“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.