Mike turned then to track Lucifer’s aura inhabiting the very air around them. Denny turned his colloidal silver/holy water spray to a mist. He coated Mike’s wounds with the healing mixture. Mike pointed at the burned-out Cliff House above. “Lucifer is up there.”
“Go get him, Mikey,” Stan urged, as his companions tightened their formation.
Mike looked around at his battle weary, but not broken, crew. “Anyone else wounded or needing medical attention from the van? Look them over, Mongo. I’ll keep focused on Lucifer.”
Mongo immediately checked his mates for wounds, as the darkness fled from Mike’s golem back into his control. The golem crumbled again into sand and stone. “They are unharmed El Capitan Darkness.”
“Stay alert.” Mike shed his pack, keeping only his iron pike. “Lucifer’s retreating from the Cliff House. I’ll be right back.”
Mike lifted effortlessly into the air, the darkness propelling him toward his target. Lucifer spotted the shadowy figure descending from the night sky, with anguish and fear. He expected all of Demon Inc to be obliterated or possessed. Instead, the crew fought without fear, led by what Lucifer now considered Mike to be: some kind of demon. Lucifer tripped on the loose stones, doing a face plant on the ground, as Mike grabbed him by the bunched clothing at his neck.
“Hi there,” Mike greeted him. He then plunged the iron pike to the hilt in Lucifer’s temple, holding on to the hooded Satanist until only a mild shudder spasmed through the corpse. Mike plucked the iron pike free of Lucifer’s skull, wiping it clean with the man’s clothing. “I’ll get brother Mongo here with Sandy, so we can give you a nice send off.”
Mike pierced into his network. “Bring Sandy to me, Mongo. Don’t say anything that can be recorded. Come quietly, Sandy.”
“Understood,” Sandy replied, letting Mongo lift her into his arms for the flight to Mike.
A moment later, Sandy stood next to Mike. Without a word, she opened a portal into the Radalia dimension. Mike heaved Lucifer’s corpse into the opening. Sandy shut the portal a split second later. “It’s over, Mike… isn’t it?”
“I believe so. We need to stay until 7 am, without acknowledging anything about Lucifer. Everyone will be trying to get a reaction from him. They’ll find the vehicle he drove here in. It will be a mystery for the SyFy Channel to end the show on.”
“We have cold leftovers from Porky’s, El Capitan,” Mongo said, “and I brought beer. Bluto is gargling with some of it. He says the slime demons taste worse than Imam Sousa’s face.”
“That spray Denny hit my wounds with is freezing my blood. I need to get down by the heat.”
Mongo carried Sandy. Together, they returned to the stone ruins near the beach. Demon finished his second beer with a reverberating belch. “I’m glad you brought a case of beer, Mongo. It took two for slime creature taste dissipation. I don’t suppose you brought a flask of the good stuff with you.”
“I did, dog.” Mongo poured Demon a double shot into his bowl.
“Add another beer to it, brother.” Demon tasted the mix with satisfaction. “Oh man… that’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
Silently on their inner network, Mike made the final pronouncement. “Lucifer is dead and visiting Radalia. For the public and media, we have no clue what could have happened to him.”
“That was as bad as anything we’ve faced before,” Steve said. “My SyFy Channel associate called to congratulate us. They are extremely happy with our video stream.”
Mongo fixed Demon a plate of leftovers. The rest of the crew feasted tiredly on the Porky’s leftovers, sipping beer, and staying close to the heaters. Mike used the first aid kit to cover the slashes he suffered in the battle, after using pure holy water with peroxide to soak the wounds clean.
“That golem you created beat the crap out of those things,” Janis said. “I guess getting up close and personal with Rayden Kirk’s golem helped.”
“It did help me visualize it,” Mike replied on the silent network. “I’m glad Denny’s mix worked on the creatures. Lucifer conjured a slew of them. I wish I’d been comfortable enough to interrogate Lucifer, but I was worried he might have one last desperate trick.”
“What’s next for us,” Jerry asked.
“Halloween. We’re taking all the kids we saved: Jimmie Manjetti, Tina Kinsler, Breanna Tate, and Drusilla’s coma victim, Danny. Their parents have all contacted me with approval.”
“I have an idea for it,” Demon said. “I’ll get one of those frontal dog costumes and be Rocket from the ‘Guardians’. Mongo can then ride my back as Baby Groot, waving at everyone. The little kids can pick the other characters in the ‘Guardians’.”
Energetic approval for Demon’s suggestion cemented the idea into place.
“This will be the best Halloween ever,” Laura said on their network from the Demon Inc control room, where she sat next to Joanie. They provided logistics for warning Tom, Grant, and Loretta to ready replacement tanks for Mongo to swoop in to get. “Little Mike can be Starlord.”
“Steve was right about this being the worst combat yet,” Joanie said. “I thought the Haunts dropping down from the hangar bay ceiling to attack you guys on board the Hornet aircraft carrier was bad. This was worse. Are you all going to stay there until morning?”
“We didn’t do all this so we could take off and lose the hundred grand, Gidget,” Demon retorted. “You and Laura can go get some sleep. We’ll be fine. Besides, I think Mongo brought along the audio of last night’s midnight ride of Loretta Revere to keep us warm.”
Mongo shamed him. “Bad Bluto… I did bring it though.”
The Muttley snicker echoed through their minds.
The End
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Chapter: Preview
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Peace
by
Bernard Lee DeLeo
*****
PUBLISHED BY:
Bernard Lee DeLeo and RJ Parker Publishing, Inc
ISBN-13: 978-1499797473
ISBN-10: 1499797478
Copyright © 2014 by Bernard Lee DeLeo
*****
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. Please respect the author’s work. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real life persons, events, or places is purely coincidental.
*****
The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by fines and federal imprisonment.
Chapter One
Pauley and Dan
In the small town of Clinton Falls, Indiana, a young boy, Pauley Peacenik, walked with his new friend, Dan Righter. Dan’s family had moved in next door to Pauley’s family the previous week. Both boys would be attending first grade together. Dan’s parents had registered him for class a few days after moving into the area; but this would be his first day at school. Pauley, in his fourth week at school, had promised Dan’s parents to accompany his new friend to class.
Pauley and Dan had become pals when Pauley had wandered next door as Dan’s family had been in the process of moving in. Diminutive for their ages, something clicked between the boys, and a friendship had developed right away. As they neared their public school, Che Guevarra Elementary, four boys Pauley knew were in the second and third grade, hurried out to meet them. Pauley immediately reached in his pocket to get his lunch money out to give to the young extortion crew.
“What are you doing, Pauley?” Dan asked his friend curiously.
“Those boys coming toward us will beat us up if we don’t
give them our lunch money,” Pauley instructed. “They usually just push me around a little if I give them the money without making them ask for it.” “I’m not giving them any money,” Dan said determinedly.
“I’ll give you half of mine,” Pauley replied worriedly. “Maybe they won’t notice. I promised your folks I’d show you the way.”
Dan looked over at his new friend, seeing fear in the young boy’s eyes. He was afraid too; but the thought of paying out his lunch money for the privilege of being pushed around endlessly went against the boy’s nature, and his Father’s teachings.
“Pauley,” Dan reasoned, “they’ll never stop taking our money, if we don’t make them stop.”
An icy, frigid, cold swept up Pauley’s body from his toes to the very top of his head, causing him to shudder as he pictured such a confrontation. His eyes became round as saucers. “But Dan, we’ll get in trouble… and they’re bigger… and they’ll beat us up.”
“Maybe a couple times,” Dan nodded in agreement with a sigh, “but when it costs them to try and take our money, they’ll pick an easier target.”
“But... they... I mean...” Pauley stuttered, but by then the bullies had reached the two friends.
The heavyset boy, who easily stood a head taller then either Dan or Pauley, snickered back at his three friends. Pauley spotted him and dropped his books at the shock of being so close, so quickly. Dan had stopped too. He did not have any books yet.
“Well, if it isn’t PP, and his little friend,” the bully said, leaning menacingly close to Pauley’s face, as his three other minions spread out around the smaller boys in a semicircle.
Pauley held out his lunch money in the palm of his shaking right hand, which the bully next to him snatched with a laugh. The boy who had taken his money put his left foot behind Pauley’s ankles, and with a shove, pushed him down. This provoked laughter from the others before the lead bully turned his attention to Dan.
“In case PP didn’t tell you,” the bully said, hovering over Dan, “we’re the school tax collectors.”
“He told me,” Dan said, hating the helpless fear making his voice quiver. “I’m not paying you anything.”
The heavyset boy’s mouth spread into a mean slash of a grin. He looked over knowingly at his three friends. Suddenly, the bully turned back to Dan, and pushed him hard with both hands to Dan’s chest, causing the smaller boy to pitch backwards painfully to the ground. To Pauley’s horror, he saw all four boys kneel over his friend and begin pummeling him. Pauley froze with fear. He could not order his body to move even a muscle, as every tendon in his body clenched tight.
Dan’s arms and feet were flailing, so the older boys could not get a grip on them, and he began to find the mark with some of his wild punches and kicks. When the leader of the tax collectors took a kick in the stomach, he broke away, with his cohorts following. Dan scrambled to his feet during the pause in the melee, using his shirtsleeve to wipe away the tears from his face and blood from his mouth. His eye was red, and had already started to swell; but he lifted up his hands, fists clenched.
“This ain’t over, you little shit,” Heavyset threatened, still holding his stomach. “We’ll get you tomorrow. You better have the money ready.”
“I ain’t paying you tomorrow, or the next day, or any day,” Dan yelled back. “This’ll be the only thing you get from me.”
The bullies stared at the little boy, rubbing sore spots where Dan’s wild defense had hit home. They shook fingers threateningly at him, backing towards the school, as Pauley overcame his paralysis finally to run over next to his friend. He looked Dan over, terrified at the sight of blood trickling down from Dan’s split lip, and the sight of his friend’s swollen face. Dan gingerly touched his eye, and grinned crookedly at Pauley.
“Dan, you look bad,” Pauley gasped.
“I’m okay, Pauley,” Dan said simply, calm in a way he had never been before. “I looked worse when I took a header off my bicycle. C’mon, you can show me where the bathroom is so I can wash up.”
“Please Dan,” Pauley said, tears of compassion leaking out at the corners of his eyes for his friend’s distress. “Just pay them.”
Dan shook his head sadly. “Sorry Pauley, I can’t. I’ll understand if you don’t want to walk with me anymore, but I ain’t giving those goons anything but a hard time.”
“We can still be friends at home, Dan,” Pauley said quickly. “I... I just don’t...”
Dan put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Pauley, we’ll just play together at home, away from here.”
The next day, Pauley walked to school alone, paying off his tormentors. The bullies did not approach Dan, and all but the leader made overtures of friendship to him, respecting the little boy’s stand. Soon, only Heavyset extorted money from Pauley, but only for a day. When Heavyset lay in wait for Pauley once again on the way to school, Dan, with Heavyset’s former friends, intercepted the bully.
“What’s going on,” Heavyset whined.
“You ain’t taking Pauley’s money anymore,” Dan said simply.
“Oh real brave now, with these other traitors to help you,” Heavyset retorted, pointing at the other three boys with Dan.
Dan looked around, and then turned back to smile calmly at Heavyset. “They aren’t going to do anything. It will only be me.”
Dan put up his fists. Heavyset looked at the determined little boy, and then at his former friends, who had backed away. Heavyset thought of pain, and then he remembered fear. He turned to leave, but Dan grabbed his shirt and pulled him to a stop.
“Don’t go near Pauley again, understand?”
Heavyset nodded, without turning around, and Dan let him go.
Dan again walked to school with Pauley, and they were friends throughout their school years. Other bullies came along, as they entered first Joan Baez Junior High School, and later Timothy Leary High; but mysteriously, Pauley would only be terrorized for a short time before the threats would end. First, his friend Dan would show up at his house banged up, saying it was nothing when Pauley would ask what happened. Then suddenly, at whatever school they were going to, the problems with other students would end.
Graduation finally came, and the friends went their separate ways. Dan gained entrance to the Naval Academy, while his friend Pauley won a scholarship to Cal Berkeley. They promised to keep in touch; but life has a way of passing by, with even the best of friends losing track of one another.
Pauley felt jubilant, as he fell in with a student activist group, called Young Communists Against Anything American. Together with his newfound friends, Pauley protested everything even remotely in America’s interests, and most of all, violence. Pauley knew if he could just get the whole world to buy a Coke, instead of go to war, he would be in heaven. He marched, he sang, he turned the other cheek, he carried signs, and no one picked on him. All he had to do was always blame America, and his new friends would cheer.
One thing led to another, and Pauley found himself in Baghdad, with some of his friends from Berkeley, he had stayed together with after graduation. They were to be human shields, to protect the innocent Iraqi Milk Factories against the dread empire building, baby-killing Americans. To their shock, Pauley and his friends were not bused to a Milk Factory. They were taken to a strange ramshackle plant. It exuded horrific fumes, and shipped out truckloads of containers with poison symbols on them, bound for hideout in Syria. When the human shields protested to the Iraqi guards who were assigned to them, they were pistol whipped, and thrown into a squalid dungeon under the complex.
Here, their laughing guards told them the other human shields, from countries against America, had already been sent home; but the young American volunteers would be held for ransom. Pauley Peacenik was in misery. His face was torn in many places from the pistol whippings. He could hardly see, and some of his teeth were broken. The guards told them they would never go home. There were no more protests from the poor puppets.
They washed
the guards’ clothes, and served them in any way asked. If they were slow, or stumbled in their tasks, they were beaten. If they spoke even a word, which sounded like a complaint, they were lashed with heavy whips. Weeks passed, with little besides scraps to eat in their now putrid smelling cell. Pauley Peacenik lay in the dirty straw on the cell floor, shaking with cold in the rags left him by the guards. His eyes were sunken in, and only two others of his erstwhile Young Communists were still alive. The guards now beat them for sport, waving articles about the coming war in their faces.
Suddenly, one dawn, explosions rocked the foundations of the building he and his fellow prisoners were incarcerated in. Shouts, gunfire, and more explosions went on all through the day. A wild-eyed guard ran into their cell, waving an AK47 rifle at them, gesturing for the prisoners to get up, and stand against the wall. He screamed unintelligibly at them, and then aimed the rifle to kill them. The two men with Pauley fell on their knees in supplication, hands clasped upwards, pleading for mercy. Pauley had learned Arabic from listening to his captors, and conversing with them over the past months. He understood enough of what the guard yelled to know there would be no mercy.
Pauley Peacenik merely leaned back, and smiled through cracked lips, for he knew finally the lesson Dan had tried to show him by example so many years ago. He stood up straight, thinking to himself: it won’t be so bad. The Iraqi guard, seeing resolution in Pauley’s face, turned the gun on him first. Before the guard could fire, Pauley heard a sharp cracking sound, and brain matter blew out a hole in the forehead of the guard, catapulting the man into a twitching heap, face first on the cell floor.
“US Navy Seals,” a strong voice yelled, as black clad figures swept into the cell, weapons searching for enemies. The leader of the team ran over next to Pauley’s sobbing friends, checking them over quickly for hidden weapons.
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