Damned

As our traveling party neared this new sight, Archer leaned close to my ear. His Ramones concert T-shirt pungent with the stench of his perspiration, he whispered, "Catherine de Medicis..."

If you asked my father for advice he'd tell you, "The secret to being a successful comedian is to never stop talking until you hear someone laugh." Meaning: Persevere. Meaning: Be determined. Make just one person laugh; then leverage that person and that joke into more laughter. As some people decide you're funny, increasing numbers of people will begin to agree.

The tiny Hitler mustache secreted safe within the pocket of my skort, I listened to Archer's counsel.

"She's some queen of someplace," Archer whispers.

Of Renaissance France, I reply. The consort and queen of Henry II, she died in 1589. Most likely she's condemned to eternal hellfire for instigating the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which Parisian mobs slaughtered thirty thousand French Huguenots. As we draw nearer and nearer, the queen's eyes become fixed upon me, perhaps sensing my newfound power and my growing lust for more. In the same manner that Hitler was trapped in the persona of a ranting blowhard, and the Countess Bathory was fixated on being a permanent youthful beauty, Catherine de Medicis seems far too attached to her imperious noble station of birth.

Stopping, Archer allowed me to continue my approach, my every step narrowing the distance between me and my new adversary. From behind me, standing at a safe distance, Archer called, "Go for it, Madison. Kick her royal candy ass....."

Admittedly, my battle charge might've appeared somewhat crudely juvenile, consisting of racing full-tilt at the object of my attack, shouting a litany of playground curses such as, "Prepare to die, dirty butt-face, you stinky, skuzzy dumb-ass snotty stuck-up wop queen... !" before shoving Catherine de Medicis's bodily from her candy-bar throne and pummeling her with a rain of toe kicks, fingernail scratches, hair pulls, savage tickles, and cruel pinches. Yet despite this schoolyard barbarism, I did manage to compel the lofty de Medicis to consume a mouthful of soil after successfully positioning Her Highness to lie facedown upon the ground. Thence, it took only my modest body weight directed through the point of my crooked elbow, driven between her shoulder blades, to motivate her royal Cathyness to recite, under duress, "Si! Si! I am a skuzzy Miss Skuzzyski and a Douchey MacDouche Bag and I smell like stale cat pee......" It goes without saying that neither Catherine nor her parasitic courtiers could understand a syllable of what she recited, but her compulsory speech occurred as highly comic to Archer, who erupted in a veritable volcano of surly guffaws.

Yes, now it's power I want. Not affection. I don't want that kind of pointless, impotent power, as earlier discussed. Mark my words: Being dead isn't all sitting around in remorseful reflection and bitter self-recrimination. Death, like life, is what you make of it.

Fortified with the Hitler mustache and the Bathory diamond, I made quick, brutal work of this cutthroat religious bigot. Once she's sent packing to join Adolf in the mucky swamp, I resume my journey with Archer, the coronet of pearls now balanced upon my own head, and the ragged retinue of Renaissance ladies and gentlemen fall into step among my growing legion of followers. Traipsing along behind us, Archer and me, our army swells with Nazi zombies... plus these de Medicis hangers-on... later, Caligula's camp followers.

You may attribute my new boldness to a sort of placebo effect, but by carrying the mustache of a loudmouthed despot, my own words began to sound more eloquent to my ear. My every statement carries the force and authority of a speech blasted over amplifiers to a rally of goose-stepping, torch-bearing, book-burning minions. In order to balance the pearl crown of a righteous, sadistic queen, I'm forced to stand taller, my spine, my bearing, my entire carriage stretched to a nobler height. Casting aside my sensible Bass Weejun loafers, I place my feet in the high heels provided by Babette, further increasing my stature.

Before we reached the next horizon, I'd vanquished yet another foe—Vlad III, alias Vlad the Impaler, a prince of the Dracul family, who died in 1476 after torturing some hundred thousand people to death—a man who formed the flesh-and-blood basis of the Dracula vampire legend. From him, I claimed a jeweled dagger, a dusty clique of corrupt knights, and a treasure chest brimming with Charleston Chews.

Subsequent to him, I utilize said dagger to obtain the testicles of the corrupt Roman emperor Caligula. And his mighty cache of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

After we'd resumed walking, at present shadowed by half the obedient idiots from world history, I ask Archer, "So you're in Hell because you shoplifted bread?" I say, "How...Jean Valjean."

Archer merely stares at me.