Grimoire Diabolique

armpit. I’ll bet you ten bucks your dick wouldn’t last a minute in my pussy.”

He stared me down, nodding. “You’re on, bitch. I’m gonna fuck you so hard your brains’ll be squirting out your ears, and when I’m done I’m gonna throw your whore ass into Isolation and leave your transponders on for a month.”

“I hear ya talking, Liberace.”

“Get the rest of these dead bitches to chow,” Stryker barked to his sergeants. “I’ll be taking this one here back to her cell for a private consultation.”

He dragged me by the hair to my cell, and then I knew I had him.

By then, see, I’d collected enough curare from the used cartridges to fill an entire dart. Stryker didn’t even have time to get his pants down before I had that baby stuck right in his fat red neck.

««—»»

“What…what did you…do?”

He came to about an hour later, and an hour was plenty of time to do the job. I held up the scalpel I jacked from that nerd tech. “See this, asshole? I cut the UV implants out of myself.”

Eventually his crossed eyes began to focus, incomprehension on his face.

“Whaaaa….”

“Then I sewed them back up in your nutsack.”

Now the incomprehension turned to slow horror. He reached down to his ballbag, felt around, and then moaned. You could hear the little nodes clicking in there. “God in heaven…please don’t—”

“Guess we better test ’em huh?”

“Noooooo! Pleeeeeease!”

I tapped my own ID into the sending unit and lit DO Stryker up like the fucking Fourth of July. Yes sir-ee. 60,000 nanounits of ultraviolet-band energy right smack-dab into his family jewels.

The fat fuck screamed louder than a truck horn, and I gotta tell ya, it was fun watching him flop around on the floor like a tadpole out of water. I had a mind to just leave him there like that, but…

There was still work to do.

««—»»

“Punch in the passcode,” I ordered.

I’d marched him down to the Utility Wing. Shiftchange was over so the halls were clear.

“No way,” he said. “I can’t. It’s a security breach. The core’s running—”

“Punch in the passcode and open the door, motherfucker, unless you want me to cook your nuts again. By the time I’m done, they’ll look like a couple of fried chicken gizzards.”

He was crying now, blubbering like a baby. I showed him the sending unit, and that was all it took. He plipped in the code and the vault door sucked open.

WARNING, one sign read. NUCLEAR FUEL CORE IS ON. FATAL RADIOACTIVE DOSE AFTER TWENTY MINUTES.

Fatal? Sure. But not to somebody who’s already dead.

I threw Stryker aside and jacked the fuel rods right out of the core chassis. The evac alarms went off immediately. “Don’t leave me in here!” Stryker bellowed. “I’ll die!”

“Buddy,” I said, “five minutes from now you’ll be praying to die.” Then I activated him again. It was tempting not to stay there and watch awhile—no, the meltdown wouldn’t hurt me, but I had the other Grubs to get out. I took one last gander at Stryker: screaming, shitting and pissing himself, blood leaking out his eyes, ears, and mouth, his hair baking off and his crotch smoking. Man, it was sweet.

Then I left and closed the door.

The reactor cooked-off about a half-hour later; the radiation took out every pinkie in the joint before they could reach safe distance. As for the rest of the Grubs, I used Stryker’s block keys to open their cells and we all waltzed out of that shitpit like we owned the place. Out front I could see the Warden and a bunch twerps from the Governor’s Office crawling across the asphalt with their skin running off their bodies. So long, chumps.

««—»»

So that’s the story, pal. Don’t believe me? Read about it in the papers. Oh, and that plainclothes U.S. Marshal who busted me in the first place? You probably read about him in the papers too. I spotted the motherfucker the first week I was back working the street. Yanked his cock and balls off then pulled his intestines out his ass. The fucker looked like he had a tail when I was done! I mean, come on, he had it coming. I never fucked with no one who didn’t fuck with me first.

But how about you, pal? Made up your mind yet? You’re kind of cute, if you don’t mind me saying so, and— holy Christ—is that Godzilla in your pants or are you just happy to see me? Ten bucks, partner, best blowjob of your life, and if I’m lying, I’ll give you your money back.

So what do you say?

Good man!

— | — | —

THE MCCRATH MODEL SS40-C, SERIES S

“She’ll have to eat it,” Prouty said, “otherwise, she’ll drown.”

Vinchetti appraised the situation, a dark, if not bewildering, scrutiny. “You’re one sick motherfucker, Doc—to think of something like this.”

Hey, you’re the one who insists on these little revenge skits, you stromboli-eating whack- job, thought Doc a.k.a. Dr. Winston F. Prouty. Fifty-seven years old, tall, lean, gray-templed, Dr. Prouty looked liked his former self in his clean white lab-coat and perfect posture. Deloreanesque, distinguished. Not too long ago, he’d been earning over a million a year as one of Beverly Hills’ most prominent reconstructive plastic surgeons. Tit-jobs for the stars. Brad Pitt noses for every Brad Pitt wannabe in La-La Land. Doc had liposucked Nicholson five times, and had created enough Hollywood cleavage to rival the East African Rift. Posh office on Wilshire Boulevard, waterfront Malibu beach house, Lamborghini in the drive. It had only taken a year to lose it all—thanks to a high gambling marker with the mob…oh, and the Demerol habit. Now Dr. Prouty worked for Vinchetti.

“It will, in the least, provide a captivating demonstration of the extremities of the human survival instinct,” the doctor appended.

“Doc, I love the way you talk!” Vinchetti replied and smacked his hands together.

That’s because I have an education, unlike you and your goombah psychopaths. He tightened the straps on the lab table, checked the angle of the lights for the video camera. Vinchetti always wanted these little vignettes preserved on tape, for sale to his sickest clients, and to serve as reminders to his own people: This Is What Happens If You Fuck With Paul Vinchetti.

Indeed. It was.

Paul Vinchetti II was the supreme boss in what the U.S. Justice Department referred to as the Vinchetti/Lonna/Stello Crime Pyramid, an armature of that mythical human machinery known as the Mafia. When his father had died of a coronary while eating calamari and white pizza, Paul had taken over the entire ball of mob wax by waging war with the rest of the families. He had the muscle. Now he controlled all of the white heroin distribution on the east coast, as well as underground porn distribution, and, of all things, magazine distribution. Slowly but surely he was working his way west with gambling and black-market import interests. The gambling— that’s how Dr. Prouty had gotten involved.

He’d run up a couple of hundred grand at the blackjack tables, and shortly thereafter had lost his license. (Two botched blepharoplastys in a row had left a corporate attorney’s wife and a DreamWorks exec with insufficient blood-supply to the eyelids. Eventually, the eyelids had rotted off.) The lawsuits had taken everything, but that wasn’t Prouty’s biggest worry, and neither were the impending criminal charges for performing critical oro- facial surgery while under the influence of a pharmaceutical morphine derivative.

Unable to make his payments, Prouty knew Vinchetti’s district boys would come a’callin’, and when they did,