Genital Grinder

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 lips 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.

“No,” Von consoled. “Not in your mouth. That’s the good news, in a manner of speaking.”

Inevitably he had to be tied to a chair, too, once they told him the game plan. The truth was that Von and Greg had already had a few turns with Sarah on tape, so “forcible sexual congress” with her was pretty old hat by this point. They had Sarah really stretching—and spreading—her acting legs. Who hadn’t seen her ready and willing for all comers a thousand times before? The more spontaneous—and unlikely—the situation, the more eagerly she wanted it. Sarah Pensie having sex and not liking it, well, that was like an actor totally vanishing into a role. This was the magnitude of Sean Penn as Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—method acting on a whole new level. They wanted Travis to have a go at her now for the sake of aesthetics, but not at the cost of the boredom of their audience. How could they possibly alter the predictable course of events? Guy finds weeping woman gagged and tied in spare bedroom. Guy unscrupulously rejects Samaritan impulses and uses her for quick gratification. Guy shoots load on the closest fetishistic body part to his stud missile—those alabaster buns or those silicone mountains. Wow, the wheel like you’ve never seen it before, no doubt about it.

. . . Unless there was some way to throw the audience a curve on the formula.

Greg, after a few objections, finally consented to feeding the tube into Travis’s urethra. Travis tried to make it a challenge, so Von smashed a beer bottle over his head and sent him to Wonderland again. He collected the shards for other uses as Greg enacted phase two. He plucked a single maggot from the bucket, and examined it before guiding it into the other side of the tube. It squirmed blindly, but aside from the movement it looked like something he’d have dug out of his nose in kindergarten. When it had advanced substantially in the tube he put his lips on it and exhaled.

Von looked up from his activities with Sarah and chuckled. “I always figured you’d give a world class blow.”

Greg shot him the finger. “Hey, do you want to do this?”

“I wouldn’t dream of ruining your time to shine.”

Greg collected another maggot and repeated the process. It was amazing what you could do on a shoestring budget if you just used your imagination and left some meat out to spoil . . . say, when you couldn’t quite fit the entirety of your hit and run conquest into the crisper.

When Travis at last awoke with the dull throbbing in his head somehow magnified, he was relieved to discover the tube had been removed. Something didn’t feel right in his scrotal sac per se, but Lolita was waiting for him to deliver the goods, tied down supine to the bed and gagged, so it would just have to be a problem for another