Mercury Rests (26 page)

“Oh, I know you don’t,” said Mercury. “But you will, you infected nutsack.”

“I hate to break this up, whatever it is,” Lucifer said, “but I don’t have a lot of time. Diabolical schemes to attend to. You have something to tell me, Cain?”

“I do,” said Cain, grinning maliciously. “I’ve done it. The seventh book is nearly finished. Everything is unfolding according to plan!”

“Well, that’s great,” said Lucifer, without much enthusiasm. “Is that all, Cain?”

“
Is that all?
” echoed Cain in disbelief. “I’m bringing about the end of the world! Remember the whole ancient Sumerian manuscript deal? This was
your idea
!”

Lucifer shrugged. “I’ve got a lot of diabolical plans in motion at any given time. Right now I’m really focused on the whole nuking Heaven thing. But hey, that’s not to take away from what you’ve accomplished. Really great work, Cain. Seriously.” He put his hand on Cain’s shoulder in a fatherly gesture that even made Mercury a little uncomfortable.

Cain glared daggers at Lucifer. “Do you have any idea what I sacrificed to make sure the final book is done properly? I killed my own daughter!”

“Really?” asked Lucifer. “That seems a bit excessive.” He looked to Mercury, who nodded in agreement.

“All your scheming would come to nothing without me!” Cain snarled, prying himself away from Lucifer. “The only reason your plan to destroy the Eye of Providence has gotten this far is because of the work I’ve done! Why do you think all of your other schemes failed? The world can’t end until the seventh book has been written! When everyone and everything else failed you, I did what needed to be done!”

Lucifer nodded, a condescending smile plastered on his face. He nodded surreptitiously at someone behind Cain.

“Goddamn you, Lucifer! You could at least say thank you!”

A muscle-bound demon strode forward and took Cain’s arm.

“Thank you, Cain,” oozed Lucifer. Then to the demon: “Get him out of here.”

The demon dragged the grumbling and cursing Cain to the door. There was the sound of the door slamming, then silence.

“Man, I didn’t think that guy was ever going to leave,” said Mercury. “Doesn’t he know we’ve got important stuff to talk about? Now, where were we?”

“I was about to blow up Heaven,” said Lucifer. “But first, I need to make sure you won’t interfere.”

“I don’t suppose that means you’re going to make me sign a nondisclosure agreement?” asked Mercury.

“Sorry,” said Lucifer, and brought the baseball bat down on his skull.

Eddie led Christine around to the back of the restaurant. Jacob, who was fairly shaken up by Christine’s performance, trailed silently behind.

They rounded the corner of the building just in time to see a tall, blond man exiting from an unmarked door.

“Back!” hissed Eddie out of the corner of his mouth. Eddie kept walking, trying to appear nonchalant.

“Why, what...” started Christine. Then she saw him. Lucifer. The devil himself. Christine had met him twice before, and she didn’t think he liked her much. Understandable, given that she had spoiled his two previous attempts to destroy the world. There was no doubt he would recognize her.

There wasn’t time to get out of sight, so Christine did the only thing she could think to do: she spun 180 degrees and threw her arms around Jacob, planting a kiss right on his mouth. After a momentary start, Jacob fell into his part with ease. By unspoken agreement, they became Anonymous Couple Necking behind Charlie’s Grill. After nearly knocking Eddie over, Lucifer strode past them, followed by two bulky demons. “Get a room,” he sneered. The three demons got into a limousine, which squealed out of the lot.

Jacob and Christine kissed for a good three seconds longer than they needed to. At last Eddie cleared his throat.

Jacob pulled back slightly. “You OK?”

Christine smiled and nodded. “You?”

“Better,” said Jacob, releasing his embrace. He was visibly calmer. “Let’s go get your friend.”

“Right,” said Christine. She spun around again, walked to the door Lucifer had just exited, and tried the handle. “Locked.”

“Hmph,” said Eddie, waving his hand over the lock.

Christine tried again, and the door opened. Stairs led down into darkness. “After you,” she said to Eddie.

“No way,” Eddie replied. “I said I’d show you the door. I’m not going down there.”

“Fine,” said Christine. “Wait here and stand lookout. Let us know if anyone shows up.”

Eddie shrugged, leaning against the stucco wall of the restaurant.

“Wait, Christine,” protested Jacob. “You can’t go down there. There could be...”

But she had already started down the stairs. Jacob reluctantly followed.

At the bottom of the stairs was another door, locked with a dead bolt from the outside. For locking someone in, thought Christine. Not that a simple dead bolt would hold an angel.

She turned the latch, releasing the dead bolt, and opened the door to find a bare concrete room lit by a single lightbulb. An unconscious man lay on his side, tied to a chair. His hair was matted with blood. Mercury.

“Is he...
unck?
” Jacob asked.

“Angels don’t die,” said Christine, rushing to Mercury. “Help me get him upright.”

They righted the chair and started to untie Mercury’s arms and legs. His eyes were closed and the left side of his face was covered with blood.

“Are you sure he’s alive?” asked Jacob.

“He’s been through worse than this,” said Christine. As if in response, Mercury’s head lolled from left to right and he groaned. By the time they had him untied, he was fully conscious.

“Early tarred all being Ed and Ed,” mumbled Mercury.

“What did he say?” Jacob asked. “Is that some sort of code?”

Christine shrugged. “Mercury, what did you say?”

Mercury repeated, more slowly, “Really. Tired. Of. Being. Hit. In. The. Head.”

“Understandable,” said Christine, eyeing the baseball bat lying in the corner of the room. “Can you walk? We should get you out of here. There’s an angel named Eddie upstairs standing guard, but I’m not sure I completely trust him.”

Mercury started to laugh but it turned into a whimper. With Christine and Jacob’s help, he got to his feet. “Eddie gummy shuttin’ dead,” he mumbled.

Jacob looked questioningly at Christine. She explained, “Eddie got him shot in the head.”

“Ouch,” said Jacob. “He’s in remarkably good shape, considering.
Unck.”

“He’ll be fine in an hour or so,” Christine said. “We just need to get him out of here before—” She stopped, realizing the doorway was blocked by a tall, well-built man.

“Before what?” asked the man, smiling. It was Gamaliel. He strolled into the room, followed by Izbazel. Two demons, one working for Tiamat and the other for Lucifer. This didn’t bode well.

“Son of a bitch,” Christine said. “Why didn’t Eddie warn us?”

“Eddie?” asked Gamaliel. “Is that the guy who took off like a rabbit as soon as he saw us? You might want to pick a better lookout next time.”

“Eddie...rabbit,” mumbled Mercury, giggling to himself.

“Shut up, Mercury!” snapped Izbazel. “Gamaliel, seize Mercury. You two, upstairs, now.”

Gamaliel shot Izbazel a bemused look. “I don’t work for you, asshole,” he said. But he grabbed Mercury by the arm, brushing Christine out of the way. He made his way upstairs, practically dragging the barely conscious Mercury with him. Christine and Jacob followed, with Izbazel prodding them from behind.

The three of them were forced into an unmarked van and their hands secured behind their backs with zip ties. Gamaliel got in the driver’s seat and Izbazel in the front passenger’s seat.

“Where are you taking us?” demanded Christine.

Izbazel smiled. “Where you can’t cause any more trouble.”

“Disneyland?” Mercury offered meekly.

While Christine, Jacob, and Mercury were being corralled into an unmarked van in Glendale, Tiamat stood stolidly surveying a horde of demons standing at attention on a remote plain in Kenya. The demons wore desert fatigues and carried assault rifles. A few of them also carried portable rocket launchers. Only the flaming swords hanging from their belts distinguished them from a brigade of human soldiers. Most of the demons belonged to Lucifer but they had sworn an oath of allegiance to Tiamat, and they were hers to command. Behind them, the sun slowly sank behind Mount Mbutuokoti. Ahead of them, barely visible in the distance, was the dome of the enclosed ecosystem known as Eden II, which concealed the world’s largest particle accelerator—CCD-2, the key to total mastery of space and time.

The main object of the assault was simple: retake Eden II from Michelle’s troops. Once the main assault started, Tiamat herself would lead a smaller force into the heart of Eden II, to the coordinates where Horace Finch had planted the apple seed. With any luck, the tree was already bearing fruit—and Michelle’s troops hadn’t noticed the peculiar tree growing in a secluded grove far inside the dome. Her bigger worry was that someone—either on
her side or on Michelle’s—would trample the little tree during the battle, destroying the apples before Tiamat could get to them. Barring that, once the facility was secure and she had plucked an apple from the tree, her team would proceed downstairs to the Chrono-Collider Device. She would then commence the execution sequence already programmed by Alastair Breem, causing a collision of subatomic particles that would release a batch of chrotons into the apple. Once she had control over the chrotons, she would control the space-time continuum itself.

Michelle’s forces would have the advantage of cover, being dug under the dome of Eden II, but Tiamat had surprise and overwhelming numbers on her side. Given enough time, there was no way the Heavenly troops could hold out. Her greatest fear, though, was that Heaven would sense that they were losing and attempt to wipe out the whole facility with a Class 5 Pillar of Fire. Lucifer had assured her that he had agents in Heaven who could muck up the approval process for a while,
¹¹
but that would buy her maybe an hour at most. She needed to get to the apple and head underground quickly, where even a Class 5 would be powerless to stop her.

“Alpha Team assemble!” she barked. Twenty demons came forth, standing at attention before her. She had selected these twenty from her own retinue of demons, picking them for their quickness, agility, and intelligence. This was the hand that was going to pluck the apple from the garden while the gardener was distracted, so they had better be quick.

“Teams Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon assemble!”

The remaining demons sorted themselves into four groups of equal size. Each team would rally at a predetermined checkpoint and attack Eden II simultaneously from a different direction—north, south, east, and west. While the defenders were off-balance, Alpha Team would slip in from the southeast and head for the apple tree.

As the sun touched the tip of Mbutuokoti, Tiamat barked, “The time is at hand! Commence Operation Reclaim Paradise!”

The demons took flight, skimming low over the plain to avoid detection by the forces of Heaven. While teams Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon headed for their assigned checkpoints, Tiamat and her team took to the sky where they could observe the onslaught when it started.

Right on schedule, the teams assembled at the checkpoints. Team Delta, to the east of Eden II, was the last to assemble. Once it was in place, the four teams moved in unison toward the dome that was now glinting in the twilight. The blighted moon rose above the horizon.

By the time the sentries buzzing a few miles out from the dome knew what was happening, it was too late. The attack started with shoulder-fired missiles that tore gaping holes in the dome, massive chunks of concrete crumbling to the jungle floor below. The sentries managed to make nearly half the rockets detonate harmlessly in midair, but the dome was breached in a dozen places.

Angels poured out of the holes like angry wasps. At first they tried to create a repulsive barrier of energy around the dome, but this was a losing strategy. The attackers had expected this and easily neutralized the barrier, overwhelming the defenders with their sheer numbers. While half the attackers focused on dissolving the barrier, the other half hung in the air, picking off the defending
angels with automatic rifles. The angels couldn’t be killed, of course, but they could be knocked out of the game for a while with a few well-aimed shots. A few of the defenders had guns but most of them wielded only flaming swords, and in any case were too busy trying to keep up their barrier to put up much of a man-to-man defense. The angels fell from the sky in droves.

Mere minutes after the battle started, Tiamat and her team plummeted from above, unnoticed in the chaos. A few angels tried to bar her way but they were taken down by the rifle-toting sharpshooters in Team Alpha. Tiamat and her score of demons descended through a hole in the dome, landing on the floor of the jungle below. She pulled out a portable GPS unit into which had been programmed the coordinates where Horace Finch had planted the apple seed.

“This way!” she barked, and they headed down a path through the jungle.

Eddie sat alone at a bus stop in Glendale a few blocks down from Charlie’s Grill, feeling sorry for himself. Why couldn’t everyone just leave him alone? He was supposed to be a disinterested observer, not a character in the story. Certainly not some cowardly quisling, which is how his character seemed doomed to be written.

Yes, he had left Christine and Jacob to be shanghaied by Izbazel and Gamaliel, but it wasn’t his job to play lookout. He had met his side of the bargain: their part of the story in exchange for Mercury’s location. In fact, he had given them more than he was obligated to, leading them right to Mercury. Besides, what difference would it have made if Eddie had warned them? If he had stuck around, he’d probably have been taken captive along with them. And then who would write the story?

Eddie was aware, on some level, that he was going a little insane. He could no longer have offered any rational explanation for why the story had to be written. It had become an obsession, a reason unto itself. The story was all that there was. But if that were true, then who was Eddie? Just another character in the story, and not a particularly heroic one at that.