Thor looked on incredulously.
“What the fuck?”
Thirty-Four: At Least It’s Not Raining Man-Eating Frogs, Right?
“OK,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, taking in the sight of his burning apartment building from the parking lot, “let’s not do that again.”
“The renting-out-the-dead part?” asked Queen Victoria XXX. “Or just the setting-our-apartment-on-fire-to-escape-the-clutches-of-homicidal-munchkins part?”
“I had been referring to the latter, but honoring the former seems like a good idea, too.”
“Man, all of my stuff was in there,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“All of our stuff was in there, Billy.”
“Except my iPod,” said Victoria, “that’s in the car.”
The car—parked absurdly close to a raging inferno, all things considered—exploded.
“Fuck,” said the queen.
“We probably should have seen that coming,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“You’d think.”
“That wasn’t our car, guys,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“Oh,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“That’s good,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
Another car exploded. Queen Victoria XXX and William H. Taft XLII looked at Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“Also not ours. I parked ours on the other side of the building, on the far side of the lot, away from the inferno, thankfully,” he explained. “How do you guys not know what our car looks like?”
“You never let us drive it,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“And you’re always moving it and ‘upgrading’ it,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“Honestly, we just take your word for it that it’s even the same car.”
“Oh,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, thinking about it for a moment. “Yeah, that’s understandable.”
Chester A. Arthur XVII, Queen Victoria XXX, and William H. Taft XLII stood in silence briefly, before simultaneously sitting down on the pavement on the far side of the parking lot. They continued to watch their home convert itself to heat and cinder.
“It’s a good thing no one else was home this weekend,” said William H. Taft XLII.
The flames twisted into the streaming smoke, like the tendrils of dancing octopi, reaching up and into the night sky. There was the occasional pop and isolated burst as an appliance exploded, but otherwise the building burned with a remarkable consistency.
The reincarnations of leaders of state found themselves oddly soothed by the whole thing, as if they were sitting around a campfire. Right up until the screaming, anyway.
“You guys’re hearing that, too, right?” asked Victoria.
An old lady engulfed in flames jumped from the roof of the building. An old man followed her. He was also on fire.
“Oh, fuck,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII. “The Jenkinsons.”
“I thought they moved out!” exclaimed Queen Victoria XXX.
The screaming didn’t stop when the old people smashed into the ground. In fact, it seemed to get louder and more inconsistent, a random mix of blasphemies, obscenities, and complaining about the pain that accompanies being on fire and breaking multiple bones. Thankfully, the immolation didn’t stop when they hit the ground either, so the screaming didn’t continue much longer.
“Jesus…”
“Well, uh, at least,” stammered William H. Taft XLII, “at least all the possessed zombies are gone now, right?”
The car Chester A. Arthur had parked on the other side of the apartment building roared past the trio. It looked to be full of reanimated corpses, at least one of whom, judging from the “Yee-haw!” shouted from the passenger seat, was possessed by a cowboy.
“That’s our car, guys,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“You had to fucking say something, didn’t you, Billy?” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“I didn’t… how was I…”
“It’s like you’ve got a god damned superpower or something,” she continued, before resting her head on her knees and sighing.
Thirty-Five: Hope Tastes Delicious
Quetzalcoatl, after cracking his skull against an exposed beam and summarily regaining the full use of his cognitive abilities—as well as his absolute animosity toward a world in which he was not a god—had decided to give up on the cabal of philosophers and strike out on his own.
The philosophers, however, were of a different opinion.
Apparently one cannot just stop being a savior.
“Though the world appears doomed, and destined to fall…”
At first, the poets and thinkers and whatever else simply followed Quetzalcoatl around. Which was fine. Once Quetzalcoatl started running, though, they, too, stepped up the pace, repeatedly getting in his way in a desperate attempt to stop him from fleeing. Which was less fine.
“… and our future looks dark and grim…”
After the former Aztec god started flailing and punching and throwing rocks, the cavalcade of coffee snobs decided it would be best to tie him up.
Once he broke loose from his restraints, they opted to chain him to a pipe.
“I mean, seriously, fuckin’ bleak. At best.”
Realizing the constant escalation could only end poorly, Quetzalcoatl relented and decided to be their Messiah after all. If, for nothing else, than because the pipe to which he was chained was full of steam and very, very hot.
“Though each morning is less and less welcome, and the days are more and more difficult…”
Eventually, Quetzalcoatl realized that having an army of philosophers and dope fiends at his disposal wasn’t as useless as he had originally thought. A steady diet of sushi and pretension had imbued each with the strength of almost two monkeys.
“Though that uphill struggle constantly seems even more… up…hill…ier…”
And, given that they kept over-analyzing everything he said until they heard what they wanted anyway, Quetzalcoatl didn’t even need to stay sober to lead them.
“Always remember that, as hopeless and awful and terrible and suicidal as life may be…”
He pulled a meaning of life out of his cereal one morning and, much like Phil, Bill, Will, and Syl had anticipated, the sheer vagueness and sugar frosting of the statement caused them all to fall in line.
“Tomorrow could bring free donuts.”
It was like being a god all over again.
Thirty-Six: Seriously, Clowns Suck
“So, uh, what now?”
“No talking, Billy,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“But, what did…”
“No, seriously. Shut the fuck up. You do not get to speak again until you can definitively prove that you don’t have some kind of supernatural stranglehold over our future.”
William H. Taft XLII opened his mouth in a manner suggesting he was about to talk, but the murderous look in Victoria’s eyes made him reconsider that course of action. It also made him urinate slightly.
“Well,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, “it was still a good question. Even if he’s not allowed to ask it.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t. But you know damn well that after he asked it he would have volunteered a suggestion or two, and one of them, without a doubt, would have been punctuated by something like, ‘until we’re raped by clowns?’ and we’d just ignore it, but then, sure enough, we’d get raped by clowns somehow. I don’t want to get raped by clowns, Charlie. He doesn’t speak.”
“Alright, OK,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, putting up his hands in a sign of defeat. “But what do we do now?”
“Fuck if I know. You’re the brains of this operation, buddy.”
“Fantastic.”
Chester A. Arthur looked at his friends, and then at the burning apartment building in front of him. Then he looked at the empty parking lot and the ruins of suburbia surrounding them.