• “I told you man, we weren’t going to ******** kill anybody!” his voice shook in fear, and he wiped sweat from his brow with his free hand, gripping his gun tightly in the other.
    “And I told you, I got nervous!” The other man shouted. “The kid was just ********’ standing there, I didn’t know what to ******** do!” He dragged the body down the lamp-post lit street, leaving a glistening trail behind.
    “Well now that you’ve got your ********’ fingerprints on him, we might as well keep the goddam body” Sitting down roughly on the curb, the man put his face in his hands. “Thom, we weren’t going to kill anybody! If you wasn’t so scared of police, I wouldn’t have even brought the bloody guns!” Thom sat next to his partner and looked at his own gun, a smooth black handgun, with disgust.
    “It’s too late now. The boy’s dead, and we only got a little bit of money. Hardly seems ********’ worth it, dunnit Al?” Thom looked at the body. The boy had been tall and wiry, with his glasses, now cracked and askew, put down to the end of his nose. Flaming red hair fell every which way on his shoulders, and his striped shirt was stained with blood.
    “Look at ‘im!” Al gestured with his gun. “All bloody and all. Breaks me heart” Al stood abruptly, and turned to his partner. “Come on then, we ain’t doing no good just sitting here.”
    The man picked up the boy’s arms and began to drag him further down the street. After a few feet, they heard a peculiar laugh, emanating from quite nearby. Immediately, both men raised their guns and squinted into the darkness, hearts racing.
    “Fellas!” came a shout from beneath them. Looking down, they saw that the boy’s eyes, had opened.
    “Jesus Christ!” Thom shouted, pointing his gun at the corpse. It sat there, perfectly still, as Thom continued to aim the gun at it’s head with shaking hands.
    “It’s a corpse Thom. Somebody’s playing tricks” Al said, laying a hand on his partner’s shoulder. Thom, still un-convinced, slowly lowered his gun.
    “Bad idea!” came a cackle, as the boy’s corpse leapt up, a devilish grin filling his face. Reaching out with one hand, he grabbed the pistol from Thom, and fired off a full round. Blood splattered everywhere, covering the sidewalk, Al, and the boy.
    Gagging, Thom fell to the ground, his limbs twitching as the multiple holes in his head bled freely.
    “Your turn now, Al my boy!” the boy cackled, throwing the gun aside. Yelling, Al fired his gun. The bullets found their mark, and pierced the skin, but no blood came.
    “Dead people can’t die again. Silly little Ally, you know not what you deal with” Prancing with delight, the boy advanced on Al who, terrified, dropped his gun and bolted. Running as quickly as he could, the man desperately looked behind him, and saw the boy standing stock-still where he had been, a figure illuminated eerily by the nearby lamppost.
    Turning a corner, Al came to a quiet street, and ran down the sidewalk, jumping over closed news stands and benches, tripping several times, only to rise and scramble desperately onwards. The laughter of the boy who wasn’t yet dead found his ears no matter how quickly he ran.
    Across the street, a police car sat idling, the officer inside obscured by lightly tinted glass. Dashing over, Al knocked rapidly on the glass, figuring that prison was worse than slaughter. The window rolled slowly downwards. Sitting in the driver’s seat there was the boy, dressed in a full police outfit, grinning up at him.
    “Surprise!” He shouted. Shrieking and mad with terror, Al dashed off, leaving the car behind him. After running for a few minutes, Al’s adrenaline failed him, and he paused to take a break, panting and huffing in the middle of the quiet empty street.
    It was at that moment when a garbage truck appeared, almost as if from out of thin air, roaring down the road with the corpse boy sitting in the driver’s seat, laughing madly over the roar of the truck’s engine.
    The crunch of Al’s bones echoed through the night, and his blood covered the front of the truck. Still chuckling to himself, as if remembering a joke from long ago, the corpse boy stepped out of the truck and knelt by the upper torso of the man.
    He sat still for the longest time, before standing, and walking off into the night, whistling merrily as his long red hair swung back and forth in time with his steps. Re-adjusting his glasses, the boy stepped off the road, and back into the night.