The Brothers Crunk
Page 7
Gluum shoots streams of black web, trying to catch the blades, but most of them slip through. Vega’s shoulder and T-Dakk’s foot, which luckily doesn’t have any feeling, each take a hit. Reynold’s left leg is also injured as one of the blades slices through the tendon just above his heel.
“Shit!” Reynold yelps. He wraps both of his hands around his ankle, applying pressure. Blood spurts out from between his fingers in substantial gushes.
Krebb removes Vega’s katana and tosses it aside. He frantically searches for something else to fire. Suddenly he remembers the item he had stuffed into his leather sack, just after they had broken into the building—Qoser’s cue-ball eye. Originally he had brought it more as a good luck charm, but with its weight, it may be exactly what he needs.
Krebb loads the cue-ball into the chamber. He wipes the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and cracks his knuckles.
“Let’s hope I don’t scratch,” Krebb mutters to himself, taking aim. Dethbryte sways back and forth so quickly it is hard to get a clear shot in. Tiny lightning bolts fly out of her eyes and what’s left of her tongue begins to flick in and out of her mouth rapidly, like a snake. She’s readying her attack.
Sweat beads up on his forehead, collecting and streaming down into his eyes. He does not flinch.
He pulls the trigger.
A cue-ball forms and fires fast into the night sky. Krebb follows it with his eye, but loses sight of it after only a second.
The cue-ball crashes through Dethbryte’s skull with such force that it shatters the bone and splits her face completely in half. Blood, bone, brain, and saliva gush out of her face like a geyser, raining down fast on Tokyo. She screams like a warthog that just ate a trough full of broken glass and disappears into the depths below.
Reynold can hardly keep his eyelid open. It gets heavier the more blood he loses. Krebb throws down his KREBBOOM and helps Vega, who is still struggling to remove the blade from his shoulder. Gluum helps T-Dakk wrap his wound with a piece of cloth.
Reynold kneels on the floor, his hands slowly slip from his ankles as he becomes too weak to apply pressure. His blood pools around him. Bright white flashes like a strobe light in his eye. White. Sky. White. Sky. White. Dethbryte. White.
Dethbryte is again standing tall beside THE BLITZ. Her split face is now nothing but a hole surrounded by blood and gore—completely unrecognizable. Out from the hole, her esophagus, gurgles a string of indecipherable speech. She pounds her fists down against the building, causing the floor to collapse from the vibration.
White. Sky. White. Sky. White.
Vega throws one of his katanas like a dart. The blade splits the air and buries itself in the neck flesh just under Dethbryte’s chin, severing the Power Glove cord. Dethbryte’s body shudders and implodes, much the same as Vandenboom’s body. She takes one final breath before her body splatters on the city street below.
White. Sky. White. White. White.
TWENTY-THREE
THE RED RAIN
Purple is gone now, as quickly as he came. The people, we stand in the red, red rain. The blood of the wicked is blood all the same. Together we stand in the red, red rain. Together we stand in the red, red rain. Together we stand in the red, red rain . . .
TWENTY-FOUR
ONWARD
Reynold saddles up and strings a fishing rod, dangling a strip of Pete’s meat in front of his ostrich. The rig works masterfully. If he wants the ostrich to turn, he simply moves the fishing rod in any direction he wants to go. Sure, it’s simple, but he imagines Divey would have been proud.
He digs into his pocket and removes a small orb. Milky-white smoke swirls inside it; a spirit trapped in glass.
Before they had parted ways, Krebb removed the orb from Vandenboom’s chest and placed it in Reynold’s palm. He said to him, ‘The body may be gone, but the soul is eternal.’ Krebb’s words will forever be stitched into his brain. The soul is eternal. Eternal.
Reynold looks out across the great expanse of the desert before him. His future will be determined by this one choice: East or West. His future, his destiny, his fate.
HIS FATE.
East or West.
He fumbles through his pockets and pulls out his lucky coin. Heads it’s East, tails it’s West. He rubs the coin between his palms and kisses it for luck, before resting the coin flat on top of his fist. He flicks his thumb and the coin goes flipping through the air. The sunlight glitters off it, nearly blinding him, as the coin comes hurdling back down. It slaps against his palm and bounces off onto the hot sand below.
“Gripes!” he shouts as he hops down off his ostrich. His bandaged foot gets caught up in the stirrups and he loses his balance, tripping and falling face-first into the sand. The small glass orb wriggles loose from his grasp and rolls away, leaving behind a faint trail in the sand. Reynold picks up the coin and scrambles to his feet, frantically searching for the orb.
“Where the fack . . .?” he mumbles to himself, following the faint snake-like trail with his eye. The trail ends with no orb in sight, but standing directly above, perky and almost smiling, is the ostrich. He gulps and Reynold can see the bulge in his throat traveling south as he swallows the orb whole.
“Goddamn it! Tell me this isn’t happening!” he yells, grabbing the bird’s long neck and choking him with both hands.
“Fack—” the bird manages to say while gasping for air. Reynold loosens his grip.
“Did you just curse at me?!”
“You were choking me! What else was I supposed to do? I don’t have any facking arms!” yells the ostrich. Reynold gasps and stumbles backwards, falling onto the sand.
“My god . . . Divey?”
“Who else would it be, you turd? Ziggy facking Stardust?”
Reynold’s eye nearly bulges from its socket. “Oh my god, Divey! It’s really you!” He jumps up and runs over to his brother, taking his breath with the squeeze of a giant bear hug.
“Alright, alright . . .” Divey says. He’s just as happy to be reunited with his brother, but was never much on all that touchy-feely stuff. “So, where do we go from ’ere?”
“Shit . . . anywhere, Div . . .” Reynold says, wiping the tears away from his eye, “we don’t have nowheres in particular to go.”
“It’s not about that, Rey, it’s about fate. Where is fate taking us? Where do we go from ’ere?”
Reynold unfolds his hand. The coin is resting on his palm tails-side up. “We go West.”
Divey bobs his head and smiles from behind his beak. “West it is then, brother!”
Reynold smiles and climbs up on the saddle on Divey’s back.
“One thing, though—could you stop waving that bag of meat in front of my face and feed me already! I’m facking half-starved ’ere!”
Reynold laughs and pulls out a dried slice of meat for each of them.
“Oh, that reminds me, Div . . . I came up with this facking brilliant idea while you were away.”
“Oh yeah, what’s that?”
“How’s about instead of brackfas burritos, we sell brackfas jerky? It’s easier to manage and best of all, we wouldn’t have any competition.”
Divey thinks for a second and nods his head. “Yeah, Rey . . . that really could work!”
The sun begins to duck down behind the horizon, painting the sky a brilliant shade of hot pink, just before total darkness.
Where one day ends, another begins.
● ● ●
The Damned Dirt Devils huddle around a mound of freshly dug earth, silently paying their respects to their fallen leader. They stand there in the hot desert for hours, saying nothing, just staring their sad, lonely eyes at the grave. Only when the sun begins to set, do they walk away, each in their own separate directions.
Krebb is the last to leave. He picks up a bucket of paint and marks the grave with a splash of purple. He raises two fingers up to his brow, salutes his leader one final time before walking away. He doesn’t know where he is going. Non
e of them do. It is the first time any of them have truly been free.
● ● ●
Ten feet away, half buried beneath the cool desert sand, the eyes of a mutilated cyborg carcass begin to glow a sinister red.
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William Pauley III has spent the majority of his life looking for his car keys. When he isn’t wandering around mindlessly, he usually writes . . . mindlessly. He writes for a local newspaper and is the author of the books Doom Magnetic!, Demolition Ya-Ya, Mr. Malin and the Night, and If You Don’t Sleep, You Don’t Dream. He can be found walking the hills of Kentucky. If found, please return him to his wife and two children. No reward.
He would like to thank you for reading his book.
For all things III, visit:
www.breaksaidsilence.com
Megan Hansen was born and raised in California. She has been working as an illustrator since 2008 and has worked on both adult and children’s books. To see more of her work, or buy her creations visit her at:
http://www.etsy.com/shop/meganhansenshop