Mercury Rises

by Robert Kroese

  This line of thought prompted another panicked realization: she had no idea where the glass apple was. If she was right about it, the apple was potentially even more dangerous than the Attaché Case of War. It wasn't something she wanted falling into the wrong hands. She looked frantically about the room before seeing the apple resting innocuously on a window ledge. How nice, she thought. A piece of decorative tchotchke with the destructive power of a small nuclear device. She would have to get the apple out of here and somewhere safe as soon as she could. Somewhere like the inside of a mountain in the middle of the Kenyan wilderness, for example. She shook her head at her stupidity. Why hadn't she just left the damn thing where it was?

  As she pondered this, the door to her room opened. It was Horace Finch, looking only slightly less banged up than she. He was carrying a vase containing an enormous bouquet of flowers.

  "Hey, you're awake!" he exclaimed. "Here, these are for you." He set the vase down on a small table between Christine and the window. He went on, "I wasn't sure either of us was going to survive the local medical care. I pulled some strings and got you a private room and a doctor with a medical degree from UCLA. He's a morphine addict with a history of credit card fraud, but beggars can't be choosers."

  "You pulled strings? What string do you have access to in the Nairobi Medical Center?"

  "Well, technically I offered to buy them a helicopter. They wanted mine, but I'm rather fond of her, so I told them I'd order one more suited to their needs."

  "You have a helicopter?"

  "Of course," Finch replied. "How do you think we got here? Once I managed to get us shielded under a boulder, I called my pilot back at Eden Two. He got to Mbutuokoti in twenty minutes. He dropped the rescue harness, I strapped you in, and we were off. Half an hour later we were in Nairobi."

  "Being an eccentric billionaire has its advantages, I suppose," said Christine.

  Finch nodded absentmindedly and walked to the window. "Nice view," he said. "They told me this was the best room in the hospital. Not that that's saying much. I've been to Taco Bells with better hygiene procedures."

  He turned to face her again. "By the way, I didn't mention the thing with the goat and the thunderstorm and the volcano. No point in complicating matters with absurd, non-medically-relevant details. I told them you were in a spelunking accident."

  "Ooh, kinky," replied Christine.

  Finch looked at her uncomprehendingly, and then shook his head, evidently deciding it was better not to ask. "Anyway, get some rest," he said. "I've got to make some phone calls, but I'll be back later."

  Christine nodded and Finch left the room. She lay back in bed and closed her eyes. She had almost drifted back to sleep when she heard a muffled whup-whup-whup in the distance. A helicopter, she thought. She sat up, unhooked her ankle from the sling, and hopped awkwardly to the window just in time to see a bright yellow helicopter with the Finch logo emblazoned on the side disappearing into the sunrise.

  "Son of a bitch," she muttered. "Where does he think he's going?" And then she realized what had happened. She looked down at the empty windowsill, which had been obscured from her view by the flowers. The glass apple was gone.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Eddie's meeting with the lovely but demanding Wanda Kwan went better than he expected, which wasn't saying much. He assured her that the manuscript was coming along perfectly well, but when pressed for details, all he could muster were some vague promises about water rights and incest. Wanda seemed a bit troubled by this dark turn in what was ostensibly a series of adolescent fantasy books, but she brightened when he promised her six explosions, seven outfit changes, three chapters taking place at the Charlie Nyx Travel Plaza and Family Fun Place, and no mention of the setting of the six previous books.

  The fact was that Eddie would have promised to write the entire book in Pig Latin to get out from under the piercing gaze of Ms. Kwan. At this point he was fairly certain he wasn't going to be able to deliver anything, so why not promise them the moon? Actually, that wasn't a bad idea, he thought. Maybe I'll tell them the climax of the book takes place on the moon. They'll love that.

  Driving back to the hotel from the Beacon building, he spotted the Buena Vista Mall just off the freeway and, on a whim, exited and pulled into the parking lot of the massive shopping complex. If there had once been a cemetery here, there was no indication of it now. Had Cody been screwing with him?

  Wandering around the mall parking lot, he questioned several shoppers before finding an elderly woman who remembered the cemetery. Her husband had died of a stroke some twenty years earlier and rested in peace for over a decade before being moved to Fullerton to make room for a Burger Giant. Eddie thanked her, offered his condolences, and headed toward the Burger Giant, which was adjacent to Bed, Bath & Beyond. If Cody was telling the truth, then her father's grave was around here, somewhere.

  There was no indication of any grave marker, just acres of concrete and bland stucco-and-concrete-block buildings. The complex housing Bed, Bath & Beyond and Burger Giant was a long, narrow stretch of stores. Eddie walked around the entire structure and found nothing indicating the presence of a gravesite. He circumnavigated the structure once more, this time looking for any subtle markings on the pavement, thinking that perhaps they had simply paved over top of the grave. But if there really was a human being buried under the parking lot, somebody would have left a marker of some kind, wouldn't they? And Cody had definitely said that her father had a tombstone. Of course, she didn't say whether her father's tombstone had been removed along with the rest of them. He found nothing.

  Standing at the rear of the structure near the service entrances, he appraised it once more and noticed something a bit odd. Most of the building was covered by a flat roof, with eaves that extended some three feet past the stucco walls. But near the center of the structure was a section, maybe fifty feet long, that appeared to have no roof. Some sort of open-air courtyard?

  A single door presented itself in this section of the building. Eddie approached it and looked around to see if anyone was watching. The area was deserted except for a couple of men unloading some boxes a hundred or so yards away. They seemed to take no notice of him.

  The door was locked, but this presented no difficulty for Eddie, as the lock's tumblers miraculously decided to line up just as he turned the handle. He pulled the door open and slipped through.

  Inside was one of the strangest things Eddie had ever seen, and having been around for several thousand years, that was saying something. It was, quite simply, a gravesite. Ensconced within this featureless strip mall was a miniature park, covered by a lush, well-manicured lawn. Directly in the center of the lawn was a small wooden gazebo that rested on a granite base about three feet high. Engraved on the base, facing the door Eddie had just entered, were the words:

  COLIN LANG

  LAID TO REST APRIL 29, 1993

  PANTON IN SUUS VICIS

  "Well," said Eddie. "It appears I've found the Beyond department."

  He approached the gazebo and stood for a moment, staring at the inscription. "Hello, Mr. Lang," he said to the unresponsive stone. "Nice to make your acquaintance. Figures that the one human being with whom I have something in common would be dead."

  As an angel, Eddie had a hard time wrapping his brain around the concept of mortality. How could a person be one moment, and then not be the next? Presumably their souls continued on after death in some way, but in all his centuries he had never bumped into one on any of the Heavenly planes. As far as anyone could tell, the man named Colin Lang had simply ceased to exist, while his temporal remains rotted under a suburban strip mall. Eddie felt a bit let down. He wasn't sure what he had hoped to find, but there were clearly no answers here---about the Charlie Nyx manuscript or anything else.

  "Well, I suppose I should let you get back to things," said Eddie. "I had an idea you might be able to help me out with something, but I can see you're busy, so I'll just see myself out." He turned and wa
lked back to the door.

  "Oh," he said, turning back to face the monument. "Cody says hi."

  As Eddie reached for the door handle, he was greeted by evidence of life beyond the grave. Actually it was not so much from beyond as from under. For just a second there was a deafening sound like a jet airplane taking off, which caused Eddie to turn back to the gazebo just in time to see something the size of a Volkswagen crash through it from underneath, shoot some twenty feet into the sky, and then fall to the grass a few feet from him. It appeared to be a metal box, about seven feet on each side, now badly dented and misshapen from the fall. Clouds of smoke and debris poured from the hole in the ground.

  Eddie stood aghast, evaluating the scene. He noticed, on the side of the box nearest him, a sort of metal bracket, as if the box were a vehicle designed to travel along a track. After a moment, he heard a sound like a person groaning coming from inside.

  With angelic grace, Eddie leaped onto the edge of the box and peered down, noticing that the top---or at least the side of the box that was currently facing up---was a sliding metal gate, the sort that used to be used on elevators. Lying inside the box, half hidden by the gate, was the form of a person. He or she was not moving.

  Eddie pulled aside the gate and leaped into the box. The figure was a small man with dark skin and a slight frame. He was banged up and barely conscious. Blood streamed from a gash on his forehead.

  Sirens wailed in the distance, and Eddie heard someone banging on the door to the hidden courtyard. There were going to be a lot of awkward questions if he didn't get out of here quickly.

  "Mr. Lang!" Eddie shouted at the man. "Can you hear me?"

  The man groaned almost imperceptibly.

  "I'll save you, Mr. Lang! Your daughter is going to be so excited to see you!"

  Eddie's assumption that the mysterious man in the box was Colin Lang, while not entirely rational, can to some extent be blamed on the fact that he had not yet had a chance to fully process the events of the previous several seconds. His mind had been forced to make a transition from a purely theoretical consideration of life after death to a very real and pressing real-world-situation in which a man in a steel box had been forcibly ejected from a gravesite occupying a spot of real estate that should by all rights have been a Jamba Juice. It was simply too much for him to take in.

  Eddie ran his hands over the man, manipulating interplanar energy to patch up the worst of his wounds. He heard voices outside and what sounded like the jingling of keys. Lifting the man's limp body over his shoulder, Eddie leaped on top of the box. Glancing behind him, he saw the door handle turning.

  Eddie crouched and then leaped with all his strength, soaring over the courtyard toward the Burger Giant next door. Uniformed men poured through the door underneath, looking about the area, bewildered. Fortunately, none of them thought to look up.

  Eddie was a bit out of practice with flying, and he landed off balance on top of the Burger Giant. Losing his footing, he skidded across the gabled roof and fell to the concrete patio in front of the restaurant, with the limp body of the small-boned-but-surprisingly-heavy-presumed-to-be-the-once-thought-dead-Colin-Lang squarely on top of him.

  They had landed on the side of the mall opposite most of the hubbub, but there were still plenty of civilians around to gawk at the site of two men falling to their presumed death from the roof of Burger Giant.

  "We've got to get out of here, Mr. Lang!" said Eddie to the once-again-unconscious man, as he hoisted him over his shoulder.

  "We're OK!" Eddie declared to the openmouthed crowd of onlookers. "My friend is just tired! From being on the roof!"

  Eddie smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring manner and took off running. He ended up running around in circles in the parking lot for a good five minutes, with the hapless unconscious man draped over his shoulder, because he couldn't remember where he had parked the BMW. Eventually he found it, stuffed the small black man into the passenger seat, and drove off.

  He couldn't wait to get back to Katie Midford's house and show Cody that he had recovered her father from his own grave, a bit bunged up but definitely alive. "Cody is going to be so happy you're alive, Mr. Lang. She's really great, by the way. Beautiful girl. Tall, blond and, well, I suppose feisty is the right word. I don't mean to be disrespectful."

  He glanced over at the small, swarthy man with short, tightly kinked grayish-black hair who was slouched unconscious in the seat next to him. He hardly seemed old enough to have a daughter Cody's age. Nor white enough to have a daughter Cody's color.

  Eddie reached over and once again harnessed a small amount of interplanar energy to heal the worst of the man's wounds. As the cuts sealed, the man stirred and moaned.

  "Between you and me," said Eddie, "I'm pretty good at spotting a narrative thread, but I'm frankly at a bit of a loss as to how this all ties together. I mean, how is it possible that you're even alive, first of all?"

  The man blinked and grunted something incomprehensible.

  "Don't worry," said Eddie. "We'll get it all sorted out. Cody---your daughter, Cody, that is---will probably be able to piece it all together. She's got sort of a gift for that, I think. Why, she's got this theory about, um, streetcars and Charlie Nyx and the petroleum inferiority complex that would just blow your mind. I mean, I'm not sure I get all the nuances, but Cody..."

  "Cody?" the man groaned softly, holding his hand to the bruise on his head. "Who is Cody?"

  "Oh, no!" exclaimed Eddie, turning the corner onto Katie Midford's street. "You have amnesia! Do you remember your name?"

  "Of course," said the man. "Jacob. Jacob Slater. Who the hell are you?"

  "Hmm," said Eddie, concerned. "Let's try for best three out of five. Do you know what year it is?"

  "I've got some idea," replied Jacob. "But before I let you in on that little secret, why don't you tell me who you are and what you have to do with all of this."

  "All of what?" Eddie asked.

  "You know, the CCD and the..." It occurred to Jacob that as an employee of the FBI, he was bound by Bureau protocol and a confidentiality agreement he had signed when he started this assignment. He had no idea whether these bonds extended to his knowledge of a secret particle accelerator beneath Los Angeles, but he figured it would be wise to err on the side of caution.

  "What's a CCD?" Eddie asked. "I just went to see your grave because Cody said...I mean, your daughter Cody, she said that you died a thousand years to the day after Saint Culain, and I thought that it was a strange---"

  "I don't have a daughter," said Jacob.

  "Hmmm," said Eddie. "Wait, so you're not Colin Lang?"

  "Who?"

  "Colin Lang!" Eddie exclaimed. "That was his grave you just popped out of!"

  "Grave?" Jacob asked. "I wasn't in a grave." He thought for a moment. "Was I?"

  Eddie nodded. "I can see how you would be confused. They buried you in a strip mall."

  "Look," said Jacob. "I wasn't buried. I'm not dead. And I'm not this Colin Lang, whoever that is. My name is Jacob Slater. I work for the FBI. The last thing I remember was being in a tunnel under some church. Now are you going to tell me who you are and what's going on here?"

  Eddie nodded. "Sure," he said. "My name's Ederatz. Eddie for short." He paused and bit his lip before going on. He had to take this man's word for it that he wasn't Colin Lang. But did it really matter who he was? Normally Eddie wouldn't tell someone he had just met who he really was, but Jacob had a disarming way about him. He possessed a sort of pained earnestness that one only found in mortals, and only a very few mortals at that. Besides, Eddie's quest for the seventh Charlie Nyx book had led him directly to Jacob. If Jacob knew something about the final book, then there was no telling what else he knew. Maybe he was already fully aware who Eddie was, and he was simply testing him with these questions. Eddie didn't dare risk lying.

  He continued, "I used to work for the Mundane Observation Corps. The seraphim had me assigned to report on the decline of the Ott
oman Empire, but I was stuck in Cork. I made a deal with a cherub named Gamaliel to get extracted from this plane by misleading Harry Giddings about the Apocalypse, but that plan fell through with the implosion in Anaheim, so when this chick from the Finch Publishing Group came to me, looking for the seventh Charlie Nyx book, I figured---"

  "The what in Anaheim?" Jacob interjected.

  "Huh?" replied Eddie.

  "What did you say happened in Anaheim?"

  Eddie's brow furrowed. "You haven't heard about the Anaheim Event? It's been all over the news for six weeks. Where have you been, under a rock?"

  Jacob gritted his teeth. "I know about the Anaheim Event," he said. "I want to know what you know about it. What hasn't been on the news."

  "Oh," said Eddie. "Well, let's see. The implosion was the work of a cherub named Izbazel, a servant of Lucifer. He was trying to kill Karl Grissom, the Antichrist. Slight overkill, if you ask me, using an anti-bomb to implode a stadium full of people. And the clincher is, he missed! Karl got away and is safely ensconced on the Infernal Plane."

  Jacob's mind did its best to remove the patently absurd parts of this account and ended up holding onto only "implosion" and "anti-bomb." It occurred to him that he would have dismissed these two words as well if he hadn't used them himself in an official briefing only a few hours earlier.

  "How did you know it was an implosion?" he asked.

  "Oh, the M.O.C. knows everything," said Eddie. "I mean, eventually. Sometimes it takes them a while to piece everything together, but it's pretty much common knowledge what happened in Anaheim."

  "Common knowledge," repeated Jacob dimly.