“Motherfucker,” he whispered. Damn it. That couldn’t be his last word. But it felt good to swear. No, not good. Nothing felt good anymore. It was a relief. No. Damn it, his thoughts were becoming confused now. Obscure memories floated in his head, songs from a wild youth cascaded and broke their melodies apart in the blinking of an eye. Was this his life flashing before his eyes? A broken kaleidoscope of thought, not the fluid chronological progression you saw in films. Damn those films. They never showed dying as it really is. A man staggering, grim faced before turning and saying one final line through gritted teeth before falling to the floor. A hero’s death. It was not his death.
He felt numb. The sickening pain wanted to make him crawl in a ball and shed his skin like some snake. His mortal flesh destroyed and wounded but his soul would live on. But he was numb, numb inside his head. The pain as something separate, to be confronted later. He leaned one hand, palm outstretched against the damp underpass wall. The smell of urine hit his nostrils. He looked down. Thank God, it wasn’t his own. Not yet. That would come later. When Death finally cut him from this world then his body would void itself of all the slime and of all his humanity. An animalistic orgasm in the throes of death. His body would become a carcass, no different from any other animal. That higher intelligence that separated his species from the rest of the world would matter not one drop.
He hand slowly slid down the wall and his face gently fell forward, pressing his forehead against the damp of the wall. He breathed deeply, causing a trickle of blood to weep from his mouth. His eyes closed. He wanted to feel alive and indeed he did feel alive, more alive than he could ever remember. At least, in recent memory. He allowed himself a bitter smile. At the very moment of death he felt more alive than he could have ever thought possible. Death was ironic.
“Fuck you all, and damn you all to hell,” he murmured to the wall. Good last words, he thought. In one simple, perhaps crude, phrase he summed up his attitude to the world and to those that had now brought his demise from it.
His knees were the first to fail him. They buckled, like a tower collapsing from the inside. He fell, his hand still clutching the exit wound that the bullet had made.
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