by D. M. Guay
Yes, she really said “Hiya.” I rolled to the side so DeeDee could get a better shot. 'Bout damn time, DeeDee.
DeeDee pumped and pumped the neon yellow gun. Whatever shot out was clear, like water, and some of it splashed on me, but didn't hurt or smell like chemicals, so who knew what was in there.
Demon Caroline let go of me and limped toward DeeDee. Her broken gimpy leg dragged behind her like she was a zombie. Let's be clear, here: I mean a slow, Romero-style classic zombie, not one of those stupid super-speed bullshit ones that run like Jesse Fucking Owens even with busted-up legs.
I crawled away, embracing my inner coward, thrilled to not be choking. I only looked back to see if anything was following me. DeeDee squirted and pumped liquid all over Demon Caroline until her Super Soaker ran dry. Demon Caroline—mystery liquid splashing on her face and all over her mink coat—commanded DeeDee to open the gate.
The stream shooting from DeeDee's Super Soaker suddenly petered out. Out of ammo. Demon Caroline was, overall, unfazed by the attack, but mildly annoyed DeeDee had gotten her expensive fur jacket all wet. Huh. Guess there was a bit of Real Caroline left in there after all.
“I was sure that was gonna work. Guess it isn't Catholic. Hey, Kevin,” DeeDee shouted as Demon Caroline floated up off the floor, busted bloody leg now dangling with one foot facing backward. “Put holy water on the shopping list!”
Kevin said, “Already did.” Over the intercom.
“New guy,” DeeDee called to me. “Distract her while I come up with Plan B.”
“You don't have a Plan B?” My voice was shaking, even though I was rage yelling.
“I said I was working on it, geesh,” DeeDee said. “Cut me some slack.”
“I absolutely will not cut you some slack.” I was really mad now. “Hello. Demon hag! Anyone?”
Demon Caroline lunged at DeeDee, but of course, DeeDee rolled out of the way and bolted away like the Flash, leaving me hanging out to dry. Again.
“Who are you calling a hag?” Demon Caroline turned her attention back to me. Great. She three-octave screeched. “Open the gate. Now!”
“No.” Sigh. I slumped in defeat. This was gonna suck. Hard. The things a man had to endure to pay off student loans.
Demon Caroline was on me in a split second. This time, she stayed afloat. I guess she realized floating was faster than limping. She had a death grip on my hair and used my follicles to pull me down aisle five toward the glass reach-in beer doors. I couldn't really slow down or resist because the floor was coated in dish soap. And Jesus, my poor scalp. Getting dragged by your hair hurt, like nine out of ten on the pain scale.
She dragged me down the aisle. I tried to peel her hands off, but she had a Superman grip. I grabbed at the shelves, using whatever I could get hold of as a weapon. I shoved a pine tree car freshener into her mouth. She spat it out. I poked her in the ear with an oil funnel. She punched me in the face. I squirted her face with dish soap. No response. A four-pack of mini Charmin rolls to the cheek? Nope. Nothing. Too soft.
“Open the gate, parasite,” she snarled.
“No.”
“You cannot deny me. I will rip you limb from limb until you submit!”
“No.” I'll be honest. It was getting harder and harder to say no. I mean limb from limb? That didn't sound fun.
I had just grabbed a toilet plunger off the shelf and was about to poke Demon Caroline with the wood end when DeeDee popped out of aisle four with a bright red rectangle in her hand. It looked like some sort of taser. Sure enough, DeeDee hit a button and two prongs shot off of it and landed right on Demon Caroline.
“DeeDee, don't!” I screamed.
Look, I'm not the smartest dude, but I've watched enough reality cop shows to know that if you're touching someone who's getting tasered, the electricity will zap right into you, too. And Demon Caroline had a pretty good grip on me.
DeeDee looked at me like I was a Grade A moron and hit the button anyway. Welp, here it comes. Please, God. Don't let me lose so much control that I poop myself. I'd heard it could happen. I braced for it, but I didn't get a shock. The lines lit up and wiggled, sure, but not with electricity. It made some sort of low humming noise. It was voices. Low, steady, voices, repeating words over and over in a monastic monotone kinda like the Muzak only without the catchy dance beat. I couldn't make out any of the words, but they definitely weren't English.
Demon Caroline stopped moving. Yeah, she still had a death grip on me, but she held still, her monster knuckles knotted in my hair. She was listening to the voices, too.
“Ha. Take that, bitch!” DeeDee said.
Phew. DeeDee was doing it. Finally!
“That music's not very catchy,” Demon Caroline said. “What is that, Justin Bieber?”
Demon Caroline shrugged and dragged me out of aisle five.
“Kevin!” DeeDee backed up, fiddling with the taser. “What's this thing set on?”
“Aramaic,” Kevin said over the intercom. “Try Sumerian.”
“What number is that?”
“Thirty seven,” Kevin announced.
I tried to buy DeeDee more time. I clocked Demon Caroline upside the head with the plunger handle. She demon eye-rolled me, grabbed the handle and tried to wrestle the plunger out of my hands, but I death-gripped that thing.
“Open the gate, worm,” she demanded.
“Come on guys, a little help here!” I yelled.
“I'm working on it!” DeeDee said. “Kevin. Sumerian isn't working. Any other ideas?”
“Try Palaic. Number eighty-three,” Kevin announced.
“You sure?” DeeDee asked, fiddling with the controls. The lines powered up again, this time wiggling and glowing red.
“Why don't you ask her how old she is, where she's from, and what the dominant human religion was last time she was banished? That's the only way to be sure,” Kevin said.
Wow, that roach sure was a sarcastic dickhead.
Whatever settings DeeDee tried didn't seem to work. Demon Caroline decided she'd had enough and plucked the taser wires off of her and smacked DeeDee up in an arc through the air, sending her sliding flat on her butt down the candy aisle. She dragged me, head bumping every single door handle, down the front of the reach-in coolers toward the beer cave entrance. Ouch. Like, seriously. Ouch.
Judging by this show of skills, if the hot goth chick and the dickhead cockroach were the only things standing between hell and earth it was pretty amazing the world as we know it hadn't already been consumed in a blaze of fire.
Demon Caroline had forgotten about my toilet plunger, which I clung to for dear life. Between face thwacks on cold steel door handles, I did manage to get Demon Caroline to turn around so I could stick the red plunger end directly over her face. I plunged it up and down like she was a toilet. No, it didn't really hurt her or stop her, but if I imagined it was Real Caroline, it was immensely satisfying emotionally.
And that's when I heard the click of a fake camera aperture opening and closing behind me. Demon Caroline and I both stopped. Click. Click. DeeDee had her Smartphone out and had snapped pics of us.
“Are you kidding me right now?” That might have been the most legitimate question I'd ever asked in my life.
“You'll thank me later.” DeeDee then produced a canister of kosher salt. She opened it and threw handfuls of it at Demon Caroline, who in return just stared at DeeDee like she was stupid. DeeDee harrumphed like she really expected Demon Caroline to burst into flames or something when the salt granules hit her.
“HELP ME!” I screamed. Seriously. All that stood between Demon Caroline and hell on earth was a toilet plunger.
“Kevin's working on it,” DeeDee said. “Plan D, Kevin. Stat!”
Demon Caroline said, “Open the gate.”
“I can't,” I said. “I don't know how.”
Might as well be honest at this point. Maybe she'd cut me a break.
“Useless asshole!”
But she didn't let go. No s
lack for me.
“Then I shall sacrifice you on the altar of destiny. Your death will show the world what happens when you cross me. You will be slain like the fat piglet you are!”
Yep. You can say “I told you so” now. I should have quit when I had the chance. I could have been playing X-box right now. But no. Mom bought an ice cream cake.
Before I knew what hit me, I was flying through the air. My face and body abruptly thwumped into a reach-in cooler door, chinking it into a spiderweb of crunched glass. She'd thrown me two rows over. I slid down the glass and when I tried to get up and run, my head spun and I fell backward right into the shelf of bread and burger buns in aisle two. All the plastic-wrapped bread bags fell on top of me like flimsy gluten armor as I lay there on the linoleum in agonizing pain.
Demon Caroline floated above me, scowling. “Time to die, asshole.”
She dropped right on top of me, mouth open, and moved to bite my throat with her yellow rotten teeth. I didn't have time to think, but I had to do something. So I jammed the eight-pack of burger buns I already had in my hands right into her mouth. She bit right into the bag and chewed. “Mmmm. Is this Bunny Bread?” she asked. “They make the best rolls.”
She swallowed half the buns, plus most of the plastic wrap around them, before she came at me again. She lunged to bite my throat out, then suddenly stopped, hovering a couple of inches over my face. Her milky white eyes got really wide. An unholy gurgle erupted in her gut.
Fffffffrrrrrrttttt.
Yes. You heard that right. She massive wet-farted, a painting-her-undies-brown level wet fart.
“What...what's happening?” Her creepy-toddler/Andre the Giant combo voice asked. “This body. Something is wrong with it. It's...it's...defective.”
She looked me right in the eyes and projectile vomited all over my face.
“Close your eyes and keep your mouth shut!” I heard DeeDee scream. “Don't get any of it inside you!”
Uh, duh. I had already squinched everything tight. But you try zipping your lips and mouth and not breathing while some unholy creature dumps thirty gallons of hot festering vomit all over you. It's not easy. The vomit felt like hot chunky beef stew, liquid but thick and slimy with lots of unidentifiable bits in it. The vomit shower went on for a minute or two then suddenly stopped. Demon Caroline moaned in agony. Suddenly, her weight lifted off of me. I wiped my face on my sleeve and dared open my eyes.
Demon Caroline appeared to be glued to the ceiling right above me. The floor—and I—were covered in a green slimy liquid that actually reminded me of lime Jello, the kind with the little carrot shreds in it that my Great Grandma used to make.
Fffffffrrrrrrttttt. Fffffffrrrrrrttttt. Demon Caroline groaned and wet-farted like an elderly white man who'd just eaten a ghost-pepper burrito. Throw in a half gallon or so of snotty green vomit squirts in between skid-mark farts, and you've got a pretty accurate idea of the situation. The place smelled like a hundred horses with intestinal issues had just taken a dump in the candy aisle.
Moaning in pain from her ceiling perch, Demon Caroline blurped out. “Fools. Your gate cannot contain us forever.”
Fffffffrrrrrrttttt.
Oof. It was hard to make a compelling speech with gas like that.
“We will be free. We will take what the world owes us,” Demon Caroline continued. “Rivers shall run red with blood. We shall meet again!”
“Melodramatic much?” DeeDee said.
Fffffffrrrrrrttttt.
And with that one last sloppy wet fart, a shimmering silvery pool that looked like the mercury out of a broken thermometer appeared on the ceiling around her. Demon Caroline convulsed and twitched. She closed her eyes and the undulating mercury puddle absorbed into the ceiling tile. Demon Caroline fell to the floor with a dull, meaty thud. A strange wind gusted around the store, then dissipated into nothing.
A sound, like the long, drawn-out reoowr of dueling cats sprang from Caroline. DeeDee immediately went into Karate stance. I grabbed my vomit-soaked plunger and prepared to strike. Caroline lifted her head and glanced around, in shock. Oh. Snap. Caroline Ford Vanderbilt was normal plain-vanilla, real-life Caroline again, only every inch of her was coated in green Jello with carrot shreds vomit. And let's not forget her horrifically broken leg, which didn't go away once the demon had filtered out of her.
Kwack. Kwack. Kwack.
Caroline heaved, tongue darting in and out of her mouth, shoulders pumping like a cat getting ready to hack up a hairball. Kwack. Kwack.
A string of spit leaked out of her collagen-injected lips. Caroline dipped her once perfectly French-manicured fingers into her mouth and pulled out something long, see-through and shiny. She pulled and pulled, and it kept coming, like cheap scarves out of a magician's fist. Oh, man. As soon as I saw the bunny face, I knew it was the plastic bag the buns had come in. Caroline examined it, horrified, then she hacked up a chewed corner of burger bun and spit it on the floor. In retrospect, it was that burger bun—not the broken leg or the vomit-soaked mink jacket—that broke the spirit of Caroline Ford Vanderbilt.
“Oh...no. no..no...no. No no no no. Is that, no. No, it can't be. Is that ...bread?” She said 'bread' like most people would say poison. She shrieked. “You two low-class, under-achieving, white-trash delinquent losers fed me CARBS?!?!”
Welp, the polish had certainly worn off, but there was no doubt Demon Caroline had reverted back to the equally horrible in completely different ways Caroline Ford Vanderbilt.
“Huh. I think you actually depossessed her with a burger bun.” DeeDee walked up next to me and assessed the situation. “That makes a weird kind of sense now that I think about it. Atkins. Paleo. Keto. Women like her haven't eaten carbs since 2001. Guess her body couldn't handle it, and it pushed that critter right out of her.”
DeeDee put her hand up, waiting for me to high five her, and said “Hail to the carbs, baby!”
Chapter 8
Caroline nearly landed a punch on a paramedic's nose when he said he needed to cut the shiny gold tennis shoe off of her shattered, rapidly-swelling foot. (The foot that was on backward fifteen minutes ago. Dude. Trust me. You can't unsee that.) “Noooooo!! Don't touch my SHOE!” She wailed. “It's Prada!”
He cut it off anyway, and Caroline sobbed. “That shoe cost more than you make in a week, you unwashed, mouth-breathing animal!”
She seemed more upset about her shoe than her compound fractures. She clutched its gold-toned, sawn-in-half remains to her chest and moaned.
The paramedics were unfazed by her insults and had her strapped to the gurney, leg in a temporary brace, ready to be wheeled out into the waiting ambulance a couple of minutes later. Her genteel, high-class veneer had completely melted away by this point, revealing the rabid viper underneath. Caroline spat venom and insults non-stop. At the paramedics. At DeeDee, who asked Caroline to smile as she snapped pics of her screaming, throwing air punches at paramedics while soaked in green slime, mascara cry-streaking down her face. And, especially at me, because it was somehow my fault her gossip recon mission had gone horribly awry.
“You and your trailer trash mother will never live this down, Lloyd Wallace,” she hissed as they wheeled her past me. “You and your family are nothing, losers, and you will always be nothing. I will destroy you! You'll pay for this. I will ruin you if it's the last thing I do!”
Uh, why waste your time, Caroline? I thought it was pretty clear I was already ruined. I was ten thousand dollars in debt, lived at home, had no degree, no girlfriend and I worked for the devil. The only place I had to go was up.
Demon Mart? Well, that was a different story. Faust better have good insurance or a zillion dollars in the bank, because Caroline was definitely the type to sue. It wouldn't take her long to calculate how she could turn this incident into ten more Prada whatsits in her walk-in closet and another Benz in her garage.
“Bye bye, Caroline. Come back and see us again. It was an absolute delight to have you!” DeeDee waved goodbye
to Caroline. As soon as the front door shut and the ambulance flipped on the siren and drove away, she turned to me. “Karma is real. That woman is proof. The way she walked in here talking shit? She was asking for trouble. But, man. I gotta give you props. The things you accomplish around here with food products are genuinely impressive. I mean, carbs? Genius!”
She patted me on the shoulder and suddenly a red hot rage built up inside me. My body shook uncontrollably. I felt like a volcano about to blow.
“Are you okay, new guy?”
Okay? OKAY!? I was covered in green demon vomit. My face was throbbing. Even my hair hurt! I was one hundred percent not okay. And DeeDee, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, who was supposed to be training me to handle all this supernatural literally straight outta hell bullshit, had left me alone to tangle with a Jello-barfing demon. And she couldn't even remember my name. She didn't know my name! “My...name...is...LLOYD!”
My voice echoed around the store. I didn't know I could scream so loud and long. My stress volcano fully erupted in screaming rage lava.
“Woah there. Calm down. It's okay,” she said in her best soft, soothing “holy crap, I better back off” voice. “Are you all right there...new...um...Lloyd?”
I just stood there shaking, too rattled to make words.
“No time for therapy and feelings circles, people. The gate opens in fifteen minutes, and we've got an unscheduled level two decontamination to get through. Get moving,” Dickhead Roach Kevin's tiny voice announced over the intercom. “But first, let us celebrate this victory with rock n roll.”
Kevin held a tiny pink—holy crap, was that a Zune?—up to the microphone and hit play. Heavy metal music pounded through the intercom.
“Kevin. Seriously, dude. We talked about this.” DeeDee screamed over the music. “Play something else!”
A rock bravado rolled over the guitar, some guy singing about the devil never being a maker. And heaven and hell?