Genital Grinder

by Ryan Harding

  Horace launched himself at Sammy, the momentum catching Sammy off-guard and putting him on his back with Horace atop. The mallet went down underneath his legs, just out of reach. Horace’s eyeball dangled just above Sammy’s face like a spider at the end of its web. His fingers were like talons, gouging at Sammy, seeking his eyes. The best Sammy could do was latch on to the wrists. He couldn’t find the leverage to throw Horace off of him.

  Finally, out of desperation, Sammy raised his head off the floor and opened his mouth. The hovering eyeball disappeared, and Sammy’s teeth sprang shut like a trap. The optic nerve snapped and sprayed in his mouth. Horace immediately fell back from him, shrieking. Blood spurted between his fingers.

  Sammy’s head struck the kitchen floor and his teeth slammed shut again, this time on the actual eyeball. It burst like a salad tomato, filling up his mouth with ocular fluid. He got to one knee and spat the fragments in Horace’s face.

  “I’m not even the one who de-boned you,” Sammy said.

  Von was just picking up the Michael Myers knife when Sammy and Horace separated. He swung the knife overhead with both hands, plunging it into Horace’s stomach as he fell on him. He sliced a six inch groove before the knife got stuck in the ribs. Horace screamed and jabbed a thumb in Von’s eye. Von clapped a hand to his face, stumbling backward, crying out. Horace got to his unsteady feet, trying to withdraw the knife. He succeeded, but with the blade came the beginning ropes of his innards.

  Horace kicked the mallet aside as Sammy got a hand on it, so Sammy snatched at the escaping coil at Horace’s stomach. He narrowly missed a strike of the knife which Horace probably would have made had he been in possession of both his eyes. He couldn’t adjust to the new depth perception. Sammy pulled the sticky ropes to the meat grinder and guided them through the slot, yanking another couple feet of intestine through the incision in the process. He started cranking the meat grinder like a tire jack. Skewered grayish clumps began piling up on the linoleum. Horace grabbed at the escaping coils in panic, trying to keep them inside, but they rolled through his fingers and fed themselves to the waiting teeth of the grinder. They were like the loose strings on a sweater which don’t snap but continue to unravel the more you try to pull them and tear them off.

  As a last resort, Horace cut his own entrails with the knife, which fortunately did not hurt. The internal hemorrhaging, on the other hand, was less merciful. Blood erupted from his nose and mouth. He stared with a kind of mute horror at the humiliation of his flesh.

  Von tackled him from behind, slamming him into the kitchen skin. The unraveled length of intestine slapped wetly against the sink basin, curling through the lip of a black rubber cavity at the bottom. The knife bounced out of the sink and slid away on the counter until it struck the refrigerator.

  “I’ve got him!” he called over his shoulder to Sammy. “Hit the switch!”

  Horace bucked against him, but Von held on. Sharp elbows to his ribs and kicks to his shins started to loosen his grip, but then Sammy reached past and flipped the switch on an outlet beside the sink. The garbage disposal roared to life, the noise overpowering. Von worked Horace’s hands behind his back, keeping him pushed up against the sink and away from the knife.

  “Put it in!” Von tried to shout over the garbage disposal.

  Sammy nodded with a little smile of amusement, as if to say, Oh, this should be pretty neat. He nudged the severed length of bowel into the dark maw of the disposal drain until it poked through the hole in the rubber. It caught in the gears and pulled taut, now in a tug-of-war that Horace didn’t look very likely to win. A spray of blood erupted from the drain in fine needlepoint spatters, like a reverse showerhead, painting Horace’s face. Von used him as a shield to block the thrust of the backwash.

  Horace made a final effort to free himself, still determined to take his tormentors with him if nothing else. He seized a handful of his entrails near the sink and wrenched at them. The rope of intestines tore apart. He tried to throw his weight in the direction of the knife, looking in that direction just in time to see the mallet whistling through the air. It cracked him above his remaining eye. Von let him drop to the floor, convulsing.

  Sammy stood over him like a worker at the abattoir. He swung again. Six times. Twelve times. By twenty-four times, the blows ceased to register as anything solid and sounded more like large rocks striking the water of a creek bed. By thirty-three, Horace’s own mother would have thought he was the Elephant Man. There were no further convulsions, only the persistent roar of the garbage disposal. Sammy finally flipped it off.

  He and Von stood in contemplative silence.

  Horace died bereft of dick, balls, right eyeball, right hand, and eighty percent of his internal organs.

  “Hey, you forgot to paint the walls with our brains,” Von informed the cadaver.

  Greg groaned behind them, hauling himself back up to his feet by groping a shelf of the pantry. The throbbing pain was at least distracting him from the uprising of consumed genital remnants that seemed to have clogged his gullet.

  “We better go get your slut out of the trunk just in case,” Sammy said, as much to distract them from their original objective as to prevent further any surprises.

  Minutes later they all stood in the moonlight behind the Nova. They could now hear Angelique pounding on the underside. Von popped the trunk and stood back.

  A sweaty, gasping Angelique slid away from them as far as the trunk allowed, wrapped in fetal position.

  “Look guys, I’m sorry for what I said earlier,” she hyperventilated. “Just please don’t hurt me. I’ll do anything you want! I’ll . . . I’ll smoke with my box. I can do it with my asshole, too! Let me show you! F.O.C.!”

  “Your butthole, eh?” Von said. “Sounds like it’s our lucky night after all.”

  “Wait a minute,” Greg said. “What kind of cigarettes? Cuz if it’s just menthols, you can forget it.”

  Sammy addressed her as if the other two weren’t even there. “You realize that doing ‘anything’ we want could also easily lead to you being ‘hurt,’ don’t you?”

  Von appraised him uneasily, practically seeing the perverse surgical configurations scrolling through Sammy’s mind.

  She raised a hand to them, as if to both ward them off and block out the sight of them altogether. “Please! My boyfriend’s name is Edward Rochester, and he has a lot of money. He’ll pay you for me . . . name your price! I have his number, just please don’t hurt me!”

  This brought them all up short. They exchanged looks and slowly began nodding.

  Finally, Von spoke. “I say again, gentlemen: Are we ready to become millionaires?”

  Part IV: Trading Pieces

  Angelique didn’t look particularly happy to be in Sammy’s workshop, which may have had something to do with the duct tape holding her fast to the chair. It didn’t help that Sammy was hovering over her, absently slapping his palm with a machete and grinning like the cat that ate the canary. He had also licked the length of the machete a few times, never taking his eyes from her. They took no chances with her, even wrapping her ankles fast to the chair legs. As a token medical measure for the cracked bone, they patched it with two strips in an X pattern (thus making it a target area if she somehow got free and tried to book . . . a kick in that place would put her right back to the ground in a hurry.)

  She’d come up with what she felt were extremely convincing arguments for prolonging her life, but none of them actually got past the strip of tape over her lips. She may as well have been trying to recite the Gettysburg Address while deep throating Johnny Wadd.

  Greg stood by the column of women dangling like slabs of beef from the overhead hooks. He ran his hands along each one like a housewife sizing up produce in a grocery store and gave their backsides a few hearty slaps.

  “How’d you girls like to come home with a real man?” he asked.

  He received a few whimpers by way of response, and a redhead (natural, he noted with no small sati
sfaction) pointlessly tried to explain that if Greg didn’t call the police, Sammy was going to murder them all.

  “Oh, well, that changes everything,” Greg replied and laughed.

  The protesting began anew.

  Von winced. “What’s the point of stealing ‘em off the streets and raping ‘em if you’re just gonna let ‘em nag like free women, Sammy? And why do you got her gagged when she should be calling Rochester and telling him to grab his checkbook?”

  Sammy finally looked away from Angelique. “Don’t tell me you bought her story.”

  “What do you mean?” Greg asked, then added, “Hey, Sammy, this girl ain’t got no butthole.”

  “I mean think about it. Rochester’s her boyfriend? Then why does he go to the Electra Complex and pay her forty bucks to hum him?”

  Von frowned. “That’s a good point. Hell, I wouldn’t waste any of my money if I already had the prize. Wait a minute . . . did you say that girl didn’t have a butthole?” He walked over to Greg, who was crouched beneath Mary Jane Turner’s derriere. They both appraised the stringy crevice left over from Sammy’s impromptu surgery like art aficionados in a museum.

  “Impressive,” Greg surmised.

  “I’ve seen half dollars that were less rounded,” Von said.

  Sammy beamed proudly.

  “Hey, speaking of, how’s that girl supposed to smoke with her asshole if we got her strapped down to that chair?” Greg asked.

  Sammy sighed. “Will you give that up? It’s not going to happen. Ever.”

  Greg sulked. “Well, that’s just great.”

  “Cheer up. I’ll find you a napkin before you go . . . make her do lipstick blots on it with her butt for you. Does that sound good to you?”

  Greg grinned. “Best deal I had since Christmas.”

  “Hey, I want one too,” Von said.

  “Lipstick blots for all,” Sammy affirmed.

  “Hell, we don’t have even a cigarette anyway,” Greg pointed out.

  “Anyway, it’s not like you won’t have your pick of butthole smokers when you get that cash,” Von said.

  “Oh, come on, Von!” Sammy shook his head. “Did you forget what we were just talking about? You know, you boys have a one track mind when it comes to ass . . . anyone’s. I’m starting to worry about you. And she’d say anything to save hers right about now, don’t you think? You got a better chance of Santy Clause giving you that money. Let’s hear what other tall tales she’s got bouncing around in her dicksucker, though . . . we’ll liven up the night.”

  Sammy ripped the tape off Angelique’s lips.

  “You don’t understand Rochester,” she gasped. “He’s really sick in the head. He gets off on paying me in the Vacuum. That’s his kink, man! If he wasn’t paying for it in a place like that, he wouldn’t even care! He enjoys feeling like a pervert, like pure scum!”

  “Well, I’m here to tell you the appeal of that wears off after about twenty-eight years,” Von informed her. “There really ain’t a whole hell of a lot of dignity left for me in pocket pussies and Rhonda Ream-Job dolls.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Sammy interjected, casting a wary eye toward Von, “but I definitely would have bought stock in motion lotion if I’d known I was going to wrack up so many solo frequent flyer miles.”

  “Damn, Sammy . . . why the hell are you jackin’ down so much when you’ve got all these hot twats on tap down here?” Greg asked. “I don’t get that at all.”

  “Unless ‘hot twats on tap’ is the answer why,” Von speculated.

  Sammy shrugged. “Sometimes if you want something done right, you’ve gotta do it yourself, especially when you can’t pay to have it done. Which brings us back to the subject at hand.”

  “Let’s give her a chance to prove herself,” Von suggested. “It won’t hurt anything if she’s lying . . . except her, of course. Look at it this way, Angelique—you’ll be saving lives. Most importantly your own. Do you think if we could afford to get laid that we’d be settling for deadhead fellatio?”

  Angelique recoiled. “You’re getting it from . . . dead heads? I only charge forty bucks at the Vacuum!”

  Sammy shrugged again. “A machete only costs fourteen bucks. Comes with a sheath, too.”

  “You know how to get in touch with Rochester?” Von asked her.

  “I have his cell phone number.”

  “Okay, so you’ll call him and outline our terms. And don’t try to tell him anything besides that.”

  “Yeah,” Sammy added sarcastically, “definitely don’t use your pre-arranged code phrase for ‘I’m being held ransom in a basement with a bunch of naked women, including one with five extra vaginas and another with no asshole.’” Sammy gave Von a disgusted look.

  “It pays to be careful,” Von said defensively. “Why take the risk?”

  “Why indeed? I’ll make the call myself.” He turned to Angelique. “If it’s a wrong number, I’m going to work on you with a circular saw and iodized salt. This is your last chance to pull out.” As if the same thing wouldn’t happen to her regardless.

  Angelique held her silence and only gulped audibly. If she’d known that amputation would only be the beginning of his overtures, the sound of her ass puckering up would have been audible through a bank vault. Sammy would never let someone die in such a passé fashion. For one, he would have mounted her as she lay there gushing blood from stumps at her elbows and knees, wallowing like a sea lion. He’d probably find the passage a bit dry, as sheer terror often had that effect on them, so he’d opt for plan B: the mouth. At this stage they generally thought they didn’t have anything to lose, so biting would be their predictable attempt at a pathetic vengeance. That’s when they found out they did have something left to lose, after all. Thirty-two somethings, as a matter of fact (if they’d brushed regularly). When the pliers came out, they’d do something Sammy wouldn’t have believed possible of women if he hadn’t seen it himself—they’d shut their mouths. Of course they’d eventually have to open them when Sammy pinched their nostrils shut, and then he’d prove a notorious adage—sometimes you really have to pull teeth if you want a woman to give you head. It took awhile to complete the excavation, and it wasn’t too pretty to look at with all the gaps in their gums and a few dangling nerves besides, but it didn’t take half the oxygen it would to blow up one of those dolls Von mentioned. He’d be soaked in blood like a newborn baby when he pulled out, but it wasn’t that much different than laying down pipe in a girl during her monthlies. They wouldn’t just bleed to death as Sammy poked and prodded for his standard thirty seconds, because he could tie off their severed arteries. Life assured that much longer, he’d been known to give the girls a hand—their own. One thrust between the legs, the other up the ass. Most would hemorrhage in the process of this internal handshake, but as they say, getting there is half the fun.

  Naturally this wasn’t his only option. He could do Angelique like Erica Granger (found 04/09/2002 under a NO DUMPING sign . . . and also throughout an elementary school playground and in a dumpster outside the police station). He’d raided his father’s tackle box and fished out a few of those red and yellow plastic balls that bob in the lake when you get a bite. He’d secured several bait hooks to them with the help of adhesive so potent it would have removed his skin if he’d got any on his hands, and then strung the balls with fishing line.

  Sammy didn’t go out on the lake, though. He instead cast his makeshift reel into a prone Erica Granger’s rectum, one ball after the other. He wore thick gloves and managed not to cut himself as he guided the custom-made anal beads deeper within. She was squirming in unadulterated agony long before he prodded the fourth one home, so all that protruded was a few inches of fishing line, which he twirled around his finger like dental floss. She looked like one of those talking dolls with a cord in the back, though in this case each yank was another scream. It took more effort than he expected to jerk them free. He’d make a few inches of progress and then the hooks wo
uld catch on something more resistant in her digestive tract. It was like trying to run through sticker bushes dragging a parachute. He was too mesmerized by the tiny tearing sounds and the emerging hooks—dragging yellow and purple strands and clumps—to even notice that Erica had died somewhere between the removal of the second and third ball. It was for this gross insolence that she was humiliated when it came time to dispose of the body. They found one section of her cadaver from waist to thighs with an added bonus—her head secured between her legs with ten-penny nails, tongue staple-gunned to her vulva.

  It would almost be worth the loss of his chance at a six figure income to work similar magic on Angelique.

  “Sammy?” Von brought him back to reality.

  “Eh? Oh, yeah . . . the phone.” Sammy punched in the number Angelique gave him.

  A man answered, sounding rather infuriated. “Yes?”

  “Is this Edward Rochester?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “I’m the guy asking the questions. Are you Rochester?”

  “I am.”

  Sammy raised a thumb. Von and Greg brightened like kids waking up on Christmas morning. Sammy turned his back on them so he wouldn’t be sickened and placed a hand on Angelique’s shoulder to steady himself.

  “Okay,” he continued. “I believe you’ve made the acquaintance of a certain Angelique?”

  “That would not be incorrect.”

  “Great, then we have something in common.”

  “What’s this about? Are you trying to blackmail me?”

  “No, although five minutes from now you’re probably going to wish that’s all it was.”

  “Maybe I will, if you actually manage to get to the point by then.”

  “I’ll give you the condensed version. I’ve got Angelique, and I’m offering you the opportunity to buy her back for three million dollars. If you say yes, I’ll give you further instruction. Assuming everything goes smoothly, you’ll get her back good as new. If you say no, I’ll do a job on her that would make the attractions at a freak show puke their guts.”