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.
“I don’t think we have any options besides… walking.”
“OK, sure. But to where?”
“Well, given that we are neither robots nor Hollow Men, and that we have no intention of joining the walking dead, I’d say we’re left with only two options. We can either take a long, meandering journey around the nuclear wasteland to the Hobo State, take up with the first ism we find, and start smoking an assortment of narcotics until we’re convinced that there are only five days in the week, or we can go to New Jersey.”
“You sure we can’t just join the living dead? They seem pretty okay with it.”
“You’re more than welcome to become a zombie if you’d like, but I’m going to vote that one down myself.”
“God, I can’t believe going to New Jersey’s the good option.”
“There’s slightly less chance we’ll die that way, yes.”
“Only slightly, though,” said a voice that did not belong to anyone known to Chester, Victoria, or William.
The trio of cloned world leaders turned as one. To their surprise, a half-dozen thugs adorned in clown wigs, face paint, and over-sized shoes were standing behind them looking menacing and evil. This actually took significant effort, given how ridiculously they were dressed. But, then, these guys were some mean fucking assholes.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“Does this mean I can talk again?” asked William H. Taft XLII.
“I’m going to murder all of them,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
Thirty-Seven: History Comes Alive
After the world was ended for the sixteenth time, the Aussichtslos Drogensucht Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung manufactured a, quite frankly, ridiculous number of clones of deceased world leaders in an effort to stack the seats of the United States government with intelligent, proven political minds.
The United States populace, however, voted in a wide array of actors, athletes, fashion icons, fictional characters and inanimate objects, all of whom, under the 32nd amendment, were forced into service under threat of being strapped to a rocket and shot into space.
Left with several thousand clones and an oppressive level of debt, the AD GmbH did the only thing it could: it pit the political leaders against themselves in gladiatorial combat and broadcast the bouts live on Pay-Per- View.
These “debates” took a number of different forms, depending on the leader involved. The George Washingtons were each given an axe and then dropped into a cherry orchard. The Winston Churchills had a drinking contest. Josef Stalin VI killed sixty-two other Stalins in a truly epic snowball fight.
Hoping to stoke an interest in political history in the young male demographic, the Queen Victorias were forced to mud wrestle. To the death.
Queen Victoria XXX defeated seventy-four other versions of herself that day with nothing more than her hands and wet dirt.
Thirty-Eight: He Owned Some Truly Disturbing Porn
Queen Victoria XXX stood over the corpses of her attempted assailants, breathing heavily and covered in blood and entrails and pieces of rainbow-colored cloth. Her eyes were glazed over, seemingly detached from this world. She was mumbling incoherently. Chester A. Arthur XVII thought it might have been backwards Latin, but he didn’t actually speak backwards Latin so it was hard to be sure.
“I’m going to look around, see if they had a car or something,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII to William H. Taft XLII. “Stay with Vicky, make sure she’s OK.”
“I don’t want to die, Charlie,” replied William H. Taft XLII.
“Yeah, good point. Come with me.”
“OK, this is bullshit.”
Chester A. Arthur XVII and William H. Taft XLII stood, heads aslant, looking at the pink and purple polka- dotted 1963 Volkswagen Beetle before them.
“Why the fuck would they even be driving around in this? There’s no shielding of any kind.”
“Maybe the clown thing was more than just a disguise,” offered William H. Taft XLII.
“I think I liked it better when you weren’t talking.”
“Whatever, man, I’m not afraid of you. Absolutely terrified of Vicky, sure, but not you.”
“I could hurt you at least as badly as she could.”
“Well aware. But you’re far less likely to.”
“That’s true.”
The duo continued to look at the car bemusedly, starkly defying, or possibly just misspelling, the amusement the car wanted them to feel.
“I don’t think you’re going to fit in there,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“I’m not that fat.”
“Maybe if you sat in the passenger seat,” said Chester A. Arthur, working out the mechanics in his head, “and we had Vicky kind of… fold herself up in the back seat.”
“With her knees in her face, for a drive of indeterminate length, across bombed out or otherwise pot-holed terrains.”
“She is gonna be pissed.”
“Yeah,” said William H. Taft XLII. “You tell her.”
“Bitch is speaking in tongues. I’m not going anywhere near her.”
“Well, what the hell are we supposed to do then?”
“Sit-ups. Or something similar. And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘you.’ Fatty.”
“What?”
“I’m going to go over there, to that grassy spot, lie down for a bit, and try and get a nap in before Vicky comes looking for us. You, my hefty friend, are going to try and lose as much weight as possible before we all try and cram ourselves into this garish, wheeled shoebox.”
“Fine, whatever,” said William H. Taft XLII, “but you don’t have to be such a dick about it.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I’m just a little cranky. I haven’t had a cigarette in over a week and I’ve been awake for three days or something, I don’t even know. Plus I didn’t get to throw a single punch at the clown rapists.”
“Yeah. Vicky just sorta went apeshit.”
“You see what she did with that one guy’s…”
“Right up his…”
“God, that was hot.”
William H. Taft XLII looked at Chester A. Arthur XVII kind of funny.
“What? Not the up-the-ass part. The Vicky-dismembering-people part.”
The look did not go away.
