by Zack Murphy
The truth was she didn’t know why she was here or why she was stealing the box, or if she was in fact stealing it. For all she knew it was Dana Plough’s box or Satan’s box, or it was this creepy guy’s box and he was going to kill her and chop up her into little pieces and scatter her remains on rose bushes for a more natural fertilizer.
“How did you find this place?”
“The Devil told me.” It was the truth, although it sounded more like a lie. If he wasn’t going to believe a lie he certainly wasn’t going to believe the truth. She wasn’t even sure she believed it.
“Okay then,” said the man as he stepped aside. Juliet just stared in a mixture of disbelief and pride that she had talked her way out of the predicament. She dismissed his sudden backing off as some sort of ruse to get her to come closer so he could beat her over the head with his mop handle.
She stepped closer, making sure he didn’t make any sudden movements. She looked in his eyes and he nodded as if to say it was okay and he believed her.
“Okay then,” she echoed as she scuttled past him and out the door. She got half way down the hallway and gave a quick glance back to see what the man was doing. He had gone back to mopping the floor and didn’t seem to give her a second thought. “Okay then,” she said to herself as she exited out to the stairway, “I’ve really got start using my connections more often.”
*****
“All I’m saying is that it’s not that big of a deal.”
“Breaking into a government facility with the sole purpose of stealing weapons grade viruses is not a big deal?” The man questioning Henry was a typical bureaucrat; someone who had spent his entire life not being amused by anything.
He had spent his childhood finding milk spewing forth from his classmates’ nostrils not the least bit humorous. He lived his teen days as a hall monitor and the Student Government Treasurer, while spending his evenings alone in his room building model planes and thinking about how the other kids were just jealous of his highly stylized way of getting down to the business of the situation.
“Well, maybe not a small deal, but really, are you going to miss one or two vials?” gulped Henry.
“That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard.”
“Believe me, I’ve asked much stupider questions than that. I mean, people are always saying to me, ‘That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard.’ So you know, well, I think I can come up with something else.”
“Shut up!”
“Okay.” Henry was not made of stone; in fact, if one were to open him up they’d probably be covered with Jell-o. He was the folding chair of the animal kingdom.
The man unholstered his gun and pointed it at Henry’s head. He slowly pulled up to cock the gun and the click echoed in Henry’s ear. The smell of cold steel filled his nostrils as his eyes darted around the room trying to evade the stare of the cobalt executioner. The man brought his mouth down level with Henry’s ear and whispered slowly and coolly, “I could kill you right here and now and no one would ever care.”
“I know you could!” Henry screamed. His shrill voice pierced the air in three octaves too high for a man of his build and masculinity. A tear streamed down his cheek, running into his mouth. The taste of salt filled his palate as his bottom lip quivered with terror.
The man stood erect, hovering over Henry. His finger slide down the trigger and started to pull. Sirens filled the air of the holding cell while flashing red lights danced on the walls like a white guy in a disco. The door of the room flung open and another large man came barreling in panting out of breath.
“Quick! Someone’s just made off with two vials of The Jamaican Whooping Fever Pox.”
The two men went sprinting out of the room, leaving Henry to flop on the floor in exhaustion. As he lay on floor he noticed the door was left ajar. He watched the manic rush of the lab personnel whir past him in a horrid frenzy usually reserved for Monster of Week movies.
No one seemed to or wanted to pay any attention to him. He tried as nonchalantly as he could to mosey out of the room and down the hall. He stopped and stared at another room that had been left vacant by the commotion.
Room 267 sat there tempting him with its tubes and vials. “But I wanted the Jamaican Whooping Fever Pox.” He lamented as he strolled in, hastily grabbed the closest vial to the door, took a look at the tumult that surrounded him, and ran.
As he was exiting through the large metal doors of the laboratory something caught his eye. He stopped in his tracks and stared. His face became flushed and his feet felt like they had become suddenly subject to mafia shoe repair.
His heart raced as he stared at the thing that had caught his soul and squeezed it tight. What he had seen passed his sight and he began to walk slowly out of the Center’s isolated gates and down the road. He did not blink or leave his steady pace as he pounded rhythmically down the road. He just wanted to get back to the city and forget whatever it was he had seen.
*****
Actor Jonathan Frakes viewed the storm clouds on the horizon as he sat barefoot on his porch reading the book for the fifth time. Good reading doesn’t get stale; it just reaffirms one’s purpose in life. The waiting for the day to arrive was eating at him. He really wished for a sign to tell him when to begin his quest to save the earth from total annihilation. He picked up a small bell from the table and gave it a little jingle.
From inside the house came Nancy, his trusted ‘servant’ for nearly ten years. It was her job to reassure him that remained one of the common people despite his wealth, fame and incredible good looks. “Nancy, I think I’m going to go out for a while. Pack my traveling bag.”
“Yes Mr. Frakes,” she said, rolling her eyes as she turned her back to him to go back inside the house. She had come to almost appreciate all of her employer’s quirks, but his traveling bag was something else.
How anyone couldn’t bear to travel without a pair of leather gloves, a pocket knife, twenty 8X11 autographs and a week’s supply of Dr. Langer’s Miracle Cream For The Everyday Needs Of A Man On The Go was beyond her.
She quickly grabbed the bag and put in the car. When Actor Jonathan Frakes said he was leaving, it meant he would be exiting the premises in a good hour. But if the bag wasn’t there in five minutes her privileges for not spending time watching old film clips of him was taken away.
*****
The cottage sat upon a small hill in the outskirts of Heaven, surrounded by bushes of black roses and pink carnations. It was a quaint little home that looked as if it had been pulled out of a fairy tale except that it came with an portentous and foreboding sense that whoever lived there was probably a bit to the left of sane.
The glow of candles flickered from the window as the silhouettes of two figures paced through the house. The more feminine of the outlines appeared to be tearing up the house as papers and pillows flew through the air.
The cascading bits and pieces seemed to serve two purposes; the first gave the impression of an attempt to find something that was hidden or misplaced by the thrower.
The second purpose seemed to be to hit the male figure as many times in the face as possible. From the shouts that accompanied the rush of the harried throwing, it was definitely both.
“Could you be a bit more careful with that? Some of those books hurt,” pleaded Michael Ryan. “And what the hell are those pillows made out of anyway? Rocks?”
“If you were more help I wouldn’t have to hit you.” She scowled and threw a vase at his head, narrowly and purposefully missing.
“I don’t even know what we’re looking for. If you’d tell me I could help you.”
“I don’t want you touching my stuff,” cried DANZ & C>500TP as a print of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the original unabridged edition [The way it was really meant to be read. The abridged version is much too compact to truly understand either War or Peace], slapped Michael upside the head.
“But you seem to have no problem with your stuff touching me,” he sa
id, rubbing a red indent of the word Peace on his forehead.
*****
The 13 Insurance Agents were sitting in silence. It was the last order that Dana Plough had given them before she left for the beach. “Stay put and shut up”, were her exact words and the Insurance Agents were nothing if not obedient. There was a concentrated eeriness to their imposed silence.
They had lived for thousands of years with the constant screams of the damned to keep them company. Then they had discovered the wonderful world of human temptations with its twenty four hour cable and non-stop rocking radio to soothe their nerves.
Now there was silence. Now there was just the spongy sound of heavy breathing coming from their companions. It was starting to grate on them; they had no idea how much the toll of relentlessly breathing fire and brimstone had taken on their lungs. The rasps and gurgling of their lungs filled the air with the reminder that they were no longer Satan’s number one through thirteen go-to guys. A woman had supplanted them.
Number Twelve began to tap his fingers on the coffee table, tapping out a little ditty he had been humming in his head. Number Four, taking a subconscious cue, began to whistle. Number One joined in as his tongue clicked against the walls of his cheeks. One by one the others joined in with their own accompaniment.
As feet tapped and fingers snapped the room was soon filled with an orchestra of sounds that rung from the walls to the ceiling of the house. The Insurance Agents, without ever looking at the others were happy in their symphony of defiance. Of course, they all kept one eye on the door, in case Dana Plough should show up early.
*****
Judge Raymond J. Little had spent, for better or worse, 40 years on the bench. He had been renowned for at least the last decade as the judge no one wanted to go before; not because of his sternness or heavy-handed grasp of his courtroom, but rather that he had most probably gone off his rocker.
It was hard to become a judge and even harder to get replaced, though many had tried their best to remove him from the bench. He held power between the hallowed halls of New York’s eleventh district with a mix between King Hared and Walter Mitty without the strands of sanity.
He walked into the courtroom and took his seat in the oversized chair he had decked out in red velvet, with a place for his beer on one side and a television remote control he used for his gavel on the other. He perused the eyes that stared up at him in a collection of horror and excitement of the circus side-show he may elicit at any given trial.
Both the DA and prosecution let out an audible sigh of desperation as they watched him take him seat and purse a bottle of cheap suds to his lips. “Case!” he screamed out to seemingly no one in particular.
A mousey stenographer in drab grey tip-toed up to the bench and presented him with a manila envelope. He opened it and perused it carefully, letting out a hodgepodge of grunts and gurgles as he turned the pages of the log. “Guilty. Next.”
He picked up the remote control and whacked it solidly on the bench; the sound of plastic on Formica bounced around the room. The stenographer slowly crept toward the bench, making sure she kept a safe distance between her and the remote control.
The last two stenographers had felt the wrath of Judge Little and his makeshift gavel, the latter spending two weeks in a local hospital while doctors tried in vain to remove the play button lodged deep behind his cornea, and he had gotten off easier than the former.
“You seem to be empty-handed,” said the judge as his eyes burned a hole through her and he reached into his seat pocket for his weapon, “I said ‘next’.”
The stenographer looked to the Defense attorney with big doe eyes that pleaded with him to be the person to interrupt the madman’s desires. Assistant DA Robert Marx reluctantly cleared his throat and decided to take one for the team, even though the judge had ruled in his favor. “Sir, if I may be so bold,” the words dripped out slowly and quietly.
“Oh, I think you’re being very bold, Mr. Assistant D.A.” the judge may have been good close up, but he wasn’t as sharp a shot from a distance, the one thing Mr. Marx knew would keep him safe for now.
“I think, perhaps, we should, you know-- um, try the case first before we get down to sentencing.” He paused as he watched the unchanging face of the judge. “Maybe?”
“I don’t see why.” A boisterous ring of accusatory deference billowed through the courtroom.
“Well, it’s just that here in the U.S. we usually give people a fair trial before we throw the um, book at them. You know; the whole innocent before proven guilty thing.”
The judge leaned over the bench and with a hint of glee amalgamated with the ravage of age and Quaaludes, pointed a wrinkled finger at the defendant. “I mean, she’s dead. What does it matter if she’s guilty or not?”
Beatrice Fields sat slumped over in her seat. With their gazes firmly stuck in the direction of the judge. No one in the room had noticed her silently passing off. Beatrice’s spirit stood hovering over her body and turned around when a cold breeze from someone behind her got her attention.
She came face to face with a cowled figure carrying a scythe and wearing a Yankees cap. “Am I really dead?”
“Friggin’ A,” said the Death of New York City [New York City has always worked on their own terms and laws. This carried over to death, which many New Yorkers were upset and dismayed that they had to share with the outside world; the outside world being anything not in one of the five boroughs], “And you weren’t even guilty.”
“Oh I was, though. I killed that guy in cold blood.”
“Yeah, but you’re a ninety year old woman with a shotgun; by law you’re supposed to defend yourself by any means necessary.”
“But I wasn’t defending myself.”
“Fuggidaboutit. Besides, the world’s about to end, anyhoo.”
“Friggin’ A!” said Beatrice.
“Friggin A!” nodded the Death of NYC in agreement.
*****
Juliet slunk, shoulders hunched, into the corner booth of a local bar and grill. The lighting just dimmed enough for her to go unnoticed to the rest of the patrons. She slowly lifted the small case from her jacket pocket and placed in on the table. Her fingers ran over the brass and gold, the raised marks passed by her fingertips like an ancient brail. She licked her lips, which had dried with anticipation, and steadily started to open the box.
“Can I start you with anything to drink?” She jerked from her spellbound gaze to find a fresh faced young waitress hovering over her and the box. She quickly grabbed the case and shoved it out of sight.
“What!?” she exclaimed as she shook off the cobwebs that had been spun in her head ever since she first gazed upon the box.
“Can I get you something to drink?” The smile that she flashed Juliet was as sincere as any smile you could get from someone working for tips and knowing that no matter how hard you try; tips will never make the rent.
The smile that Juliet saw however, was one of a person plotting against her, wanting what she possessed. This waitress’s toothy grins and good will was nothing but a façade in an attempt to take the box from her.
“Miss?” the waitress tried again. She had a feeling Juliet was going to be one of those. She was going to be the type of customer who wants you to leave them alone, then crows about how you weren’t attentive enough. Those people used their own hang ups as a way to get out of giving a good gratuity. If you’re a big enough ass you’ll automatically believe everyone else is too.
“I don’t know. Water. Coffee. Whatever.” Juliet waved her away with a flick of her wrist. She watched the waitress exit to a safe distance and pulled the box back out. She tentatively lifted the cover off the box to reveal the treasure that was entrusted to her protection.
It glimmered and gleamed with such a luminescence that her eyes had to gradually become accustomed to the sheer brilliant radiance that blazed from within.
She slowly lifted a large pendant from its enclosure and held it to her ey
es. It was the most magnificent thing she had ever seen and the sheer power emanating from it was inspiration in the grotesque. Her gaze transfixed to the glowing pendant; she quickly shoved it back in the box and closed the lid tightly.
Juliet knew she was now important in her boss’s cause. To be trusted with the procurement of such an object of pure incomparability was something to be held in great esteem. The act of just touching the pendant gave her a sense of a supreme duty to those that had trusted her with it.
And with such duty came great responsibility. A renewed loyalty to what would soon be her sole purpose in life. She was now one of the chosen few, and she was going to be more dominant in this world than she’d ever have dreamed. She was now ready for that drink.
*****
War was starting to get rather uncomfortable riding bareback upon a three ton purple dinosaur. He had always been a big proponent of pain and agony, but this was starting to get ridiculous. He decided there and then to one strict rule: No more torturing the nether regions, no matter how effective that torture may be.
There was a glimmer of light on the horizon. War wiped his forehead and relief breathed its sweet anticipation of relief as visions of ice packs danced in his head.
“Civilization! Glorious, glorious civilization! We finally made it to the ranch. Oh, I’ve never been so relieved to see a horse in all my life," he bellowed from under his helmet.
“There shouldn’t be a town here.” The Death scratched his head as he looked over the sand, trying to squint through no eyelids.
“There shouldn’t be giant purple dinosaurs either, but we seem to be riding those,” War wailed. The pain was starting to turn the most powerful vanquisher into a newborn without a bottle. If there was ever a leveler in the universe it was the throbbing tenderness a man feels riding for ten hours without a saddle.
“All I’m saying is that if the ranch is camouflaged from the outside world, it shouldn’t be able to be seen by the naked eye.”
“My eyes aren’t naked, and we aren’t exactly in the outside world. There’s a light out there, and where there’s light there’s electricity. And where there’s electricity there’s refrigeration.”