Another Day at Work...

    “Hey, over here Don.” He caught James’ voice coming from behind, followed by a thick sigh.  Don turned to the end of the alley, there, James was crouched down in his evening tuxedo, eyeing a corpse with a head sized hole in its chest.  No hint of blood, not even the slightest of foul stenches, just a man with his back to the grey alley wall, eyes still open, his mouth wide, as the moonlight shined onto their faces.

    “What in the hell got to this one?” Don asked, lifting a cigarette to his mouth as he spat his last to the cracked concrete, slipping a lighter out of his white coat pocket along with it.  Their taste was dry and brought him to gag many a time, no doubt he had to stop going through so many.  Still he couldn’t help but flick on his lighter for and bring it to the cigarette tip yet another time, especially as his eyes settled on the dead body before him.

    “Depends…” James moved his hand into the hole in the man’s chest, brushing away remnants of his wool sweater, gracing the wall through through the fatal wound.  “It was fast, there isn’t a bit of sweat on him, but it was slow enough for him to see, judging by the look on his face, it was fast.” Don caught a quiver in James’ tone with those words, and his partner shook his head as Don stepped behind him.

    “Damn!” Don cursed under the glow of the moonlight that struck his black hair, spitting another cigarette to the ground.  With a thud that echoed through the tight alley, the bottom of his shoe slammed onto the fallen cigarette, and grinded it into the into the concrete.  “We were late! We’re always so damn late!!!

    “Cool it Don, I know, but we can’t completely cleanse a place, let alone this damned town fully, you know how it is.”  James closed the corpse’s eyes with a soft touch of his hand, even if it didn’t matter either way.

    Don gave the pulverized mess under his foot another scrape against the ground, “you don’t get it,” he grumbled, “you just don’t get it, day in, day out, a body sucked completely dry, a failed exorcism, it’s all the same every damn day...”  Don’s voice quieted, but he murmured his thoughts and gripped his lighter with a trembling fist.

    James sighed and ran a hand through his blonde hair.  With a grunt, he hefted the body from the ground.  “Hey... you remember that day, the day we decided that this… that this is what we wanted to do with our lives?”

    Don’s eyes shuffled to his feet, “yeah, I said… we were going to try and make this world better, you and me.”

    “Well, all we can do now is keep on trying,” James said, leading the way out of the alley, the glow of the moonlight shining off his hair...

    -Darkgoman