The splash of the sniper rifle hitting the surface of the water as the ocean consumes it.

"So that's what the devil looks like," Hosk says, lighting a cigarette.

"More like an agent of chaos."

The sun is rising over the desert, the canyons on the horizon glowing, casting shadows across the lower elevations.

"What's the damn difference?"

"Fire and brimstone."

"That's more like a symbol, like a kinda metaphor like," Hosk says, pulling on his cigarette. "You'd be surprised the mundane ways in which the devil finds us."

"Maybe I would," Stebbins says. "Just maybe I would. You think that's him?"

"Tails? I can't imagine who the hell else it'd be. You think some random yahoo walked all them miles up that jeep trail just to kill a complete stranger? Nawh. That's Miles Prower. He shaved his damn fur off."

"But he's only got one tail."

"That we can see," Hosk says, exhaling.

"That'd at least explain why we couldn't find him. His picture is all over the city. Without his fur he looks like someone else entirely."

"Ah well. Coroner will figure it out soon as they get down here and bag him up."

"You think she'll be okay?" Stebbins asks looking up at him.

"She might miss a night or two's sleep. You can tell by talking to her she didn't take no pleasure in the man's life ending the way it did. But I think she'll be okay. She's a strong woman. She'll pull through."

"I sure hope so. Sweet lady like her."

"Still sounds to me like you the one should be asking her out," Hosk says.

"Now is neither the time or the place for something like that."

"Sure as hell got that right." The sound of gravel displacement as they head back to their truck. The doors opening and shutting. The motor starting.

"What do you make of all this, Hosk?"

"It's a goddamn mess. None of it makes a whole lot of sense. Shoot, maybe some of the people what died recently deserved to die. Maybe some of 'em didn't. It's not our call to make. It's just nasty business, tending to the dead, Earl."

"Sometimes you're gonna come across cases like this, Hosk. Cases what don't make a whole lot of sense. You aint never gonna get no answers here. The only one who knows the whole story appears to be dead, and the dead aint got nothin' to say. Hell, this isn't even close to the worse thing I've seen in my time on the force. Thinking back on some of it, well. It just makes my skin crawl. I can't tell you how many times this job pushed me to a place where I didn't even think I could bare facing the world anymore. Not after seein' all that ugliness. All that horror. The only thing that's kept me going all the years was the chance to say I did the right thing. This job is very taxing. It can ruin a marriage, hell, it can ruin a life. It can end it. It can turn you into a cold, mean bastard, Gregg. I don't want to see that happen to you. If you can keep hardship from corrupting you, if you can look entropy or decay right in the eye one day and keep on truckin' the next, you'll be all right. And if I know as much as I think I do about you, I know you'll always try to do the right thing. If you can do it and know it you'll always have the strength to hold yourself up when nobody else will."

Gregg doesn't know what to say. He looks up at Stebbins without the words to respond.
Stebbins nods at him.

"We're alone in this world. Always remember that."

Hosk looks back down at the dead body of Miles Prower. His expressionless face staring up into the morning sky. Maybe expressionless is wrong. It's almost as if he's experiencing a moment of clarity. He looks back up at Stebbins and he nods at him. "Thank you, Earl," he says without an ounce of irony.

Vernon lights a cigarette and leans back in his desk chair.

"If you insist on smoking," Nolan says, wrapping his body around the chair awkwardly and slithering under the headphones on his desk to put them on. "Please remember to use the goddamn cough button." He spits his fork tongue as he speaks, flitting through his fangs as he enunciates. Nolan's a yellow snake, a descendent of the ancient clan Death what was all but wiped out back before the Devil's Gulag was ever established. But you already know all of this, yeah?

Vernon Danforth, however, is a stinky sack of shit. "Is that what they call yer grandpappy's fluid sack? Nuggets." He presses the boing sound effect button.

"Dude, please let up on the sound effects, you sound like a moron."

"I got the -" he presses the button for the gentleman double-scream short sound effect, "- to pay the -" he presses the long lady scream. He's pleased with himself.

"Act like a moron if you gotta, though. How about dialing it back during the key news moments."

"Whatever you say, dingus nuggets." He presses the chopper button.

"Goddamnit. We're on in three." Nolan hisses softly to himself. "Bep, give me some good news and tell me about how those functions conjunct."

The intern is plugging in a dongle to his laptop when he looks up. "Uh, yeah, s-sorry."

"Sorry? If everything's up and running why are you sorry? Are we gravy or what."

"Yeah."

"What?"

"Yeah, uh. We're gravy. Sorry."

"For what? Goddamnit, Bep."

Vernon pushes the audience booing button.

"Guys, we're ready to go. Holy hell."

"Better be," Nolan hisses to himself before turning his attention to Vernon. "And you. Did you get rid of the who let the dogs out button."

"Maybe," he says, pressing the dog barking button.

"I'm serious, you can't keep playing those sound clips when we discuss rioting, dogs are starting to get pissed off."

"It's fine, it's fine," Vernon says, a mocking attempt at trying to assure him. "I got something better anyway." He presses the Klasky Csupo button, which is about six seconds of wacky sound effects.

"You're an asshole, Vernon, and I hate you."

He makes a kissy face at the snake and Nolan fantasizing about constricting the stupid fuck until he loses all of his life force and unhinging his jaw to end the wretched piece of shit. On in three, two,

NOLAN
Hello everybody and we're back." He looks over at Bep and the bear gives him a thumbs up. He nods and continues. "Last we left off Tails was dead, Sonic was dead and potentially a suspect of murder because Princess Sally Acorn is also dead, found dead in her office, strangled. I'm talking about the day after she died folks, brilliant work by our very own Station Square police department.

VERNON
It's not like a celebrity strangled the princess in her own office in broad daylight, or anything. Fire up the looney balloons and stab my bunghole because that there is eating the peanuts out of a turd.

VERNON presses the Klasky Csupo button. NOLAN is visibly fuming.

NOLAN
The receptionist, Henrietta Oswald III, reported that Sonic was indeed the last person to leave her office that day. When questioned why she didn't think anything weird when she was getting off work and hadn't heard a thing from the princess since Sonic's departure, she only had "she likes her privacy" to say. You believe that shit?

VERNON
I don't believe a goddamn word of it, Nolan. I think she's covering something up, something she doesn't want us to know. Someone's gotta be held accountable for this.

VERNON pushes the elephant noise button.

NOLAN
It baffles me just how stupid you are, buddy. Anyhow, the whoever killed the princess might just still be at large, as a distress signal was picked up early this afternoon by an Emerald Coast patrol boat where they found Antoine dead in his yacht on top of a sheet of plastic with a suitcase full of surgical instruments.

VERNON (in a mocking Eurish accent)
Ah! But how do I get rid of zee evidence of murder after I am dead! To be thinkings, Antoine!

VERNON coughs after doing the voice. He didn't mute himself.

NOLAN
It wasn't Antoine who made the distress call, but the naked eight year old human boy who had virtually no recollection of how he'd gotten there. When questioned, he said the last thing he remembered was walking home from school, and had virtually no idea that he'd been missing for three days. When asked about how he knew to send a distress call, he said he didn't know what to do so he just started pushing buttons.

VERNON
So, what, the kid woke up and kicked his ass in self defense? Only a Eurish could get his ass beat by an eight year old.

NOLAN
He was actually sniped with a .338. His brains all over the interior of the yacht. He was assassinated while-

"Can we change the channel?" Amy asks from the back seat.

"Hrm?"

"How about some music?" She asks instead of repeating the question.

The cab driver seems to grunt in response. "Uhhh yeah sure. What do you wanna hear, lady?"

"Anything," she says. "Classics."

He flips the station and Mother Goose by Jethro Tull is playing. She quietly watches the scenery of traffic at the entrance to the airport. People getting out of cars, saying their goodbyes, ready to fly. People happy to be on the ground. Greeting their families. Starting new adventures.

Amy feels serene. When they get to her gate she asks how much she owes him and he taps on the meter. She hands him some bills and grabs her luggage and takes a step closer to a better life.

"Who the hell is that?" Vernon asks, adjusting the headphones to fit his ears better.

"Looks like a homeless person," Nolan says. "How the hell did a goddamn homeless person get in our studio."

"Ladies and gentlemen this a first indeed."

The lady is banging on the sound proof glass, all they can hear is the mild vibration of it. She's waving around a suitcase around. She points at it and shouts something at them that they don't hear a word of. She sets down the briefcase next to the door and gives them both thumbs up, nodding and backing down the hallway where she came from.

"She seems to have left some kind of briefcase," Vernon says into his microphone. "Maybe some kinda present from a crazy fan? Who knows."

"Bep," Nolan says to the intern, gesturing with his head towards the door. "Go see what's in the briefcase."

"Yeah, Bep!" Vernon says. "If we aren't paying him to open strange packages that strangers leave in our recording studio, what the hell are we paying him for?"

Nolan pushes the mute button with his tail, and extends his phallic body across his desk hovering over Vernon's. "Bep's an intern. We don't pay him."

Vernon doesn't bother pressing the mute button. He starts cackling madly and says "I just realized he does all the shit work and we don't even pay him" between bursts of giggling before he coughs twice loudly right into the mic.

Bep sets the briefcase on Vernon's desk as Nolan retracts his body, annoyed and disgusted at the same time before looking over at Bep, opening the clasps on the side of it. He presses the mute button with his nose this time.

"Well, you heard it here folks. Bep. What's in the case?"

Opening the suitcase triggers the explosive that kills all three of them pretty much instantly. Their broadcast is abruptly cut short.

The cabin rumbles mildly.

Amy got a seat at the back of the plane, the aisle seat. She was initially a bit bummed she couldn't get a window seat but was pleased to find out there would be an in flight movie. However, this too would prove to be problematic when everyone on the plane seemed to line up for the bathroom she was sitting right next to, facing her as she sipped from a plastic tumbler of whiskey and cried because the cartoon stump had just discovered that it'd never be a tree again. That part of its life was gone forever.

She understood that way better than she wanted to. She wanted to look away and hide her crying face but she also really liked this movie. She was probably gonna buy it when it came out on VHS.

"Two please."

"You waiting on someone?"

"Yes," she says, smiling, "my daughter."

The waiter shows her to a small table and lights a candle on it. She tells him what she wants to drink and he disappears.
Not long after, Mary finds her way to the table. Amy can barely contain herself. A smile and a greeting. She gets up to hug her daughter. People notice but nobody says anything.

They find their seats. Amy smiles at her daughter. Her black eye fading but still visible in the candle light. She leans forward and touches Mary's hand.
It's cold because she has poor circulation.

"So!" She says, excited to catch up with her daughter. "What have you been up to since we last talked."

"I've been dead, mom."

The smile fades into something sympathetic laced with guilt. "You know I - " she starts, trying to find the words. "I finally got rid of that piece of shit. I... it'd be easy to blame him for everything, honey, but honestly... I let him ruin my life. I'm so sorry, Mary. I just hope he didn't ruin yours too."

She's crying before she even realizes it. Tear drops collecting on her jawline.

Mary looks like her shadow when she leans forward in the flickering light to stop her. "I am only here because of you," she says.

Amy smiles. It's bittersweet. "You were a blessing of hope while I drowned in a sea of darkness."

Mary also smiles. It's also bittersweet. Her mom knows she hates the beach, she hated being dragged out there at every opportunity. "Let's get some sun, mom."

Amy laughs and the bartender arrives with her drink.

"I hope the reader is doing okay," Amy says, stretching out and laying the reflector in the sand above her head just before collapsing tiredly, letting out a sigh of relief.

"Me too," Mary says. Unlike her mother, she understands her role in all of this. She looks over at her, her eyes probably closed behind those sunglasses, her limbs akimbo.
She knows she'll be okay. She knows she's immortal and will live on forever in the stories people tell about her. The happy ones. The sad ones. She knows her mother will always have some sort of meaning in her existence.

Mary knows she won't be so lucky. She knows she's supplemental, a plot device at best. She knows she won't be back, she knows this to be true. She knows much of her existence to be a bitter and sad one.
But still, she thinks of the reader. She hopes the reader is doing okay.

She wishes you well.

As distance proves, Amy appears to be on an island - on an island alone. Die Young by Ke$ha plays.
The end.