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
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.”
Noncommittal murmurs arose from the men.
Mercury tried again. “Anyone want to clue me in about what challenges we’re facing with level
seven? The first six levels seemed to go smoothly. Level seven is pretty much more of the same if I
remember the plans correctly. No judgments here, just trying to get an idea of any special challenges
we might have with level seven so I can make sure to give you all the resources you need. My goal is
to provide an atmosphere of empowerment.”
Still no one spoke up.
“Hold on, I think I’ve got a copy of the plans with me,” said Mercury, riffling through a satchel
hanging off his shoulder. “Yep, here we go. Hmmm. Yeah, nothing special for level seven. Sun-baked
clay bricks on the inside, fire-glazed bricks on the outside walls, same as the other six levels. And
you’ll only need about half as many bricks as you did for the last level, on account of the fact that
we’re building a pyramid. Volume decreases geometrically as we go up, as you’ll recall. I don’t mean
to tell you your business. We’re all professionals here.”
Grunts and mutters.
“OK,” said Mercury. “It’s cool. I’m sure you guys are tired. Why don’t you take the rest of the
day off and we’ll meet back here first thing in the morning? I’ll have Tiamat swing by in case you’re
more comfortable talking to her.”
Suddenly the men leaped to their feet and all began talking at once. Mercury could make out
nothing in the cacophony of voices.
“Whoa, hold on,” he chided. “One at a time. You, Nabu. Tell me what’s going on.”
Mercury hated playing the Tiamat card. He took appealing to her authority as a personal failing
as a manager. Besides preferring positive motivation over negative and feeling that he should be able
to handle the men without appealing to an external authority, he was secretly afraid the men would
someday call his bluff. He had a better chance of summoning a thunderstorm than getting Tiamat to
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show up. Never a hands-on leader, Tiamat rarely even bothered these days to make the occasional
unscheduled appearance to berate the laborers for their stupidity and laziness and throw a few over the
edge as an example for the others. That left Mercury to rally the men on his own, a difficult enough
task even when he wasn’t being called off on Heavenly errands every other week.
Nabu, one of the group foremen, launched into a litany of grievances: shoddy brickmaking, lack
of proper burial arrangements for workers who fell to their deaths (Tiamat had recently decreed that
only one funeral would be allowed per week no matter how many men had died and no matter how hot
the weather was), preferential treatment for the Amorites, and on and on. But the root problem was
one Mercury knew well: an ailment he called almost-finished-ism.
one Mercury knew well: an ailment he called almost-finished-ism.
The men had been laboring toward the completion of the ziggurat for nearly a generation, but
now that it was nearly done, they feared the change its completion would bring. There would be other
ziggurats, that much was certain—Tiamat’s assurances that this was “most likely the last one” had
always proved false in the past. But relocation was difficult on men with families, and starting over
was always a bit demoralizing.
“Some of the men and I were talking,” Nabu was saying. “We were thinking, why build another
ziggurat when we could just make this one taller? I mean, a pair of two-hundred-foot-tall ziggurats is
impressive, but wouldn’t one three-hundred-foot ziggurat be better? Imagine that, a three-hundredfoot ziggurat!”
Mercury sighed. “Admittedly a three-hundred-foot ziggurat would be a sight to behold,” he said.
“But you understand that a ziggurat is essentially a pyramid, right? It’s a fundamental geometric
shape. The height is a function of the size of the base. You can’t, you know, decide when you’re ninety
percent done to make it taller.”
“Right, right,” said Nabu. “But here’s what we were thinking: what if we excavate, say fifty feet
deep all the way around the base of the ziggurat, to a distance of a mile or two? And then we cover up
the dirt at the base with more bricks? I mean, who would know we didn’t just build it fifty feet higher?
Pretty clever, eh?”
Mercury managed a pained smile. “Yes,” he said, doing some quick estimating in his head.
“Moving eight hundred thousand cubic feet of sand does sound like an attractive option. But here’s the
thing: ziggurats are meant to look impressive from a distance. You’ll notice that we deliberately built
it on a hill, and we even brought sand in to raise some low spots in the middle of the site before we
started construction. In fact, right over there, if I’m not mistaken, is where your father died of heat
stroke twenty-five years ago while carting in buckets of sand one beautiful summer day. The point is,
we’d have to excavate several miles out for it to do any good. It might take a hundred years, and we’d
be digging up all the work your father did—and probably your father himself, if I’m remembering
what we did with the corpses that day.”
Nabu was quiet for a moment. Mercury could tell he was still trying to think of a way to make his
excavation idea work, so he pressed the attack.
“Also, there’s the flooding problem. Remember last year when your brother-in-law died in that
flash flood because he couldn’t get out of the limestone quarry in time? Basically you’re talking about
making all of Babylon into one big limestone quarry. Whenever it rained, we would all have to flee to
the surrounding hills where we had dumped all the sand from the excavation. And there we’d sit,
looking down on our pitiful ziggurat sticking out of the mud. No, Nabu, I’m afraid it’s no good. We
just need to finish this thing and move on. So what do you say, guys? We start bright and early
tomorrow morning on level seven?”
The men grumbled assent. Mercury thanked them for their hard work and trudged back down the
steps. “I’m not cut out for this job,” he muttered to himself. “Bloody ziggurats. Where’s the point?”