One time-saver was the plastic drop cloth they'd already spread out under the coffee table.

This was, after all, a scat film scene. Never Leave A Mess was the rule. The trashed bathroom presented a bit of a problem, though, until Nick put the brain G.o.d gave him to work. The bathroom was padlocked shuta"hence, no bath tub to cut her legs off in and, doubly hence, no place for all the blood to drain. Nick deftly cut four yard-long lengths of extension cord and began to apply the tourniquets just as they'd taught him in the Army.

He cranked the first two on at the top of each thigh as close as possible to the hip joint, then two more a half-inch below the first two. He cranked them all down tight and tied them off. Next, with the Gerber, he began to cut. He cut all the way around each thigh, straight to the bone. Sharp as the Gerber was, the task proved much, much, much, much, much, much, much more difficult than one would think. Very little blood leaked out, however, due to the dual ligatures on each leg. A hammer and chisel from the Caddy's tool box neatly cracked each thighbonea"

And off the legs came.

"Nice job, Nick," Frankie complimented.

"Thanks."

Spooky's torso fit perfectly into the suitcase, and the legs went right on top. They zipped the suitcase up, slid it into the Caddy's back seat, discarded the drop cloth into the motel dumpster, and drove away.

Nick turned on the radio and smiled. What better harbinger could he ask for? The Yankees were beating Baltimore 11-1.

And it was only the fifth inning.

"I don't know about the ca.n.a.l, Frankie." Nick appraised the long stripe of black water from the road, trying to drive normally. "I saw two cops on the other side."

"They were just roosting," Frankie felt confident. "Eatin' donuts and reading the funny papers. They'll go back on patrol soon. Let's just kill some time, drive around a while."

"Frankie, we got a f.u.c.kin' torso in a suitcase in the back seat. I'd kind of like to get rid of it as soon as f.u.c.kin' possible, know what I mean?'

Frankie nodded, seeing the logic. "f.u.c.k, you got any Demerol, Nick? I'm all out and I need a bang."

"Wait till we get back to the compound. And you better pray that Vmch believes our story "cos if he don't you're gonna need a s.h.i.+tload of Demerol for when that kooky doctor starts doing the job on you."

"f.u.c.k. I definitely need a hit"

Nick pulled a u-turn, a sudden endeavor occurring to him.

"Where we going now? Those cops ain't left the ca.n.a.l yet"

"The Kwik-Mart," Nick answered. "For Wet-Naps."

"Wet-Naps? We goin' for ribs?'

Nick frowned. "No, we ain't goin' for ribs. Wea"or, I mean youa"gotta wipe down everything we touched." Nick pointed to his head. "Think, Frankie. That suitcase has our prints all over it and so does Spooky."

"f.u.c.k." Frankie seemed disgruntled. "I don't wanna wipe fingerprints off her f.u.c.kin'

corpse with Wet-Naps."

"I don't give a f.u.c.k what you don't want. You got us into this mess, so you're gonna do the job. I ain't spendin' the rest of my life on Riker's with some guy named Luther usin' my a.s.shole for a place to party. I can't believe how bad you f.u.c.ked this up."

"It wasn't my fault, Nick." Frankie was pouting now. "She asked for it. She shouldn't oughta have said those things to me."

Nick pulled a Demerol tab from his pocket, showed it to his cohort. "You wipe down the b.i.t.c.h's body and then you can take your bang."

"Hey, thanks!"

The front of the Kwik-Mart s.h.i.+mmered in neon. There were only a few Vehicles in the parking lot: a mint-condition '68 350 small-block Camaro that had been oddly spraypainted black, an old red pickup truck, and a gold Dodge Colt with a P.I.L. sticker in the back window. Nick and Frankie loped inside, Frankie beginning to sweat out some early withdrawal. "s.h.i.+t, yeah!" Nick bellowed in the store. The man behind the counter, who wore a turban and bore a suspicious resemblance to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, jumped an inch off the floor at Nick's celebratory outburst. What was Nick celebrating? There was a little television behind the counter, the Yankees game on, and somebody named Giambi just hit a grand slam. The score was now 15 to 1.

And it was only the sixth inning.

"I knew that big boat anchor was good for somethin'!" Nick railed happily. Frankie shrugged, wis.h.i.+ng for a mainline. They bought Wet-Naps and big coffees, and as they headed back toward the Caddy, Nick said, "You know, Frankie, I've got a really good vibe about tonight, even after all the s.h.i.+t that happened with Spooky." He shook his head hopefully. "When the Yankees beat the s.h.i.+t out of Baltimore, great things happen."

"Uh, yeah," Frankie replied, scratching himself. "I need to take a bang."

Nick dropped his coffee when he reached to open the car door. It splashed all over his shoes.

"Nick," Frankie asked. "What'choo drop your coffee for?'

Nick didn't answer. Instead his eyes rolled up into his head and he fainted, toppling to the pavement.

Frankie looked into the back seat and noted at once that the suitcase was gone.

"a"two grand slams in the bottom of the ninth inning against the generally automatic Mariano Rivera," the tinny voice announced. "Yes, folks, it's a record-setting comeback as the Baltimore Orioles beat the New York Yankees, 16to 15!"

Callused fingers, tinged in green light, snapped the old Philco radio oft". Spooky wasn't dead, by the way. This might seem beyond belief, but in truth she hadn't actually broken her neck against the edge of the coffee table, nor had she suffered any manner of vertebral fracture or spinal-cord-transection. The impact had merely pinched her seventh and eighth cervical nerves, resulting in a reduced heart and respiratory rate and temporary neuromuscular paralysis. The tourniquets had prevented death from blood-loss. Hence, Spooky was alive.

And not in a very good mood when she regained consciousness.

Those motherf.u.c.kin 'tube-steaks, she thought. Goombah morons can't do any-f.u.c.kin'- thing right.

She lay in the front footwell of a vehicle whose suspension springs creaked mercilessly over the back road's pot holes and dips. At first Spooky couldn't seea"er, well, she could see enough to note that her legs had been summarily amputated, but that was about it.

Above her, she made out faint green light, which she presumed were dashboard lights, but her vision was still too blurry to see the driver.

The driver, incidentally, was possessed of a very complex belief in providence. Twice a year he made these aimless drives all the way up the east coast and all the way back, not to visit relatives or to see sights, but simply to be. To contemplate himself. It proved a very self-actualizing experience. He'd merely pulled over at the Kwik-Mart, purchased a bag of Beechnut chewing tobacco, and had been walking back out of the store whena"

poofa"the inclination had struck him to look into the back of that big Cadillac. He'd seen the suitcase there and had simply taken it. It was providence, see?

Providence had told him to do that.

"Why, hey there," the driver said when he noticed the head on the torso moving. "How you feelin'?"

"What kind of a d.i.c.k for-brains question is that, you old ruck?' the torso replied in the softest voice. "I've been armless for eleven motherf.u.c.kin" years and tonight the mafia-version of Laurel and Hardy cut my legs oft" in a motherf.u.c.kin' Howard Johnsons. How the f.u.c.k do you think I feel?'

"I understand your plight, hon, and there really ain't no cause fer profanation. Not now.

See, I'se savin' you from yer travails. Gettin' diseases, smokin' the drugs, gettin' cornholed by fellas . . . it's the negertive forces'a the universe that's has caused you to veer from the blessed path that yer supposed to take. I'se'll help you, missya"help you git'cherself back on the path."

"Huh?' Spooky said.

"Jus' you wait'n see, child," the driver said, his grizzled face eerie and green in the dash lights. He looked down at her through the darkness. "What 'cher name, darlin'?'

"Spooky," Spooky said.

"Well. I'se pleased as punch ta meet 'cha. Spooky." The driver smiled. "My name's Lud."

Grub Girl.

in the Prison of Dead Women.

Sure, hon, I got some time. I'll tell you the whole thing while you make up your mind.

And this is no bulls.h.i.+t, either. You can read about it in the papers.

You know about Grubs, right? No? s.h.i.+t man, you from overseas or something? I'll make a long story short. "Grubs" are what they call us, same way they call black people n.i.g.g.e.rs.

Nice tag, huh? But I guess we are a little on the pasty side. But, look, don't get freaked out. I heard somewhere there are over ten thousand of us total. It all started with that ramjet thing. I don't know, a couple of years ago. Christ I'm sure you heard about that.

NASA and the Air Force were testing some new kinda plane, remotely piloted, they called it flying it a hundred miles off the coast over the Atlantic. It was a nuclear ramjet or some s.h.i.+t could fly indefinitely without fuel, no pilots, ran by computers. The idea was to have these things flying around all the time real high up. Cheap way to defend the nation. "The ultimate deterrent" the President said when they announced that they were gonna spend billions developing this flop. What they didn' announce was that plane kicked out a trail of some off-the-wall kinda radiation wherever it flew. The government wasn't worried about it 'cos it flew so high, the s.h.i.+t would go right out of the atmosphere.

Well, something f.u.c.ked up during one of the test flights, and one of these things wound up flying up and down the east coast at treetop level on something they called an "emergency urban alert bomb mode" for something like five days before they could veer it off course over the sea and shoot it down. Thing was flying over cities, for s.h.i.+t's sake.

And I was one of the ones lucky enough to get rained on by this thing.

I'd just come up from the docks down there, you know, by the Market Square, and I was walking up toward Clay Street. 'Rome, my pimp, he usually picked me and his other two girls up at about four am. Best time for us alley girls to turn tricks is after two, after the bars are closed 'cos then the cops stop buzzing the street to bust our chops. f.u.c.kin' cops, nine times outa ten when they catch you, all they do is make you give 'em a b.l.o.w.j.o.b, then let you go. Anyway, here I am, hoofing it up to Clay after turning about five tricks, and then there's this rumble way down deep in my belly and this sound like slow thunder, and I look up and see this ugly motherf.u.c.kin' thing flying about hundred feet over my head.

Didn't know what to make of it. It looked like a big black kite in the sky, and when it pa.s.sed, I could see this weird blue-green glow coming out of the back of the thing, its engines, I guess. l died a couple hours later, and the next day I woke up a grub.

There was a big whupdeedo for a little while. All of a sudden there were ten thousand dead people walking around and not knowing what the f.u.c.k hit them. President called an emergency meeting or some s.h.i.+t. Oh, you should've heard all the fancy talk they were spouting. At first they were gonna "euthanize" us "to safeguard the societal whole from potential contraindications," until some egghead at CDC verified that we weren't psychotic or contagious or radioactive or anything. Then some a.s.shole Republican senator made a big pitch about how we should be "socially impounded." "Protean symtomologies," see, that's what they were worried about. These s.h.i.+theads wanted to round us all up and put us on an island somewhere! It all blew over, though, after the activists started gearing up, and they let us be. After all, grubs are people too.

It didn't hurt really. Just felt sick for a few minutes, got a headache, puked, and died.

Woke up the next day feeling pretty much the same as I always did. Woke up a Grub, and that's my story.

We call live people "pink" or "pinkies," and they call us Grubs. Only fair, they got names for us, we got names for them.' Rome didn't get it, the p.r.i.c.k, he stayed pink, and so did his other two hookers. The s.h.i.+t from the plane wouldn't get you if you were in a car or under a roof. About a dozen other hookers got it, though, 'cos they were out on the street just like me when that f.u.c.ked up plane flew by, and now every pink hooker in the city hates us. See, Johns want Grubs more than pink girls 'cos we're cheaper and we ain't got diseases. AIDS, herpes, and all that s.h.i.+t, I had it all when I was pink, but not no more, and a John knows that if he buys himself a nut with a grub he ain't gonna catch nothing.

Here's why I killed 'Rome, though. After I got grubbed, he got this brainstorm that he could really cop a bundle off me with the kinks. He'd work me right out of his crib, hitting Johns up for a couple hundred bucks an hour! These sick f.u.c.ks'd come in and do anything they wanted, and I mean anything. Bondage, S&M. scat, that sort of s.h.i.+t.

'Rome's only rule was that they weren't allowed to break any bones or cut off any parts.

These kinks were a trip, let me tell you. You'd be surprised how many really sick motherf.u.c.kers there are in the world. They'd tie me up, jack me out, stick needles in my t.i.ts, s.h.i.+t in my mouth, you f.u.c.kin' name it.

Well, I started to get sick of this s.h.i.+t real fast. Here's this sc.u.mbag making cash hand over fist offa my a.s.s, and I don't get s.h.i.+t out of it. So I...

Well, if you wanna know the details, I busted a toilet tank cover over his head one night, cut his belly open, and ate his guts.

h.e.l.l. Sometimes a girl's gotta do what she's gotta do.

See, grubs can only eat raw stuff. You eat regular food like the pinkies and the s.h.i.+t don't come out, you bloat up. There was this one gal named Sue who got grubbed just like mea"blonde, kinda heavy set, really big t.i.tsa"and she just goes on eating the regular s.h.i.+t that the pinkies eat, and one day I saw her walking past the hotel and, I swear, she's big as Jabba the Hut, and before she could make it to the bus stop, she, like, exploded right there in the street, made one holy h.e.l.l of a mess. And this s.h.i.+thead Republican senator I was telling you about, you should've heard the guy, like because we can only eat raw stuff, that means we're gonna go on some zombie rampage eating people in the streets like some horror movie so that was his case for "socially impounding" us. Glad that a.s.shole's s.h.i.+t didn't fly. Of course, it probably sounds pretty hypocritical of me, since I just got done telling you I chowed down on 'Rome insides. I just figured it was the thing to do, that's all. I got tired of being used by this sc.u.mbag, so I did the job on him. It wasn't like his guts tasted any better than anything elsea"grubs don't have a sense of taste.

One good thing about being a grub hooker, though, you start to stick up for yourself. You get a case of the a.s.s and you don't take s.h.i.+t anymore. The rule had always been no girl works solo. You wanna work the street, you gotta have a pimp. Ask any hooker in any city in the world. You try to work solo, you get your face beat to mush or wind up in some dumpster with your throat cut. We'd always be too afraid to fight back, stand up for ourselves, you know? s.h.i.+t, most girls are strung out anyway. I was. Back when I was pink, I was firing up scag four times a day, had to shoot up into my foot 'cos the veins on my arms all collapsed and turned black. I'd turn over my take to 'Rome every night like clockwork, and he'd keep me in junk, and that was all I cared about. When you're strung out you really don't have a soul anymore. Yeah, turning my tricks, keeping 'Rome happy, and getting my fixa"that's all there was for me. It was h.e.l.l, let me tell you. But after I got grubbed, I didn't need the scag anymore, and it finally dawned on me that I didn't need 'Rome, either. All the other grubs working the street got the same gist, and all of a sudden a lot of pimps were winding up in body bags. The pink girls, sure, they're all still in their stables, but their pimps don't f.u.c.k with us grubs 'cos they know that if they do. they'll wind up just like 'Rome.

f.u.c.k 'em.

And this f.u.c.khead senator? He starts this s.h.i.+t about we'll destabilize the work base, how we gotta be segregated because employers will be hiring grubs instead of pinkies "cos we can work round the clock, but then the congress pa.s.sed a law against it. Of course, prost.i.tution's still illegal but around here at least, the cops don't f.u.c.k with the grubs. It's a real laugh. We give 'em the creeps, so they just let us do our tiling and leave us alone.

Er, I should say, they used to. But the new congress changed all that and fast. Now it's roundup time, hoss. If you're a Grub and you so much as spit on the sidewalk, there'll be some John Law motherf.u.c.ker waiting to lock you up.

It was a plainclothes U.S. Marshal that busted me. Just my luck. "You're under arrest for s.e.xual solicitation," he was nice enough to tell me only after he came in my mouth. "You motherless d.i.c.kcheese ball-bag-stinking pig motherf.u.c.ker!" I yelled back. I was gonna bust his coconut right there in the unmarked but before I coulda" PAP!a" he hit me with a round from his track-operated spicule pistol, and that was it for me.

Regular weapons don' t work on Grubsa"we' re dead, you know? So the pigs started making new kinds of guns that would paralyze us. Tubocurarine darts, electromagnetic-pulse nets, milliwave disrupters. When I came to, some fat DOa"stands for Detention Officera"a guy named Stryker, he was finis.h.i.+ng up a body-cavity search while I was chained to a wall. The f.u.c.ker had his hand so far up my a.s.s I thought he was trying to stick his fingers out my mouth.

"I want a f.u.c.king lawyer!" I screamed.

"Lawyer? Don't you watch the news? You're dead, b.i.t.c.h. Civil rights don't apply to dead people anymore. Thank G.o.d the Republicans are back in office. We can do anything we want to you grub sc.u.mbags."

When he finished fis.h.i.+ng in my bowels, he jerked off on my a.s.s, then let a half dozen more DOs gang-bang me right there against the wall. The last guy p.i.s.sed up my a.s.s, for posterity, I guess.

So that's it in a nutsh.e.l.l. The new administration dropped all the previous non-discrimination laws. Grubs weren't considered people anymore, so we were no longer ent.i.tled to humane treatment. That $ 10 b.l.o.w.j.o.b got me a five-year sentence in this stone motel they call the Alderton Federal Rehabilitation Center. We'd heard rumors about this joint on the street; it was a Grubs-Only prison. Torture, slave labor, experiments. I learned the score here real quick; any Grubs that were good-looking got a.s.signed to the Behavioral Segregation Wing. They called it the f.u.c.k Farm. Gang rape was the order of the day. and so were kink jobs. In the old days, if the pinkies f.u.c.ked with us we'd just pop their heads open and scarf their brainsa"Grubs are a lot stronger than pinks. But we couldn't fight back anymore because all inmates were fitted with UV nodes.

I remember the day I went in for my "fitting."

The sign on the door read: OBEDIENCE IS VIRTUE, but below that was another sign: IMPLANTATION UNIT.

Stryker and some egghead tech had me strapped down to a padded table. The tech slit each of my nipples with a scalpel, stuck something about the size of a marble in each t.i.t, then sewed me up. Then he slit open my c.l.i.toris and repeated the procedure. Sounds nasty but it was really no big deal: Grubs don't feel pain... er, at least that's what I'd always thought.

DO Stryker grinned down. "From now on. Grub, you do everything we say."

"Don't count on it, pig," I told him. "Oh, and by the way, your mother blows farm animals."

"What we've done, inmate," the tech informed me, "is surgically implant Bofors Model 250 ultraviolet-wave transponders into your most sensitive mammalian and genital nerve cl.u.s.ters. 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, replenis.h.i.+ng all electrical synoptic impulsesa"hence, causing pain that can only be described as incalculable."

"Drink my zombie p.i.s.s," I replied.

"Mouthy little wh.o.r.e, 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 p.e.c.k.e.rsnot on the floor.

World'd be a better place."

"I'd take the officer's warning under serious advis.e.m.e.nt," 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 c.o.c.k off and f.u.c.k you in the a.s.s with it?'

"You think this is a joke?' Stryker whipped out the sending unit, like a tv remote. "If I tell you to s.h.i.+t on the floor and eat it, you'll s.h.i.+t on the floor and eat it."