Grimoire Diabolique

“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.