“OK,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, taking in the sight of his burning apartment building from the parking lot, “let’s not do that again.”
“The renting-out-the-dead part?” asked Queen Victoria XXX. “Or just the setting-our-apartment-on-fire-to-escape-the-clutches-of-homicidal-munchkins part?”
“I had been referring to the latter, but honoring the former seems like a good idea, too.”
“Man, all of my stuff was in there,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“All of our stuff was in there, Billy.”
“Except my iPod,” said Victoria, “that’s in the car.”
The car—parked absurdly close to a raging inferno, all things considered—exploded.
“Fuck,” said the queen.
“We probably should have seen that coming,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“You’d think.”
“That wasn’t our car, guys,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“Oh,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“That’s good,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
Another car exploded. Queen Victoria XXX and William H. Taft XLII looked at Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“Also not ours. I parked ours on the other side of the building, on the far side of the lot, away from the inferno, thankfully,” he explained. “How do you guys not know what our car looks like?”
“You never let us drive it,” said William H. Taft XLII.
“And you’re always moving it and ‘upgrading’ it,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“Honestly, we just take your word for it that it’s even the same car.”
“Oh,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, thinking about it for a moment. “Yeah, that’s understandable.”
Chester A. Arthur XVII, Queen Victoria XXX, and William H. Taft XLII stood in silence briefly, before simultaneously sitting down on the pavement on the far side of the parking lot. They continued to watch their home convert itself to heat and cinder.
“It’s a good thing no one else was home this weekend,” said William H. Taft XLII.
The flames twisted into the streaming smoke, like the tendrils of dancing octopi, reaching up and into the night sky. There was the occasional pop and isolated burst as an appliance exploded, but otherwise the building burned with a remarkable consistency.
The reincarnations of leaders of state found themselves oddly soothed by the whole thing, as if they were sitting around a campfire. Right up until the screaming, anyway.
“You guys’re hearing that, too, right?” asked Victoria.
An old lady engulfed in flames jumped from the roof of the building. An old man followed her. He was also on fire.
“Oh, fuck,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII. “The Jenkinsons.”
“I thought they moved out!” exclaimed Queen Victoria XXX.
The screaming didn’t stop when the old people smashed into the ground. In fact, it seemed to get louder and more inconsistent, a random mix of blasphemies, obscenities, and complaining about the pain that accompanies being on fire and breaking multiple bones. Thankfully, the immolation didn’t stop when they hit the ground either, so the screaming didn’t continue much longer.
“Jesus…”
“Well, uh, at least,” stammered William H. Taft XLII, “at least all the possessed zombies are gone now, right?”
The car Chester A. Arthur had parked on the other side of the apartment building roared past the trio. It looked to be full of reanimated corpses, at least one of whom, judging from the “Yee-haw!” shouted from the passenger seat, was possessed by a cowboy.
“That’s our car, guys,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“You had to fucking say something, didn’t you, Billy?” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“I didn’t… how was I…”
“It’s like you’ve got a god damned superpower or something,” she continued, before resting her head on her knees and sighing.