“Did it what?”
“Did it blow up?”
“My goodness, I hope not!” exclaimed Nisroc. “It’s structurally unsound, isn’t it? I had my doubts right from the beginning. I told them you couldn’t build something like that in the middle of nowhere. That’s where they built it, you know. Literally in the middle of nowhere. How are you going to keep it from falling down, I asked. You know what they told me? ‘Special bracing.’ How’s that for an answer? ‘Special bracing’ indeed. It’s unsafe!”
Christine realized that Nisroc of course knew nothing about Lucifer’s plot or the linoleum portal. This was the Nisroc of 5000 BC. He had no idea who Christine was, as she wouldn’t be born for nearly seven thousand years.
“Anyway,” said Nisroc, “I’ve been sent to tell you to clear out.”
“Clear out?” asked Jacob. “What do you mean, clear out? Unck.”
“Reports of a temporal anomaly in the area,” said Nisroc. “Eddies in the space-time continuum.”
“Eddie is where?” asked Christine.
Jacob shot her a dirty look. “Yes, well,” he said to Nisroc. “I can explain that. It’s this apple, you see.” He picked up the apple from the table where it had been resting. “It transported us back here from seven thousand years in the future.”
“Oh my goodness!” exclaimed Nisroc. “What on Earth is that?”
Jacob followed the angel’s gaze to the counter of the bungalow’s kitchenette, where Christine had left an unopened can of SpaghettiOs.
“Here,” said Christine, grabbing the can and handing it to him. “Take it. Just leave us alone, OK? The temporal anomaly is over. We’re not hurting anyone.”
“No!” Nisroc exclaimed, holding up his hands. “Keep your metallic cylinders with their oddly enticing labels! I won’t be swayed from my duty!”
“I’m telling you,” said Jacob. “It was a one-time thing. We’re not going to be doing any more time travel around here. Promise.”
Nisroc shook his head violently. “They don’t mess around with temporal anomalies,” he said. “Not since the Gibeon Incident.”
“The Gibeon Incident?” asked Christine. “What’s that?”
“Time stands still for a whole day,” replied Nisroc. “They had to recalibrate the entire SPAM.”
“Time stood still? When was that?”
“Oh, it hasn’t happened yet,” said Nisroc. “That’s the worst part of it. Wreaks havoc with long-range planning. Anyway, I need you to clear out.”
“And go where?” Christine asked. “This is the only place with food and shelter. We’ll die if we leave here.”
“No need for melodramatics,” said Nisroc. “There’s a group of Homo sapiens just south of here. Nice people, just invented bronze. I’ll introduce you.”
“And if we refuse to go?” asked Jacob.
“Ah,” said Nisroc, “then I suppose I’ll have to use my flaming sword on you.”
“You don’t have a flaming sword,” observed Christine.
“Well, not on me, no,” Nisroc admitted. “But I do have one, be assured of that!”
“Why didn’t you bring it then?” asked Christine.
“I, ah, set it down for a bit. Listen, we really need to hurry.”
“Do I smell smoke?” asked Jacob.
“I doubt it,” said Nisroc. “No reason to believe you’re smelling anything of the kind.”
“No, I smell it too,” said Christine. “Look, you can see it through the hole in the dome. Something’s on fire!”
“All right,” said Nisroc. “The fact is, I may have dropped my flaming sword in the grass on the way over here, and it may have started a bit of a flare-up.”
“A bit of a flare-up!” Christine exclaimed. “The whole plain must be on fire!”
“Again with the theatrics,” said Nisroc, frowning. “The fact is that if we leave now, we’ll have plenty of time to get out of here before the smoke becomes life-threatening. Come, please.”
Christine grabbed a backpack, and she and Jacob threw a couple of days’ supplies into it. Christine took her unfinished manuscript, and they began to make their way across the plain. Fortunately, the fire was to the east, and the wind was carrying it mainly to the northwest, so they were able to get safely out of its path without much trouble.
“So you’re really kicking us out of Eden II?” asked Christine. “The only habitable place in this godforsaken prehistoric country?”
“Orders are orders,” answered Nisroc. “Anyway, it’s not so bad. You’ll see.”
After a couple of hours, the ground began to slope upward for several miles. Christine and Jacob followed Nisroc silently, not knowing what else to do. After a few hours, they stopped to rest at the peak of a hill overlooking a muddy creek bed at the bottom of a valley. Sheep grazed on the side of the valley, and at the bottom were several dozen small grass huts nestled among a stand of deciduous trees. A handful of people were visible milling about the huts.
“See?” Nisroc exclaimed proudly. “Civilization!”
“Looks nice enough, I suppose,” said Christine, shivering as a cool breeze picked up. The sun was about to set, and the temperature would soon drop precipitously. The bonfire at the center of the village began to look rather welcoming. But was she really going to spend the rest of her life here? It didn’t seem like she had much of a choice. At least she had Jacob to keep her company.
“What did I tell you?” asked Nisroc. “Nice people. Getting the hang of agriculture, but they still make time to do the hunting and gathering thing. Good balance of work and home life.”
Jacob shrugged. “We’ll manage,” he said. “Assuming they don’t kill us on sight.”
“Nah,” said Nisroc. “They’re pretty easygoing. You’ll be all right.”
“Oh shit!” Christine exclaimed suddenly. “We left the apple!”
It was true. In their haste, they had left the glass apple on the table in the bungalow.
“I’ll have to go get it,” said Nisroc. “Heaven wouldn’t want something like that to fall into the wrong hands. I have to go back for my sword anyway. You’ll be all right without me?”
Jacob put his hand on Christine’s shoulder and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I think we’ll be OK.”
“OK, good luck!” said Nisroc, and leaped into the air, soaring across the darkening sky back the way they had come.
Nisroc didn’t have any trouble finding his sword; it lay smoldering at the edge of several hundred acres of blackened ground. The fire continued to blaze in the distance; fortunately it was traveling away from the village. Presumably it would burn itself out eventually; Nisroc didn’t really know how that worked, but he figured that he couldn’t be the first one to accidentally drop a flaming sword in a highly combustible area. Damn things were hard to hold on to.
The glass apple presented more difficulty: it wasn’t on the table. He searched the entire bungalow, but it was nowhere to be found. This wasn’t good. He had heard about those apples; they had started out as an experiment to create instant temporary portals, but they were too unstable to be of any practical use. The apple wasn’t terribly dangerous at present, but it would gradually absorb more and more interplanar energy until it eventually imploded, sucking all nearby matter into another plane. It would probably be thousands of years before the apple imploded on its own, but still—that wasn’t the sort of thing you’d want just lying around unaccounted for. Nisroc would be in a lot of trouble if they found out he had lost it.
As he rifled through the bungalow, tearing out couch cushions and looking under rugs, he heard someone clearing her throat behind him. He turned to see what appeared to be a young, dark-skinned girl standing before him. Behind her were several very serious-looking cherubim standing at attention.
“Looking for something?” she asked sternly.
“No,” said Nisroc nervously. “That is, these temporal anomalies...they can be tricky devils. Sometimes they hide in the couch cushions. Can I, ah,
help you?”
“We’re on assignment from Michael, the archangel,” said the girl. “Tracking a fugitive. Have you seen any other angels around? We’ve lost a marketing director.”
Nisroc shook his head. “Just a couple of humans. I was told to escort them out of the area, because of the temporal anomaly.”
The girl nodded, looking around at the disheveled bungalow. “We’ll take it from here,” she said. “Good work, uh...”
“Nisroc. Thank you, sir. Ma’am.” He stood for a moment, looking at the girl.
“Anything else, Nisroc?”
Nisroc opened his mouth and then closed it. “No, ma’am.”
“Be on your way, then.”
Nisroc nodded and left. He felt a little bad about not telling the girl about the apple, but that wasn’t really his job. He had done what he had been instructed to do, and he couldn’t worry about problems that might not surface for several thousand years.
Besides, he thought, these things had a way of working themselves out.
FORTY-SEVEN
Job watched as the fog rolled in, enveloping a stop sign not more than thirty feet from where he stood. He could no longer see even the nearest buildings; the horizon was nearly an unbroken blur of gray. All that remained was this little patch of concrete, and soon that would be gone as well. Reality itself was at its end.
“Quit stalling,” said the voice of Cain behind him.
Job smiled and turned. “Not stalling, just thinking.”
“What’s there to think about?” Cain sneered. “It’s over. Soon there will be nothing left. Admit it, Job. You were wrong. There’s no point, no purpose, no meaning. It’s just game over, that’s it. Since the Eye of Providence was destroyed, the Universe has been living on borrowed energy, and now it’s gasping its last breath.”
“Hmm,” said Job thoughtfully. “Aren’t you supposed to be the skeptic?”
“What do you mean?”
“You keep saying that the Eye of Providence was destroyed. But what evidence do you have?”
“What evidence?” asked Cain. “Are you serious? Look around you, Job. Reality is disintegrating before your eyes. The sustaining energy of the Eye is gone.”
“Maybe,” admitted Job. “Or maybe this plane has just been cut off from the energy somehow. Just because things are ending for us, that doesn’t mean that reality itself is done for. I just have this feeling that the Eye is still out there somewhere, and that its energy is still radiating out into the void, maybe creating whole new universes as we speak. For that matter, even if the Eye is gone, who’s to say that there isn’t something greater than the Eye, something completely beyond our understanding, that somehow imbues all of this with meaning, even when it seems like everything is falling apart?”
“Unbelievable,” Cain grumbled. “I’ve got to listen to this bullshit right up to the last moments of my existence. Just shut up and serve the damn ball, would you?”
Job smiled. “Twenty-five to twenty-four,” he said. “Game point.”
He tossed the ball into the air.
WITH THANKS TO:
Joel Bezaire, Jeff Ellis, Mark Fitzgerald, Nicklaus Louis, Jocelyn Pihlaja, Medeia Sharif, Michele Smith, and Charity VanDeBerg for their invaluable feedback on the manuscript;
The Amazon Publishing team for taking a chance on a silly book about an angel and for their continued support and general awesomeness;
All my Facebook friends and Twitter followers, especially those of you who have been around since the Mattress Police days, for your words of support and encouragement;
And of course my wife, Julia, for putting up with me.
NOTES
1 Like all almond farmers in the California Central Valley, Travis pronounced almond to rhyme with salmon. When asked why, Travis would smile (Number Six) and say, “Because when they shake the nuts out of the tree, they knock the l out of them.”
2 Almonds on his father’s side, walnuts on his mother’s. There were also some pistachios a few generations back, but the Babcocks didn’t like to talk about that.
3 It was customary at the time to denote wealth in terms of the quantities of animals owned, which is a rather unhelpful measuring system if you think about it. Massive herds of animals are all well and good, but they don’t necessarily translate to luxurious living. After all, who wouldn’t trade a couple hundred yoke of oxen for indoor plumbing or, say, a house that doesn’t smell like several hundred oxen? Still, I think we can assume that Job was living pretty well, despite being surrounded by thousands of filthy farm animals.
4 Those who have read my previous report will recall Mercury’s decapitation at the hands of Lucifer’s planeport spies.
5 Plane 4721c, known for its delicious cheeses.
6 Job had a hard time believing this one, but it actually happened as reported. Heaven was testing an upgrade to their Pillar of Fire project (Class 3), and Lucifer had one of his spies switch out the test coordinates (the middle of the Gobi desert) with the coordinates of Job’s sheep herd.
7 On more than one occasion while president he had resorted to humming the “I’m Just a Bill” song to remember the sequence of the legislative process.
8 It may strike the reader as odd that an angel would use such a primitive method of attack. In fact, angels often resort to using crude projectile weapons (such as handguns or rocks) because it tends to be quicker and easier than harnessing interplanar energy. Mano a mano fights between two angels armed with only their own miraculous angelic powers tend to go on for days, ending only when one of them becomes too bored to continue. An angel armed with a steady supply of rocks can keep the defender too off balance to get a handle on the energy streams, eventually pelting him into submission.
9 Generally believed to be a listless cherubic paper-pusher named Ederatz.
10 A representation of the Eye of Providence can be found on the US dollar bill, supposedly put there by wily Freemasons. Freemasonry has been the subject of much conspiracy theorizing, but in fact it is a completely benign and prosaic organization that was founded specifically to divert attention from the activities of the far more secretive and insidious Order of the Pillars of Babylon.
11 There is probably no single process in Heaven requiring more paperwork than a Class 5 Pillar of Fire. After several POF-related debacles early on (the worst being the incineration of Job’s sheep by a misdirected Class 3), a considerable number of fail-safes were put in place to prevent future abuses and/or mistakes. Regulations became progressively more onerous over the course of the next few thousand years, culminating with the POFPAP (Pillar of Fire Paperwork Alleviation Protocol), which doubled the number of forms required.
12 In one of his first assignments, Perp was tasked with having the prophet Jonah killed by a whale for refusing to go to Nineveh. Perp felt sorry for Jonah and arranged for him to be swallowed alive by the whale and regurgitated three days later. Heaven found out that Jonah was still alive and was about to throw the book at Jonah when Mercury stepped forward, claiming that he had given the whale indigestion by feeding it tainted eels.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Kroese’s sense of irony was honed growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan—home of the Amway Corporation and the Gerald R. Ford Museum, and the first city in the United States to fluoridate its water supply. In the second grade he wrote his first novel—the saga of Captain Bill and his spaceship, Thee Eagle. This turned out to be the high point of his academic career. After barely graduating from Calvin College in 1992 with a philosophy degree, he was fired from a variety of jobs before moving to California, where he stumbled into software development. As this job required neither punctuality nor a sense of direction, he excelled at it. In 2009 he called upon his extensive knowledge of useless information and love of explosions to write his first novel, Mercury Falls. Mercury Rests, his third book, concludes the trilogy.
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