The Brothers Crunk Read online

  Published by Grindhouse Press

  POB 292644

  Dayton, OH 45429

  www.grindhousepress.com

  The Brothers Crunk

  Grindhouse Press #004

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9826281-7-1

  ISBN-10: 098262817X

  Copyright © 2010 by William Pauley III. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction.

  Cover art and design copyright © 2010 by Brandon Duncan

  www.corporatedemon.com

  Interior artwork copyright © 2010 by Megan Hansen

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author or publisher.

  Also by William Pauley III

  Demolition Ya-Ya (forthcoming)

  Doom Magnetic!

  If You Don’t Sleep, You Don’t Dream

  Mr. Malin and the Night

  This book is dedicated to Gordan K. Smith

  The author would also like to thank Mingua Beef Jerky and Cherry Coke. Without them, this book never would have been possible.

  THE

  BROTHERS

  CRUNK

  An

  8-Bit

  Fack-it-All

  Adventure

  in

  2D

  ONE

  SOMEWHERE IN THE DESERT . . .

  The taste of electricity hangs in the air.

  A thick blanket of darkness rolls over the hot desert sky. The sand begins to cool in an instant—cracks and sizzles. Steam puffs out of the ground in giant belches.

  A faint hum resonates in the distance. The sound of a television being turned on. The TV is bright purple with yellow dials and is half-buried in the sand. Slowly, an image appears on the screen. It is the image of a large, powerfully built creature with long white fangs hanging like daggers from the lower half of his face. One of his eyes is squinting. The other is wide, irisless, and wrapped loosely with a thousand thin black rings, spinning around his eye in an entrancing manner, as if to hypnotize. In a strange and distorted voice, he begins to cackle and scream.

  “HEH-H-H-GAH GAH GAHH! D-D-DEVIL’S OF-F-F T-THE D-D-D-DIRT, B-B-B-B-BECOMMEE OONNEE-E W-WITH M-M-MEE!” the beast on the television cries—his voice sounding like a squirrel’s with throat cancer.

  “V-V-VANDENBOOM!”

  The television speakers crackle and fuzz as the audio trim exceeds its limit. The feed suddenly cuts to black. The desert is again swallowed by darkness.

  Ten feet away, half-buried beneath the cool desert sand, the eyes of a mutilated cyborg carcass begin to glow a sinister red.

  TWO

  BOOM CLICK CLICK

  Divey Crunk wriggles his fingers through a spaghetti mess of wires, examining each of them closely before tossing them back into the chaos. His goggles are dark and fogged from the perspiration pouring down his forehead. He wipes the backhand of his glove along his hairline and again digs into the knot-ball of wires.

  “Damnit, Divey, this is taking too long! I’m out, man! I’m facking out!” says a tall man with a thick Cockney accent.

  “Shut your goddamn mouth, Reynold, and watch the door! I’m telling you, it won’t take but a minute to solder. I just have to find the right facking wire first. If I have to . . .” His words trail off into indecipherable mumbles.

  Reynold walks to the back door of the van, peeks out the window, and anxiously bobs up and down, as if holding back a river of piss.

  “Do you mind? You’re breaking my facking concentration!”

  “I can’t help it. This sneaking around business always gets me heart a thumping.” Reynold tries to calm his nerves. He holds his breath. Unconsciously, he begins to swing his hips, doing his piss dance again. Divey slams his toolbox against the metal floor of the van and clutches his skull with both hands. The vein in the middle of his forehead is throbbing in anger.

  “You know, I think I’m going to get a bit of fresh air. Yeah, that’s what I need. It’s getting a tad bit stuffy in ’ere.” Divey doesn’t move. “Yeah . . . so, ah, well . . . I guess I’ll just beat on the side of the van if I see him coming, yeah?” Divey grumbles. Reynold nods and hops out of the van.

  The concrete is wet and glistening like a blanket of diamonds underneath the ginger glow of the streetlamp. The van sits in an otherwise empty parking lot, outside a minor league baseball stadium. The air is clean, fresh, as it always is after a good rain. He takes a deep breath and wipes his finger along the edge of the side glass window. The yellow paint of the van is beginning to chip away, revealing the original egg shell white underneath. The words, ‘BRACKFAS BURRITOS ¥99’ are written in giant red lettering across the side panels and doors.

  A flitter of light reflecting off a small metal object lying on the ground catches the corner of his eye. He walks over to it and picks it up. It is a small round coin with Japanese lettering on either side.

  “Ha, fancy that . . . a 500 yen piece! I guess it’s me lucky day.” Reynold bites the coin and buries it in his front pocket.

  “Whatchu got there?” a man’s voice asks from the darkness—deep and gravelly. Pete. Reynold’s nerves jump.

  “Ah, heya there, Pete . . . I just found me a bloody 500 yen piece, just lying ’ere on the pavement. Imagine that, huh?” There is a nervous quiver in his voice. He slowly backs toward the van. Pete steps out of the shadows, revealing three hundred and forty-nine pounds of pure American meat tightly tucked into a pair of black sweatpants and a red Members Only jacket—no shirt.

  “Heh, yeah, imagine that . . .” Pete lights up a fag. “Go get your brother, we’ll have one last smoke together.” Reynold nods his head and jumps in the back of the van.

  “Christ, Divey, put that shit away! Pete’s outside!”

  “Just in time, too . . .” Divey tosses a screwdriver in his toolbox. He turns around quickly and aims an orange plastic gun directly at a remote sensor installed in Reynold’s right eye socket. The gun he is holding is a 1984 model Nintendo Zapper.

  “Have you lost your facking mind?!” Reynold says, cupping his hands over the sensor.

  “Relax, the gun is rigged to go off on the third pull of the trigger. All we have to do is get Pete to go last.”

  “And you’re sure you fixed the generator too, right?”

  “Of course I fixed the generator, what kind of dumb-arse bloke do you take me for?” Divey takes off his gloves, pulls a wooden pipe out of his front shirt pocket, and smiles. “Let’s smoke, brother.”

  Divey stuffs the plastic gun into the waistband of his jeans and hops out onto the pavement.

  “Hey there, Pete . . . no luck I see,” Divey says as he lights his pipe.

  “No . . . no luck.” Pete takes a long draw from his fag and exhales for what seems like an entire minute. Reynold hops out of the van, his cigarette already lit.

  “Well, you know what that means . . .” Divey removes the light gun from his beltline. “We zap for it.”

  “You know, I was thinking, we could always wait until the next town to do this. I mean, shit, we still have a couple days worth of rations. We may not have to do this at all.”

  “That’s what you said in the last town. And the town before that. Things gotta change ’ere, Petey boy. We’ve gotta stay ahead of the game. Right now, we’re eating up all of our profit—literally. We’re supposed to sell our burritos, not eat them. And now with the shortage of meat, well . . . one of us just has to go.” Divey pulls a long black cord from the bottom of the gun and plugs it into an electric generator sitting on the pavement behind the van. “This is the only fair way to choose which one of us has to make that sacrifice.”

  “Okay, boss. You’re right.” Pete bites his upper
lip. “But, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to go first.” He takes one final draw from his cigarette before stomping it out with his boot. Reynold’s mouth drops open. His cigarette burns a hole in his shirt as it falls to the ground.

  “Wait, why should he get to be the one who chooses?” says Reynold, batting the ashes off his shirt. “Yeah, you know, I think I want to be the one who goes first.” He smiles smugly at Pete and puts another cigarette up to his lips, lighting the wrong end by mistake and inhaling a lungful of torched filter. He hunches over and begins to cough. “Shit, that was me last ciggy.”

  “Well, I’ll tell ya what, princess,” Pete says with a smirk, “why don’t you take out that shiny lil’ 500 yen piece you got in your pocket and let’s have us a good old-fashioned coin toss. Winner goes first, loser last, and boss here will go second. How’s about it?”

  Reynold looks over at Divey, but Divey shies his eyes away and says, “Sounds like a plan, Pete, but Reynold gets to call it. Fair?”

  “Fair,” Pete replies.

  “Rey, coin please?”

  Reynold digs into his pocket and hands the coin over to Divey. “You sure about this?” he whispers.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think, brother, it’s up to fate. All of this is by chance, isn’t it? Whether or not you win this facking coin toss, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost the game. The gun could still go off on any of us at any moment.” Divey winks. Reynold takes a deep breath and nods, trusting that his brother knows what he is doing. Divey places the coin on top of his fist. “Call it in the air.”

  He flips the coin.

  “Heads.”

  The coin flickers under the streetlight and lands in Divey’s palm. He balls his fist around it. An unpleasant stench fills the air—it smells like burnt tire rubber.

  “For fack’s sake, tell us what it is!” yells Reynold.

  “Wait a second, what the hell is that smell?” says Divey.

  The generator begins to crackle and smoke.

  “Shit, Rey, you set the generator down in a facking rain puddle!” yells Divey.

  “Well, where else was I supposed to have put it? Everywhere is a facking rain puddle!”

  “Well now the generator isn’t going to work properly, you dolt!”

  Pete’s eyes narrow like two coin-slots. “Are you both fucking putting me on? That generator has been broken for ages. You know that. That’s the whole reason why we’re using the fucking thing, because it’s impossible to know when it will fire!”

  Reynold and Divey exchange ‘oh shit’ glances. Pete is getting suspicious. Oh shit, indeed.

  “Wait a second, you two fucks are trying to set me up! The zapper’s been rigged and that’s why you don’t want me to go first, right?!”

  Reynold and Divey stare ahead blankly and slowly shake their heads ‘no’.

  “Right,” Pete says. “Give me the gun.” Divey hands the gun over to Pete, butt-first.

  “Fuck it. We’re still doing this. But I’m going to go first.” Pete holds the gun up to the remote sensor installed in his in his left temple. “You guys have t’wake up pretty early in the morning to outsm—” Pete pulls the trigger. His skull explodes and brain sludge erupts from the crater, spraying along the side wall of the van. His body falls limply to the ground.

  “Holy shit! I thought you said the gun wouldn’t go off until the third pull of the trigger!” Reynold yells.

  “Fack, but yeah, that was when I thought the generator was working right! Shit! I wasn’t expecting that!”

  Reynold holds his hands over his mouth, shaking, and takes a deep breath. After a moment of silence, he says, “Shit. Why did it have to be Pete, Divey? Why not either of us?”

  “I told you before, he’s bigger than the two of us put together. The business could run nearly three times as long from the meat off of his bones than it would from either of ours.”

  “You know what I mean . . .”

  “Oh shit, you’re not going to get emotional on me, are you, Rey?”

  “I just want to know. Why Pete? I mean, fack, we rigged the zapper to go off on him, it didn’t work out the way we planned, but the bloody thing still went off on him. It’s not just that the odds were stacked against him, no, he really had no facking chance.”

  “Fate.”

  Reynold wipes the sweat from his upper lip. “You know, I never believed any of that shit before today, but I think you’re right, brother. Fate. Damn.” Reynold bends down and removes a pack of fags from Pete’s jacket pocket. He puts one up to his lips and lights it. “Do you think we have the power to change our fate?”

  Divey unfolds his palm. The coin is facing heads up. “No, brother, we don’t.” He places the coin in Reynold’s hands.

  “But what if this is just some sort of lucky coin? What if it has nothing to do with fate . . . only luck?”

  “You’re asking questions that I can’t answer, Rey.” Divey puts on a pair of canary yellow kitchen gloves.

  Reynold holds the coin up to the light. The Japanese writing shimmers in a way he hasn’t noticed before—as if it possesses some sort of magic. He presses the coin up to his lips.

  “Hey, once you’re done snogging with that coin, you think you could give me a hand ’ere?” Divey begins hacking Pete’s limbs off with an axe, tossing the bloody hunks of meat into the back of the van.

  Reynold stuffs the coin into his pocket and ties a surgical mask around the bottom half of his face. “I’ll get the trash bags.”

  THREE

  PINK DEATH XXX

  Reynold fingers through a case of loose cassette tapes, plucks one from a litter—a white one labeled, ‘Z. STARDUST’—and pops it into the tape deck located in the back of the van. The deck pops and whirrs. The sound of a bluesy rock guitar shreds through the air as “The Jean Genie” boom-rattles through the speakers and causes the pots and pans hanging above the stove to hum along with the drumbeat.

  Divey sits up front, driving. Destination: Terratown. He doesn’t hear the music - his brain is a clogged pipe of thought and steam. Thoughts of survival. Thoughts of Pete. Thoughts of flesh, blood, and bone. Thoughts of remorse. Thoughts of surviving in this god-forsaken post-apocalyptic world of Japan in this year of our Emperor 209 [E209]. If the van could travel at the speed of thought, they would have arrived in Terratown hours ago.

  Reynold tosses a few strips of Pete’s meat onto a sizzling skillet. His mouth salivates as the aroma fills his nostrils. It’s been over a month since either of them has had anything other than refried beans in their stomachs.

  He opens the cabinet door hanging above the freezer on the other side of the van. He moves aside a few bottles of soap and cleaning agents and removes a clear bottle full of light pink liquid out from behind. The label is hot pink and shiny metallic. It reads “PINK DEATH XXX”. Reynold twists the cap off and takes a swig. It burns like the fires of fack all the way down to his empty, churning stomach.

  Reynold makes his way up to the front of the van.

  “Hey, Div—You want me to fire you up one of these Pete and bean burritos? It smells facking delish.”

  “Naw, I’m not feeling too hungry just yet. Thanks though.” Divey looks at Reynold, eyeing the bottle of PINK DEATH XXX in his hand. “Shit, Rey, I don’t mind you drinking and all, but fack man, don’t get wasted! We’ve got to be in Terratown by morning, or else we aren’t gonna catch the morning traffic. You know how many goddamn brackfas burritos we can sell in a big city like Terratown?” Reynold stares blankly and shrugs his shoulders. “Shit-tons, that’s how many. So, really, don’t get facking drunk, man. I’m counting on you to take the reins here in a few hours. I didn’t get much sleep the last few days. I need to try and get some rest.”

  “Relax, Div . . . I’m only celebrating. I promise I won’t overdo it. Scout’s honor.”

  “You were never a scout.”

  “Yeah, but I tried to be, remember? Goddamn childhood asthma.”

  The stench of scorche
d meat makes its way to the front of the van.

  “Shit! My burrito!” Reynold cries and jumps into the back.

  Divey grabs the bottle of PINK DEATH XXX lying in the passenger seat, removes the cap, and takes a whiff.

  “Christ, Rey, what the fack are you drinking?” he mutters to himself.

  ● ● ●

  The night begins to play with Divey’s eyes. It is raining, for one, the glassy reflections dancing across the road make it almost invisible. And more recently, shadow animals have been darting out in front of the van, causing him to jerk the wheel and nearly skid off the road. Divey decides to draw the line at hallucinations. It is probably best that Reynold begins his shift so he can get a few winks of rest.