Despite Jacob’s quirks, Christine was glad he had come along, and not just because she feared what the FBI would do to him. Having him near made her feel less alone.
Somehow her debriefing with Director Lubbers had spooked her more than her encounters with demons like Tiamat and Lucifer. There was something profoundly unnerving about the way Lubbers talked about Heaven as if it were just another security threat to be dealt with. She couldn’t deny being a bit disillusioned with her own experience of Heaven, but somehow she still believed that underneath all the bureaucracy and infighting, there was something mystical and sublime—that Heaven was more than it appeared to be, that it was the source of some sort of ineffable power that gave people reason to hope, even in the most dire circumstances.
Lubbers had evidently come to the opposite conclusion: that Heaven was just another foreign dictatorship with an arsenal of dangerous weapons and interests at odds with those of the United States. As such, the logical course of action was to act quickly to neutralize the threat. In a demented sort of way, it made perfect sense—and that’s precisely what terrified her.
FIFTEEN
Some 3,800 years after the Job debacle, Lucifer sat in a wheeled leather office chair in the center of the living room of his unassuming pink stucco house at 666 Lucifer Way, nestled among the plastic trees of the Hidden Oakes subdivision of Plane 3774d, also known as the Infernal Plane. The room was dominated by a semicircular bank of plasma screens that could be configured to display input from 1,024 different cameras placed in strategic locations scattered about the Mundane Plane. Currently, though, they were set to act as a single monitor displaying one gigantic image. For one hour a day, Lucifer took a break from his surveillance to indulge a guilty pleasure: drinking a tall, icy glass of Schweppes ginger ale and watching The O’Reilly Factor.
Bill’s guest was an antiwar activist by the name of Medeia Sayed. Medeia was denouncing President Babcock’s speech. “This is the exact sort of intentional ambiguity that got us into Iraq,” she was saying. “Everybody knows this president wants to go to war with Syria, and now he’s got an excuse. There is absolutely no reason to think the Syrians had anything to do with the destruction of the moon, but Babcock wants us to think—”
“Shut up, Medeia, you stupid whore!” howled Lucifer. He liked hurling epithets at Bill’s guests. It helped him relax.
“Who do you think blew up the moon?” Bill asked pointedly.
“Yeah, Medeia, who the fuck blew up the moon, you ignorant bitch!” Lucifer added. He took a sip of ginger ale.
“I couldn’t begin to speculate who was responsible for that,” said Medeia.
“Well, you realize the president of the United States doesn’t have that option, right?” asked Bill. “He can’t just throw up his hands and say, ‘Gosh, I don’t know who did this, so I guess I’d better just ignore it.’ ”
“Zing!” yelled Lucifer.
“I’m not saying that he should ignore—”
“Yes you are, Medeia!” shouted Bill and Lucifer simultaneously. “You simpering diseased cunt!” added Lucifer.
“What I’m saying, Bill, is that as far as we know, the attack on the moon is completely unrelated to the ongoing troubles in the Middle East, and that it would be premature to—”
“You’re premature!” screamed Lucifer, shaking so hard he nearly spilled his ginger ale. “You’re the premature, syphilis-ridden retarded orphan daughter of Joseph Stalin and a goat!”
He downed the rest of his ginger ale. “Karl!” he yelled into the kitchen. “You’re missing O’Reilly! And I need another ginger ale!”
After an initial rough period, Lucifer and Karl the Antichrist were getting along surprisingly well. They enjoyed many of the same reality programs, particularly Jersey Shore. Karl had been teaching Lucifer Battlecraft cheats, and Lucifer had been helping Karl on his epic rock opera, Shakkara the Dragonslayer. He had convinced Karl that any rock opera worth its salt had lots of satanic messages encoded in it. Karl hadn’t seen the point of making the satanic messages hidden, and Lucifer had explained that they were meant to be subliminal.
“Sublibitable?” asked Karl.
“Subliminal,” said Lucifer. “The messages can’t be perceived by the conscious mind. They slip into your subconscious and make you think evil thoughts, like sex or Coca-Cola. Of course, your brain has to be trained to decode the messages.”
“Trained? How do you do that?”
Lucifer explained that the training program had been dismantled in the early nineties as the subliminal marketing campaign hadn’t led to the levels of Satanism and Coca-Cola consumption he had been aiming for. “For a while, though, we were running several million middle-schoolers through the training program every year. We’d show them a couple hundred advertisements with the pretext of warning them about the dangers of subliminal advertising. Liquor ads, cigarette ads, car commercials...hell, half of the ads they showed weren’t even part of the program. It didn’t matter. They had kids seeing satanic messages in Scooby Doo cartoons. There was a whole generation of teenage boys who couldn’t see three ice cubes in a glass without getting an erection.”
Karl didn’t see the point of including backward messages in Shakkara the Dragonslayer when the target audience hadn’t been trained to receive them. Lucifer tried to explain that these days it was more about the principle, but Karl wouldn’t assent until Lucifer agreed that half of the messages would be about Karl.
Karl returned from the kitchen bearing two cans of ginger ale and a plate of pizza rolls. “What’d I miss?”
Lucifer took one of the ginger ales. “Bill is going to town on some libtard peacenik buttaface,” said Lucifer.
“...just days after Israeli troops surrounded Damascus. And then, less than twenty-four hours after the Israeli prime minister hints that tactical nuclear weapons might be used, someone bombs the moon, making a pretty effective demonstration of the relatively limited capabilities of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Are you saying that’s a coincidence?”
“Look, Bill,” Medeia replied. “Obviously the Anaheim Event and Black Monday were both terrible tragedies, and America will not rest until it has found those responsible for these events and held them accountable...”
Lucifer sat open-mouthed, ready to deliver another barrage of obscenities, but the words didn’t come. He found himself enthralled by what this Leftist loony had just said.
America will not rest until it has found those responsible for these events and held them accountable.
Yes, thought Lucifer. If there was one thing that America was good at, it was finding bad guys and punishing them. Evil was, to the American way of thinking, something that could be identified, rooted out, and destroyed. Lesser peoples seemed to think of evil as a sort of pervasive miasma that could occasionally be avoided, but Americans knew that evil was a discrete thing that existed out there somewhere, waiting to be hunted down and vanquished by those with the means and the courage to do so. Sometimes, of course, they needed a little shove in the right direction, like the time that Lucifer had one of his minions whisper in Dick Cheney’s ear about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“You’re stupid, you stupid bitch!” Karl yelled at the TV.
“Shut up, Karl,” snapped Lucifer.
No longer listening to the talking heads, Lucifer muted the channel. He had been in a bit of a funk lately, what with that asshole Mercury once again screwing up his attempt to destroy the world. Truth be told, he was also a little angry with himself for letting the opportunity slip through his fingers. He could have let the anti-bomb detonate on Earth rather than helping Mercury dispose of it on the moon, but that would have resulted in Lucifer’s eternal incarceration in Heaven. He would have made his point, sure, but that was a steep price to pay.
In the end, Lucifer had made a leap of faith. He had trusted what he felt to be true about the Charlie Nyx books: that somehow the completion of the series would result in the end of the world. He couldn’t expla
in how he knew it; he just knew it. All he had to do was ensure that the series was completed and the world would end, putting to an end all of Heaven’s vain plotting, and revealing Creation itself to be one big, pointless joke. Blind faith had caused him to walk away from a sure thing, and now he doubted the wisdom of that choice.
Cain, the agent he had tasked with writing the books, had once again disappeared. The last time they had met, Cain had pleaded that he had hit a roadblock, but that he had an idea for how to write the final book. Lucifer hadn’t really understand it; Cain had been talking about levels of reality and metanarratives and other stuff that sounded like high-falutin’ literary bullshit to Lucifer. “Just write the damned book,” he had told Cain. That was nearly three weeks ago, and Lucifer hadn’t heard from him since.
“Should have imploded the whole planet when I had the chance,” he grumbled. But Medeia Sayed, that mewling ass-kitten, had given him an idea. Perhaps he didn’t have to sit here and wait for the End to come. Perhaps he could still do something to help things along.
“Azrael!” he barked to the minion lurking in his foyer. “Alert our people at the planeport. I need to make a trip to Washington, DC.”
SIXTEEN
Mercury and Job were unable to get Cain to tell them any more about Wormwood. Mentioning the name seemed to have triggered something in him. Cain simply sat on the curb staring at the fog rolling in, laughed, and muttered incomprehensibly to himself. Mercury began to reconsider his conclusion that Cain was the saner of the two.
“So what happens if I just step into the fog?” Mercury asked.
“Hard to say,” replied Job. “Maybe nothing.”
Mercury sighed. “Again, what kind of nothing are we talking about? Do you mean nothing happens, like it’s just regular fog? Or nothing happens, where I get erased from history and all that?”
“I honestly don’t know,” said Job. “Cain tried it, and nothing happened. Which is to say, he simply reemerged from the fog, as if he had walked in a circle and ended up where he started. Presumably the same thing would happen to me, although I haven’t tried it. I remain hopeful that there is something else beyond the fog, but that may just be my own bias.”
“Why don’t you try it?” asked Mercury.
Job shrugged. “I have no great desire to end this life. Whatever is coming will come soon enough. In any case, as I said, I suspect the same thing would happen to me as happened to Cain. He and I seem to be in this until the end.”
“But you have thought about it,” Mercury insisted. “You must have some idea what’s out there.”
Job nodded. “What’s out there,” said Job, his gaze lost in the fog, “is only what you take with you.”
“Really?” asked Mercury, peering into the fog in awe.
“What am I, Yoda?” asked Job. “I told you, I don’t know what’s out there. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. My best guess is that what’s out there depends on what you bring with you. Your hopes and fears will determine your reality, as they always have.”
Cain momentarily broke from his deranged giggling to snort in disgust. “Your hopes and fears!” he repeated in a gushing mockery of Job’s optimistic tone.
Job sighed and shook his head. “For his sake, I kind of hope he’s right,” said Job. “If we get swallowed by the fog and it turns out that it’s just the beginning of some entirely new reality—or worse, a continuation of the old one—he’s going to lose it completely. Look at him. He can’t take much more.”
But Mercury was still staring into the fog. “I’m going to do it,” he said.
“Do what?” Job asked.
“Go into the fog. The waiting is killing me. And who knows, maybe it’s not too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“I don’t know. To fix this somehow. Keep reality from disintegrating completely.”
Job smiled. “I sure hope you’re right. So when are you going to do this?”
“I was thinking now-ish.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you.”
“Tell me it’s going to be OK.”
“It’s going to be OK.”
“All right then,” said Mercury. “Here goes nothing.” And with that, he walked into the fog.
After a few steps, he was completely enveloped by the gray haze. He felt nothing: no dampness in the air, no thickness in his lungs. Whatever the fog was, it wasn’t water vapor. Striding boldly forward into the blinding cloud, he began to think that Job and Cain had been putting him on. Clearly there was something a little weird about the fog, the way it moved in from all sides and the way it felt—or didn’t feel—on his skin, but—
Suddenly his right hand felt like it was waking up. Pinpricks of something unpleasant but not exactly painful shot through his hand. He tried to pull his hand back, but it was immobilized, as if encased in amber. The sensation then crept into his left toes and swept across the right side of his face. Then the right foot, the left hand, his ears, his lips. Soon his whole body was paralyzed, enveloped by some nauseating hybrid of numbness and agony.
Hopes and fears! thought Mercury frantically. What are my hopes and fears?
The only thing that popped into his mind was the face of Christine Temetri. I hope nothing bad happened to Christine, he thought. I hope she’s OK.
The fog was inside him, tearing him apart—limb from limb, cell from cell, atom from atom. Somehow, amid all of this, he remained conscious of what was happening—of his very physical essence exploding and expanding in every direction, until it filled all of reality in every dimension. Mercury screamed, and his scream was the sound of a universe dying.
And then—
Falling. The sensation of air blowing past. Condensation collecting on his skin. And then a blinding light in an azure sky dotted with clouds. The sun!
Orienting himself, he spun to see a vast expanse of darker blue below him. Ocean? He gradually slowed his descent until he was hovering maybe a mile above the water. There was plenty of interplanar energy here, wherever he was. Closing his eyes, he felt the tendrils of energy around him, emanating in different strengths from the east, south, north, west...Yes, this was definitely Earth, and not the far-future Earth he had just left, either. The strength and configuration of the streams matched that of Earth just after the reconfiguration caused by the LA earthquake. The LA convergence was a long way from here, though—several thousand miles to the west. About the same distance to the southeast he could feel the Kenyan convergence, where Horace Finch had constructed his chrono-collider device. That put Mercury somewhere above the Atlantic, just off the coast of southern Europe.
Sure enough, peering into the distance he spotted the familiar outline of the Azores. He had spent some time in these islands not long ago, when he had been on the run from the Heavenly authorities. They were a good place for an angel to get lost because they were so far from the routes that angels typically traveled on the Mundane Plane.
Now what?
Somehow he had to stop whatever had happened to unleash the fog, whatever had made the world such a miserable, hopeless place. He had to warn Heaven about Wormwood.
He took off toward the Megiddo portal. It would take him about four hours to get there. He could always request a temporary portal from the Azores, but Heaven had really been cracking down on unbudgeted expenditures and he wasn’t exactly sure where he stood with the Heavenly bureaucracy at this point. Presumably he’d earned some goodwill by saving Earth from annihilation, but there was also a chance that he’d be held accountable for unauthorized travel outside the stratosphere. In fact, with Uzziel out of the Bureau, he wasn’t even sure whom to call about authorizing a portal. No, it was better for him to just show up in Heaven in person and tell whoever would listen what Cain had said about Wormwood.
With a tailwind coming in from the Atlantic, Mercury made it to the Megiddo portal in just over three hours. Slipping out of Mundane Reality, he appeared in the planeport and made his way toward the portal that would take h
im to Heaven. He hadn’t even made it halfway when he ran into a familiar figure.
“Hey, Perp,” Mercury called, waving at the infantile winged cherub buzzing down the concourse. Perp was the only cherub Mercury knew who still sported the classical winged baby look, in defiance of angelic fashion trends of the last four hundred years. This was, surprisingly, not the most jarring of his personal attributes; Perp was also well known for his tendency to pepper his speech with impertinent and banal maxims of dubious quality.
“Mercury!” Perp hissed, altering his course to make a beeline toward Mercury. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? To keep potatoes from budding in the bag, put an apple in with them.”
“Long story,” said Mercury, ignoring Perp’s tuber truism. “After I imploded the moon, I got sucked into some far-future version of Earth where Job and Cain—you know, from the Bible—were playing Ping-Pong and—”
“By Heaven’s Gates,” said Perp, staring aghast at Mercury, “you’ve completely lost it.”
“Look, I know it sounds crazy, but there was this fog that was going to erase everything, and Cain said the fog was because of Heaven being destroyed by something called Wormwood, so I—”
“Shhhh,” said Perp. “We’re going to get you the help you need. But first, come with me. If you have bubblegum stuck to your shirt, put it in the freezer and then scrape it off with a knife. Come on now, quickly!” Perp spun around and darted off toward a door that read PERMITTED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“Look, Perp,” said Mercury. “I don’t really have time to explain everything to you. I need to get to Heaven and tell them—”
“Heaven!” exclaimed Perp. “Goodness, no! The last place you need to be right now is Heaven. Come with me. Hurry! Security could spot you at any moment!”
Mercury sighed and trudged after Perp. Hopefully Wormwood, whatever it was, could wait for another five minutes.
Perp opened the door with a key that hung from a key ring that he pulled from the cloths wrapping his loins and ushered Mercury inside. It was some sort of utility closet. Cleaning supplies and tools hung from the walls. The room was dimly lit by a small fluorescent panel in the ceiling.
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