On The 7th Day

by Zack Murphy

  As his head fell to level, he crept back to the hidden den of thorns he had made from the garden’s rose bushes. He pulled out another candy bar, slowly ripped the paper off and, tearing into it with his teeth, never letting his glance escape the window.

  *****

  Barnaby staggered towards the safe by the bed, still trying to regain some semblance of motor ability. His knees buckled and his arms flailed by his side as he scuttled across the floor. Ketty wasn’t sure whether she should be concerned about his physical well being, or laugh [When in doubt: Laugh] at what would have been a cheap effect in a Laurel and Hardy meet a monster movie.

  He bent his head to one side and circled his shoulder blade around as it made perhaps the most hideous crackling sound since the time Old Lady Wilbraham grabbed her husband’s neck and squeezed hard after finding out that he had been spending a little too much time milking the cows.

  As he reached the safe he collapsed on the bed in exhaustion; the fifteen feet from the window to the bed had been one long trip. “I’m just going to lay here for a while.” He said as he stared up at the ceiling, gently closing his eyelids, which were one of the few parts of his body that only hurt a little.

  The moans and creaks from his body filled the room like a small town cheap haunted house presented by the local chapter of elks. “Make yourself at home.” He motioned with his arm to the barren room around them.

  “Maybe we should just go?” Ketty was starting to get an uneasy feeling about the time they were spending there; not that the act of breaking and entering into the home of the mistress of the Prince of Darkness with a small army of large, mutant, muscle-bound freaks a floor below was helping any.

  “All right, just give me an hour or so and we’ll be on our way. While you wait, why don’t you do a little detective work? I’ll supervise. From here.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to break into that impenetrable safe.”

  “Oh, so easy work?”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “You just said it was impenetrable.”

  “And your point is?”

  Ketty wanted to scream. In fact, there were many times in the past few days that her partner in crime and punishment had made her lose her mind. As the sounds of Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want To Have Fun slipped through the vents of the bedroom Ketty nervously went to work on the unbreakable lock.

  Her hands trembled as she listened to Barnaby walk her through the art of safe-cracking, something she was starting to wonder if he knew anything about himself.

  She alternated turning the lock clockwise and back, listening intently for small clicks from inside the large steel box she had propped her ear against.

  It had looked much easier in the movies; breaking into safes was usually a two minute montage of sweaty men acting secretively until finally, in a triumphant act, the door of the safe slowly opened and smiles were handed out amongst the room. This wasn’t the movies and she didn’t have the luxury of an overzealous editor to make the hour go by faster.

  “This just isn’t going to go down Barnaby. I can’t do it.”

  “Oh well, there probably wasn’t anything in there anyways.”

  “Wait just a damn minute. You just had me spend an hour on the floor breaking into this thing for probably nothing?”

  “It would have been cool if we had broken into it.”

  Ketty stood silently, the look in her eyes becoming more and more enraged. She balled up her hand into a tight fist and leapt. She landed on the strewn Barnaby with full force and began to rain down a fury of left and right hands onto his chest.

  “Hey, I’ve broken my neck in eight places here,” cried Barnaby, trying to pry off the pint-sized Rocky Balboa.

  “Let’s try for an even dozen, shall we?” the fists of Ketty were pounding him with a rage that was often left for Crossfire debates.

  “Don’t make me wish you into the cornfield!”

  *****

  Four large crates surrounded Earl as he packed them with a wide array of other-worldly killing armaments. He pulled out a large scythe, bright flashes of white and blue flicked the air as the blade hit the overhead lights just right.

  The tool had been constructed out of the purest of steel, a blade so sharp that it could cut through a man without having to touch the flesh. As he perused his magnificent work, there were three knocks on the door. “Why can’t people just read the freakin sign?” he griped as he rose from his work and walked over to the intercom. “One more time please.”

  “Excuse me?” said a female voice on the other end.

  “Knock one more time please.”

  “Why? You know I’m here.”

  “Listen. There are rules. I can’t just go around opening the door for every Tom, Dick and Harriet who decided that it was okay to just knock three times. I have a business to run here. So if you wouldn’t mind, just knock the requisite four times. That would funtastic!”

  “Just let me in.”

  “Not until you knock again.”

  “Fine!” Another knock followed and Earl smiled. He knew the four knock rule was stupid, but it was a fun little game he got to play. When you own a shop that is only frequented when the universe is in dire straits, you have to find ways to pass the time.

  He buzzed her in and sat and waited at his desk. It was better to have people come to you, it added to the suspense of the place. The door opened and the click of heels on the cold cement floor showed that the owner of the pace was on a mission and wasn’t up to playing games.

  Juliet came around one of the tall cases, her arms whipping through the air like two propellers by her side carrying her faster to her destination. It was the walk of someone who had had a very long day and was now ready for the next person to put that last straw on her back so she could finally wail off and clobber someone.

  “Welcome, young lady, to Ye Olde Crazy Lodi’s Arms Emporium. We have a funtastic sale on aisle seven. Silver bullet special, for all your unwanted werewolf needs.”

  Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning Juliet’s hand was around the throat of Earl, her grasp getting tighter as she pulled him close to her face. Her breathing was rapid and small white pools of spittle filled the corners of her lips. She moved his head, which was getting blue with every pulse from his struggling veins, so that they were eye to eye, a location that was extremely uncomfortable for Earl for numerous reasons.

  “I’m not in the mood for any funny business, do you understand me?” Earl struggled to nod under the pressure that was keeping his head from doing any movement at all. “I need swords. I need big swords. And I need them now.”

  Her grip relaxed and Earl shot back, trying to get any semblance of stature back in his body or reputation. He had dealt with nasty customers before, in his business they were the most valued, but there was something about the grip of that small vice that made him reconsider the early retirement to a nice island in the Pacific he had dreamt of.

  The eyes of this woman were beady, and not in a good, oh she’s probably one of those women who’ll marry you and kill you on the honeymoon night after a marathon love-making session way.

  “Swords?” he smiled, straightening out the mess of wrinkles she had put in his clothes, “That we can do.”

  “Funtastic,” she smiled back. “My assistant will be in shortly to help you pack up the car.”

  *****

  “Why are we even here?” Ketty sat on the edge of the bed, her hands propping up her head, which was feeling heavier than usual. Little sleep and dealing with Barnaby was beginning to be a recipe for a brain tumor.

  “What are we looking for?” she groaned, “And, if we find it, how do we use it? Can you tell me any of this? Because if you can’t I don’t how much longer I can keep doing this. I can’t keep up the pace of saving the world when I don’t know how we’re supposed to save it in the first place.”

  Barnaby stretched out and sat up, putting his hand on her shoulder.
“What do you want me say?”

  “I just want a morsel, a penance, a glimmer of hope that what we’re doing here is making any kind of difference. I want to believe in you. I do. But right now-- all of this, I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel; all I see is darkness and I feel like you’re keeping the hood over my eyes.”

  “I just--”

  “Anything.” She turned to him and stared into his eyes. A tear streamed down her cheek and Barnaby could see that he was losing his only ally. He could feel her drifting from him and the cause. He could feel himself drifting down the same river, and over the next few miles were going to be rapids.

  “The baby.” He pronounced in his best professorial speech “Once it’s born, we have sixteen hours.”

  “Why do we only have sixteen hours?”

  “You see, once it’s born it doesn’t have the power to destroy the world, it’s an innocent, a shell for either good or evil. I know its cliché, but the child has the choice.”

  “What choices could it have after being alive for a half a day?”

  “Through new eyes will a new earth be born. Through those eyes it will determine whether the world is a vessel for goodness or if it should be destroyed before it can destroy itself. Sixteen hours will show the child what millions of years of evolution the human race has squandered.

  ‘When the time comes the child will be placed on the throne and it will make its decision. We need to find out where the throne is located. We need to stop the whole thing before the throne thing is even done, but if we don’t, we at least have to stop the seating.”

  “But what if the child deems the earth to be worthy of living?”

  “Because the only two people the child will be in contact with for those sixteen hours will make it clear that it isn’t.”

  “Oh.” This news didn’t make her feel any better. But at least it was news. The tunnel now had a light at the end, although that could have been the rain of fire of brimstone in the distance.

  “So, we need to find out where the throne is,” he said, struggling to get to his feet. He wobbled, grabbing out for anything to help him with the balancing act his spine and brain were at odds with. “You know, in case our first plan doesn’t work out.”

  “And our plan is?”

  “We have two or three days to figure that out.”

  Barnaby opened the nightstand drawer and picked up a book that lay hidden under a stack of papers. He snapped the little silver latch that kept it secret from the world and rifled through its pages, a focused furrow in his brows. It was bound in pink leather with a daisy embroidered on the cover. “Found it,” he said nonchalantly.

  “What?”

  “Diary.” He waved the book over his head to catch the attention of Ketty’s blurred eyes.

  “You can’t read that. It’s personal.”

  “It was sitting in plain sight.”

  “It was in a drawer, under a bunch papers, locked, in a house we broke into.”

  “If she didn’t want us to read it she should have invested in a better security system.” Barnaby struggled to keep focused on his new-found treasure and after a few ill fated attempts at deciphering Dana Plough’s diary, he gave up. It had been a long day and any attempt at trying to reason with the handwritten gibberish that Dana Plough had delivered amongst the pages of her journal would have to wait until he had a chance to get a good night’s rest or a man-to-woman dictionary [Also known as another woman].

  He laid the diary on the bed and listened as a noise from the master bathroom turned his attention to the opening door.

  Barnaby shot up from his slumped position on the bed and Ketty, who had fallen asleep amongst the twenty or so pillows piled on Dana Plough’s bed, leapt from her slumber with the awareness of a cat that had been three miles away and heard the sound of an electric can opener in its house.

  The two burglars stood at attention as they watched the door to the bathroom slowly open to reveal in the back light the glorious shape of a very large man, or thing; in fact, upon further examination it was more of a man-thing, or, to be more precise, Insurance Agent #2.

  Number Two knew he wasn’t allowed in the upper part of the house; that decree had been burned into the consciousness of the Agents from the first minute they arrived, but when a man-thing’s gotta go, a man-thing’s gotta go.

  The giant stopped and stared at the two people he caught in Dana Plough’s bedroom, as Barnaby and Ketty stared at the guy they had caught coming out of Dana Plough’s bathroom. At the rare times when a person or persons are caught by another person or persons doing what they are not supposed to be doing, but not knowing that the other person or persons don’t know that they are not doing that, the person or persons who are more mentally capable at deceiving the other person or persons will usually get away with whatever that person or persons were doing, and in this case Barnaby and Ketty had a slight advantage [Of course a drunk goat would have an advantage ninety-three percent of the time over Agent Two].

  Of course, the person who speaks first usually has the upper hand. “What are you doing here?” asked the bewildered Number Two.

  “We? Doing here?” echoed Barnaby as his eyes raced between Ketty and Number Two while his brain raced with possible answers as to why on earth two people would be scurrying around a stranger’s bedroom in the dark in the middle of the night. “We’re here on um, on official business. Yes, we’re mattress inspectors. You know, that time of year again. But everything seems to be great. The mattress is within acceptable comfort levels. So, I guess we’ll be going.”

  “Okay.” Shrugged Number two.

  This threw Barnaby, as he hadn’t in a million years thought this would be something he would ever had gotten away with. “Okay,” echoed Barnaby as he headed towards the window, Ketty tailing behind him.

  “Wait a minute.” These words were never good as someone was making a getaway. Ketty and Barnaby stopped in their tracks and did a slow turn to catch the voided gaze of Number Two. “Why are you here again?”

  “Why?” If stammering was the equivalent of a brain aneurism, Barnaby would have dead from a clot the size of Mount Rushmore. “Because, we are, you know, we--,” tricking a mentally feeble minion of Satan was going to be harder than he thought.

  “--are here doing a survey for National Jewelry Monthly,” Ketty piped in, “And we’ve noticed you have some very nice pieces.” She picked up a necklace from off the dresser and held it up to the moonlight, the diamonds proving to be a shiny object that no one with the IQ of 28 could resist gazing at. “This one in particular is exquisite. See how it shines, how it gleams.” The diamonds weaved and spun their hypnotizing dance before his darting eyes as he watched the great ballet of light.

  “Yes, I do. It’s very nice.”

  “Great- keep it as a souvenir!” Barnaby tossed the trinket to #2, grabbed Ketty and led her to the window.

  “Okay, but--.”

  This was getting farcical. The buts were becoming a hazardous sidebar to the escape route Barnaby and Ketty had paved. A path through the carpet between the bed and window was becoming worn with the constant returning to the scene of the crime.

  This wasn’t what worried Barnaby the most. The worrisome aspect about the constant standoff with Number Two was that sooner or later, he was going to be recognized.

  The after-life was a big place, but there are certain occasions when people get together, and when people get together, even though they may not talk, they still recognize each other. They traveled in the same circles. Luckily for Barnaby, for now, he was dealing with something that stood on the outskirts of the parties [It's hard not to be noticed when you’re a minion of Satan, except when the big guy is standing there too] and not a ‘hey look at me, aren’t I wonderful’ kind of guy’.

  Number two was a wall flower, but sometimes those are the most dangerous types. Wallflowers watch, and to watch you have to look. Barnaby was trying desperately to get the behemoth not to look.


  “We’re here about the cable.”

  “Oh?” it was the type of ‘oh’ that was reassuring, because it was the type of ‘oh’ that meant the person who was giving the 'oh' didn’t know what the speaker was talking about, but was willing to accept the statement as fact [Much like an art major sitting in a physics class on string theory].

  “There’s nothing wrong with the cable is there?” Being cooped up in Dana Plough’s house all day, there was one constant that ran through the Agents’ everyday conversation and that was, ‘thank god for cable.’ Cable television is something that some people will attest to being the devil’s tool, but in fact, cable television was invented by mere mortals who had no desire to make this a shrine and bow before the dark overlord of the underworld, but merely as something to impress women with whom they tried to pick up in bars.

  There was a break of silence and then a noise, not a noise that any of the participants in the upstairs debate club wanted to hear.

  *****

  The front door opened up wide and Dana Plough entered with Satan close behind, juggling her suitcases and trying to look as cool demeanor in front of the troops. Being the supreme leader of Hell wasn’t exactly a physical job, so he was a little more out of shape than he would like to admit.

  It felt good to be back; there was a lot to get done and not long to get it done by. Plus, anything was better than spending time with Dana Plough’s parents. A lesson that all men learn the first time they have to spend an uncomfortable weekend sleeping in the same bed as their beloved while her folks lie awake in the next bedroom thinking of ways to break up the lovers.

  Dana Plough had made her way to the staircase and turned around to determine how far back her baby’s daddy/indentured servant had fallen.

  A smile crept passed her lips as she watched him breathlessly attempt to keep pace. She knew that no matter how powerful a man was, or how many armies of the undead he controlled, they were no match for a woman’s wiles.

  Sampson had fallen to these charms and now Satan was sitting in the barber chair. She wiped a few stray hairs from her lips and opened her purse pulling out a lipstick a shade of red that would have made the Queen of Sheba blush. She slowly applied the waxy balm as the throngs of onlookers wept silently inside while biting their cheeks just enough to draw a small drop of blood with the wanting of being that lipstick.