Ryan Harding - Genital Grinder

But nothing else happened. This virus or biological weapon or whatever it was seemed isolated to just the three of them. A government agency most of the general public had never heard of before shut the theater down and quarantined the auditorium. All of the ticketholders are still being examined at an undisclosed location while biological experts look for the elusive “Gard Factor,” wishing to hell they’d gone to a matinee instead. (The “matinee” thing is conjecture, but the rest—right down to the line about the lobby, which I am proud to say was my own contribution—went directly as written, painted, and painstakingly sculpted over a series of weeks. I kept one of Lee’s fragmented body sculptures . . . like a mini Han Solo in carbonite, dropped and shattered into tiny pieces.)

There seemed to be a lot of mass hysteria going around by that point. You would almost think it was a communicable disease with its own variation of a flu season. The barely repressed panic had returned. I was hearing it in conversations at work while I wrote pamphlets I did not comprehend. I was seeing it in the relief of my neighbors when they made it back to their apartments without being beaten and sodomized by a cartoon. It was in everybody’s sudden mistrust of cell phones (and movie theaters), and the deep reluctance to go anywhere that a lot of people were gathered.

The success of the Gard Incident convinced it was time for our masterwork at last. We started by putting something different on the canvas and in the clay: ourselves.

Section XI

I agreed to go first, and the effect was instantaneous—needle-like punctures over my chest, like a mouthful of extended teeth perforating the skin. It looked like my heart had grown teeth and was attempting to gnaw itself out of me (see figure 11.1), with the ossific slivers simultaneously serving as an alien suture to seal the aperture. Such a disfiguration would disgust anyone who saw it, but Kathaaria changed all that.

Kathaaria was why Ursula wanted my contribution. My fascination with disease had impressed her with a vague poetic passion.

The results we wanted could not be adequately illustrated. Perhaps there could be a view of Earth as seen from space with mushroom clouds expanding all over, but why should we submit ourselves to such a conflagration? You can’t imagine the plans we have for a world running on a different clock. So how do we really draw the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem for those who won’t be included? Well, along with Lee’s molding of a triple-helix viral cell and Geoff and Ursula’s portrayals of its effects, that is the purpose of this pamphlet . The disease known as Kathaaria has a contagion rate of 100% among people without the deformity described above.

Don’t blame the messenger, but like I said, this never happened. It wasn’t written, and you aren’t reading it. It’s after the end of the world. For those in the next one, though, the suffering we have shaped for you will be very real, as you will see described below in the First Indications of Infection .

A few words about each of the preceding stories, for those with a morbid curiosity.

Bottom Feeder—This was written in January of 2000. If you knew that one of these stories was a tribute to Richard Laymon, you could be forgiven for guessing it was “Bottom Feeder,” which was informed in no small part by “The Tub.” I’m sure many who’ve had a one night stand have had a pregnancy scare—is this story any different? Well, maybe a little.

Damaged Goods—I believe I stitched this together the night before I drove to Atlanta for the World Horror Convention in 1999, where my last minute planning resulted in sharing a hotel room with a couple of guys I hadn’t actually talked to a whole lot before that point—Brian Keene and Mike Oliveri. Such were the benefits of being part of the Horrornet community, where even if you didn’t always know somebody, you may as well have. I’m not sure what I would have come up with given slightly different circumstances, but I had read Lee & Pelan’s Shifters shortly before this, and the whole “pizza cutter” scene communicated to me in no certain terms that I was going to have to go beyond the sensibilities of mere gore and bodily waste to make a real impression. That and a fairly steady diet of the hardcore solo offerings of Sir Lee at the time were integral to this metamorphosis. It was the best reception I ever got from a reading, before or since, and a lot of that was the payoff of no one knowing what to expect from me. The Gross Out Contest is sort of the exception to the rule about making a good first impression, or at least not “good” in the traditional sense. The judges were Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum (who offered some choice commentary throughout the readings), John Pelan, and Simon Clark. “Damaged Goods” took first place. It is more of a vignette than a short story due to trying to keep time limit considerations for the reading. I have updated this version to adjust continuity of later Von and Greg adventures and lend a bit more gravitas . . . such as it is.

Sharing Needles—This was the last of the stories, written in 2003. I was invited to submit to an anthology called Family Plots , where each story was to involve family members committing a murder. I’ve been a true crime aficionado since high school, and this seemed like a good opportunity to explore that fascination. The challenge was to set up a story where most of the internalizing came from journal entries and the details emerged through the dialogue. Not exactly “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time” as twist endings go, but I still like it. As I recall, there were going to be 30+ contributors for Family Plots and it probably would have been a logistical nightmare to get signatures from everyone for a publisher based in Australia, but the publisher folded and the project followed.

Genital Grinder: A Snuff Film in Five Acts—The World Horror Convention in 2000 was held in Denver, and I wanted to show up with something even more deranged. The funny thing is that it wasn’t originally going to be a sequel to “Damaged Goods.” I forgot about this until my friend forwarded me an old email, but I was using the same concept with different characters and a different tone. The problem was that I had to be cognizant of a sensible time limit on reading, and short of using an excerpt out of context I didn’t see how it was going to happen—it was taking too long to set up. The easy solution was to use Von and Greg again. There was a very different atmosphere to the Gross Out this time, though, and by the time I read (I went last), the collective interest was all but bled dry. I took 2nd to Mark McLaughlin, a far more animated reader. The story did impress Kelly Laymon, though, who wanted to put together an anthology to use “Genital Grinder” as the closer. An amusing irony, because I remember having an unemployment claim at the time and being denied a shot at benefits for the week because the temp agency didn’t deem the trip integral to my career. My college graduation would have been that weekend, but it wasn’t a choice to me; I was going to read “Genital Grinder.” This version of the story has been altered significantly and expanded by a few thousand words, once more for a new continuity and to embellish details I glossed over to have a more presentable story for a reading limit.

An additional fun fact to this is that Richard Laymon was once again a judge at WHC 2000, and asked me to mail a copy of the story to him. I was happy enough to do that with nothing expected in return—“Richard Laymon asked me to send him my story!” was reward enough—but an “equal trade” for him was to send me a copy of The Travelling Vampire Show —hardcover edition. So not to have gone to WHC 2000, opting instead to do menial clerical tasks for a business that probably wouldn’t have told me my time was up there until the very last day (just to make sure I didn’t do a half-assed job at zero hour or, you know, actually contact my temp agency about finding me a new place to land immediately afterwards instead of having to wait for a new gig with no money coming in, which I’ve found is SOP for pretty much every single business that ever hired a temp) and go to a negligible graduation ceremony . . . I may as well never have written the story at all. I am pretty sure its appearance in Kelly Laymon’s anthology for Freak Press is why this book is happening in the first place.