Genital Grinder

collided with him immediately, slapping the gun loose. Sammy drove him over to the far wall where they both tripped over the Divided Man and collapsed beside the body. Nearest to them, Greg snatched Horace up by his hair and the belt of his pants and dragged him a few feet over. Greg set Horace face down in the chest cavity of Sammy’s homage to Gray’s Anatomy. Horace’s face mashed the entrails flat and ripped some of the coils open. He inhaled the digestive juice remnants involuntarily, gagging as they burned his nostrils. They tasted even worse, he discovered a moment later, and he vomited explosively. At such proximity the bile washed along the inner walls like a gully, then rolled back under his face. He was dangerously close to drowning in his own vomitus when Greg let him go.

Horace jerked his head up, gasping and trying to wipe his face off with the front of his shirt. He closed one of his nostrils and exhaled through the other. A burning stream of gastric juice trickled out, like the fleeting last seconds of urination. He turned in time to see that Von had picked up his .38 from the floor and aimed it from a crouched position which left the gun poised at point-blank range in front of his already decimated crotch. Powder burns fanned across his thighs as the deafening blast of the gun evolved to a painful ringing sound in his ears.

Von attempted to punctuate by firing in Horace’s screaming open mouth, but the gun was empty.

Horace wasn’t finished. He’d already lost the main part of his anatomy, and the power sources were extraneous now anyway. He watched with an almost detached fascination as his testicles dropped out of either side of his pant legs. Von intentionally stepped on one, bursting it like an egg yolk as Horace shouldered past him and out the door in a seizure-like fashion.

Von and Greg helped Sammy up and followed the high-pitched screams. They caught up with him in the kitchen, just in time to see him snatch up the mallet Sammy had used to flatten Mary Jane Turner’s anus. They cornered him, Sammy around the left side of the kitchen island and Von and Greg to the right.

Sammy ripped out a silverware drawer and removed a carving knife that wouldn’t have shamed Michael Myers. His eyes never left Horace, who was backed up against the kitchen sink, head jerking left and right to plot a plan of attack.

Greg reached out to slap grab Horace’s wrist. Horace yanked it away and swung the mallet on reflex. It struck a glancing blow across the crown of Greg’s head with a hollow thwock! He stumbled backward and crashed into the corner of the room. He didn’t move.

Von wisely backed away, scanning for a readily accessible weapon and finding nothing. He dropped to his knees as Horace swung for his head.

Aware that Sammy was right behind him, Horace pivoted and blindly lashed with the mallet. Sammy was just out of range, but the next mallet swing struck the knife and sent it clattering to the floor.

That was when Von reached up under Horace and grabbed a handful of his mangled crotch. Horace thought he felt something loosen and spurt, but he couldn’t imagine what was possibly left to do so. Horace’s vocal cords went taut as piano wire as he screamed, abruptly dropping the mallet.

Sammy seized it and swung it at Horace’s head, putting his body into it. The mallet cracked loudly, with force brute enough to jar Horace’s right eye from its socket. A dollop of blood sputtered over his cheekbone. The eyeball had not been freed; it was still connected by a straining optic nerve, and for the first time in his life Horace could see his face without a mirror. Von’s hand was still wringing his crotch, and Horace kicked blindly behind him. He connected with something, and the hand was withdrawn.

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.