Genital Grinder (18 page)

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 satisfaction) 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.