Spooky Legends & Giveaway: Trent Jamieson’s Death on Drop Bears “THE BUSINESS OF DEATH”

So today’s Spooky Legend might be my favorite of the whole event.  It comes to us courtesy of Trent Jamieson via his character Death from the Death Works trilogy.  The first two installments along the third book have all been packaged together in one omnibus titled THE BUSINESS OF DEATH (available now from Orbit Books).  Ever heard of Drop Bears?  I hadn’t, but I’ll never be able to look at koalas the same way again.  And if you are new to this series which I called a “sly, subtly humorous urban fantasy with a bittersweet love story and a novel approach to the business of death”, make sure to check out the giveaway below for a chance to win the omnibus.  See details below.

Click to see the Spooky Legends Master List with links to all the previous posts and giveaways

Death on Drop Bears
by
Trent Jamieson

There's this story about killer koalas: that they drop from trees onto their victims and kill with tooth and claw. Hence the term Drop Bears. It's something for the most naive of tourists, and it's a load of crap.

Except when it isn't.

When you're Death you find yourself privy to all sorts of stuff you wish you weren't. Some of it sad, some of it awful, a lot of it both.

I'd been just a few weeks into the new job, the Promotion that I NEVER wanted - end of days drawing near, how else did you think I got the job, no-one else wanted it - when I felt, well, not exactly a blip, but something definitely wrong, in the great web of Death that binds life.

Of course, I sniffed it out.  What else was I going to do? This close to the end, you were never sure if it was finally happening: the beginning of the end. Stirrers, those enemies of life, had been banging at the back doors of hell particularly hard of late. Maybe this was the last big assault.

The conservation park in Springwood was empty, well not quite. I found the dead guy in a ferny glade beneath great eucalyptus trees - his face pale, lit with a bluish light. He blinked at me like the dead always do, eyes new to their own ending.

"Am I?" he asked, not needing to finish the question.

I nodded. "What happened?" You get straight to the point with the Dead, their attention wanes, pretty quickly.

"Something got me," he said, pointing into the trees. "Something up there."

"What?"

"I didn't see. I-I don't know."

I touched him once; felt his soul pass through me to the Underworld, then looked for the body. Didn't take me long.

You know, stuff tumbling out of trees kills more people than car accidents in some countries, so I thought that would be the case here. Maybe a falling branch, or something like that, one of the many bad-luck-ways that you can go - and there's almost an endless supply of those.

Not this time. Sure, he'd been hit with the unlucky stick, clobbered with it in fact. But branches aren't clawed; they don't tear a hole in your skull.

Now, Australia has some of the deadliest wildlife in the world, and Brisbane has a fair percentage of them, but it's all snakes and spiders. We don't have large predators outside of the oceans and rivers, and certainly nothing that could do this.

Except something had.

Even as I watched: the body before me started to twitch. Stirrer. It opened its eyes saw just who was in front of it and sighed.

"Bad timing, mate," I said, sliding a stony knife across my hand, and stalling it. Blood and touch, no Stirrer is resistant that. It didn't even put up a fight.

Of course, I should have been looking for what killed him.

Damn thing dropped on my head. Its claws closed around my throat.  It bellowed in my ear - that great groan that only a mad koala filled with death lust is capable of.

Blood gushed from my neck, and that was when it realised its mistake. It tried to let me go, but it was too late. It doesn't need to be a hand. My touch and my blood: drove that Stirrer right back to the Deepest Dark where it belonged.

The koala's limbs went limp, and I lowered it gently to the ground. I could have left it there, but last things these animals needed was bad publicity - koalas are endangered. I could see where this one had been struck by a car. Poor thing had been killed crossing the road, organs pulped, the driver probably hadn't even noticed that they'd hit it.

I looked at its corpse, at the bleak and deadly thing that the Stirrer had forced it to become, and felt a cold rage fill me.

I found that poor Koala a good place beneath a tall strong eucalyptus and buried it with my own hands. The creature deserved a hell of a lot better, but there was nothing else that I could do. The world was coming to an end: for some things much sooner than others. But it's always been that way.

Back in my office at Number 4, I poured myself a glass of really good Scotch that I'd picked up from a rich dead man a couple of weeks back, and dropped into the throne of Death.

I'd barely put the glass to my lips when my wonderful Lissa arrived, back from her own run in with Stirrers no doubt. She looked at the glass, shook her head: I tried to ignore her disappointment. I'm pretty good at it.

"You'll never guess what happened to me at the office today," I said.

She raised an eyebrow.

"Drop bear, well, a Stirrer infected koala. I had to fight a koala."

Lissa shrugged, gave me a kiss. "It's Australia, darling. Everything tries to kill you eventually."

She was right. I was Death, I should have known that even a Koala can fall from the sky with murder on its mind.

I drank my Scotch and thought about the coming end of days.

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About the author:

Trent lives in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife Diana. His book, the Business of Death is out now. He can hear koalas calling at night. Every time he does it makes him smile.

Visit Trent Jamieson online: Website|Twitter Want to read more from Trent Jamieson

Giveaway provided by Trent Jamieson

One copy of THE BUSINESS OF DEATH by Trent Jamieson

 

Available now from Orbit Books

Description:

Steven de Selby has a hangover. Bright lights, loud noise, and lots of exercise are the last thing he wants. But that's exactly what he gets when someone starts shooting at him.

Steven is no stranger to death - Mr. D's his boss after all - but when a dead girl saves him from sharing her fate, he finds himself on the wrong end of the barrel. His job is to guide the restless dead to the underworld but now his clients are his own colleagues, friends, and family.

Mr. D's gone missing and with no one in charge, the dead start to rise, the living are hunted, and the whole city teeters on the brink of a regional apocalypse - unless Steven can shake his hangover, not fall for the dead girl, and find out what happened to his boss - that is, Death himself.

THE BUSINESS OF DEATH includes the first two volumes of the Death Works trilogy, Death Most Definite and Managing Death, as well as the third volume

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**Don’t forget to visit Dark Faerie Tales today for her Spooky Legends guest blog with Karen Duvall and a chance to win KNIGHT’S CURSE**