Posterity for the Second-Second-Blonde-Child-After-Brian Jones' Sake

BAM!

    “Holy shit, what the hell was that?”
    Almost whiplashing over, of course fucking him over there, a shotgun in one hand, a cigar in his mouth, both items wafting smoke out of them. I put the two-and-two together.
    “Did you just light your cigar with a shotgun?” Just to confirm.
    “Yeah, I did.” He said, completely nonchalant, I was in disbelief for a second, but then I remembered that he probably wouldn’t care less if that gun accidentally blew his head off. A non-inconvenient occurrence of simple circumstance; he wanted to smoke, if you look at it from all three angles he was going to die anyway, and by extension…Me.

    One: Scientific fact, smoking kills, as does second-hand smoke.
    “Do you want some?” He asks.
    “No.”
    Two: Probability, could’ve blown his head off, and I can’t hold them all off by myself.
    “You have to admit, I can handle shotguns pretty well with one hand!”
    Three: Math, not like that would matter much, there are still too many for the both of us to hold off.
    “They will have heard that, they’ll be here shortly.”
    “Yeah…” I said.

    “I should’ve warned you so you could take a picture… You know, for posterity.” He said, breaking the silence.
    “Is this a time to worry about posterity? We’re not going to be around to posteritize much about it.” I said.
    “Exactly! That is the kind of fucking pictures you see, you know? On the covers of magazines, and shown in documentaries, like that picture of the poor fucker in the Vietnam War you see about to get his head blown off. No one remembers his name or what he did…”
    “He killed like a dozen people that same morning or something.” I interrupted.
    “But that doesn’t really matter in the picture; you remember his face, that shit sticks with you.”
    He paused for a little bit.
    “I’ve never been much of the thinker…”
    “No really? Says the man that lights his smokes with a gun?” I interrupted again, and he puffs a cloud of smoke my way.
    “But that’s the kind of thing I care about.”
    “Looking cool?” I just want to give him a hard time.
    “No! I mean yeah sorta, but that’s not what I’m talking about…”
    He gives it another minute.
    “Being remembered you know?”
    “You’re such a rock star," I told him, "Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Cobain…”
    “Edie Sedgwick.” He refutes.
    “Oh yeah?” He is more complicated than I thought.
    “Yeah, I completely identify with her.”
    “Then it makes sense why we are here now, when you look up to self-destructive kinds of people.” As if learning his lesson now will be of any use right now.
    “I prefer to look at it as ‘self-deconstructive’. For that I know who I am and what I want.”
    “And what’s that?” I ask, just to confirm.
    “A picture of me lighting my cigar with a shotgun.” He gives it a second before asking. “Does the camera still have anymore film on it?”
    I shuffle through my bag, whatever, dud plastic explosives, a few rounds, symbols of ideals that aren’t so much worth a damn right now, tools that failed us against these damn monsters trying to do crap-knows-what-and-even-if-we-did-who-gives-a-damn kinds of things to our planet. Yeah, the camera still has some space on it.
    “Alright,” he says, “let’s do it.”
    “How many bullets do you have left?” I ask.
    “I don’t know exactly,” He counts in his head “like 4 or 5.”
    “Ok, let’s get this in one, two at the most.”