Grimoire Diabolique

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 weren’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.