On The 7th Day

by Zack Murphy

  The Ploughs didn’t believe in caffeine in any form [He had decided after hour two of mind-numbing, excruciating boredom that without caffeine there would be, if he had anything to do with it and he most certainly had, a special place in hell for these types of people]. Dana Plough had somehow persuaded her mother after a few choice exchanges to allow her to bring it in to the house. She jumped at the chance to get out of the house, the three blocks to the coffee shop felt like a prison furlough she has earned for the good behavior of not beating someone to death with one of tomes of childhood memories. That had been over an hour ago and Satan was starting to become punch drunk from the never-ending life history in pictures that raced past his glazed-over stare.

  “Isn’t this exciting?” Mrs. Plough beamed.

  “That’s a word,” His clinched fists fixed under his legs trying to hide his struggle to keep from either going cross-eyed and fainting from the utter boredom or from punching his elderly host upside the head. He was wondering which feeling could win out in his drained brain first. And although the violence toward a seventy year old woman sounded fine, he knew he probably need to run after the punch, and at the moment he couldn’t feel his legs.

  “And here she is preparing for going up the stairs.”

  “You must have been very proud of that day.”

  “Oh yes. We’ve always been proud of our little Dana. She’s our princess. How could we not be proud? I just wish we had a subscription to the Lake Forest Register.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t be a silly goose.”

  “Okay. I’ll try.” He had met many geese and they were all from silly, they were just plain mean. “What do you need the Lake Forest Register for exactly?”

  “Because she works there. I think that if you got her pregnant you should really know some things about our Dana.”

  “She doesn’t work for the-- Why do you think she works for a small town newspaper?”

  “Because she does.” Mrs. Plough was worried that her daughter has gotten herself involved in a man who had little interest in what Dana Plough did. And not being totally immersed in everything her little princess, was to her, THE original sin. “Are you sure you know Dana?”

  “Do you?”

  “She’s worked there for almost twenty years. Right out of college. We’re so proud of her; what with her being managing editor of a major publication and all.”

  “There are two statements in that sentence that are so very, very wrong. Don’t you watch television?”

  This statement seemed to have shocked Mrs. Plough, who let out an astonished gasp holding her hand against her heart. He had never seen eyes bulge out of a person’s head as far as Mrs. Plough’s had. Her look of sheer horror and unqualified bewilderment had him totally beat as to what she could possibly have been so taken aback by. He seemed to have struck a nerve and was now going to dig into the nerve to see how far down the wound was.

  “So you’ve never seen Dana on the television?”

  “How could I possibly do that? I’ll tell you Larry and I saw the TV once. We went over to the Carters down the street to see what all the fuss was about; it was October of Forty Eight, I’ll never forget it. We sat down to all gather around the set to watch some guy called Milton Barley or something like that. And do you know what we saw?

  ‘A man in a dress! I mean, can you believe it? A grown man prancing around in front of millions of people in ladies clothing! That was first and last time we ever watched that horrible thing. I said at the time, ‘if this is the kind of thing they’ll put on the television, we don’t need it.’ I was totally shocked and disgusted about the whole situation. I thought I would just die!”

  “Well I guess it’s a good thing you stopped watching sixty years ago because you’d have been in the grave years ago.”

  Mrs. Plough looked at him with perplexity. To her there was no way in the world that you could fall down further down the slippery slope of morality than a man in a petticoat. She was puzzled that this man would have the audacity to even joke about her innocent little girl being part of that horrible industry where she might be in the presence of people who thought that sort of low brow humor was at all funny.

  “Although we do like going to the movies. I like that Jimmy Dean fellow.”

  “You mean James Dean? I believe Jimmy Dean makes sausages.”

  Suddenly the front door swung open and Dana Plough entered, carrying two large cups of steaming hot coffee. The two hours away had done her a world of good. She was now smiling and rejuvenated, as only getting away from the elderly can do to younger people. Satan’s eyes caught the steam rising from the Styrofoam cups and leaped off the couch.

  “I thought I’d never say this, but thank God!”

  “You don’t believe in god?” asked Mrs. Plough.

  “No. I believe in God. I just never thought I’d be thanking him.”

  *****

  A shadowy figure crept behind a line of bushes. It was dressed in military fatigues and the green glow from night vision goggles pierced through the thicket. The figure found a soft bed of dried leaves and situated itself, peering at the house on the horizon.

  It reached into its vest pocket and pulled out a candy bar, he gently unwrap the chocolate so as to not give away his position. As his teeth tore through the bar he gazed into the house through an open window to see thirteen extremely large men dressed in numbered tee shirts doing a poor man’s version of the Electric Slide.

  The wrapper dropped to the ground and swirled in the light breeze around the dead leaves. He looked down, then back to the house, then back to the paper. He sighed as he leaned over to retrieve the litter he had produced and stuffed it into his pants pocket.

  After his eco-friendly project he turned his sights back on the commotion inside. His long fingers scratched his head under the wool cap, a piece of spying uniform he wished he’d forgotten in the hot California night.

  He heard footsteps and voices approaching his position and dove into the bush. He watched the feet of two people, a man and a woman, travel past him as he laid still, dampness soaking through his clothes on the soggy ground that had a few hours ago been thoroughly watered by underpaid immigrant gardeners. The pair had gone from his sight as he slowly rose from his leafy protection and returned to his re-con work.

  *****

  Actor Jonathan Frakes was happy to be in his home again. It had been a long fourteen city trip of autograph signings and speeches and his voice and wrists were killing him. He dropped down on the couch, cracked open a beer and opened the massive book that sat on his lap.

  It was his third time through The Last Days vol. XII: or what to do when it finally does happen and it never seemed to get old, especially the parts about him. In the book he was the ultimate hero in the war between heaven and hell, an intricate part of humanity’s ongoing existence.

  He was well versed in fan fiction, but this was something all together new. This was a work by someone who really knew the true him-- a man who could, if asked, save the planet from the dark nightmarish forces of evil.

  His eyes raced through the pages of sepia, written in fine calligraphy; whoever the author was, they had spared no expense in making it a grade ‘A’ project. Although the pages were yellow and crumbly and seemed to have been written hundreds of years ago, Actor Jonathan Frakes had resigned his skepticism for the book to its fine craftsmanship in ensuring what was a really good read.

  *****

  The mustang raced south along the highway, Satan and Dana Plough wore their smiles as badges of honor as they had escaped twelve hours of what would be known, for as long as the Earth still existed; the longest day ever. Dana Plough’s hair whipped through the air, her tangled locks like overgrown ivy climbing her face.

  The trip to Sacramento wasn’t a colossal waste of time. Although nothing between her and her parents was resolved, she had got to see them before her torturing began. And she wanted to remember them as they were, living, and not the she
lls of themselves as red hot pokers were being crammed into open cavities.

  She wanted to tell them how much they meant to her in her life, mostly bad, but a little good. She wanted to them to bask in her glory, to tremble in her image as a media goddess. She had to settle for the astonished look as she they stood on her childhood steps where she had played in simpler times, as they went as grey and solid as poured cement at her parting words.

  “Bye mom and dad, I love you--. And, oh yeah, the baby’s daddy is the devil. See you both in hell!” They hadn’t been able to reply, as their arid tongues were dangling from their gaped mouths.

  She knew the whole ‘see you in hell’ shot was probably unnecessary, but it was both fun and true. She could now watch the world around her destroyed in a fiery rage and be all right with everything.

  In the chaos that was to come she took solace in the knowledge that she had made peace with her life; even if that peace of mind was to shock and humble the loving parents who had bore her so she could complete her fate as the chosen vessel for the destruction of humanity.

  *****

  “Why can’t we just go through the backdoor? They’re all in the living room. No one would even know we were here,” said Ketty, dangling from the limb of a tree outside Dana Plough’s house, a wayward branch jutted into various nooks and crannies where she wished no vegetation would have never ever have visited.

  “That would totally ruin the whole purpose of what we’re doing here,” replied Barnaby, who was fighting with gravity by trying to hold himself up as he pried open with a second story window.

  His body was beginning to lose a high stakes game of Twister between the frame of the house and the tree. His right hand slipped from the window pane to a loose tile on the house while his left foot jumped from a sturdy branch to a small, moss-covered, flimsy twig to the right of his left hand.

  “And what exactly is the purpose of this?”

  “The element of surprise.”

  “So, we’re going to surprise them by having them wake up in the morning to find our dead, mangled bodies lying in a heap outside their breakfast nook window.”

  “That’s one scenario.”

  “I’m leaving,” she took a long look at her position in the giant oak tree, “How do I get down from here?”

  “You can’t leave. We just got here.”

  “No, we didn’t just get here. We’ve been in this damn tree for forty five minutes.”

  “The window’s almost opened.” He grunted as peered down on her with big doe eyes. Barnaby’s child-like whine grated on the teacher in her. If he had been one of her students she could have lectured him on the importance of attempting to become more grown-up, but this man didn’t seem to have a genetic disposition to learning at any level.

  She gave the sixty or so feet to the ground another once over and decided that falling to her inevitable lengthy hospital stay of drinking pureed vegetable soup out of a straw and the uncomfortable silence during the daily sponge baths [Hospital sponge baths are not given by porn stars as a prerequisite for hot woman on woman sex as most popular movies lead us to believe and are often given by the one person who would make anyone go celibate] was worth giving Barnaby another few minutes. Besides, she had finally gotten the branch in a rather comfortable position.

  “Two minutes, then I’m climbing down and I’m finished with all of this silliness. Do you understand me? This is it. I can’t take it much longer; this isn’t how I want to spend my last few days on earth, hanging outside some strange woman’s house, dangling from tree limbs with a crazed man-child.”

  “That’s the spirit!” A huge smile crossed Barnaby’s lips and he tugged on the window.

  *****

  A small man wearing a bowler and dressed in a dapper tweed suit with bulky coke bottle glasses sat fidgeting on a plane from Grenada to Los Angeles. He muttered to himself about how for years he had been a faithful servant, never questioning, always following. He complained under his breadth about the years of planning, of research, of selflessness he had put up with.

  He spoke wildly about the time and effort he spent being a wonderful person with no ego and no motive, only doing for others while putting his life on the back burner for the good of mankind. He protested to no one for about two hours before he had worked himself up into such a snit that he fell asleep from the mental fatigue.

  The man decided that if he was going to be used in such a way, he would take matters into his own hands. He would be the hero of the day and be fitted with the other worldly robes and crowns that he had spent his existence in the darkness and the shadows to procure. He was going to take matters in his own hands. And they be damned who may try to stop him.

  *****

  Barnaby had given up on trying to open the bedroom window. When the downstairs dance party had cranked up the volume to revel in Michael Jackson’s Thriller, he smashed through the glass and climbed inside. The room was dark and bare; it was a room to which not much thought was given except for sleep.

  Shadows from the various grooming items that lined the dresser cast an air of despair along the blank white walls that gave the room a hint of mystery built on familiarity. He took out a small flashlight that had been tucked into his pants and shined it around the room until it rested on a small safe that doubled as a nightstand.

  Barnaby crept towards it, trying to soften the sound of his footsteps from the ears of the Agents a floor below.

  “I think we found it, Ketty.” he whispered “This is what we’re looking for. Ketty?” His glance flowed back behind him to see that his accomplice in breaking and entering was not behind him. He made his way back over to the opened window and saw Ketty still hanging on for dear life to the branch she had been perched on for the past hour. “Why are you still out there? I got the window open.”

  “Yeah, thanks so much for the invite, but I’m just going to hang out here for a while if you don’t mind.” She hung for dear life, her nails embedded into the hulky bark.

  “Of course I mind. We’re a team. Teams work together.”

  “Why don’t you be a team with yourself for a while?”

  “Because there’s no ‘I’ in team, although there is an ‘I’ in warriors, and we’re more warriors than a team, so think of us as more warriors than a team and you can do it.”

  “Fine, come out here and help me.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  Barnaby put one foot out the window and felt for a sturdy tree branch to support his weight. With his right foot bracing his weight on the window sill he inched his left foot down the branch that had been much mossier than a branch should have the nerve to be.

  He twirled his arms, trying to use the force of his flapping arms to balance his anatomy to avoid going where certain parts should never go. As his toes were becoming parallel to his belly button he decided that perhaps the sixty foot drop to the ground wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

  Perhaps it was the stretching of his groin or the vertigo caused by the slip that had left him looking like a human T as his head was now pointing directly toward the ground, but he had no time to be diffident about what was to happen next.

  In a feat usually reserved for acrobats, gymnasts or certain ladies you pay a little extra for, Barnaby swung himself from his toes and caught a large branch with one hand while grabbing Ketty with the other. While in mid-swing, he tossed her through the open window and with a one and half tuck, landed on the branch he was dangling from seconds ago.

  Ketty, who had pulled herself up from the broken glass-laden floor to catch the triumphant landing, was speechless, but was able to do a small clap in response to what she was pretty sure had never happened.

  Barnaby caught her eyes and grinned enormously, threw his arms out to his side and bowed. He tanned himself in the soft glow of the spotlight that surrounded him in his mind, which quickly became a rushing cold wind.

  He was woken from his boasting to find himself hurdling face first toward the g
round, which seemed to take a few hours. But in reality he landed with a large splat in one second, flat.

  Ketty, who had stopped clapping long enough to bring her hands over her eyes, finally peeked out and down to survey what damage had been done by the falling mass of black turtleneck and woolen hat. Her silent horror was directed at the large lump of mangled body parts, tree limbs and wet leaves sprouting out amongst the large roots of the oak tree.

  It wasn’t moving, which was always a bad sign, especially since the lump seconds before had been breathing and genuflecting.

  “Barnaby?” she was pretty certain he would be dead if he was alive to begin with. “Are you all right?”

  There was no answer, no movement, and no sign of life at all. Ketty was now on the second floor of someone’s whose home, only a few days ago, she’d have gladly broken into to spray curse words in bright red paint, but was now a prisoner locked in a high tower without the hair to ensure a princely escape.

  “Barnaby,” she tried again hoping to get some sort of response. A long pained moan rippled from the lump below. “Barnaby- is that you?” Another moan bustled from the pile. “Are you okay?”

  “I think I’m broke.” Barnaby whimpered from the pretzel shape in which he had been supplanted. He spit out a few loose leaves and dirt clods that had made their way into the craw of his mouth and coughed, sending a sharp pang around the roller coaster of his spine.

  “Do you need me to come down there and help you?”

  “No. Just give me a few minutes to straighten myself out.” There was a rustle, some moans and a few cries of pain. “Which way are your feet supposed to point?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, I’ll figure it out.” There was a large crack that echoed up to the top floor window. “Ow, that wasn’t supposed to make that sound.”

  “Let me help you,” pleaded Ketty.

  After a few more bone-curdling cracks from the darkness the tree began to sway. Barnaby rescaled the tree and popped his head inside the window. “Now, let’s get to work. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep myself together.”

  *****

  The figure in black crept from bush to bush, running and doing summersaults between each. He reached the tree, where he watched as Barnaby’s foot disappeared through the shadowed canopy into Dana Plough’s window.