distracted, staring absent-mindedly at the wall of the mayor-king’s living room.
“Is somebody holding something shiny?” asked Catrina.
“Is it gas?” asked Queen Victoria XXX.
“You better not fart in here,” said William H. Taft XLII. “I just had this place painted.”
“No,” said Thor slowly. “I sense something, a presence I’ve not felt since ...”
The former Norse God of Thunder walked quickly out of the room, the blanket draped over his shoulders swaying behind him like a cape as he exited.
***
Standing on the far side of William H. Taft XLII’s body-strewn front lawn, bathed in a brilliant moonlight, was a tall, gaunt man in a bright green, freshly-ironed suit. Hefted upon his shoulder was an ancient and massive short-handled hammer.
The man’s name was Loki Laufeyjarson.
The hammer’s was Mjolnir.
“Loki,” spat Thor Odinson, stepping from the gilded mansion’s gilded stoop, and then over the corpse of a rock demon from earlier, and onto the yellow brick walkway. “I thought I told you never to touch my stuff.”
“Good to see you again,” replied Loki, “brother.”
“Up yours. Why are you dressed like the Joker?”
“The Joker wore purple, you fucking half-wit.”
“You’re wearing a purple tie.”
“Lots of people wear purple ties.”
“Name one.”
“Prince.” Then he muttered, “Probably.”
The thunder god shook his head. “Why are you here?”