Barnageden
Written by Chiz

Motionlessly I lay across a roof support. I had been waiting for hours while activity under me started to increase. Technicians and P.A.s scurried around the television studio underneath me. I had planned for weeks and worked all night to make sure that my charges wouldn't be discovered, but my breath caught each time one of the crew walked near one. I did let a smile creep over my face as the camera men moved their newly modified cameras to their marks. I had decided that it was the only way to get my claymore mines into the proper position without anyone noticing. When I had been here, a month before, I had taken pictures and documented distances to make sure that every thing would work out today. I had to go for maximum damage and to make sure that everyone caught an uncomfortable lump of metal introduced to them at a very high rate of speed. I had made a mock up of their Canadian television studios. I remember using Gummy Bears for the bad guys and gobbled them down when I knew they would be taken out. This was the second time I had snuck into this place, a billion dollar complex deep in the Canadian wilderness. Warmed by the geothermal hotspot it was perched on top of. The hot springs were full of sulfur so everything smelt like ass. A small town built just for this purpose, the end of humanity. I won't tell you how I snuck in but I will tell you I'll never eat clam chowder again. I was here tonight because this was the broadcast that would end the world. Tonight, they would utter the final words to an incantation that they had been broadcasting piecemeal for the last three years. Every day words to a spell in a 3000-year-old dead language were recited by millions of innocents. The only place where you could find that many innocents these days, plopped in front of TV just after diapers but before the violence of the Power Rangers.

He was a clever beast. He tested the waters himself in the name of research and to serve his ego. He made a daily show where a group of young people gathered around his fuzzy stuffed idol and summoned him with song and dance. All they missed was the human sacrifice and it would be just like that demonic summer camp I had to take out last year. Think of it as a Zoroastrian mystery cult with a truly wicked merchandising team. Next he loads four of his little minions into foam rubber suits and sets them up to become the living incarnations of the four horsemen. Four chubby monkey faced aliens, each with the symbol of the horseman they represent sticking out from their fuzzy heads. I remember that the purple one is supposed to be death and the red one is war, but I keep getting the green and yellow one mixed up. And the dinosaur gets to be the lord over them all. Very biblical, very revelations. He just didn't anticipate me and twenty pounds of C-4 to brighten up his day.

His procession arrived, a seven foot tall purple dinosaur, his four costumed idiots and twenty boot lickers. I swear to god he even had flower girls and couple of trumpeters. What a pompous ass hole. The four wannabe horsemen took their places on set. The Beast was practically drooling. He barked out directions and picked up a clipboard and an oversized head set. I checked my earplugs before I pulled my mask over my face to shield it from the flash and fumes that were about to come. I reached out for the detonator that I had placed in front of me hours before. I'd been staring at it so long I had named it Shawnee, I think it means river. The Beast must have seen my movements or maybe he could hear my thoughts, it didn't matter. He looked up just as I flipped the arm switch on the detonator. I hope he could read my thoughts because then he would know I was smiling under the mask. He was yelling at the guards in his entourage to shoot just as I pushed Shawnee's shiny red button. I always did know how to find that special button on a lady.

I held onto the roof support for dear life as the world shook around me. And I do mean dear life I was in occupying 20 of about the 80 cubic feet that did not just turn into a kill zone. If I fell or had miscalculated the amount of structural damage I had just caused I would plummet to my death. Through the ear plugs, the waves of concussions from the blasts made it feel like someone was boxing my ears over and over again. It reminded me of the time I was at the Jerry Springer show when the 400 pound prostitute took the stage. Jerry (boom) Jerry (boom) Any part of me that was not shielded by the support beam was pelted with debris and cooked with sudden heat. But the roof support lived and so did I. The harsh studio lights where replaced by fire and shooting sparks. I had been a busy boy and knew that all the generators and power lines had also just gone up in smoke. The entire complex had just gone dark. I also placed incendiaries in all the buildings I could reach. So I was pretty sure that I would be undisturbed for a while.
I crawled to the roof ledge and grabbed my bag hidden there. First I put on an insulated fire suit and hooked its oxygen tank up to my mask. Smoke and hot gases filled the roof area. I climbed down what was left of an access ladder, dropping the last 10 missing feet. I would like to point out that dropping ten feet into flaming rubble while wearing a 30 pound fire suit and carrying 20 pounds of ordinance is not a smart thing and should not be tried at home. I took a mp5-40 and a heavy cutting saber out of my bag. I hurried over to the would be bringers of the apocalypse and started to gather up their heads. The Clamors had done their jobs well, too well in one case I had to scoop up half the head and put it into a drawer that had out lived the rest of the desk. I put the 50lbs of smoking meat into my bag and turned back to get their boss. This is when I learned that a 7 foot tall dinosaur can hit a full-grown man wearing about 50 pounds of armor and ordinance with enough force to send him flying approximately 25 feet through the air. I was fine until I slid into what was left of the food service table, that's when I broke my left arm and got a spork stuck in a place were I'll have to get it surgically removed.

Adrenaline is a wonderful thing. I saw The Beast standing above my bag looking at his latest plan for world damnation staring back at him with 7 dead eyes. I hadn't been able to find the purple one's other eye. The Beast's skin was the smoldering remains of foam rubber. Patches of it had been blasted away revealing the bumpy and shiny scales underneath. As he moved toward me more of his rubber coating, now brittle from heat, flaked off like the scabs. Retractable claws slashed through what was left of his foam rubber mittens. The smoke and flames of this cavernous studio provided a fitting backdrop as the monkey part of my brain tried to get me to run or at least s**t myself so I can fling it at him. Instead, I gave into the tool using part of my brain and let him have a full clip from my MP-5 that was for some “I must have done some thing right in a past life” reason was still in my good hand. Needless to say, The Beast didn't like that very much. In the accelerated time sense of the adrenaline laden fight or flight world I was in, I could see the pattern of dots appear on his scaly hide. As the clip went dry, I saw blood start to pour from the many wounds. I had spent the money to get my 40 caliber bullets made from silver and then blessed by a priest. I had no idea if it had helped at all but what the hell. The Beast fell to its side and made this sound that reminded me of whale song, if the whale was receiving a hydrochloric acid enema. I got up, chucked my now empty gun at the Beasts thrashing head, picked up my saber and approached the screaming monster. It thrashed about trying to trip me with any of its five limbs. With a bit of acrobatics belittling my wardrobe and broken arm, I jumped a clawing hand and came down with all my weight behind my saber aimed at The Beast's thick neck. I got all the way through to the bone on the first try. It was easier to avoid the slashing claws the second time. As soon as his head came loose, the body started to truly flail about. I dropped the saber and jumped away. I got a thermite grenade out of my bag and went back to the shuttering body. I saw what had hurt it so badly. There was a huge hole in its back where a blood soaked spotlight had been lodged before the fighting had even started. I kicked the head toward my bag and pulled the pin on the grenade by stepping on the ring and pulling the grenade free. I stuffed it deep into the headless neck, thankful for all my experience as an airport customs inspector. I reached for the head and it snapped at me so I picked up my saber from in front of a now smoking and glowing mass of writhing flesh and turned Mr. Uppity-biting-head into Mr. Kabob and stuck it in my bag along with the other party favors.

All this time the building had been falling down around me. I packed up my bag and slung it over my shoulder taking care to elbow The Beast's snout while I was at it and headed out. With all the chaos and fire, the dumb little cult members that weren't busy fighting fires simply ran about like Demons with their heads chopped off. I calmly walked out to the parking lot and threw the bag into the back of a nice convertible I had seen the night before. I took off the suit that had served me so well in the last twenty minutes and jumped lightly into the drivers seat with my new; I'm no longer carrying around 50 pounds of crap, bounciness. I muttered my more colorful expletives to myself as I realized that there was no way I could drive a standard with a broken arm. So I put my stuff into a nice family sedan that the pervious owner had been kind enough to leave the keys in. Foolish lovable trusting cult members. Then I simply drove away. The worst part was when my brain found out what happened to my arm. Actually the worst part was I had chosen the only car in Canada with a fully stocked selection of western show tunes.
A month later I'm on a chartered boat over the Mariana Trench, kicking a large wielded shut steel box into the ocean. There were holes cut in it so that the pressure wouldn't tear it apart. I could see the Beasts head still moving in the darkness. I figure if he does ever get loose again I'll have died of old age. Splash. I contemplated the phone number on my cast from the nurse in the hospital as the bubbles rose from the sinking box. She had promised to nurse me back to health and I was pretty sure her nipples were up for the job. I love being me.

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