Mercury Revolts (5 page)

“OK,” said Mercury. “But just so you know
,
it isn’t actually the End Times. Trust me. I’ve been through all this. The
whole Apocalypse thing, it was a bust. The more I think about it, the more I’m
convinced that Apocalypse Bureau completely misread the prophecies. Between you
and me, I’m pretty sure all that stuff in Revelation was meant to be
metaphorical.”

“Metaphorical!” the woman cried angrily. “The Bible means
exactly what it says!”

“Except for the part where the Mark of the Beast is actually
an RFID chip,” replied Mercury.

“Huh?”

“Well, that’s a metaphor, right? It’s not literally a mark;
it’s a computer chip. If the Bible was meant to be taken one hundred percent
literally, it would just say, ‘The government is going to force everybody to
get a computer chip implanted,’ not ‘the beast will force them to receive a mark.’”

The woman stared at Mercury, momentarily dumfounded. “What
are you, some kind of atheist?” she finally demanded.

“Not at all,” said Mercury. “I just think God has a twisted
sense of humor. Anyway, good luck stopping the Apocalypse.”

The woman continued to glare at Mercury as he continued down
the street. Man, Mercury thought. Not only are there no flying cars, but people
haven’t learned a damn thing. They’re still obsessing over the End Times, just
like they were four years ago.
And four hundred years ago.
Granted, there was some reason to think the world was ending four years ago—a
third of the Moon had imploded, after all. That was some scary stuff. Mercury
knew first hand just how scary, since he was the one who had imploded it. Only
he and a few others knew that it had almost been Earth that had imploded
instead.

Where did people get this crap about RFID chips being the
Mark of the Beast? He seriously doubted whether Lucifer had the technological
savvy to pull something like that off, even before he was incarcerated. The
idea of him masterminding such a scheme like that now was ridiculous. If there
was any truth to the claim that the government was putting RFID chips in
people, it was probably some completely sensible program to keep tabs on
criminals or something. People always got all worked up about the silliest
things.

Less than half an hour on the
Mundane
plane and he’d already encountered a crazy mob. Was there something about him
that caused this kind of crap to happen? Hadn’t he been through enough of that
sort of idiocy? Why couldn’t those faux-Satanist knuckleheads have just left
him alone? Mercury found
himself
nostalgic for his
early days on this plane, back when everything seemed new and hiding two
hundred sweaty Greeks inside a giant wooden horse seemed like a good idea.
These days everything was just so… predictable.

He despaired of finding a cure for his malaise, but he knew
one sure-fire way to forget about the problem for a little while, and that was
to get stinking drunk.

Chapter Four
                      
 

Washington, D.C.; August 2016

Zion Johnson waited in the
antechamber of the Oval Office. He sat upright on a couch, looking straight
ahead, his mind clear. Zion Johnson didn’t get nervous. “Superior attitude,
superior state of mind,” Zion Johnson mouthed silently. This was his mantra.
Zion Johnson had never studied Zen or Eastern philosophy, but he had watched
every Steven Seagal movie ever made, many of them a dozen times. His favorite
was
Hard
to Kill
.

Twenty minutes later, he was summoned into the Oval Office.
The president was seated behind his desk. He smiled as Zion Johnson entered.

Zion Johnson took a step into the room and stopped.
Something wasn’t right. He had specifically been told that the president would
be meeting with him alone, and yet there was someone else in the room. Zion
Johnson resisted the urge to draw his gun—which wasn’t in its holster anyway;
you couldn’t take a loaded gun into the Oval Office. He turned toward the
interloper, sitting unmoving, unassuming,
almost
invisible, in a chair to his left.

It was a young girl, maybe thirteen years old.

Zion Johnson looked at her, looked at the president, and
looked back at the girl. Zion Johnson was rarely at a loss for words, but he
simply couldn’t process this data. She might have been the president’s
daughter, but Zion Johnson knew the president had no children. And what would
his daughter be doing at a top secret briefing? Also, the little girl was
black. Her skin wasn’t as dark as Zion Johnson’s, but she was clearly of
African descent.
Flawless chestnut brown skin with long,
curly black hair.
She regarded Zion Johnson with what appeared to be
detached bemusement.

Zion’s heart sank as it occurred to him that the ‘new phase’
of his assignment to keep tabs on Chaos Faction was in fact an entirely
unrelated and highly undesirable assignment. Presumably the president wanted
him to babysit this girl, probably the daughter of some paranoid diplomat,
worried that his daughter was going to be abducted or get mixed up with the
wrong element during the family’s stay in D.C. Twenty-eight years of government
service, and Zion Johnson had ended up as Denzel Washington in
Man on Fire
.
“Superior attitude, superior state of mind,” Zion Johnson recited to himself,
willing himself back into Seagal territory.

“Mr. President,” said Zion Johnson at last. “We seem to have
a visitor.”

President Danton Prowse smiled that effete Connecticut smile
that would have cost him the election had he been running against anyone but
Travis Babcock, the dim but affable Republican who had spent the last few
months of his term mired in scandal. President Babcock had, for some reason
that had never been fully explained, authorized a secret program to build a
so-called “suitcase nuke”—a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb small enough to fit in a
backpack. Congress had been kept in the dark about the program; only Babcock,
the scientists and technicians involved in the project, and a handful of
advisors knew about it. When details about the program appeared in a
Washington
Post
story, most of those involved pleaded ignorance about the program’s
purpose and lack of proper authorization, and Babcock was left to twist in the
wind, defending a program that seemed indefensible.

Babcock had been a popular president up to that point, and
the Democratic challenger Danton Prowse had been running a somewhat perfunctory
campaign against him. Prowse had only gotten the nomination because none of the
top-tier Democrats wanted the humiliation of being defeated by a grinning
buffoon like Travis Babcock. But when the Wormwood scandal broke—that’s what
the secret program was called, Wormwood—suddenly Babcock’s popularity plummeted
and Danton Prowse was the frontrunner. Even with the inconvenient revelations
about Wormwood, Babcock probably would have come out on top, except for one
very troubling fact: he couldn’t explain where the bomb had gone. If Project
Wormwood had one redeeming quality, it was that it had been successful: the
technicians had managed to create a single ten kiloton nuclear bomb roughly the
size of an Oxford dictionary. But no one seemed to know what had happened to
it.

As it turns out, the American public will
put up with a president who undertakes a morally dubious and illegal program,
but only if it gets results.
Constitutional experts disagreed on whether
Babcock had the authority to run a secret nuclear weapons program in defiance
of Congress and various international arms treaties, but everyone agreed that
misplacing the bomb was unforgiveable. Was it tucked away in a corner of some
government warehouse, its nuclear core gradually decaying?
Had
it been stolen by some terrorist group?
Disposed of
somewhere in the depths of the Pacific?
There were plenty of theories,
but no one—not even Travis Babcock himself—seemed to know for sure. Babcock
insisted that he had only recently learned about Wormwood and planned to tell
Congress about it (after the election, of course), but only the blindest of
Republican hacks believed that.

Babcock, although he was no Rhodes Scholar, was at least
smart enough to keep the truth to himself: that the bomb had been sent through
a portal to the interdimensional hub known as the planeport, where it had
detonated, destroying the planeport and cutting Earth off from every other
plane of existence. That hadn’t been the goal, of course. The goal had been to
blow up Heaven itself.
[4]

Three months after Wormwood came to light, Prowse was
elected President of the United States, and no one was more surprised by this
than Danton Prowse. A two-term senator from Hartford, Connecticut, Prowse
combined the animal magnetism of Michael Dukakis with the unbridled energy of
John Kerry. Zion Johnson hadn’t voted for him and didn’t particularly like him,
which put him in the company of forty-nine and eighty-seven percent of the
American people as a whole, respectively. For his part, Zion Johnson preferred
a Commander-in-Chief who exuded more of an air of authority. Travis Babcock may
have been an idiot, but at least he always seemed sure of himself. Danton
Prowse always seemed to be thinking things through as he spoke, emphasizing
each word that came out of his mouth in turn, eventually arriving at his point
the way he had arrived at the Presidency: with a demeanor that suggested he
wasn’t sure where he was or how he had gotten there, but he was happy enough to
be there, all things considered.

This was the first time Zion Johnson had met Danton Prowse
in person (although they had spoken several times on the phone), and if
anything the man was less impressive in real life than on television. He was
tall but reedy and slightly hunched over, with a sort of grayish cast to his
face, as if death had decided to claim him but then gotten distracted. Zion
Johnson tried not to let his disappointment—both in the president himself and
in the presence of the little girl who was undoubtedly to be Zion Johnson’s
charge—show, but it took a great deal of effort.
Superior
attitude, superior state of mind
.

“This is Michelle,” said the president, indicating the girl.
“She’s an advisor of sorts.”

The girl nodded toward Danton Prowse and smiled almost
imperceptibly.

“An advisor,” repeated Zion Johnson, trying to make sense of
the meaning of word in this context. Politicians never just came out and said
what they meant.

“Please, sit down, Mr. Johnson,” said Prowse. “You’re making
me nervous.”

Zion Johnson glanced again at the girl, who continued to
observe him impassively, shrugged, and took a seat across from the president.

“We were disappointed with the events in South Dakota,”
Prowse said.

Here it comes, thought Zion Johnson. “Mr. President,” said
Zion Johnson. “I’ll do whatever is required of me in service of my country. But
I have to tell you right now that personal security is not my specialty.”

Prowse seemed confused.
“Personal
security?”

“I assume,” replied Zion Johnson, “that you want me to
babysit our young guest here.”

At this, Prowse burst into laughter. The girl—Michelle, if
that really was her name—smirked a little and rolled her eyes. Her reaction
made the hair stand up on the back of Zion Johnson’s neck. It wasn’t the
dramatic exasperation of a teenage girl; it was the knowing smile of someone
who was in on a joke that she despaired of anyone else ever getting.

“Michelle is not your concern,” the president said. “As I
mentioned, she is an advisor. I know she looks too young to be able to advise
me on anything but the latest Justin Bieber song, but looks can be deceiving.”

Zion Johnson smiled inwardly. Danton Prowse had a reputation
of being “out of touch,” and he’d just confirmed it. Even Zion Johnson knew
Justin Bieber hadn’t had a hit since his meltdown in 2014.

“Zion, I need you to focus,” said Prowse. “I’ve got a job
that needs doing. It’s extremely dangerous, not technically legal, and needs to
be done for the good of the country.”

“I’m listening,” said Zion Johnson.

Danton Prowse leaned back in his chair. “I assume you’re
familiar with the Wormwood project?”

“Of course,” replied Zion Johnson. “Illegal project started
by the Babcock administration to build a suitcase nuke. It cost him the
election. It’s the reason you’re president.”

Prowse smiled painedly. “Hmm, that and my winning
personality,” he said.

Zion Johnson said nothing.

“That was a joke,” added Prowse.

“I know,” replied Zion Johnson coolly. “Why did you ask me
about Wormwood?”

Prowse glanced at Michelle, who was still quietly observing
the two of them. “As you know, Wormwood was an embarrassment for this country.
Not just for Travis Babcock, for the whole country. To lose track of such a
powerful weapon… it doesn’t look good.”

“It doesn’t look particularly good for the executive branch
to have gone completely rogue with a secret weapons program either,” said Zion
Johnson.

“No, no, of course not,” replied Prowse hurriedly. “The
whole thing, it was a big clusterfuck, the way it was handled. But you know
,
we’ve had these sorts of Constitutional squabbles before.
Iran-Contra, the Teapot Dome scandal… it’s all part of the give-and-take of a
healthy democracy.
Losing a nuclear weapon, though… that’s
just embarrassing.
It damages our image overseas. I know you understand
the importance of projecting a strong image to our enemies, Zion.”

Zion Johnson nodded, agreeing in principle, but not
following where the conversation was going.

“I had a few meetings with Babcock during the transition
period,” Prowse went on. “We agreed that it was of utmost importance that the
bomb be located. And he made it very clear to me that was very unlikely to
happen, unless… extraordinary steps were taken.”