Mercury Rests (15 page)

Jacob laughed again. “Why’d you close your hand so slowly?”

“I didn’t...OK, let’s do it again.”

He gave Christine the dime and she once again placed it on her palm. “Tell me when to close,” she said.

“Close,” he said. She snapped her hand shut. This time, she noticed Jacob moving, almost imperceptibly. He held the dime in his fingers.

“No one can move that fast,” said Christine, as if she suspected Jacob of being possessed by demons.

“When I’m off my meds, I perceive time differently,” explained Jacob. “Everything moves very slowly around me.”

“You’re like The Flash,” said Christine in awe.

Jacob smiled weakly. “Kind of,” he agreed. “If The Flash had uncontrollable muscle spasms and crippling social anxiety.”

The bus got back on the road. Evidently they were going to travel straight through to LA, with several people taking turns driving. They drove all day, stopping every few hours for a meal or a restroom break. At the first stop, Christine and Jacob’s new-found born-again friends took up a collection for them, which came to an embarrassing $316.41. Whatever faults these people had, they were certainly generous.

Sometime after dinner, Christine began to see signs for Oklahoma City. Christine had been to Oklahoma City only once before, when she was very young. Her family had been on vacation in Texas when the Murrah Federal Building was destroyed in a terrorist attack, and her father had thought that seeing the site of the bombing would be a good lesson in current events. There hadn’t been much to see: just a pile of rubble surrounded by police barriers. Her father had tried to explain to her that the pile of rocks was all that was left of a government building after a very troubled man had exploded a truck bomb. Christine didn’t get it. She wanted to know what the building had looked like. Had it looked like the Alamo? No, she was told, it had just been a regular old square building. She felt like they were putting her on. Why would they drive six hours out of their way to see
a building that hadn’t been anything special even
before
it had been blown up?

A few years later, when she realized the point of their detour, it still struck her as a bit odd. What had been the point of dragging a child to see the site of a horrific catastrophe that she couldn’t possibly comprehend? She hadn’t really understood it until very recently, when she had made her own pilgrimage to the site of the Anaheim Event. It was a way of coming to terms with the gaping nothingness that constantly loomed at the edges of human civilization. It took only one lunatic with a rented truck and a few thousand pounds of fertilizer and fuel oil to reduce to rubble a building that had taken hundreds of people years to build. And it took only one little glass apple to suck Anaheim Stadium right out of existence. She shuddered at the thought and looked up at the pathetic moon. Things could very easily have gone much worse—
would
have gone much worse if it weren’t for Mercury’s quick thinking and nerve.

Mercury.

Where the hell is he? she thought. The archangel Michelle had said that Mercury might be stranded on some remote plane with no way back to the known Universe. But something in the back of Christine’s mind told her that wasn’t right. No, she thought. This isn’t over yet. The world is in too much danger, and I can’t do this by myself. Somehow, he’s got to come back.

Christine turned to look at Jacob, who was sleeping soundly, curled up in a fetal pose in the seat across the aisle. Occasionally his left hand would jerk wildly, as if he were shooing away an invisible insect.
Ticks
, thought Christine, smiling at the pun. The hand-jerking was almost cute, making Jacob resemble a dog that was dreaming of running. Certainly less annoying than the weird vocalizations and head-jerking he did when he was awake.

Her smile faded when she realized the pettiness of these thoughts. If she found the tics annoying, how much worse must it be for Jacob? The tics weren’t something he
did
; they were something that
happened to him
. What would it be like to be unable to control your own body? To feel a near-constant compulsion to act in ways that appeared to observers as bizarre affectations, probably hinting at some severe underlying mental illness? Ironically, Jacob was probably the sanest person she had met since all of this stuff with the Apocalypse had begun. The extent of his neurosis was a debilitating social awkwardness—a condition that she could only assume was not helped by his uncontrollable muscle spasms. As amazing as Jacob’s inhuman reaction speed was, she couldn’t imagine Jacob wanting to be the way he was. In fact, he had specifically chosen otherwise, taking medication to suppress his symptoms. Presumably, the medication also suppressed what Christine had come to think of as Jacob’s “ninja powers.”

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.

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 explain 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.”