Mercury Falls by Robert Kroese

steps to his dusty brown room in the dusty brown attic of her dusty brown house in a dusty brown neighborhood in the middle of the dusty brown part of Northern California. Unfortunately, that hadn't stopped her from screeching incessantly upstairs at Karl for most of the past thirty-seven years.
    Ninety-six percent of the people who had met Karl's mother had, at one time or other, described her as "unpleasant." The remaining four percent, who were somewhat more perceptive, tended to describe her as "unpleasant and a little off ." In fact, Karl's mother was—unbeknownst to anyone—a medical curiosity: she had been born without an appendix, in place of which was a second gall bladder.
    "Karl!"
    " What? " he howled back. " Jeez , Ma. I'm getting dressed!"
    "You've been getting dressed for twenty minutes. You're going to be late!"
    "Myah-myah-myah-myah-MYAH-myah!"
    "Karl, are you mocking me?!"
    "No, Ma."
    "You'd better not! Now get down here!"
    "This shit is hard to get on, Ma! Give me a second."
    "Don't you curse at me, young man!"
    Karl let out a torrent of profanity.
    "Karl!"
    Karl Grissom was a thirty-seven-year-old film school dropout and part-time pizza delivery guy who was still acclimating to his role as the Antichrist. If it were up to him, he'd have stuck with just the pizza delivery gig, but his ma wouldn't have it. "A great opportunity," she called it. And it was, for her : an opportunity for her to get her hair styled and her toenails painted and her eyebrows plucked. Her eyebrows had been so sparse and uneven that the poor stylist had ended up removing them completely in a futile effort to produce something like a definitive line. Ma had been outraged at first, but she took it as an opportunity to have new eyebrows tattooed just above the originals, so that her face now ironically seemed to be expressing the exact horrified surprise felt by anyone who was unfortunate enough to meet her.
    Karl hated his mother, which was one thing he had in common with everyone else, whom he also hated, but not as much as he hated his mother. He hated her first of all because every day for the past nineteen years she had nagged him to stop playing with his "toys" and do the laundry, despite the fact that not once in his life had he ever done the laundry. He couldn't fathom why she still thought he might someday break down and wash his own clothes. He certainly never gave her any reason to believe that he would. Ten years ago this week, in fact, he had stopped picking up his underwear from the bathroom floor in an attempt to convince her that her nagging was causing him to regress developmentally, but this tactic had had no noticeable effect on her behavior. He was still planning his next escalation in their little power struggle.
    Karl had become the Antichrist quite by chance, at least as far as any human being knew. 7 It was very important for legal reasons that his selection appear random. For this purpose, Karl had been a good choice, because anyone looking at him could only assume that he had come into the position through sheer, unadulterated luck.
    Like most thirty-seven-year-olds who lived in their mother's attic, Karl was a fan of teen warlock Charlie Nyx.
    The Charlie Nyx books were extremely popular with those who had read them and extremely unpopular with those who had not. Despite their understandable lack of familiarity with the finer points, it was, surprisingly, the latter group that was able to discern that the true mission of Charlie Nyx was not to defend the great city of Anaheim from troglodytes, nor even to generate truckloads of money for Katie Midford, but rather to promote the diabolical interests of Lucifer himself.
    Everybody figured the Antichrist promotion was a joke, of course. Even the Mundane Observation Corps didn't take it particularly seriously. The applicants were more interested in money or fame than being conscientious servants of the Evil One. The only ones who took the gimmick seriously were