“Not the damn penis again…” said Thor, writhing on the couch.
“What? I’m proud of it, Thor. I can lift a god damned Volkswagen.”
“Christ, Mark, now I’m picturing it. And there’s a midget watching you for some reason.”
“That… that sounds all kinds of unpleasant,” said Catrina.
“It is, Catrina. It is! But I can’t stop! There’re two midgets now and they’re… they’re dancing!”
“Wow, OK,” she said. “I was actually talking to Mark.”
“It’s not so bad,” said Mark. “You get used to it, really. And besides, now I can sex up a vending machine if I get bored.”
“What? Vending…? Is that why there’s a hole…” Catrina trailed off. “Oh god.”
“Yeah…” said Mark. “Don’t use the vending machine on this floor if you can help it.”
“I don’t really feel so bad about disliking you anymore.”
“I call her Sheila.”
Nine: Bananabilism
“Are we there yet?”
“Does it look like we’re there yet?”
“I… I honestly can’t tell,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “Between the bleached wasteland and the engorged, white-hot sun, I’m not really sure what I’m looking at anymore. I think I may have gone blind.”
“You’re not blind,” replied Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“OK, well, I think I may have become bored. Like, catastrophically.”
“That’s a distinct possibility. Have you tried not being bored?”
“Yes. It didn’t work.”
“Maybe you were doing it wrong.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I followed the instructions in the pamphlet note for note.”
“What pamphlet?”
“The one I wrote on the back of this napkin.”
Chester A. Arthur XVII took the napkin from Queen Victoria XXX and held it against the steering wheel.
“This is completely unintelligible. I’m pretty sure most of it isn’t actually English.”
“Well, no. Step two is create your own language. I’ve got seventeen words that mean ‘oh my god, can’t you drive any faster.’”
“It’s not my fault you forgot to charge your iPod.”
“I’m hungry.”
“How many words do you have for that?”
“Six. One sounds an awful lot like ‘no Chinese’ and two of them rhyme with ‘cannibalism.’”
“Only two?”
“I don’t really feel like driving.”
“Well, we’ll be stopping soon, I’m going to have to refuel anyway.”
Queen Victoria XXX scanned the vast, empty space between their car and the horizon.
“Define ‘soon.’”
“That would be roughly equivalent to the length of time it takes us to move through this impenetrable nothingness and into a someplace that actually houses something of use and, preferably, isn’t populated by homicidal atomic mutants.”
Queen Victoria XXX returned her eyes to the horizon. She searched for any signs of civilization, any signs of life, but, instead, found only her sanity lowering a rusty razorblade to its wrists, weeping and inconsolable, desperate for some kind of a release from the incomprehensible, never-ending void that lay before it.
“So, what, twenty minutes?”
Ten: Twenty Minutes Later
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“Are we there yet?”
“You are aware that the controls for your window are available to me, and that opening said window will immediately flood the interior of the car with enough radiation and heat to boil your skin from your bones in a matter of moments, right?”
“Yes.”
“OK.”
“Are we there yet?”
“Seriously, Vicky, I’m not above killing us both to get you to shut up.”
Eleven: Happy Fun Breakfast Time
“Come on, babe,” said Josh, one hand on his coffee, the other upon his wife’s hand. “The city isn’t that bad.”
“I know,” said Jennie, one hand under her husband’s hand, the other on her pregnant belly. “I like it enough, I just don’t know that I want to raise a child here, is all.”
“Hey, I grew up here, and I turned out fine.”
“I know…”
“The schools are good, crime is down…”
“That’s true,” said Jennie, shifting in the wrought iron seat set up outside the café. “It’s just… I don’t know. Maybe… maybe you’re right. Maybe it isn’t so terrible here after all.”
Josh smiled at his wife. Jennie smiled back as her husband leaned across the matching wrought iron table to kiss her.
It was at this point that Quetzalcoatl ran down the street making extraordinarily loud whooshing noises, one arm raised as if in flight, the other holding a baby like a football.
“That…” said Josh, shaking his head, “that probably wasn’t a real…”
It was at this point that an irate mother dragging an empty carriage and screaming, “Give me back my baby,” a taxi driver hopping on one foot and screaming, “Give her back her baby,” and three policemen—two of whom appeared to have been hit in the face by an apple pie—screaming, “You god damned son of a bitch, give her back her baby,” ran down the street after Quetzalcoatl.
“OK, yeah,” said Josh, still positioned uncomfortably over the table and not quite kissing his wife. “I’ll put in for a transfer tomorrow.”
Twelve: The One Reserved for Ponies
Chester A. Arthur XVII and Queen Victoria XXX sat with their backs against the closed, locked doors of the liquor store, staring out into the alternatingly bright and pitch-black dawn.
“We probably should’ve checked the hours before we left,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“Yeah,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, leaning his head against the door. “In hindsight, our actions were rather rash.”
“We were out of beer,” explained Queen Victoria XXX, shrugging.
The pair watched as the horizon turned purple, then black, then blue, then purple again, within a span of seconds.
It had been doing that a lot lately.
After the world was ended for the twenty-first time, every single governing body on the planet collapsed in what was described as “the greatest, most confusing game of dominos ever witnessed.” During the brief vacuum of political and military power that followed, an orbital cannon was hijacked by a giant lizard that was, in turn, being controlled by a giant ape and, well, hijinks ensued.
“The sky’s kind of pretty, though.”
“In that ‘science can’t explain how it hasn’t killed us all yet’ kind of way, sure.”
It was all very complicated.
“Well, yeah,” replied Queen Victoria XXX. “What other definition of ‘pretty’ is there?”