“You sure? I thought the hybrids sat that one out.”
“They did,” he replied, arriving at the couch and kneeling next to Catrina. “I was still human then.”
“Oh,” said Catrina. “Sorry.”
“You should be. I’m not one of those Mark I cyborgs that volunteered to have their skin grafted onto a robotic skeleton ‘cause they were too chicken-shit to keep fighting. I’m a good, old-fashioned human, forcibly joined with an x-ray eye and a pneumatic penis because I was too stupid to stop fighting.”
“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.”
