“So, uh, what now?”
“No talking, Billy,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
“But, what did…”
“No, seriously. Shut the fuck up. You do not get to speak again until you can definitively prove that you don’t have some kind of supernatural stranglehold over our future.”
William H. Taft XLII opened his mouth in a manner suggesting he was about to talk, but the murderous look in Victoria’s eyes made him reconsider that course of action. It also made him urinate slightly.
“Well,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, “it was still a good question. Even if he’s not allowed to ask it.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t. But you know damn well that after he asked it he would have volunteered a suggestion or two, and one of them, without a doubt, would have been punctuated by something like, ‘until we’re raped by 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.