Mercury Falls (8 page)

Christine sighed, convinced that she had hit a new low in a career that was littered with some pretty impressive lows. Even that flaky cad Jonas Bitters had the good sense not to hinge his eschatological pronouncements on a fictional adolescent warlock.

"I must be the only person on Earth who doesn't give a shit about Charlie Nyx," Christine muttered. "Between the books and the movies and these ridiculous publicity stunts. . ."

"It is a strange way to pick the Antichrist," Mercury admitted.

Christine raised an eyebrow at him. "You do realize that it's just a stunt, right? They picked some guy at random and called him the Antichrist. It's just a stupid, sick joke."

"Sick, yes. Stupid? That remains to be seen. I'm betting Lucifer has something up his sleeve. Picking that dickweed Karl Grissom to be—"

"Karl?" said Christine dubiously. "The Antichrist's name is Karl?"

"Yeah, some dumb schmuck in Lodi. South of Sacramento, I think."

"Lodi? You mean like in the song?"

"What song?" asked Mercury.

"You know," said Christine. "The Credence Clearwater Revival song."

"'Proud Mary'?" offered Mercury.

"No, the other one."

"'Bad Moon Rising'?"

"No."

"'Born on the Bayou'?"

"'
Lodi
,'" said Christine coldly.

"Right," said Mercury. "South of Sacramento. There's a song about it." The beer bottle fell from Mercury's palm and rolled under Christine's chair. Mercury looked like he was trying to decide whether it was worth going after it, based on the limited entertainment value the bottle had provided him so far.

Christine pressed on. "So tell me, Mr. Mercury, what is your role in all of this?"

"I thought I covered that," Mercury said. "I missed the meeting. Maybe I'm supposed to. . .hold a sign or something? You've seen the greeting cards."

"Uh huh. So what are you doing here?"

"Well, right now I'm savoring a slight buzz and anticipating another mark in the win column against Toby."

Christine gritted her teeth.

"Well, Mr. Mercury," she said, "it's been a pleasure. I'd love to stick around, but I've got lunch with a leprechaun. I understand he has some information regarding the whereabouts of a certain pot of gold."

"Leprechaun," considered Mercury. "Nice. Mythical creature. You do believe in angels, of course?"

"Mr. Mercury. . ."

"Just Mercury."

"I seem to have made a mistake. I just got back from an assignment in Israel, and someone mentioned the name 'Mercury.' For some reason, I assumed they meant you, but clearly I was mistaken."

Mercury nodded. "Wow," he said. "There's simply no reason for your face to be as attractive as it is. It's like six different faces that have been welded together."

Christine sighed again, regretting ever having listened to Pierre Gabrielle and the magic briefcase. What the hell was she thinking? There was no way General Isaacson had meant
this
Mercury.

"Hey," said Mercury, "would you like to see a card trick?"

"I'm sorry?"

"A card trick. Here."

Mercury produced a deck of cards from his pocket. The backs of the cards were adorned by pairs of cherubim riding bicycles.

"Examine the deck."

"Mercury, please. I don't have time for card tricks."

"Trust me, card tricks are about all you have time for at this point. Examine the deck."

"OK, one fast trick and I'm leaving."

"I bet you say that to all the cult leaders."

"Funny. The deck looks fine."

"Pick a card. Don't show me."

Christine rolled her eyes. She picked a card. Seven of hearts.

"OK, now put the card back and shuffle the deck." He handed her the deck and closed his eyes while she shuffled.

"Hand me the deck," he said.

She did.

"Now look in your back pocket," he said with a wry smile.

Christine was dubious. "There's no way. . ." she began as she reached into the back pocket of her slacks. Her fingers touched the smooth edge of something that felt suspiciously like a playing card. She pulled it out and looked down.

"Is that your card?" Mercury said knowingly.

"No," Christine said flatly.

It was the ace of spades.

"No?" Mercury asked. He seemed genuinely surprised.

Christine said, "That was fun. Maybe you should stick with ping-pong."

Mercury turned the card over, examining every detail. When the card continued to stubbornly refuse to admit to being the seven of hearts, he proceeded to examine the rest of the deck. The look on his face reminded her of General Isaacson just before the rocket struck. After a moment of brow-furrowing, he fanned the cards, turning them so she could see.

Every card was the ace of spades.

"Ah," Christine said. "Toby must have gone to a lot of 7-Elevens to get you fifty-two of those."

Mercury dropped the cards. Black aces scattered everywhere.

"This isn't good," he said. "We need to go."

"We?" Christine asked.

"Go!" he said more firmly, pointing to the exit. "Now!"

She followed dumbly as he raced out the front door and into the street. He crossed at an angle, darting through the traffic. Car horns blared. Christine followed tentatively, dimly wondering why she was leaving a perfectly amicable Victorian mansion to follow its clearly insane occupant into a busy street.

"What?" she growled as she caught up to him on the sidewalk on the far side of Telegraph. Mercury had stopped and turned to face the direction he had come. At first she thought he was waiting for her, but his eyes were fixed on the house.

"What the hell are we. . .?"

"Not Hell," said Mercury. "Heaven. Watch."

Christine tried to follow Mercury's gaze. "I don't. . ."

There was a blinding flash of light. Before her eyes clamped shut, she thought she saw something like a pillar of fire, some twenty feet in diameter, shooting straight down out of the clouds. When she opened her eyes a second later, the entire house was engulfed in flames. Anyone inside must have been incinerated instantly.

"Those people. . ." she started.

Mercury sighed, shaking his head. "Friggin' cultists," he said. "They never learn."

The Antichrist, meanwhile, was having a bad day. He had only this morning been dethroned as the reigning
BattleCraft
champion of Server 7, and now his mother was getting on his case again.

"Karl?" she said in that particularly annoying tone that she used when she spoke. Thankfully, his mother lacked both the motivation and the stamina to climb the steep, carpeted steps to his dusty brown room in the dusty brown attic of her dusty brown house in a dusty brown neighborhood in the middle of the dusty brown part of Northern California. Unfortunately, that hadn't stopped her from screeching incessantly upstairs at Karl for most of the past thirty-seven years.

Ninety-six percent of the people who had met Karl's mother had, at one time or other, described her as "unpleasant." The remaining four percent, who were somewhat more perceptive, tended to describe her as "unpleasant and a little
off
." In fact, Karl's mother was—unbeknownst to anyone—a medical curiosity: she had been born without an appendix, in place of which was a second gall bladder.

"Karl!"

"
What?
" he howled back. "
Jeez
, Ma. I'm getting dressed!"

"You've been getting dressed for twenty minutes. You're going to be late!"

"Myah-myah-myah-myah-MYAH-myah!"

"Karl, are you mocking me?!"

"No, Ma."

"You'd better not! Now get down here!"

"This shit is hard to get on, Ma! Give me a second."

"Don't you curse at me, young man!"

Karl let out a torrent of profanity.

"Karl!"

Karl Grissom was a thirty-seven-year-old film school dropout and part-time pizza delivery guy who was still acclimating to his role as the Antichrist. If it were up to him, he'd have stuck with just the pizza delivery gig, but his ma wouldn't have it. "A great opportunity," she called it. And it was, for
her
: an opportunity for her to get her hair styled and her toenails painted and her eyebrows plucked. Her eyebrows had been so sparse and uneven that the poor stylist had ended up removing them completely in a futile effort to produce something like a definitive line. Ma had been outraged at first, but she took it as an opportunity to have new eyebrows tattooed just above the originals, so that her face now ironically seemed to be expressing the exact horrified surprise felt by anyone who was unfortunate enough to meet her.

Karl hated his mother, which was one thing he had in common with everyone else, whom he also hated, but not as much as he hated his mother. He hated her first of all because every day for the past nineteen years she had nagged him to stop playing with his "toys" and do the laundry, despite the fact that not once in his life had he ever
done
the laundry. He couldn't fathom why she still thought he might someday break down and wash his own clothes. He certainly never gave her any reason to believe that he would. Ten years ago this week, in fact, he had stopped picking up his underwear from the bathroom floor in an attempt to convince her that her nagging was causing him to regress developmentally, but this tactic had had no noticeable effect on her behavior. He was still planning his next escalation in their little power struggle.

Karl had become the Antichrist quite by chance, at least as far as any human being knew.
⁷
It was very important for legal reasons that his selection appear random. For this purpose, Karl had been a good choice, because anyone looking at him could only assume that he had come into the position through sheer, unadulterated luck.

Like most thirty-seven-year-olds who lived in their mother's attic, Karl was a fan of teen warlock Charlie Nyx.

The Charlie Nyx books were extremely popular with those who had read them and extremely unpopular with those who had not. Despite their understandable lack of familiarity with the finer points, it was, surprisingly, the latter group that was able to discern that the true mission of Charlie Nyx was not to defend the great city of Anaheim from troglodytes, nor even to generate truckloads of money for Katie Midford, but rather to promote the diabolical interests of Lucifer himself.

Everybody figured the Antichrist promotion was a joke, of course. Even the Mundane Observation Corps didn't take it particularly seriously. The applicants were more interested in money or fame than being conscientious servants of the Evil One. The only ones who took the gimmick seriously were the anti–Charlie Nyx activists. And Lucifer, it turns out.

Karl Grissom was not, by most accounts, the ideal Antichrist. Christian fundamentalists would have preferred someone a little more threatening, and the publisher of the Charlie Nyx books would have preferred someone with substantially less neck stubble. For his part, Karl would have preferred someone else to have been selected as well, because he felt that he had better things to do.

Karl would bristle at the suggestion, occasionally made by neighbors and his mother's canasta circle, that he was just an un-motivated loser living in his mother's attic. Karl had ambitions. Karl was a
musician
.

This claim would have surprised everyone who had ever met Karl (including his mother), as Karl didn't play any instruments, had never learned to read music, and didn't own any albums. He did, however, have a library of 26,923 illegally downloaded songs on his computer, and he had thus far incorporated samples from 327 of them into an epic rock opera he was writing entitled
Shakkara the Dragonslayer
. He had been working on it for seventeen years, although his first real breakthrough hadn't occurred until the release of Flat Pack's dance remix of "Sweet Child o' Mine."

All of this Antichrist stuff was, in Karl's opinion, a big distraction from his art. He was getting very close to calling it quits with the whole business. If it weren't for the free publicity, he'd never have agreed in the first place. His mother was thrilled with the money he had won, but Karl never paid much attention to financial matters. He had never wanted to
win
the contest; he had been hoping to be one of the runners-up who got ten grand and an autographed copy of the latest Charlie Nyx book.

Karl finally got the costume on, except for the helmet, and plodded downstairs to the kitchen, where his mother waited.

"People are counting on you, Karl."

"Whatever," Karl said. Like his mother gave a crap about other people. All she cared about was maintaining the steady stream of checks that Karl signed over to her. He got in his mother's Saturn and drove to the Charlie's Grill in Lodi, where the fans of Charlie Nyx waited impatiently for the Antichrist to appear.

"Natural gas explosion."

"Excuse me?"

"That's what they'll blame it on. The authorities."

Christine tried to sigh, but it came out as a series of short huffs. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. They were on the highway, heading east. She was vaguely aware that she was going the wrong direction; she would need to head south at her first opportunity to get on a highway that would take her back to Los Angeles. She wasn't sure what she'd do when she got back to Southern California; some small part of her was trying to pretend that she could leave all of this insanity behind her in Berkeley. That illusion would be easier to entertain, of course, if the cherubic lunatic weren't sitting next to her, fiddling with the radio. Mercury had simply gotten into the car, without even bothering to ask for permission. She had been too shaken to make an issue of it.

"You have no idea how much divine retribution is blamed on natural gas explosions," Mercury was saying. "It's criminal, really. Natural gas is quite safe, generally speaking."

"Natural gas explosion. . ." Christine mumbled, trying to air-brush the image in her mind until that caption fit. But every time she replayed the scene, the fire always started out
above
the house.

"Should have gotten a Mundanity Enhancement Field. A pillar of fire won't work in an MEF. Disrupts the interplanar energy channels. Of course, my card tricks wouldn't work either." He sighed. "The interplanar energy channels are a harsh mistress." He finally took his hand off the radio's tuner knob, having settled on Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars." "Ooh, I love this song," he said.

"You. . .blew up. . .that house. . ." sputtered Christine. It was a series of unconnected thoughts that had somehow come out as a sentence.

"
I
blew it up? Hardly. I don't have the authority to call down a Class Three pillar of fire, even if I wanted to. Which, of course, I didn't. My ping-pong table was in there."

"But you knew. . ."

"The card trick was the tip-off. Ace of spades. Somebody's idea of a joke."

"So the house blew up because you screwed up a card trick?"

"No, the card trick got screwed up because the house was going to be blown up. You see, I can't perform miracles without—"

"Dammit," Christine spat.

"Something wrong?"

"I don't even know where I'm going. We should have stayed there. The police. . ."

". . .are going to be looking for someone to blame," Mercury said. "Are you familiar with Walter Chatton?"

"No," replied Christine, impatiently. "Should I be?"

"Walter Chatton devised a theory which states that when you're trying to explain something, you should be prepared to keep adding to your explanation until whatever it is that you set out to explain is fully explained."

"Fascinating."

"The idea never really caught on."

"Hard to imagine why," Christine said irritably. "Wilbur Cheetham was clearly a misunderstood genius."

"Actually, it's a rather unhelpful theory, particularly for people who are paid poorly to explain a virtually unlimited number of nearly inexplicable incidents. It was the best response Walter Chatton could come up with to another principle of limited usefulness, called Occam's Razor. You know that one, I suppose?"

Christine was tiring of the lecture. "Something about not trusting an Italian woman who shaves more than twice a day?"

"Occam's Razor states that—"

"I know, I know. The simplest explanation is the best."

"More or less. It might be better summarized as 'Don't needlessly complicate an explanation.' You know who loves Occam's Razor?"

"Kittens?" offered Christine, who was trying to focus on more pressing matters than a rivalry between medieval theologians.

"The police. The authorities. Right now, the simplest explanation is a natural gas explosion. The police aren't going to trouble themselves to satisfy Walter Chatton. They're going to go from point A, unexploded house, to point C, exploded house, and they're going to pencil in 'B, natural gas explosion,' between them. Unless, that is, you and I show up uninvited at point B with a look on our faces that says, 'Something far more troubling than a natural gas explosion.' Understand?"

Christine hated to admit that this person, this clearly insane person listening to catchy early 1990s pop songs in the passenger seat of her rented Camry, was making sense. But of course, he was. What
would
she tell the police? A pillar of fire descended from the heavens as divine retribution for a bungled card trick?

"So you screwed up a card trick, and now someone is trying to—"

"I executed the card trick flawlessly," countered Mercury. "For a journalist, you're not much of a listener. The card trick was foiled by an interloper. I didn't figure a card trick would show up on Heaven's radar, but somebody must have gotten a trace on me. Two somebodies, in fact. Not just anybody can authorize a Class Three pillar of fire, so that was presumably the work of my superiors. The people I work for aren't known for issuing warnings, though, so the card thing must have been someone else trying to get my attention. It's a good thing they did, too, or we'd never have gotten out of the house in time. Lucky, huh?"

Christine took her eyes off the road to direct a pained glance in his direction.

Mercury began again. "You see, I can't perform miracles without—"

"Oh, good lord," Christine said. "I can't believe I'm listening to this. You're telling me that the card trick was a
miracle
?"

"What, you don't believe in miracles?"

"I don't believe that card tricks are miracles."

"Well, most aren't. Neither are most escapes from collapsed buildings."

"You—how did you know about that?"

"Unauthorized miracles of that sort make it on the news."

"The news? They haven't even released the fact that General Isaacson. . ."

"Dead, I know," said Mercury. "Possibly another minor miracle."

"You're happy he's dead?"

"Happy? What does that have to do with anything?"

"You said it was a 'minor miracle' he was dead."

"I said 'possibly.' That was one lucky rocket strike, otherwise. Or unlucky, if you're General Isaacson."

"Or someone else in the house."

"Well, to be fair," Mercury mused, "that's the second house in three days that's blown up around you. You might consider the fate of the people who've been unfortunate enough to be in your vicinity." Having evidently lost interest in the conversation, Mercury lapsed into singing along with the radio.

We. . .count. . .only blue cars. . .

It was true that up to this point, Christine hadn't thought of it in quite that way. It was as if two sides of her brain had been arguing about how to process the input it had received over the past two days.

"What a run of bad luck I've had," said Side One.

"Ah, but how about all those people being killed? That was quite tragic, wasn't it?" said Side Two.

We have. . .MA-ny questions. . .like children often do. . .

"Yes, but look at me. I've nearly been killed in two separate, highly unlikely explosions, and now my body is quite badly scraped up," Side One responded.

"True, true. Terrible about the killings though, isn't it?" Side Two replied.

"Indeed it is," acknowledged Side One. "And ordinarily I'd be rather torn up about it, but at the moment I'm somewhat preoccupied by my own ill fortune."

. . .all your thoughts on God, cuz I'd really like to meet Her. . .

But what had promised to be an amicable disagreement was now in danger of gelling into an unfavorably one-sided perception of the events. It was dawning on her that the deaths of General Isaacson, Ariel, and however many others had one thing in common: her. The logical conclusion was that she was somehow the proximate cause of the explosions. Was someone trying to kill her? Was the Universe itself out to get her? If so, why? Hadn't she done what the Universe wanted, following its cryptic signals to Mercury? The Universe, she was beginning to think, was something of a jerk.

There was no other explanation. Someone Up There was trying to kill her. The rocket strike could be explained as bad luck, but pillars of fire from the heavens didn't just happen. On the other hand, if the Universe wanted her dead, presumably there were more effective—not to mention subtle—ways of bringing that about. So. . .if someone or some
thing
had it in for her, they were far from omnipotent, but they did seem to have access to information about her whereabouts. Did they find out from Harry? Or did they find out the same way that Mercury had?

. . .tell me am I very far. . .

"What news?" Christine asked.

Am I very far now. . .

"Where did you hear about me and General Isaacson? You said that you heard it on the news. But they haven't. . ."

Ami VE-ry farnow. . .

"Mercury."

Oooowamiveryfarnow. . .

"MERCURY!"

"What?"

"Shut
up!
For Pete's sake. If this is what angelic choirs are like, remind me to take some cotton balls into heaven with me. Because I swear to God, if I have to hear the angelic host belting out Sheryl Crow songs. . ."

"No danger of that," said Mercury.

"Thank God. Wait, are you saying. . ."

"Angel Band."

"Huh?"

"You asked where I heard about you and General Isaacson. Angel Band."

"Angel Band? Did you just say 'A
ngel Band
'? How much time do you spend coming up with this stuff? Because honestly, it's starting to sound like you're making it up as you go along. If you're going to be delusional, at least put some effort into it."

"Hey, you asked."

"So do you have a special Angel Band radio? Maybe a secret decoder ring?"

"Angels can hear things on what you might call a 'subplanar frequency.' Transmission of information by way of the manipulation of interplanar energy fluctuations."

"Don't suppose you'd be willing to demonstrate?"

"Better not. If they're looking for me, they'll latch on to me the second I tune in."

"Of course," said Christine. "We don't want
them
to find you."

"So," said Mercury, "where are we going?"

"I have to go see the Antichrist," Christine said, in a misguided attempt to put Mercury off balance. She was trying to think of a way to find out if he knew anything about the briefcase without tipping him off. Her rapidly fading hope that he might actually be
the
Mercury was the only reason she hadn't kicked him out of the car five minutes outside Berkeley.

"Oh jeez," said Mercury. "Seriously? The
Antichrist?
" He said it as if she had announced she was going to a Nickelback concert.

"What do you have against the Antichrist?"

"He's an ass, Christine. A real dickweed."

"Well," said Christine, "he is the
Antichrist
. . ."

"Hey, we all have our jobs to do. That's no excuse for being a dickweed."

"You know," replied Christine coolly, "I didn't ask you to come along. This is my job. I'm a reporter. What do you do? Play ping-pong and eat Rice Krispies bars?"

"Trust me, Christine, if you knew what my job was, you'd be happy that I spend my time playing ping-pong."

"I thought you didn't even know what you were supposed to be doing. You missed that meeting, remember?"

"I have a general idea. SPAM."

"You're supposed to be sending spam?"

"Schedule of Plagues, Announcements, and Miracles. SPAM. It gives the angels their assignments."

"Oh, of course," said Christine. "
That
SPAM. I suppose they send updates over. . ."

"Angel Band, right."

Christine sighed heavily. "Anyway, you convinced me that this guy in Lodi, Kevin. . ."

"Karl. The Antichrist's name is Karl."

"Yeah, you convinced me that this Karl is the honest-to-goodness Antichrist, and I'm going to Lodi to ask him some questions about his plans. For example, does he plan to rule with an iron fist? Or does he prefer a more lightweight carbon fiber fist?"

"I think you're going to be disappointed," replied Mercury.

"Why? Is it because he only has five heads? Because between you and me, six-headed Antichrists are overrated."

"Nah, he's not very interesting," said Mercury. "Just, you know, a typical dickweed. If it weren't for that contest. . ."

"Right, the contest Lucifer used to pick the best Antichrist," said Christine dryly.

"You're not a big Charlie Nyx fan, are you?"

"I'm indifferent to Charlie Nyx. Mostly, I'm just so sick of hearing about him that I change the channel whenever I hear the name. They're children's books, for Pete's sake. I couldn't even avoid him on the trip back to the States. That damn movie with the magic and the trolls and the warlocks. . ."

"Personally, I love the books," said Mercury with apparent enthusiasm. "The way Katie Midford paints the subterranean realm underneath Anaheim Stadium, I feel like I've been there."

For some reason, this comment unsettled Christine. "You do realize that there aren't really monsters living under Anaheim Stadium?"

"Please, Christine," said Mercury. "I'm not crazy."

"Right, I forgot. You're a perfectly sane ping-pong-playing cherub."

"Why the hell would you want to interview that wanker? You know who you should interview? Me."

"What do you know that anybody would care about?"

"Well, I know that the Antichrist is a big wanker, for starters."

"Yeah, I got that. You're not a fan. So what do you know about David Isaacson?"

"The Israeli general?" said Mercury. "Not much. He's been a PAI for some time. Like yourself."

"PAI?"

"Person of Apocalyptic Interest."