And then he was in the corridor.
He turned around and held out his hand. “Come on.”
“How?” I stamped my foot. Frustration and horror and rage and resentment made me stutter. “D-don’t torture me, Mal. It’s not kind.”
“Pollywog. Love. Pog. This is the Regional Office. You design it for yourself, just like you design your demon body. It matches your feelings.” His face twisted. “Haven’t I got you to feel any different?”
He was going to make this a test of my love or some fucking thing. I wanted to kill him. I wanted him to come back into this room, even though neither of us might ever get out again. “This isn’t about you, Mal, or you and me. It’s just me.”
He came closer to the doorway. I backed up. “I believe in you, Polly.”
Black bitterness rose up in my throat. “That’s nice. Now I think you should go—away for a little while.” Get out. Go while you can. Stop tormenting me. “They send around fifty demons every now and then to stand outside the door and mock me,” I lied. “They’re about due.”
He inflated his chest. “I can take ’em!” Then he spoiled it by looking over his shoulder.
“Please, Mal. Just for a while.” Going by experience, I imagined that nobody would want to come into Lust Division ever again, but what about all those rose petals he’d been squirting all over the place? What if they found a demon brave enough to follow his trail? “Oh. Here. Take your pack.” I shoved it through the doorway.
Mal eyed me seriously. “Polly, I’m coming back.”
I swallowed. “I hope so, Mal.”
He leaned through the doorway. I couldn’t resist. We kissed long and slow. The bad feeling faded, and I smelled dried roses, and hope made me dizzy, and then the pain roared back as I felt myself sticking in the doorway again. He’d almost got me to try to get out again.
I pulled away. “C’mon, let me strap you back into this thing.”
ISH
He let Pog chase him out of there. She was lying, of course. The Regional Office couldn’t spare fifty demons to go make fun of one chubby girl from South Shore. But he went.
If he came back and she wasn’t there anymore, well, hurrah, and he’d find her again. Amanda was right about that. Love made you sure of what mattered. In the Regional Office, where everything is about perspective and feelings, he couldn’t lose her.
And if he came back and she was still there, well, at least he’d be there with her. She needed some time alone, though, time to think in. They hadn’t seemed to do much thinking when he was in that room with her.
He turned his attention to sabotage. Thanks to the pyramidal hierarchy down here, the infrastructure was centralized and vulnerable. He remembered the location of the main freight elevators. He wanted to do some more damage before he left.
Hm, he’d got into the air, the drinking supply, the rugs, and surfaces that got touched a lot. What had he missed? Oo, buttons in the elevators. Especially the “door open” buttons. The Regional Office had a million elevators, all of them creaky and stinky. He noticed as he rattled his way down from Second to Third Circle that dust shivered off the light fixture inside the elevator. Boom. He lifted the plastic hiding the fluorescent tubes and shot a handful of powdered rose petals inside. Worst case, the guy who changed the tubes would get it.
That got him thinking about printer cartridges. He wished he’d had time to bring some back to the Lair. They could load them up with rose petal powder mixed with toner. Wham, everybody who read a memo from that printer would get it.
He thought about love as he skulked around looking for ways to make trouble. Love had got him sentenced to ten years in the RO. It also got him out, and showed him how great a life he’d made for Polly—okay, Delilah did most of that—but Ish had helped. He’d hired Reg. He’d kept their reports running through smoothly. In a way, he’d done his bit to protect the girls from hell’s machinery and gave them room to make their own lives.
Was it worse that she’d had to spend eight years hustling, or would it have been worse if she’d actually died when he thought she had?
That was the Regional Office kind of thinking.
Love showed Ish that he was looking at it backwards. It was better that she had this great new life. And better that he now had a shot at loving her the way he’d always, always wanted.
Like Cricket said, it wasn’t really why it happened. It was what you did with it that counted.
He had used up most of his rose-dust spray charges already. But he had some loose rose dust. That gave him an idea. How about sabotaging Buugh’s office?
This proved to be a little more ambitious than prudent.
Buugh’s assistant was away from his desk. The boss’s door was unlocked. Ish sneaked in.
Buugh’s office was full of stylish ebony furniture, black rugs, black glass lamps, obsidian mirrors, even a private black marble shower. Ish hit every surface that looked like it would hide the schmutz of black rose-petal dust and then release it slowly.
Then he heard a bellow behind him.
“Qbybbl, you maggot!”
There he was, Ish’s purple chrome nemesis, blocking the doorway and swelling with fury.
Ish had a blunderbuss full of rose petal charges, but it was strapped to his backpack. Shit.
“Stand back!” he quavered. “I’m armed! I got rose petals in this thing!” It was a sandwich bag, and it was mostly empty, but Buugh stopped in his tracks. “Demon-slayer dust! Don’t come any closer!”
Now he had a problem, because he didn’t want to spray it around in here while Buugh was watching. Then he’d think to have the room decontaminated, or else move his office. Ish wanted the office to stay occupied and toxic.
The doorway filled up with bulky Anger demons. Ish gulped. Guess he found some more commandos somewhere. Time for plan B.
He pulled a Twinkie out of his cargo-pants pocket.
“What’s he doing?” hissed an Anger commando.
“Dunno. Taking poison?”
“Dummy, he’s got poison. That killer dust.”
“Go get him!” Buugh screamed. “Get him out of my office!”
“Ah-ah-ah,” Ish said. “You don’t want me spilling this in here, do you?” He jiggled the sandwich bag suggestively.
“Wait!” Buugh shrieked.
Ish got the Twinkie wrapper between my teeth and tore it open. The Twinkie fell on the floor. He grabbed it back in well under five seconds and bit the ends off it.
“Sayonara, assholes.” He dropped the Twinkie at his feet again and shrank as fast as imagination would let him. When he was half an inch high and the pastry tube loomed in front of him, he screamed too.
He’d forgotten to suck out the cream!
The demon commandos surged into the room, making unintelligible thunder-rumblings of puzzlement and hot pursuit.
Ish took a deep breath, pictured Polly’s cell, and charged at the creamy filling blocking the Twinkie tube.
Good thing he was hungry. In the end he was forced to eat his way through, sucking a wormhole for himself, shrinking down to fit into that hole, sucking another hole, shrinking again—a Twinkie is a long, long tunnel when you’re half a millimeter high. He thrashed clear at the far end, gasping for air and completely over the taste of creamy filling.
Far behind him but getting closer, he heard roaring and squishing and cursing.
Something went bang! behind him, and he felt something smack the back of his head.
But he was standing in the corridor outside Polly’s cell. He was covered with white goo. He swiftly grew to his normal height and stamped with all his strength on the Twinkie.
It went squish.
Nothing came out.
“You idiot,” Polly said. “Your hair’s on fire.”
Far away down the corridor, demon voices bellowed.
It was time to get her out of there now, even if he had to hit her on the head and carry her unconscious body home.
POG
&nb
sp; After I sent Mal away, I curled up against the wall of my cell and cried myself to sleep.
I dreamed I was in my cell in the Regional Office. Mal had just explained that we create our own reality down here, and then he had summoned a speedboat to come along and drive him away up the canal that suddenly appeared outside my cell doorway—or inside it. It was hard to tell. Needless to say, it was a very skinny speedboat.
I turned away, feeling desolate, and found myself standing at a kitchen counter looking at an array of bowls and pots, a stovetop, an oven. A well-remembered voice beside me said, “You need to feed yourself.”
I woke with a start into another dream, where I stood in my cell, which now had a kitchen, and Gabrielly stood beside me, short and hairy-chinned and kind as always, looking severe on the outside, but I could sense her grinning delightedly on the inside. I squealed and threw my arms around her. She hugged me back. A moment later she stood four feet away, as if we had never touched, and she was lecturing me.
“You had the right idea when you were a kid. Feed yourself.”
“But, Gabrielly, your food was so much better!” I wailed.
She touched my face. “I made it with love. Just as you made food for yourself with love. Why did you stop?”
“I was broke and homeless and scared and a fat whore. I just wanted calories to put in my face. I didn’t have a gourmet kitchen!”
“That’s not why you stopped feeding yourself with love. You stopped loving yourself when you became a whore. You hated yourself because your father hated fat whores. That’s fucked up, honey. You still deserve to feed yourself with love. Haven’t I taught you anything?”
Gabrielly would never have said fucked up. Plus, she wouldn’t have lectured me about the state of my soul.
“I hate this dream!” I stamped my foot. “And I’m so hungry!”
She changed then, and I thought I knew her new face, but she was putting my hands on the ingredients on the countertop, naming them as I touched them, just the way she used to do, so I couldn’t keep looking at her and also at the food we were about to make.
She said, “It’s time, then.”
And then she taught me how to make pão queijo.
They were perfect. Pão queijo are little puffy golden balls of crisp shell outside and hot air and gooey chewy tangy cheese inside. We made them with butter, and I beat the eggs in separately until the dough was glossy and gluey. Once I started taking the trays out of the oven, it seemed there was no end to them. I ate and ate.
“Can you taste the love in them?” Gabrielly kept saying.
Someone far away was shouting. I began to wonder about the noise. The pão queijo tasted more and more like air and less like my memory. The kitchen was a horrendous mess and I didn’t care. I filled myself up. I looked up and saw, through the doorless doorway of my cell, Mal running toward me down the long beige corridor. His hair was on fire.
I let the last pan fall to the floor and walked toward him, worried. “You idiot,” I said as we met. “Your hair’s on fire.”
Then I realized several things: we were standing in the hallway outside my cell, and there was no mirror out there, and way down the corridor and coming closer, people were shouting in a very unfriendly way.
“We’d better get going,” Mal gasped. He was wrestling something like a wide-mouthed grenade launcher out of its holster on his backpack.
“Give me that.” With the calm certainty of a dreamer, I knelt, took aim, and fired back down the corridor.
A shower of smoke and tiny black particles blew from the gun as if gushing from a firehose.
The cries of the hunting demons turned shrill. Then they receded.
Meanwhile Mal was smacking his hair with his hands, which were covered, like the rest of him, with fluffy white creamy stuff.
“Hey. You’re out,” he said, standing there with his hair crisping down to his scalp in little sizzling curls of sparks.
I looked back into my cell. There was nothing inside except a chair. “I had this dream,” I said.
“Oh, Polly,” Mal said.
So then I got to cry on him and climb all over him and bite him.
“Ow!” he yelped. “If you’re hungry, this is not the moment—”
“Holy state fair junk food, am I hungry!”
“All right, all right.” He dug his hands into the pockets of his cargo pants, one after another. “Might want to put some clothes on.” He sent me a lewd look that I could actually feel on my skin like slithering warm hands.
“I’m getting to that.” I tried to picture clothing myself in something similar to what he had on and couldn’t. I settled for some low-slung jeans and a snug-fitting denim shirt. “You mentioned food? Wait.” I stared at his bulging pockets and the snack packs he was pulling out of them. “Are you telling me you had food with you all this time?” A growl started in the back of my throat.
He silenced me by handing me Twinkies, one at a time, as we ran through the empty Circles of the Regional Office. We dumped every bit of rose dust he had and all the whole petals, even some felt-tip pens that he claimed were impregnated with liquified essence of rose dust.
Finally we ran out. We paused in the middle of a broad, litter-strewn corridor that was once the main aisle through Greed. I was out of breath from laughing.
“Shouldn’t we have a plan to get out of here?” I said.
“I can get us out any time we want,” Mal boasted.
I glanced down the corridor. An elevator door opened at the far end. People emerged, gave a yell, and started running toward us.
“Now might be a good time for that.”
He dug a final Twinkie out of his cargo-pants pocket and unwrapped it. His eyebrows wiggled lewdly. “Have you ever sucked the creamy stuffing out of a shaft of golden—ow!”
“Quit talking dirty, you idiot.”
He grinned. “No, really. This is our exit strategy.” He handed me a Twinkie.
My jaw dropped. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I said that, too.” He peeled the wrapping off. “But it works.”
POG
We made a clean getaway. It was Ish’s idea to choose the emblem that Buugh’s demon had planted in the Lair as our return point. I want that on record. Because when we arrived, we found ourselves standing in a teeny wooden room lit by a single bare light bulb, with benches along two walls and a big heater. The air was about a hundred and twenty-five degrees and full of smoke. Sweet, rough Mary Jane smoke.
The big wooden door handle came off in Ish’s hand.
“Fuck it,” I said, and kicked the door off its hinges. This proved easier than it might have, because, we learned later, the girls had removed the hinge pins.
“I thought you’d come back this way,” Amanda said, standing calmly outside the room. She had a pitcher of margaritas on the rocks in each hand.
Good grief, I love my team.
I took one pitcher from her and guzzled. It gave me an instant ice cream headache and I didn’t care.
“Thank you,” Ish said when he came up for air. “What’s in there?”
Amanda was rehanging the door. “My marijuana-drying room. We’ve repurposed it into a demon trap. Think anyone followed you?
“Eventually. I mean, is that weed smoke? You must have used a lot.”
“Might as well use up some of that massive stash the slackers left behind.”
My thirst somewhat quenched, I looked around.
They’d moved the marijuana-drying room, which was once a grotty old sauna used by the slacker demons before us, away from its low-ceilinged corner and parked it on the basketball deck, which was the only area with a high ceiling in the factory space. The big room was dim, since night had fallen outside. Smoke had boiled out of the demon-trap into the big space, and apparently the girls had rigged big colored spotlights in red and blue and green and purple to shine down onto the deck. They made very pretty-colored pillars of light in the smoke.
More colored pill
ars of light shone down on a long row of caterer’s tables that had been set on the deck, dressed up with tablecloths and ice sculptures, and bearing enough food to feed an army of fund-raisers. Whole glazed salmon, piles of dumplings, platters of sushi so beautiful it hurt to look at them, an unmanned carving station with a huge chunk of rare beef running juices, another carving station holding a ham, a third with a turkey. Rows and rows of wine bottles. A beer keg!
“What is all this?” I said, moving forward, my mouth watering. I’d been fasting for several months, or thirty-six hours, depending on your time frame. I staggered a little. That weed smoke was no joke.
“Illusion,” Amanda said.
Ish passed a hand through the nearest ice sculpture. “Nice. Is it magical?”
“Nope. Just a projection on smoke. When the smoke dissipates—” She walked away a moment, then came back, accompanied by a faint roaring sound. “Fan. Watch.”
We watched. My heart was breaking. I was starving.
The smoke blew away, and the big row of tables faded away, and the bright lights fell on the uninteresting basketball court floor and...a single, undecorated table. This table was also loaded with food: bowls of Cheetos and cheese nips and peanut-butter-filled pretzels and chocolate-covered acai berries, what the fuck? that must have been Melitta’s junk food. The beer keg was still there.
Drool ran down my chin. “Is it real?” I breathed, moving forward.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s bait, sweetheart,” Ish said, grabbing me around the waist. “Don’t mess it up.”
“He’s right,” Melitta said, coming up to us. The rest of the team was trickling downstairs from the living quarters. “Everything on that table is doped with marijuana or rose petals or both.”
I heaved a tortured sigh. “Fiendish. When can we eat? Because I’m famished here.”
“That’s brilliant,” Ish said. “You guys came up with all that?”
“Well, we had a week,” Melitta said.
“Whaaat?” Ish exclaimed. “But I left the night Buugh grabbed Pog!”
“You told me time is different in the RO,” I said. “Now do you believe me when I say I’m passing out from hunger here?”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 99