Junior laughed and then picked up the fork and knife. He was swaying erratically now and his eyes were wet and half closed and appeared to be getting worse by the second. He even tried to rub his face again and almost stabbed himself in the eye.

I laid there until he got close. When he did, I opened my eyes wide and stared him down before delivering my right, un-eaten, leg so hard into his testicles that I actually heard an audible crunching sound. He doubled over, dropping the knife and fork. The knife slashed my open leg wound as it fell.

Hurt. So bad.

Junior hit the floor in front of me. He was in a ball and vomiting foam. I looked at the Hughes boy. He and his mother’s heads were up. The kid had gotten one hand free and he was working on the other. I gave him a wink.

“You two might want to close your eyes again,” I said, raising my leg into the air above Junior’s head on the ground.

“Don’t!”

I stopped. Looked up.

The Hughes boy had freed himself. He was frantically pulling the last of the rope off of himself. I put my leg down.

I watched as the Hughes boy walked across the slaughterhouse to his father on the slab and stopped his head barely above the draining table. Nothing can describe the pain in the boy’s eyes as he discovered his dad had finally passed. His exposed lungs were no longer moving.

The kid’s expression changed from sorrow to pissed in less time than I’d ever seen and I’d seen it plenty. He glared at the killer rolling on the floor then at the assortment of tools.

He chose a small hammer/ax combo deal that looked like something for cutting bone, and then walked over and stood above Junior who was unaware of everything going down around him except he was fucked up and his balls were crushed. Within minutes, Junior’s head would be added to the crush list too.

“Hey kid,” I muttered.

The boy looked at me. His eyes were blank rage. “Yeah?”

“You sure you want to do that?” I said, “I can take care of it if you don’t want to.”

The kid slammed the blunt end of the tool down onto Junior’s skull so hard his sandals, bloody feet kicked up.

The kid said, “I’m sure.”

Even if I could have I don’t think I would have stopped the kid. He was working out what would’ve turned into a lifetime of rage right there on the scene.

It took about a dozen equally hard whacks until the cannibal stopped moving. His head was pulp and hair. The Hughes kid just let the tool fall from his hand. He was done. He’d had his vengeance.