Lots of lawyers. If it was a good day, I might give them a chance to escape with a bullet to the knee.

There was a fat red-head who took a lot of bullets until she went down. She blocked the entrance. Actually, she was stuck in the entrance, but her red-letter Virgin jacket with the flash adverts made her an advertisement in my book, so I took her down. The cleaning crews came at night to clean up the mess I made during the day. They were usually quiet. I didn’t sleep much anyway.

After a while, I started to lose interest. Four hundred forty three times, I shot that weapon. Three hundred and fifty four times, I killed someone. Only once did the clean up crew forget to clean up. Somewhere in the middle, the death penalty was applied to those that tried to steal advertising space, and some judicial moron extended it to my job without a problem.

* * *

“So now what?” he said; this red-headed replacement they sent me who was supposed to be some hotshot with a rifle. “So now you take over. It’s best if you get a lawn chair. I’m keeping mine,” I said. I walked down those stairs for the last time, the lawn chair under my arm. When I looked back, I could see the kid walking into the shrine. The job was a comfortable one all right. Free everything. He should have a good time for a while. I imagined him wandering down the spiral to the great column. Funny, how the spiral curled around the back leaving a little space. I wonder if he was smart enough to look around the back of the pillar.

Hal was here.

I set down the lawn chair and leaned back into it. I fancied that I could hear the kid loading his rifle.

END TRANSMISSION

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