He picks the black pistol, and it's Christmas, the day they say a son of god was born.

He walks an empty road for some cold, cold years now, striving southward to some warm place he heard existed, and he's the only one alive in a dead world, death's last target, and he thinks he'll piss death off, like so many have before him, by not waiting for it to find him old and tired by the side of the road, but instead firing fast metal through whatever it is that keeps him breathing, and he only needs to get in touch with his Inner Assassin better than he'd done with his inner child, or mother, or sober--all failed to come through, but his Inner Killer he thinks he has the number for.

He thumbs the safety over to the dangerous position. It doesn't feel dangerous.

The world has done well where he has failed: it went dry, and they said the drinking's why he'd lost all that was supposedly his, but he knows that there's a difference between symptoms and root cause, and anyway, now that they're all gone, and he's the last one alive, thinking the very last thoughts that would ever be, it's all last year's snow.

The cold metal on his tongue sends a final human shiver down his spine. He aims up, pulls the trigger, and he knows the whole world at once.

He hopes that maybe he still has time to