The Pentagon

September 11, 1941. Midnight.

A titanic crash echoed through the virgin Pennsylvanian forest. Zombie Abraham Lincoln straightened his hat and holstered his revolver with a steely glint in his eye.

“Ooh, boy. She’s angry alright. We’re going to need something a mite bigger this time around.”
He motioned to the man next to him.
“Ronald... bring me Tabitha.”

Ronald Reagan gave a curt nod and sprinted into the darkness. Lincoln stood in the clearing, stock still, and silent. He was good at standing still. It was one of many advantages of being undead. The unholy symbol draped around his neck pulsed with an unearthly light, drawing the creature closer, like bait in a trap. Exactly like bait in a trap, since it was, in fact, the bait in a trap.

Any second now...

The trees in front of him exploded into splinters, and from a hundred feet in the air there was a tremendous roar. Lincoln stood his ground, drawing both this silver revolvers and emptying twelve alchemical iron rounds into the beast’s towering form. The creature roared, less with pain than with annoyance. He placed his hand on the thousand-year-old katana on his back. If Reagan didn’t hurry, he was going to have to get medieval-Japan on its reptillian behind, and that would just ruin his suit.

“Abraham!” came the shout from across the clearing. In the split second it took Lincoln to glance his way, the beast struck, swiping at him with a claw the size of a stagecoach, sending him flying into the air. As he came down, he drew the katana and, performing a perfect backflip, landed on the beast’s scaly head

“NOW, REAGAN!”, he roared, as he brought the blade down ineffectually against the enormous skull. On the ground, Ronald Reagan let out an animal yell, which was only marginally less terrifying than the whine of Tabitha, Lincoln’s vorpal minigun, spinning up to four hundred thousand RPM. In a blaze of eldrich energy, Reagan opened fire.

The effect was almost instantaneous. One of the creature’s seven limbs was liquified to a gooey paste of bone and sinew. With a screech of genuine pain this time, the creature thrashed its thousand ton mass from left to right, leaving Lincoln clinging to the handle of the katana, whose steel blade embedded in the creature’s skull was the only thing preventing him from being thrown to his re-demise. “AGAIN! HAVE AT HER!”, he bellowed.

Reagan’s second burst of sustained fire struck true. Half a million shards of depleted Neptunium bored a perfectly cylindrical hole in the creature’s chest. With a quiet groan, it keeled ponderously over and landed on the ground with a ground-cracking crash. Lincoln stepped calmly off the beast’s head, wiping the viscera from his katana. “That won’t stop it for long. We need the containment field ready, as soon as possible. Get Edison out here on double. Tell him we have her down.”

“No need, Mr. President.”, said a voice from the shadows. Thomas Edison lurched out of the forest and, with a curt nod to Abraham Lincoln, offered one cloth-wrapped mummified hand to Ronald Reagan. “Mr. Reagan. The late Thomas Alva Edison, at your service.” He turned to the shadows again. “Bring out the generators!”

A rustling and squeaking came from the surrounding forest. As the three looked on, thousands of bats, each tied to a tiny harness, dragged out five massive engines, each bolted to a pair of copper coils which, in turn, was atttached to a parabolic dish. The creature on the ground began to stir feebly.

“No time to lose. Everyone out of the pentacle!”. Edison handed Lincoln and Reagan each a pair of goggles, and then pulled down hard on a lever on the side of the closest generator. In unison, five bolts of lightning lanced across the clearing, trapping the waking creature at the centre of a perfect five-pointed star.

“Reagan. The incantations.”, said Edison.

“You have no idea the lengths I went to to get this. I had to rob the library of congress. Me, the President- well, the president one day at any rate-”

“Quiet! Just do it!” Lincoln turned one eye to the horizon. “Dawn is coming.”

Ronald Reagan pulled a surprisingly small but exceptionally old grimoire from inside his trenchcoat. He uttered fourteen guttural syllables, and snapped the book shut as they watched the creature flicker into invisibility.

As the sun rose, the three headed out of the forest. Lincoln turned to the other two. “Right. Our work here is done.” Checking his pocket watch, he turned and nodded gravely at each of the men in turn. “I shall see you at the End of the World.” As Lincoln returned to his grave, Edison to his flying pyramid space zeppelin, and Reagan to his stolen time machine, each one of them saluted the secret service men, who were just beginning to arrive. They were here as part of a far larger plan. A far more difficult, and complex, and dangerous plan. A plan to contain the beast, not just temporarily, but permanently, within a specially constructed pentagonal building, whose shape could channel away and safely earth the arcane energies which surrounded the beast and whose construction would be supervised under the watchful eye of the Department of Supernatural Defense of the United States of America. A building which would come to be known as...

The Pentagon.

---

I watched Cowboys and Aliens last night. So I thought, hey, why not Presidents and Dinosaurs?

This was really fun to write, because I decided from the start that I didn't care how silly it ended up, and as soon as I thought of something which would be cool I added it, plot be damned. And after last week, I figured I needed a change of tone, to something with a little less actual literary merit. I think it worked out pretty well.