Mercury Rises
Authors: Robert Kroese
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Fantasy fiction, #Fantasy, #Humorous, #Humorous fiction, #Journalists, #Contemporary, #End of the world, #Government investigators, #Women Journalists, #Armageddon, #Angels
| Mercury Rises | |
| Robert Kroese | |
| AmazonEncore (2011) | |
| Rating: | ★★★★☆ |
| Tags: | Humorous, Fantasy, Contemporary, Fiction Humorousttt Fantasyttt Contemporaryttt Fictionttt |
From Booklist
The sequel to Kroese's debut,
Mercury Falls
, finds the irreverent angel Mercury and his reporter pal, Christine Temetri, again facing the end of the world. The U.S. government is still trying to puzzle out the explosion that took out Anaheim Stadium and sends dozens of experts to comb the area for clues. Now out of a job, Christine decides to put some distance between herself and Los Angeles by traveling to Africa to volunteer for an aid organization. She finds two things she doesn't expect in Kenya: wealthy entrepreneur Horace Finch, whose under-the-radar biosphere masks a secret project, and an antibomb like the one that destroyed Anaheim Stadium. The discoveries bring her back together with Mercury as the two battle human and angel foes to prevent the antibomb from imploding the world. Though not quite as seamless as its predecessor, Kroese's sharp-witted follow-up will certainly appeal to
Mercury Falls
fans. The cliff-hanger ending will have readers eagerly anticipating the next installment. --- Kristine Huntley
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright ©2011 Robert Kroese
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by AmazonEncore
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN: 978-1-6121-8086-1
For Mrs. Price, who told
me to "just keep writing."
With thanks to: Joel Bezaire, for fleshing out Noah; Michele Smith, for catching the all-too-common, errant comma; Jocelyn Pihlaja, for zeroing in on clichés like a hawk; Alex Hamilton, PhD, for helping me avoid violating the laws of physics; and my wife, Julia, for helping me avoid violating most other laws.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
To Your Holiness, the High Council of the Seraphim,
Greetings from your humble servant, Ederatz,
Cherub First Class,
Order of the Mundane Observation Corps
There comes a time in every angel's life when he is compelled to reflect on his existence and ask himself that most difficult of questions: why do I even bother?
For me, that time lasted from June 6, 1979, to August 21, 1986. This seven-year bout of existential doubt was followed by six years of relatively undisturbed self-pity, a year and a half of morose cynicism, eight months of figurative hair pulling and teeth gritting, another three months of literal hair pulling and teeth gritting, and, finally, an indeterminate period of drunken obliviousness.
It's been clear to me for some time that no one in your organization is reading these reports. I'm not sure when I first came to that realization; it may have been when no one bothered to follow up on my claim that an elite unit of nineteenth-century Turks had traveled to Ireland in 1976 through a rift in the space-time continuum in order to seed discord among the members of U2.
And yet I persist in writing. Why?
For one thing, I suppose I'm still clutching to a shred of hope that some sympathetic seraph will come across these missives and extract me from this dump of a plane. Beyond that pedestrian motivation, I seem to have fallen victim to the illusion, so common on the Mundane Plane, that committing facts to paper will somehow help me make sense of them. I long ago gave up any attempt at systematic description of events down here, but I can't quite bring myself to stop trying to herd them into some kind of semi-coherent narrative.
Speaking of which, you'll undoubtedly notice that many of the names I've used for characters are anachronistic. For example, the cherub now generally known as Mercury was obviously not called "Mercury" eighteen hundred years before the dawn of the Roman Empire. For that matter, the organization he worked for was not originally called The Apocalypse Bureau, and it is very unlikely that the biblical figure Noah ever used the words
dude
or
asshole
.
Further complicating things, I've gone and gotten myself inextricably tangled up with the plot. Despite my best efforts to remain uninvolved and objective, I've...well, to be honest I pretty much gave up trying a while back. So now I'm a character in my own story. I tried to leave myself out, but, well, it's complicated. You'll see what I mean.
I do have one advantage this time around: this time I know how the story ends. In fact, I'd better get started telling this story, or I'm going to run out of time. As a wise man once said, "We've always been headed toward the Apocalypse. It's just a question of proximity."
Years ago we learned from the Bible that the flood occurred in the year 4990 BC...Just before the flood, Noah was instructed by God that in seven days the flood would begin. Using the language that "a day is as a thousand years," it is like saying through Noah, "Mankind has seven days or seven thousand years to escape destruction." Since 2011 A.D. is precisely seven thousand years after Noah preached, God has given mankind...another infallible, absolute proof that May 21, 2011, is the date of the Rapture.
---The Rev. Harold Camping, January 1, 2010
The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.
---Nicholas Chamfort
ONE
Circa 2,000 B.C.
Mercury sighed as he trudged up the road to Babylon, his eyes affixed on the squat silhouette of the nearly finished ziggurat at the edge of town. He had been called away on some Heavenly errands and was anxious to see what progress had been made on the massive clay brick pyramid while he was gone.
As he expected, he found that the ziggurat was within weeks of being finished. Unfortunately, it had been within weeks of being finished for over three years now, and no perceivable progress had been made while he was gone.
He clambered up the steps of the hundred-and-fifty-foot-high structure to find several dozen idle laborers encamped at the top. The men didn't even make a show of pretending to work as Mercury reached the plateau.
"What gives, guys?" he asked, trying to maintain the nice-guy demeanor he had cultivated on the worksite. "Kinda thought you'd have started on level seven by now."
