Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,103

continued.

“To go easy on me, I guess. Quick death by asphyxiation. Either that, or they ran out of nails.”

Attention turned, for a while, to the nitty-gritty details of de-crucifying this employee of Jake’s. The cross had been socketed into an aboveground framework bolted together with slotted angle irons, rising to about midthigh on Sophia. Only gravity was holding it there, and so they decided to get all hands around it and lift it straight out. Then they set it down on the parking lot, still vertical, and Sophia braced the butt of it with her foot while the guys walked it down. The victim was now supine, breathing much easier. Sophia walked up to that end of the cross and squatted down next to him as the men hemmed and hawed about how to remove the nails without the crowbar’s crushing his wrists. For the nails had been driven not through his palms but through the complex of bones where the forearm joined the hand.

“If you have a hacksaw or better yet something like an abrasive cutoff wheel you could simply remove the heads from the nails. Then I could lift my arms right off. My name is Enoch. You’d be Sophia. I’d shake your hand but—”

“Maybe later,” Sophia said. “What is that nailed to yours? Doesn’t look like a Bible.”

“Oh, it could be almost any book,” Enoch said dismissively. “I didn’t have one on me—unusual for a missionary, and confusing to them—so they took one at random from the library of that school.”

“It’s The Boys’ First Book of Radio and Electronics by Alfred Morgan,” Sophia said.

“Oh, that’s a good one!” he said. He turned his head to look at his left wrist. “You see what I mean?” he said to Eric. “They had a disagreement as to the correct pressure setting on the air compressor.”

“They used a nail gun?” Pete said incredulously. “Lazy.”

“Of course they did! It’s very laborious hand-driving a sixteen-penny nail into glulam. They like guns. Tap, tap. Done. My point being that if the setting is too high, the nail goes all the way through, which spoils it. You’ll note that—experienced crucifixionists that they are—they dialed it back so that it only went in part of the way. Plenty of leeway there for you to get a hacksaw under the head.”

An hour later they were back across the bridge in Sioux City. Sophia had been envisioning a helicopter ambulance or something, but the fact of the matter was that Enoch wasn’t that badly hurt. Each wrist, of course, had a puncture wound all the way through, but apparently the nails found a way between the little bones and so it was all soft tissue damage. The swelling looked dreadful and had turned both hands into stiff purple mittens—when they gave him a bottle of Dasani, he had to trap it between his palms, like a bear—but there simply wasn’t a lot to do medically. Jake had arranged for doctors to be there, and they took him to the local trauma center just for the sake of form. But, other than the wrists, he was fine.

“Where next?” Enoch asked Sophia as they sat in a waiting room in the X-ray unit. “Oh, Jake mentioned you were on a cross-country trip. Which come to think of it would be fairly obvious even if he hadn’t mentioned it.”

“Uh, well, before all this happened, we were just going to keep driving west. South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming . . .”

“I don’t suppose I could talk you into making a little southerly detour?” Enoch asked. “To Moab.” He shrugged. “Business there.”

The detour would add a couple of days to the journey. They raised, then eventually dismissed, the obvious questions: Couldn’t Jake just get Enoch a plane ticket? Or, come to think of it, a whole plane? Why was Enoch now their problem? What kind of weird stuff had he been up to among the Ameristanis, and would he turn out to be an insufferable weirdo during the two days they’d have to spend in the car with him?

They went out for coffee. While they stood in line at Starbucks, Phil asked Enoch point-blank: “What are you? Not just some regular Joe, apparently.”

Sophia gave him side-eye. Enoch noticed that and raised his eyebrows in an amused way. “It’s perfectly all right!” he assured her. “One so rarely gets a direct question.” Then, to Phil, he said, “As far as I can make out, I am an emissary of sorts from another plane of