The Chosen

Taylor thought beyond the madness of what was being done to him. Play dead! Let them think you’re dead!

Not an easy task, considering what happened next. His fancy red undershorts were skimmed off, and, very quickly—

“Holy shit!” Taylor yelled, lurching on the table.

“How do you like that? He’s not dead after all—”

A bottle cracked Taylor in the head, then shattered. His brain bounced within his skull.

“Yeah, that ought to calm him down a little.”

Only then did Mr. Terrence Taylor pass out for real. But just before that final spark of his consciousness faded away, he did indeed realize what exactly what was being done to him: He was being very enthusiastically sodomized.

««—»»

Eventually it all came back. No details, just the barren facts. The fuckers tried to kill me… His vision, and consciousness, returned to him in little drips. Pain roared in his skull.

Where am I now? he struggled to wonder.

He lay flat on his back, elevated. A table, he thought. It felt cold beneath him. His eyes roved behind slitted lids, against cold white light, but his vision remained too blurred to make out any features of the place; beyond just a few feet, objects turned to blobs.

Then he heard…whistling.

Very slowly, Taylor turned his head to the right. Just a yard off a figure stood with his back to him. It’s that Kyle psycho, Taylor realized. The fucker that tried to strangle me, the fucker that—

Well, Taylor didn’t finish that thought. He squinted on. Kyle was whistling as he tended to some unseen task at what appeared to be a long stainless-steel table.

Like the prep tables he’d seen earlier, and the ones he remembered when he’d worked at T.G.I.F. A kitchen. A restaurant kitchen. Was that where he was?

Taylor strained his eyes. The effort steepened the throbbing pain in his head, but soon his vision began to clear.

He craned his neck off the table, staring. Then his thoughts ground to a halt…

Kyle was fileting strips of meat off a long bone, and placing each strip in a pan. Yes, it was meat, all right—

Human meat.

For what Taylor made out next, as his vision continued to focus, were the two bare human legs lain out across the table before Kyle.

What in God’s name…is this place?

This was a reasonable question, but by now the answer scarcely mattered, at least not to Mr. Terrence Taylor. Because in the next moment he became aware of an even more atrocious fact:

He managed to rise up on his elbows.

He looked down.

Oh my God no holy Jesus—

It wasn’t enough that the legs on Kyle’s cutting table were human. When Taylor looked down—

—holy Jesus holy Jesus to God…

—he realized, upon the sight of his