Tim shifted uncomfortably as a chill wind rustled through the trees.  He looked over at Joey.

“Three hundred bucks and two grams of ice per night, right?” he asked.

“You heard ‘im,” Joey replied.  “And an ounce of weed each for both nights.  He plans to get it moved on Sunday.”

Tim grunted and brushed his long straight dirty-blond bangs out of his eyes.  Shuffling his LL Bean camo hunting boots in the leaves littering the forest floor, he zipped up his green nylon flight jacket.  His tight jeans and black cotton t-shirt with a Metallica logo were doing little to protect his lithe, seventeen-year-old body from the cold. 

Joey was dressed similarly, his jeans tucked into a pair of Browning brown leather lace-up boots.  His jacket was nearly the same color as Tim’s, but it was a hooded hunting jacket that he’d kept zipped over his long-sleeved gray t-shirt.

“So…” Tim began after a few moments of silence, “Whaddaya think he’s got in there?”  With a backwards jerk of his head, he indicated the metal storage building they were being paid to watch over.

“I don’t know,” Joey snapped curtly, “and I don’t want to.”  After a pause, he added, “And you don’t either—not if you’re smart.”

The boys were born only a few weeks apart and had known each other for years, having grown up—and still residing in—the same trailer park.  In fact, there were rumors that Tim’s mother had an affair with Joey’s dad, but the latter’s dark wavy hair and dark eyes weren’t compatible with the former’s lank blondish hair and deep blue eyes.

And there were other differences, too.  Tim wasn’t unintelligent; like Joey, he’d hunted in these woods since he’d been old enough to hold a rifle.  He knew them like the back of his hand and knew how to gut, skin, and dress every animal he killed.

Joey, on the other hand, had a subtle intelligence which, combined with his lack of formal education and utter inability to find a job, often led him astray.  Tim would get into problems by getting drunk or high and fighting.  Joey…well, Joey had made the connection with Pedro.

Most of the kids at the Clenmore County consolidated high school—and all the dropouts—had heard of Pedro to some extent; after all he was the source for anything you might need.  You wanted weed, coke or meth, you went to Pedro.  Pills?  Shrooms?  Heroin?  Go to Pedro.

Except you didn’t, not literally.  While everyone had heard of Pedro, almost no one ever actually saw him.  In a pyramidal structure not unlike the Mafia, he had gathered the thugs and the scum of the county to represent him in both sales and collections.  He kept them loyal by supplying them with drugs—and loyal they were.  Several CCCHS students that reputedly had had trouble paying their tabs had disappeared.  Two of them—a fourteen-yeah-old-boy and a sixteen-year-old girl who had come from wealthy and politically connected families in the county seat—caused something of a public reaction, especially since they vanished within weeks of each other and were unlikely to be runaways.

The resulting widespread search by the SBI found the remains of well over half a dozen more teenagers in varying states of decomposition.  Some of the more intact bodies showed clear signs of torture.  A county-wide dragnet was thrown out and three of Pedro’s highest and most brutal henchmen—two of whom actually had been directly involved in the torture killings—came under close scrutiny.

And that’s where Pedro’s efficiency and utter ruthlessness showed itself.  He’d already formed several contacts inside the county sheriff’s department.  Once he learned the identities of the who’d been zeroed in on, they also vanished and were never found.

Everyone knew most of this, but Joey knew more than most.  He’d actually met Pedro and had been taken into his confidence—he was, in fact, being groomed to replace Jacko Malone, one of the three who’d disappeared.

He know a lot, Joey did.  He knew exactly where Jacko and the others were buried, with two slugs each in their skulls.  He knew the metal shed they were guarding had been a meth lab at one point but was now being used to store twenty-five kilos of coke cut with fentanyl and over seven hundred grams of meth, individually bagged. 

There were some other items, though, of which he was unaware.  He didn’t know about the ten forty-two-gallon garbage bags full of the finest weed north of the border.  He didn’t know about the safe in the corner with five Uzis and a quarter of a million dollars in small, used bills.

He didn’t know that as he turned and yanked on the padlock on the shed door to reassure himself, he was being closely watched.

He didn’t know that over the next forty-five minutes, he would suffer a death so nightmarish and agonizing, a visit from Pedro’s enforcers would seem like a blessing.

But then again, he didn’t know Pedro had already undergone his own horrific torture and death.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Mac didn’t usually work on spec, but this one intrigued him.  He always avoided speculating on the identities of his employers, but his brief for the hit on Pedro Albañez included photos of some of the murdered students.  One of the parents was an attorney who had made heavy contributions to the governor’s campaign and had been subsequentially appointed as a county judge.

Not that any of that shit mattered to Mac—what had pulled him in was the immediate payment of a quarter of a million along with the offer to confiscate for his own use any cash in Pedro’s possession.  And drug dealers always dealt in cash.

Pedro had nearly half a million in his home safe.  It took a little persuasion to reveal this, and a bit more to learn how to open it (after which Pedro was left with only three out of his ten fingers still attached to his hands).  Fifteen minutes later—after a lot of knife work—Pedro finally coughed up the existence of the shed and how to access the money in the shed, along with a thick gout of blood.  Seconds later, a drawn-out gurgle in the gangster’s throat signaled his last breath.  He died like a dog in his basement, face down in a pool of his own blood.

And now, the only thing between Mac and the rest of his pay was a pair of teenaged punks who’d signed on to work for an utter scumbag.  Grinning, he felt his massive cock pulse within the confining groin of his tight black jumpsuit.  With his black knit cap pulled low, his black leather tactical gloves and tightly laced boots, he was almost completely invisible in the darkness of the forest undergrowth.

He placed his hand on the grip of his Ka-bar utility knife with its 9-inch double-sided blade—one smooth, the other serrated, and both honed to a truly lethal sharpness—that hung from his webbed nylon belt.  Again, he felt a spasm in his potent shaft of manmeat.

Yeah, it was a job.  But it was a job he fuckin’ loved.  Goddam, nothing felt better than holding a piece of shit guard in your arms and showing exactly how much better a warrior you were, especially if it was young.

Mac was a cold-blooded professional killer.  But that didn’t mean that he didn’t take pleasure in showing little boys who thought they were men what it really meant to be a man—what it meant to die like a man.

You’re playing in the big leagues now, boys, Mac thought to himself, smiling grimly as he crept silently forward, let’s see if you have what it takes.  If I can’t put you both down, screaming like fucking bitches, within the next forty minutes, I’ll donate fifty grand to the asswipe governor’s campaign myself.

But as he carefully planted the sole of his leather combat boot another step forward, he knew that no donation would ever be made.  And yet again, his thick, vein-wreathed member pulsed at the thought of what he was going to inflict on the teens boys.  He was commando—as well as a commando—within his jumpsuit; he’d already learned that it left him less clothing to wash his cum out of at the end of a mission.

He’d been observing the boys long enough to have worked out his strategy based on the power dynamic between them. The dark-haired one was obviously the leader; the blond would be unlikely to be in possession of any pertinent info. 

Which meant his only use was as a psychological tool against the other one.  Mac was about to put their friendship to the test.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Tim was becoming bored and antsy.  He lit a Marlboro—he’d been smoking for several years.  Joey glanced over at him, but his lack of any kind of sentry training or skills didn’t recognize how strong—and undesirable—a signal smoking on guard duty can send.  It ruins any change of concealment and is a profound indicator of amateur status. 

Admittedly, in this instance, it didn’t matter, but if Mac had been a sniper, he could’ve taken them out from a half mile away once he’d seen the spark.  As it was, it only proved that the teens, with their hormone-driven cockiness, were laughably inept.  And it was going to cost them their lives.

“What’re we supposed to be lookin’ fer?” Tim asked as Mac continued his low, stealthy approach, his boots not making a sound on the forest floor.

“Aw, I dunno,” Joey responded. Reaching into the back pocket of his skin-tight Levi’s, he also drew out a pack of Marlboros—but what he pulled from the pack was a tightly-rolled joint, not a cigarette.  He fired it up and immediately had a huge coughing fit. 

“More ya cough, more ya get off,” Tim chuckled, but Joey didn’t seem to hear him.  His response, when he was able to speak again, was to continue his reply to Tim’s question. 

“I mean,” the hardbodied, booted adolescent gasped, as soon as he was able to catch his breath, “who’s gonna dumb enough to fuck with Pedro?”  He took another lung-busting hit but managed not to cough this time.  He pondered for a bit as he slowly released the heavily-scented blue smoke back into the air.

“Still…” he said musingly, “he mighta had some reason.  And it ain’t like we been really guardin’ this place, y’know?”

“Whatcha mean?” Tim asked, turning slightly.

As he did, a sliver of moonlight briefly crossed his face.  Mac was both alert enough and close enough to see the dilation of his darting eyes and a sheen of sweat on his face.  No wonder he wasn’t smoking weed—the kid was high as fuck on meth.

“I mean, we just been standin’ here,” Joey said.  “I mean, what if someone’s tryin’ to break in around the back?  Look, I’ll go around that side.  You take this side, and we’ll meet in the back.  Shouldn’t take more ‘n a minute or so. And take yer gun, dude,” he added, nodding at the rifle Tim had propped against a nearby oak tree.  He already had his own hunting rifle in his hand.  

And with that, Joey headed to the farther side of the shed.  He’d left the nearer side to Tim because it was less encumbered with vegetation; he knew his homie was too fucked up to deal with tricky situations.  As usual, he was going to have to watch over Tim.  When’s the stupid fucker gonna learn to take care of himself? Joey thought.   A swell of an almost paternal love for the other youth filled his heart at such a deep, subconscious level that he was utterly unaware of it; he only felt a warm emotional glow.

It was the last positive emotion he was going to experience in his short and useless life.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

As the dirty-blond teen came within arm’s reach of Mac’s ambush spot, his camo hunting boots loudly signaled his approach as twigs snapped and leaves rustled under their heavy tread.  Mac grinned momentarily; the meat was making this too easy.  Then his hard, cold face snapped back in a seriousness that showed his laser-like focus on the task at hand.

He was unaware that he was not only leaking precum at this point, he was leaking so much that a patch the size of a quarter was glistening in his groin.

Mac’s lightning-swift lunge took Tim so by surprise that the adolescent punkmeat never did figure out what exactly happened to it.  Of course, it wasn’t given much time—and what time it was given was completely devoted to terror and agony. 

It started with Mac’s gloved hand clamping over Tim’s mouth with an iron grip that formed an airtight seal.  Simultaneously, his right hand sank his Ka-bar knife an inch and a half deep into the cunt’s back.  The hand over the unlucky youth’s mouth muffled his inadvertent scream of pain into little more than a muffle grunt.

Mac jerked the knife out immediately.  He’d deliberately missed any organ or major blood vessel; this was meant as an appetizer, so to speak.  Something to whet the meat’s appetite for what lay in store.

Dragging the teenaged sentry into the undergrowth, Mac found a small glade, barely five feet across, less than three yards from the building.  This was where it was all going down.

The tall, well-muscled hardman held the boy securely in his arms as it shuddered and writhed.  Its continued grunts told him it hadn’t stopped trying to scream.

Lowering his heard until the three-day scruff on his manly cheeks abraded Tim’s outer ear like steel wool, he whispered hoarsely to the suffering boy.  “Shut the fuck up, asswipe.  You ain’t dyin’—yet.  Here, look at this.”

With that, he held the double-sided blade up in front of the boy’s eyes.  Two things were instantly clear, even to Tim’s meth-clouded brain.  One was its terrifyingly obvious capability of inflicting excruciating death.  The other was that for all the pain Tim was in, he’d only experienced a fraction of that capability.

Somewhere in the back of the barely coherent teen’s mind, a vague sensation of wet warmth on its feet was registered and immediately ignored.  It never knew it had lost control of its bladder as the sight of the blood-smeared blade, its pissed cascading down its leg to where its jeans were tucked into its water-tight boots.

“Hold on, motherfucker,” Mac muttered grimly, “We’re just gettin’ this show started.  Now we gotta what for yer buddy.  Heh, what’s the deal with you two.  You faggots?  Butt-pirates?  Ass-bandits?  Betcha are.  Makes this so much easier.  World’s better off without cocksuckers like you, anyway.”

Mac was edging.  He needed to pull back from the brink or this wouldn’t be up to his professional standards.  So he did.

And for nearly four minutes straight, Tim had to suffer the nightmarish torture of being clamped tightly in the muscular arms of a powerful, anonymous male, a terrible wound in his back, his nostrils full of an overpowering mix of leather, sweat, and the subtle but amazingly strong influences of adrenaline and testosterone.

Worst of all to the seventeen-year-old scumshit was the way it all resulted in an utterly involuntary and uncontrolled erection.  Tim was a muscular country boy, as was Joey.  Both had explored each other during their homosexual stage in puberty; each was a good seven inches long.  Joey only won out in girth; fully erect, his was over two inches in diameter while Tim was left with a nonetheless-respectable inch and a half.

And somehow, in some way, that long slab of boymeat had come to life on its own after he’d filled his boots with piss, responding to Tim’s pain and fear with a swollen, aching erection.  But he was pinned so tightly he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

It seemed to take an eternity for Joey to reappear around the corner of the building—an eternity of terror for pain and of anticipation for Mac.

Placing his brown leather lace-up boots carefully, the adolescent peered around, an expression of concern.  “Tim?” he called out, audibly but not loudly.  “Where ya at, man?”

Within Mac’s inexorable grasp, Tim struggled to respond.  Mac tightened his grip to the point that the punk desisted from sheer pain alone.

Joey rounded the corner to the side he’d sent Tim down.  He paused, looking down at something.  Mac followed his eyeline and saw the rifle Tim had dropped when he’d been snatched.  The jig was up.

“Hey, motherfucker,” the buff assassin called out.  “Wanna watch yer butt-buddy die?  Get yer faggot ass over here.”

Joey heard Mac’s contemptuous, masculine voice and his blood ran cold.  He cautiously stepped forward, his face pale in the watery moonlight.  Something bad had happened to Tim…

The moment the adolescent punk placed his boot into the glade, he froze in horror.  A windblown cloud had blocked the moonlight and he could just make out Tim standing in an awkward position.  There was something over his mouth—and something behind him, something Joey couldn’t identify.  But it scared the fuck out of him.  There was a glint there in the darkness, the faintest glint of icy steel…

Then the cloud cleared the moon, and Joey was confronted by the sight of Tim being held in the iron-hard grip of some guy who looked like a fuckin’ commando.

“Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me??” The teen blurted out.  In response Mac smiled and held up the blade and Joey instantly saw that the guy wasn’t fucking kidding him.

It was the most wicked knife Joey had ever seen, grotesquely long, obviously razor-sharp—and smeared with blood at its tip.  It took a moment for the stoned guardboy’s fogged brain to accept what it was seeing.  Whose blood was it? 

It was fresh.  It could only be Tim’s, and the tears of pain and terror streaming down his face confirmed it.  But even so—no.  This was a bad scene, but it wasn’t that bad.

And of all the bad decisions and moronic miscalculations of the young asswipe’s useless life, that was undoubtedly the stupidest.

“Drop the heat fuckwad!” the man snarled in the same cold, hard voice Joey had heard before, but the boy merely stood there, motionless and slack-jawed.

Mac knew what had happened. He relaxed a bit, internally—his rigid muscular form itself never relaxing in the slightest.  Not that he was in any way concerned about the course of events, but the main problem in dealing with raw amateurs was the unpredictability of their reactions.  In the case of fight or flight, flight was the least favorable outcome.  There was always the possibility of the target alerting others before being put down.

But a large number of them went the third way, like the worthless piece of shit in front of him now.  The target would simply freeze, its soft, weak mind in a kind of vapor lock.  The question now was, what it would take to get that soggy lump of THC-soaked tissue inside the sentry’s skull working again? 

“HEY!!” Mac shouted.  Joey started and looked him straight in the eye.  Mac’s icy blue gaze locked onto the teen and held him in place as surely as if he’d been physically restrained, and from that moment, he gave up both his own and Tim’s life.

“Drop your fucking rifle, you dumbass cunt, or I’ll cut your boyfriend’s throat.  You’ll like that.  See?”  With that, Mac held the blade against Tim’s throat and drew the blade along the smooth, tender skin.  He only used enough pressure to break the skin, but Tim’s muffled screams almost drowned out Joey’s bleat of despair as he saw blood trickling down his best friend’s neck.  His nerveless hands went slack; the sound of its impact on the carpet of leaves was faint but distinctive. 

Nonetheless, Joey didn’t hear it.  Nor did he feel the warm wet sensation spreading out from his crotch.  He was fully focused on Mac—almost hypnotized, like the old canard about snakes and birds.

“Good,” the experienced merc went on, his tone calm and even.  “Now, c’mere.” 

Joey took another two steps forward.  “Closer, boy.  We’re gonna have a nice little talk, the two of us.”

The adolescent sentry crept forward like a half-tamed deer, his feet cold and wet in his piss-filled Browning boots.  Faint piteous moans escaped involuntarily and almost inaudibly from his mouth, but he managed to bring himself within reach of Mac despite his overwhelming terror at doing so.

“Ok, here’s how this is going down.  I’m gonna ask ya some questions.  You keep answering, you’re ok.  You don’t answer, you lie even once, I’m gonna butcher this cocksucker like a fuckin’ hog right in front of you.  You get me, buddy?”

Joey stared at Mac in horror, his jaw still hanging open.  Tim’s eyelids were tightly clenched shut.  But neither of the teens could power off their senses, or their reflex reactions.  Overpowering adolescent hormones combined in their blood along with the massive amounts of adrenaline and testosterone generated by all three males as they navigated a profoundly critical situation.

So as a trickle of saliva trickled down Joey’s chin from his gaping mouth, the bulge tenting his tight jeans was even larger than the one Tim had been sporting for the last ten minutes.

Despite abject terror having a severely sobering effect, Joey had been so stoned that even now his foggy brain couldn’t seem to generate a response of any kind.  Needless to say, Mac was not pleased.  But he didn’t want to kill the little homo he’d grabbed—yet.  For one thing, it eliminated one of his bargaining chips.  And for another it could send the other pile of boymeat so far over the edge that interrogation would be useless.  He needed to start gently.

The reality was that Mac was well aware that these relatively low-level punk fucks were unlikely to know anything and almost certainly had no info that he’d find useful, or even pertinent.  But he hadn’t become so proficient as a killer mercenary without trying to gather whatever possible intel he could.

And the thought of showing stupid young dumbshits what it meant to play with the big boys always got his enormous staff of manhood as stiff as a girder.

“Hey, dude,” he called out to the free-standing teen, “ya remember what I said about not answering?”  And with that, he stuck the blade into Tim’s throat.

 It only went in half an inch, and Mac was dexterous enough to be able to miss any major blood vessels.  It did what it was designed to do, though, especially given that at the same time he’d momentarily uncovered his hostage’s mouth.

Between Tim’s panicked screech of pain and the minor but visually impressive spurt of blood that spat out his neck, it gave Joey the distinct impression that he’d just seen Tim get killed.  The wounded boy continued to scream.

“SHADDUP!!!” Mac yelled, clamping his hand back over the meat’s mouth.  He turned his face to Joey.  “Fucking pansy crybabies, both of ya,” he sneered.  “Look, the blood is barely trickling now.  Trust me, motherfuckers, if I really have to off you, it’s gonna hurt worse than anything you’ve ever felt.”

Here, he lowered his head and moved it slightly forward, his rough, stubbly cheek once again scraping against Tim’s tear-stained face.  His eyes locking onto Joey’s, he made sure that the young sentry felt the full impact of his gleefully malicious grin.

“You gotta understand, you scumshit,” Mac said in a low, malicious tone, “I’m good at what I do.  What’s more, I enjoy it.  I fuckin’ get off on torturing and killing stupid fuckwads like you two, who think they’re warriors—that they’re real men.  So I’m gonna ask you this one last time, and if I don’t get an answer, I’m gonna use your little butt-buddy here to show you exactly how much a man can suffer before he dies—and if you keep it up after that, you’ll get to enjoy the sensation yourself.  Now, do you fucking UNDERSTAND me?!?”

It worked.  Somehow, the logjam in Joey’s mind broke up.  He gulped and inhaled shakily.  “Y-y-yes, s-sir,” he stammered in such a faint, pathetic voice that I would have moved Mac to tears, if he had had a heart.

But he didn’t have a heart, he had a long, hard cock, and a long hard blade.  And the only way to relieve the ache in the former was to put the latter to work.

“So,” Mac replied, almost casually, “what’s in that shed?  Why did Pablo have you two incompetents out here guarding it?”

“Dude, I don’t—” Joey began but Mac’s glare and a faint twitch of his knife, back at Tim’s throat silenced him.

“Remember what I said about lying, you little asswipe,” the hardbodied killer hissed.

Joey gulped again, more loudly, and started again.  “C-coke an-and meth, sir,” he blurted, “I don’t know how much, really, sir.  I know there’s a shit-ton of both in there but please, I really don’t know how much—please don’t hurt us no more, ok?

“What else?” Mac snapped.

“What-what else?” Joey asked faintly, as if in shock, “Noth-nothing else, man, please, oh fuckin’ God, please let us go!  That’s it, dude, I swear, there ain’t nothing else!!”

The teen boy shriveled as the muscled merc glowered furiously at him.  The cocky adolescent who’d thought himself such a badass was dead; if Joey survived this night, he’d emerge with his psyche so shattered as to appear similar to physical brain damage.

In a sense, then, the fact that he wasn’t going to survive that night was a mercy.  But only in a sense…

“BULLSHIT!!” Mac roared.  “I know there’s a lot more shit in there than that.  And I know Pablo was training you to be his right-hand man, so you gotta know, yeah?”

Joey’s face had gone past white; it had the gray death-like power of abject terror, with large, dark rings circling the youth’s brown, long-lashed eyes. His hood had fallen back, revealing brown hair that had been carefully styled into an untidy mop at one point but was now soaked with sweat despite the chill.

“How do you know about that?” he whispered in terror.  No one knew about that besides Pablo and him.

“Oh, Pablo told me,” Mac replied casually, a jaunty smile on his face.  “That was not too long before I tore his throat out.  Of course, he was as reluctant to talk as you.  More so, in fact—I think my persuasive techniques left him grateful for death.  So you see, dickhead, if you keep pretending like you don’t know anything, I’ll be more than happy to ease your passage likewise.”

Joey fell to his knees, sobbing and pleading incoherently.  Tim had long since made little motion in Mac’s arms.  The boy was breathing normally and trembling, but Mac suspected that this particular piece of guardmeat had checked out some time ago.

That was ok.  He still knew a way to evoke a response from it—and from the other one, too. 

After all, both had to die anyway; that was a given.  The experienced mercenary never left any witnesses.  But it wasn’t enough that he kill them—as far as Mac was concerned, they needed to suffer for their profound presumption into thinking that raw teens could possibly compete with a field replete with experienced professional killers.  And there was yet another reason.

The circles in which Mac moved professionally were not huge; he was among an exclusive tier of hired assassins. It wasn’t the highest tier; Mac wasn’t an international killer.  He preferred to clean his own house first.  But within his level, he was very well-known and well-regarded.  This kill would be advertisement.  Those who knew him would recognize his MO.  He’d already terminated the main target in a way that sent an unmistakable message, so the job was already a success.  Putting these two little pieces of shit down would only enhance his reputation for ruthlessness and thoroughness. 

The moment he rammed his blade horizontally through Tim’s neck, his cock began seeping precum.

Oddly enough, so did Tim’s, even though no one knew it at the time.  Not even Tim; he was too busy dying.

‘GACKPTH!!!” the agonized teenager spat out, along with thick gout of crimson blood, as the razor-sharp steel sliced through tendons, ligaments, veins, and arteries with the ease of penetrating a bowl of gelatin.  The only resistance was when the trachea was pierced, and the knife encountered the rubbery tissue of the larynx.  Mac had done this literally dozens of times before; increasing the pressure on the hilt until the knife sprouted out the other side of the punk’s neck was an automatic reflex by now.

At least three inches of blood-smeared steel had come out the far side of Tim’s throat when Mac, a sneer of utter hatred on his face and his stallion-like dick trickling a steady stream of precum, twisted the blade and reamed out the fucker’s throat, ripping its voicebox into bloody shredded calamari.  Then the sadistic merc sawed the knife out, cutting forward out of the meat’s neck—the knife was sharp enough to slice through everything like deli meat, but Mac knew the slow sawing caused much more pain. 

Placing his knee in the middle of Tim’s back, he shoved the gurgling, blood-spewing teen right into the arms of his best friend.  Still kneeling, Joey half-rose and caught him in his arms before sinking back down and laying Tim on the forest floor.  He instantly found himself retching uncontrollably as Tim’s hot, sticky blood cascaded over him, filling his nostrils with the overpowering and nauseating scent of copper.

“Oh—oh God, Tim, no, don’t’ die!  For fuck’s sake Tim, stay with me!!”

Cradled in Joey’s arms, Tim looked up at him, his face twisted in unimaginable agony and horror. The geyser of blood from his ripped-open throat was starting to slow when the boy convulsed and a thick jet of pinkish foam shot out over Joey, leaving him reeking of alcohol. 

In his death throes, Tim had vomited all over Joey.  But the only contents of his stomach were a six-pack of cheap beer.  Gazing up at Joey, Tim reached up.  He managed to stroke Joey’s face once before his hand dropped limply to his side and he began to thrash violently.  Joey held him tight during his last few nightmarish seconds on earth.

Had either of them know it, it might have helped—on a deeply internal level that neither could have possible even admitted to each other—to know that Tim most intense orgasm of Tim’s utterly useless life happened while he bled out in Joey’s arms.

After all, Joey’s death wouldn’t be in the arms of his latent, repressed crush.

The young sentry had kept his hunting jacket buttoned; now he unfastened it.  Shrugging it off, he staggered backwards from horrifying stench of death.  Amazingly enough, despite the fountain of gore he’d endured, his clothing was clean, aside from some stains on the front of his legs above the knees.  It had also splashed on his face, but he’d already wiped most of it off with the jacket sleeves.

“Now it’s your turn,” Mac said, smiling grimly as he held up the bloody blade.  As he stepped forward, his experience and professionalism showed in the way his tightly-laced black leather utility boots didn’t make the slightest sound on the carpet of dead, brittle leaves.

Mechanically, Joey began backing, matching Mac’s pace.  His eyes, leaking tears, were locked helplessly onto the muscled killer’s steely gaze.  He knew he was going to die—but he didn’t really know it.  He didn’t feel it.

Mac was going to change that.

“You want this, don’t you?” he said in a low, almost seductive tone as he held his gore-stained serrated knife up.  “Look at it, asshole.  Look at how hard it is—how long.  You want it inside of you, don’t you?”  His leer was suggestive and somehow hypnotic.  “I stuck in your boyfriend.  Does that make you jealous?  I thrust it in hard and fast, right up to the hilt.”

Here his eyes flicked downward, too quickly to break their mesmerizing spell on the mind-raped teenager.  It was enough to confirm his suspicions.  “You’re hard, boy.  Miss your little faggot butt-buddy, huh?  Well, you’ll be joining him soon.”

Joey could only sag against the tree behind him and whimper.  He was, quite literally, mindless with terror, unable to form a single lucid thought.  And yet—and yet, some fragment of his hatefucked mind was still painfully aware that his thick young boycock was not only erect but was straining so hard as to cause physical pain. 

At that moment, though, Joey was much more aware of something else.  Mac had finally reached him.

Mac pressed his hard, firm body up against the kid, pinning him to the tree.  Reaching around to force his hand between cunt’s head and the tree trunk, he gripped the boypunk’s head from behind like a clamp to keep it still.

After all, this next part was going to be so agonizing that the sentry was going to thrash violently.  Meat always did when it died—especially teen meat. 

For a moment, a memory flashed before Mac’s eyes.

It was right before he’d wasted Pablo.  The motherfucker had passed out under interrogation and Mac had been looking for something to amp up it’s pain when it woke back up—he was excellent at this kind of improvisation.  Before finally lighting on a pair of garden shears, Mac had found some insulin pen needles—evidently the thug was diabetic, something of which Mac would permanently cure him within the next hour.

Anyway, they were too small to do any damage, but a phrase on the side of the box caught his attention—“lubrication designed for gentle injection”.

The sadistic assassin chuckled malevolently.  There wasn’t going to be anything gentle about this injection—and the only lubricant was going to be the blood of a dumbfuck teenage boy.

Mac placed the tip of the blade against the soft, tender flesh of the trembling guard’s underjaw, three inches behind its chin, which was just beginning to sprout with downy, adolescent fuzz—the sign of an incipient manhood that would never have the chance to blossom to its full state of twisted criminal growth.

This was what the aroused hardbodied killer loved—this intimacy.  The way his target writhed beneath him as he watched its utterly worthless life drain from its eyes, the helpless bleating of despair and agony…this was what he needed.  It wasn’t enough to off the scumshits—they needed suffer, and he needed to make goddam sure they did.

As he began to slowly increase the pressure, driving the knife up into the sentry’s mouth.  Almost immediately, a loud screech came from the meat.  It didn’t matter—there was no one else to hear the stupid teenager scream out the last nightmarish minutes of its life.

“Shh,” Mac whispered tenderly, perhaps even lovingly, “You’re gonna love this shit, dude.  You already know you need it and deserve it.  Fuck, you want it.  I can feel your dick, faggot.  It’s rubbing against mine.  You want me to cum, yeah?  You want to try to make my spunk as you unload your death wad?  That’s exactly what you’re gonna do, fuckwad—fuck yeah, let’s get this shit on!!!”

The next stage was more horrifically excruciating than anything in Joey’s life—beyond anything the boy could have possibly conceived.  In fact, even though he would never know it, it was worse than anything Tim had ever experienced as well.

And that included having his throat ripped out.

Mac’s movement was swift and brutal.  In so many words, he stabbed the teenager in the sinus.

From below.

In doing so, he drove the wicked serrated blade up through the muscles on the underside of the jaw.  Entering the oral cavity, it continued upwards, pinning the tongue to the roof of the mouth.  When Mac encountered the resistance of the palate, he applied more pressure.  The bone cracked with an audible splintering sound, allowing the sharply honed steel to penetrate into the sinus.  As it did so, completely bisected the unlucky boy’s tongue, neatly as the midpoint.

Even as the front half of its tongue flopped forward, beyond control, it was still attached to the meat’s mouth by the frenulum.  It was unable to eject the large wad of ungovernable muscle in its mouth.  The young guard could no longer articulate, it could only utter wordless shrieks and drool blood.  Even so, as Mac was well aware, it maintained its erection.  Fucking deathpig, it wanted this so bad, and Mac was more than happy to help.

“Fuckin-A,” he murmured into the boy’s ear, “Salt and copper, yeah?  That what you’re tasting?  That’s blood.  That’s what death tastes like, motherfucker!”

Joey knew that by now.  In fact, it was all he knew now.  His entire existence, his entre awareness, had (with one exception) focused on the sharp point of the blade that was slowly impaling his cranium.

“It’s called skullfucking, asswipe,” Mac hissed at the trembling kid, his eyes glittering icily with erotic hatred, “Ya get it?  I’m fuckin you up bad, right through the skull.  Now the fun’s about to start—next thing I’m fuckin’ up is your worthless brain.”

Joey could hear; he could hear every word.  The words seemed to be a faint echo from down a long hallway, true, but he still heard them.  He could still feel the knife slicing upwards through his oral and nasal cavities.  That pain didn’t stop.  But what happened next didn’t cause him any pain at all.  There are no nerve endings in the brain.

Instead, the dying teenager suffered the impacts of gradually worsening traumatic brain damage.  Mac knew how to kill almost instantly with a knife to the brain—jam up in through the back of the neck, up through the foramen magnum, the hole through which the spinal cord exits the cranial vault.  You get the knife into the brainstem and grind it around in there a bit, and you’ll  stop its heart and/or lungs in, well, in a heartbeat. 

Or you could do it the way Mac was doing it now, but instead of shoving the blade straight up, you angled to the rear and hit the cerebellum, incapacitating the target loss of motor control and inducing overpowering nausea.  You could get the same effect going in through the ear.

These methods turned a dangerous professional armed guard into a twitching pile of manmeat within seconds.  Mac reserved them for worthy opponents.  This worthless sack of shit was going out the hard way.

That meant slashing straight up into the cerebellum, deep into the parietal lobe, the sharp steel tip lodging directly into the insular lobe.  It took a lot of skill to be able to get the blade to exactly the right spot, but it was one of the first Mac had acquired—it was one of his favorites.  He had done this so often in the past that the ability was almost reflexive at this point.

With the knife in this precise position, Mac had blocked the punk’s sensory inputs and interpretation.  With certain slight movements, he was able to control what it felt.  He wasn’t a neurosurgeon and had no interest in the specifics involved, but he was able to manipulate what it felt in terms of pain and pleasure, both in volume and intensity.

This always worked the best on these stupid young guns.  Their very youth helped them fight through the massive trauma-induced shock.  Its senses would be all fucked up, but it could still hear and see and smell.  Mac didn’t know how well—it would have pleased him to know that it produced so painfully exaggerated sensations.  But it definitely could still feel.

This was what the stupid young fuck needed to cure its cockiness.  This was what happened when boys pretended they were men.  This was how they learned their place.  A real man could have posed a threat.  A real man wouldn’t have let his emotions control him—he would have watched his comrade die in the blink of an eye.  These teens had to die hard—because they made it too easy.

And because Mac enjoyed it.

He knew he’d placed the knife correctly when the boymeat made an incoherent gurgle and wrapped it hands around his thick, tense biceps, clutching them tightly.  Its dark eyes, ringed gray with shock and as wide open as seemed humanly possible, suddenly dilated.  Mac inched closer, his utility boots bracketing the meat’s brown leather hunting boots as their groins ground together, long hard cocks rubbing against each other through the killer’s black tactical jumpsuit and the dying guard’s piss-moist jeans.

“Now, boy,” Mac whispered, his almost loving tone belied by the ferocious look of mingled hate and lust in his hard, scruff-covered face, “It’s almost over.  Only a few more seconds.”

He was close enough for the full strength of his masculine pheromones and testosterone to be carried by the tang of his sweat past the kid’s blood-streaked upper sinus.  The way the blade was placed in the insular lobe massively exaggerated the effects these had on the impact of the adolescent’s nervous system, already overstimulated and rampant with adrenaline and teenage hormones.

The only thing that prevented Joey from oragasming on the spot was that the tiny bit of lucidity that still clung on despite the mind-bending agony and terror was still there—fear is a great cock-blocker.  So the sheer awareness of onrushing death was enough to curb the sexual reflex.

What it needed was just a tad of stimulation—a mere soupçon.  What it got was a devastating explosion, and all Mac had to do was just twist the blade inside the teen’s brain ever so slightly…

What Joey experienced would be difficult to describe in words.  It was as if a huge nuclear weapon had been set off in the center of his brain.  Except…except it was different.  A sudden explosion of white light that began to fade.  A deafening high-pitched tone that replaced all other sounds.  A burst of unbearable heat that slickened his lithe adolescent body with the cold sweat exuded under conditions of overwhelming pain.

Because there was pain.  Holy fuck, there was pain, so far off the scale that it merged imperceptibly into the most profound, intense pleasure that Joey’s firm young frame went rigid in searing, agonizing ecstasy.

He didn’t know he was ejaculating.  What little of his mind was left could only interpret the sensation as one of molten lead being pumped up out of his balls and through his hard dick, excruciating, boiling heat accompanied by a powerful shock.  Mac knew what was happening, though.

Finally.  This was it.  This faggot cocksucker finally learned its proper place in the world, and that was enough.  This had happened so many times before that Mac had trained himself to undergo some of the most massive orgasms in his life without making a sound.  The only signs he gave off were a sudden ragged increase in his breathing and a mild tremor in his rock-hard limbs—and a glistening spot in his groin where his hot seed, potent as any weapon, had spewed out in such volume as to soak through his clothing. 

None of was strong enough to prevent him from jerking the knife grip back towards himself and upwards, rotating it around its center of mass like a pivot.  This swung the back of the blade downwards, its tip making an arc along the inside of the rear of the cranium.

And that was the end of Joey.  As the steel knife sliced down into areas that controlled more basic bodily functions, the gray connective tissue parting like a curtain all the way down into the brainstem, the few surviving specks of Joey’s personality, his being itself, faded to black.  The last thing he felt was the grotesque pain of his still-spurting deathload.

Not that the convulsing teenmeat was dead.  Its respiration and heartbeat both became rapid and highly irregular, signs that it had suffered fatal brain damage  The eyes rolled back in its head and a grunting, bleating sound emerged from its throat in tempo with its gasping for air.  Again, Mac handled it like a professional.  Finishing the job, keeping the target silent and immobilized until its violent death throes slowed enough that he knew it wouldn’t attract any notice.  There wasn’t anyone around to notice, but it was important to do the job right, no matter what.

And as he clamped his gloved hand across its mouth to muffle its final death gurgles and pressed the dying punk against the tree with his own body, Mac took advantage of the situation by allowing the last few convulsion of the youth to massage his crotch and milk the last two loads of his own semen out.

And then that was it.  The convulsions slowed, the breathing reached a crescendo, then trailed off in a long-drawn out gargling sound deep in the throat.  It was literally meat, random limbs shuddering as nervous system misfires continued for a few more minutes.  Mac yanked his gore-streaked blade out of its head and wiped it carefully on the dead kid’s sweat-darkened shirt.  Then he stepped back and let the corpse slump to the floor like a rag doll.

It had been less than four minutes since the other fucker had squirted its own deathwad.  In fact, a little over ten minutes ago, both Joey and Tim had been blissfully unaware of Mac’s presence.

Eminently satisfied with a job well done, the hardbodied assassin left the glade without so much as a backwards glance.  The fact that he’d seized a moment to enjoy his job didn’t mean he didn’t take it seriously.  And besides, the rest of his pay was waiting for him.

Behind him, the chill wind cut through the glade, lowering the temperatures of the pair of already-cooling corpses.  Splayed on its back, the sac of meat that had gone by the name of Tim had stopped kicking; all that remained were the rapidly decreasing spasms that made its fingers curl and its boots twitch.  Joey’s remains were a few minutes behind in the grisly dance of death.  It was still digging a furrow in the leaves with its right bootheel—the left leg had folded up under it in such a way that the only motion its left foot could make was to pivot up and down silently at the ankle.

 Mac had already forgotten them.  Not literally, of course, but his laser-like focus had shifted elsewhere.  He’d gotten into the shed with little difficulty.  The safe would be as easy but would take a little time—and precaution—to pull off.

Some time ago, he’d come across some pilfered military gear while on a job.  He managed to acquire a decent amount of PE-4, the British equivalent of C4, along with a gross of detonators.  Needless to say, knowing that he was going to tackle a safe, he brought some along.  He’d deliberately learned this skill not so much because his job called for it as because he thought it was a useful ability to have.  He didn’t do it often, but he had been expertly trained.

That training included, as well as determining the right amount and placement for various types of safe, the effects of sound and blast damage to the surroundings.  As far as sound was concerned, Mac had no worries.  It was the blast damage that prompted the precaution.

He scanned the interior of the shed with his flashlight.  Half of the space was stacked floor-to-ceiling with trash bags full of weed.  There was barely any scent from them, and none had been noticeable outside.  Mac had expected this; at some point Pablo had babbled that the shit was old and dry and he’d been trying to find some sucker to unload it on.  The sadistic killer had only been interested in that the stuff could be dry enough to become tinder—but even then, it would likely only smolder.  Otherwise, he neither used nor sold drugs.

It was the stuff his light revealed on the other side that really worried him. Meth is definitely flammable and ignited heroin can be explosive; luckily, those packages had been placed in such a way that, as Mac noted when he finally located the safe in the far corner, were shielded by the meth. 

After all, Mac didn’t give a shit if the shed exploded as long as he wasn’t inside getting the cash when it did.

He did, however, remove the two gallons of acetone left over from the shed’s days as a meth lab that had been placed on top of the safe.

After that, the safe itself presented no problems; it was prepped and opened within five minutes.  The cash was easy enough to grab and stuff into a specially-designed pouch attached to his webbed nylon belt—twenty-two stacks of five hundred used twenties, along with some loose bills—two Benjamins and a Grant, also used.

The guns, however, posed a problem for him.  He didn’t give a shit about the drugs, but the though of those Uzis falling into the hands of someone he might have to go up against.  He didn’t use automatic weapons often—he was more a hands-on killer—but they were handy at times.  He already owned a couple of Uzis.

But the contents of the shed gave him an idea.  Stuffing the safe as full of the heroin packages as he could, he placed the remainder around it, then walled it in with the meth.  Around that, he dragged as many of the weed trash bags as he could until he’d filled in enough to reach the entrance.  Standing outside, he emptied the first bottle of acetone he could reach, then used the other to create a train out to a safe distance, making a crude but powerfully effective time bomb. 

He lit it with a lighter he carried with him—just in case—and silently vanished back into the forest, his muscular shadowy form melting into the darkness, never to be found.

By the time the shed detonated, felling several nearby trees and sending up a small but very noticeable mushroom cloud up over the forest, all movement had ceased in the teens’ corpses.  It took an hour for emergency personnel to arrive at the scene, and the bodies weren’t discovered until nearly three hours after that, by which time they’d become so stiff that the ME had a hard time getting them into his van.

The news of their deaths caused little to no public interest—or, indeed, among their own families, who considered them wastes that they were collectively better off without.  Even law enforcement ignored them beyond associating the incident with the ruthless torture and brutal murder of Pablo Albañez, which they were far more interested in investigating.  After all, he had a very long list of high-profile enemies.  And some with not so high profiles with cartel connections.

And so, three weeks after the murders and a week and a half after the families declined to claim them, the bodies of Tim and Joey were donated to science under a law that permitted the county to avoid paying for the disposal of an unwanted body.  As a result each one ended up at different anatomical education institutions.

After that, the only thing they shared was falling into the hands of male medical students who, alone in the med labs at night, cut the teens open and enjoyed their corpses just as much as Mac had enjoyed making them corpses.