By Pickle
~ Chapter 21 ~
I finish up and they unchain me, and escort me outside and direct me around behind the torture barn and up the hill behind it a few hundred yards to another barn. I’m later to learn that this one does actually serve as an animal barn, and this truly is a working farm.
I hadn’t really checked out the clothes I donned in the dark yet. I guess I must have been too ravenous to care what I was wearing, but I now saw I was wearing a pair of really well-fitting and very faded jeans, and a dark green shirt, like I’d seen on “Coffee” … the shirttails were cut deeper than most of my own shirts, and they curved like the dress shirts I remember seeing my old man wearing. I kinda liked the shape of those shirttails. Maybe they reminded me of him or something. Kind of a nice memory, since he passed away when I was in my early teens.
My two chaperones lead me beyond the barn but near one end where we pass a large manure pile. I’m halted when we reach a small, square pit. There’s a couple tall poles that I eyeball to be at least twenty feet high, and a thick crossbeam between them. I see a large winch and a chain extending down from it over the pit, but the end with the hook has been pulled over to one of the poles and hooked there, waiting … I can only assume … for me. The pit is about six feet square and since it’s filled with a gross-looking mixture of non-identifiable gunk that smells like nothing I’ve ever smelled before. I gag from the stench and my “companions” both laugh.
The drizzle has stopped as the bog is getting gray as the cloudy skies block most of the sunlight as the day is getting long. Missing his hard hat, Josh is leaning against a tree with dirty white rope tightly securing his body. The biologist is still unconscious, as his hands are also tied, laying in his lap, his hi-viz gear covered in dirt and mud.
