And Tails collapsed.
In the sweltering desert heat, Sonic heard a head impact against a soft bed of sand as he looked behind, his sunburned neck aching as he turned his neck. Tails was face down, his tails limp and his fur glazed unhealthily by the sun. Sonic's eyes gleamed over hungrily, streaming tears weltering down his burning. "Dios mío," cried Sonic in a thick Cajun accent, lunging toward his fallen comrade.
Sonic knelt, his voice cracked and his eyes welling with tears, turned Tails over. Tails breathed lightly in the sandstorm, his eyelids crusted with blood and closed over his sand-battered eyeballs. Sonic thought of each sand particle ground firmly against millimeter long spaces in Tails' corneas, and his stomach growled a little. He swallowed his slavering spittle as he reared over Tails' body ravenously.
"If rise he shall not," Sonic crowed, "then one with me he shall become." And he dove into his comrade's body and bite down onto the soft tissue on Tails' neck; and ripped forth flesh caught and bloody in his daemonic teeth. He supped forth the blood; O God, the blood of the Juvenile, Sonic thought, wrought so between my fangs? Pray, say I, a Miracle; a sign of peace and vertue. And he ravaged the meat of his comrade with rending tears of his flicking claws, tearing into the raw intestine in his stomach, tied into horrid pink knots as he tore and chewed at them and spilling with lifeblood. The taste, Sonic thought as he feasted, he loved; the squirting, biting taste of the blood as he bit into Tails' flanks washed out the dry bits of Sonic's starved, parched mouth, even between the irritating feel of his meal's soaked fur and bits of desert sand passing against his lips and to his tongue. There was a depraved fervor in Sonic's movement, so savagely articulate; each time he tore into the carcass, he did so with a deliberate, precise cruelty, with a theatrically savage grin on his face all the while. The sun beat down on the desperate hedgehog as he tore and bit into his quarry, his tears resuming as the taste started to disappear.
The fluids in Sonic's mouth started to dry off. His naked paws, still blood-soaked, were starting to crust slightly with heat burns, and the feeling of burning eyes and booming ears and searing dry mouth returned. He still desperately tried to chew the flesh of his comrade Tails – or perhaps it was Espio, he couldn't quite tell who the carcass dangling in strips in his paws had been – but it started to become stuck in his teeth, hard and sticky and mushy. He tried to swallow and push the food pulp down his throat; but never all the way down did it go, and eventually, desperately thrown between trying to suck in the air and trying to swallow the flesh, his air cut off.
His eyes bulged. He collapsed to his side into the sand like his comrade before him, spasming and spewing as he tried to exhale the lodge of poorly-chewed meat chunk lodged in his airway. His face went increasingly sanguine as he was rendered struggling for air for longer and longer, rolling around a bit in the sand in throes of suffocation and his arms blindly wiggling around. His quills started to sink downwards and his eyes started to bubble and boil over. The skin burns, crackling and swelling each time he failed to gasp in a breath, started to overtake the left side of his body, his bones creaking and starting to crumble. Edging closer and closer to death, Sonic tried to expel the foodstuff once; twice; thrice; choking incoherently and blood running down his sandy muzzle to join in with his slain comrade's. His skin withered and his frame started to dry up, and Sonic weakly choked out one more defeated cough, a new trickle of blood oozing down his chin, black and sickly; and shuddered still, laying there, already seeming dead for eight years instead of eight seconds. Not one more move transpired between the mangled fox-skin slaughterhouse that had become Tails, or Espio, or Blaze, or the cracked, shriveled fossil Sonic, bits of half-chewed ooze congealing at the bottom of his gaping jaw.
The vultures came early that sweltering, fatal morning, and their beaks spattered black and red with cursed blood.