“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?”