When Claudette felt the pistol slide up and out of her waistband, her instinct propelled the knife on its coast-to-coast journey across the throat of her yeast fetishizing and stripteasing daughter.

When Charlie felt the blade catch the express east, her nervous system sprang her body back and her finger to clutch the trigger. As she fell, one lone slug burrowed into her chain-smoking, slatternly mother.

The forces of two bodies on each other may always be equal but -- fuck Newton's Third Law -- when the force is derived from the basest of the worldly elements, in the end they are directed in same, pitiful downward spiral. Claudette and Charlie hit the floor, their ink-like life spilling and cooling around them.

Their story had ran its serpentine course to an inevitable finish in a dimly lit room of thugs, thieves and incomprehensibles.

Silence.

No rumble of trucks in the sullen streets. No echoes of bells in the church steeples. No birds.

The day had come to a rest.

"You. Must. Be. Fucking kidding me!"

Roman, laid out flat, started to laugh the laugh of a man who watched so much death in the past hours that it all seemed grossly comical that he was one of the few to survive it.

"Oh, Jesus, God All-Motherfucking-Mighty. You see that shit? Euri! Get your pathetic-clown ass over here and cut me loose, man. Mother-and-daughter-fucking fuck, man," Roman almost sang. "Euri, where are you, man?"

Euri, abandoned by his captors, abandoned by life yet still full of it, walked behind the bar and helped himself to the first green bottle he spotted. It would do for a start.

"Euri. Euri! Man, c'mon. I know you're there you stupid Greek bastard," said Roman, staring up at the finite emptiness above. "I know you are there."

"No," Euri said, draining a second shot and smiling as a strange new warmth filled his body. "I'm not anywhere near here."

He hobbled around the bar and hunched down, his creaking and popping knees be damned, so Roman could get a full close view of his creased, weathered face as he lit the last of his hand-rolled black cigarettes. "That is, my friend, unless you start talking about the Laughing Whore."

Roman couldn't even muster the strength to blink which allowed him, for he thought the first time ever, to see Euri break into something resembling a smile.