Messi@ (54 page)

The three of them embraced and tasted one another's tears, and at that moment something came to pass. Their embrace set in motion the last act of will in history.

Or so Major Notz explained consequent events when he revealed the last chapter of the world's secret history to an audience composed in equal parts of angels and humans.

The connection between Felicity, Andrea, and Ben took the form of a spongy emotion that jumped through their nervous system, joining them together with light threads.

We are being woven, they thought.

The brilliant, salty light of the cave grew in intensity.

“Jesus,” said Andrea, “We are a mushroom.”

Their bodies were crisscrossed with the fine gills of a spore connected to millions of living things outside the dome. A sparking green glow discharged energy around them, and they knew that together they would battle heaven on behalf of creatures like themselves, tender flesh forms filled with light and confusion. They were a joined nothing, less than nothing, but each one of them yielded a luminous distinction: Felicity felt arrowhead hard the presence of her courage; Ben, the sharp twang of his desire for justice; Andrea, the delicious languor of her power to transform. Together, they were an arrow drawn against certainties, verities, eternal truths, gospels, edicts, writs, primers, laws, stone tablets.

A phalanx of bald Bamajans escorted them to the platform where Mullin was enthroned. The preacher bade them sit on the mushroom-shaped stools around his console. A sultry, dark girl in a blue sari approached and stood behind Mullin.

“Kashmir,” Felicity gasped. “You're alive!”

“I was dead until I found God,” replied Kashmir, looking serene.

The major fixed Mullin in a pitiless gaze. “Preacher! You have forgotten your creator!”

Mullin surveyed the instrument-laden Dome, his hand resting lightly on his control keyboard. “I am grateful, Major, grateful indeed for the wondrous mechanisms you've bestowed on me. But now the true work begins. In a few moments, you will witness the End. And when the End is under way, you will witness the small ends of these sinners, followed by your own end. And I promise you a worthy end, Major. I do admire you.”

Notz smiled, recalling the vast tapestry he had woven to bring this event into being. He had used his knowledge of conspiracy to provide a philosophical ground for the “End,” as the preacher called it. He had learned the methods of each and every major act of hidden will in human history and synthesized them for application to his purpose. He had used secret intelligence connections to set up an elaborate network of unwitting agents, and he had recruited Mullin. Mullin and his ill-gotten millions had done the rest. The major had ruthlessly dispatched anyone who had threatened his plans or the flower of his project, Felicity. Under the protection of the millennial fever sweeping the world, he'd launched hundreds of charlatans to provide the world with a raison d'être for its own disappearance. Technicians, both paid and converted, had done the rest. Notz had guided Mullin from the shadows and smoothed his path, and now the fool believed he was in charge.

“Preacher, could we have something, a little lunch, before you fiddle with your Armageddon stick?”

Felicity laughed. “That's my uncle! Just because the world's ending—”

“I feel the same way,” interrupted Andrea. “A last meal!”

Ben was astonished by the frivolous turn of events. The last thing in the world he wanted was food, and he knew that neither Andrea nor Felicity wanted any. But then he understood: it was going to be a ritual last supper, their disconnection henceforth from the eating of matter.

Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin was feeling generous. He instructed Kashmir to prepare food, and she shortly returned with a platter of pickled mushrooms, a bowl of fresh figs, and a pitcher of milk.

“How did you come to select these creatures to survive?” Notz asked, plunging two saffron-spiced 'shrooms into his mouth at once. The mushrooms were followed by a fig.

“You recognize my talent at last, Major. Deciding who would survive Armageddon was more difficult than your studies and technology. I couldn't have done it without Jesus. I came up against the limits of human expertise. We designed the End to engulf all but the Dome, and I screened my beings as carefully as Noah choosing animals for the ark. As you instructed, I scanned the range of human types for strength of character and physical distinction, but also for their faith in the Lord and in me. Every race is carefully represented, every individual genetically screened for abnormalities. Every girl in the First Angels Choir's has been tested, biographed, X-rayed, analyzed, and measured for faith. They've been chosen for libido, for hardiness, steadfastness, both left- and right-brain-specific skills, and the other characteristics that you painstakingly outlined for me.”

The major finished swallowing the mouthful of mushroom and fig and laughed.

Felicity's stomach knotted and suddenly she knew—her mentor, her teacher, her father was the mastermind of Mullin's insane plan. She looked at the fat man swallowing his food and saw the real monster, his shadow stretching to her very beginnings, imbedded in her life like the roots of a live oak.

With their vision magnified, the three friends could see that the demented Reverend Mullin was only half bad. The bad half sold certainty to a desperate public—but his innocent half was in love with a fantasy of love. If they had the power, they would grant him a life with his slutty waif, stripped of his wealth, forced to live with the uncertainties of poverty for the rest of his miserable days.

They saw the silent drones, the bald Bamajans, and the singers in white, and they weren't all bad, either. Their capacity for faith had been misled. They had been saved from their chaotic freedom and held captive by the serenity of song. Mullin had stolen their free will, but faith lived on in its prison. Angels had stolen bodies as well, shoving their spirits into dank cells. Even the merely dead, neither humans nor angels, ranged freely across the fields of these timid souls, taking them as they pleased.

The divine gift of faith had been perverted by preachers, priests, texts that promised closure, prophecies, bibles, commandments, depictions of the End, promises of salvation. The wielders of these false closures were guilty of cupidity and ignorance.

The three friends experienced their loving solidarity as a wave of repulsion against the purveyors of certainty, a wave soon replaced by another, of love for those who searched, who had doubts, who were tormented by their bodies and unhappy with the limits of their minds.

How arrogant, Felicity thought, to believe that she could solve crimes and find answers to the mysteries of passion and disappearance. But Notz was the most arrogant—he was responsible for her bondage to the discipline of certainties. He believed that human will could control events and minds and hearts. Dear Lord, she silently told the others, we have harmed God, who may have fattened on the praise of men like Mullin, and been delivered to the likes of Notz. The threesome was enveloped in sadness, but green pulsed through them again, and their power returned.

They saw light stream through the multicolored gossamer of millions of angels' wings. The crystals burst with light. People were mixtures of faith and bondage, but one element was steadfastly good. Salt. The salt of their sweat and tears was infinitely amplified by the miles of salt surrounding them. The salt of their suffering was going to war with the cunning of false promises.

They thought that, like themselves, the world was not finished. It was continually evolving in complexity. God was not in the past but in the future. Humanity was evolving God, therefore there could be no End. At least not until God was born.

Mullin was ready. “Showtime, sinners!” He pressed an orange key on the control board, and in his mind he saw the underground fires beginning to snake into oil refineries and chemical plants, turning the Mississippi River into fire and the land into molten tar.

Notz was amused. He had not been speaking in riddles when he told Felicity that in him she might read the last chapter of the world's secret history. He held the ending in the palm of his hand—a compact black box with a single red button on it. It would relay the single command needed to set off the chemical corridor, overriding Mullin's controls.

He had succeeded perfectly. The red button held his concentrated brilliance; it was the center of his ambitions, the concentrated form of his wide-world connections, the point of his plan. When he activated it, he would unleash Armageddon on a scale Mullin never imagined. Everything but the Dome would evaporate, bringing Rapture to the Christians, nirvana to the Hindus, Paradise to the Muslims. Destruction would be his triumph.

Then he saw Felicity's face, and all her pain and anger invaded him. I have nurtured you to be my queen, he wanted to tell her. For you I have tested my will in that most dangerous place, my own heart. He felt a physical need to see her eyes filled with love and admiration. Great men had utterly passed from history. In this age without heroes, even the belief in the possibility of greatness had been extinguished. He had single-handedly engineered the destruction of humanity and had conceived of a new world, born of Felicity and himself. This was the something he had raised her for.

Felicity heard him and sent back her wordless reply. There was no mistaking it, and he received the full content of her disdain. So be it. He was tired. Major Notz, author of the single greatest act of will in history, a big man in whose folds of flesh was written the secret history of intention, closed his eyes and pressed the red button. The button went in like his mother's nipple when his greedy baby mouth sucked too hard, but there was no blast, no devastation, no glory. Notz pushed the mechanism over and over, bewildered. It wasn't possible. He had personally constructed the little beastie, connected each wire. His life's work was a dud.

Felicity, Andrea, and Ben rose up at once and enveloped Notz and Mullin in a terrible kindness. Intense green light streamed from them like a flashbulb snapping a giant photograph. A hidden fountain of grief sprung inside Mullin, and salty tears streaked down his cheeks. He no longer wanted the world to cease existing—his only desire was go to Airline Highway, the true center of his universe, to find the child who owned his heart.

Mullin lifted a hand, and the First Angels Choir burst into the purest song that was ever sung. “Amazing grace,” they began, “how sweet the sound …” The cavern pulsed, wounds healed, evil light was released, trapped passions flew into the open. One thousand girls made of nothing but music released a blessing into the salty air.

The major clutched his chest.

Mullin covered his face with his hands.

“The figs and mushrooms were poisoned,” Kashmir whispered.

Not that it mattered. Immediately after the failure of the red button, the major had chosen the Roman way out—he'd swallowed a cyanide capsule.

Felicity tried to embrace the stillness that had been her mentor, but her arms could not reach all the way around him. She saw the major's spirit rising to join the flocks of angels that sat watching throughout the Dome. Without missing a beat Notz began to explain himself to an audience of the heavenly host, proffering both the explanation and apology he would be doomed to repeat for eternity.

Felicity wept for her uncle and for the world. The salt that fed her tears was inexhaustible.

Sylvia and the devil sat on a patch of salty grass not far from the mouth of the mine shaft. The devil had spotted her immediately, calling out, “Hey, Sylvia girl, what is it? Who's that inside you!”

They had known each other forever, and Sylvia was happy to see him, but explaining Zack wasn't so easy. At first sight of the devil, Zack had started pouting, beating his wings, and making a low growl like a threatened mutt.

“Unfortunately,” Sylvia-Zack said, “we are a querulous unit, though my joie-de-vivre is bound to prevail over our bitching.”

“Well, you two sit right down here on this grassy picnic spot and relax.” The devil pointed to an inviting glen flanked by a murmuring spring.

“I want to go down,” Sylvia-Zack said. “I have to see the new creature.”

“Would you like to see from here? It's so much more comfortable.” The devil scorched a patch of grass with his hand, clearing the ground and leaving behind a circular black mirror. Reflected in it was the scene below.

“I can barely see them,” protested Sylvia-Zack, “and I can't hear a thing.”

“I can fix that.” The devil zoomed in on the scene and turned up the sound.

Deep inside the cave, Felicity, Andrea, and Ben held on to one another as if they were the only people left on earth, although hundreds of choir girls and Bamajans milled around, looking lost. Mullin's followers needed direction, but Mullin lay crumpled on the control panel, sobbing with his head in his hands, and the three young people who had defeated him did not seem in a hurry to take charge. It looked to Sylvia-Zack as if the three of them could care less if anyone else was alive on earth or not. They were, Sylvia-Zack realized, simply in love with one another.

“They are in love. This is amazing,” she told the devil.

“Love,” said the devil. “One of my better inventions.”

“I don't care,” said Sylvia-Zack, “who invented it or why. All I know is that ever since I got this body, I've been wanting to roll around kissing on some warm skin. I have to go down with them. So much depends on these critters. I have to help. I have a job. I'm an angel. I'm forgetting the Minds.”

“Don't be delusional,” said the devil. “Nothing depends on anything. Nothing will happen, no matter what happens. Tell your big brains to go home—the show's over.”

“I'm off to the underworld, 'Phisto.”

“A regular Orpheus, eh?”

“Well, what would you suggest I do?”