Mercury Rises (6 page)

Christine had had enough. Clearly she wasn't going to be able to do anything to quell the chaos, and bedlam could go on just as well without her. Leaving her car in the de facto parking lot, she trudged off toward the place where Anaheim Stadium once stood. She figured it was about a mile away; at the rate things were going, she'd have plenty of time to get back to her car. And if not, what was the worst that could happen?

She realized that she didn't really want to think very hard about the worst that could happen. However, if the worst did happen, it would be just as well for her to be a mile away at the time.

Walking briskly, it took her less than twenty minutes to get to the scene of the Anaheim Event. She couldn't get very close; construction fencing ringed the entire area a good hundred feet from the crater's edge. She walked up to the chain-link fence, finding a place among the other gawkers and picture takers. Her view was mostly obscured by the dozens of vehicles, tents, and other temporary structures that skirted the crater.

She could only assume that the figures scurrying about inside the perimeter fence were trying to figure out what exactly had happened there. She imagined they probably weren't having much luck.

Her eyes alighted on a small, thoughtful-looking black man wearing civilian clothes who was crouched on the shallow slope just inside the jagged swath of asphalt that marked the crater's edge. Sand filtered between the fingers of his left hand, and he stared vacantly into space as if waiting for inspiration to strike. Who was he? Christine wondered. Not a cop, certainly, and not military. He didn't look like a government bigwig or bureaucrat either. A researcher or investigator of some kind, maybe? Maybe, she thought with a tinge of pity, he was the one that all the bureaucrats and bigwigs were expecting to explain this mess.

Part of her wanted to call out to the man, to tell him she knew exactly what had caused the crater. But what would she say? That Anaheim Stadium had been imploded by a supernatural device that could fit in the palm of one's hand? If she were lucky, she'd be dismissed as delusional, and if she were unlucky, she'd be charged with interfering with a federal investigation---or worse. And her situation wouldn't be improved by spilling her guts about who had used the anti-bomb, and why.

She had tried her best to put all those details out of her mind during the six weeks since the Anaheim Event, and now that she forced herself to think about it, she realized she was having a hard time keeping it all straight. She wasn't sure she'd be able to offer a cogent narrative of the events leading up to the Event even if she wanted to. The politics of Heaven and Hell were just too damned complicated.

First, there was that conniving bastard Gamaliel, who was working for that conniving bitch Katie Midford, who was really the demoness Tiamat, who wanted to---how did she put it?---subjugate humanity with an iron fist.

Then there was that imbecile Izbazel, who was a minion of Lucifer aka Satan, who wanted to destroy the world.

Then there were Uzziel and Michael and all the other agents of Heaven, who couldn't seem to agree on much of anything; and Harry Giddings, who thought he was working for Heaven but wasn't; and Karl Grissom, the accidental Antichrist.

And then, of course, there was Mercury. Mercury was infuriating, exasperating, callous, and self-absorbed, and she was having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that she would most likely never see him again. She didn't exactly miss him; she felt more or less the way she had felt that day she came home from school to find that her father had sold the bright orange Oldsmobile Toronado that he had driven as long as she could remember. The car was horrifically loud, belched huge clouds of blue smoke for a good ten minutes every time it was started, and always inexplicably smelled like overripe peaches, but Christine had cried herself to sleep that night because she couldn't imagine life without it.

The man she had been staring at glanced her direction, and for a moment she thought he was looking directly at her. She half expected him to walk over and launch into a series of questions about what exactly she knew about the Anaheim Event, but he simply muttered something under his breath, stood up, and then walked away.

Of course he wouldn't question her. There was no reason to suspect she had had anything to do with the destruction of the stadium. In fact, she reminded herself, she
hadn't
had anything to do with it.

Yet, for some reason, she felt a twinge of guilt whenever she thought about what had happened here. That guilt was the main reason she hadn't visited the implosion site until now. She wasn't sure her brain would be able to process the reality of the aftermath; until now it had seemed like something out of a half-remembered nightmare, and a part of her expected to break down completely at the sight of the destruction. But standing here overlooking the crater, she felt like an extra in a Hollywood film. The vast gray crater dotted with tents and portable offices bore no resemblance to the image of Anaheim Stadium packed with True Believers that was etched into her mind. Surveying the scene now, she simply felt numb---and somehow that was worse than the tsunami of guilt she had expected.

Fraternizing with Mercury has warped my soul, she thought. Seeing this hole in the ground instead of a stadium filled with tens of thousands of people should make me feel
something
. After all, I was the reason Karl was onstage in the first place. If I hadn't saved him and delivered him to Harry wrapped up with a nice bow, he wouldn't have been here, and Izbazel wouldn't have detonated the anti-bomb. It's
my fault
.

But she couldn't make the words mean anything. Damn it, she thought. Maybe I just need to get out of here. Away from this place, this city. Somewhere I can do something meaningful.

She fingered the scrap of paper on which she had written the number of Eternal Harvest. Africa? she thought. That was a bit extreme, wasn't it?

On the other hand, her career as a journalist seemed to be over, and she still dreaded returning to her condo. Why
not
move to Africa, far away from the aftermath of the Anaheim Event, the cynical machinations of the
Beacon
, and her infernal linoleum? A remote village in eastern Africa sounded positively welcoming compared to this unholy place. She couldn't possibly feel more useless and unfulfilled there than here, and who knows? She might even be able to do some good---real good, helping people in a meaningful, concrete way for once, rather than spreading a combination of false hope and cynicism through her Apocalyptic columns.

Gunfire erupted in the direction from which she had come, followed by screams. Police cars and National Guard vehicles raced past her toward the scene. Pandemonium was taking hold of Los Angeles.

Christine pulled her cell phone from her pocket and began to dial.

SEVEN

In high school Jacob Slater had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a vaguely defined condition which, in the final analysis, meant that people gave him the heebie jeebies.

He didn't like crowds, and he liked smaller groups of people even less. One-on-one contact with a person he didn't already know was roughly as painful for him as a third-degree sunburn. To compensate him for this deficiency, the Almighty had given him a keen intellect and a preternatural ability to make sense of disparate data and recognize patterns, abilities he had put to good use as a forensic blast expert for the FBI.

Technically he was a "forensic explosive investigator," but his interest was not in the explosives, but rather the explosions. He had always loved explosions, even as a child. When he was ten he had once poisoned a neighborhood stray cat by feeding it liverwurst laced with gunpowder, and his protests that the poisoning had been an accident didn't save him from several trips to the school psychologist. Technically he was telling the truth: he hadn't meant to poison the cat; he had meant to blow it up. This admission didn't help his case either. Ironically three days later the cat was apprehended by an animal control officer who took it to the city pound, where it died by lethal injection after a miserable, frightening, weeklong incarceration in a small cage surrounded by dozens of other doomed animals. Young Jacob concluded, not unreasonably, that his parents and teachers weren't really concerned about keeping the cat alive; what they wanted was for the cat to die quietly and alone rather than in an exciting and very public explosion.

Jacob never tried to blow up another animal after that, partly because it was clearly too much trouble and partly because as annoying as stray cats and raccoons could be, at least they weren't hypocrites. He did, however, blow up plenty of inanimate objects, from model airplanes to mailboxes, both because he liked to see things explode and because he liked the challenge of trying to reassemble the pieces. He would occasionally videotape his projects but was disappointed to learn that the typical camcorder recorded only thirty frames per second---not enough to dissect an explosion in much detail.

The FBI didn't call Jacob Slater when they wanted to keep a bomb from going off; they called him two minutes after a bomb had gone off. His job was essentially to tell the story of what had happened during the fraction of a second before everything went to hell. He did his job exceedingly well, and he had been waiting his entire adult life for the call he had received six weeks ago.

At least, he thought it was the call he had been waiting for. A massive explosion at Anaheim Stadium, they had said. But once he got there he found...nothing. That wasn't hyperbole; he had literally found
nothing
. Where there once had been a stadium filled with people, there was now only a gigantic bowl-shaped hole in the ground. They were calling it the Anaheim
Event
rather than the Anaheim
Blast
for a reason, that reason being that everyone who had seen the devastation in Anaheim who knew anything about explosions knew that it hadn't been caused by any known type of explosive device.

Jacob Slater was, above all else, a scientist, and science works by systematically isolating and eliminating unknowns. Unfortunately, the crater in Anaheim was one big, gaping unknown, and there were very few definite knowns to be had.

The fact was that no one knew what had happened in Anaheim, just as no one really knew what was wrong with Jacob Slater. The doctors who had analyzed him two decades earlier hadn't actually found anything definitively wrong with him. Yes, they had offered an authoritative-sounding diagnosis, but it wasn't as if they had discovered anything concrete like an imbalance of bodily humors or a band of angry dwarves living in his small intestine. All they had done was to confirm that, yes, there was something a little off about young Jacob, and lump him into a category with a few million other kids who were a little off---a category called "Asperger's." When all else fails, science comes up with a label, like "gravity" or "inertia" or "Asperger's" and calls it a day. And that, in a nutshell, is how the Anaheim Event was born. It was a name that explained nothing and meant nothing, but it stuck the phenomenon into a category around which life could go on more or less as usual.

Jacob was, in fact, one of seven explosive experts from various agencies who had been called on to help explain the Event. Experts in other disciplines had been recruited as well, of course---some three dozen men and women bearing laminated badges identifying them as hailing from some arm of the government or other wandered about the crater at any given time, jotting down God-only-knew-what in government-issued notepads and talking to God-only-knew-whom on government-issued mobile phones. Jacob couldn't fathom who all these people were, and he didn't make much of an effort to find out; he communicated only with his direct superiors and the other blast guys, not only because of his aforementioned discomfort with strangers, but also because that seemed to be what his superiors wanted. Interagency cooperation was all well and good, but it was understood to be the sport of the aristocracy; rank-and-file workers like Jacob were expected to keep to their own kind.

Jacob's own notepad was empty, because despite having been on-site for six weeks, he still didn't know where to begin. None of his training seemed to apply; it was as if they had called him to investigate the site of a UFO landing or diagnose a case of lycanthropy. The only inference he could draw from the scene was so bizarre, so far outside anything he had ever experienced, that he dared not even write it down for fear of where it would take him. So he had spent six weeks walking in circles trying to devise a reasonable explanation when it was clear that whatever happened here was anything but reasonable.

Jacob sat in a crouch at the edge of the Anaheim crater, letting sand fall between his fingers and wondering what he was going to tell his superiors. A hundred or so feet away, behind a barrier of hurriedly constructed fencing, a handful of tourists stood gawking and taking pictures. The authorities would have preferred to keep the public farther away from the crater, but the blast site (as those in charge insisted on calling it) was so huge and so close to the center of bustling downtown Anaheim that isolating it had been effectively impossible. Still, they made a good public show of keeping the area secret as a matter of national security, with twenty-foot-high chain-link fencing topped with barbed wire marking a perimeter some hundred feet outside the rim of the crater, and National Guardsmen patrolling the streets a quarter mile out. The sight of armed men in camouflage gear driving around town in Humvees made for a surreal juxtaposition with the amusement park atmosphere of Anaheim, prompting one cynical joker to spray paint a nearby building with the moniker FASCISM-LAND. The perpetrator was arrested and held for three days without access to an attorney as an "enemy combatant" before being handed over to the local police, a regrettable episode that not surprisingly failed to quiet protests that the military had overstepped its authority.

"Hey, um, Slater," called a voice. "You are, um, going to be late." It was Kevin Samson, another member of the blast team. That's what they were calling it: the "blast team." Jacob found the name ironic not only because he was pretty sure that what had caused this crater was in no way any kind of blast, but also because the members of the team were some of the dullest people he had ever met. What was it about explosive guys that made them so impossibly boring? Did a life centered on explosions cause a man's personality to somehow implode? Not that Jacob minded; he actually preferred dull people, because they made few social demands and tended to make him look interesting by comparison. "Team" was also a stretch, as once the bus from the blast site deposited them back at their hotels, each team member went his separate way, not seeing the others again until the bus picked them up the next morning. This "blast team" was as big a blast and as much of a team as the 1962 Mets.