Science cannot accurately state whether or not death comes quickly to those at peace with themselves. Religion cannot prove that death comes gently to he who walks in the light. A family cannot sincerely tell me, standing before a 9-foot-deep hole in the ground, that death came peacefully, because we loved him and grieve for him. These things cannot be said of a man who ran for his life to the tune of bullets, hounds, and frozen twigs snapping against his bare feet on every step of the 12-mile panic through a hidden logging tract leading deep into the forest.

Yet these were the things they said about the man they called Jim, whose cold, naked corpse has begun its 9-foot descent into the ground, protected from Mother's Last Embrace by a poorly crafted, poorly decorated $6,000 suit of nails and wood, and then only for as long as the thin body-shield could stall the worms, grubs, and other too-many-footed insects that would want so very badly to get at him. His wife and his two children should begin crying right about now, eye faucets wide open, unable to close because the heart is a bastard that cares too much and too often and won't listen to the brain that screams "Just let go! It's easier!" and it stands there, at the helm of the tear ducts, unwilling and unable to close the valve because, damnit, how can normal life resume when I still have this gaping hole in me right -here- where forever a part of me was rent away in the flash of a moment without hesitation, without permission, without goddamn even bothering to -ask me- first.

The man in Black holding a Bible should have begun reading the passage heard 52,000 times this year due to drunk driving and 14,000 times this year due to cocaine abuse and 600 times this year because some idiot decided to shake the damned soda machine and it toppled over and killed him and sent him to the one place on Earth where they don't serve soda to gluttonous bastards because this place is called -Hell- and in one fell swoop he tore his pass to Heaven into a million tiny pieces while at the same time earning himself a guaranteed spot on many of the year's statistical "Top 10 Idiot" lists.

I can't see the coffin being lowered and I can't hear the family grieving and I can't hear the preacher man preaching because I've turned away and i've walked away and I've tuned out everything from my mind except my friend called Jim. I keep looking for him amid the tombstones, out near the hearse and the village of cars, lined up straight, outlining the street, the only sign of life amidst the brown grass covering the landscape for miles and the snow-capped mountains barely visible through the veneer of the distant fog, blurring the boundary between 'here' and 'horizon.' The sun-deprived, oxygen-choked grassy fields can't conceal the patches of frozen ice the Westerners fearfully call 'snow,' its scent not quite fresh in the air, but the presence of such a scent, combined with the chill, the winds, and the disheartening lack of warmth despite the presence of the sun still 2-and-a-half spans above the western horizon hints strongly of another storm, renewed in volume and vigor, soon to come.

I unconsciously began to walk quicker, quicker, ignoring the clouds of breath forming outside my mouth every 4 heartbeats, already frozen in midair before I have a chance to desperately shove new oxygen down my long-numbed trachea. I searched the landscape surreptitiously, unwilling to be branded an unresolved "griever," doomed to three years of psychiatric "help." I surveyed the barren grounds in front of me, like I had a hope of finding him at some point, somewhere, as if he could squat in camouflage in plain sight, as if he could spin back out of thin air. I searched because I knew in my mind, not my heart, my mind, that he waited for me.

The heart is an easily corrupted organ, far less resilient to external forces than the mind. Men like me are trained to rely only on our minds, to expect nothing more from the heart than circulation and regulation, and to accept not an ounce more. Some call us sociopaths, some call us heartless. I've killed my fair share of the former; the latter merely repeat what we say amongst ourselves.

The staccato crunching of my boots over the foliage, dead as last week's dinner, covered the ceaseless sound of my trench coat's meandering sweep of the ground behind me. My sunglasses hid my eyes and my gaze without hindering my sight. I did not choose these very ordinary, plain, unadorned objects accidentally, though given the choice I undoubtedly would. They were assigned to me for exactly the functions they served to me now.

I rounded a corner at a slow pace, my instincts, my honed reflexes, my spidey-sense, whatever you will, warning me for caution, alerting my extra-sensory perceptions of that which, according to the laws of physics, I could not legally know. At the far corner of my peripheral vision, a stray beam of light betrayed the location of a small metal object out by the tree line, sticking by a mere inch out of the inside-pocket of the right half of a black leather trench coat made at exactly the same time as mine, by exactly the same hands as mine, hiding boots of midnight-black mirroring those on my own feet. The pistol that glinted the single, momentary beam of light into my eyes and mine alone could fit into my hand as easily as its cousin in -my- inside-right pocket. We use small revolver handguns because they're flashy and cause people to expect to hear such a loud noise before they die, before they see the proverbial light and experience that horribly cliche tunnel.

The truth of it is, no one looking down the barrel of our guns ever registers that they did, in fact, hear the thunder of the hammer sending the bullet from my hand to his head in exactly half the time it takes for a human to blink. Not to say that they cannot register this sound because I shoot the bullet directly into the brain and the brain dies-- I never shoot the brain. Shooting the brain makes death come quickly, gently, peacefully and that's not what I want when I do what I do. I want my enemies to know whose hand pulled the trigger, whose temper they pushed, whose wrath they've earned. No, no one looking down the barrel of our guns ever registers this sound because the brain is incapable of registering more than one thought when this thought is an all-present, body-shocking, mind-numbing internal screech of terror that if vocalized would sound something like -OH MY GOD MY THROAT MY GODDAMN THROAT HOLY GOD I CAN'T BREATHE BECAUSE OF THISE GAPING HOLE AND THE GUSHING FROM IT HOLY CRAP WHAT IS GOING ON.- But of course, by the very nature of the existence of this thought, it could never be uttered aloud.

Death does not come quickly when I've got the reins of the Black Chariot, with Death's cowled hood shivering in fear as he cowers next to me, subservient to my every whim. Death does not come quickly because I don't want him to. And I'm accustomed to getting what I want.

My legs carried me to the black-clad, gun-wielding figure. I did not stop; seamlessly his gait matched mine, of no particular accord or will but of history and practice, and we paced a deliberate march toward the Black '66 Impala at the end of the long procession, still parked near the Preacher Man.

I looked to my right.

"Jim."

He chuckled, a low, deliberate chuckle. "Jim's dead, remember?"

As we neared the car, I said nothing more, never wavering my glance from his face.

Finally he relented. He looked me in the eye, never stumbling once over the deceased fauna littering the ground around us.

Using my True Name, he completed: "Mark." A statement of fact moreso than recognition, a statement of recognition moreso than question. And most importantly, the completion of a ritual older than he, older than I, older than any one man or woman alive on the planet.

With a final backward glance, the silhouette of a woman and two children, black overlaid starkly against the failing golden-yellow of the setting sun behind them, heads bent, silently acknowledging that one aspect of their lives was forever changed with no possibility for regression.

We turned back and stepped into the Impala. The doors shut. The engine roared to life. And loudest of all, a woman standing by a small mound of dirt at the foot of a plain tombstone laid her head back and wailed, releasing, through an act as old as humanity itself, five days of pent up emotion, five days of forced strength in the eyes of her children and her community, five days of repressed anger and resentment against God, against her husband, against all things living.

A satisfied hint of a smile touched Jim's lips. "Our work here is done. Let's go."