Genital Grinder (17 page)

“Well, ma’am, I—”

“If he was here right now, you know what I’d do?”

“No, but—”

“I’d take a meat cleaver and chop him off. I’d dice his little cock into shish-kebab, that bastard—”

“In that case, I have some good news for you, ma’am. You see, we already took care of that for you.”

“You diced it into shish-kebab?”

“Well, not exactly. It’s still in one piece—” Here Von crossed his fingers. “—and if your husband wants it back, he’s gonna have to pay us.”

“Oh, he’s not getting it back,” she replied firmly. “He can spend the rest of his life pissing through a plastic tube for all I care.”

The three men shared a look of absolute horror—not at the prospect of Edward Rochester pissing through a plastic tube for the rest of his life, but the increasing likelihood that there wasn’t going to be any ransom payment.

“Wait, listen, the women really weren’t that cheap, and he wasn’t even buying lap dances, I swear!”

“Nice try, but I’m not going to be stupid about trusting my husband anymore.”

“Okay, but what about compensation?”

“I’m not reporting you to the police. That’s my final offer.”

“We want our jillion dollars, you bitch!”

She hung up on him with an efficient little
click.

“Well, Von, you ready to go buy that yacht now? Hell, let’s go jet-setting,” Sammy suggested, for once not enjoying his own sarcasm.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Von shouted.

“Wasn’t it? All you had to do was say, ‘Look, I cut off your husband’s tool, and it’ll cost you three million dollars to get it back so they can reattach it.’ The way you did it, you may as well have said, ‘Hey, your husband just raped a bunch of preschoolers after firebombing six hundred sixty-six churches and performing analingus on your mother’s rotting cadaver, and by the way, how much will you pay to get back this penis I ripped from him?’ If someone said they’d kidnapped your girlfriend while she was out slobbing knobs for a five-spot on Seymour and Laymon, would you pay up?”
Von, who’d never actually had a girlfriend—not a willing one, at least—said nothing. He slammed the phone on the counter and curled his arm around the Tupperware bowl, almost protectively. He looked at the spoon, remembered its origin, and raised the bowl to his lips. He supped from it like it was the last of the milk in a cereal bowl.

“So you mean to say we ain’t gettin’ one red cent for what we’ve done tonight?” Greg asked.

“That’s what I mean,” Sammy clarified.

“You mean I had to put that guy’s . . . that guy’s
thing
in my mouth, and swallow it for nothin’?” Greg couldn’t have looked more outraged if Movie Heaven stopped renting out
Gaping Anus.

“Yep,” Sammy agreed. “The eternal plight of women everywhere.”

“Well, that’s just low down as anything.” He sulked, miserable at the idea that they probably
would
be shopping for yachts right now if Von had just read his script.

They were silent momentarily, stunned at this cruel turn of events, at a loss for words . . . the overconfident team who had boasted all along about their “inevitable” championship victory crusade, only to fall to the upstart underdogs. It wouldn’t have seemed possible for their night to turn out worse than Rochester’s, but here they were anyway. Every one of the involved parties, emasculated in one way or another.

As if on cue, they all heard a sudden outburst of laughter overhead which could only be construed as demonic. It did not seem to be predominantly masculine or feminine.

“Okay, I think we’ve had enough of your secrets,” Von said. He about-faced and left the kitchen for the stairs, carrying the Tupperware bowl with him.

“It’s safer if you don’t go up,” Sammy warned.

They ignored him. He tailed them with a sense of finality, not attempting to stop them. It was when they were passing the door to the Divided Man that a voice froze them. “Look down here, boys. I want to see your faces before I paint the walls with your brains.”

“Who’s this B-movie actor?” Von asked Sammy as they all obeyed the directive. “Another one of your ‘art’ exhibits?”

They found themselves seeing all of Horace for the first time, not just the fresh stump of his manhood jetting haphazardly like a lawn sprinkler. He stood at the foot of the stairs, deathly pale, with the front of his jeans almost entirely soaked in blood. He held a .38 on them. “From my glove compartment,” he explained. “I never drive without it. Guess I should have brought it inside the Electra Complex.”

“I’ve never seen him before,” Sammy replied to Von.

“Well, we don’t recognize him either,” Greg said.

“Of course you don’t,” Horace sympathized. “We weren’t properly introduced before you ran off with my still-bleeding dick, now were we?”

“He ain’t Edward Rochester,” Greg said.

“Hell no he ain’t,” Von agreed. “The pale little son of a bitch is lying.”

“Look at the front of my pants!” Horace shouted incredulously.

“
Homosexual
and pale,” Von revised.

Sammy sighed. “Allow me to translate for you two jack-offs—you didn’t castrate Rochester in the bar. Okay? You got
this
guy by mistake. Still with me? Now he’s going to kill us all. The perfect end to the perfect night.”

“Wrong guy? Bullshit.” Von pointed at Horace. “Prove it.”

Horace kept the gun on them while he undid the button of his jeans with his free hand and pulled his pants down. “You see now?” he asked triumphantly, then cried out when his underwear jostled the remnants. He had revealed something that looked more like a charred crater left by a meteorite than the external male reproductive system. His movements since the cauterization had teased open some of the heat blisters which had formed at the very base of his shaft (what little remained). Yellow pus was oozing over the rim of the blackened wound, the entrails of which were as indistinguishable as the remains of spontaneous combustion victims. The pus adhered to them like candle wax.

“Well then,” Von said. “We stand corrected. But before you blow our brains out—” He heaved the contents of the Tupperware bowl in Horace’s direction. The contents splattered across Horace’s face, blinding him and—when he inadvertently swallowed some of them—ickening him. He covered his face with both hands, trying to clear his eyes.

The trio scrambled into the Divided Man’s room and threw the door shut. Sammy had barely locked it and stepped back when the gun began firing on the other side, blowing out huge holes.

Von looked around frantically. “There’s nothing here!” he said, referring to the lack of an arsenal. Greg gave the tube sock wide berth as he searched, also unsuccessful.

The gunshots destroyed the lock and Horace kicked the door open almost effortlessly and rushed in. Sammy 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.