Authors: Robert Kroese
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear about how you’re going to fix it,” snapped Wanda. “All you have to do is change the name of the Israeli general who gets killed in chapter four, remove the stuff about Harry Giddings, gloss over the part about Anaheim Stadium exploding—”
“Imploding, actually,” corrected Eddie.
Wanda stared at him. “Oh, imploding.
Imploding
,” she said. “Well, that makes it OK.”
“It does?” Eddie asked, confused.
“No, you imbecile! Do you have any idea how many different parties would have grounds to sue us if we published this...this...
abomination
? Not to mention that it’s in absolutely horrible taste. You can’t just stitch together a flimsy fantasy story from the latest newspaper headlines, Eddie. I mean there’s topical, and then there’s...God, I don’t even know what this is.”
“I did try to warn you,” said Eddie defensively.
She glared at him. “You told me you might have to do some rewriting because of the Anaheim tragedy. I didn’t realize you meant you were having trouble incorporating
more
horrific real-life events into the book. Besides, that discussion was about the Charlie Nyx book, not this...
thing
.” She looked distastefully at the thick stack of paper on her desk. “Eddie, there isn’t a publisher on Earth who would touch this manuscript. Maybe you could”—Wanda’s nose crinkled in disgust at the thought—“
self
-publish it.” She shook her head grimly. “What a waste.”
Eddie was pretty sure she meant the money the Finch Group had spent retrieving him from Ireland and putting him up in a hotel for two weeks, not the time and effort he had put into his manuscript. Still, he silently agreed. Why did he keep doing this to himself? Why did he persist in the delusion that he was destined to be a successful writer?
“You can see yourself out,” Wanda said, not bothering to look up from her desk.
Eddie got up and made for the door.
“Forgetting something?” she asked, still not looking up.
Eddie shuffled back to the desk and scooped up the manuscript.
“Leave the keys to the Bimmer,” said Wanda. “We’ll cover the hotel through the end of the week.”
“How am I supposed to get back to the hotel?”
Wanda sat back and smiled. “Fly, little angel, fly.”
Eddie sorely wanted to turn the keys into a hummingbird just to see the look on Wanda’s face, but he knew that would accomplish nothing. He dropped the keys and left Wanda Kwan’s office with the manuscript under his arm.
Once outside, Eddie turned to look up at the Beacon Building. The glass pyramid shimmered surreally in the morning sun. The streets around the building were strangely quiet—a sharp contrast to the chaos of the past three days. LA had already been on edge before Black Monday, and after the moon imploded, things really went to hell. Riots, looting, arson—and that was in addition to the twenty-foot waves crashing in from the Pacific and the temblors rattling windows and setting off car alarms every few hours. Presumably the rioters were now resting up for tonight’s festivities.
It had all started on Monday.
Black
Monday. That’s what the humans were calling it, in their myopic and predictable manner. Why the moon? he wondered. What had the moon ever done to anyone except provide light and hope and beauty? Imploding the moon was like killing a completely harmless animal, like a penguin or something. Eddie loved penguins.
As baffled as Eddie was by the destruction of the moon, he at least knew more than the poor, frightened people hurrying past him down the street. He knew that only one thing could have caused the moon to collapse in on itself that way: an anti-bomb, so named because it
sucked
rather than
blew
. Anti-bombs
were Heavenly devices that looked like ornamental glass apples. The older the anti-bomb was, the “riper” and more powerful it became. The one that had imploded the moon must have been very old indeed. So he knew the
how
, but the question remained:
Why
?
Eddie wandered aimlessly down the street, still holding the rejected manuscript in his hands. He knew that it was selfish to worry about his career as a writer when the whole world seemed to be falling to pieces, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow he had been cheated out of his destiny. After all, hadn’t Culain—or whatever he was calling himself these days—told him that his book was the key to unleashing the End of the World? He had certainly seemed convincing at the time, but maybe Culain was just a lunatic.
Lunatic
, thought Eddie. There’s a word that’s going to see a resurgence. People driven mad by the moon—or lack thereof.
Culain claimed to have lived for thousands of years—claimed to be, among others, William Shakespeare and the Biblical figure Cain. Surely that was evidence of madness. But if he wasn’t who he claimed to be, who was he? How did he have access to those reams and reams of Heavenly reports? How had he found Eddie—once in Ireland and once here in Los Angeles? And what did he
want
? He was apparently not an angel, but he was certainly no ordinary human. Eddie had at first assumed, in fact, that he was...well, Someone Else entirely. He rolled his eyes at the memory. Talk about a
deus ex machina
.
Whoever he was, he had taken in Eddie with his talk of the Charlie Nyx books and meta-universes and destiny. Wanda Kwan was right: no publisher on Earth would touch his manuscript. He had been a fool to think otherwise. There was nothing to do now but head back to his hotel, pack up his stuff, and...well, the rest
was a little unclear. Hopefully he’d figure it out when he got to that point.
It
was
a shame, though, he thought as he stepped off the curb to cross the street. He had been rather proud of the little narrative he had put together. It had everything a good book should have: drama, humor, explosions...It was a little light on the romance, of course, but he could throw some of that crap into the sequel. He opened the manuscript to a random page and smiled at a particularly clever turn of phrase. “A tapestry of religion,” he chuckled to himself.
Then he was run over by a Prius.
“That’s game,” said Cain disinterestedly. He had won, 26 to 24, his deliberate, mechanical method edging out Job’s reckless and unpredictable playing style. He walked toward a fragment of brick wall, making a mark with a piece of chalk that he had pulled from his pocket. “That’s eight hundred fifty-six thousand, five hundred eleven for me, and zero for you. Give up?” Cain sounded tired, like he had played about 856,510 more games of Ping-Pong than he had really wanted to.
“No way,” said Job cheerfully. “I’m just getting my ninety-eight thousandth wind.”
“I need a break,” said Cain.
Job nodded, and they both sat down, leaning against the partial wall. Not knowing what else to do, Mercury sat down between them, cold bricks pressing against his back. The three of them sat staring at the fog shrouding the buildings in the distance. Mercury tried to determine whether the fog had moved a little closer than the last time he looked. The odd thing was that it seemed to be moving in from the left and right as well. But that was impossible; that wasn’t how fog worked. It had to be a trick of the light.
“Jeez, how long have you guys been playing?” asked Mercury.
Job shrugged. “Seven hundred years, off and on. I don’t really keep track.”
“I wonder why,” muttered Cain.
“So you’ve never won?” said Mercury to Job. “Not once?”
Job shrugged. “I’ve come close a few thousand times. One game went to eight hundred and four points. I only lost because I had a cramp.”
Cain snorted. “It’s always something.”
“Why do you keep playing?” Mercury asked Job.
“Who’s to say I won’t win one of these days?” Job replied, reasonably enough.
“Huh,” said Mercury. Job had a point, he supposed. “So, what’s the deal? Why are you guys here? Shouldn’t you both be, like, dead?”
“We’re immortal,” said Cain. “Both of us. Cursed.”
“Blessed,” corrected Job. “We’ve been blessed with eternal life.”
“How?” Mercury asked. “I thought humans had a strict age limit after the whole Methuselah debacle. A hundred and twenty years.”
“Yes,” agreed Job. “Except for me and Cain. We were blessed—”
“Cursed,” muttered Cain.
“...to witness the whole of human history.”
“But why?” asked Mercury. “By whom?”
Job cast a sideways glance at Cain. “We have a difference of opinion on that. Cain believes it’s all just a big joke, the Universe screwing with us for its own amusement. Or maybe for no reason at all. He tends to think the Universe is an arbitrary, meaningless place.”
Cain shrugged at what was evidently a reasonable summary of his beliefs.
“For my part,” Job continued, “I think we are representatives.”
“Of what?” Mercury prompted.
“Different ways of looking at the world. Faith and hope versus cynicism and despair.”
Cain snorted. “More like reason and practicality versus superstition and false hope,” he said.
Job smiled. “Difference of opinion.”
“So,” Mercury said to Job. “You’re still an optimist? I mean, even after everything that happened...?” Job’s suffering was legendary. There was a whole book in the Bible devoted to his travails. And who knew what had transpired since Mercury had last seen him, almost four thousand years earlier.
“I’m an optimist
because
of what happened to me,” said Job.
“Really?” asked Mercury dubiously. “Do you know...?” He trailed off, not sure how much he should say. Mercury had seen some of the behind-the-scenes political wrangling that led to Job’s ordeal, and he didn’t know how much Job knew—or whether knowing would make him feel better or worse.
“About Lucifer abducting the archangel Michael? About how I was just a pawn in a celestial game of chess? Yeah, I found out a few hundred years ago, from one of the cherubim that used to come around here. We don’t see angels anymore,” he added wistfully. “They all seem to have disappeared.”
“And it doesn’t bother you that your whole ordeal was the result of a grudge match between Lucifer and the Heavenly authorities?” Mercury asked.
Job shrugged. “The proximate causes of my suffering are of no concern. I believe there is an overarching purpose to everything. Even suffering serves a purpose.”
Cain made a
tsk
ing sound. “There’s no
purpose
inherent in suffering, other than to teach you to avoid it. Suffering in itself is meaningless.”
“I’ve heard it builds character,” said Mercury.
Cain sighed. “Character is just another word for conditioning,” he said. “People with ‘character’ are those who have been kicked around enough to know how to avoid most causes of suffering. Consider a toddler who knows not to touch a hot stove because he’s been burned once before. Does he have ‘character’? Or has he just learned an arbitrary fact about the unforgiving world in which he lives?”
Mercury raised an eyebrow at Cain. “You’re kind of a downer, you know that?”
“Try hanging out with him for seven hundred years,” said Job.
Mercury had to admit that Job’s optimism given their situation—not to mention Cain’s relentless cynicism—was impressive, but he wasn’t sure if it was admirable or the sign of some sort of deep psychosis. Did Job have “character,” or had he simply developed a coping mechanism for dealing with a harsh, capricious Universe? Cain’s bleak outlook certainly wasn’t an attractive option, but was Job’s manic cheerfulness any better?
Cain shrugged, gazing at the fog in the distance. “I just want it to be over.”
This last comment gave Mercury the chills. “Why do you guys keep looking out at the fog, like you’re waiting for the three-fifteen to Queens?” The buildings on either side of them had grown less distinct, as if the fog were slowly swallowing them.
“It’s not fog,” said Job. “Cain calls it the Existence Horizon. It’s slowly moving in on us. Once it gets here...” He trailed off, letting the words hang in the air.
“Then what?” asked Mercury anxiously. “What happens when it gets here?”
Cain shrugged. “Nothing. That’s it. The end.”
“The end? The end of what?” Mercury demanded.
Job answered. “The end of everything.”
Eddie regained consciousness on a sidewalk a few feet away from where he had been run over by a Prius.
“Whoa, dude,” said a lanky, long-haired teenager who was crouched over him. “I can’t believe you’re still alive. That Prius just
laid you out
.”
Eddie sat up and looked around. He dimly remembered seeing the vaguely Satanic Toyota emblem a half second before being knocked to the ground, but there were no Priuses (Prii?) to be seen. It occurred to him that maybe the hit-and-run had been intentional, but he dismissed the idea as unlikely. First of all, why would anyone want to run him down? And second, if you were going to run someone down, why would you use a Prius when there were so many oversized American cars much better suited for the task? No, embarrassing as it was to admit, Eddie had been distracted by the cleverness of his own writing and had walked into traffic. The driver must have panicked and fled.
“Need to watch where I’m going,” said Eddie, stating the obvious. “Did you see...?”
The kid shook his head. “Dude took off,” he said. “I didn’t get a plate or anything.”
But Eddie wasn’t wondering about the car. He shook his head. “No, did you see a stack of papers? I was carrying a manuscript.”
“Oh, man!” the kid exclaimed. “Weirdest thing. Car hits you, papers go flying. I see this dude run into the street, like he was going to do CPR or something. But no, what does he do? Grabs up all the papers! He’s got this big stack of papers in his arms and just takes off. So I dragged you onto the curb. Figured you were dead.”
So, Eddie thought. Someone was following me. Someone who was interested in the manuscript. They saw me get hit, probably figured I was a goner, and grabbed the manuscript. But who? Like Wanda Kwan said, no publisher on Earth would touch the thing. Oh, well. Good riddance.