Grimoire Diabolique

by Edward Lee

  And when the asshole wasn’t looking, I pinched one of his scalpels…

  ««—»»

  Part Three was the toughest part. See, in 2003 the NRC authorized liquid-plasma isotope reactors for industrial use, and they had one of these little Three Mile Islands providing all the power for the prison.

  If I could get a key to the Fuel Core Station…

  ««—»»

  At night, when the gang bangs and kink parties were over, I’d just sit in my cell and dream. Even dead people dream. I’d think back to the way things were when I was working the street. Didn’t ask for much, and I never ripped off a john in his life who didn’t have it coming. Sure, I killed some pimps and baddies, but they had it coming too. All I ever wanted was to do my thing, mind my own business, and live my life. But the Feds and the pigs and the U.S. Marshals came along with their Dr. Strangelove Big Brother bullshit. What I ever do to them? And—what?—it’s my fault their fuckin’ nuke-powered plane crashed and turned 10,000 people into Grubs? Fuck that.

  And fuck them.

  I knew I had to make my move just before LockDown. I wanted as many government bigwheels in here as possible. But I knew I had to get Stryker alone.

  So when they were taking us to chow before LD, I hocked a lunger right into Stryker’s face and said, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell.”

  Stryker grinned. He was glad I did it. “You’re a ballsy little whore, ain’t ya? Like to run that cocksuck zombie-whore mouth of yours.”

  “Your daddy must’ve had shit on his dick when he knocked your mama up with you.”

  His grin turned demonic. “Baby, I’ll cut your head off and jerk off in your mouth.”

  I cracked out a laugh. “Man, all you can do is jerk off. Can’t lay any serious dick on a woman to save your life.”

  “Think so?”

  “Gimme a break? A peter-licking, panty-wearing, no-hard-on little candy-ass like you?”

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll activate you till your tits pop and your hair burns off. See how the smart-mouth Grub Girl likes that action.”

  “Talk is cheap. You can light me up with that pissant UV thing all you want. I like pain, pig. Gets me horny, you know, for a real man? Too bad there ain’t any in this 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 extremit
ies 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, they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. “We can hang you upside-down by a meat-hook through your asshole,” they’d been kind enough to explain, “and then blow-torch you to death, or…”

  ««—»»

  “So how long’s it take, Doc?” Vinchetti asked.

  “Oh, twenty more minutes perhaps, before the copper sulphate adequately saturates the duodenal blood vessels.”

  “And where the hell’s Tony?”

  “I believe he’s trying to locate a camera, sir.”

  “The fuck?” Vinchetti complained. “What’s taking him so long? We got more cameras in this joint than Paramount. Jesus Christ.”

  “They were making some snuff tapes in the basement last night. Remember? The deputy police commissioner’s children?”

  The memory rekindled on Vinchetti’s expression. “Aw, yeah, that’s right—the baby triplets. I’ll bet that’s gonna be some sweet work.”

  Dr. Prouty frowned to himself. He remembered seeing the crew bring in the pit bulls.

  A chuckle, then: “Teach that fuck cop to bust my guys,” Vinchetti continued. “Fuckin’ guy’s been on our pad for five fuckin’ years, and now he wants to break bad? “ Another chuckle. “He’ll know what bad is when he sees that tape.”

  Prouty felt a twinge in his belly, in spite of his now-well-honed clinical detachment. But getting back to his own predicament, when given the choice of hanging upside-down from a meat hook in his rectum or working for Vinchetti, the doctor had unsurprisingly picked the latter. This involved an expeditious relocation to one of Vinchetti’s compounds on the outskirts of Pennellville, New York. The facility was part safe house, part recovery ward, and part full-tilt mother-fuckin’ chamber of horrors. Its remote location made it perfect for all of the above, especially the video end. All manner of illegal and homicidal pornography was made on the premise: snuff flicks, nek flicks, “wet” S&M, and various other types of productions the likes of which could make even the lowest demon queasy. But Dr. Prouty had little to do with the videos; his chief purpose at the compound entailed changing appearances. Two weeks of cold-turkey withdrawal had cured him of his Demerol addiction, after which he’d begun to utilize his clinical expertise in order to pay back his gambling debts. Whenever it was looking like the feds were going to grab one of Vinchetti’s men cold, said man would come to the compound and, thanks to Prouty’s skills, leave several weeks later with a new face. Simple. And Prouty didn’t really mind at all. They gave him a little room to live in, three meals a day plus all the satellite channels, and it sure as hell beat hanging from that hook. Escape was impossible; the compound was constantly locked, full of guards, and close to fifty miles from any other dwellings. It was this or the hook.

  This worked.

  These little side jobs were another matter, though. Not only was the compound used as a production stage for the most unimaginable endeavors in visual pornography, it was a stage, too, for Vinchetti’s own personal desires for vengeance. Whenever somebody stole from Vinchetti, or lied to him, insulted him, slighted him in any way, it was Dr. Prouty’s job to initiate a creative revenge which Vinchetti would personally witness and have video-taped for posterity. The deeds definitely tested Prouty’s intestinal fortitude but then…there was always the hook…so he simply did what he was told and didn’t morally question himself about the victims. Hell, they were all probably bad people anyway.

  Quite often, Prouty kept them alive for as long as possible. Non-anesthetic lobotomies were another Vinchetti favorite, as were full body flensings, acid catheters, and “trunk jobs.” Genital mutilation comprised so much activity in this place that it had actually grown blasé; you could only dissect some many penises, remove so many scrotums, poach so many testes, and gun-brush so many urethras before it lost its thrill. Hence, Vinchetti kept pressing the doctor for new and original spectacles.

  Like this one.

  The woman’s name was Darcy, one of Vinchetti’s part-time paramours. Vinchetti liked them skinny and trashy (such women reminded him of his New Jersey childhood) and Darcy definitely fit the bill. Ninety-five pounds, tiny-breasted, and with a mouth more foul than the bottom of a slaughter house dumpster, Darcy had made the faux pax of telling one of the other girls: “Vinch has a little dick. It’s teeny, like my pinkie.”

  Big mistake.

  The other girl had ratted and now here Darcy lay, side-strapped nude to Prouty’s work table. It was an odd sight, to say the least: Prouty thought of conjoined twins connected at the mouth. See, Darcy shared the lab table with another of Vinchetti’s employees, one Hymie Levy. Hymie was a young mathematics whizz-kid who’d graduated with honors from Georgetown Business School, and now—or it should be said, until very recently—he’d served as one of Vinchetti’s accountants. Standing at a full five-foot four, Hymie weighed—easily—three hundred pounds, and the reason he occupied space on the torture table was simple: he’d been skimming money from Vinchetti’s trough. Hence, the mandate. If you stole even a nickel from the boss, you got the table. It was the principle of the thing.

  Vinchetti was wincing at the site of Hymie strapped naked to the table. “Christ, Doc, that’s a lot of matzah balls; he looks even worse with his clothes off. The kid’s got enough blubber on him to keep an Eskimo family eating for ten years. No wonder there’s people starvin’ in the world. This fat fuck ate all the food.”

  “I wouldn’t be too hasty in accusing the obese of a lack of will-power,” Dr. Prouty pointed out. “Recent research from John’s Hopkins indicates that perhaps as much as forty percent of obesity in America can be attributed to a previously unidentified icosahedral virus. Nonstructural protomers in the viral shell allow it to roam undetected by immune responses and directly attack the mitochondrion mechanisms in human fat cells. The result is a cell that cannot effectively turn glucose into energy—hence, an excess storage of adipose matter. Obesity is a tragic disease, not an instance of willful over-indulgence.”

  “Aw, put a lid on that liberal bullshit, will ya, Doc? The fat motherfucker’s fat ’cos he can’t keep his fat fuckin’ hands out of the fuckin’ refrigerator. He eats six fuckin’ meals a fuckin’ day. He stuffs his fat motherfuckin’ face every fuckin’ chance he gets. It ain’t no f
uckin’ virus, Doc. It ain’t no fuckin’ disease. The only problem this fat fuck has is a fuckin’ fork-to-mouth problem.”

  Prouty knew the futility of taking exception. “Of course, you’re quite correct, sir. Pardon my oversight.”

  Vinchetti smiled subtly. “Damn straight. And this fat fuck’s defnitely had his last fuckin’ meal.”

  “Actually, sir,” the doctor reminded, “if you give the matter some abstract consideration, they’ll both be spending their final moments of life…eating with quite a bit of gusto.”

  Vinchetti’s eyes dimmed for a second, then, “Oh, yeah! I get’cha, Doc! Man, is this gonna be sweet!”

  Indeed, Prouty commiserated. Medium doses of Phenolax had rendered both subjects unconscious, after which Dr. Prouty had stripped them and strapped them, face to face, on the table.

  Then he’d…connected them…at the lips.

  Vinchetti was leaning over, peering at their faces. “So how’d you do their lips, Doc? What, you stitched ’em together? That looks like some pretty tough work.”

  It was actually the simplest chore of all; the only “tough” work was suitably arranging Hymie’s incredible bulk on the table. “With this,” Prouty said, and held the instrument up.

  At first glance, one might think the doctor had raised a chrome-plated curling iron, or even an electric steak knife. A power cord led to a shiny oval-shaped housing which fit comfortably in Prouty’s hand. From the front end protruded two very narrow steel tubules, whose gap could be adjusted by a knob at the base. “It’s a McCrath Model SS40-C, Series S, top of the line.”