Mercury Revolts: (Book Four of the Mercury Series) Read online

  Brayden’s face flushed and he sank into the cushions of the lumpy old couch. Clay was to his left and Sean and Neva were sitting on easy chairs with badly worn and stained floral upholstery. Brayden’s aunt’s basement was like a furniture graveyard.

  “Fine,” said Sean, who had been dragging the edge of his sneaker around the pentagram in an effort to adjust the lines. “I fixed it, see?”

  “What the hell is that?” asked Clay.

  “Pentagram,” said Sean defensively.

  The group regarded the blurred lines dubiously.

  “It looks like Bob Marley,” said Neva.

  “It does not!” Sean protested. Then, after a moment: “Who’s Bob Marley?”

  Neva sighed heavily. She already had her doubts about Sean’s fitness as High Priest, and his ignorance of a revolutionary leader like Bob Marley

  [2] only cemented his incompetence in her mind.

  “Whatever,” said Clay, the most pragmatic of the group. “My mom wants me home by eleven, so if we’re going to do this, we need to get started.”

  “OK,” said Sean. “Let’s do this.” He rooted around his backpack, producing four black candles and a cigarette lighter. He lit each of the candles in turn and handed one to each of the three Unholy Acolytes, keeping one for himself. He directed them to take their places around the ersatz hexagram and opened Demonology for Imbeciles to the chapter on summonings.

  Demonology for Imbeciles was a strange book, even by …for Imbeciles standards. After dominating the instructional book market in the 90s, the publisher of the …for Imbeciles books, I Don’t Get It, Ltd., fell on hard times due to the rise of a plethora of free instructional websites written by and for imbeciles. Imbeciles wanting to build a gazebo or breed cuttlefish found all the information they needed online without having to pay $19.95 for Building a Gazebo for Imbeciles or Breeding Cuttlefish for Imbeciles. IDGI’s response to this threat was to launch the …for Cretins line of books, aimed at people who were too stupid to get on the Internet. When titles such as Watering Plants for Cretins, Four-Way Stops for Cretins, and Are My Clothes Inside Out Again? for Cretins inexplicably foundered, IDGI spent $6 million on market research, which informed them that most of their target audience thought cretins were a kind of aquatic animal. The …for Cretins line was thus relaunched as the …for Total F*cking Dumbshits line, but this effort failed as well because, as it turns out, even total f*cking dumbshits have a little pride.

  The end result of this series of failures was that IDGI began to skimp on the content of their books while simultaneously attempting to broaden their appeal. Thus Quantum Physics for Imbeciles, Feng Shui for Imbeciles, and Urban Engineering for Imbeciles shared the same cartoons, with minor variations in the captions. Demonology for Imbeciles was a rush job thrown together from various public domain sources of dubious credibility by an editor whose knowledge of the occult was gleaned entirely from Black Sabbath records and I Dream of Jeannie. As it happened, though, the editor had come across one of the few extant recipes for a bona fide demonic summoning in the semi-coherent ramblings of an eighteenth century inventor and occultist named Josiah Vandersloot, which Vandersloot had published under the awkward title The Little Book What’s About Demons. Had Vandersloot’s grasp of English syntax been on par with his knowledge of the dark arts, the publication of The Little Book What’s About Demons might have ushered in a golden age of demonology, but unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), most readers were unable to make any sense of his garbled prose. The IDGI editor cleaned up the verbiage as best he could, throwing in Rush lyrics when he got stuck.

  The result was that although Demonology for Imbeciles was almost entirely rubbish, chapter fourteen included, purely by chance, a nearly flawless recipe for summoning a demon. The only thing missing was the name of the demon to be summoned. Demons guard their true names jealously, and it’s virtually impossible to summon a demon without knowing his or her name.

  Demonic names are represented by a complex sigil that is generally comprised of a geometric figure enclosed in a circle. It is commonly thought that the pentagram is a Satanic symbol, but in fact the use of a pentagram in Satanic ceremonies arises from a misreading of ancient texts in which a five-pointed star is used as a placeholder for the name of a particular demon. Trying to conduct a summoning by using a pentagram is the spiritual equivalent of asking the telephone operator to connect you to Insert Name Here.

  By an odd coincidence, Sean’s imperfect hex-cum-pentagram very closely resembled the sigil for a certain fallen angel who had been exiled on a distant plane as the result of the accidental detonation of a small nuclear device at an interplanar transport hub. And so it happened that shortly after Sean finished reciting the incantation on page 124 on Demonology for Imbeciles, a cloud of sulfurous smoke arose from the sigil, enveloping the terrified members of the First Satanic Church of Milhaus, who dove behind the furniture for cover. After a moment the smoke began to clear, revealing a lanky figure who immediately doubled over in a fit of uncontrollable coughing, apparently overwhelmed by the fumes. After some time it became clear that the man was trying to speak.

  “…open… window…” the man gasped.

  His initial fright having been supplanted with nausea, Sean eagerly complied, propping open one of the ground-level basement windows. Clay found a small electric fan which he turned on in an attempt to disperse some of the rotten egg smell.

  “Ugh,” said the man, waving his hand in front of his face. “You never get used to the smell.” The four congregants stood gaping at the newcomer. They weren’t sure what a demon looked like, but none of them had expected this. Other than being exceptionally tall and adorned with an absurd shock of silver hair, he looked like an ordinary human being. Male, good-looking—if a little lanky—apparently about twenty-five years old.

  “Are you… a demon?” asked Brayden at last.

  The tall man frowned. “Let’s not get hung up on labels,” he said, regarding the dilapidated furniture of the basement. “Speaking of which, what sort of operation are you running here?”

  “We’re Satanists,” announced Sean, trying to sound confident.

  “Ah, Satanists!” the man said, nodding. “Adherents of Lucifer. Of course you realize that Lucifer is in Heavenly custody, and therefore unable to continue his rebellion against the highers-up? And that even if he weren’t, all transportation between the Mundane Plane and the Infernal Plane has been cut off, thanks to the some knucklehead detonating a nuke at the planeport?”

  The assembled congregants of the First Satanic Church of Milhaus gaped, speechless.

  “Of course, you must know something about interplanar travel,” said the man, “seeing as how you summoned me.”

  Sean pointed wordlessly to the copy of Demonology for Imbeciles, which was resting on the back of a dilapidated easy chair. The man picked it up and thumbed through a few of the pages. “Ugh,” he said. “Where do they get this crap? How in hell did you manage to… oh. Wow, they stole the whole summoning chapter from Vandersloot’s The Little Book What’s About Demons. Man, I thought we’d burned all of those.” He frowned, staring at the corrupted pentagram on the floor. “But how’d you know my name?”

  “Your name?” asked Neva.

  “Well, you misspelled it,” the man said, gesturing at the sigil, “but you got the phonetics right.”

  The four regarded the sigil. “That symbol is your name?” asked Sean.

  The man nodded. “More or less.”

  “How do you pronounce it?” asked Sean.

  “Oh, no,” said the man. “I’m not saying it out loud. Bad enough you wrote it out like that.” He dragged his foot across the sigil, obliterating it.

  “But what do we call you then?” asked Neva.

  “You aren’t really going to need to call me anything,” said the man, “because I’m not planning on hanging out with you morons.” He walked passed Neva and began up the basement stairs. He stopped and turned, g
rinning. “But if you’re wondering what name to give the malevolent entity you’ve unleashed on the world,” he said, “you can call me Mercury.”

  Chapter Two

  Near Rapid City, South Dakota; August 2016

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” asked Nisroc, pausing suddenly on the trail.

  Izbazel stopped short behind him and thought about it for a moment, gazing at the massive granite faces towering over them. The fact was, Izbazel wasn’t at all sure it was a good idea. In fact, if he were honest, he’d lay even odds that it was an absolutely terrible idea. But Izbazel wasn’t particularly good at being honest with himself, and he was even worse at being honest with others. “Of course I’m sure,” he said. “You’ll see. This is going to be huge.”

  Nisroc sighed and continued trudging up the sloping path. Izbazel was immediately behind him, followed by Konrath and Scalzi. Each of them wore a heavy pack and carried two large duffel bags, and they were sweating in the heat of the South Dakota sun.

  The four demons were all that was left of the once proud and globally feared organization known as Chaos Faction. After pulling off a string of several high-profile terrorist attacks around the world, Chaos Faction was betrayed to the federal agents by one of its own, a demon named Ramiel, and most of its members were arrested and never heard from again. Among those who were apprehended was Tiamat, the demoness who was the brains behind Chaos Faction, and her right-hand demon, Gamaliel.

  The four demons who remained at large were decidedly second-string: they had only gotten away because Tiamat had insisted they be nowhere near the site of what turned out to be Chaos Faction’s last major operation, knocking over Fort Knox.

  [3] That operation had failed, thanks to Ramiel, and now Izbazel found himself in charge of what was left of the organization, more-or-less by default. He and Nisroc were the only ones with any experience running covert operations, and Nisroc didn’t have the temperament of a leader.

  Given that the four of them were demons and therefore capable of manipulating interplanar energy fields, it would have been a simple matter for them to create chaos on a large scale—for example, by crashing the computers of the New York Stock Exchange with a freak magnetic pulse, or by replacing the face of Ben Franklin on ten million hundred dollar bills at the Federal Reserve with that of Rick Springfield. But the modus operandi of Chaos Faction had always been to use mundane technology, for reasons that Izbazel wasn’t completely clear on. He thought it had something to do with not wanting to escalate the conflict with the powers of Order into a full-fledged war. Or maybe it was because Tiamat had wanted it to look like Chaos Faction was a large grass-roots operation expressing the frustrations of millions of disenfranchised people and not merely a band of rogue demons wreaking mischief. The subtleties of Tiamat’s decision-making processes were beyond Izbazel’s somewhat pedestrian mind.

  Whatever the explanation, Izbazel intended to stay within the operational guidelines Tiamat had established. Eventually he hoped to figure out where Tiamat and the other demons were being held and break them out—but not before he had established himself as Tiamat’s obvious choice for second-in-command. Ideally he’d find a way to rescue Tiamat while leaving that asshole Gamaliel to rot in prison.

  For now, though, he needed to focus on the mission at hand. So far, Chaos Faction had encountered no resistance in its latest mission—only confused glances and giggling from tourists who couldn’t imagine why anyone would need an oversized backpack and two duffel bags full of supplies to hike the half-mile circuit of the Presidential Trail. Izbazel now saw that their luck had come to an end, though: a park ranger was walking down the trail toward them, and he didn’t look happy.

  Izbazel pushed Nisroc aside, taking the lead. Picking up his pace, he pretended not to see the ranger in the hopes that if he didn’t stop, the ranger wouldn’t bother to ask about the packs.

  “Hold on there, guys,” said the ranger, a hippie-looking blond guy with his hair in a ponytail. “What’s in the packs?”

  “We have the right to travel unmolested by fascist thugs,” snapped Izbazel, while the other three simultaneously shouted, “Just water!” In the heat of the moment, Izbazel had forgotten their agreed-upon response.

  “Water, huh?” said the ranger, ignoring Izbazel’s outburst. “Mind if I take a look?”

  “You don’t need to look in our packs,” said Izbazel, with a slight wave of his hand.

  The ranger stared at Izbazel. “I don’t need to look in your packs,” he said.

  Izbazel smiled and started to walk past the ranger.

  “But I’m going to,” the ranger added, placing his hand on Izbazel’s shoulder.

  Before Izbazel could react, something flew over his shoulder from behind, smacking the ranger in the forehead. The ranger’s eyes went wide, and then his pupils rolled back in his head and he fell to the ground. The golf ball-sized rock that had struck him skittered into the underbrush.

  Izbazel whirled to face Nisroc. “What the hell was that?”

  Nisroc held his hands up. “It looked like you needed some help.”

  “You think I couldn’t have hit him with a rock if I had wanted to?” growled Izbazel. “You thought to yourself, ‘Man, Izzy’s in real trouble here. What he needs is someone capable of throwing a rock at a forest ranger’s head from five feet away. It’s a good thing I’m here, because that’s right at the top of my impressive list of talents.’ Is that it?”

  Nisroc’s brow furrowed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think I understand the question?”

  “Forget it,” Izbazel snapped. “Let’s get out of here before he comes to.”

  Izbazel pressed on, leading the three demons up the trail. Soon they had looped around to the rocky plateau on the back of Mount Rushmore.

  “Alright,” said Izbazel. “For this next part, we need to cut across country so we can get to the faces.”

  “Which way?” asked Scalzi, peering into the distance.

  “That way,” said Izbazel, pointing to his left.

  “Can’t be,” said Scalzi.

  “Why not?” asked Izbazel.

  “We should be able to see the backs of their heads.”

  “The backs…” started Izbazel. “You realize that it’s just the faces carved into the rock, right? Not the whole head?”

  Scalzi frowned. “That’s a bit misleading then, isn’t it?”

  “How is it misleading?” asked Izbazel.

  “Well, when you see George Washington’s face, you say, ‘Look, it’s George Washington.’ You don’t say, ‘Look, it’s George Washington’s face, behind which is probably a big pile of loose gravel and shrubbery.’”

  “It’s not… look, just shut up, OK? No more talking. That goes for you too, Konrath. Konrath!”

  Konrath, who had stopped to pick daisies a few paces behind the rest of the group, suddenly jerked to attention. “Yessir, Izzy,” he said. “No talking.”

  “Good,” said Izbazel. “Now, we’re going to cut across here and climb down the faces, just like North by Northwest. Got it?”

  The three demons nodded.

  Izbazel left the path and started to cross the rocky field toward the front of the mountain. He had gotten about ten paces when he realized no one was following him. He turned to see the other three demons walking the opposite direction.

  “What in blazes are you guys doing?” he yelled.

  The three stopped and exchanged confused glances.

  “You said north by northwest,” said Nisroc at last.

  “The movie!” growled Izbazel. “Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint scale the faces of Mount Rushmore to get away from Martin Landau.”

  “Oh!” cried Nisroc. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why were they trying to get away from Martin Landau? Seems like a nice enough fellow.” The other two demons nodded in agreement.

  “Forget I said anything about North by Northwest!” snapped Izbazel. “Just be quiet and f
ollow me.”

  The demons shrugged, muttered to each other, and fell in line behind Izbazel. It wasn’t long before they had reached the top of the gigantic sculpture. They lined up on the edge of a lock of Jefferson’s hair, overlooking the vast slope of the Founder’s forehead.

  “How long did this take to make?” Konrath asked.

  “Millions of years,” answered Scalzi confidently. “Erosion.”

  “You idiot,” spat Izbazel. “They carved it out of the rock with explosives, just like the Grand Canyon. Tie the end of this rope around that rock over there.”

  Scalzi and Konrath took the end of the rope and tied it to the boulder Izbazel had indicated.

  “OK,” said Izbazel. “Nisroc, you’re going to climb down the rope and swing over to Washington.”

  “Why me?” asked Nisroc.

  “You said you had experience with explosives.”

  Nisroc frowned. “You asked me if I had ever blown a nose.”

  “You must have misunderstood. Anyway, there’s nothing to it. Just shove the explosives up Washington’s left nostril. I’ll activate the detonator from here.”

  “Why Washington?” asked Nisroc. “What’s wrong with Jefferson?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Jefferson. But George Washington is the alpha male of the group.

  “He’s the what?” asked Konrath.

  “The alpha male. The leader. Father of his country, all that.”

  Nisroc rubbed his chin. “I kinda think Roosevelt could take him.”

  “Sure,” agreed Izbazel. “It’s generally agreed that Teddy Roosevelt was the manliest of all the presidents. If they were all in a bar fight, Teddy would come out on top. Lincoln would make a good show of it, but he’s too lanky and slow. And Jefferson—well, let’s be honest here, a delicate guy like Jefferson isn’t going to last long against dudes like Washington or Roosevelt. But as manly as Roosevelt was, Washington was the original American badass. Stood up to the greatest military of the time. Cracked walnuts in his bare hands. Valley Forge, cherry tree, all that. First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. So he’s the one whose nose we need to blow.”