Genital Grinder

I.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“I won’t tell you that, but I’ll you the worst thing I’m gonna do . . . the most depraved thing.”

“Does it have anything to do with this little movie we’re going to make?”

Von only laughed. “I lied; I’m not going to tell you that either.”

Greg smiled in return, and cast a backward glance to verify the cargo was still quite immobile. “All systems go,” he reported.

They were eastbound on Gardner Drive, destination Von’s house. They’d already run the risk of a hazardous houseguest in the form of Claire Perkins, the hit-and-run victim they’d kindly transported some time ago from Sherman Avenue (and Bowling Boulevard) to Von’s for the express purpose of necrophiliac debauchery. Claire was currently cooling off in a crisper, at least what was left of her. After three days and nights of experimentation, they’d exhausted every nook and cranny. Von came up with an ingenious idea to dispose of the body, but it was slow-going. The entire feast would probably last nine days between the two of them.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner—all Claire. If they’d known it was going to turn into this big a headache, they’d have just wined, dined, and married the bitch. He could scarcely believe at this point that he had been so thankful to find her before, but like anything new, all it took was a little over-exposure to remember that life had been just fine before her arrival. Nothing like blowing a few loads in a putrefying backdoor to rend the veil real quick-like.

No point holding it off any longer . . . it was about time for the cunt a la mode to add a little spice to the whole drudgery of the cannibalistic enterprise. He was actually looking forward to being back home for that.

But that wasn’t the only reason, of course; there was the movie.

Hog-tied, gagged, and tarp-wrapped in the bed of his truck now was the infamous Sarah Pensie, better known to porn connoisseurs as “Lolita Ream,” friend to the varsity football, basketball, and tennis teams back at Bartok North High School, not to mention the shop class and even—God save us—the chess club. Greg and Von hadn’t participated in a damn thing, so they’d missed out. When they heard she’d gone on to a lucrative career in pornography, they’d really felt like Bill Buckner in game six of the ‘86 World Series. Down but not out, they decided to write to her. Against his better judgment, Von left the province of contact to Greg, a decision he’d dearly regretted when he saw what Greg evidently thought a “romantic overture.” The gist of his letter, minus a broad interpretation of acceptable grammar:

Dear Sarah, we went to school together, but I never got to bone you in your sweet ass. I hate that you have missed out on this jizz rocket I’m strapping. All those guys in your movies look like they’d rather be smoking on a rope than giving you the hard yard, so do yourself a favor and get your ass back to Bartok for a real man. You won’t regret it, baby. If you’ve ever wanted to be so pumped full of sauce that your eyes popped out of your head with your twat right behind ‘em, I’m the man to see. I sent you some high dollar earrings last year, so I figure fair is fair.

Your pal, Greg.

P.S. Please hurry as the doctors tell me I may die of the sickle cell in a few weeks.

The bitch did not respond, however, necessitating this little road trip. Apparently too much time blowing Louisville slugger-sized hard-ons in hot tubs and doling out rim jobs aplenty had her thinking she was too good for all the “little people” these days. Well, maybe it was time for her to reconnect with her roots.

They’d staked out the P.O. box for her fan mail—and “gifts” that secret admirers could send her from her fan letter wish list, as if she wasn’t raking in cash hand over quim with her videos selling for about 40 bones per. They watched the post office for three very uneventful and boring days and nights, passing the binoculars back and forth from a strip mall across the street. Even all the tight-shorted eye candy strutting it up the sidewalks grew a bit tiresome after they reluctantly made a pact not to get up to any “funny stuff” with any of them. They had to stay pure for Sarah and not endanger the mission. This rare display of restraint had given them plenty of time to brainstorm what they could do with her when they finally grabbed her. It was a blessing in disguise, because they’d come up with some solid gold indeed.

They’d actually almost missed her. She was totally slumming it in a jogging suit and sunglasses, but Greg recognized the swing of her ass (and the way she bleached that balloon knot, Greg could probably have picked it out of a police line-up) as she swayed through a door held open by an old man who not-so-surreptitiously scoped her backside as she floated past. She came out with a mail crate, probably filled with several envelopes, large mailers and boxes with some of the lingerie or high heels or other wish list items that some pathetic dick-jack believed would earn him some sexual payback puss (scraping together their nickels and dimes to order her a set of lah-di-dah earrings and only receiving some thank-you form letter with no instructions on when they should expect to meet her so she could spread her thighs and properly show her gratitude—they’d knifed the whole envelope open to verify there was nothing else in it—they knew only too well that it left a man with a hole in his wallet and a burning in his ass).

They tailed her to a supermarket and finally to her home, the kind of upper middle class pad owned by someone who ought to be able to buy their own damned earrings. They chloroformed her right there in her driveway as she popped the trunk for her grocery bags. They didn’t think anyone saw it go down, but didn’t linger long to find out. Von gunned it out of the neighborhood and backtracked to the interstate. Greg actually made a decent navigator. It was simple enough to find a vacant rest area (the kind of rip-off place where there weren’t really any facilities and you had to piss between your open car doors if you didn’t want anyone to glom your wang) and get her properly secured.

The sultry little slut was going to fuel quite the orgasmageddon, with her silicone-enhanced breasts defying the mere C-cup that stingy Mother Nature provided, forcing the game into double D overtime.

“Should’ve written back, slutcake,” Greg yelled, though she probably couldn’t hear him.

Truthfully it wouldn’t have mattered if she did. She’d still be here now. She would soon have company, too, because Von and Greg had been quite busy when they weren’t deducting on Claire Perkins.

What sparked the whole endeavor was a news report on the trial of Earl Newman, the alleged serial killer affectionately known as Mr. Drill Bit. He’d abducted eleven women and over the course of three days would subject each to repeated rapes and other assimilated degradations, and filmed the festivities on a camcorder. At the conclusion of three days, he attempted to lobotomize them with his namesake, to no avail. He gave up after four tries and settled for reducing their teeth to peppermint shards and spearing their eyeballs like fish until the sockets burst. This, Earl claimed, was the only way he could achieve orgasm (forgetting the videotapes showed an entirely different story). The strange thing was that he only filmed the rapes, never the killings. Snuff films, reported anchor newswoman Geisha Hammond, therefore remained an urban legend; an unverified crime.

Above the heads of Von and Greg, light bulbs appeared. Naturally, the first to be abducted for the creation of the world’s first sanctioned snuff film was Geisha Hammond herself. A stun-gun did the trick, and duct tape did the rest.

Trussed in the basement, not far from Claire Perkins’ makeshift tomb, struggled Bill Glasscock, who up to this point thought his name was by far the worst card Fate had ever dealt him. He’d been at the park with his video camera under the pretense of filming a soccer game, though he was far more intrigued that the players of said game were 10-year-old girls. And if there was grass on the field, you could play ball.

He was rendered unconscious by a blow from a tire iron when he was returning to his car, too invigorated by the choice footage he had collected and the night of ball sack-draining soccer which awaited him back at his apartment. Von and Greg had taken precautions by getting him from Brackard’s Point instead of Bartok; plus, they’d also needed a video camera.

For purely aesthetic reasons they took Travis Wicklund, who was handcuffed, gagged, and locked up in a coat closet. He sometimes told women on the Internet that he was an architect and other times an environmentalist. They got him walking home from his real place of work, the Burger King on Seymour Street.

Sarah, Geisha, Bill, and Travis. This was the cast of unknowns (well, minus “Lolita Ream” and maybe Geisha) who would involuntarily participate in the making of Genital Grinder, the first legitimate snuff film ever made.

II.

They chose a bathtub scene to open, because there wasn’t a movie worth a damn that didn’t have one. Geisha Hammond was more than happy to strip and get in the tub when Von brandished a machete. She was decidedly less comfortable in front of the camera than they expected for someone who made a living in front of it. Von decided it had something to do with the lack of a teleprompter, although the assurances that they would slit her throat if she didn’t comply probably contributed at least marginally. She’d have to do without. Fortune had been smiling on them when it delivered Bill Glassock’s Hi-8; they weren’t going to conveniently catch a gentleman lugging a teleprompter away from a sporting event involving prepubescent girls. Geisha Hammond was wet dream material, so the bathtub assignment was a given. She always wore tight blouses with a little glimmer of cleavage, which made you feel pleasantly warm inside as you listened to an item about somebody blasted pointblank with a shotgun during a “drug deal gone bad” or a newborn tossed off a rooftop like a clay pigeon. Blond hair so light it was almost silver. Long skirts, but usually with a healthy slit up the side allowing a peak of bronze legs in the occasional fleeting long shot. And such lips . . . bee-stung and primed for pleasure. As she detailed the latest local atrocities—a single mother mutilated beyond recognition by the Bartok Butcher, a hobo pushed in front of a train, a cabin full of corpses by an old dirt track, a 12-year-old overdosing on heroin in an elementary school bathroom—all you could think was, If she put those thick lips on my quim-splitter, I’d blast my payload right out the back of that blond head in about 2.2 seconds.

Seeing her in all her nude glory now, he wondered why the hell he’d sat on his old beat-up recliner nursing a cold beer and a hard-on for the past few years when he could have just gone out and snatched her. All that wasted time. If his stomach wasn’t lurching most disagreeably right now, he would have clamped his fingers around one of those solid ass cheeks (no tan lines . . . none) and expected a crack of lightning to explode through the ceiling and consecrate his hand forever as a sanctified object, holier than anything in the world of man.

The bush was only a little tuft of grass, allowing easy exposure of the other lips which could undoubtedly summon a skull-shattering payload in 2.2 seconds as well. It was all Von could do to stay back and not get in the way. He had to remember, they were here to create art.

“Just sit there and soap your titties,” he instructed. “Improvise.”

“Are you going to hurt me?” she asked. Her eyes couldn’t seem to escape the hypnotic hold of the machete tapping against his leg.

“We can negotiate your contract later.” He paused, his own eyes similarly locked on her legs, or more specifically between them, not exactly sure what he was seeing. Two yellow-greenish trails were rising to the surface of the water, like liquid worms. Others soon followed, creating a cloud, and a definite froth was congealing above her thighs.

Greg peered from around the viewfinder of the camera at this “breaking story” in Geisha Hammond’s box. “Is that . . . cum?”

“You idiot,” Von snapped. “You know women don’t have orgasms.” His stomach tensed again, although perhaps it had more to do with the Claire sandwich he’d wolfed down earlier.

“I have trichomoniasis,” Geisha confessed, at first abashed and all miserable, but then her face brightened, suddenly hopeful. “I’ve only been on the antibiotic a couple days . . . and I missed the last dose because of you. Say, I’m not right for your movie at all—”

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 trichomoniasis, 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 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 day. He had a suspicion that blowing up her box with enough spunk to fill a tube of toothpaste would probably do the trick anyway. He gingerly maneuvered his way to the bed, wondering why Lolita had to make this harder than it already was by fighting him. He wasn’t the enemy. Did she not realize how many burgers he’d flipped just to save up the jack to buy her videos? These might not be the conditions he would have imagined such an encounter as this taking place, but he’d begun to feel entitled to it. Other than a shaved sack and half again as many inches, the boys in those movies didn’t have anything he didn’t, and probably hadn’t paid forty dollars for a volume of Gaping Anus, to boot. There seemed to be a pool of blood spreading underneath her, but he paid it no mind. She looked a little pale compared to the movies, but maybe it was a trick of the lighting. He gave up looking at her face and closed his eyes, latching both of his hands onto her tits as though to keep from floating off into outer space. The euphoria was so intense that a UFO could have landed on top of the house and it wouldn’t have registered with him.

Greg found a good angle with the camera.

“Remember,” Von warned Travis. “Pull out when it’s time.”

And less than a minute later it was time, because all the girlfriends Travis boasted about on the Internet had something in common—none of them actually existed. Quoth he: “I can’t hold it any longer!”

He pulled out and aimed for Lolita’s chest like the dudes in pornos always did. The first couple cubic centimeters were normal, if somewhat hesitant; after that, they were anything but. It was like a squeeze bottle with only a smattering of butter remaining which expels, tapers, jets, halts, and finally sprays haphazardly everywhere but where you intended. It was remarkably similar in texture to potato salad. The maggots mostly dribbled off the end of his equipment, but the first couple actually shot an impressive distance as though propelled down a water slide and launched up the mounds of Lolita’s breasts, writhing. Travis looked down in mute horror. The load had concluded, but one last maggot depended from his urethra, still squirming in the swollen orifice.

Travis yelped, and made pincers of his finger and thumb. He slid it out, groaning sickly. He pinched it too hard, cutting it in half, and flicked the pieces away. He turned away from the abominable sight and retched.

“Tell me you got that!” Von pleaded.

Greg gave the thumbs-up. “We got the whole thing . . . the money shot and him puking at the end like a total pussy!”

Von clapped him on the back. “Travis, you’ve been a real sport, my man, so we’re going to let you do her again. And no maggots this time, either.”

“The only catch is that you have to use her ass,” Greg added.

“No way, man,” Travis began. “I’m not—”

Von cocked the .357, and Travis reached for Sarah’s hips to turn her over real quick-like.

“No,” Von said. “Don’t turn her over. Just hoist her up some.”

Travis did, and closed his eyes. He could see where the blood was issuing from the plundered orifice, but he’d just ejaculated a clump of corpse-eaters, so no reason to get squeamish now. It took him a moment to re-harden, but you might say he was an old hand at masturbation marathons, and he was erect enough to go again.

He felt the gun at the base of his skull. “Keep going,” Von said.

Travis didn’t understand at first why Von would even bother telling him that—may as well tell him, Keep breathing there, bucko—until he felt searing pain across an inch of his dick.

. . . then another . . . and another . . . Each thrust opened another wound, what seemed like a thousand cuts concentrated in a horribly limited space. He could feel rivulets of blood coursing down his shaft, then dripping off his scrotum and down his thighs, spattering in dime-sized droplets on his feet. It was doubtful he would have noticed a UFO landing on the house at this moment, either.

“Faster,” Von said simply. The gun cocked again and Travis complied, now screaming. They let him; no gags this time.

Greg made sure to get a close-up when Travis was at last allowed to withdraw. He crumpled on the bed, his mutilated sex organ gleaming like a skinned rabbit and bearing a passing resemblance to same. For a brief instant Greg discerned a tiny shard of glass jutting from one of the lacerations, one of the fragments from the bottle slammed over Travis’s head . . . then implanted within Sarah Pensie by Von. A nicked artery was blasting like an automated Super Soaker. Greg continued to film Sarah, because the intercourse had caused an exodus of some of the glass shards. Now runny tissue from within her digestive tract was slopping from her anus. He wasn’t sure when exactly it happened, but she was no longer screaming behind the gag.

Von held a pillow in front of the gun and placed it over Travis’s face. No point in prolonging his agony; that would just be excessive. He did wait a moment while Greg sauntered over into better position with the camera, then fired. A fan of red streaks and gray matter exploded above Travis’s head and across the carpet, as though he’d just had an idea too amazing to be contained within his skull.

Greg tracked over the debris until he captured Von in the viewfinder, still crouched on the floor beside Travis, smoke curling from the crevice blasted into the pillow. Bloody feathers floated to rest on the linen, the motionless body, the carpet, like snowflakes in a paperweight.

“I guess that’s a wrap,” Von said.

And with that, Genital Grinder had concluded.

V.

The clean-up afterward was rigorous, and they made themselves complete it before they watched the movie; otherwise it might never get done. They’d stored Geisha’s meaty legs in the crisper (and the rest of her in Von’s bed), and even though children were starving in Africa, they incinerated the last of Claire’s remains. Whoever’s turn it was in the bathtub, they kept the camera in there with them just so the other wouldn’t be tempted to try to preview their masterpiece in their absence.

While Greg waited for Von to get cleaned up in the bathroom, he watched the latest installment in his preferred series of backdoor-based pornography, Gaping Anus. Von, in turn, watched a menstruation epic called Ragtime Girls, with the irresistible tag line, “They come with no strings attached!”

And at long last, it was time to watch their magnum opus of film-making, the Citizen Kane of snuff movies. Greg, never shy about pointing out the obvious, was the first to comment as the TV presented no Geisha, no Sarah, no maggot orgasm, but instead a soccer game with girls who could have just as easily been mistaken for boys if not for their long hair: “Sonofabitch, Von . . . we never did hit record, did we?”