Mercury Revolts (22 page)

They were now floating a little over a hundred yards off the
ground. The helicopter’s rotors were spinning so slowly that Suzy could see the
individual blades. A fall from this height would kill them as surely as a fall
from ten miles up.

“Rope!” yelled Zion Johnson. The other man handed him a
bundle of rope, securing one end to a metal clip in the floor. Zion Johnson
tossed the rope out the door and it unwound as it fell. The end of the rope
hung about thirty feet off the ground.

The man who had handed Zion Johnson the rope shrugged.
“That’s all we have,” he said apologetically.

“Are you shitting me?” asked Zion Johnson. He turned to
Eddie. “Can you drop us another thirty feet?”

Eddie stared at the man in horror, his whole body trembling.
His face was purple and his clothes were drenched with sweat.

“I think that means no,” said Suzy. “I mean, he can drop us,
but we’ll keep dropping.”

“Alright,” said Zion Johnson. He turned to the other man.
“Get down there.”

“Sir?”

“Climb down the goddamn rope until you run out of rope. Then
fall to the ground. Find that cube and get it as far away from us as possible.
Preferably before we crash into you.”

“Yessir!”
The man gripped the rope
and lowered himself to the helicopter’s landing gear. Then he disappeared from
view.

Suzy moved closer to the door so she could see what was
happening.

“Don’t try anything!” growled Zion Johnson.

“Like what?” demanded Suzy, holding up her hands, which were
still bound with a zip-tie. “Falling to my death?”

The young man had made it about halfway down the rope, and
was continuing to move hand-over-hand toward the ground. The helicopter jerked
suddenly and fell a few heart-stopping feet before halting its descent again.
Suzy looked over at Eddie, who looked like he was about to pass out. “Just a
little longer, Eddie!” she said. “You can do it!”

The man had now reached the end of the rope and was looking
uncertainly at the ground, which was still a good twenty feet below him.

“Jump!” yelled Zion Johnson. “We don’t have time for this!
Jump, Newton!”

The young man, evidently named Newton, let go of the rope,
plummeting to the cornfield. The ground looked rather soft and muddy from the
helicopter, but Suzy supposed it didn’t feel that soft when you fell onto it
from twenty feet up.

Newton yelped in pain, rolling to his side and gripping his
ankle.

“Find the cube!” shouted Zion Johnson.

The man got on his knees and began crawling around the
cornstalks.

“I can’t…” Eddie gasped.

“Just hold on a little longer, Eddie!” Suzy cried.

Down below, Newton was still crawling around in the mud,
trying to find the Balderhaz cube.

“Got it!” he shouted at last, holding a black object about
the size of a Rubik’s Cube.

“Get away from the helo!” yelled Zion Johnson.

Newton began crawling away.

Eddie continued to shake, and he eyes began to glaze over.
He looked like he was having a seizure, but the helicopter remained levitating
just over a hundred yards up.

Newton had managed to get on one foot and was hopping as
quickly as he could away from the helicopter.

Eddie’s eyes began to roll back in his head. The helicopter
pitched forward began to lose altitude.

“Eddie!” Suzy cried. But Eddie had passed out, slouched over
in his seat. The helicopter was in freefall. “Eddie!” Suzy screamed again,
slapping him across the face.

“Eh?” said Eddie, looking around crazily.

“We’re falling!”

“Oh,” said Eddie.

Then the helicopter hit the ground.

It landed head-first, throwing Suzy against her restraints
and knocking the wind out of her lungs. The windshield shattered and the
cockpit crumpled. Then the helicopter rolled onto its left side, rocked a few times,
and was still. Suzy was dazed but conscious, as were Zion Johnson and the
pilot. Eddie had passed out again.  She could only assume that Eddie had
managed to break their fall at the last moment. There was no other explanation
for why they were still alive.

Suzy managed to free herself from her restraints and then
unfasten Eddie’s.

“Don’t try anything,” said Zion Johnson, who
was lying sprawl on the wall of the helicopter, still
holding his gun on her.

“Will you stop saying that?” Suzy snapped. “I get it, you
have a gun. I don’t. Now will you help me get Eddie out of here?”

Zion Johnson nodded to the other men. The pilot climbed out
the door of the helicopter, which was now overhead. The other man grabbed Eddie
around the middle and hoisted him onto his shoulder. The pilot grabbed Eddie’s
belt and dragged him on top of the helicopter. Then he gave Eddie’s limp body a
shove, and Eddie slid across the top of the fuselage to the ground, landing
with a thud.

“Hey!” cried Suzy. “Be careful! He just saved your life!”

The man next her shrugged.

Zion Johnson went next, managing to climb out with minimal
assistance despite his immobile left leg.  When he was out of the way, the
two men helped Suzy out. She scrambled down the fuselage to the ground,
followed by the other man. Eddie was lying crumpled on the ground, moaning.
Zion Johnson and the pilot stood nearby. The man who had fallen from the rope,
Newton, was nowhere to be seen.

“Newton!” yelled Zion Johnson. “Get back here!”

Suzy helped Eddie sit up. He lay blinking in the sunlight.
“Wow,” he said, staring into the distance.

It didn’t take long for Suzy to figure out what Eddie was
looking at: the remnants of a mushroom cloud hung in the sky. “The city…” she
gasped.

Eddie shook his head.
“Too far away.
He did it. Mercury saved Grand Rapids.”

“Newton!” yelled Zion Johnson again. “Get back here with
that cube!”

“Eddie,” whispered Suzy. “Can you walk? If we can get far
enough away from that cube…”

Eddie nodded, glancing over at the three men, who were still
staring into the cornfield.

“Where the hell is Newton?” growled Zion Johnson.

Eddie quietly got up and the crept away between two rows of
corn.

“Hey!” yelled Zion Johnson. “Didn’t I tell you not to try
anything?”

Suzy stopped, raising her bound hands above her head. They
turned to face Zion Johnson, who was training his gun on them.

“If you fire that gun, I’ll make it blow up in your face,”
said Eddie.

“Why wait?” replied Zion Johnson with a smirk. “Just make it
blow up now. Go ahead,
do
it.”

Eddie glared at him.

“You won’t,” said Zion Johnson, “because you can’t.”

As he spoke, Newton crawled out from a wall of corn stalks.
His face was ashen, and in one hand he clutched the Balderhaz Cube. He dropped
it and fell face-first into the mud. His left ankle was bent at a completely
unnatural angle.

“Now here’s what we’re going to do,” said Zion Johnson,
plucking the Balderhaz Cube out of Newton’s hand and handing it to the man to
his left. “Purple-hair and Jenkins are going to go for a nice walk to that
tractor over there. Eddie, you’re going to fix Newton’s ankle and my leg. If
you try anything funny, Jenkins is going to shoot Purple-hair in the head.” He
glanced at Jenkins, who nodded and drew his gun. “Then, assuming we’re all
still alive and ambulatory, we’re going to walk to that farmhouse and
commandeer a vehicle with four fucking wheels and some drink holders.
Everybody on board with that?”

Chapter Twenty-eight
     
 

Heaven,
Washington, D.C., and Plane
4721c; 1
789 -
1793

To
Mercury’s astonishment, his plan of angelic non-involvement in North America
met with some interest in the higher reaches of the Heavenly bureaucracy. The
main concern was the difficulty of enforcing the agreement. If Heaven pulled
its agents out of North America, it would have no way of knowing whether
Lucifer and Tiamat had done the same.

Another problem was that
various Heavenly agencies not involved in military intelligence insisted that
it was necessary for them to have free reign in North America. Prophecy
Division, for example, claimed that it was a violation of their charter to
agree to any sort of neutrality treaty. Mercury’s own organization, Apocalypse
Bureau, also expressed misgivings about going along with an agreement that
would limit its ability to manifest the Divine Plan.

Mercury’s solution to this
problem was to limit Heaven’s activities only in regards to political
endeavors. He argued that there was
no reason both Prophecy
and Apocalypse Bureau couldn’t fulfill their obligations without attempting to
directly influence political decision-making
. They’d be free to do
whatever they wanted in the nascent country except to partake in the process of
governing or manipulate political officials. He called it the Separation of
Angels and Government.

Prophecy was skeptical, but
Uzziel said he thought he could sign off on the concept if Lucifer and Tiamat
could be convinced to go along with it. Presumably Uzziel assumed that would
never happen—a safe assumption, given the fact that Lucifer and Tiamat rarely
agreed on anything, and almost never agreed with Heaven. But Mercury pulled
some strings with the Diplomacy Corps, and ultimately a meeting was set up on
neutral ground
[6]
between the archangel Michelle, Tiamat, and Lucifer. The meeting was rancorous
and vitriolic, but after three days the three parties had hammered out a basic
agreement.

It was Tiamat, surprisingly,
who offered a solution to the problem of enforcement. Tiamat had for centuries
been experimenting with ways of manipulating interplanar energy to bend the
fabric of space and time. She’d had limited success with this, but in the
course of her research she had learned a great deal about the nature of the
mysterious energy that permeated every plane of the multiverse. Angels,
although they instinctively know how to use interplanar energy to bend the laws
of physics, generally know about as much about the nature of this energy as
fish know about the nature of water. Tiamat had realized early on that if she
could discover the basic principles by which this energy operated, she might
very well exercise dominion over all the other angels, who were so thoroughly
dependent on it.

The most brilliant angel in
her employ had been an eccentric cherub named Balderhaz, the inventor of the
Balderhaz Cube.
[7]
Balderhaz had left Tiamat’s employ not long before, having been recruited by
Michelle to be her chief weapons supplier. Tiamat knew that when Balderhaz
left, he had been working on another sort of device based on the technology
used to create the Balderhaz Cube. He called it the Meta-Energy Oscillation
Weapon, or MEOW. MEOW would create a field like that emitted by a Balderhaz
Cube, but instead of cancelling out the Interplanar Energy, it amplified it and
altered its frequency. The result was that any angel within range of MEOW would
not only be unable to harness the energy; he or she would also experience a
constant ear-splitting screech that sounded like a cat being slowly turned
inside out.

Tiamat also knew, though,
that Balderhaz had run into apparently insurmountable technical difficulties
with MEOW. She divulged this fact at the meeting—as well as making the claim
that Tiamat herself had found the solution. Michelle, who had been hoping to
use MEOW against Tiamat, was loath to reveal anything about the new weapon, but
she was even more concerned that Tiamat might successfully build one before
Heaven did. Tiamat, who was missing some key components and the brains behind
most of the development, had similar fears about Michelle. Tiamat suggested
that she and Balderhaz meet to complete the design, and that the first working
device be placed in the capital city of the United States. The effect would be
to prevent any angels or demons from entering the city limits. There would be
nothing preventing them from attempting to influence politicians outside of
this sphere, but it was thought that making the capital itself completely
off-limits to supernatural influence would prevent the most blatant attempts at
manipulation. Lucifer knew nothing of MEOW, but he was happy to go along as he
didn’t currently have the manpower to try to corrupt the entire U.S. Congress.

So Balderhaz and Tiamat met
and hammered out the technical details, and a few weeks later they had a
working prototype. After testing indicated that the device caused excruciating
pain to any angel within a one-mile radius, it was decided that it was ready
for deployment. By this time Washington, D.C. had been selected as the location
for the U.S. capitol, and designs were being finalized for the Capitol
Building. Mercury arranged for the device to be hidden inside the cornerstone
of the capitol, which was laid on the first of March, 1793. From that date
until late in 2001, neither angel nor demon came within a mile of the U.S.
Capitol.

And then something changed.

Chapter Twenty-nine
             
 

Somewhere in the Eastern Atlantic
Ocean; August 2016

Some time after being blown into a
billion pieces by a nuclear bomb, Mercury found himself in a bar called La
Traviata on an island in the Azores. If asked, he probably wouldn’t have been
able to answer precisely when he reincorporated or how he got to the bar exactly.
Being vaporized tended to wreak havoc on one’s short-term memory, and having
eighteen beers in the course of four hours didn’t help either.