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.