Drake Brule

Dust Cover

Drake Brule is a generous man—after a fashion. His personal business, that free-iron work he had done for these past twenty years, was in danger. His generosity, his triple-tap mercy; his trademark benediction in this phony world of mass contradiction, was under dire threat. Something was stalking the night, slinking along, meddling, in HIS night, impinging on the latitude of action he had long since resurrected as his sacred birthright. Times were nigh, necessitating a backup action. For Drake Brule did not plan, but acted, imposing an older will upon the mewing drivel of the gas-fed masses bugging their sloe eyes UPWARD at the latest incarnate masters.

Extended Dust Cover

Brett Gascon limped about the lie-lit world in dogged determination to remain beyond the vacant swirl of automation. Starving, rather than buy food with digital currency, soaking in the rain for neglect of a weather APP, Brett clung to arcane action—ever more alone in this society of rampant distraction. A pathological distrust of any tool with a moving part, let alone a powered—or, Blood Forbid—smart tool, cast him in the lurid glare of the Luddite. Getting bye, cutting meat for a good boss, robbing the occasional criminal, coaching those few who valued fist, sap or blade for the conduction of the only autonomy left to be made, “Mister Brett,” as he was called, found himself summoned back into the web of Time. No longer able to use a Post Office Box, Misterr Brett arrived at the Package Drop for his handmade molasses candy from Miss Winny, only to find that ominous calling card. The card was flat black, printed in a gloss of steely silver. It was, at the first and only hard glance, that most ominous summons to dreadfully dance: “Drake Brule, Adjuster at Large,” had left HIS card.

So Brett’s other, secret, boss had left it for “HIS GUY.” In such straights, according to a decades old handshake, the hair in his back chilled under his wool smock, answering where his mind stammered, sure that he must tender that honorable answer in person. As the phony sun set below an improbably sky, a voice out of his past chimed, “Anyone but you—anyone, Mister Brett—is already dead!”

Dedicated to:

Drake, my friend.

Inspired by:

“Baby, I just wish you could kill ‘em all while I fixed your dinner.”

-Megan, Saturday 5/16/26

A Three-by-Three novel, for the reader of action with but a few hours free for distraction.

Contents

ACT 1: The Diner

Here men of like mind discuss fools fallen behind

1.) Coffee & Cuties

2.) Steak & Stakes

3.) Business & Nightbirds

ACT 2: The Condo

There reposes “The Man” cautious of the Adjuster’s hand

4.) Park & Jive

5.) P-1 to F-14

6.) Door-to-Door

ACT 3: The Locker

Where luxury goods are gathered for the few who matter

7.) The Haul

8.) The Hook

9.) The Look

Nightbird

The world of Drake Brule and Brett Gascon is a mesmerizing reality overtaken by a shrouded actuality. Here day has lost the balance with night, a night stalked by birds born to rule in the absence of light. Drake is an Adjuster, among the first of his kind, having aged into Time’s blunt decline. For a man risen to the peak of his profession, to be threatened with obsolescence, to be “adjusted” in his own cold turn, is a bitter pill to swallow. So coos the Night Swallow, its beautiful lack of malice, bringing to mind the ease by which a dark hero might be cast aside, caught suddenly old, fumbling through the digital night as his marks, all sold, retired—maddeningly unadjusted—beyond the confines of their suburban fold.

So Begins The End

Of the Narrative Structure

Aristotle, in On Poetry, advanced the case that a proper story had a beginning, a middle, and an end, warning the poet against straying from this structure. In the cause of bringing fiction—where The Philosopher taught truth was to be preserved against the mere facts of history—to the time-pressed eyes of men of action, this three-by-three novel has been structured. A story told in three acts, each act divided into three scenes, and prefaced by an overture brings, a ten-part yarn. The intention is for a busy man to be able to read the novel on his lunch break over the course of a week, or in an hour or two on his day off.

Nightbird Novels

The concept of the Nightbird arose on Friday the 15th of May, 2026, on the parking lot of a Baltimore County diner, just after the first three chapters in the story here related occurred. At that time, the author and his subject, Adjuster Brule, discovered that they were subjects of the Night Swallow; and, stubbornly befitting their doomed kind, shrugged off their final warning with a condescending flare… and so stepped full-afool inter Eternity’s pitiless glare.