"Funerals for cops are different. Nobody cries or seems sad; they just stare with this look on their face. Like they are proud that our species can produce a person who lived and died this way. It is not the same honor as the funeral for a warrior. The funeral for a cop is a window into the life of someone who was willing to sacrifice everything at the start. In the end, the cop is the human sacrifice. The cop is not a warrior, the cop is a martyr." Sergeant Avery slurred as he explained the virtues of the badge.

An imaginative bunch: they could see him dipping the badge in a coffee mug of martyr's blood and biting into it like a doughnut. Shouldn't there be a twenty-one gun salute or something? The man died in the line of duty, standing between two inner city miscreants and a gun wielding pedestrian. Sometimes negotiations are the wrong move. Sometimes.

They played back his eulogy at his own funeral, just one week later. Was Sergeant Avery a martyr? The newspapers flipped a coin and decided it would be more sensational if the latest cop death was to be cheered on. So he got some labels in the form of: "Was he a racist?", "Did he hate children?", "Why couldn't he stop drinking?" and "When are you going to stop beating your wife?".

We all love a bit of creative writing from our licensed journalists. In some worlds they hang you for lying in public while holding a certificate. Freedom of the press is legalized murder. Many men would rather die than be mislabeled for all time. Better to be known as a good man and die a little early than live long enough to have one's name forever damned. So let's be clear, they weren't lying. But here's the truth:

Avery was literally the most racist man who ever lived on earth. In contrast to his racism, the other side of that trait, he was also perversely charitable. When someone racial asked Avery for a dollar he gave them a twenty and when they asked for a smoke he gave them the rest of his own pack, minus one for himself of course. Didn't mean he didn't hate race. Avery hated every race, but he loved people. Loved every person he ever met.

We all know he was a child-hater. Avery hated kids, never wanted kids. He even hated kids when he was a kid. There is really no excuse for this horrible attitude. Avery simply hated children. He was never mean to kids, oddly enough, kids loved Avery. They were magnetically drawn to his cool and commanding exterior and his warming gaze. He saw everything, a cop with the eyes of a hawk, and kids felt watched. They could feel the attention, it didn't feel hateful. Indeed they felt safe and cared for. Children near Avery felt safe. That's because he never showed them how much he hated them. He only hated them because he felt unsafe, he couldn't really keep them safe. It made him insecure to realize how fragile and perilous their lives really were. He had seen one too many dead children of all ages. He hated children because they made him vulnerable. He couldn't protect them, it was impossible.

Avery, like any man, even Jesus Christ, loved alcohol. His first miracle was to drink up all the booze at a party and then get more, even better booze. Later he was to be crucified for drunkenly flipping over a bunch of tables at a bake sale in a church. He got help after that, of course, but the moment followed him around for thirty years.

It was the third cop killed, just a few days after Avery, that quieted the newspapers. Why it took the murder of three cops in just a week and some days to change the tone from mourning to ridicule to silence is a fact of human ingenuity. Denial.

I know what I saw. I know what clawed its way back from nonexistence. Everyone turned their back on Travis Demesne. He was an unfortunate coincidence. The third cop killed in the cycle of two weeks. Journalism is really about entertainment and without the superior attraction, the story might as well not exist. That wasn't the real problem. They just didn't know where to go with it. Emotionally, the readers only wanted to be sad about the first cop, a hero. The hero.

Can't have two hero cops in a week. Avery gets defiled as a drunk racist child-hater. He wasn't married, but that's because he came from an abusive family where his dad hit his mom. So he would have too, of course. That's how you sell the news. Nothing personal.

"Three cops shot dead in less than two weeks? Fuck that. We aren't running the third one, it would be tacky. The other news aren't running it either. If there is more we will start a count, starting at four or five cops shot. We'll get a headline going like 'Cop shootings continue, five dead sofar.' but wait for the other channels to pick it up. Don't be stupid. This story is boring, only run it as an arc on the side before commercials." Is lucidly said by more than one news editor.

What exactly is a news editor in the grand scheme of things? A leech? A person, but one that feeds off of everyone else, drinking the blood through the break in the skin, just a little sip at a time. If there was such a creature and its true powers were obvious, nobody could call it a parasite.

The fourth cop was the second one in that marriage. Sharing blood with someone we've slept with. Blood for blood, the same is the spouse. What we share, we share alike. She died exactly the same way. Same number of armor piercing bullets from cheap submachineguns. Those uzi were never legal. When the soccer moms gave up their legal handguns the uzi stayed where it had always been.

Make guns illegal. The uzi doesn't mind. It stood alone in the shadows while good citizens carried guns and it will stand there still when they put down their guns. Little difference, just the law abiding citizens are unarmed. Makes crime easier.

Loaded up a fifty round clip with five point five six millimeter bullets. They were all painted with teflon nailpolish giving them an armor piercing property. Then they went around shooting cops to death. Good thing nobody else has a gun.

When there are no more cops and all the law abiding citizens have disarmed, who do you call? Like seriously, if three masked guys with guns kick in your back door and drag your teenage daughter out to their van, who are you supposed to call? You've got your phone in your hand, so call someone.

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There aren't any more cops. They quit.

Well, there is this one cop. The nine one one person says there aren't any officers available at this time. He doesn't start his shift until six in the morning. You used to own a gun, you could have shot those guys yourself.

The last cop drove to the warehouse. The vans had deposited all the girls and the black ski mask wearing henchmen with uzis were loading the girls into a shipping container. The last cop got out with his shotgun and told the henchmen to get on the ground, to drop their weapons.

They tried to turn their weapons on him. He started shooting them, blowing the heads off the first two and the head, right arm and torso off the third one. His automatic shotgun got shot and he had to discard it. The last cop drew his sidearm while taking fire. He returned fire with his side arm and wounded all of the remaining henchmen. Then he retreated to his vehicle. He was shot seventeen times, not including forty seven more graze wounds where the bullet hadn't entered his body. He wondered if the teflon nail polish they used was toxic. Then he died holding his radio and saying the word "Officer..."

He was left there like that.

The skies whooshed overhead, darkness, light. Rain, flies, crows. The lights on his car had gone out. The radio eventually did too. The corpse was ravaged by the drying, wetting, destructive outdoor elements.

Everything that came to it fed on it. All of his weapons and tools were stolen. His car was looted. Everything was given over to pillage. Flies enjoyed him as a nest for their young. Dogs took bones as trophies.

Snow fell and blanketed him and when it was gone his outline was a shameful wreck, where the shroud was so smooth and white. Rats chewed the leather of his flesh and beetles drove their bores into his dried skin. His empty eyesockets and his grin grew happier every day as they were cleaned to bleached perfection.

All things wished to indulge the broken heap. The darkness of night borrowed the hidden shadows. The coldness of the autumn took its temperature from the open grave. The malevolence of the city was at least as odious as the sign of his car left with him sprawled dead, half upon the driver's seat.

His blood gave the only lawful testimony left. Indeed the industry of justice had become a mockery. The courts were ruled by those who appeared and paid fines. Those dues gave them the power to break the rules, make the rules and take what they wanted. Justice had become injustice, without the cop.

Such imbalance creates a counter balance. Supernature must adhere to older physics than the limited sampling of his devices. Man's devices? Call our science wisdom, if you will, but we have only seen a speck of the time and space of the universe and an equally proportionately limited phenomena. That is, we ain't seen nothing yet, the universe is big and old. What are men, scurrying without law all over one rock for a brief moment?

A vacuum.

It stretched first the sticky hand mass clutching the radio. Then it tried from its dislodged shoulder bone to move, yet there was no connection of the bones. No muscle remained upon it. Even its armor and uniform were in tatters, soaked and combined with its rotting remains. The skull's grin did not give in to this futility.

It moved one foot, free of a boot. The twisting motion continued up its spine until the arm was snapped back into the socket of the bone. Then it began, as of the most peculiar form of motion, to lift that arm and to free its sticky hand mass clutching the radio. Thus set it got to its one knee and began to assemble its other leg.

As the sun rose upon this monstrous behavior the corpse was just beginning to peel itself free from the seat it had leaned upon. With a patient grin the skull fell back and the peculiar movements stopped. It twitched queerly and then lay still. The clouds and shadows swung round and gave it back to nightfall.

The horror rose to its feet and stood there. Parts of it were dried and flattened and it smoothed out the edges of its desiccated remains. It began to walk in the direction its killers were. It slowly and painfully ambulated through the darkness.

Day found it strewn upon someone's front yard.

At night it arose in a coroner's office and made its way out. It walked all night until it reached the home of the closest of its killers. It hid in the bushes outside as the morning dropped it to a heap.

That night the corpse rose and broke in. He screamed as it came for him and shot it over and over and attacked it with a kitchen knife. It took the broken knife and slashed at him. He crawled, fleeing its wrath, but the undead thing was atop him. The skull bit its dry naked teeth into the skin of his neck and then bit again and again. It began eating him, not bothing to kill him first. When it was done the corpse that had walked in as a skeleton was looking more like a gross, flesh filled skeleton, dripping blood everywhere.

It started out for its next meal, the next closest killer. One by one it found and ate each of them. Every time it devoured and killed another of the men who had shot it to death it grew back into more of a corpse.

The ghoulish thing couldn't remember who it used to be. It was, in its bones, a cop. Its flesh was the monster. It was what it had eaten, now the same as those men. Now it had to feed on criminals to sustain itself. The flesh wanted what the flesh wanted. It was hungry, hungry for the flesh and blood of the living villain. It was the monster. In its bones it was still a cop.

"Long Arm of the Law." It called itself. Indeed the creature did have perversely elongated arms. It had claws too, it had mutated, feeding on the unjust vultures of the system. It went throughout the courthouse at night.

"Who is there?" Judge Warner asked.

"A cop." Long Arm of the Law was in the shadows, hiding its grotesque form.

"Show yourself. There are no more cops." Judge Warner wished he had a gun.

"This is I. I am Long Arm of the Law. There must be justice. I will bring you the unjust. I must know justice again." Long Arm of the Law said. It stepped out of the shadows, a tall gaunt ghoul with the vulture's claws of the lawyers it had eaten as it hungered for the law. It had fashioned a gavel for itself, a tool it could clutch in its claws and crush its prey.

"What the Hell are you?" Judge Warner turned pale and sweated at the sight of the grinning skull and hollow eyesockets and the claws and bloodstained hammer. It wore a cop's uniform, but it was a monster.

"I am hungry for justice, for you Judge Warner." Long Arm of the Law told him. It hurled the gavel. Judge Warner just barely managed to get out of the way as it smashed through the pews.

He took up a sharp piece of the broken seats. The monster came for him. "You are the one killing all the lawyers!"

"I ran out of criminals!" The monster claimed.

"Then your justice is to rest! Rest in peace!" Judge Warner drove the wooden fragment deep into the heart of the creature and pinned it to the wall. As the sun came up he felt its claws in him and he staggered free. It withered in the sunlight, no longer a part of the world.

Only the bones remained, collapsed in a heap. Among them was the badge it had worn, shining.