Nuvein Fiction | The Groom’s Men by Brian Downes

About the Author

Last April Nuvein published Brian Downes' short story, Full Dark at Twelve PM.
Recently, Nuvein also published Christmas Tour. The current work of short fiction The Groom's Men is the third short story by Brian Downes to appear in Nuvein. Below is a list of his writing credits:
Book reviewer and assistant producer for the Rhett Palmer Morning Show, September 2001 to Present: WFLA 1370 AM in Vero Beach, Florida, 7 - 10 AM Monday through Friday. Duties include the weekly Book Report and occasional co-hosting, especially when authors are guests on the show. Rhett Palmer (561) 473-7777.
Managed Lives, stage play, in development at the Orbit Theater Company in Port Saint Lucy, Florida. Artistic Director Nathan Sanders, orbit@peoplepc.com, (561) 879-4196.
On The Cold Sea, at News of the Brave New World (www.indy95.chem.unc.edu), October 8th, 2001.
"Mordred Fisht" and "Marcu", items for the Places to Go, People to See column at The Shadowrun Supplemental (http://tss.dumpshock.com/tss.html#t13), in Issue 15, October 2001.
Full Dark at 12:00 PM, short story, at Nuvein (www.nuvein.com), Issue 11, April 14th, 2001.
"Simplicity is Elegance", article for the "Guy Speak" column at Dare Magazine (www.daremag.com), under the pen name "David Ross," Spring/Summer 2001 issue.
The Formative Weeks, short story, at Dare Magazine, under the pen name "David Ross," Winter 2001 issue.
Savage Weapons, short story, at Writers of the Lost Ark (www.writersofthelostark.com), November 22nd, 2000.
Strange Fits, short story, at News of the Brave New World (www.indy95.chem.unc.edu), August 2000.
Country Weekends, short story, at News of the Brave New World, June 2000.

“Christ, Ed, I’ve got some bad news.”

“Who is this?” Ed asked, puzzled. The voice sounded familiar; it was a man; but there were a lot of male voices that were familiar to Ed. At first he thought it might be Kopecki, calling from Albania to tell him that one of the guys had gotten cashed out by a Serbian landmine.

“It’s Larry. Who did you think it was?” It was clear that Larry couldn’t conceive of any reasonable set of circumstances where he might be mistaken for someone else. “I just saw Cammie. Guess what she’s got on her hand?”

Ed thought about it for a few seconds. “Ohhhh . . . . no,” he groaned. “She didn’t get – ”

“A conspicuously cheap little rock, that’s right,” Larry rode over him. “That little prick proposed.”

“And she said yes?” Ed’s disbelief was fighting a desperate rearguard against Larry’s morbid glee. But it was the glee that made Larry so convincing. Larry would tell the story of an orphanage fire like Chris Rock would talk about sex in the champagne room.

“Come on, she was thrilled to say yes. Cammie thinks this is the greatest event of her young life. I had to tell her it was a beautiful piece.” Larry was a jewelry salesman by profession.

“Man . . . man . . . ” Ed shook his head back and forth, struggling with himself. He believed that marriage was a beautiful and sacred institution; an engagement was a time for joy; but he knew that Jeffie, Cammie’s new-minted fiancé but boyfriend of intolerably long standing, was an asshole.
“The whole fucking enterprise stinks of doom. Doom!” Larry said authoritatively. “Anyway, that’s the news. Gotta go, I’m driving and a state trooper is behind me. See you Friday.”

Larry, Ed, Cody and Harvard met that Friday at a bar called The Pound in the Cleveland flats. It was a serious drinking establishment with a tiny dance floor and music that wasn’t loud enough to prohibit conversation.
“Guess what? Cameron is getting married,” Larry promulgated to Cody and Harvard. “She’s the future Missus Jeffie Jackass.”

“Oh God, no!” Cried Cody.

“That shit’s not funny, Larry,” Harvard said ominously, but soon enough he realized that it was no joke – it was a fact.

“It’s a cheap and tawdry little ring, too. A ring for a pimp to give his ho.” Larry looked into his beer for the answers, like a fatalistic man of the world.

“I thought Jeffie was on his way out!” Cody protested.

“We’d hoped he was on his way out,” Harvard corrected.

Ed clarified, “We threw him out, but Cammie’s still got him.”

Cody was plaintive. “Why?”

“How the hell should I know?” Larry demanded. And he spoke for all of them.

Every one of the four was twenty-five, except for Larry, who was twenty-four. Cammie, little Cameron Hotchkiss, had come into their circle three years ago because she had been an acquaintance of Larry’s sister. Cammie had been seventeen when they first met her, but turned eighteen straightaway. Her friendship with Larry’s sister faded, but she ran with the boy’s crew still. She was psychologically delicate, high-strung, and lived to party. Cody, Harvard, Ed and Larry all thought of her protectively as their “little sister,” who just happened to like sucking dick. And what man would dispute her right to pursue her interests? It was a free country, wasn’t it?

She was a sweet kid, and loyal as a puppy – to the group, in her own way. She’d emailed Ed two or three times a month while he was overseas in the Marines, before he accidentally got run over by a Hummer and was sent home on a medical discharge.

Her “real boyfriends” came and went, but the four of them were always there to help mend her self-esteem when those relationships fell apart, which they always did. Cammie had awful judgment in men, outside of her friends. The four of them thought of her as a kind of natural resource. There was no party Cameron didn’t attend, and she had a changing lineup of little hottie friends she was always bringing with her, after priming them with hours of stories of how crazy sexy cool her guy friends were.

“Of all the guys she’s dated, why the hell would she pick Jeffie to stick around?” Cody wanted to know.

Larry repeated, “How the hell should I know?”

“Come on, guys. It’s not cool for you all to bitch and moan just because you’re never going to get to do Cammie again,” said Ed.

“It’s not like that,” Harvard told him reproachfully. “I haven’t had anything to do with Cammie for a year at least.”

“No, no, me neither,” the other two agreed. (They were all lying.)

“It’s just that she’s our friend, and I, for one, hate to see her throw her life away.” Harvard was a computer technician. These days he had a full beard and hair he was growing, because computer wizzes liked to look like holy madmen who had just wandered in from the desert to perform their rituals. It gave his words punch. Larry and Cody nodded along. “We hate to see her throw her life away,” was the consensus opinion; they had to look out for their girl.

“Come on, we can’t let her marry a man who can’t outgrow the nickname his mother gave him,” Cody cracked.

“He beats her up,” Ed cautiously ventured.

“No! Does he?” Cody was appalled.

“She would have told us something like that,” Harvard shook his head.

“No, I mean it. When I saw her last time, she had two little round bruises on the outside of her arm and one on the inside, like fingerprints,” Ed told them.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Larry shouted over their noise and the bar noise. “We know that little Jeffie doesn’t beat her up because he doesn’t have enough personality to aim when he pees, much less beat anything but his meat. And we would have killed him a long time ago if he did, anyway.”

They all cheered Larry for that.

The following week, Ed tried to raise Cammie on the phone. He called her home phone once on Monday and once on Tuesday, and got the answering machine both times: “Hi, this is Cammie’s house. I’m not home right now, but I promise to call you back as soon as I can.” He left two messages, but she didn’t call him back.

On Thursday, he called her cell phone.

“Hello?”

“Cammie?”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Ed.” Usually she recognized his voice on the phone. There was a lot of background din, a staccato peal of white noise.

“Hi, Ed!” Her voice suddenly infused with long-held warmth, as for an old friend (who she had been to bed with a few times a few years ago) – but there was an undertone of something that bothered Ed, a fake cheerfulness for the sake of appearances. “How have you been?”

“Fine. We haven’t seen much of you these days.”

“I know,” regret and a mischievous plea for forgiveness in two words. “I’ve been busy!”

There was a silence as Ed considered how to approach. “What’s all that noise?” He asked, distracted.

“I’m in the car,” she answered so quickly that he wasn’t certain if she was answering his question or making conversation.

“Oh, congratulations!” He rushed forward in the hope of looking spontaneous. “I hear you’re going to be Mrs. Jeffrey Watby!”

Pure pleasure in her purring reply, “Thank you. Did I – you saw my engagement ring, right?”

“I haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks,” he explained.

“Oh, you’ve got to see it. We’ll get together soon and I’ll show it to you.”
Somehow, he got the feeling that her offer to get together wasn’t exactly genuine. She said something else, but the background noise rose up and destroyed the meaning of it. “What? What?” He raised his voice.

“ – I don’t think Larry liked it much.” She came back out of the audio soup.

“No, no, he liked it, he liked it. He said it was a beautiful piece,” Ed reassured her.

“What?” Her voice sounded utterly confused.

“The ring,” Ed supplied. “He said it was a beautiful ring.”

“Oh, yes, it absolutely is beautiful,” Cammie said dreamily. “But I don’t think Larry likes my marrying Jeffie.”

“Jeff’s off probation already?” Ed dodged the question. He disliked having to tell lies (and being friends with Larry seemed to require it a lot of the time, somehow).

“He’s still got six months to go, but, like, you know. He just told me that he couldn’t wait anymore.” Jeffie was serving eighteen months probation for selling two stolen TVs. When Ed had gotten back from the Balkans four or fives months ago, with his leg still in a cast, one of the first things Cammie had told him was that her boyfriend had promised to marry her as soon as his probation ran out. The other guys had all been sure that Jeffie was on his way out any minute back then, so Ed hadn’t taken her very seriously.

“How sweet,” Ed said. “When are we going to get to throw you an engagement party?”

“What?”

“An engagement party!” He shouted slowly over the static, enunciating like he’d been taught in the Marines.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m so busy all the time that it’s, like, really hard to plan . . . ” Ed knew Cammie well enough to know that she was staging that uncertain tone, and that what she really meant was that he might as well forget the engagement party idea. It was never going to happen.

“It’s really hard to hear you, Ed. And I’m almost pulling – ” Cammie’s cell phone cut out. There was a far-away sounding hum for a second or two, then she cut back in louder than before. “ – I’LL TALK TO YOU ANOTHER TIME, HON.”

“OKAY. GOODBYE,” Ed shouted back.

There was panic and alarm at The Pound that Friday. Every one of the boys had called Cammie, and gotten the same distant Stepford Wife-style treatment. They recounted these stories to each other like Job’s last surviving servants.

“I think he was there when I talked to her. She was in a hurry to get off the phone,” Harvard said. “And she didn’t sound very happy when I gave her my best wishes regarding her engagement. She just said, “Yeah, that’s true.””

“He doesn’t let her talk to any of her old friends,” Cody said bitterly. “They used to end up having goddamned screaming matches by the end of the evening whenever they went out.”

“Because he’s so jealous!” Larry said loudly, as if he was telling them something they didn’t know. “He’s afraid she’s going to ditch his dumb ass.”

“Why doesn’t she? What does she see in him? He’s fucking stupid!” Was Cody’s verdict. “You remember the time he told all those nigger jokes?” “What!?” Ed was dumbfounded at this; Cody was half black, and it was easy to tell if you looked at him for a second. “When did this happen?” Larry stepped in to explain. “When you were still off at war with Count Dracula. There were a couple of weeks back then when Cammie brought Shithead around as if we wanted to see him as much as she did.”

Cody took the anecdote back over. “And one night he just starts going off with nigger-this and nigger-that. What’s wrong with five niggers going over a cliff in a Cadillac?”
“What?” Ed asked, because he didn’t understand the question in this context.
“A Cadillac seats six. And I’m sitting there just staring at this dickhead the whole time, and he just keeps going on.”

Harvard interjected, “I actually said to him, in no uncertain terms, “That shit is not funny.” But there was no stopping him.”

“He must have thought I was Native American,” Cody quipped, and they all laughed. “We didn’t let him hang around much after that. But then we couldn’t see Cammie, either.”

Larry dropped a bombshell: “She was crying when I talked to her.”

“She was crying?” Cody was startled.

“Crying her eyes out. I got her at home. She picked up after the first ring.” Larry pitched his voice high to imitate Cammie, and low to imitate himself: “ ‘What is it?’ She says. ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ Sniff, sniff. ‘You sound like you’re crying.’ ‘I’m okay. What did you call for?’ ‘Well, I just called to say hey.’ She sniffs some more, and sounds choked up when she talks. ‘All right. I’m really busy right now. Thanks for calling. I’ll call you back.’ Click.”

The other three were appalled while they listened to this story. Silence reigned afterwards, while Larry looked significantly from Ed, to Harvard, to Cody. Doom, Larry’s theatrical expression said – Laden with doom.

Why had Cammie been crying? All four were certain that it was some weaseling, turdcake thing Jeffie had done. The awful question was, what runny little misery was it?

“He’s a dick,” Harvard said, shaking his head. “He doesn’t deserve her.”

Larry spoke up. “He doesn’t love her. That’s not love. We love her, not him.” They all stopped and held their breaths, and looked at Larry.

The moment held.

Then Larry nodded jerkily. “You know what I mean.”

Sure. Of course. A circle of nods. The four exchanged glances. They knew what he meant.

“Somebody should do something,” Ed said sorrowfully.

“Somebody should do something,” Larry agreed, “and I’ve been thinking about that. And I’m going to need your help, Ed. And yours, Harvard. And you too, Cody.”

Larry outlined his plan concisely in two minutes. They were all attracted to it in the first forty-five seconds, but the last seventy-five were far enough away from the sun that the first impulse of astronauts Cody, Harvard, and Ed was to jump the hell off Starship Larry. By the time he was done, they were all sitting a little bit further away on their bar chairs.
“That’s a great, highly illegal idea,” Harvard said. He cocked his head facetiously and scratched his beard. “Twenty-years to life, if my math is right.”

Larry tossed his head as if Harvard had suddenly transformed into fifty pounds of dead tuna. “Illegal? Pfft!”

“No,” Harvard rebutted. “No “Pfft”.”

Larry lay down, “There’s no such thing as illegal. There’s only getting caught and not getting caught. No, more to the point, there’s only getting convicted, and getting acquitted. What jury is going to believe Jeffie Watby, the hot TV king? It’ll never even go to a jury. The cops will laugh right in his face.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Ed asked.

“What were you doing in the Marines?” Larry countered.

Ed was momentarily stunned by the sudden jump in the conversation.

“You were defending the United States of America, am I right? Mom, God, apple pie, and all the girls back home. You got run over by a two-ton truck and got your ankle all fucked up so that girls like Cammie could go on doing what they do, in a free country, but you won’t do this? Come on! You stood with a machine gun, ready to take on the whole Russian Army to defend our girls, but you’re going to let Jeffie conquer her?”

“Come on,” Ed said weakly. But the argument was winning him. He had often thought about Cammie when he was on Parris Island and at Camp Lejeune, and when he was on active duty in Europe after his training was complete. Her image was the mental picture he had whenever he read or heard the words, “American way of life.”

So Semper Fidelis.

“This is totally crazy,” Ed said by way of caving in.

“So let’s get crazy!” Larry turned to Harvard and Cody, trying to whip them into action. “We can’t let down our friends! She needs us. She’s too young and too stupid to know that Jeffie is a goddamned worthless moron.”

That was certainly true. They all felt something should be done about it; Larry’s plan was the only one on the menu. What could they do? It’s axiomatic in life that it’s always the crazy people with the determination and the energy to affect change.

Jeffie Watby sat on the deck of a big white sailboat named The Lakeswimmer. Two of his fiancé’s friends were sitting there with him. Ed, who’d just come back from the Navy SEALS, which was very cool, and Harvard, who was kind of like a Grizzly Adams looking guy with a beard and a ponytail. And that was cool. They were cool guys. Jeffie was happy to be there. He was smiling at both of them. They smiled back. He took his second beer from between his knees and drank a big mouthful.

“This is pretty cool,” Jeffie said.

“Yeah, it’s nice,” said Ed, nodding agreeably.

Harvard grunted in assent.
They were just going by the stark dark arm of the breakwall off Rocky River, outside Cleveland. The rocky outreach was black against the moonlight on the surrounding water. They went past it under sail power.

Jeffie kept on smiling. It was really cool being here with these guys. In the past, he’d had some vicious, screaming battles with Cammie about her hanging out with them. He’d accused her of being a slut, of taking them on all four at a time whenever his back was turned. She’d begged him to believe that she loved him. He went off on her. He threw the in-pile of mail at her, aiming for her face, throwing them like Frisbees.

But that was all forgotten, now that he was out here with them. He was proud to have been invited. “This is a really nice boat,” he grinned again.

“Uh huh,” Ed nodded.

“Yes,” said Harvard.

They all sipped from their beers.

Then the other two guys joined them. Larry and Cody had been busy handling the boat. “There we go,” Larry said, climbing down along the side of the boat to join them. “We’re shipshape. She’ll pretty much steer herself now. How’s your drink, Jeff?” Jeffie look at him like he was confused. “Do you need a another one yet?” He clarified.

Jeffie tipped his beer up and took three big gulps. “This one’s still half full,” he said a little sadly when he came up for air.

“Don’t hesitate to get another one when you want,” Larry encouraged him. “Don’t anybody hesitate, there‘s plenty.”

“It’s a beautiful night for sailing,” Cody said sincerely. The Lakeswimmer was his, having made up about 85% of the estate of his favorite bachelor uncle four years ago. And it was a beautiful night for sailing.

Ed and Harvard loosened up now that Larry and Cody were back. They drank up their beers and got new ones. They started telling blowjob jokes. Jeffie contributed a couple of new ones about sand niggers that the other four chuckled at supportively. They laughed together, and all became very chummy. They turned on Cody’s portable radio and got louder and louder.

“So you’re going to get our Cammie,” Ed told Jeffie.

“Uh huh,” Jeffie said with smug understatement, and a smug grin, too. “Girl can’t live without me.”

Even in the partial light on the boat on the dark lake, Ed saw Harvard grimace, and keep down whatever had been about to come out.

Larry cried at one point, “This is the fucking life! Am I right, fellas?”

“Ye-ah,” Jeffie agreed. He was pretty thoroughly drunk by now. “Just the brothers, with no fucking hoes to bitch all the time.”

“To brotherhood,” Cody sentimentally proposed straight away, and Ed, Harvard and Larry raised their beers and shouted out, “To brotherhood!”

“To brothers-hood!” Jeffie said, aping the other four.

“Seeing as how you and Cammie are getting married, we wanted to hang out with you a little,” said Larry to Jeffie. “Give you our congratulations, you know.”

“Thanks,” said Jeffie.

“I saw that rock you bought her,” Larry said. He smiled powerfully, and his eyes glinted in the light like little madnesses.

“Ye-ah, baby,” Jeffie nodded his head emphatically, thinking the engagement ring he’d gotten her was a gargantuan achievement. “I know how to keep all my bitches satisfied.”

“Ye-ah,” Ed, Cody and Harvard all amplified admiringly, nodding in the same fashion. Then they broke out laughing. They laughed so hard they had to put their hands on their knees.

Jeffie looked around uncertainly, trying to get what was so funny.

“Let’s take some pictures,” Larry directed. He had a Polaroid instant camera. “Everybody move together. Smile!” They did, the flash popped, and the first snapshot extruded out the slot.

In great bonhomie, the guys moved back and forth in the line-up as Larry took pictures. They held their beers up, they grinned and squinted into the flash. They slapped each other’s backs, and Jeffie’s, and put their arms around each other’s shoulders. Larry used up a roll of film and loaded another one.

“I want to be in a few of these. Harvard, here,” Larry handed the camera off. Then he put his arm around Jeffie’s back and yelled, “For the boys!”

Jeffie was transcendental with happiness. He was one of these guys, he was part of their group; that group had swept him up with open arms because he was going to marry Cammie. “Smile for the hoes back home! Hi, Cammie! Hi, Cammie!”

Flash, went the camera. Harvard’s bearded face was red with mirth while he waved a snapshot around in the breeze to make it develop faster.

Jeffie was canoeing blissfully down Beer River, and Ed put a new one in his hand. Jeffie embraced him, shouting patriotically, “Navy SEALS!”

Ed rolled his eyes. “I was in the Marines, man.”

Jeffie let go of him. “Oh, man, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, dude,” he over-apologized for his mistake. Ed was now sorry for having pointed it out, the correction having had such an instant tumbling affect on their guest’s mood.

“Did you ever get to kill Saddam Hussein?” Jeffie asked him with manly sincerity.

“No, man,” Ed just smiled, and shook his head, without pointing out that Desert Storm had been over six years before he ever joined up. “Okay, time to let go of me, man.”

Cody told a joke about three men pissing off a bridge. “‘This bridge is tall,’ ‘This water is cold,’ ‘And it’s deep, too.’” They all choked with laughter, and their esprit de corps regenerated.

“Look at these pictures,” Larry urged, motioning everyone over towards him. “Aren’t these beautiful, Jeff?”

Larry had the Polaroids lined up in a double row on top of an Igloo cooler. He was sitting in a chair on one side of it. In a motion that suggested choreography, Ed slid another chair up to the impromptu table for Jeffie to take a seat in, opposite the jewelry salesman. Jeffie sat down heavily, the smile still stuck on his face and sweat in his hairline. But the smile soon slipped away, and so did all his color, while he examined the pictures. It took him a little time, but the guys let him have all he wanted, in silence.

The first picture was one of the shots of the group of them, taken minutes ago. Cody had his arm crooked around Jeffie’s neck in the photo. They both had sincere-looking smiles. Cody had a barbed gaff hook in his hand, inches from Jeffie’s throat.

In the next shot, Harvard was holding a hangman’s noose over Jeffie’s head from behind. Jeffie’s eyes were closed in a drunkard’s slow-motion blink at the popping flash.

In the next, Ed was behind Jeffie while Jeffie waved to the hoes back home. Ed was looking sort of slyly to the right, off camera. But nevertheless, the Beretta semiautomatic he had in his hand was pointed directly behind Jeffie’s ear.

The last three shots were not Polaroids. They’d been taken with a much more sophisticated camera, and didn’t have the white borders of the instant snapshots. The first one was a grinning Larry, sitting in the driver’s seat of Jeffie’s car, which was in Jeffie‘s driveway. It was night in the photograph. Larry was casually waving at the photographer. All four doors and the trunk of the car were open.

The second shot was Jeffie, asleep in his bed inside the house. The third was almost the same as the second, except for the addition of Larry again. Larry was holding his finger to his lips in a cartoon gesture for silence. In his other hand was a thing with the word Craftsman printed on the blade.

Jeffie now looked very thoughtful, and kind of pained. His eyes went back and forth over the pictures. The boat had stopped. There was the quiet sound of the water against the hull, and the Lakeswimmer’s rocking.
“You’re like the guys who destroyed the World Trade Center,” Larry said quietly, and with muted pleasure. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with.”

“What is this?” Jeffie asked. Not with bravado, but because he didn’t know. But he did know that it was scary, that was for sure.

“This is your kiss-off,” Larry explained. “We want you so fucking gone it hurts our nuts, I’ll tell you what.”

“You’re an asshole,” Cody told Jeffie.

Harvard threw in, “You’re an ignorant piece of shit.”

“Stupid prick,” Ed guillotined.

Larry said with casual confidence, “We love Cammie. But I bet you never dreamed we would keep you from ruining her life. No, you didn‘t see that coming.”

The other three all felt a lurch inside. Jeffie was likely to misunderstand Larry’s use of love. But none of them wanted to break the momentum for a painstaking explication right now.

“I thought you . . . ” Jeffie stopped and started again. “She wants to marry me.”

“She’s young and doesn’t know what she wants. She’s fragile. That’s why her friends have to protect her.” Larry took a fat white envelope out from under a heavy porcelain coffee mug on the control console nearby. He laid it down on top of the Polaroids that were a sort of paint-by-numbers guide to Jeffie’s end. Jeffie looked at it with fear, as if it might be the last method of his execution -- gaff hook, noose, pistol, chainsaw, envelope.

Ed watched all this. He was trying to stand confidently, but his knees were shaking. Larry had predicted, and Harvard had eventually agreed, that Jeffie would react in a certain way, be docile and compliant, because he was basically a dumb bastard, and a bully and a coward. Ed hadn’t been entirely convinced that was going to happen, up until this moment. But when he saw that Jeffie made no move to accept or reject the envelope, but looked around to the three of them -- pitiful confusion and approval-seeking in his eyes -- and then looked back at Larry for permission to make a move, Ed knew that he was their dog. This was all wrapped up. He heard a faint grunt from Cody. Ed glanced at his friend, and knew that Cody saw it too.

“We took up a collection. That,” Larry explained, “is six thousand dollars. And a plane ticket to Texas for the day after tomorrow. You can buy a lot of hot TVs for six thousand dollars in Dallas/Fort Worth. And then you stay there, Jeffie,” Larry shook his finger at Jeff so hard it snapped like a whip. “And don’t you ever let us or Cammie see or hear from you again. Or it’s rrrr-rearr-rrra-reeeaarrr!” Larry screeched the onomatopoeia for the sound of a tiny chainsaw, his voice diving an octave on the last syllable, like the chain was ripping flesh.

The End