Flyknife Comics

Yo ho! Here’s this week’s flash fiction. For the interested, you can still read the ongoing serial novel (of which this is not a part) at its Figment page. That will update later today. Until then, here’s…

GRAVE DEEDS

(A Tale of Lucky and Goode)

Lucky snuffled his nose into the dirt as the acrid smoke drifted up from the hole.

    “You shouldn’t smoke, Frank. It’s bad for you”.

    Franklin Goode propped his shovel up against the thick, wet dirt of the pit’s walls and looked up at the big Alsatian dangling his paws into the side of the hole.

    “You wanna get down here and see how it smells otherwise? Be my guest”.

    Lucky wrinkled his nose at the thought. “I can smell it just fine from up here”.

    Frank flicked the butt of the cigarillo out into the damp grass above, where it sizzled and died, then grabbed his shovel and got back to work.

    The only other sound at the bottom of the pit was the man nearly folded into the corner, scratching away at a small, leather-bound pad with a pen. He was remarkably good at staying out of the way- though when you’re barely five feet tall and slight as a taper, it can’t be that hard.

    “Not what you expected?” Frank tossed another clod of dirt over the edge of the pit.

    The man twirled his pen idly through his fingers as he gazed skyward. “I try to go into these things without expectations.”

    Frank just chuckled. The man was an Author, Rhuke Wilson- barely a story to his name and not a single character of note. If anyone knew about failing to meet expectations, it was Rhuke Wilson.

    “It’ll never work,” Frank said as he hocked another shovelful of dirt over the edge. “You know that, right?”

    Rhuke just smiled and kept taking notes. “What else am I going to do on a Saturday night?”

    Frank grinned and kept digging. A moment more and his shovel rang with the tell-tale clang of the head striking metal. “Alright, there she is,” Frank muttered. “Go on, make yourself useful and scoop away some of the dirt”.

    Lucky watched the two men brush the thick muck off the coffin, letting the scents of the charnel yard through his nose. No danger, yet. With a smooth and practiced motion, he flicked his leg up behind his ear and scratched away a fleck of dirt.

    Frank finally cleared the last of the dirt from the large metal coffin and, with a grunt, hauled the lid up. The body inside was barely intact- buried in the uniform that had made her famous, but the once-beautiful face long since dessicated and drawn. Alanis Cole, the Human Electrode, once Adrastia’s greatest legend, beloved by thousands. She deserved better than a knife in the back, courtesy of a drunk who couldn’t even remember the deed the morning after. Such a near thing. Her author had taken the night off to spend time with her beau- turn your back for five minutes…

    Still, nothing to be done about it now. Well, nothing other than what they were already doing, at least. Frank looked up at Rhuke and scratched at the black ring around his left eye, feeling the hollow space under the skin. “Sure about this, eh? I’m not about to pretend it’s much fun”.

    Rhuke shrugged. “It’s worth more shot than anything else. All of Van is labouring to bring back the Human Electrode. I figure if you can get the story as it really was, Kubal might have a better chance”.

    “And if you’re the one to do that, it’ll catapult you from B-grade pulp novelist to the hottest property in town”.

    Rhuke grinned knowingly. “Just so”.

    “Alright. But don’t say I didn’t warn you”.

    Frank pulled his hand into his sleeve and rubbed away at his eye until the green and purple spots behind his eye started to fade. When he opened it again, he could see the blackness creeping into the edge of his vision. Without another word to Rhuke, he knelt over Alanis’ corpse and stared into what was once her eye.

    Being that she was freshly dead, it didn’t take long for her story to come back to Frank. Her life before she’d been Written, just a girl growing up in Van, meeting her author, the course of every adventure she’d ever had rolling into Frank’s head, and the final moments of her life, ended in a flurry of regret and shock.

    Lucky’s ears perked up and he jolted to his feet. “Wilson,” he barked, “Get out of that pit!”

    Rhuke just bit the end of his pen and looked up. “Sorry? Couldn’t hear-” He was cut off as the full force of Frank Goode took him clean in the chest.

    Lucky didn’t waste a second. He leapt into the pit and clamped his jaws around Frank’s leg, 40 kilos of pure dog tearing at Rhuke’s assailant. Frank was already squatting on Rhuke’s chest, driving his fists into the Author’s face over and over. Rhuke struggled to shove Frank off, but the gravedigger had both size and weight over him, and it was a losing fight.

    “Frank,” Lucky shouted around a mouthful of pant leg. “Back off ‘im!”

    The darkness began to recede from Frank’s vision, and he looked down at the broken and bloodied face of Rhuke in front of him. With a quiet croaking noise, he slumped off to the side, the Author gasping as the weight lifted from his chest.

    “I- uh,” Frank muttered as he fished a cigarillo from his pocket. “You okay?”

    Rhuke gingerly prodded his face. “Well, I’ve still got all my teeth, anyway.” He grinned weakly, blood running from his lower lip.

    Frank coughed. “Hope it’s not as bad as it looks.” After a long drag, he passed the cigarillo to Rhuke, who gave it a quick pull. “I, uh, I’m sorry about that,” Frank mumbled. “It’s never been that bad before. Sometimes… sometimes something else comes through, but this was, uh…”

    “Something else,” Rhuke supplied.

    “Yeah,” Frank sighed. “Well, I got her story, in any case. You wanna take the notes here, or back home?”

    Rhuke spat out a mouthful of blood and chuckled. “Forget her story,” he said, “I’m more interested in yours.”

Hello! Reception to ‘The Unceremonious Rebirth of Django Crane’ was so roundly positive, that I have written more- this slim little volume titled…

AN INTERLUDE CONCERNING THE CRANE BROTHERS

Previous Parts:

Prologue: Quitting While a Head

Part 1: The Unceremonious Rebirth of Django Crane

“Don’t ever call me that again”, Lamar growled.

    Django raised an eyebrow quizzically, before taking another sip of his coffee. “Call you what”, he said mildly. “Ginger?”

    “Yeah”.

    “But that’s what you are”, said Django, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And indeed it was. Though Max and Django shared the rich, dark hair of their mother, Lamar had taken after their father in more ways than one, and one of his inheritances was a frock of coppery locks and a faceful of freckles.

    “What about ‘ginja’? Y’know, like ‘ninja’”.

    “No”, Lamar said, flatly.

    “Django, stop antagonizing your brother”. Max drifted over from the bar and pulled up a seat at the table, dropping a straw into the cool glass of water in front of him.

    “I’m not antagonizing him”, Django said plaintively. “All I did was point to him and say ‘ginger’”, he pointed to Lamar, as though to recreate the event as perfectly as possible, “And then to his drink, and say ‘ale’”. He shifted the focus of his bandaged finger to the glass of ginger ale in front of Lamar. “I thought it was funny, in a passably stupid kind of way. Lamar got himself all wound up over it”.

    “It’s an insult”, Lamar grumbled. “I had to bear the brunt of ‘Kick a Ginger Day’ way back when, and now I gotta put up with it from you”.

    “If I wanted to insult you”, Django said, blowing over his coffee, “I could think of something better to focus on”.

    “Yeah, he’s got a point, it’s not like you can do anything about your red hair”, Max added.

    “I’d focus on your complete lack of a sense of humour. Or, I dunno, the similarities between your love life and a revolving door-”

    The rest of the sentence caught in Django’s throat as a sharp pain crackled in his leg, the heavy boot of an Arkology officer cracking hard against his shin. He washed it down with a sip of the coffee.

    They were an odd lot, the Crane brothers. To see them together, you might never guess that they were related. Certain similarities could be drawn between Max and Django, certainly- the same dark brown, nearly black hair, though Max’s curled and whorled while Django’s hung straight; the same dark eyes and fondness for steely gazes, but Max’s features were softer. You’d never guess that he took a punch like he was carved from wood, or that he hit back like an ironbomb. Django was easier to figure in that regard- even through the filth-soaked bandages you could see his knuckles were well-acquainted with faces.

But neither of them had anything on Lamar. In terms of not looking the part, Lamar was king. Round, almost childish features (appropriate, since he was the youngest of the three brothers), the aforementioned copper hair, eyes the blue-gray of the sea before a storm, all perched on a frame with all the intimidating capacity of a scarecrow.

But Lamar had a secret. Lamar was the lynchpin of the Crane brothers. Because

Lamar recognized the secret truth of the world. Lamar saw the heart of the world that everyone else tried to ignore. Lamar had gazed into the abyss, met its stare, and found it wanting. Lamar knew how it, so to speak, was.

So there were the Crane brothers. They’d found themselves in some approximation of an Irish pub, or what may have at one point been an Irish pub (difficult to take the aesthetic seriously when ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ pipes over the speakers). They’d wound up here because Django wanted a cup of hot coffee, Lamar wanted a hamburger, and Max went where they went. Granted, Django still smelled like corpse dirt, and 12 days of being mostly dead hadn’t improved his attitude, but at least they were together again, and that counted for a lot.

That did leave the matter of how to defuse the tension between Lamar and Django, though, so Max reached into his jacket and flipped the tiny map fragment onto the table. “So”, he said, “next move?”

The three of them leaned in close to consider the map. It showed Florida, clearly enough. Well, in any case, Florida as it had been before the Bridge. Most of Miami had been hauled into the sky by Khan Rhom after the Bahamas had been lanced. What was left wasn’t, strictly speaking, Florida.

“Well”, said Django, “It’s an old map, we know that. At least 20 years, and we can all reckon in on that not being one hundred percent reliable”.

“Do we want to take that chance on a Rune, though”, Max asked between sips of water. “We all remember what happened in Ottawa three years back”.

Django and Lamar shuddered involuntarily at the thought. Canadian Shield troopers torn apart by screamer bombs and driven mad by what the Library had labeled ‘Jester Lucrative’. No, they thought, whether or not the map was accurate, there were worse things than busting a hump halfway across the continent for no reason other than peace of mind.

“So at least we’re agreed on that”, Max said. He swirled the straw pensively in his glass. “To Rhom, then?”

Lamar shook his head and tapped the map, agitated. “The path goes through Florida, it doesn’t stop there. We don’t know in what direction it’s going, either. Hell, it could be in Manhattan, for all we know”.

“So we need the rest of the map”, Django said.

“We can’t afford to lose any time, here”, Max said, a hint of urgency creeping into his voice.

“Which is why we need the rest of the map. We get the map, we don’t have to waste time checking everywhere it could be. Point is, I’d rather know where I’m going, and if we need to fast-track ourselves there, at least we’ll know where to point”.

    The brothers all dropped silent as Lamar’s hamburger arrived. Lamar smiled and nodded kindly to the waitress, who bustled off with hardly a second glance.

There was a name for what the Crane brothers did. Broadly speaking, it was halfway between treasure hunting and troubleshooting. On this fragile Earth, not all treasure was good. There were the obvious examples, certainly- scepters of long dead kings imbued with hate and power that drove the holders insane, gemstones containing the specters of liches and daemons, etc, etc. But large caches of gold and silver could be problematic in the right hands, and there were many who thought it politically expedient for such things to vanish. Money, after all, makes the world go round, and there are those who’d rather it kept spinning exactly the way it was. So, for a nominal upfront fee and a cut of the loot when applicable, the Crane brothers hunted down these treasures and made them disappear.

As to what to call their profession, the sensible part of the world was divided between ‘treasure hunters’ and ‘troubleshooters’. Fools and the foolish called them ‘treasure shooters’, for the imagery it conjured. But the folk who had encountered them, who had seen their quarry and the aftermath of their hunt had a different, wryly euphemistic name, and that was the name on their business card:

THE BROTHERS CRANE

(MAX, DJANGO, AND LAMAR)

TROUBLE HUNTERS FOR HIRE

No faerie gold, dragon hordes, pirate loot, or bank jobs.

$2000/hr.

Group rates available.

    “There’s the contract to think of as well”, Lamar said through a mouthful of hamburger.

    Now, that was knotty business. The contract was with Salazar Brink, head Beanman of Manhattan, and the manner in which it was struck was something of a tale in itself…