Sands felt his knees buckle. The torn muscles in his thigh screamed as he finally let his legs give way and he fell down down down until he was on his ass. God, this was funnier than a Simpsons episode. Too bad the thought of laughing made him want to curl up and weep from the pain. Forget dignity dude, dignity was for idiots and heroes.
Now that he had the time to think about it, the pain and nausea and God knew what else, has become all encompassing. It had been easy to overlook shit when he was hopped up on adrenalin and drugs, and having a grand and merry time shooting everyone to jolly frickin' Hell.
Party was over now, obviously. Nobody wanted to hang around to help clean up the mess.
The fallen CIA officer painted a disturbing picture; covered in gore, naked eye sockets staring emptily into the street from behind sunglasses that had miraculously stayed on even after the universe had very merrily gone to fucktown. He was surprised that his young guide hadn't run off screaming yet.
He was wet everywhere. He knew most of it was blood, but he wondered if he'd pissed himself.
"Fuck off, kid." He thought he heard himself say to the boy. "Leave me here to die."
Maybe he had passed out then, maybe the kid had already left. He heard no footsteps. Either the boy was standing perfectly still, staring at him with solemn, little boy eyes, and had been for –how long has it been? An hour? A year? A nanosecond? - or the kid had already run off, and Sands had been too busy drowning in a formless void of unflagging agony to notice. There was no answer save the buzzing of flies drawn to the growing stench of putrescence around him. It was probably the latter. The flies congregated around the sticky, bloodied mess on his face. He would have been more than happy to let them cover his entire head and fly up his eye sockets into his fucking brain, but even the barest whisper of wind created by the buzzing of the insects' wings created a roaring sort of torture that didn't quite agree with him. So he halfheartedly waved the persistent bastards away with a limp hand. But they were persistent bastards, so they just kept on coming. His arm was impossibly heavy, and practically numb. Maybe it'll fall off now. When will the hurting stop? a voice in his head screamed. He didn't want to acknowledge the petulant, helpless little baby-voice, but it was echoing rather painfully across his cranium, and despite himself, he was in unanimous agreement with it.
He didn't want to think about the implications of his current condition; the possibility of a life lived in constant darkness and all attendant idiosyncrasies. Instead, he wished he had a gun. He'd stick the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger, and he'd blow his brains out so that his skull cavity would match his eye sockets.
But by some sick cosmic joke, he had somehow lost his guns, and –surprise surprise- he didn't have any eyes, so he couldn't fucking look for them. Oh joy.
His head reeled crazily, and images flashed in his mind like some PCP-flavored nightmare from his college days. Stupid fucking high-quality cartel drugs were still in his stupid fucking system. Thought the adrenalin would've washed them all out. Heh.
El Mariachi grew two extra heads and went on a rampage with his guitar. Orange monkeys. The crazy doctor's white white teeth, grinning, grinning... more orange monkeys. Everything faded, inevitably, into black, and he was lucid again. Or at least as lucid as a man with three bullet wounds and no fucking eyeballs could possibly be.
Did scrambled eyeballs taste like scrambled eggs? Stop. Thinking. You. Imbecile.
He would have liked nothing better than to swear up and down from high Heaven to Hades, creatively insulting whatever crazy, fucked-up deity was orchestrating this magnificent travesty. But when he opened his mouth, pain traveled across his face like electricity, creating explosions where his eyes were supposed to be.
Agony was overrated, he decided. There was nothing noble about pain, other than the fact that it fucked you up the ass, no matter who the fuck you were, and that no matter how used to it you thought you were, it still threw you for a loop.
He swam in and out of consciousness, but he wasn't too sure. The darkness was everywhere, and it was pretty hard to distinguish between reality and Never Never Land when all he could make out was this humongous, claustrophobic void. And maybe he was falling, but there was the ground, and there was his ass, and his ass hurt like a motherfucker. No impact. He felt chills travel across his body, aggravating the bullet wounds on arm and legs, and pulling him back from the brink of sweet oblivion with each wave. Shock? Blood loss? Fever brought about by infection? He didn't think he cared anymore at this point. Hell, at this point, he wouldn't have cared if the 2003 Playmate of the Year gave him a blowjob right then and there. Not that he was in any condition to get sucked off, anyway.
Funny how all the shit he'd been through led to this moment. It seemed like a poetic, pretty, utterly senseless way to die: eyeless, assaulted by fucking flies, and slowly bleeding to death in a corpse-strewn sidewalk somewhere in some buttfuck town in Mexico. Or maybe he'll die quickly. Some merciful motherfucker might actually be kind enough to condescend to shoot him in the head. He wanted to laugh. Fat chance of that happening anytime soon. He probably looked deader than the carcasses around him. If, by some felicitous fluke of fate, some random stranger should just happen pass by this godforsaken little avenue, Sands would probably be mistaken for just another corpse and be left there to rot.
That was funny too.
Ha fucking ha.