Max 1 (Patreon)

Here's the start of a story I'm working on. I've got a pretty good idea what happens in the first act and there's tons of room for adventure in acts two and three, but I haven't any idea where the tale is headed just yet.

———

Max crept across the bridge, his claws scratching against the concrete, but noticing that he was alone, he stopped and turned back. Rustham stood before the half-way point, frozen, so Max skittered back to his best friend’s side, his off-white pelt glowing in the moonlight like a specter.

Taking the charcoal grey male’s paw in his, Max whispered, “C’mon, Rust.”

But the silent male shook his head, eyes staring at the town before them. He pulled his paw away. “No, Max. We’re not supposed to.”

Max grinned with his ears wide. The mysa race had evolved to be nocturnal, so they had never gained facial muscles. What good was raising an eyebrow or curling the lip—like the lio did—in the dark? Instead, they conveyed their emotions with sublexical sounds and the bold motions of their oversized ears. “We’re not supposed to be disruptive,” said Max, drawing out the final syllables to make it seem more innocent. He took his friend’s paw once more. “You know they all stay on lio schedules just in case there’s any work to be had. They’ll all be asleep this time of night.”

Max tugged ever-so-gently on Rustham’s arm, trying to ease him over the boundary to Doetown. “So long as we’re quiet, we won’t bother any of the gals.”

The recalcitrant mysa’s ears sagged farther, so Max added, “Have I ever led you—” But he shut his muzzle when Rust squeaked and glared. “Okay, never mind. Don’t answer that.”

The pair had gotten into plenty of trouble over the years and the majority of it had been Max’s idea.

Eventually, Rustham softened, taking one tentative step and then another until the pair had finally left Bucksburg. Soon the two were skirting silently around the edge of Doetown with tails tightly intertwined. To their right, the shallow river that divided the ghetto and the steady breeze that blew consistently over the water’s surface, protecting the two towns from one another. To their left, ramshackle apartments that—while in poor condition—looked like they were far better maintained than the ones on the guy’s side of the water.

Max took a deep breath and his sensitive nose drank in the night’s scents; water bugs, fish, mud, oil and welded metal, leftover stew, the does themselves… That smell was particularly intoxicating, and Max gave thanks that their wonderful, musky aroma was so faint. Come morning when the dockworkers returned to their jobs, the smell would surely be a hundred times as powerful.

“What do you even want from here, Max?” whined Rust. “We really shouldn’t be here. Let’s go back and get to work.”

“Work,” grunted Max.

“Yes, work,” chided Rustham. With fists on his hips, he turned. “There’s a half-dozen leaking roofs that need our help. They’re not gonna patch themselves, y’know?”

Max crossed his arms, his big ears lying flat in a scowl. “And do any of these jobs pay?”

Rust groaned. “They’d pay us if they could. Everyone in Bucksburg is broke. You know that.”

“Then what’s the point—”

“The point, Max, is that the work needs to be done,” he said with a tiny growl. “If it bothers you so much, just … just pretend that the welfare check is your paycheck.”

Max groaned and hung his head. “Ugh, I’m just sick of it. This isn’t living, it’s existence. There’s no way to get ahead on welfare,” he said a little too loud.

Rust put his fingers over Max’s lips, then slid a gentle touch to the side of his face, cupping Max’s cheek. “If welfare bothers you so much, you could always go ace. No one would think any less of you. Then maybe you could find work…”

He grabbed Rustham’s paw and squeezed it. “I need to get out.”

“There is no way out of the ghetto.”

“There has to be,” said Max. “There just has to be.”

They strolled along through the empty shipyards with only the songs of bugs and frogs covering the silence between them, until at last they came to the yard’s newest visitor, a gigantic lio Corvette getting refitted and restocked before her next voyage. The does did most of the lio ship work. They learned quickly, paid attention to details, and—most significantly—worked cheap.

For the price of a single lio employee, they could hire a few dozen mysa. And that was just the savings in the shipyard! A mysa crew meant fewer provisions. Each lio officer consumed hundreds of times as much food each day as a mysa crewman.

Rustham turned to Max. “This? This is what you wanted to see?” The off-white mysa nodded and Rust groaned. “We didn’t need to sneak into Doetown to see this ship! There’s not a spot in Bucksburg where you can’t see it.”

Max sighed. For the past two evenings, he’d been climbing up on the roof Bucksburg’s tallest building—maybe a meter and a half above street level—to gaze at her, but it still hadn’t been enough. With her rounded bullet-top, the nearly featureless cylinder stood over twenty meters tall, looming over the ghetto and filling the sky.

Unlike them, this ship was going places—it, and much more significantly, the mysa maintenance crew aboard it. Once they finished prepping it, the ship would go … well, who knows where? Far, far away from the ghetto. That much was certain.

Then Max’s eyes popped wide. The gangplank was still down.

He pointed with an outstretched arm, but Rustham grabbed it with both paws and pushed it back down. “No, Max.”

“What in the Enlightened One’s name were they thinking, leaving the ship open in this neighborhood? They’ll be lucky if her frame is still in place, come morning.”

“Well, we aren’t taking anything,” insisted Rust. “That’s not who we are.”

“Well, no, but,”—he said, taking Rust’s paws in his own—“don’t you see? This is our chance! This is our ticket out of here.”

The charcoal male’s black eyes darted between Max and the gangplank. “What? You want to stow away?”

“Yes!” hissed Max. “We hide on board and go …. wherever the ship takes us.”

“No,” said Rustham, grabbing his friend by both wrists. He ran his thumbs around Max's cuffs—the decorative cloth he kept wrapped around each. “Absolutely not. That’s a terrible idea! You have no idea where they’re headed. It could be right into the heart of the war.”

But Max was no longer listening, so Rust had to grab him by the shoulders and shake him to get his attention. “What if they catch you? What would they do to you? Do you really think they’d come all the way back here just to drop you off?”

“Not me, Rust. Us! You and me, knocking the dust of this crappy planet off our paws and never coming back.”

He shook his head, squeezing even harder. “No, I can’t. I have family here. We have family. We can’t just abandon them. We can’t leave without a word.”

Max hung his head. Speaking almost too quietly to be heard, he said, “Bucksburg is killing me.” With a deep breath, he lifted his fingers to the notch he’d sliced in Rust’s right ear. He put his fingertip inside the V and rubbed it gently back and forth, feeling both edges. “Remember when I gave you that?”

Despite himself, Rustham chuckled. “It’s kind of hard to forget.”

“I still don’t know if I cut too deep, or I hit a vein or what. It must have bled for—”

“An hour,” he finished for his best friend. “You, sitting on the floor of my apartment, pinching the crap out of it, trying to stop the bleeding and apologizing over and over like an idiot.”

“I didn’t mean for it to bleed like that,” said Max, his ears drooping.

“I know.” Rust touched the one he had put in Max’s left ear. “Please don’t do this, Max. Please don’t leave.”

“I have to. But you could come with—”

Rustham was already shaking his head and Max could smell the salt in his tears. “Get the surgery,” he pleaded. “If you have to go, then maybe you could hire on legitimately.”

Max silenced him with a kiss. He didn’t want to hear any more about going ace. Not now, not ever. He closed his eyes and tilted his head, sliding his fingers through the soft fur behind Rust’s ear, and his best friend did the same.

Max ran his tongue between Rust’s lips, caressing them with a friend’s kiss—too soft to be a lover’s but more passionate than an acquaintance's kiss. He loved him like a brother—more than any of his actual brothers, certainly. He smelled Rust’s breath, felt it warm against his lips, and for a moment, considered pleasing him—right there on the deserted street. No one was around. He could kneel down and do it, just as he’d done dozens of times before.

But that wouldn’t be fair to him, would it? he realized. It’d be cruel. If he managed to change Rust’s mind, he could resent him for not respecting his decision. And if he failed to change it … well, he might always resent that Max tried such a shallow ploy. He bit his lip and resisted the urge.

I wonder if he’s contemplating the same thing … using pleasure to bribe me into staying? Max wouldn’t mind the attention—he never did—but it wouldn’t have mattered. This was a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity and he wasn’t going to pass it up.

Desperation is funny like that. At the bottom, he couldn’t imagine how anything could possibly have been worse.

They hugged farewell and Max told him how badly he’d miss him. Rust did the same. “Please don’t get yourself killed, Max.”

He crushed him as close as his tiny arms could. “I’ll try.”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jUu0--eDi8A4sV12rgnTA17Ahu43nQBRJ57C6XNiakA/edit?usp=sharing

What do you think of Max? Is he likeable? Do you want to know more about him and what lies ahead for him?

Max is on the left. The gal on the right doesn't have a name just yet.

Art by @HKLuterman