Mercury Rises Read online

  Mercury Rises

  Robert Kroese

  AmazonEncore (2011)

  Rating: ★★★★☆

  Tags: Humorous, Fantasy, Contemporary, Fiction

  Humorousttt Fantasyttt Contemporaryttt Fictionttt

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  From Booklist

  The sequel to Kroese's debut, Mercury Falls, finds the irreverent angel Mercury and his reporter pal, Christine Temetri, again facing the end of the world. The U.S. government is still trying to puzzle out the explosion that took out Anaheim Stadium and sends dozens of experts to comb the area for clues. Now out of a job, Christine decides to put some distance between herself and Los Angeles by traveling to Africa to volunteer for an aid organization. She finds two things she doesn't expect in Kenya: wealthy entrepreneur Horace Finch, whose under-the-radar biosphere masks a secret project, and an antibomb like the one that destroyed Anaheim Stadium. The discoveries bring her back together with Mercury as the two battle human and angel foes to prevent the antibomb from imploding the world. Though not quite as seamless as its predecessor, Kroese's sharp-witted follow-up will certainly appeal to Mercury Falls fans. The cliff-hanger ending will have readers eagerly anticipating the next installment. --- Kristine Huntley

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©2011 Robert Kroese

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-6121-8086-1

  For Mrs. Price, who told

  me to "just keep writing."

  With thanks to: Joel Bezaire, for fleshing out Noah; Michele Smith, for catching the all-too-common, errant comma; Jocelyn Pihlaja, for zeroing in on clichés like a hawk; Alex Hamilton, PhD, for helping me avoid violating the laws of physics; and my wife, Julia, for helping me avoid violating most other laws.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  To Your Holiness, the High Council of the Seraphim,

  Greetings from your humble servant, Ederatz,

  Cherub First Class,

  Order of the Mundane Observation Corps

  There comes a time in every angel's life when he is compelled to reflect on his existence and ask himself that most difficult of questions: why do I even bother?

  For me, that time lasted from June 6, 1979, to August 21, 1986. This seven-year bout of existential doubt was followed by six years of relatively undisturbed self-pity, a year and a half of morose cynicism, eight months of figurative hair pulling and teeth gritting, another three months of literal hair pulling and teeth gritting, and, finally, an indeterminate period of drunken obliviousness.

  It's been clear to me for some time that no one in your organization is reading these reports. I'm not sure when I first came to that realization; it may have been when no one bothered to follow up on my claim that an elite unit of nineteenth-century Turks had traveled to Ireland in 1976 through a rift in the space-time continuum in order to seed discord among the members of U2.

  And yet I persist in writing. Why?

  For one thing, I suppose I'm still clutching to a shred of hope that some sympathetic seraph will come across these missives and extract me from this dump of a plane. Beyond that pedestrian motivation, I seem to have fallen victim to the illusion, so common on the Mundane Plane, that committing facts to paper will somehow help me make sense of them. I long ago gave up any attempt at systematic description of events down here, but I can't quite bring myself to stop trying to herd them into some kind of semi-coherent narrative.

  Speaking of which, you'll undoubtedly notice that many of the names I've used for characters are anachronistic. For example, the cherub now generally known as Mercury was obviously not called "Mercury" eighteen hundred years before the dawn of the Roman Empire. For that matter, the organization he worked for was not originally called The Apocalypse Bureau, and it is very unlikely that the biblical figure Noah ever used the words dude or asshole.

  Further complicating things, I've gone and gotten myself inextricably tangled up with the plot. Despite my best efforts to remain uninvolved and objective, I've...well, to be honest I pretty much gave up trying a while back. So now I'm a character in my own story. I tried to leave myself out, but, well, it's complicated. You'll see what I mean.

  I do have one advantage this time around: this time I know how the story ends. In fact, I'd better get started telling this story, or I'm going to run out of time. As a wise man once said, "We've always been headed toward the Apocalypse. It's just a question of proximity."

  Years ago we learned from the Bible that the flood occurred in the year 4990 BC...Just before the flood, Noah was instructed by God that in seven days the flood would begin. Using the language that "a day is as a thousand years," it is like saying through Noah, "Mankind has seven days or seven thousand years to escape destruction." Since 2011 A.D. is precisely seven thousand years after Noah preached, God has given mankind...another infallible, absolute proof that May 21, 2011, is the date of the Rapture.

  ---The Rev. Harold Camping, January 1, 2010

  The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.

  ---Nicholas Chamfort

  ONE

  Circa 2,000 B.C.

  Mercury sighed as he trudged up the road to Babylon, his eyes affixed on the squat silhouette of the nearly finished ziggurat at the edge of town. He had been called away on some Heavenly errands and was anxious to see what progress had been made on the massive clay brick pyramid while he was gone.

  As he expected, he found that the ziggurat was within weeks of being finished. Unfortunately, it had been within weeks of being finished for over three years now, and no perceivable progress had been made while he was gone.

  He clambered up the steps of the hundred-and-fifty-foot-high structure to find several dozen idle laborers encamped at the top. The men didn't even make a sho
w of pretending to work as Mercury reached the plateau.

  "What gives, guys?" he asked, trying to maintain the nice-guy demeanor he had cultivated on the worksite. "Kinda thought you'd have started on level seven by now."

  Noncommittal murmurs arose from the men.

  Mercury tried again. "Anyone want to clue me in about what challenges we're facing with level seven? The first six levels seemed to go smoothly. Level seven is pretty much more of the same if I remember the plans correctly. No judgments here, just trying to get an idea of any special challenges we might have with level seven so I can make sure to give you all the resources you need. My goal is to provide an atmosphere of empowerment."

  Still no one spoke up.

  "Hold on, I think I've got a copy of the plans with me," said Mercury, riffling through a satchel hanging off his shoulder. "Yep, here we go. Hmmm. Yeah, nothing special for level seven. Sun-baked clay bricks on the inside, fire-glazed bricks on the outside walls, same as the other six levels. And you'll only need about half as many bricks as you did for the last level, on account of the fact that we're building a pyramid. Volume decreases geometrically as we go up, as you'll recall. I don't mean to tell you your business. We're all professionals here."

  Grunts and mutters.

  "OK," said Mercury. "It's cool. I'm sure you guys are tired. Why don't you take the rest of the day off and we'll meet back here first thing in the morning? I'll have Tiamat swing by in case you're more comfortable talking to her."

  Suddenly the men leaped to their feet and all began talking at once. Mercury could make out nothing in the cacophony of voices.

  "Whoa, hold on," he chided. "One at a time. You, Nabu. Tell me what's going on."

  Mercury hated playing the Tiamat card. He took appealing to her authority as a personal failing as a manager. Besides preferring positive motivation over negative and feeling that he should be able to handle the men without appealing to an external authority, he was secretly afraid the men would someday call his bluff. He had a better chance of summoning a thunderstorm than getting Tiamat to show up.1 Never a hands-on leader, Tiamat rarely even bothered these days to make the occasional unscheduled appearance to berate the laborers for their stupidity and laziness and throw a few over the edge as an example for the others. That left Mercury to rally the men on his own, a difficult enough task even when he wasn't being called off on Heavenly errands every other week.

  Nabu, one of the group foremen, launched into a litany of grievances: shoddy brickmaking, lack of proper burial arrangements for workers who fell to their deaths (Tiamat had recently decreed that only one funeral would be allowed per week no matter how many men had died and no matter how hot the weather was), preferential treatment for the Amorites, and on and on. But the root problem was one Mercury knew well: an ailment he called almost-finished-ism.

  The men had been laboring toward the completion of the ziggurat for nearly a generation, but now that it was nearly done, they feared the change its completion would bring. There would be other ziggurats, that much was certain---Tiamat's assurances that this was "most likely the last one" had always proved false in the past. But relocation was difficult on men with families, and starting over was always a bit demoralizing.

  "Some of the men and I were talking," Nabu was saying. "We were thinking, why build another ziggurat when we could just make this one taller? I mean, a pair of two-hundred-foot-tall ziggurats is impressive, but wouldn't one three-hundred-foot ziggurat be better? Imagine that, a three-hundred-foot ziggurat!"

  Mercury sighed. "Admittedly a three-hundred-foot ziggurat would be a sight to behold," he said. "But you understand that a ziggurat is essentially a pyramid, right? It's a fundamental geometric shape. The height is a function of the size of the base. You can't, you know, decide when you're ninety percent done to make it taller."

  "Right, right," said Nabu. "But here's what we were thinking: what if we excavate, say fifty feet deep all the way around the base of the ziggurat, to a distance of a mile or two? And then we cover up the dirt at the base with more bricks? I mean, who would know we didn't just build it fifty feet higher? Pretty clever, eh?"

  Mercury managed a pained smile. "Yes," he said, doing some quick estimating in his head. "Moving eight hundred thousand cubic feet of sand does sound like an attractive option. But here's the thing: ziggurats are meant to look impressive from a distance. You'll notice that we deliberately built it on a hill, and we even brought sand in to raise some low spots in the middle of the site before we started construction. In fact, right over there, if I'm not mistaken, is where your father died of heat stroke twenty-five years ago while carting in buckets of sand one beautiful summer day. The point is, we'd have to excavate several miles out for it to do any good. It might take a hundred years, and we'd be digging up all the work your father did---and probably your father himself, if I'm remembering what we did with the corpses that day."

  Nabu was quiet for a moment. Mercury could tell he was still trying to think of a way to make his excavation idea work, so he pressed the attack.

  "Also, there's the flooding problem. Remember last year when your brother-in-law died in that flash flood because he couldn't get out of the limestone quarry in time? Basically you're talking about making all of Babylon into one big limestone quarry. Whenever it rained, we would all have to flee to the surrounding hills where we had dumped all the sand from the excavation. And there we'd sit, looking down on our pitiful ziggurat sticking out of the mud. No, Nabu, I'm afraid it's no good. We just need to finish this thing and move on. So what do you say, guys? We start bright and early tomorrow morning on level seven?"

  The men grumbled assent. Mercury thanked them for their hard work and trudged back down the steps. "I'm not cut out for this job," he muttered to himself. "Bloody ziggurats. Where's the point?"

  TWO

  Some four thousand years later a demon called Eddie Pratt sat alone in a pub in Cork, Ireland, nursing a pint and massaging his left hand. He had been writing (and drinking) almost nonstop for the past six weeks, and he was very close to completing his opus. Stacks of papers littered the booth that had become his office, by virtue of the fact that Eddie seemed to have an inexhaustible thirst for Guinness (and a wallet that miraculously always had a few more pounds in it)---and the fact that no one wanted to clean it.

  "Another pint, Eddie?" asked the bartender, a dour-faced old man who went by the name Cob.

  Eddie, his eyes still fixed blearily on his work, held up the empty glass in answer. Cob took it and returned a moment later with a refill of stout.

  "Och, what's all that?" he asked.

  "Same as always," Eddie grunted. "Report."

  "Aye," said Cob. "But what are all those ticks? Tick, tick, tick. Every line more ticks."

  "Those are quote marks," replied Eddie, tiredly. "It's dialogue."

  "Och, I know," said Cob. "Too much dialogue. People hate all those ticks. You need more action."

  "You're a writer now?" Eddie asked, peering up skeptically at Cob.

  "Ah, no. But I know what I like. Reading all those ticks would drive me to drink."

  "You don't read the ticks. They're punctuation. And you're a bartender, Cob. That's not much of a drive."

  "Tick, tick, tick," repeated Cob.

  "This isn't easy, you know," grumbled Eddie.

  "Och, I'm sure not."

  "Are you familiar with Plato?"

  "Aye."

  "You realize that the work of Plato is one of the cornerstones of Western civilization, and that everything he ever wrote was dialogue?"

  "Everything who wrote?"

  "Plato. You said you were familiar with him."

  "Och, I thought you said, 'Play-Doh.'"

  "No, you imbecile. Plato. The disciple of Socrates. Plato believed that all of the things we experience are really just impressions of some greater, ultimate reality that underlies the Universe."

  "Impressions?" said Cob doubtfully. "I think you may be thinkin' o' Silly Putty. Rememb
er, you could pick up pictures from the funny pages. Darned if I could read 'em though, 'cause they were all backwards. Kind of a dirty trick, making the words backwards, don't you think?"

  Eddie gritted his teeth and went back to work.

  "Tick, tick, tick," said Cob again. "Too much talking."

  "You got that right at least," said Eddie.

  "Sod off," grunted Cob, and returned to the bar.

  A moment later, the door to the pub opened and an attractive woman with stern, vaguely Asian features walked in. By her clothes and demeanor, Eddie judged she was American. When she opened her mouth to reveal perfectly straight, gleaming white teeth and a propensity for over pronouncing the letter r, his suspicion was confirmed. She walked straight up to him and said, "Eddie Pratt?"

  Eddie grimaced. There were only a handful of reasons for an attractive American woman to be seeking him out in a pub in Cork, and none of them were good.

  "Mind if I have a seat?" she asked.

  Eddie shrugged, as if to say, "If you can find a seat, you can have it."

  Carefully relocating several stacks of papers, the woman sat down across from him. "Mr. Pratt," she said, "my name is Wanda Kwan. I'm not sure exactly how to broach this subject, so I'll just say it: I know who you are."

  Eddie winced. Could it be? Had he somehow been found out? If someone had figured out that he was an angel exiled on Earth---which was bad enough in itself---they might suspect he had something to do with the recent horrific events in Southern California. He was in no physical danger, of course; Eddie, like all angels, had at his disposal the miraculous power of the interplanar energy channels, which would keep him out of any prison designed to hold mortals. What he feared wasn't imprisonment or torment by humans; it was the loss of face among angels.

  The worst thing that can happen to an angel on the Mundane Plane---particularly an agent of the Mundane Observation Corps, an organization whose activities are supposed to remain completely invisible to humans---is to be outed as angel. Beyond embarrassing, it's akin to the feeling that overcomes a substitute teacher who has been outsmarted by a class of third graders. Despite his current exile, Eddie still hoped to someday leave this plane, and if he ever wanted to show his face in Heaven again, he would have to find a way out of this bind.