“Glad to help. Now stop running around in circles and tell us!”
“Catrina.”
Catrina smacked Thor upside the head.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Catrina.
“As I was saying,” continued Mark, “money was tight around here even before our most recent guests either left or were murdered in our lobby by equally as murdered employees. Between the cleaning bills and replacing the windows and you guys living here for free, we’ve actually lost more money this month than we made all of last year.”
“That doesn’t sound like profit,” said Thor.
“It’s not. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of profit. That’s why, effective three weeks ago, I’m no longer able to pay you.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” said Thor.
“How is that not fair?”
“It’s completely fair, Mark,” said Catrina. “Thor had a lot of sugar earlier and it tends to go straight to the idiot part of his brain.”
“That makes senses, given the proportions.”
“Yeah.”
“Damn right,” said Thor. “I’m… wait, hold on.”
“No,” said Mark, turning back to Catrina. “If he’s going to keep babbling like a moron, at least try and steer him toward figuring out a way to get us more customers. I don’t care how ridiculous his ideas are. I have no problem shooting them down for being stupid.”
“That’s good.”
Catrina turned to Thor, but Thor had walked into the break room. Mark looked at Catrina with a raised eyebrow. Catrina shrugged. Thor returned to the lobby carrying a shovel.
“What happened to the talking, man?” asked Mark. “We decided on talking about your stupid ideas!”
“Talk is for AM radio,” said Thor. “It’s time for action!”
“The AM wavelengths were obliterated before…”
“Don’t even bother trying to figure it out. He’s gone,” said Catrina. “I just hope he doesn’t maim someone.”
“Well, someone poor, anyway.”
Fifty-Two: Nice to Meet You
Mac, doing his part to spread the gospel of Quetzalcoatl, was walking up and down and back up every street he could find, knocking on doors and things he thought were doors. Occasionally they would open. Occasionally he would speak. Sometimes there was a conversation. Most times there was not.
Mac approached the next house on the block and knocked on the door. The door was opened by a giant mechanical man.
“Excuse me, sir or madam,” said Mac, reading from a script written on his hand in permanent marker, “I was wondering if I may have a moment…”
The giant mechanical man punched Mac through the face.
Fifty-Three: Famous Last Words
“Well, we’re here,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, pulling off what passed for the interstate and onto the New Jersey Turnpike.
“Where’s here?” asked Queen Victoria XXX. “All I see is swamp.”
“Yeah. Welcome to the Meadowlands.”
“This is the famed Meadowlands? The gateway to one of the last bastions of civilization left on this earth?”
“Yep.”
“It smells like ass.”
It did smell like ass. The Meadowlands was, and had always been, swampland reinforced with landfill and littered with dead mobsters and industrial run-off. But one could spit on it from New York City, and therefore it was valuable and convenient real estate.
“Where the hell’s the civilization?” asked William H. Taft XLII.
At least, it was, prior to the sinking of Manhattan. Now it was just there. And, much like a cockroach, the Meadowlands had proved nearly impossible to destroy.
“It’s that hazy cluster of buildings off in the distance.”
Chester A. Arthur XVII sped the car down the open expanse of highway before them, the hazy cluster of buildings off in the distance soon becoming the hazy cluster of buildings right over there.
“According to the sign,” said the dead president, cruising down the exit ramp, “there should be multiple hotels in this general area. Keep an eye out.”
“Or you could just go straight into that shopping plaza,” said William H. Taft XLII, pointing to a directory at the end of the ramp denoting “Hotels” and pointing toward a driveway.
“Or we could just go straight into that shopping plaza.”
Chester A. Arthur XVII steered the car along the curved plaza entrance.
“Of course. No thanks, no credit, for my keen and amazing eyesight,” replied William H. Taft XLII, slumping back into his seat. “I should’ve just let you keep driving around.”
“Yes,” replied Chester A. Arthur XVII, “you really should have.”
The car rolled to a stop along the crest of a small overpass leading into the plaza. Situated throughout the shopping center were a half dozen burning buildings. The trio of world leaders looked out across the smoky expanse, trying to make sense of the scene before them.
“Well, just drive through anyway,” said William H. Taft XLII, taking in the scene. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen.”
“God damn it, Billy,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
Fifty-Four: Love is a Battlefield. So is Hate
“Quinn,” said Will, approaching Quetzalcoatl. “Mac is dead. So are at least four others. We’ve been getting… scattered reports and text messages that our diplomats are being… hunted down by robots… everywhere.”
“Sons of fishes,” said Quetzalcoatl, crushing an empty beer can in his hand. “This is the same shit they tried back in the day.”
“Back in the day?”
“Time travel’s impossible,” replied the former Aztec god, shaking his head.
“What?”
“What?”
“What do we do, Quinn?” asked Will urgently.
“What do you mean what do we do?”
“How… do we respond? What are our… next steps?”
“What are our next steps?!” asked Quetzalcoatl, crushing another empty beer can. “Jesus, Will, what do you think? When some bully pushed you around on the playground, and I’m sure they did, what did you do?”
“Well, I usually tried to… ascertain why…”
“That’s the wrong answer.”
“I’m… pretty sure it’s not.”
“You think we should talk to them.”
“Yes.”
“You think we should talk to the killer robots.”
“Well, yes, Quinn,” said Will. “To defeat our enemy… we must first know him.”
“How in the fuck are you going to know a computer?”
“By talking to it.”
“You just went around in a circle there. That wasn’t…”
“I’ll inform the others.”
Quetzalcoatl shrugged and said, “OK, whatever.” Then he crushed another beer can. “There’s hundreds of you fuckers running around anyway.”
Fifty-Five: Hollow Midget Arsonists
Chester A. Arthur XVII, Queen Victoria XXX, and William H. Taft XLII limped into the hotel lobby. Their faces were either bleeding or bruised; they were covered in dirt and sweat and pieces of shattered glass. They smelled like smoke.
“Our car,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, approaching the hotel counter and the young woman behind it, “appears to have fallen into a hole.”
“Oh,” said the girl, “yeah, we, uh, we have a small… Hollow Men infestation. In the, uh, general area.”
“Are you sure?” asked Queen Victoria XXX, stepping up to the counter next to Chester A. Arthur XVII. “It didn’t look like one of their sinkholes.”
“Oh, well, by ‘small Hollow Men,’ what I meant was ‘Hollow Men who are tiny in stature.’ Hollow Midgets and Dwarves. By god, they try, but they’ve got such little arms. They’re just not very good.”