You're dead tired. You opt for the second watch.

Virgil gives Emily the guest bedroom, and puts you in a tool room right across a wall from where the generator is chugging. You find some ratty tarps to cushion the floor, and zone out.

In the dark, later, you wake to hear some kind of commotion, but over the loud generator you can't hear much. You drift back to sleep.

Virgil wakes you, pounding on the door, to say it's your watch.

You get up. He points to a plate on the kitchen table with a thick hunk of cooked meat on it, a few feet away from the now-steaming hog-fryer.

"Better eat up 'fore your watch," he says.

You sit down and swallow a few bites of the meat. Virgil sits across from you. He stares. He's pretty fucking creepy.

"Somethin' we need to straighten out," he says. "Things apt to git real lonely 'round here... 'specially for... Little Virgil." He glances down past the edge of the table, at his crotch, as he says that. "Little Virgil goin' need to be kept company, if you can reckin' it."

"Listen asshole," you say. "The girl's with me. That's the end of it."

Virgil grins. He's missing most of his teeth. "The girl's on your plate, you fuckin' dumbshit. And you're what's goin' keep Little Virgil company."

You look at the hog-fryer again, and just as you realize what the hell he's talking about, giant hands clamp onto you from behind.

In seconds, Lonnie and Virgil tie you up and bend you over a workbench in the next room, and yank your pants down to your ankles. You glance back and catch a glimpse of Little Virgil. It's about the size of an aerosol can and, at the moment, just as hard. Big Virgil is lubing it up with some 30-weight motor oil. You shut your eyes and try not to think about how bad this is going to be.

A second later you feel the two hemispheres of your nether regions rended apart as if by the jaws of life. Bones and tendons and ligaments separate. Something--probably your colon--ruptures violently.

It takes you about forty minutes to bleed to death. They are, without even the ghost of a fucking doubt, the worst forty minutes of your life.

But hey, congratulations, you've discovered the most horrific of all endings to the story.


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