Mercury Rises

by Robert Kroese

  "And six times as likely to die from eating the food," offered Eddie helpfully.

  Tim glared at Eddie. "The cause of death for three of those cases hasn't yet been proven." He continued, "The point is that Charlie's Grill could use some good publicity, especially now, as we embark on a new phase in the expansion of the Charlie's Grill concept. As you know, before this run of bad luck, we began construction on the new Charlie Nyx Travel Plaza and Family Fun Place in Laguna Hills, just south of L.A. The Laguna Hills location was to be our flagship, the shining gem in the crown of the Charlie's Grill chain. Of course, there are always naysayers, and especially with the bad press we've gotten lately, many commentators are insisting that we've overextended ourselves. It goes without saying, then, that our grand opening this winter has to be a smashing success. What I'm suggesting is that we use the power of Charlie Nyx to revitalize the Charlie's Grill brand."

  Eddie stared dumbly at Tim. "You...want to hold some kind of Charlie Nyx--related event at this travel plaza thing?"

  "No, no," said Tim. "I mean, yes, of course. But more importantly, we want to incorporate the Charlie Nyx Travel Plaza and Family Fun Place into the book somehow. Maybe Charlie stops there on the way to the tunnels of the lizard king to take a shower or play some video games or something."

  "I love it," gushed Wanda. "The Tunnels of Doom movie is already scheduled to premiere at the adjacent Charlie's Cinemas, so we'll do a huge grand opening slash movie premiere slash book-release party. It's a perfect storm of corporate synergy. The shareholders are going to pee themselves. Of course, that does mean an aggressive publishing timeline for the book. We'll need a draft by next Friday. That won't be a problem, will it, Eddie?"

  "Wha...er," Eddie started. "So I have find...er, rewrite the book to take out any references to Anaheim and add a chapter where the main character swings by a truck stop? In a week?"

  "A truck stop!" exclaimed Tim. "This is a Travel Plaza and Family Fun Place, Eddie. Complete with one-hour napping rooms, luxury showers, and a Family Massage Center. We just need Charlie to take twenty minutes out of his busy adventuring schedule to drop by there. He can't spend all his time whacking goblins with his magical staff, after all. You know how fifteen-year-olds are."

  A stern-looking man at the end of the table cleared his throat.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, Dan," Wanda said. "You had some legal concerns you wanted to mention."

  "Yes," said Dan. "As you know, the entire Anaheim Stadium site is an ongoing crime scene, which means that under no circumstances is the book to make any reference to it. I trust that won't be a problem, Mr. Pratt."

  "Well, I can't just..." Eddie began.

  An editor for Finch Books, a bookish woman named Linda, spoke up. "Although, of course, it's very important that we maintain continuity with the rest of the series."

  Eddie protested, "But how can I maintain continuity if I can't mention the setting of..."

  "Yes, yes," the man in charge of action figures and merchandising said. "Continuity is very important. Also, the outfits."

  "Outfits?" Eddie asked, confused.

  "In the series thus far, Charlie's sweetheart Madeline changes outfits an average of three and a third times per book. We'd like to up that to five for this one. Sales of Sweetheart Madeline dolls are down forty percent this year, but we think we can make most of that up by offering several new accessory sets."

  "And explosions," added the movie studio representative. "Receipts from the last Charlie Nyx movie were down fifteen percent, and our research indicates this is partly due to the relatively low number of explosions in that installment. We need at least six explosions to keep the interest of our core audience."

  "Tasteful explosions," Wanda clarified. "The main thing, of course, is that the book reflect the true wishes of the late Katie Midford. What her wishes would have been if she had written them, I mean. And that we get the finished manuscript by next week."

  "I'm sorry," Eddie began. "I just don't see how I can..."

  "And once that's out of the way," Wanda went on, "we can talk about your angel book."

  "Ooh, you've got a book about angels?" asked the studio rep. "How many explosions does it have?"

  For a moment, Eddie stared at them in disbelief. Then, with the slightest hint of hope in his voice, he asked, "Do implosions count?"

  SIX

  The day after the Banner was shut down, Christine made a pilgrimage to the Anaheim Crater, the capacious hole in the ground where Anaheim Stadium had once stood. She hadn't been back since the stadium was destroyed.

  Traffic, always bad in Los Angeles, had gotten exponentially worse since the Anaheim Event forced the closure of several main roads. Christine got lost and ended up cutting through an alley only to be trapped in a seemingly endless sea of immobile vehicles. All around her, horns honked and drivers hurled curses. Some of them had gotten out of their cars and were screaming and gesturing wildly at someone or something ahead of her.

  "This whole city has gone insane," Christine muttered, gripping the steering wheel. She and Mercury might have averted the Apocalypse, but you certainly couldn't tell from the atmosphere in L.A. recently. Even before Anaheim, people had been on edge because of the earthquakes, but now things were really getting bad. It reminded her of those wretched movies about the teenagers who were supposed to die in an accident but somehow cheated Death only to be painstakingly hunted down one by one by Death over the next two gruesome, pointless hours. The Apocalypse, not to be cheated of its moment in the sun, seemed to be asserting itself in the collective psyche of Los Angeles: where earthquakes and implosions had left off, mass hysteria was taking over.

  After five minutes of sitting immobile behind a great white plumbing van bearing the markings of "Kip's Plumbing," Christine turned off the engine of her Scion. Another three minutes and she threw the door open and got out of the car.

  "What the hell is going on?" she demanded of no one in particular. Looking around the van, she could make out some sort of disturbance about ten cars up. She locked the Scion and marched forward, determined to find out what was going on. What she found was a crowd of maybe fifty people standing in a rough circle. Squeezing through to the front of the crowd, she saw the source of all the trouble: an unkempt, elderly man had parked his pickup in the middle of an intersection. In front of the pickup was a metal barrel, in which a fire was burning. The man was hollering something incomprehensible at the crowd, and they were hollering something incomprehensible right back at him. In his hand was a hardcover Charlie Nyx book.

  "Oh, jeez," muttered Christine. This old kook had arranged an impromptu book burning in the middle of a busy intersection. And he was about to get himself lynched, judging by the mood of his audience. She doubted many of them were die-hard Charlie Nyx fans, but quite a few of them seemed to be fans of "Get out of the road, asshole!"

  A beefy, balding man wearing blue coveralls had stepped forward and was berating the old man furiously, jabbing his finger into the man's ribs. Embroidered on his chest was the name "Kip." Great globs of saliva were fleeing Kip's lips in droves, landing on the old man or anywhere else they could find refuge. What the old man lacked in size, he made up for in intensity, shrieking like a wounded seagull about "blasphemous books" and "signs of the End Times."

  While this altercation was going on, a young man in a business suit rushed forward and gave the barrel a kick, knocking it over and spilling a mass of flaming books into the street. Several onlookers dove out of the way of the conflagration, creating havoc in the crowd. Meanwhile, a new fracas had broken out closer to Christine, with an angry contingent castigating the man who had kicked over the barrel. Kip had brought his fist back in an effort to cow the old man, and two other men had stepped up to restrain him. In the distance, Christine heard sirens and saw the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, but they seemed to be making little progress toward the source of the trouble. Chaos was spreading through the scene like germs at a preschool.

  Christi
ne had had enough. Clearly she wasn't going to be able to do anything to quell the chaos, and bedlam could go on just as well without her. Leaving her car in the de facto parking lot, she trudged off toward the place where Anaheim Stadium once stood. She figured it was about a mile away; at the rate things were going, she'd have plenty of time to get back to her car. And if not, what was the worst that could happen?

  She realized that she didn't really want to think very hard about the worst that could happen. However, if the worst did happen, it would be just as well for her to be a mile away at the time.

  Walking briskly, it took her less than twenty minutes to get to the scene of the Anaheim Event. She couldn't get very close; construction fencing ringed the entire area a good hundred feet from the crater's edge. She walked up to the chain-link fence, finding a place among the other gawkers and picture takers. Her view was mostly obscured by the dozens of vehicles, tents, and other temporary structures that skirted the crater.

  She could only assume that the figures scurrying about inside the perimeter fence were trying to figure out what exactly had happened there. She imagined they probably weren't having much luck.

  Her eyes alighted on a small, thoughtful-looking black man wearing civilian clothes who was crouched on the shallow slope just inside the jagged swath of asphalt that marked the crater's edge. Sand filtered between the fingers of his left hand, and he stared vacantly into space as if waiting for inspiration to strike. Who was he? Christine wondered. Not a cop, certainly, and not military. He didn't look like a government bigwig or bureaucrat either. A researcher or investigator of some kind, maybe? Maybe, she thought with a tinge of pity, he was the one that all the bureaucrats and bigwigs were expecting to explain this mess.

  Part of her wanted to call out to the man, to tell him she knew exactly what had caused the crater. But what would she say? That Anaheim Stadium had been imploded by a supernatural device that could fit in the palm of one's hand? If she were lucky, she'd be dismissed as delusional, and if she were unlucky, she'd be charged with interfering with a federal investigation---or worse. And her situation wouldn't be improved by spilling her guts about who had used the anti-bomb, and why.

  She had tried her best to put all those details out of her mind during the six weeks since the Anaheim Event, and now that she forced herself to think about it, she realized she was having a hard time keeping it all straight. She wasn't sure she'd be able to offer a cogent narrative of the events leading up to the Event even if she wanted to. The politics of Heaven and Hell were just too damned complicated.

  First, there was that conniving bastard Gamaliel, who was working for that conniving bitch Katie Midford, who was really the demoness Tiamat, who wanted to---how did she put it?---subjugate humanity with an iron fist.

  Then there was that imbecile Izbazel, who was a minion of Lucifer aka Satan, who wanted to destroy the world.

  Then there were Uzziel and Michael and all the other agents of Heaven, who couldn't seem to agree on much of anything; and Harry Giddings, who thought he was working for Heaven but wasn't; and Karl Grissom, the accidental Antichrist.

  And then, of course, there was Mercury. Mercury was infuriating, exasperating, callous, and self-absorbed, and she was having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that she would most likely never see him again. She didn't exactly miss him; she felt more or less the way she had felt that day she came home from school to find that her father had sold the bright orange Oldsmobile Toronado that he had driven as long as she could remember. The car was horrifically loud, belched huge clouds of blue smoke for a good ten minutes every time it was started, and always inexplicably smelled like overripe peaches, but Christine had cried herself to sleep that night because she couldn't imagine life without it.

  The man she had been staring at glanced her direction, and for a moment she thought he was looking directly at her. She half expected him to walk over and launch into a series of questions about what exactly she knew about the Anaheim Event, but he simply muttered something under his breath, stood up, and then walked away.

  Of course he wouldn't question her. There was no reason to suspect she had had anything to do with the destruction of the stadium. In fact, she reminded herself, she hadn't had anything to do with it.

  Yet, for some reason, she felt a twinge of guilt whenever she thought about what had happened here. That guilt was the main reason she hadn't visited the implosion site until now. She wasn't sure her brain would be able to process the reality of the aftermath; until now it had seemed like something out of a half-remembered nightmare, and a part of her expected to break down completely at the sight of the destruction. But standing here overlooking the crater, she felt like an extra in a Hollywood film. The vast gray crater dotted with tents and portable offices bore no resemblance to the image of Anaheim Stadium packed with True Believers that was etched into her mind. Surveying the scene now, she simply felt numb---and somehow that was worse than the tsunami of guilt she had expected.

  Fraternizing with Mercury has warped my soul, she thought. Seeing this hole in the ground instead of a stadium filled with tens of thousands of people should make me feel something. After all, I was the reason Karl was onstage in the first place. If I hadn't saved him and delivered him to Harry wrapped up with a nice bow, he wouldn't have been here, and Izbazel wouldn't have detonated the anti-bomb. It's my fault.

  But she couldn't make the words mean anything. Damn it, she thought. Maybe I just need to get out of here. Away from this place, this city. Somewhere I can do something meaningful.

  She fingered the scrap of paper on which she had written the number of Eternal Harvest. Africa? she thought. That was a bit extreme, wasn't it?

  On the other hand, her career as a journalist seemed to be over, and she still dreaded returning to her condo. Why not move to Africa, far away from the aftermath of the Anaheim Event, the cynical machinations of the Beacon, and her infernal linoleum? A remote village in eastern Africa sounded positively welcoming compared to this unholy place. She couldn't possibly feel more useless and unfulfilled there than here, and who knows? She might even be able to do some good---real good, helping people in a meaningful, concrete way for once, rather than spreading a combination of false hope and cynicism through her Apocalyptic columns.

  Gunfire erupted in the direction from which she had come, followed by screams. Police cars and National Guard vehicles raced past her toward the scene. Pandemonium was taking hold of Los Angeles.

  Christine pulled her cell phone from her pocket and began to dial.

  SEVEN

  In high school Jacob Slater had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a vaguely defined condition which, in the final analysis, meant that people gave him the heebie jeebies.

  He didn't like crowds, and he liked smaller groups of people even less. One-on-one contact with a person he didn't already know was roughly as painful for him as a third-degree sunburn. To compensate him for this deficiency, the Almighty had given him a keen intellect and a preternatural ability to make sense of disparate data and recognize patterns, abilities he had put to good use as a forensic blast expert for the FBI.

  Technically he was a "forensic explosive investigator," but his interest was not in the explosives, but rather the explosions. He had always loved explosions, even as a child. When he was ten he had once poisoned a neighborhood stray cat by feeding it liverwurst laced with gunpowder, and his protests that the poisoning had been an accident didn't save him from several trips to the school psychologist. Technically he was telling the truth: he hadn't meant to poison the cat; he had meant to blow it up. This admission didn't help his case either. Ironically three days later the cat was apprehended by an animal control officer who took it to the city pound, where it died by lethal injection after a miserable, frightening, weeklong incarceration in a small cage surrounded by dozens of other doomed animals. Young Jacob concluded, not unreasonably, that his parents and teachers weren't really concerned about keeping the cat alive; what t
hey wanted was for the cat to die quietly and alone rather than in an exciting and very public explosion.

  Jacob never tried to blow up another animal after that, partly because it was clearly too much trouble and partly because as annoying as stray cats and raccoons could be, at least they weren't hypocrites. He did, however, blow up plenty of inanimate objects, from model airplanes to mailboxes, both because he liked to see things explode and because he liked the challenge of trying to reassemble the pieces. He would occasionally videotape his projects but was disappointed to learn that the typical camcorder recorded only thirty frames per second---not enough to dissect an explosion in much detail.

  The FBI didn't call Jacob Slater when they wanted to keep a bomb from going off; they called him two minutes after a bomb had gone off. His job was essentially to tell the story of what had happened during the fraction of a second before everything went to hell. He did his job exceedingly well, and he had been waiting his entire adult life for the call he had received six weeks ago.

  At least, he thought it was the call he had been waiting for. A massive explosion at Anaheim Stadium, they had said. But once he got there he found...nothing. That wasn't hyperbole; he had literally found nothing. Where there once had been a stadium filled with people, there was now only a gigantic bowl-shaped hole in the ground. They were calling it the Anaheim Event rather than the Anaheim Blast for a reason, that reason being that everyone who had seen the devastation in Anaheim who knew anything about explosions knew that it hadn't been caused by any known type of explosive device.

  Jacob Slater was, above all else, a scientist, and science works by systematically isolating and eliminating unknowns. Unfortunately, the crater in Anaheim was one big, gaping unknown, and there were very few definite knowns to be had.