Grimoire Diabolique

by Edward Lee

  I’d just come up from the docks down there, you know, by the Market Square, and I was walking up toward Clay Street. ’Rome, my pimp, he usually picked me and his other two girls up at about four a.m. Best time for us alley girls to turn tricks is after two, after the bars are closed ’cos then the cops stop buzzing the street to bust our chops. Fuckin’ cops, nine times outa ten when they catch you, all they do is make you give ’em a blowjob, then let you go. Anyway, here I am, hoofing it up to Clay after turning about five tricks, and then there’s this rumble way down deep in my belly and this sound like slow thunder, and I look up and see this ugly motherfuckin’ thing flying about hundred feet over my head. Didn’t know what to make of it. It looked like a big black kite in the sky, and when it passed, I could see this weird blue-green glow coming out of the back of the thing, its engines, I guess. I died a couple hours later, and the next day I woke up a grub.

  There was a big whupdeedo for a little while. All of a sudden there were ten thousand dead people walking around and not knowing what the fuck hit them. President called an emergency meeting or some shit. Oh, you should’ve heard all the fancy talk they were spouting. At first they were gonna “euthanize” us “to safeguard the societal whole from potential contraindications,” until some egghead at CDC verified that we weren’t psychotic or contagious or radioactive or anything. Then some asshole Republican senator made a big pitch about how we should be “socially impounded.” “Protean symtomologies,” see, that’s what they were worried about. These shitheads wanted to round us all up and put us on an island somewhere! It all blew over, though, after the activists started gearing up, and they let us be. After all, grubs are people too.

  It didn’t hurt really. Just felt sick for a few minutes, got a headache, puked, and died. Woke up the next day feeling pretty much the same as I always did. Woke up a Grub, and that’s my story.

  We call live people “pink” or “pinkies,” and they call us Grubs. Only fair, they got names for us, we got names for them. ’Rome didn’t get it, the prick, he stayed pink, and so did his other two hookers. The shit from the plane wouldn’t get you if you were in a car or under a roof. About a dozen other hookers got it, though, ’cos they were out on the street just like me when that fucked up plane flew by, and now every pink hooker in the city hates us. See, johns want Grubs more than pink girls ’cos we’re cheaper and we ain’t got diseases. AIDS, herpes, and all that shit, I had it all when I was pink, but not no more, and a john knows that if he buys himself a nut with a grub he ain’t gonna catch nothing.

  Here’s why I killed ’Rome, though. After I got grubbed, he got this brainstorm that he could really cop a bundle off me with the kinks. He’d work me right out of his crib, hitting johns up for a couple hundred bucks an hour! These sick fucks’d come in and do anything they wanted, and I mean anything. Bondage, S&M, scat, that sort of shit. ’Rome’s only rule was that they weren’t allowed to break any bones or cut off any parts. These kinks were a trip, let me tell you. You’d be surprised how many really sick motherfuckers there are in the world. They’d tie me up, jack me out, stick needles in my tits, shit in my mouth, you fuckin’ name it.

  Well, I started to get sick of this shit real fast. Here’s this scumbag making cash hand over fist offa my ass, and I don’t get shit out of it. So I…

  Well, if you wanna know the details, I busted a toilet tank cover over his head one night, cut his belly open, and ate his guts.

  Hell. Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what she’s gotta do.

  ««—»»

  See, grubs can only eat raw stuff. You eat regular food like the pinkies and the shit don’t come out, you bloat up. There was this one gal named Sue who got grubbed just like me—blonde, kinda heavy set, really big tits—and she just goes on eating the regular shit that the pinkies eat, and one day I saw her walking past the hotel and, I swear, she’s big as Jabba the Hut, and before she could make it to the bus stop, she, like, exploded right there in the street, made one holy hell of a mess. And this shithead Republican senator I was telling you about, you should’ve heard the guy, like because we can only eat raw stuff, that means we’re gonna go on some zombie rampage eating people in the streets like some horror movie so that was his case for “socially impounding” us. Glad that asshole’s shit didn’t fly. Of course, it probably sounds pretty hypocritical of me, since I just got done telling you I chowed down on ’Rome insides. I just figured it was the thing to do, that’s all. I got tired of being used by this scumbag, so I did the job on him. It wasn’t like his guts tasted any better than anything else—grubs don’t have a sense of taste.

  One good thing about being a grub hooker, though, you start to stick up for yourself. You get a case of the ass and you don’t take shit anymore. The rule had always been no girl works solo. You wanna work the street, you gotta have a pimp. Ask any hooker in any city in the world. You try to work solo, you get your face beat to mush or wind up in some dumpster with your throat cut. We’d always be too afraid to fight back, stand up for ourselves, you know? Shit, most girls are strung out anyway. I was. Back when I was pink, I was firing up scag four times a day, had to shoot up into my foot ’cos the veins on my arms all collapsed and turned black. I’d turn over my take to ’Rome every night like clockwork, and he’d keep me in junk, and that was all I cared about. When you’re strung out, you really don’t have a soul anymore. Yeah, turning my tricks, keeping ’Rome happy, and getting my fix—that’s all there was for me. It was hell, let me tell you. But after I got grubbed, I didn’t need the scag anymore, and it finally dawned on me that I didn’t need ’Rome, either. All the other grubs working the street got the same gist, and all of a sudden a lot of pimps were winding up in body bags. The pink girls, sure, they’re all still in their stables, but their pimps don’t fuck with us grubs ’cos they know that if they do, they’ll wind up just like ’Rome.

  Fuck ’em.

  ««—»»

  And this fuckhead senator? He starts this shit about we’ll destabilize the work base, how we gotta be segregated because employers will be hiring grubs instead of pinkies ’cos we can work round the clock, but then the congress passed a law against it. Of course, prostitution’s still illegal but around here at least, the cops don’t fuck with the grubs. It’s a real laugh. We give ’em the creeps, so they just let us do our thing and leave us alone.

  Er, I should say, they used to. But the new congress changed all that and fast. Now it’s roundup time, hoss. If you’re a Grub and you so much as spit on the sidewalk, there’ll be some John Law motherfucker waiting to lock you up.

  It was a plainclothes U.S. Marshal that busted me. Just my luck. “You’re under arrest for sexual solicitation,” he was nice enough to tell me only after he came in my mouth. “You motherless dickcheese ball-bag-stinking pig motherfucker!” I yelled back. I was gonna bust his coconut right there in the unmarked but before I could—PAP!—he hit me with a round from his track-operated spicule pistol, and that was it for me.

  Regular weapons don’t work on Grubs—we’re dead, you know? So the pigs started making new kinds of guns that would paralyze us. Tubocurarine darts, electromagnetic-pulse nets, milliwave disrupters. When I came to, some fat DO —stands for Detention Officer—a guy named Stryker, he was finishing up a body-cavity search while I was chained to a wall. The fucker had his hand so far up my ass I thought he was trying to stick his fingers out my mouth.

  “I want a fucking lawyer!” I screamed.

  “Lawyer? Don’t you watch the news? You’re dead, bitch. Civil rights don’t apply to dead people anymore. Thank God the Republicans are back in office. We can do anything we want to you grub scumbags.”

  When he finished fishing in my bowels, he jerked off on my ass, then let a half dozen more DOs gang-bang me right there against the wall. The last guy pissed up my ass, for posterity, I guess.

  ««—»»

  So that’s it in a nutshell. The new administration dropped all the previous non-discrimination laws. Grubs we
ren’t considered people anymore, so we were no longer entitled to humane treatment. That $10 blowjob got me a five-year sentence in this stone motel they call the Alderton Federal Rehabilitation Center. We’d heard rumors about this joint on the street; it was a Grubs-Only prison. Torture, slave labor, experiments. I learned the score here real quick; any Grubs that were good-looking got assigned to the Behavioral Segregation Wing. They called it the Fuck Farm. Gang rape was the order of the day, and so were kink jobs. In the old days, if the pinkies fucked with us we’d just pop their heads open and scarf their brains—Grubs are a lot stronger than pinks. But we couldn’t fight back anymore because all inmates were fitted with UV nodes.

  I remember the day I went in for my “fitting.”

  ««—»»

  The sign on the door read: OBEDIENCE IS VIRTUE, but below that was another sign:

  IMPLANTATION UNIT.

  Stryker and some egghead tech had me strapped down to a padded table. The tech slit each of my nipples with a scalpel, stuck something about the size of a marble in each tit, then sewed me up. Then he slit open my clitoris and repeated the procedure. Sounds nasty but it was really no big deal: Grubs don’t feel pain…er, at least that’s what I’d always thought.

  Stryker grinned down. “From now on, Grub, you do everything we say.”

  “Don’t count on it, pig,” I told him. “Oh, and by the way, your mother blows farm animals.”

  “What we’ve done, inmate,” the tech informed me, “is surgically implant Bofors Model 250 ultraviolet-wave transponders into your most sensitive mammarian and genital nerve clusters. Upon activation, each transponder node will become energized with 20,000 nanounits of collective ultraviolet-band energy. In spite of the fact that you’re clinically dead, this energy will flood the target dendron/axon ganglia, replenishing all electrical synaptic impulses—hence, causing pain that can only be described as incalculable.”

  “Drink my zombie piss,” I replied.

  “Mouthy little whore, ain’t she?” Stryker chuckled, unstrapping me. I got up off the table, still groggy from the tubocurarine darts they’d been zapping me with. “But she’ll soon learn that silence is golden.”

  “The only thing golden is the shower I’m gonna give you when I get out of this cement Ramada. Too bad your pappy didn’t pull out early and leave his peckersnot on the floor. World’d be a better place.”

  “I’d take the officer’s warning under serious advisement,” the tech said. “The Bofors Model 250 is decidedly effective.”

  When you’re a zombie, your life is bad enough. Grubs don’t like to be intimidated.

  And I guess I always did have a big mouth.

  “How about I cut your cock off and fuck you in the ass with it?”

  “You think this is a joke?” Stryker whipped out the sending unit, like a TV remote. “If I tell you to shit on the floor and eat it, you’ll shit on the floor and eat it.”

  I dragged up a big chest oyster and hocked it in his face. “Eat that.”

  Ever heard of the Chicago Fire? That’s what I felt like when the ever dutiful Detention Officer Stryker tapped my ID number into that sending unit. First my tits and pussy felt warm, tingling…then—WHAM! I felt alive again, all right, and that tech geek wasn’t kidding about the pain. Like a brand-new Red Devil razor blade being slowly dragged through the middle of my clit, and a channel-lock on each nipple, a sewing needle in each eye, and a drill bit in my brain—that’s what the pain all added up to when Stryker “activated” me.

  “Gonna be a good girl now?” Stryker asked.

  The ultraviolet waves surged through me. My spine arched back like a u-bolt, and I hit the floor. There was a sound somewhere that reminded me of squealing tires, but eventually I realized it was me—screaming.

  “Here’s your golden shower, bitch.” I just lay there flopping like a fish on a hot plate. Stryker must’ve pulled a ten-beer piss on me, which upped the current transfer…and doubled the pain.

  “Be a good girl now and do what I told you.”

  More needles, more channel-locks, more razors sliding… Just when it felt like my eyeballs would rupture, I…well.

  I did it.

  Shrieking like a baby in a furnace, I shit on the floor and ate it.

  ««—»»

  Stryker and his boys ran the Bev-Seg unit. Since Grubs don’t sleep, they’d work us pretty much round the clock. First thing every morning they’d take us to the “Dining Hall.” Brother, this was no Four Seasons. What they’d feed us was this goulash of what they called “rendered livestock.” Mostly diseased pigs and chickens that wouldn’t pass USDA, they’d get the shit from local farms and grind it up in hoppers. Um-um good.

  After that, General Work Block. Cleaning up this federal outhouse, whatever needed to be done: swabbing toilets, mopping floors, cleaning the dumpsters and greasepits. Along the way me and the other girls’d sometimes catch glimpses of the other wings. Males Grubs, and any Grub girls who weren’t good-looking, they’d be used for CDC research and Defense Corp experiments. But it was mainly curiosity when you get right down to it. The government still didn’t know a whole lot about Grubs, so they’d do all these experiments to see what happened when you fucked with one. Starvation, for instance, wouldn’t kill a Grub; you’d just get down to literally skin and bones. They had an entire wing full of Grubs who hadn’t been allowed to eat for over a year. Then there were the transplants: putting live organs into dead people, usually animals guts and shit like that. There was a rumor that the R&D techs had successfully transplanted two heads onto a single Grub. Ordnance Development was worse: the military using Grubs to test new bullets, landmines, and rockets on. When things got too hot, they’d send us in for the cleanup—Jesus. It was mostly pieces we carried out of there. The Ectogenics Lab was reserved for Halfers—a Halfer is a Grub who’d only partly turned: half dead, half alive, and they’d fuck around with the ovaries on these Halfer chicks, knock them up, and see what came out.

  You name it, these sick fucks did it, anything for a kick: microwaving, broiling, freezing. Brain transplants, lobotomies, transfusions. Whatever turned them on. It was enough to turn even a dead girl’s stomach.

  Next was RT—Rehabilitative Therapy. They’d make us sit in a room four hours a day and watch snuff films, live S&M, executions, car-wreck and ER footage. This was supposed to “cure” us, showing us what a life of crime would lead to. Gimme a fucking break! One time they showed this flick of a bunch of stoners with ten-inch herpetic cocks pulling a train on some junkie chick eight-months’ pregnant. They fucked her so hard she breaks her water and miscarries right there on the floor. So I look in the back of the room and half the DOs are so boned up watching this flick they’re jerking off! If anybody in the slam needed rehab, it was them, not us.

  After that was another Work Block, then a trip to the Hygiene Unit; the DOs’d watch while we soaped each other down, then they’d hose us off and get us ready for LockDown. See, they’d want us squeaky clean before the fun began. They might as well’ve put a revolving door on our cells with all the men coming in and out. First shift was for VIPs: bigwheels in the state government, Prison Admin chiefs, staffers, Public Safety officials, the Warden and his suits. One hard tubesteak after another. Then the guards themselves would get their turn, and that was worse. These guys were real kinks and psych-jobs, especially Stryker. Ass-fuck parties, fletch parties, scat, gang-bang face-fucks. One girl threatened to bite the next cock someone tried to stick in her mouth, so they activated her UV implants and left them on all night. Then they took us to the Med Unit the next day and pulled all our teeth just to be safe.

  Stryker particularly had it in for me: ordering other girls to shit on me, piss in my mouth, fist-fuck me. His favorite move was to buttfuck another chick and make me suck his jizz out of her ass. And what could I do about it? Jack shit. Any time I pitched a fit, he’d whip out his sending unit and activate my UV nodes. You learn fast in this place….

  But don’t worry. No
way in holymotherfucking hell was I gonna take this shit for my whole hitch.

  See, I had a plan.

  ««—»»

  A three-part plan. I had to do it just right, and it took months to get ready. Busting out of this shithole wasn’t good enough. I had to get the rest of the Grubs out too, not to mention a few scores to settle.

  Once a week it was my job to empty the trash in the Booking Unit. There were a lot of used tubocurarine darts in bottom of the can. Any chance I got I’d pinch a few, hid ’em in my cell later. Why? Because there was still a little curare left in cartridges…

  Next was the geek in the Implantation Lab—and when I say geek I mean GEEK. This wuss made Mr. Rogers look tough, and it was a good bet he’d never been laid. Next time I got mop duty in the IL, I put the make on him hard. I mean, I ain’t bragging but ya gotta admit—am I good-looking or what? Once I stepped out of my cellblock overalls, I had this guy worshipping me, wound up fucking his brains out. Wore his virgin pecker out, I did.