Genital Grinder

by Ryan Harding

  Von recalled a pamphlet he’d seen at the health department while waiting (and waiting . . . and waiting) to be seen. You might have trichomoniasis if . . . Even though he didn’t have the symptoms described, it had spooked him. Each disease pamphlet he looked at seemed like an inevitable prophecy rather than something informative. Thank God it had only turned out to be genital warts. No cure for that, so same deal as a broken toe . . . tape it and wait until you feel ready to get back in the game. He remembered from the pamphlet that over seven million people were affected with the disease. It was just his and Greg’s sorry luck that they found one of them. What were the odds?

  “Get rid of it,” Von said. “It’s spoiling the shot.”

  Greg looked at the mini cyclone of vaginal froth taking shape above her thighs. “Uncooked meat can do that to you?” he asked, incredulous.

  Geisha flipped a hand through the water as though trying to disperse a cloud of gnats. The froth merely expanded.

  “Look, this just isn’t a good idea,” Geisha said, sounding as if she sure was sorry about this turn of events. “Why don’t you just let me go? I don’t want to ruin your movie, and I haven’t had a good look at your faces anyway . . . I lost my contacts on the ride over here. I swear I won’t tell a soul about any of this, okay? What do you say, guys?”

  Von and Greg exchanged a look, and Von glowered back down at her. “I say, get rid of that stuff.”

  “I can’t,” she reasoned, speaking slowly, as though her argument would get through to them if they just meditated on every word. “You want it . . . I want it . . . but it’s just not meant to be. I’m not the right person for this movie. We gave it a good try, didn’t we? Look, I’m a good sport . . . I’ll jerk both of you off before I go.”

  “You’ll jerk us off?” Von repeated.

  “Well, yeah, of course!” She smiled, a crooked gesture that seemed to be holding her whole face together against a building flood of tears. “You can . . . you can do it on my chest if you want. Yeah? And you can blindfold me and drop me off somewhere . . . anywhere . . . and we’ll forget the whole thing happened.”

  “You’ll jerk us off?” Greg said.

  She gave a mock two-finger salute. “Scout’s honor.”

  “At the same time?” Von asked.

  “Uh . . . sure, I mean if you want. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds a bit homo,” Von said, at approximately the same time Greg said, “That would be great!” Greg acted like he was adjusting the camera, blushing.

  “Yeah, like Von said . . . that sounds homo. Both of us at the same time. But we can do it on your chest, right? One after the other, I mean. We could start with me.”

  She wiped her eyes, the smile dead on her face but maintaining position. “Whatever you want.”

  “Think you could hold it like that microphone you talk into on the news?” Von asked. “Like you’re at a crime scene and telling everybody what went down?”

  She didn’t speak, just nodded.

  “Good . . . we’ll give you the chance to do that. But first, you need to get rid of that stuff and soap your titties up.”

  There was a long silence. She wasn’t smiling now. “I can’t,” she said, gesturing to the discharge like it was a sea otter covered in oil, and her without her best brush. “Don’t you see?”

  “Eat it,” Von said.

  “What?”

  “Scoop it up in your hands and slurp it down. C’mon. Time’s wasting. We’ve still got two other scenes to shoot today.”

  “Let’s just drain the tub,” she reasoned. “It won’t happen again after that.”

  “Lady, what kind of shooting budget to you think we have? This camera isn’t even ours.”

  “But—”

  Von raised the machete overhead without warning and swung it down into the tub. Geisha Hammond jerked back out of harm’s way as the blade struck somewhere between her knees, splashing whatever over the sides of the tub and across Von’s jeans.

  He pointed the tip of the machete at her face. “I guess all actors need to know their motivation. Well, yours is to live five more minutes by doing everything I tell you to do. So when I tell you to eat that nasty looking shit in the bathtub, you better eat that nasty looking shit in the bathtub, because I promise you, the next swing won’t miss.”

  She bent forward so quickly with her hands cupped that Von had to grab her wrists until Greg confirmed that he had all the action framed through the viewfinder. Geisha made a bridge with her palms which managed to encompass the majority of the discolored concoction. Some of it slipped through the cracks in her hands and fingers, but there was enough consistency to the primary concern that it simply caught there in the cradle formed by her hands. She raised them to her face, her eyes knotted shut, and opened her mouth to receive. She gagged immediately, even as Von urged her to lick the mucus-like trails that hadn’t gone down with the remnant bath water. A conglomeration of bile and the yellowish dregs she had just forced herself to swallow spewed across the surface of the water. The sight of it just as quickly prompted another round of a rancid torrent from her lips, which Von at least momentarily did not associate with 2.2-second load-blowing action of skull-decimating potential. The gastric debris was determined to congeal and remain afloat, like ocean foam surrounding an island.

  Geisha sat horrified, sucking air, knowing better than to try to get up. Enclosed in a festering pool of freshly regurgitated giblets, she resembled the main course in a cannibal stew.

  “Holy Antichrist,” Greg said. “If the camera adds thirty pounds, you just lost twenty-five of them.”

  Von sighed. “Looks like you already jerked us off. I guess we don’t have a choice now. I’m really not looking forward to the water bill this month.” He pushed down the lever to open the drain. They made Geisha stand under the showerhead for a few minutes until the vomit rinsed off of her and out of the tub altogether. They refilled the tub and finally got the primo footage they wanted of Geisha, and then it was time to bring lover boy on stage as shooting moved to the bedroom.

  III.

  Lover boy in this case was Bill Glasscock, who wasn’t sure what horrified him more—the prospect of being executed by his captors, or having to slide his beef baton into the bitch from Channel 2 News. To most men, she was probably Playboy centerfold material, but she was at least 15 years too old for Bill’s sensibilities. Her lips alone could probably engulf the head of his member like a Dum-Dums sucker. No thank you . . . at least not if you weren’t fairly new to the practice of long division.

  He decided Geisha was the lesser of two evils when Von put a .357 to his temple, although as it turned out, he probably should have just taken the bullet.

  Von was setting the camera up on its tripod when Greg called for him to examine the now-naked Bill. Von didn’t have to ask what had spooked Greg, it was immediately obvious—Bill Glasscock had pierced genitalia.

  Geisha, nude and shivering on the bed, now showed more than professional interest.

  “Hundreds of thousands of people in this world and we keep picking up the freaks,” Greg said unhappily.

  “Stop being such a child,” Von said absently.

  Bill, mishearing him, perked up a little. “Really? Where?”

  Von nonchalantly pinched the ring with his thumb and index finger and yanked it out abruptly, as though trying to spare himself prolonged pain while removing a Band-Aid.

  Bill dropped to the floor instantly, bright red blood pooling in his hands and through his fingers. He cried out once, ear-splittingly loud, before Von chopped him in the throat. He curled into fetal position on the floor.

  “What a pussy,” Greg chided. “He’s not in any shape to mount that snatch now.”

  “You can have the honors,” Von offered. The whole business with the bathtub had left a bad taste in his mouth which he didn’t think he could immediately put aside, even for the good of their movie. He couldn’t stop seeing the facts from the First Indications pamphlet on trichomo
niasis, a constant stream of symptoms across his mind like the crawl at the bottom of ESPN. Besides, those lips would feel just as good when she was a cadaver. Maybe even better.

  Greg looked over at Geisha, who started shivering again. “Won’t I catch her … mononucleosis?”

  Von considered sharing the likelihood of transmission with his oldest pal and co-director, but then he thought of that toilet brush he’d never gotten back from Greg. Hell with it. He did offer a little sage advice as a compromise, though: “When barbarians are at the gate, your best friend is the back door.”

  Greg frowned, then had an epiphany. He gave a thumbs-up. “Lock and load, Von.”

  They used the bed sheets to secure Geisha to the bed face-down, and roped Bill to a chair. There was going to be a prelude to Geisha’s big scene, and unfortunately for Bill it would be at his expense. They positioned the camera for a static shot to promote authenticity. “Who will survive, and what will be left of them?” Von asked, cackling. He and Greg were crouched in front of Bill, who renewed his pleas for mercy—apologizing for having a piercing, for stealing Brach’s candy from the grocery store when he was a kid, for seducing his sister’s best friend, for seducing his sister, and for being born in general.

  “You sure you’ve got us all in the picture?” Von asked, looking back at the camera uncertainly. He didn’t want them to miss a frame of this.

  “No doubt about it, son.”

  “Then hand me the screwdriver, Greg,” Von said.

  Greg plucked one from an array of tools on the carpet and handed it to him.

  “No . . . the one with the flat-head.” Von accepted it, squeamishly took hold of Bill’s whole member, and plunged the driver into Bill’s urethra. At this point they decided it’d be wise to tape his mouth shut. Another jab to his Adam’s apple silenced him long enough. His wrists were bleeding from the struggle to tear himself from the chair. There wasn’t much blood from the screwdriver insert, so Von asked for the ball peen hammer, which Greg graciously provided him. The testicles reacted more accordingly as the hammer dropped, one strike to each more than enough to mash them to the chair and subsequently burst them in a flash of skim milk white and deep red, a concoction that might have greatly interested the Cadbury egg candy makers. A healthy portion of it streaked up Von’s arm, causing Greg to get the giggles.

  “Not a word,” Von snapped. “Remember who’s holding the hammer.”

  Greg somehow stifled himself. “And for the coup de la creme . . .”

  Von announced. “Greg . . . cheese grater.”

  Scraping his knuckles on one several times had given Von this idea. Disappointed by the lack of cruor from the screwdriver, this seemed like a good supplement. Greg held the grip of the screwdriver to properly elongate Bill’s organ, which had actually engorged from the insertion, futile as that now was. Von applied the grater to Bill’s skin and began the scrubbing, like someone with OCD having to sponge dry a white Cadillac. He half-expected Bill’s screams to burst through the tape. He watched, fascinated, as he both saw and felt the skin and erectile tissue tear away. Perhaps most mesmerizing of all was the sound, wet and somehow reluctant. The head took the most effort, as the rim of course jutted beyond the shaft. Von had to really put his elbows into it. Blood and skewered fragments of dick were siphoning through the holes and collecting at the bottom of the grater. A spreading pool of it dripped off the chair, spattering the plastic they’d laid out underneath the chair.

  “Shit!” Greg cried out. “Watch it! You cut my fingers!”

  Von tapped Bill a few times on the crown of his head with the ball peen until the steady thocks became less pronounced, and soon sounded almost coital. Once penetrated, the skull allowed mushroom-like clumps of brain to spill onto Bill’s face and in his lap, where it mingled with the genital carnage. To the untrained eye, it would almost look like Bill somehow had a miscarriage.

  As Von polished him off, Greg got ready for his love scene with Geisha. She’d turned away from Bill the instant they started trading screwdrivers, so she hadn’t seen what happened to him, but she’d heard enough to nearly rip up the bedposts. The knot work on the sheets had held up, though, fortunately for the world of cinema. They decided to keep her face-down on the bed, as that would be more convenient for Greg.

  “Do you got any Jergen’s or something?” he asked. They’d let her dry off after the bathtub scene, and dry was the operative word here. “This could be pretty rough going.”

  Von detached the camera from the tripod and went over to the bed. “Sorry. These are the sacrifices you have to make for art.”

  Greg considered this sadly, but then smiled. “Nature will provide.” He pushed his left nostril shut with a finger, and exhaled through the right. A cupped palm was waiting to catch the stream of mucus, which he quickly lathered on his half-erect dick . . . it then sprang to full attention. Geisha, who’d heard the exchange and the snot rocket, began thrashing anew, but Greg was used to women trying to evade him in such a fashion. He eased inside in two seconds flat.

  Von loosened her gag to get some screams on tape, because you couldn’t decipher from her grimaces if she was in agony or rapture. This was hardly the kind of film where ambivalence would be acceptable. He did his best to keep her choicest body parts in frame while trying to exclude Greg’s less savory appendages. When it came time for the surprise, he came around to the foot of the bed, always keeping her smooth, bronze body in the viewfinder. Greg had finished by then, grunting in a way Von found overly theatrical and then pulling away from her with a harsh sigh, as if he’d just set down a 400-pound barbell. Von began to question his very sanity as he immortalized every curve available to him in her prone position. He’d let Greg have dibs on Geisha Hammond? Just because of some grody-looking froth in the bathtub? He needed to be locked up where he could do no further harm to himself. Von held the camera in place until Greg could get his pants buckled and take it from him. Von retrieved the bolt cutters from the spread of tools in front of Bill Glasscock. This was a tricky shot, as they needed to make sure she couldn’t move her legs and destroy the angle.

  When they saw she wasn’t going to cooperate, Greg filmed while Von regagged her and took a hacksaw to the backs of her legs. It pained him, these little sacrifices for art, but he decided that as long as she at least had her lips and thighs attached to the trunk of her body, he would get the utmost satisfaction from defiling her later. Greg eventually had to set up the tripod again and shove the saw from the left while Von pushed at the right. The jagged teeth found a rhythm and began grinding through the supple meat. The rich crimson sluiced from the incision deepening across her limbs in perfect symmetry. The bones were predictably resistant, but even they had to give way eventually with enough elbow grease. Von pulled the limbs away with a little effort, ripping through the last of the arteries, veins, and sinews. It was like the trick where the magician and his assistant sawed through the boxes and wheeled them apart, except there was only one box here and it had yet to make its own contribution to the menagerie. Blood jetted from the stumps unimpeded as Greg tossed the limbs aside for later. He quickly took a knife to one of her restraints, and then got on the bed and stood with a foot on either side of her. He got his hands underneath her arms, and lifted. It delighted him when he saw how the stumps blasted out the red stuff that much more aggressively when he nudged her sternum, setting her down face-up. He held her in place, dangling her off the edge of the bed so that Von would have easy access.

  Von slid beneath Geisha’s torso on his back, as though working under a car. He carefully poised the bolt cutters as renegade blood squirted on his hands, arms, and chest, and quickly snipped off the right labium majora, then the left. They dropped on his face and stuck there like wet leaves.

  Greg purposely stepped on her abdomen as he came down from the bed. The stumps shot supremely one last time. She didn’t struggle much now, even with one hand free. That lovely bronze skin had begun to look quite pallid. Von stuck the severed l
ips on his ear lobes for a minute. They clung precariously like a playing card to a forehead, then slipped onto his shoulders like flesh-colored petals. He scooped them up and hurled the labia at the wall over the head of the bed. One stuck; the other slid behind the headboard, leaving a glistening red trail. Von turned his bloody profile to the camera and waved. “Hi, Mom!”

  IV.

  Initially, Travis Wicklund had been rather apprehensive about his abduction, but the worm had most definitely turned. They wanted him to screw Lolita Ream? By God, where did he sign? If this was the sort of fate that awaited someone who took candy from strangers, more people would gladly be snatched off the streets. This was a life-long dream, minus the aching blow to the head and whole kidnapping scenario. He was so astonished by this turn of events that he didn’t speculate on what nefarious plans Von and Greg had for him afterwards . . . in Travis’s mind, there was no afterwards. No before, either. He could face an eternity of flipping burgers on the fryer with this kind of memory accessible to him. He was actually going to bang Lolita Ream, porn queen supreme, full of his ball sauce, and that was all that mattered to him.

  . . . Until he saw the bucket of squirming maggots and the transparent tubing beside it.

  “We’re going for a lot of firsts here,” Von explained, fresh from a shower. They’d moved shooting to the spare bedroom and taken care to clean themselves up so Travis wouldn’t immediately be tipped off to the likelihood that his services would not be required if they were ever to make a sequel.

  “We want to be the first to make a—” He paused, catching himself. “Movie . . . of this kind. We want to have a zombie spewing maggots on Sarah.”

  Travis cringed. “I have to put those in my mouth?”

  Greg almost laughed.