Benjamin “Motherfuckin'” Franklin, a hulking mass of bones, dirt, worms, and faded wool long johns, stood on the far side of the entrance ramp to the Samuel Adams brewery. The walking corpse was hurling fireballs recklessly and roaring toward the heavens.
“Oh, come on,” grumbled Thor, the fallen Norse God of Thunder, exiting the brewery and discovering the rampaging, incendiary cadaver. “This wasn’t here when we got here!”
“Maybe there’s a back door,” suggested Boudica IX, clone of the Celtic revolutionary, poking her wild mane of red hair through the doorway.
“Yeah, but it’s all the way on the other side of the brewery. And this place is huge.”
Benjamin “Motherfuckin'” Franklin bellowed incoherently in reply.
Unlike the other Revolutionary War-era politicians running around, Benjamin “Motherfuckin'” Franklin was not a clone. Shortly after a thermonuclear pissing contest between Canada and Switzerland ended the world for the eleventh time and transformed Philadelphia into a burned-out husk of crime and cheesesteak stands , Benjamin Franklin’s exhumed corpse was moved to Copp’s Hill Burying Ground below the tree-city of Boston where he could, presumably, rest in eternal pieces.
Almost immediately, though, the Charles River running beneath the city overflowed from an excess of feces and Yankees fan corpses during a particularly raucous St. Patrick’s Day riot-parade. The green dye and Bostonian excrement seeped into Franklin’s grave, waking him from the afterlife and transforming him into a monstrous, super-powered nightmare version of himself.
Benjamin “Motherfuckin'” Franklin had been roaming the forest-metropolis of New England ever since, terrorizing anything and everything that crossed his path, or, really, got anywhere within his peripheral vision.
“I think you’re going to have to take him out, honeybutt,” said Boudica IX, ducking back into the brewery lobby as a fireball exploded above the doorway. “Or we could go back inside and get drunk and hope he goes away.”
“No, the only thing they have ready right now is light beer,” replied the former Norse god, “and I will never drink light beer. Stay back.”
The sky darkened and thunder rumbled, shaking dust from the brewery facade and sending the empty beer bottles littering the tree-borne walkway into a tiny jig. Benjamin Franklin looked up at the roaring sky just in time to take a bolt of lightning squarely between his rotting, hollowed eye sockets.
The colonial inventor giggled.
“OK,” said Thor, raising an eyebrow, “that’s not supposed to happen.”
“Ben Franklin discovered electricity!” shouted a brewery employee, popping his head through a nearby window. “Lightning won’t have any effect on him, he’s been struck by it too many times!”
Benjamin Franklin’s spine glowed blue and he belched atomic bile at the window, the radioactive fluids eating through the glass and brick and the poor bastard standing behind them.
“Holy shit,” said Thor, staring at Benjamin “Motherfuckin'” Franklin, his eyes wide.
“It’s Franklin’s atomic vomit!” shouted a brewery visitor, crouched behind a nearby railing. “No one knows what it is precisely, or how it happened. When he came back, he just had it!”
“That sounds gross.”
“It is! But that doesn’t mean it –” The man abruptly stopped speaking and started screaming as he was now on fire. So was the railing. And a pigeon that had chosen a truly terrible moment to alight.
“Damn it,” grumbled Thor. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he shouted, “If there are any other people hiding in the immediate vicinity of the brewery and this fire-throwing assclown, you should really run away now.”
A half-dozen people scrambled from behind garbage cans and benches and fled past the colonial monster, running down the suspended footbridge and toward the wooden skyline of Boston proper.
Out of frustration, and a lack of variety in his distance attacks, Thor struck Franklin with a tremendous bolt of lightning again, scorching the ground and setting a bench and a few overreaching branches on fire. Benjamin Franklin’s knees buckled slightly, but he didn’t fall. Instead, he came flying toward Thor, riding the jet of flame erupting from his anus.
“Sugarbuns,” said Thor, stepping away from the door and pulling his arm back, “you should probably get back. I think this is going to do some property damage.”
Boudica IX backed up from the entranceway and found something solid to crouch behind farther inside the lobby. Peering from the far side of the giant marble statue of a drunken Red Sox fan, she watched through the narrow frame of the door as Benjamin “Motherfuckin'” Franklin roared toward her boyfriend, radioactive bile erupting from his mouth and dissolving Thor’s clothes and patches of his skin. The thunder god didn’t flinch, bringing his fist forward as Franklin neared. The two collided and Benjamin Franklin’s head exploded like a watermelon meeting a sledgehammer. The shockwave shattered every window and splintered every wooden plank in the area, rocking the very tree-foundation of the brewery. Boudica IX, for her part, simply fell onto her butt.
Thor, smoking slightly and more than stark naked, small splashes of muscle fiber visible to the world, looked down and said:
“Damn it. Now I have to buy new pants.”
“Not so fast there, snickernoodle,” commanded Boudica IX, slinking through the porcupined doorway. “You and I aren’t done here yet.”
“I’m pretty sure we are,” said the thunder god slowly, looking at the headless colonial writer, confusion passing over his face. “And those were the only pants I had, and you and Catrina are always telling me I have to wear them when I go out.”
“Catrina’s not here.”
“Well, yeah, but you are.”
“Yes,” said Boudica IX, pressing herself against her smoldering boyfriend, a smile on her face. “I am.” She pushed Thor to the ground.
After Queen Victoria XXX murdered Boudica IX in a fit of frothing rage, Dr. Lee Arahami, a mad roboticist, brought the cloned Celtic leader back to life using science. However, unlike fellow miracles of cybernetics rendered powerless by the global blackout, Boudica IX was not overly reliant on subcutaneous microelectronics to function. There were, in fact, only a few parts of her affected by the geomagnetic superstorm that turned out all the lights.
Lady parts.
Her bones being titanium, though, and the rest of her mostly meat and human tissue, Thor was unable to strike her with lightning to recharge her genitalia, lest he accidentally fatally electrocute her – even if he did only strike her with a little, tiny lightning bolt, as he often offered. Being in the general vicinity of a much larger sky-clapping electrical discharge, however, turned out to be more than enough to jump start her junk.
“Holy criminy,” said Boudica IX breathlessly, rolling off the prostrate thunder god and sitting on the scorched sidewalk, “that was worth the wait.”
“I am a fucking god,” said Thor, sitting up.
“I know, sweetiepoops,” she replied, patting him patronizingly on his shoulder. “You don’t need to say it every time.”
“Hey, let’s go get some pancakes,” he said, jumping to his feet, his man bits bouncing in the breeze.
“Sure,” agreed the redhead, laying her back on the pavement, her pale chest still heaving. “Just give me a couple minutes to catch my breath.”
