Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “So it’s all my fault,” Pog told Buugh. “Take me.”

  Buugh glowered at her, then at the rest of the team in turn, and last, at Ish where he knelt at Amanda’s feet, staring woozily up at Pog, full of confusion and grief.

  “All right then.” Buugh pointed unimpressively at Ish with a paw gloved in bulky white Tyvek. “Don’t fuck up again.”

  Then he and Pog vanished.

  POG

  As soon as we appeared in the Regional Office, which looked like the waiting room of a very fancy lawyer’s office, Double Executive Divisional Vice President Buughdybogh tore off his hazmat suit and flung it on the floor, growling the whole time. Under the Tyvek, his business suit was rumpled and sweaty in the armpits.

  I began to feel less impressed immediately.

  He led me personally through miles of beige office corridors and, eventually, stood me up in a rather stylish plexi case, not the cage I had expected, in a huge roundish meeting hall. We had a delay of twenty minutes while someone replaced Ish’s name, photo, and IIDN with mine in the Powerpoint up on the big screen behind the dais. There was further delay while they focused blinding lights on my plexi case.

  The delay on the lights allowed me to see that, curiously, there weren’t a lot of demons in the seats.

  There were television cameras, however.

  Eventually Buugh made his speech. Through his unmatched leadership, his superb acumen, and his intrepid disregard for his own safety, he was able to identify, isolate, and neutralize the cause of the recent crisis, and capture the culprit responsible for the unwitting and catastrophic exposure of Dis’s citizenry to blah blah blah. He used a lot of corporate-speak.

  From all this I gathered several things:

  ♠ That the population of demons in the Regional Office was greatly reduced from its heyday.

  ♠ That the Regional Office was in way more trouble than I had previously thought. This wasn’t the dance band on the Titanic arguing with management about overtime. This was the dance band on the Titanic holding primary elections for upcoming contests over offices with 300-year terms.

  ♠ That the focus of the Regional Office had shifted completely away from the field and into its own navel, employing, and this was the crazy part, techniques and strategies for organizational navel-gazing learned from dying pyramidal corporate hierarchies in the field, i.e., on earth.

  ♠ That everybody of minor rank in the Regional Office knew that their organization was tottery, and had given up worrying about it, and was now focused on having as good a time as was possible in a place where you couldn’t get beer or a decent cup of coffee.

  ♠ That guys like Buugh owed their positions to their ability to help the infernal public convince themselves that everything was just fine.

  If proof were needed of how bad it was, after twenty-five minutes of listening to Buugh strop himself in the bright blaze of publicity, I was thinking in bulletpoints.

  I was able to maintain my calm throughout my public humiliation and verbal excoriation by entertaining myself with these observations.

  Things got imperceptibly worse after I arrived at my actual cell.

  The demon who brought me to Second Circle in the elevator and across a few thousand feet of relatively new beige carpet was bulky in a stolid rather than menacing way. He had the comic-book thews and tusks, but also a pretty impressive beer gut. He told me we were going into Lust division, which was appropriate, since our team worked under their banner.

  Lust was a ghost town. We passed acres of empty cubicles. I didn’t see anyone walking around. Amanda had told me that there was no workday, no clock to punch, no weekends or holidays except as declared by lower management. So where was everybody?

  “Lust? It’s dead here,” my demon guard informed me through his tusks. “Heresy’s getting pretty skinny too.” He sent me a sidelong glance.

  I strode along beside him, not having any idea how to escape, even if I was motivated to do it. I was still wondering what had possessed me to jump into Ish’s place on the hot seat. Besides the fact that he was scared to death of what Buugh might do to him.

  I couldn’t stand to see that, any more than I had been able to stand it when we were ten, raiding the dumpsters of bakeries in east South Shore, and he’d literally peed his pants when a cop car turned down the alley.

  We got to my cell-slash-room-slash-whatever. The guard pointed at the doorway. It wasn’t a cage or a cell. It was just a room. There was a chair, woo hoo. No bed. That was unsatisfactory. But...there was no door! Just a doorway. A narrow doorway.

  I was surprised to find I had to edge through it sideways.

  “What’s the big idea?” I said through the gap. “I could just walk right out. Unless you’re going to stand guard the whole time.”

  I sent him a sidelong look. I had succubus wiles I could use on a guard—especially a lonely, bored guard.

  “Beats me,” he said. “You’re the one who designed it.”

  “I designed it?” I squinted around the room. It wasn’t comfy, but it wasn’t miserable in any obvious way.

  “While they were getting the VP’s presentation set up,” he said, speaking through the narrow doorway and through his stupid tusks.

  “But I wasn’t thinking about this,” I objected. “I only stood there twenty minutes.”

  “More like four days. Time’s different here,” he said, freezing my blood. “They got software in place now that pulls your torment out of your subconscious mind. You just have to stand there. It does the work. Putting regular guys out of a job,” he added in a mutter.

  “Software.” I almost giggled.

  “The fewer damned souls we get in here, the more they automate the fuckin’ system. Pretty soon won’t be nobody left except one guy in Inhuman Resources. Sending out paychecks to a handful of Luddites with quill pens and their scalps shaved. Putting green sheets in his own file. Emailing motivational notes to empty desks.”

  He spoke with considerable creativity about the end times and their proximity.

  When I got tired of him, I put my hand in my pocket full of rose petals, which was less full than when I was arrested, and pulled one out. “Know what this is?”

  “Uh?”

  “Did you hear what happened to the guys who attended that basketball tournament?”

  He turned pale. “No, what?”

  I let the feather-weight, blackened thing lie in my palm. “Nobody knows. Because they’re gone. It is known that they came in contact with this at the tournament.”

  He began to tremble.

  I leaned toward the doorway. Its gap seemed noticeably narrower than when I’d sidled inside. “I’ve been dropping them every few yards, all the way from that meeting hall place to here. Better warn the help, don’t try to sweep or vacuum them up. They disintegrate readily, and then they’re a fine dust that gets everywhere. On your shoes. Up your nose. Worked down into the carpet so deep it won’t come out.”

  My guard bolted down the beige hallway without warning.

  That’s when I noticed that I had gained about three dress sizes.

  By my calculations, that meant yes, I’d been down here four days.

  Now that my guard had fled, I found that there was a mirror outside in the corridor, opposite the narrow doorway, far enough that a thrown shoe couldn’t hit it. I know, because I tried.

  The room’s single chair was bolted to the floor, facing the doorway. Which I could not slide through anymore. Because I was too fat.

  All I could do was sit in that chair and look at myself in that mirror.

  I remembered now talking to Beth about fat jail. Was that where their infernal subconscious-analyzing program had found this idea? Because it really was fiendish.

  The room seemed a lot smaller all of a sudden.

  It wasn’t. I paced it.

  My bare feet wore the crappy carpet out pretty quickly, and then, inspired with hope, I tore it up and threw the carpet pieces out the doorway. The floor u
nderneath was concrete.

  There was an air duct in the wall, close to the floor, too small for me to fit through.

  There was no window.

  I had a day or so, or an hour, or a month, or a minute of total panic. It seemed to go on and on without any marker of time. I would forget to breathe and it didn’t matter. My heart thumped, or it didn’t, seemingly for hours. My ears hissed with frantic blood pressure, but I didn’t pass out.

  Other issues popped up and then vanished when I forgot to think about them: my ankles swelled hideously and hurt with every step. My neck had a crick in it from sleeping against the wall. I beat my hands bloody against the walls. When I woke, the ankles didn’t hurt any more, my neck felt fine, the cuts in my palms were gone. Until I remembered them. Then I felt them all over again, and the blood ran anew.

  In fat jail, I expected to be tormented by demons pretending to be johns, or even pretending to be Ish, making me dance and laughing at me. I was so fat. So, so fat. After a while I could barely move in this tiny room, let alone dance.

  But nobody came. The place seemed deserted. What, they couldn’t even come by to tell me I was too fat?

  Fine torment this is, I thought, and sniffled. Just my luck. I get sent to hell during a hiring freeze.

  Then I remembered threatening my guard with one of those rose petals, and the trail of rose petals leading to this too-narrow doorway. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. A path my team could follow, if they ever came down here to get me, and the demons wouldn’t dare try to pick it up or sweep it away.

  Another failed plan.

  One thing never changed. I was starving.

  I swelled so much that my pajamas ripped at the seams. They hung off me in shreds.

  But nobody brought me anything to eat.

  I realized they weren’t going to. They didn’t have to. I’d created my own hell and the demons were probably delighted with it, because they didn’t have to invest any demon-hours in it. Thoughtful of me.

  There was, however, plenty of time to hate myself in.

  I remembered how I had nagged Jee to eat. I’d lamented her increasing size. I’d called her names, disgusting, horrible, gross, revolting, ugly. I tried to remember if I’d said all those awful things aloud, or if I’d only thought them. Did it matter? When she needed me, I’d abandoned her to Reg’s attentions.

  When I couldn’t stand to think about that anymore, I thought about high school. My parents hadn’t spared my feelings in the years before that, but it wasn’t serious until I crested a hundred and fifty pounds, and they’d mocked me in front of classmates at a debate meet. We won, and they took my debate team out to dinner, and my mother canceled my order for chicken wings, saying, If you eat that you’ll be the size of a hippo by Monday, and ordered me a salad, and then my father referred to the coach of the other debate team as a fat whore, and he looked at me when he said it. Not a nice look.

  After that I was everybody’s target. I was called every large-mammal name there was. The kids tripped me on the school stairs and stole my sack lunches, and if I bought lunch, they knocked my lunch tray out of my hands. I wasn’t too big to get into a gym uniform. That was the limit rule at my school. If I’d been too fat for the uniform I’d have been excused from gym. So I was chosen last, and hit harder than anyone else, and knocked down without apology, and had balls bounced off every part of my face, head, and body at any time, even when we were standing around waiting for the teacher to start us, and made to jog around the playing field while everyone else played the game du jour. There was never a school spirit shirt or a band uniform in my size.

  And thanks to Ish being at the public school while I received superior education and humiliation at the Academy, I’d had nobody, but nobody to turn to.

  As I remembered those times, I found I forgot the backaches and sore ankles and neck cricks and the cuts on my palms. I even seemed smaller. I know because I measured myself all the time, trying to get through my fat jail doorway. Every few minutes, or hours. Whatever an hour meant down here. There was no time. Whenever I thought of it, I tried. Sometimes I could squeeze an arm through. Never a leg. My thighs were just too huge. I was afraid to stick my head out. What if I stuck?

  It was remembering how I’d taken control of food behind my parents’ backs that reminded me how I had decided to become a whore. My father’s favorite sneer at any woman was calling her a fat whore. He said it even about quite thin women. It was the worst thing she could be.

  In the beginning, I was still young enough to wonder if the women he called that were actually doing it. In middle school I read up on whores. What they earned, where they worked, the health risks, the sex acts, pimps and runaways, the clothes. I watched Pretty Woman over and over. Julia Roberts was so thin. Thin, and so very tall.

  I’d look at myself in the mirror, trying to imagine myself tall and thin. Couldn’t do it. I was only a little under average height, but to my young eyes, thirty pounds overweight was bloated.

  Every kid in school agreed with me. I hated myself completely. Nothing I could possibly do or say would make me worthy of anyone’s notice.

  As I thought all this in fat jail, I had to curl up in a ball and hide under my own arms, hoping against hope to stop thinking, stop remembering, stop feeling all those things. Good luck with that. This was hell. Time stood still.

  Sometimes I remembered my brief escape. College. Freedom. New clothes chosen by me. Food! I ate whatever I wanted at the cafeteria, so relieved to eat unsupervised at last that I gained fifty pounds in the first semester. I’d thought I was free of my family at last.

  Then I went home for Christmas break. I weighed over two hundred pounds. They took one look at me and threw me out.

  My father wouldn’t talk to me at all. My mother talked and talked, probably trying to convince herself they were doing the right thing, or maybe trying to convince me that they didn’t need to feel bad about doing it. I never knew what her true feelings were about anything.

  When Beth came to live at the Lair, she had seemed so much like my mother that I could barely stand it. Then I saw how scared she was, and how lonely and confused and really puzzled that this could have happened to her. Beth had believed all the crap that people in my parents’ social class tell themselves. And it had bitten her in the ass.

  I couldn’t hate her.

  Being kind to Beth about all that was the first step, I saw now, in getting me to where I was today, sitting on that bolted-down chair, staring out that narrow doorway at my hippo-like reflection with tears running down my face.

  How long had I been in fat jail? A week? Surely longer than a day. I’d thought too many thoughts, and then, exhausted and starving and emotionally wrung out, I’d cried and beat on the walls with my open palms and torn up the carpet and tried over and over and over and over to squeeze through that narrow doorway, and then slept, because it hurt too much to be awake. And then woke up and did it again. So, more than a week, surely. A year? Ten years?

  Couldn’t be ten years. I would have thought about my fat whore years if I’d been here that long. I woke up and sat myself on that chair and stared resolutely at my appalling reflection and remembered leaving home with a rollaway suitcase packed full of rice cakes. Thanks, Mother. That’ll sustain me while I’m sleeping in the bus station.

  And then I met Vito, who took me away from the bus station. He managed my first two days of hooking. I was called too fat to fuck by not one but three of the johns he presented me to. I thought about those two days very deliberately. Vito had got me new clothes. Vito had sold my class ring and my birthstone ring for me. Vito had hit me on the head, very carefully, where it wouldn’t show under my hair, and forced me crying into the shower where he explained that girls who didn’t play nice with their manager got brought to frat parties and gang-raped, that I wouldn’t like that. He did things with his hands while he said it.

  The next day I had run away to Mal at Muffy’s.

  Yeah, that d
idn’t work out.

  I went back to Vito. I knew he was right—I wasn’t ready to work on my own yet. He treated me a little better for almost a week. Then he wanted me to try crack. He said it was just a cigarette, but I’d never been a smoker, and I’d done my homework in middle school, so I pretended and handed it back to him and just acted crazy, and then when we got in the cab to go to a party where he said we would score some big money, I waited until we were stuck in traffic and then got out on the other side of the cab and ran away. I had nothing but the clothes I was wearing.

  Oddly, all these thoughts were making me feel better.

  I was beginning to hate myself less.

  Life on the street was much harder than I had read about in middle school. A week and a half of Vito had completely hardened me to the necessity of stealing. I stole a cell phone and sold it immediately. With that money I bought a cheaper phone, and went straight to the library and set up an email account, and started looking for customers. I still had to stand on street corners waiting to be picked up, but I knew something about my johns. I kept careful records after every trick. Information is a weapon.

  And I needed weapons. Sleeping in public leaves a person wide open to every kind of attack. Cops arrested me and stole my money. I wasn’t safe from assault in the lockup. I got sick. I stole over-the-counter meds and kept hooking.

  But I lived. I learned. Occasionally I could connect up with another girl and we’d share a room. The rent was always way too high because the landlord knew who he was renting to. There I was able to use some of my poor-little-rich-girl smarts, because Chicago has wicked strong tenants’ rights laws, and if I or my roommate had a lease, we kept a roof over our heads far longer than we would have if I hadn’t studied up.

  So I wasn’t a total failure. Dammit, I’d done pretty well, for someone who was too goddam stupid to get out of the skin trade.

  But it wasn’t that easy to get out. Fat girls don’t get hired, I learned, no matter how smart or well-spoken they seem. I couldn’t get “honest” jobs. I seldom had an address to put on my application that I’d had for longer than six months. I hadn’t thought to bring my high school diploma in that suitcase full of rice cakes. I had no more than a semester of college. And if I did land a job earning money on my feet, or behind a phone, or under a hairnet, I earned a whopping two hundred dollars a week before taxes, because of course I couldn’t get full time.