Mercury Rests

by Robert Kroese

The boy returned again. “He says, ‘That night—may thick darkness seize it; may it not be included among the days of the year nor be entered in any of the months.’ ”

  “Jeez, more about the day, huh? OK, go get the rest.”

  “He says, ‘May that night be barren; may no shout of joy be heard in it. May those who curse days curse that day, those who are ready to rouse Leviathan.’ ”

  “Rousing Leviathan, got it. OK, go.”

  The boy returned again. “You got any more mangoes?”

  “He’s asking for mangoes?”

  “No, I want more mangoes.”

  “Fine, here. What’s he saying?”

  “He says, ‘May its morning stars become dark; may it wait for daylight in vain and not see the first rays of dawn.’ ”

  “Seriously? He’s still talking about the day he was born? Tell you what: wake me up when he either curses God or gets to the point in the story where he soils his first nappy.” Mercury leaned back against the tree for another snooze. It didn’t look like his torment was going to end anytime soon.

  TEN

  Christine and Jacob found themselves once again in the back of a black SUV. Agent Daltrey was driving while another agent, a tight-faced, thickly built woman named Ruiz, rode shotgun. The vehicle was barely moving, hemmed in by traffic. Christine was exhausted, and the glare of headlights was giving her a headache.

  “How much farther?” she asked.

  “Just a few blocks,” said Agent Ruiz. “Traffic is bad tonight. Riots.”

  “Riots?” asked Christine. “What are they rioting about?”

  Ruiz glanced back at her. “Whaddaya got?”

  Jacob was gazing out his window, apparently enraptured by the city lights. Christine turned to look out hers. She saw throngs of pedestrians on the street, but they seemed peaceful enough.

  Ruiz spoke again, without looking back. “Charlie Nyx fanatics, antiwar protesters, and end-of-the-world fanatics, not to mention a grab bag of assorted lunatics. You’re going to want to stay off the streets. Not that you have any choice in the matter.”

  The FBI agents were escorting Christine and Jacob to a nearby hotel, where they would evidently be staying indefinitely. It was made quite clear to them that the FBI would be more than happy to save money by letting them sleep in underground holding cells if they objected to their accommodations. A second SUV was following them, carrying agents who would stand guard outside their hotel rooms.

  Anger rose in her throat as she thought of Director Lubbers’s arrogance and presumptuousness. What gave him the right to hold her and Jacob against their will? If they knew what we’ve done, they’d throw us a parade. Not that she particularly wanted a parade, of course. In fact, a hot shower and a hotel bed sounded pretty damn good when she thought about it. This thought was augmented by the occasional whiff of overripe sweat emanating from Jacob in the seat next to her. In his present condition, with his hair mussed and his clothes torn and stained, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Pig Pen from the Peanuts comic strip. He stared out the window as if wondering, Pig Pen–like, where all the dirt kept coming from.

  Jacob still hadn’t snapped out of the trancelike state he had fallen into during their interrogation. Christine felt a tinge of pity for him. He hadn’t had as much time as Christine to adjust to how strange a place the Universe really was, and now he was being asked to account for his behavior by his employer, which happened to be one of the more hard-nosed and humorless extensions of the federal government. Jacob seemed like the type to chafe at contact with his superiors in even the best of circumstances, and these circumstances were far from the best. He now seemed to have shut down completely. Every so often he would lean his head back and make a strange sound in his throat, but he hadn’t spoken since they had left the underground facility.

  What did Lubbers want with them? He had asked about the angels’ “defensive systems.” Was he just taking precautions, or was he actually planning some sort of attack?

  An attack on Heaven, she thought. The idea was insane. Even if you could somehow get through the planeport’s security and get to Heaven, you’d be facing the full might of the Heavenly army commanded by Michelle herself. How many angels was that? Hundreds? Thousands? She had no idea, but she imagined that each of them was easily a match for an entire platoon of Special Forces commandoes. She had witnessed Mercury restarting Karl Grissom’s heart simply by laying his hand on him. How much harder could it be to stop a heart? Or a hundred hearts, for that matter? You’d have to be a madman to send human soldiers up against angels.

  And what could Lubbers hope to accomplish with such an invasion, even if, against all odds, it somehow succeeded? Sure, the angels could be manipulative troublemakers on occasion, but their overall effect seemed to be benign. Well, there was the whole Apocalypse thing, of course, but Heaven had lost control over that plan weeks ago. At this point, they were mostly doing damage control. In fact, the last she knew, Michelle was mobilizing her troops to help with earthquake relief efforts. This memory made her a bit uncomfortable. If Lubbers were to launch an attack, now would be a good time: the Heavenly army was scattered all over the globe, with probably only a small remnant left behind to guard Heaven.

  She tried to see things from Lubbers’s perspective. The implosion of the moon was unsettling, to say the least. There would be political pressure to figure out what had happened and to keep it from happening again. But Heaven wasn’t responsible for what happened to the moon. Nor were they responsible for the Anaheim Event, for that matter. Those events were both the doing of a few rogue angels, primarily Lucifer, Tiamat, and Mercury’s exboss, Uzziel. Assuming the account that Lubbers had read about the Anaheim event was accurate, then he knew that Heaven was not to blame. And Christine herself had told him what had happened with the moon. Why would he plot an invasion of Heaven when he knew Heaven was not responsible for these tragedies?

  In any case, a military action against a foreign power would have to go through President Babcock, who was a right-wing Bible thumper. Harry Giddings, Christine’s late fundamentalist boss, had been a major contributor to Babcock’s campaign. Babcock had ultimately lost the contest for the Republican nomination to the more moderate Alexis Friedman, but she had added him to the ticket as a sop to the Religious Right. The idea of Babcock launching an attack on Heaven was ludicrous. One of the charges of the Left had been that Babcock intended to make the United States into a theocracy; that if given the option, he’d hand the keys over to Jesus Himself. Babcock launching an assault on Heaven would be like Fidel Castro attacking Moscow.

  Still, Christine’s grilling by Lubbers about the “defensive systems” of Heaven had unnerved her. Clearly he was planning something. She wondered how much information was in that report. Who had written it? How had it fallen into the hands of the FBI? And most importantly, how much havoc would it allow Lubbers to wreak? One thing was certain: no good could come from it. Both Heaven and the United States government had done just fine over the past two hundred years without the latter having a backdoor into the former. Christine needed to warn the Heavenly authorities so they could shut the portal down.

  Christine’s musings were cut short when the SUV came to an abrupt halt. On a whim, she tried opening her door. As she expected, pulling the latch had no effect. The door was rigged to be locked by the driver in cases where he might be transporting people who might be tempted to escape from the vehicle.

  “Shit,” growled Daltrey.

  Christine looked out the windshield to see the source of his frustration: several cars up, a minivan had stalled in the middle of the street, and a gaggle of youths had climbed on top of it. They were jumping and dancing on top of the vehicle, and a crowd had followed them into the street, either to egg them on or to persuade them to get off the car. As a result, traffic was now completely stopped in both directions.

  Daltrey checked the rearview mirror and then turned to look behind him. “Shit,” he growled again. “We’re boxed in.”
His hands alternately tightened and released his grip on the steering wheel as he assessed the situation.

  Ruiz had her cell phone to her ear and was speaking quietly in a near monotone to someone about their situation. After a moment, she put the phone down on her lap. “They say to hold tight,” she informed Daltrey. “DC Metro is en route. ETA twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes,” grumbled Daltrey, his knuckles going white. “This crowd will hit the flashpoint in ten. It’ll be like something out of Hieronymus Bosch by the time DC Metro gets here.”

  Ruiz scowled at him, presumably because she recognized what his tone portended and not because of her distaste for sixteenth-century moralistic painters. “Chill,” she said with a hint of motherly concern. “You’ll only make things worse if you go out there.”

  In the minute or so that they had been waiting, the crowd had already gotten larger, and now a squirrelly-looking young man in a tank top and baggy shorts was approaching the minivan with an aluminum baseball bat.

  “Things are getting worse on their own,” said Daltrey. “Wait here.” Daltrey pushed open his door and stepped outside.

  “Damn it, Daltrey...” began Ruiz. The force drained from her words as she realized the futility of trying to prevent Daltrey from intervening.

  Daltrey slammed the door and strode boldly through the crowd, his right palm hovering an inch above his sidearm. With his left hand, he pointed directly at the teen with the baseball bat and shouted something at him. Christine couldn’t make out what he was saying over the sound of the engine and the cacophony of the crowd.

  The throng shrank back from Daltrey’s impressive form, and the kid with the baseball bat froze like a spooked animal. Several people who were about to step onto the street from the sidewalk took a step back. Daltrey seemed on the verge of calming the maelstrom through sheer force of will.

  Then something strange happened.

  Something small, maybe the size of a baseball, flew from somewhere on the right side of the street toward Daltrey, striking him square in the temple. The object splattered against Daltrey’s skull, falling in juicy chunks from the side of his head. It took Christine a second to realize that it was an apple. Not the imploding sort of apple, fortunately, just a regular apple. Still, not something you want to get hit in the head with. Daltrey went down.

  He fell to his knees, stunned, his right hand pressed against his temple. The kid with the bat snapped out of his daze and took a step toward Daltrey. The crowd went wild.

  “Son of a bitch!” exclaimed Ruiz. “Don’t move!” she growled in the general direction of the back seat and exited the vehicle. She motioned to the agents in the SUV behind them, and several men came running forward to assist her. “FBI!” shouted Ruiz, drawing her pistol. “Drop the bat! Now!”

  Jacob sat stock-still, watching the scene unfold as if it were a particularly unremarkable episode of Law & Order.

  “Let’s go!” Christine hissed at him. He frowned and looked at her as if she had suggested changing the channel to Glee.

  “Come on, Jacob,” she said urgently. “This is our chance!”

  Jacob turned again toward the scene ahead of them. Ruiz had the bat-wielding teen on his knees, and the other agents were ordering people out of the streets. They seemed to have the situation nearly under control.

  “My job—” Jacob started.

  “Your job is done,” snapped Christine. “You don’t work for the FBI anymore. You’re their prisoner, got it? They have no idea what—or who—they’re messing with, and they’re going to hold on to us as long as they think we’re of use to them. And after that...God knows what they’ll do with us.” She was being a bit overdramatic, she knew, but she had no intention of being sequestered by the FBI indefinitely. Besides, if Lubbers was serious about launching a preemptive attack on Heaven, somebody needed to warn the Heavenly authorities. She needed to escape, and she had started to feel a little like an older sister to Jacob. She didn’t like the idea of him having to face endless interrogation by the FBI alone.

  “I’m leaving,” said Christine, trying to sound decisive. “You’re not going to get another chance. Come with me or spend the rest of your life in FBI custody.” She scrambled between the front seats and pushed the driver’s-side door open just far enough to crawl out of the SUV. The SUV was angled so that it would be difficult for Ruiz and the others to see her if she kept close to the vehicle. Too frightened to check whether Jacob was following her, she crawled to the rear of the SUV and then stood up, walking briskly toward the sidewalk. She half expected to hear Ruiz’s gruff voice shouting at her to stop, but she heard only the random cacophony of the crowd.

  She made it to the sidewalk and pushed her way through the crowd, trying to put as many people between her and the scene as possible. The unruly crowd frightened her, but her even greater fear of being apprehended by the FBI propelled her forward. Just when she thought she had escaped, she tripped and fell headlong into a heavyset man who smelled of stale beer and sweat, knocking a Subway meatball sub out of his hand.

  “The fuck, woman?” demanded the man.

  “I’m sorry,” said Christine. “I just need to get—”

  “You gonna be sorry,” said the man, puffing up his chest and glaring down at Christine.

  “Step back, sir,” said a voice behind Christine. It was nervous but firm. Jacob. He must have been following Christine the whole time. He was now standing beside her.

  The big man laughed. He towered at least a foot over Jacob. “I’ma give you options, little man,” he said to Jacob. “You know what options are?”

  “I do,” said Jacob, calmly.

  “Options is like an either/or situation,” explained the man. “For example, I’ma give your woman the option of either getting me another sammich, or the option of sucking my—”

  Something happened at that point that caused the man to pause. Christine couldn’t be sure of what it was at first. There had been a flash of movement and suddenly the man stopped talking. He fell to his knees, unable to catch his breath.

  “You know what the solar plexus is, asshole?” Jacob asked, his voice still calm. He was rubbing his left hand with his right.

  Christine realized that she was standing with her mouth open, staring at Jacob. Had he punched the man? She had never seen someone move so fast.

  “Come on,” she heard herself saying. “We need to get out of here.”

  Jacob nodded.

  They left the man wheezing on the concrete and took off down the street.

  ELEVEN

  Circa 1800 BC

  If Elihu was to be believed, Job spent another good twenty minutes cursing the day of his birth, but he never did curse God. Mercury decided it was time to change tacks. He had Elihu summon Job’s three friends for a huddle.

  “Look, guys, I admire your loyalty to Job and all,” he said, “but I don’t think any of us wants to spend the rest of our lives sitting in ashes with some poor sap scraping his sores and cursing the day he was born. We need an exit strategy. It’s time to brainstorm. Come on, guys, don’t be afraid to toss out ideas.”

  “Who are you?” asked Bildad. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m just a guy who wants to see Job’s ordeal end,” said Mercury. “Now, who’s got an idea of how we can make that happen?”

  “Well,” said Eliphaz, “in my experience, suffering is caused by wrongdoing. God doesn’t just punish people for no reason. And God is also merciful. So if we can get Job to admit what he did wrong, maybe God will forgive him and end his suffering.”

  “OK, good,” said Mercury, rubbing his chin. He had actually been hoping one of them might suggest euthanasia, but this seeking-forgiveness-for-wrongdoing idea had some potential too. “All right, we need to present a unified front. You guys should each come at him from a slightly different point of view, but the gist has to be that Job has committed some sin for which he needs to beg forgiveness.”

  The three friends nodded in agre
ement. They came up with three bang-up speeches, which they would deliver one after another. Job wouldn’t have a chance. He’d be begging God’s forgiveness just to get the three of them to shut up. Hopefully God would respond, maybe by striking Job by lightning or something, and this ordeal would finally end.

  One by one, the three friends delivered their speeches imploring Job to admit his wrongdoing, but Job would not be swayed. He challenged each of them to point out where he had gone wrong, yet none of them could do so.

  Job began weeping and mumbling to himself.

  “Quick,” said Mercury to Elihu. “What’s he saying? Is he cursing God?”

  Elihu ran over and listened for a bit. He returned, shaking his head. “Doesn’t sound like it. He’s pretty pissed off at those three guys, though. He called them ‘worthless physicians’ and told them to shut up.”

  “Oh boy,” said Mercury. This was not going at all the way he had hoped. Rather than getting Job to either give up or change his attitude, they had only caused him to dig in and stick with his stubborn refusal to either admit guilt or cast blame. Mercury didn’t know what it was going to take to end this stalemate, but it seemed pretty clear that unless he did something drastic, they were going to be stuck out here in the ashes for a long time.

  “OK, change of plans,” Mercury said to Elihu. “You need to talk to him.”

  “Me?” asked Elihu. “I’m only nine years old!”

  “No worries,” said Mercury thoughtfully. “Just tell Job that you don’t have to be old to possess wisdom.”

  “Why don’t you do it?” Elihu asked.

  “Oh, I can’t interfere,” said Mercury. “I’ve got to stay fifty paces from Job at all times. If you can pull this off, there will be a lot of mangoes in it for you.”

  Elihu’s eyes lit up. “All right, what do I say?”

  Mercury sighed. “Hell if I know. Anything to end this torment. Clearly we’re not getting anywhere trying to get him to confess his sins, so I think we’re back to trying to get him to curse God.”