Coed Demon Sluts_Beth Read online

“They must have left in a hurry,” Jee said as we downed our third brew apiece.

  We sprawled on the busted lawn furniture and stared around the factory floor. I for one was much less disenchanted with it, thanks to the beers.

  “Maybe they wanted us to feel welcome,” Amanda said, reading the label on her bottle. She glanced toward the fridge. “Is that an ice maker? Wonder if I can get it running.”

  “Knock yourself out,” I said. Hoisting myself to my feet, I added, “Who wants to brave the living quarters?”

  “I don’t even see a bed,” Jee complained.

  “Right? I’m figuring all that is through this door.” I opened a steel door and stood aside to let them risk first contact with whatever. They walked into the next big dark room.

  “What is this?” Jee demanded, echoing even more than she had on the basketball court.

  I pushed past her. A ray of sunlight came in from a high, narrow row of frosted, chicken-wire-reinforced windows at one end. The tiled room was lined with broken-down lockers and long wooden benches. Clearly it had once been the factory’s employee locker room. Off to the left were two curtainless private walk-in showers and an unspeakable toilet.

  But most bathing must have happened in the middle of the room, at a giant thingy that looked like a squat, monster bidet, or a stainless-steel, donut-shaped fountain. Formerly chrome waterjets, dry now and unpleasantly encrusted, pointed toward the center of the fountain into a smooth cement basin. A double row of jets stuck up in a ring around the bottom of the basin, too.

  Amanda sent me a glance. “Think it works?”

  I snorted. “No. We’ll have to hire a plumber. I suspect this was the locker room for an all-male factory workforce.”

  Jee wandered out. “I found the stairs,” she called.

  Amanda and I followed Jee up a flight of clangy metal stairs into what once may have been offices but were now clearly sleeping rooms off a long corridor, and a huge kitchen in back. The sleeping rooms smelled like bachelors. They were mostly unfurnished.

  The kitchen...the kitchen made us all sigh. For different reasons, I suspected.

  The ceiling was high, and the brick walls above about ten feet were covered with eighties and nineties porn posters. But along one end, below the porn posters, a row of six 75-inch flat-screen monitors were mounted on the wall and bent around a corner, just about where you’d see them if you were lying back in a chair.

  In front of all this high-tech hedonism ranged a row of shabby leather-covered recliner chairs. On the arm of each one lay a remote control.

  “Holy shit,” Jee breathed. She moved slowly toward the nearest chair.

  Amanda took a flying jump and plopped onto the next. “Lumpy.” She pointed her remote at the wall of screens.

  I looked over the other end, at the room’s more kitcheny features. After all, I’d be the one using it.

  The dishwasher was old, but it was a Kitchenaid. The counters were ancient Melamine, rimmed with aluminum, but clean, and heavily scarred with knife-marks near the sink. The sink was thankfully a lot more modern, fitted with a sprayer, a water filter, and a garbage disposal. I gave the disposal a sniff: not bad. Cleaner than the empty, musky bedrooms we’d passed. Somebody here had given a shit.

  Behind me a TV erupted into noise. ESPN, Wimbledon coverage. That would be Amanda.

  Two Margaritaville machines sat next to an ancient but stout-looking cappuccino rig, all ugly but clean. I checked the cupboards. Damned few real dishes but plenty of paper plates, paper bowls, and plastic cups. Cookware that had been top-of-the-line thirty or forty years ago.

  It was like delving into the purse of a total stranger and learning good things about her. I wondered if the sex demons had had a housekeeper with excellent taste, and given her a sky’s-the-limit budget, forty years ago.

  Another TV added its din: Jee was playing Super Mario—really? Another antique. Hm.

  On the exterior wall, a window had been turned into a home-made plywood garbage chute. It didn’t smell bad. I peered down it and saw that it spiraled away toward the alley below. Since the beer in my hand was empty, I dropped the bottle down the chute and heard it slither-slide away, until a distant clank told me it had gently come to rest among other bottles. Hence the spiral—the bottles wouldn’t smash. Clever.

  I turned around to ask my roommates to dial the noise back. Then I saw the other wall of the kitchen.

  It was lined with refrigerator-freezers. Big ones. I counted: Six.

  Holy shit. How many sex demons had lived here?

  Huge packages of paper towels were piled on top of each fridge-freezer. Also, more paper plates, canned beer, and frighteningly large bags of Cheetos. Sex demon emergency rations.

  I walked to the nearest fridge and opened the door, feeling my heart thumping. What if they’d left something in there like a grenade, or some moldy cheese? It wasn’t like I could be killed. But I was starting to trust the former owner of this kitchen, and I’d learned that where the Regional Office is concerned, trust is a bad idea.

  The first thing I saw was a handwritten note on a sheet of yellow paper, taped to the upper shelf. I pulled it down.

  This fridge was, again, full of microbrews.

  I pulled three beers out and handed two over to my teammates. They didn’t say thank-you. No surprise there.

  I pulled a chair out from under a Melamine-topped kitchen table and sat down to read.

  Dear colleague, it ran in exquisitely tidy block printing. Welcome to the Lair. We lived here for fifty years give or take, and while it is not in perfect condition it has been left as clean as I can bully these assholes into making it.

  This lady—hm, I looked at the signature, Baz, that was no help, but I was beginning to guess that Baz was male—this guy had clearly been the first team’s version of me. Older than his buddies, more responsible, probably ran his kitchen with an iron fist, and committed to luxury within certain controllable parameters. I read more.

  Downstairs there is a pot farm slung under a skylight out on the factory floor. Hot tub on the roof. If you empty it every week or so and leave it for a day, the sun will bleach it clean-ish. Out on the factory floor, the sewer sometimes backs up, but it won’t affect the basketball court surface unless it fails to drain within forty-eight hours, which could eventually rot the support stringers. That fridge out there is fit only for beer. Watch the left-front nozzle on the gas grill. It wants replacing. We fixed cars and bikes in the back so the floor’s a bit oily. You’ll find the van parked back there. Keys in the ignition. The sauna back there is sadly unusable. Upstairs here you have five bedrooms. Thank the stars I don’t have to be around for the bullshit while you sort out who gets which fridge and which bedroom. The Margaritaville rig on the left is broken. You won’t like the bathroom, but we didn’t either. I recommend a direct nuclear strike. It’d be cheaper to rebuild.

  I smiled. When I read the next bit, I stopped smiling.

  I won’t kid you. There’s some shit been going down here lately. Some of the rooms may have a bit of a hoodoo on them. I have no idea how that’s going to affect you. We had all mostly moved out when it happened. Just warning you. So you’re on your own. Who am I kidding, aren’t we all.

  I looked up at Jee and Amanda, ignoring each other, focused on wide-screen amusement, sucking on microbrew.

  Jee looked around at me. “Is there more of this?”

  “Get it yourself,” I said, and pointed at the correct fridge.

  She grunted, got up, tottered over on her Italian-wood-stacked wedgies to the wrong fridge, opened it—and voila, more microbrew. My heart melted. I really liked this Baz character. I returned to his fridge-note.

  Ish is a good guy. He won’t come into the field to pester you. Burnout. Turn in good scores and he won’t give a darn what you do. (signed) Baz. PS, we used that crap Toshiba laptop on the counter for filing monthly reports. It is synced to the far-right TV.

  I knew Ish already, having trained with him on fill
ing out RO paperwork two years ago. To a point, I agreed with Baz’s assessment, but I suspected we wouldn’t get as smooth a deal as the boy sex demons had got. The Regional Office, like the Home Office, is deeply suspicious of women, even female demons. Ish had been evasive about the size of team I’d be working with here. I was willing to bet that there would be more team members coming along. Because, for a veteran supervisor in hell, Ish wasn’t a good liar.

  No point in worrying about it. The other shoe would drop when it dropped.

  That went for Baz’s shit been going down here at the Lair. I’d have been amazed if the place wasn’t boobytrapped somehow.

  I got up and opened the rest of the fridges, feeling more relaxed.

  Baz had left behind a lot of condiments, the usual jars of pickles and weird-harold mustards, cocktail onions, maraschino cherries, stuffed olives, bulk vats of mixers and little bottles of bitters in eight flavors—alcohol is a food group in all nine circles of the Regional Office. One freezer was packed with baggies of frozen dried vegetable matter. My eyebrows rose. Guess we’d soon find out how good their weed was.

  The lower kitchen cabinets were full of cases of hard liquor.

  A scream from down the hall jerked my head around. “Eeaaughhh!”

  “That’s Jee!” Amanda said.

  We raced out of the kitchen and down the hall.

  Jee stood in the doorway of the bathroom.

  Baz hadn’t been kidding. It wanted a nuclear strike. It wanted a bleach bomb and a bulldozer. Apparently when he bullied those assholes into making the kitchen habitable, he’d skipped the bathroom.

  Black mold grew between the tiles on the walls, floor, and ceiling of the walk-in shower. The glass shower door was opaque with dried soap scum. The toilet looked like fifty years in a frat house. There was no tub. The sink was so dribbled over with unguessable yuck, I couldn’t tell what color the porcelain was.

  Every flat surface, including the toilet tank, was crowded with toiletry products, all with their caps off, crusty and leaky.

  Beside the toilet sat an ancient wooden rack stuffed full of magazines, grotty half-full lotion bottles, and many sheets of that flimsy gray paper the Home and Regional Offices use for hard-copy memos. I smiled. The incubi had known what those documents were good for.

  Jee and Amanda were focused, wide-eyed, on the final frontier.

  A small medicine cabinet stared at us, daring us to open it. The mirror door had been scrawled on in crimson lipstick and then wiped clear in the middle—a face-sized clean spot in a roomful of filth. In it I saw my custom-designed newscaster face, sweet and bland without war paint, my straight blonde hair, and my horrified blue eyes.

  “You do it,” Amanda said, glancing at me.

  But it was Jee who shrugged, tiptoed into the room, and opened the cabinet. Amanda and I leaned in and peered around her. Disposable razors, shaving cream cans, leaky tubes of stuff I didn’t want to see up close, more random bottles of lotion, condoms—condoms?—Animal House stuff. No prescription bottles. That’s one thing working for the Regional Office does for you. Your health is always perfect. You want recreational drugs, you can afford the best, and you don’t need medical insurance to get them. The metal shelves were corroded. Some of the products inside had leaked, decades ago, and stuck on.

  The three of us drew back and retreated to the kitchen.

  “Okay,” I said, pulling out chairs for the other two at the table and seating myself. “Council of war.”

  The other two supplied themselves and me with a sixpack apiece, so nobody would have to get up.

  “When do we get the funds to get that hellhole ripped out and replaced?” Jee said, getting to the top item on the agenda.

  “Got ’em,” I said. “I can make the call today.” I flipped Baz’s note over and got a pen out of my purse. “Specs? Make it fancy. We don’t want to have to call contractors in here to upgrade it all the time.” Baz had had the right idea, forty years ago: get top-of-the-line stuff and then you never have to think about it again.

  Together we specced out the bathroom:

  multi-jet shower with long and short tiled benches and steam

  triple sinks

  triple makeup counters

  full wall of cabinets above and below the counters

  two commodes with Japanese smart bidets

  towel warmer

  “That’s all we can fit in there,” I said, scratching my scalp with the blunt end of the pen. “No room for a sauna.”

  “I don’t care. Do it. If we have to knock out a wall,” Jee said. Jee was a huge consumer of luxury toiletries and cosmetics. She’d been born in a cardboard refrigerator box on an Indonesian beach. She certainly dressed like it—nine thousand dollars on the hoof, gold, diamonds, jade, Coach everything.

  “Put the sauna downstairs,” Amanda suggested.

  “Good idea. But better make it five sinks. Ish has something up his sleeve,” I warned them. I showed them Baz’s note.

  Jee read, then looked over her shoulder at the doorway. Obviously she’d got to the part about the coming fight over who would get which bedroom.

  I took the note back. “Never mind the room thing for right now. We need to be ready for whatever crap Ish has been hiding from us. He’s already warned me he’s gonna stick us with one, maybe two more girls. I try to remain desireless. But I bet nobody fights me for this kitchen.”

  I was prepared to kill anyone who did. I’d been living in fashionable quarters ever since I became a succubus, restaurant meals every single night, and I’d come to hate it. I wanted this kitchen.

  They both showed me their palms.

  “All yours,” Jee said.

  “No problem,” Amanda said.

  “But we all have to do groceries together, at least a few times,” I said, relieved. No time like the present for laying down ground rules. “You each have to pick out what you like for a few weeks and email it to a central database. Then we go on a rotating shopping roster. I’ll give you an app for the roster and the database. Are you vegan, or any of that crap?”

  Amanda shook her head. “See-food diet.”

  “Four stars and above when I eat out, otherwise, junk,” Jee said, which I knew, having roomed with her for two years. A little shamefaced, she added, “Every now and then I want some home cooking.”

  “North Indonesian?” I said.

  “Or if you can’t do that, I’ll take Thai.”

  “No problem. We’ll set up delivery schedules for the staples, and each of us’ll get our own special stuff for ‘every now and then.’ But we are not going to live on junk food all the time. I like to cook. There will be meals. There”—I pointed—“is a dishwasher. I won’t abuse my privileges if you don’t abuse yours.”

  “I didn’t go into this business to do dishes,” Jee grumbled, eyeing the dishwasher.

  “Me either,” I said pointedly.

  That night, I made the team file a preliminary on our monthly report. We’d got past the squabbling-over-rooms part, and had phoned the movers to bring our stuff in, and made plans to redecorate, and ordered about three hundred dollars’ worth of junk food to be delivered by the grocery service. Emergency rations. Everybody’s favorites.

  Meanwhile Amanda pulled out as many brews as we fancied it would take to keep us from going insane from filling out the online forms. Jee opened one of the cub-scout-camp-size bags of Cheetos. I fired up the laptop. We dragged three of the recliners to face the far-right TV and sat down to commune with hell’s payroll system.

  Baz, the faceless incubus who had used the system before me, had left all the defaults in place on the Regional Office interface, as I’d hoped he would, but I soon discovered that in the intervening weeks since I’d last logged in, Second Circle, as threatened, had upgraded to Windows 8, which is truly a hellish invention. I came close to throwing the laptop across the kitchen.

  “Here,” Amanda said, woman of few words. I handed her the laptop. Right away she had it working.
“We’re using the new interface, right?”

  “There’s a new interface?” I watched her fingers dance.

  “‘Fraid so.”

  Jee and I looked at her with respect. Farmhand looks or no, this softball queen would be an asset to the team.

  One by one, each putting left foot up on top of right thigh, yoga-style, we handed the laptop around and keyed in the eighty-eight-digit Infernal Identification Numbers tattooed on the soles of our left feet, and saved them under a shorter, friendlier password. I know, right? Some security system. But not even a demon can remember an eighty-eight-digit sequence. That was why the Regional Office chose to make IIDNs that long when they went paperless in the eighties. Of course it was also why the whole system was leaky as a second-grader’s backpack.

  First thing, the system wanted us to log two-thirds of our quotas.

  “What?” Jee growled irascibly. “I just got here.”

  I sighed. “Just make something up.”

  We grumbled and cussed our way through the monthly report screens, which had of course changed in the past three and a half weeks. The Regional Office’s infrastructure has grown immensely more complicated since computerization. It’s been a major contributor to the fall-off in productivity in the field, and, in-house, has led to demons abandoning their line jobs in droves, which means that traditional punishment in the Inferno has become a joke. The firepits are cold and dead. Everybody hunches at workstations now. On the other hand, anybody with engineering chops is guaranteed promotion down below. Plus, such damned souls as we get now have to do data entry.

  Jee and I cobbled together something for a mid-month report, each of us anteing up a mythical encounter with a guy in a bar. She hemmed and hawed a lot over the details. As in, details about what she was wearing when she fucked these mystery guys: her dress, her hair, her jewelry, and her manicure. Jee is a perfectionist. Then she got just as fussy about making up names and details for her sexual conquests for the month.

  I tried a few suggestions to hustle her along.

  “No way would I fuck a guy in a toupee. Girls don’t make passes at men who wear glasses, or hadn’t you heard?”