What, you're still reading this? Are you sure you want to? Okay, if you say so. Here is the next chapter - and again, I swear, this seemed like a good name at the time:

Chapter six
Screwed

Tony drove and drove as far as he could down highway 180, but eventually he ran out of gas. "Oh, that's just great," he said, pulling over. Attempting to hitchhike, he noticed a few construction workers erecting a sign in the rain and decided to watch. He noticed a bolt holding it down was loose. "Hey, dude!" he yelled at the man who seemed to be supervising the whole thing. "You have a loose bolt here!"

Tony was completely surprised by his reaction. "Oh no! How could I have let this happen again? Come on, people, let's move!" He and the other two construction workers raced down and screwed the bolt in in a flash.

"Dude, what's the big deal? It's just a screw," Tony said.

"Just a screw? It was just a screw that killed three young people two years ago!" the construction worker responded.

Tony stared at him. "One more time?"

"Two years ago, a young teenage boy walks into a coffee shop, but before he does that, he tells a construction worker, Mark, about a loose bolt holding up a platform. The worker doesn't screw it in right away, but he and two of his friends, Danny and Patrick, get off of the platform.

"Seconds later, the platform falls over and makes a truck swerve into that same coffee shop, killing the kid and his two friends. The construction workers escape unharmed thanks to that kid and vow never to let a bolt be that loose again.

"Then, the construction workers do some research and find out that the kid had saved seven or eight people at a racetrack, and hundreds of people from a mall fire. He and his friends, however, had been steadily dying ever since they escaped the racetrack."

Tony, whose attention had been steadily fading as the worker talked, listened intently again. "And you say he saved all the people that had been dying?"

"Yeah, and he saved those three construction workers before he died, too.

"The weird thing is, the construction workers began dying in mysterious ways afterwards. Mark fell to his death when a diving board ladder became separated from the board, and Danny fell off of a cliff while he was on a tour of the Rockies, which just leaves – me. Patrick Deacon, at your service."

What Patrick didn't know was that a mile down the road, a trucker had had three beers too many.

"Cool! You're one of us!" Tony said.

"Us? Who's us?"

"Survivors."

"Survivors? What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means some dude saved your ass when you were supposed to get it and now Death's stalking you, which means you're really gonna get it this time," Tony elaborated. "Your friends died in the order they would've if that guy hadn't saved your asses."

"That's ridiculous!" Patrick said. "For one thing, if you were really supposed to die in the same order, whoever would've died next – anywhere in the world – would have also died."

What Patrick didn't know was that the trucker was starting to list to the right side of the road.

"For example, let's say Mark really was saved and that he was a 'survivor'. It took him almost five months to die. Does that mean that if, in Britain or somewhere else, a man had shot another man a moment after Mark died, murderer, bullet and victim would have been frozen for the five months he was alive just so they could die in the right order? I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that."

What he didn't know that the truck driver, woken up by a car horn, now swerved to the right and hydroplaned off the road, slamming into the platform.

It didn't fall. Patrick did. He fell off of the platform, breaking his leg. "Oh my god! AAAH!"

"Are you okay?" Patrick asked.

"No, I'm not okay! I just broke my leg!" Patrick yelled.

"You would've broken a lot more if I hadn't been here," Tony said.

"What do you mean?"

"If I hadn't told you to screw in that bolt, the whole thing would've come down on you!"

What Tony didn't know was that the billboard the workers were working on was also critically damaged, and that it really was coming down.

As Tony began to walk towards the truck that crashed, Patrick cried out, "Help!"

Tony turned around and bent down. "I'm trying to see if that truck driver was injured! Honestly! You save a guy once, and then they expect you to bust your ass for them."

What both of them did know was that the billboard, which, for the record, read 'Karl's Football helmets', swung down and did to Tony's rear end what it would've done to his skull had he not bent down.

"AAAAH! My ass! My ass!" Tony yelled, writhing on the ground. There he and Patrick lay, waiting for someone to come to their aid. However, as their blood began to spread across the ground, nobody seemed to be coming to their aid-

RING RING!

"Hey, Tony, it's Martin. Where are you?"

"Well, funny you should ask…"