----

Sheldon Jeffery Sands had been propped up against a dusty Mexican wall in a dusty Mexican street next to a dusty Mexican boy for what had seemed like an eternity, or, perhaps, more likely, it had only been half an hour or so. What the fuck did it really matter, anyhow?

Actually, he wasn’t even sure the chicle boy was still there. He had told him to shut up and fuck off earlier, and hadn’t heard a sound from him since. He knew in the back of his mind that it must be approaching evening, as he could feel the temperature dropping slightly, or was it just the ice in his bones he was feeling? It was so hard to tell lately. So much of his blood lay seeping into his clothes and skin and the ground around him, it was unimaginable that there could be much left to run his short-circuiting brain, after all.

Finally, finally, finally, his legs trembled and gave up the fight, betraying him as his feet skittered out from under him. Sands cursed softly at the defeat. His ass suddenly and joltingly hit the ground in an undignified thump, stirring up yet more Mexican dust to irritate his nostrils and further dry out his parched throat.

The sounds of the dumpy Mexican town flooded his consciousness, almost, but not quite drowning out the buzzing in his ears. Sounds were all he had left at this point, after all. His body had gone numb some time ago, his swollen tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, his nose was filled with dust, and, well, the empty caverns in his face pretty much spoke for themselves.

Soon though, the buzzing grew louder and pervasive, drowning out everything else like a hive of angry Africanized honey bees swarming through his brain. Sands began to wonder if anything else existed besides the damn buzzing, or had the universe finally collapsed in on itself, leaving nothing but static and an empty void? ‘If hell exists,’ Sands thought, as he dropped into merciful unconsciousness, ‘this must be hell.’

----

“El Mariachi” (as he was now almost exclusively called, as though he had never had any other name at all) hadn’t seen it coming. Who they were, he’d probably never know. Leftovers from one of the drug cartels bent on revenge? A drunk? Some dumb kids out joyriding? Who the hell knew? It didn’t really matter at this point. All he knew was that one second, he’d been walking down the road, guitar case in one hand, and his country’s flag draped across his chest as vehicles whistled by, and the next, screeching tires and beat-up-old-truck were flying straight at him.

He had leapt to the side at the last second, when he’d finally realized a tad late that the truck was not going to simply whistle by, but the front of the vehicle still caught his tail end. It all but shattered his pelvis and legs, and sent him flying into a shallow ditch, before speeding off to leave him to his misery. Luckily, there was still a bit of sunlight left and one of the passers-by (an old man with an old dog in yet another old pick-up) finally saw fit to stop and investigate the dark lump laying beside the road.

The old man had almost-kindly dragged his near-unconscious form from the ditch and hauled him not-quite-gently into the bed of the old pick-up. The old man then dumped El Mariachi on the doorstep of the hospital back in the town that he had left not much earlier that day.

----

Sands wasn’t entirely sure if he was awake or not. Hell, he still wasn’t entirely convinced he wasn’t actually dead and in the midst of some ridiculous farce of an afterlife. He’d never really believed in a hell or a God or the devil or anything of that ridiculous nature. Frankly, it wasn’t something he generally wasted time thinking about. He was tactile sort of guy, after all. He liked touching things, prodding, poking, taunting, seeing how things reacted. He didn’t like something he couldn’t investigate, and, more importantly, manipulate. Like pain. He didn’t really like pain all that much.

Sands still felt fairly numb, but it was not the pervasive numbness from before, at least not the cold numbness that spread throughout, turning his fingers and toes into lead (there was always a cold numbness at the core of his being, but that, again, was not something he tended to think about, much less acknowledge). It was more like the numbness resulting from painkillers. There was a currently a dull pain nipping about the edges of his consciousness, mostly centered on where his eyes once rested, and also in his leg, and again in his arm.

He tried to move his fingers, flexing them slowly, digging them into the scratchy cotton sheet he was laying upon. A sheet? He was in a bed, he realized, and a rather uncomfortable one at that. He tried to lift the bullet hole-free arm to his face, only to meet resistance in the form of an intravenous drip feeding into his forearm. Oh great, a fucking hospital. He groaned inwardly, why the hell couldn’t they have just let him die with some shred of dignity?

He almost sat straight up, and would have, had his broken body not screamed its protest at the mere thought. Somebody had taken him to a hospital. He hadn’t died on that dusty Mexican street. What kind of fuckmook would take him to a hospital? The CIA had probably already forgotten about him completely, presuming that he was dead (which he knew was what his superiors were hoping would happen when they sent him to this shithole country anyhow), his FBI puppet had disappeared some time ago, as had that Mexican chump he’d hired to do the clean-up work...

----

El Mariachi felt like shit. That was the only way to describe it. Hours spent under anesthesia while the surgeons drilled and nailed and, for all he knew, bubblegum-and-scotch-taped his broken lower half back together had left him feeling like he’d been run over more than a few times, rather than only once. It had been entirely too fortuitous that he’d gotten out the business with the coup in one piece that it simply couldn’t have been true for long.

El really didn’t have the stomach for this business anymore. He thought he’d left it behind for good after he’d lost his precious daughter and wife, but that damned CIA gringo bastard had blown through his life like a tornado, knocking down the straw-house of peace and normalcy he’d manage to build. Why couldn’t he just be a mariachi and be left alone? Fate seemed to have it out for him sometimes.

El was distracted from his thoughts when a child in a yellow shirt bolted through the door, followed by a slightly overweight middle-aged woman. He looked up, blinking a few times. What the hell? But neither the child nor the woman spared him a glance before darting around him, tossing back the curtain dividing the room and moving to the man on the other side of the room. Well, at least they weren’t going to bother him.

He flopped back against the lumpy pillow and scrubbed at his eyes before freezing. He realized that he knew that crumpled-looking man, the one in the bed across the room from him. Oh Mother of God, it couldn’t be...