On The 7th Day

by Zack Murphy

  She was, to put it gently, a prideful woman. She had had aura of unmitigated aplomb and was going to do anything in her power to insure that after she was finished with you, you wouldn’t. She found a rather sadistic glee in the knowledge that anyone who passed by her temper would leave with an icy sensation of utter failure and a sinking feeling that whatever hopes and aspirations they had would soon go the way of the dodo.

  The woman who could, in one small phrase or raised eyebrow, reduce everything someone had ever wanted to a delirious drivel. Many would leave her side with sense of self-delinquency that would never compare to the lofty goals of her own. Dana Plough had confidence. And her confidence was power.

  *****

  Ketty looked at Barnaby. Barnaby looked at Agent #2. Agent #2 looked at a small shiny necklace that lay in his palm. Barnaby, hearing footsteps looked at Ketty. Ketty, hearing footsteps looked at Barnaby. Agent #2, hearing footsteps looked at the necklace. Ketty ran. Barnaby ran. Agent #2 ran.

  *****

  The dark figure moved under the tree outside Dana Plough’s window and stared up. He heard what sounded like a herd of elephants stampeding toward the window above him. He took a step back.

  *****

  Satan opened the bedroom door as the curtains fluttered in the breeze. He wondered if he had heard a crash outside, but chalked it up to being tired. This had been one hell of a day [Pun intended] and he was ready for it to end. If there had been a thud, it could wait until morning to investigate.

  *****

  Ketty was first out the window and hurtled towards the ground with a tremendous speed. As she landed with a thud onto a thick pile of leaves underneath, she knew how the apple felt when it hit Newton. She lay on the pile and sighed, and then the pile of leaves groaned.

  Barnaby came through the window with a bit more force. The door was opening up as he jumped, causing him to glance back. That moment of confusion had caused him to trip on the way out, catching his pants leg on the window sill. The topple shot him spiraling downward towards the darkened ground, like tornado passing through a pinwheel. Luckily, his fall was softened by very big pile of leaves. The pile of leaves moaned.

  “Ketty?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you a moaning pile of leaves?” he asked the whimpering heap.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh good.” he would have felt awful about hurting an inanimate mound of dead vegetation. All non-human life was valuable to him.

  “But not the only one.” She groaned.

  “Death of The West Coast of the United States including Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii?” said the camouflaged figure from underneath Ketty.

  “Jeremiah?”

  Jeremiah removed the hood and night-vision glasses from his face and gave his best pained grimace. Smiling hurt a little too much under the weight of two people who had just seconds ago come barreling toward him from the heavens. It was good to see a familiar face, although it was a tad bit confusing as to why.

  “Barnaby?” Ketty asked, picking a twig out of her hair.

  “Barnaby?” asked Jeremiah.

  “Don’t ask. I’ll explain everything once we get out of here.” Barnaby jumped up and dashed across the lawn, leaving the other two confused discomfort.

  “Where are you going so fast?” yelled Ketty to the fleeing blur.

  Barnaby looked back just long enough to point and scream, “Dogs!”

  As he scaled the brick wall to safety, he exclaimed once more, “Really, really big dogs!”

  *****

  2 DAYS BEFORE THE BIRTH

  “--Nine months passed and the young woman gave birth to a child. The child she bore from her womb was neither of human nor demon, but of a new species. A species that would walk the earth during night and hide from the light. One that would thrive throughout the years of the evolving world. One that would drink of the blood of his mother’s clan.”

  Jeremiah and Ketty sat side by side their mouths agape at the two hour story told by Barnaby. They looked at each other in silence and nodded in reciprocal confusion.

  When he finished, Barnaby sat back in his chair and threw his hands behind his head as a last act of relishing in his storytelling glory.

  Ketty sighed as she was wont to do after one of Barnaby’s nonsensical ramblings in the face of cataclysmic disaster that was to befall the whole of mankind. Sometimes she wondered if he really cared about stopping the end of the world, or if he was just here to make her life miserable until her inevitable end.

  They had gone back to the hotel to share the information the two sides had gathered over the past four days; information that was pertinent to helping save humanity, a group that both Ketty and Jeremiah had invested their entire lives in trying to be part of.

  Time was running out, a fact that seemed to escape the Agent of Death who sat back and sipped his vanilla flavored coffee and reveled his own world; a world that was going to be destroyed in less than two days. But, Barnaby had assured himself that there was plenty of time to get in a few stories and maybe a nice nap before it all went down.

  “Well,” Jeremiah still trying to wrap his head around the tale, “It was an interesting story, but it still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

  “That’s a story for another time,” said Barnaby taking a sip of coffee.

  “We don’t have another time. The antichrist is going to be born in two days. Why did you waste time telling the history of vampires?”

  “Exactly.” Barnaby said as if everything in the soon to be a big ball of smoldering gas Earth was okay. “Don’t go all porcupine on me now.”

  “What? That doesn’t make any sense at all.” Ketty decided to defend Jeremiah against the verbal desecration of the English language that was being spouted by her partner.

  “It makes perfect sense.” Snapped Barnaby.

  “Porcupine isn’t a verb. A porcupine is a spiny rodent. A porcupine is a noun.” Ketty replied.

  “I think it’s more of an adjective really.” Assured Barnaby as Ketty stared at him in hanged bewilderment. “You’ll see. In the future, everyone will be using the phrase porcupine. It’ll be the thing to say. The people of the future will know what it means.”

  “You don’t even know what it means.”

  “That’s not for me to decide. That’s for the future to decipher.” Declared Barnaby as if knew instinctively the silliness had ended.

  A fog of Haziness and doubt crept over Jeremiah and his face contorted into a shape that spoke volumes about the sheer confusion and exacerbation that filled his heart. The idea that the world was basically in the hands of someone whose job it was to make people’s lives miserable, by taking it away, perhaps wasn’t a well-formulated blueprint for triumph.

  Barnaby saw the look and decided to get on with the information exchange before Ketty took Jeremiah’s side and started hitting him. Something he didn’t look forward to, as he had already been hit too many times by the pint sized jackhammer. “Okay, I’ll catch you up on events while you people catch up on some other characters in the book for a while.”

  Ketty and Jeremiah’s eyes darted around the room to try and figure out to whom or what Barnaby could possibly be talking. The room was empty except for the three of them. Ketty face was mystified with an expression of someone who was used to Barnaby but hadn’t really become comfortable with his foibles. Jeremiah scratched his head and turned to Barnaby, “Who are talking to?”

  “Exactly.”

  *****

  Juliet awoke with the glimmer of cold steel in her eyes. The morning sun raced through the Venetian blinds that had come with her apartment. She had planned to put up some nice curtains, but never got around to decorating. The space she had carved out for herself in her seventy-five square foot studio apartment had become merely a vessel to lay down every once in a while.

  Her eyes battled against the brightness of the sun’s interrupting rays, as she rubbed the sleep from her eyes. Sleep? This was something new and wonderf
ul Juliet had discovered last night. For the first time in nearly two years she had slept, but more than that, she had dreamed.

  Dreams were something she thought she would never possess again. She had hallucinated a few times over the past couple of years due to lack of sleep, but this was different; this was sleep dreaming. And it was wonderful.

  She dreamed in glorious colors of blues and red swirls as they raced and danced through the subconscious ballet of her innermost fantasies. It was one of the most amazing transgressions of her life, getting eight solid hours of sleep. Her eyes opened to focus on the gleaming point of a sword that rested just an inch from her gaze. It was just enough to very quickly jerk a person from a magnificent, magical land of rest.

  She sprung to her feet and through the haze of sleep tried to remember the result of the surrounding weaponry that resided in the one room of her apartment with her. The small room was crammed with over-sized swords meant to put fear into the hearts of man, and to kill whomever they didn’t.

  She remembered bringing in the WMD’s, but in her sleepiness had forgotten that they were so close to her orbital lobes. It was a sight that would make even a heroic soul wet the sofa bed.

  Juliet slowly rolled out of the way of the tip and lifted herself into a seated position, wiping the crust that had grown over night around her eyes. She massaged the back of her shoulders, which had become a huge knot throughout the night, and gave a small yelp when she hit a rather painful knot that had worked its way into a tangled ball of anarchic nerve endings at the base of her nape.

  She surveyed the room as the sun hit the finely pressed metals, causing an unholy prism of lights to bounce off the bare white walls of her surroundings.

  She looked down at her hand; it was throbbing under the bloodied bandages that were wrapped tightly with gauze. She had found out the number one rule of heavenly domination and warfare: weapons are extremely sharp; sharper than normal really; the metal could slice through air causing a pocket of oxygen would fall to the ground.

  She had accidentally touched one of the swords unloading it from her car and had bled for the better part of two hours. This helped a lot with the sleeping.

  Juliet picked up her phone and dialed.

  *****

  “Yello,” answered Henry Angler, who had been reading the newspaper at his favorite café. “Yes, I’ve got a pen. Okay.” He started to jot down a list that he was being dictated over the phone between the grids of the sudoku puzzle he had been trying to enjoy.

  “I can get the twelve cases of Dr. Pepper, three hundred feet of electrical cord and the stuffed Snoopy doll. But the vile of Ebola virus and the industrial strength catapult is going to be a little more difficult.” He held the phone from his ear as Juliet screamed obscenities through the receiver. “Okay, I’ll do the best that I can.”

  A few more choice words came his way over the headset. “All right, I’ll do better than what I can do.”

  He hung up the phone and perused the list he had been given. This was going to be more work than usual. He had gotten somewhat used to the irrational wants of his boss and in return her boss, but this was strange even for them. He took one last sip of his coffee and took another bite into the half eaten Danish that lay on his plate and got up.

  He looked at the clock on the wall and sauntered out the door. Seven o’clock in the morning. Where was he going to get a weapons-grade nano-virus at seven o’clock in the morning?

  *****

  Actor Jonathan Frakes was still sleeping. It had been a rough night the evening before and he was in his comfortable pajamas. The cool ocean air nibbled at his cheeks as it swam in from the open windows of his bedroom. He opened one eye and caught the morning sun wishing him awake with its soft orange glow. He turned over in the bed, put a pillow over his head and went back to sleep. It had been a rough night.

  *****

  Loman stopped by Ketty’s apartment to bring her a bagel and see if she wanted to carpool into school that day. He rang the bell thirteen times before finally giving up and deciding that she had probably already gone in to get a head start on that day’s lesson plans.

  He figured that if he high-tailed it over to work quickly he could catch her before the first bell. Obsession to the point of ignorance was an important lesson that Mr. March had taught his fourth grade class; a code he dedicated his life to.

  He hopped back into his ’82 baby-blue Buick Continental, which was now more rust than steel, and headed toward the school. He made just a quick stop at a florist shop to get a bouquet of roses he would present Ketty with at the end of the day, when he would ask or if all else failed beg, her to chaperone the Sadie Hawkins day dance [Sadie Hawkins Dance: A common once a year get-together for school age children where girls would ask boys to be their dates. And, if one were really desperate, a boy would ask a girl, only to be emasculated for doing so] with him.

  He had been planning this day for the better part of six months. She may have turned him down at every opportunity so far, but she could never resist bagels and flowers from a very sad individual with nowhere to go but up.

  As he drove his mind started to wonder about the strange man he had seen Ketty with a few days prior while he was out walking [Stalking is for crazy people. Walking and happening to be one hundred yards away from someone at all times is just exercising]. That guy didn’t have anything that Loman didn’t have. In fact the man she was with seemed to have worn his high-strung, possessed mania on his sleeve, not ensconced so far down in his psyche that his conscious mind could miss what other people could see unmistakably and clear as day. He was sure that she had no feelings for this stranger and would soon be his, no matter what she had told him so many times in the past.

  *****

  The Death, War, Famine and Conquest were lost. Being lost, especially when one (or four) of you are supposedly impeccably infallible beings is rather embarrassing. But, to be fair, any big empty desert starts to look the same after wandering around for a day and a half. Sand dunes are pretty much homogeneous in the visual variety department. Plus, when one is covered head to toe in large bulky armor, it’s more about getting over the next hill than about which hill was the right hill to cross in the first place.

  “I’m pretty sure we’ve been here before,” said Famine, wiping her brow and brushing a few stray locks from her eyes. “This one looks familiar.”

  “How can a sand dune possibly look familiar?” glowered War as he perused the never-changing landscape that stretched in a cascade of uniformity before him.

  “Leave her alone,” bellowed Conquest, always the first to come to the charge of championing women’s rights in the workplace.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” interjected The Death, trying to bring a small semblance of decorum to the expedition.

  “Anywhere is better that here,” mumbled War. “Wherever here is,” he added.

  War was an Alpha-male in every sense of the word, and, being a type A personality, he didn’t like the idea of being on the same level as woman, even though since the dawn of time he’d had two that were his equals.

  He had watched with growing frustration over the past years as humans became in his words, “touchy-feely, Oprah-watching, tea-sipping, metrosexual-looking, pantyhose-wearing fairies [War is of course in the “Don’t ask-don’t tell, and if you tell I’ll kick your man-lovin’ ass” club; and always would be].” It’s not that War was totally intolerant, it’s just that after a few millennium of thinking a certain way, one gets used to one’s own intolerances like a well worn tee-shirt. And he’d had that shirt for a very long time.

  The Four Without Horses at the Moment of the Apocalypse stood and scratched their heads as they eyed the wide reaches of sand that stretched before them. The sun was high and glistened off the golden kernels of the desert floor.

  Everything looked the same; wind had covered any footprints that would be left to trace back, and their patience was at a premium. The Death looked at Famine and asked casu
ally, “Got anything to drink? I’m rather thirsty.”

  *****

  Actor Jonathan Frakes rolled over and lifted himself out of bed. He stretched his well-toned arms into the air and flexed them in the mirror that stood three feet from the edge of the bed. Damn, he was a good-looking man, if he did say so himself. For good measure he said aloud, “Damn, I’m a good-looking man.”

  He yawned and stretched again. This was going to be a big day in the life of Actor Jonathan Frakes, he told himself as he smacked the taste of the night before off his lips. Yes, this was going to be a big day indeed.

  He hobbled to the bathroom where his morning routine was going to be cut at least by half. Although, he thought to himself, how anyone could possibly get ready in only two hours was beyond total comprehension. Hair-styling alone was a one hour process, and there was no way he could possibly take less time on something as important as one’s well-coifed do.

  He decided to shower instead of bathe, although he could really use a nice long, hot bath to reenergize the old muscles before a big day of non-stop action and heroic exploits, but some things would have to be sacrificed in the name of bravery.

  The razor harshly abraded the stubble that filled his face through the foam of the shaving lotion that tickled his nose. One absent-minded prick later a trickle of blood rolled down his cheek. He reached up and caught the drop on his finger and stared at the gash on his face. Okay, he thought to himself, maybe this wasn’t going to be a great day, but tomorrow--.

  *****

  Juliet poured coffee into an oversized novelty mug she had gotten as an Administrative Assistant Day gift. A gift that was re-gifted from a goody bag her boss had received for being a guest speaker at a local amusement park and then discarded in Juliet’s lap. She had then accepted the mug as a “gift” out of sheer spite for the fact that her boss hadn’t given her so much as a cost-of-living raise in the years she had worked for her.

  She figured, in a moment of self worth that an oversized stolen mug was better than nothing. She added her regular twenty-two teaspoons of sugar and stirred the whirling snowstorm of sucrose, watching the grains slowly dissolve in the hot brown goo. She pressed the cup to her lips, closed her eyes, and sighed.