by Sean Grigsby
CHAPTER 13
Two glass containers sat on either end of a table in Yolanda’s lab, both glowing like tiny infernos from their contents. One held the ashes from the phoenix, the other contained the embers from the smaug.
When the door slid closed behind Afu, Yolanda spun around with her yellow lab coat flapping open as if she was some superhero of the periodic table.
“So is it true then?” She smiled, filled with so much excitement she might have burst into flames. “Was it a phoenix?”
“Yes,” all five of us said at the same time.
“Hot dog!” Yolanda drove a fist into her open palm. “I really wish you would have kept it alive. The possible–”
“We tried,” I said. “At the risk of getting burned alive, too. The Sandman didn’t do shit, so Patrice trapped it with the chain net. Then it blew itself up.”
“Must have been some kind of defense mechanism,” Brannigan said. “Maybe like when there were bumblebees and they’d die after stinging you?”
“The tranq laser didn’t affect it?” Yolanda could have been talking about her collection of mold spores. “Whacky.”
“More like wack,” I said. “Wack as hell. The Sandman should put anything living to sleep. Not just dragons. Do you remember what happened to that one smokie on Slayer 13? Newton or somebody?”
Afu nodded. “Accidentally power jumped into the path of the laser and was out cold for nearly a month.”
“This bird is obviously different,” Yolanda said. “The fact that it exists is a complete anomaly. If only I’d been able to study it.”
Chief took out his holoreader and set it on the table between the two containers. A hologram video of the phoenix rose above the screen. The fiery bird flapped its wings, zooming toward tiny versions of Afu and me.
“I didn’t see this until Renfro and Naveena were already on their way,” Brannigan told me.
I rolled my eyes.
In the holovideo, a chain net flew into the picture and caught the phoenix, throwing it into the ground. A moment later, tiny Afu tackled tiny me as the phoenix fire grew bigger despite the foam I had been dumping onto it – I hadn’t even realized that was happening. Next thing you know, the phoenix burst into an explosion of flames that could have destroyed two city blocks.
We were goddamn lucky to be alive.
Brannigan shut off the holoreader as a digital Patrice was calling us ash kickers, and returned it to his pocket. “What do you make of that, Yolanda?”
The propellerhead rubbed her chin and walked around to the other side of the table. “I’m going to talk this out because it’s all muddy in my head right now. We know that fire acts differently depending on the conditions and the fuel it’s gobbling up to continue burning. But this,” she held a hand out to each glowing container, “won’t quit burning.”
“It even burned up a wraith,” said Afu.
Naveena widened her eyes and turned to me. “No shit?”
“Yup,” I said.
“And these two are very different substances.
Not just in how they look.” Yolanda grabbed each container and began sliding them towards each other. “But similar in how they – ouch!”
Yolanda jerked her hands back when the containers touched. The smaug’s embers flashed and died, while the phoenix ashes grew flames and filled the container.
“What in fuck?” Brannigan said.
Renfro whistled. “It’s like the one container absorbed the energy from the other.”
Rubbing his hands and breathing heavier, Afu said, “You know what the legend says about phoenixes, right?”
Yolanda shook her head. “Not this again.”
“There was only ever one phoenix at a time, right?” Renfro said.
“Yeah,” Naveena said. “But that’s because it would burst into flames whenever its body was failing and would rise again from the ashes.”
Rise again from the ashes. What if Afu was right?
We all turned our gaze to the phoenix flames. It looked like bottled hell inside the glass container.
“Told y’all!” Afu shouted.
“But that’s impossible,” Yolanda said. “Matter can change, but it can’t revert back. And it sure as poop can’t reform into a living thing.”
“Then how do you explain what we just saw?” Afu asked.
The yellow flames danced across my vision. I looked down and noticed the glow was casting shadows of us all. “Dragons,” I said. “And ghosts. Hell, even the droids out there directing traffic in the middle of Parthenon City. Remember when people thought they were impossible, too?”
Naveena nodded. “She’s right. I think we need to be more safe than sorry on this. Chief?”
“Right,” Brannigan said. “Yolanda, we need to lock these ashes up. Somewhere fire resistant and only accessed by you and me. Can you make that happen?”
It was the first time I’d ever seen Yolanda surprised or upset. “But… but how will I study it if it’s locked away?”
I could have sworn she was on the verge of tears.
“You can study the video I have and the damage to Cannon 15 when they tow it back here. If I think it’s safe to do so, you can take the ashes out intermittently to do your job, but I’m firm on this, Yolanda. Okay?”
She dropped her head and nodded slightly. “I can put it in the safe-room and change the card-reader to only let in you and me. I know someone who’s an expert on mythological creatures. I have to find his information. It’s been a few years. Maybe some of you can go talk to him and see if he knows something that can help.”
“That brings up a good question, Chief.” I said. “What do me and my crew do until Cannon 15 is repaired? And what about those redneck… those volunteers who died today?”
“We’ll notify their families and tell them what happened. Propellerheads on scene told me there weren’t any bodies to recover since they’d been burned, eaten, or both.”
“One of their bodies is still in Lake Erie,” I said, remembering swimming over Wilkins’ corpse.
“No use keeping this clusterfuck secret. And those idiots should have never been out there in the first place. I heard them on the video. Volunteer smokies my ass. As far as your truck and getting back to work, you can’t do shit while one of your crew is lying in a sick bed anyway. Williams, you’ll have to earn your new pay-grade by filling out a big ass report on everything. And I mean everything. I want it as thorough as you can make it. No loose ends.
“Otherwise, I’d say you all earned some paid time off for the great job you did today. Who knows how much of the state that thing would have barbecued if you hadn’t been there. Oh…” Brannigan puckered his lips.
“Oh?” I asked.
“Well, this isn’t really the time or place, but Sherry’s been bugging the shit out of me to invite all of you out to our house this Saturday. I’m throwing a barbecue. Might as well turn it into a celebration of the ash kickers, the only smoke eater team to ever fight a goddamn phoenix. Plus, I’ll have a keg.”
“I’m there,” the other three said in unison. Keg is a magical word.
“Don’t go throwing around nicknames for us.” I pinched the bridge of my nose.
Ash kickers. Ridiculous.
“I kind of like it,” said Afu.
“I think I should stay here with Patrice,” I said. “Going to have to cancel my DJ gig, too. So it’s a no for me, Chief.”
“Patrice will be there, too,” Brannigan said. “I know this is scaring the shit out of you, but you’ve seen how fast the curate works. Look at your arm.”
I did. Where a gash had been, now there was only a slight pink scar that would also vanish in time.
“I expect her to be fully-recovered by the morning,” Yolanda said.
The day of a DJ gig I usually slept in so I’d have energy to go until two or five o’clock in the morning, depending on the venue. That usually didn’t happen if my mama needed help with moving Daddy from his bed to his wheelchair
to the toilet and back again.
But Afu said something that I’d been feeling, too. I missed this, the old team together. Even though it wouldn’t be fighting scalies or running from flying wraiths, it was something I’d been craving but hadn’t known I’d been missing.
I sighed and looked at Brannigan. “Can I bring my parents?”
CHAPTER 14
“I bet you it’s some damn Satanists,” my daddy said from the back seat.
“Carl!” My mama’s eyes about popped from her head as she spun to glare at him from the passenger seat beside me. “Don’t say that word.”
“What, ‘damn?’”
“No, the ‘S’ word.”
I hunched over the steering wheel a little more. I’d already been in full-Quasimodo mode since starting this joyous trek to Chief Brannigan’s house. At least there would be beer and other people to distract me from my parents once we got to the barbecue.
I’d traded in my coupé for a hover-van after I’d broken up with Afu and moved in with my folks. Yolanda had generously given me the psy-roll wheelchair, the one Brannigan had been locked in on our trip to Canada. My daddy was hesitant at first and unbending against receiving any ieiunium curate, but he finally gave in on using the psychicallypowered wheelchair when I assured him he could get in and out of it anytime he wanted and that I would drive him to his Friday night card game when I wasn’t on shift.
The propellerheads had helped me trick out my van with an extendable ramp where Daddy could roll in and out. They even installed a holoreader into the psyroll so my dad could watch the Feed, controlling the volume and channels with his mind. All it took with the upgraded version was a few sticky pads to his head.
The Feed is what had brought up my daddy’s outburst about Satanists. There’d been another suicide arson fire. It had happened in broad daylight in the middle of a hospital while I’d been fighting the phoenix. The fire department had successfully contained the blaze, but there were still casualties. The only video of what happened showed the torcher engulfed in flames and walking into a janitor’s closet full of chemicals that had advanced the blaze.
“These idiots that are blaming the new people moving to the city have got it all wrong,” Daddy said. “They’re just regular folks trying to get help, even if they’re wanting that devil juice.”
‘Devil Juice’ is what he called the dragon blood curate. I was conflicted on his position. An infusion would have my dad walking on his own again and breathing normally in a day’s time, but I also understood where he was coming from. It was weird to put a foreign substance in your system to begin with. Given that it was the blood of the monsters that were trying to burn and eat every last one of us, you could multiply the strange factor a hundredfold.
I looked at my daddy through the rearview mirror. He was shaking his head and had his eyes glued to the holoreader.
“A few people have said these arsonists might be a part of some cult,” I said.
“Satanists!” he shouted.
“Carl Williams!” My mother put a hand to her face and leaned against her window. “We don’t have to say that name. And you don’t even know if that’s true. I tell you something, though. Nothing has changed since the beginning of time. Fire, lasers. When I was growing up it was bullets and automatic rifles. Terrible people would walk into a church and start shooting. Or go into a school and kill babies. Evil people have been around forever. Evil people with sick minds and souls. This world needs Jesus.”
This was nowhere near the conversation I wanted to be having on a Saturday afternoon. I tried to imagine how crisp and cold Brannigan’s keg beer would be. My mom would have to drive us back, because the way it was going now, I was planning on getting blitzed.
Cars and trucks filled the street outside Brannigan’s house when we pulled up. When I got out the smell of burning meat and kids’ screaming filled the air. As a smoke eater you get used to that kind of thing but it was usually in a completely different context.
“Now you stay away from any red meat, Carl,” my mom said as Daddy rolled out of the van and onto the sidewalk. “You don’t want your gout acting up.”
“Woman, I’ve lived long enough to have earned the right to eat what I want.”
Rather than stay around listening to a five-minute argument, I shoved my hands into my jeans pockets and trudged toward Brannigan’s backyard.
Chief was at the grill, tongs in one hand and a plastic cup in the other while he talked to Afu and Harribow. Everyone was wearing polo shirts or tank tops. It was kind of weird to see us all together outside of uniform, even though I hung out with one or two of them off duty.
Brannigan’s adopted daughter, Bethany, and a few other kids were chasing their robot dog around the party. The dog’s name was Kenji and he only spoke Korean, but he was more faithful than any biological pet I’d ever met. And given that real dogs couldn’t speak English either, it wasn’t that big of a deal not to understand what he was saying. But I’d recently installed an automatic translation app onto my holoreader for just such an occasion.
Brannigan’s wife, Sherry, walked out of the house with a tray of deviled eggs – there wouldn’t be enough for everybody, given that all chicken eggs came from one of the farming skyscrapers downtown, and every citizen of Parthenon City was only allowed a dozen a week. These farms of glass and steel were the only way to get fresh produce and non-chemically-created animal products in a country with toxic soil and nothing but ashes covering the ground. Part of me felt bad for the cows and chickens stuffed on each floor, but the greater part of me would be pissed if I didn’t get a burger every once in a while.
Sherry placed the tray of eggs onto a long table that had been covered with a cheap red cloth and other trays of food. Above the table, a holobanner flickered in the sunlight, saying, “Thanks, Ash Kickers!”
Goddamn it.
I walked over to Sherry. “Need help with anything?”
Her red and gray hair swung over her shoulder when she turned to smile and hug me. “Hey, Tamerica! No, I’ve pretty much got everything taken care of. Get yourself a drink. Keg and cups are at the end of the table there. As soon as Cole is done taking his sweet time at the grill, we should be ready to eat.”
“I’m definitely hitting the keg.” I gestured my head toward Mama and Daddy making their way into the backyard. “My parents came with.”
“That’s great!” She spun away from me as if a spider had bitten her on the ass. “Bethany! Stop riding Kenji like a horse and go wash your hands.”
Little Brannigan, with fist raised to the sky as she galloped around the yard on the back of her metal steed, jumped off with a malicious laugh and ran into the house.
Back to me, Sherry grinned, as happy as she could be, and said, “I love being a mom.”
At the keg, the ice-cold beer filled my cup – a golden brown with beautiful foam. Chief had gotten the good stuff. I stood there sipping on it while I got a lay of the land, keeping back before I had to start mingling with people I didn’t feel like talking to, or having to explain my parents.
Patrice hadn’t shown up yet. For the last few days, I’d been calling Yolanda almost constantly to see if my driver was back to her old crazy self. Yolanda was so good natured, she would have never come right out and told me to shut the hell up and let her do her job, but when she started rattling off figures and million- dollar words in reference to Patrice’s condition, I knew I’d bugged her about it enough. I just told Yolanda to call me when things had gotten better.
She never called me.
I tried not to worry. I sold myself on the notion it was because Yolanda had forgotten. Knowing Patrice, my driver would probably want to make a big entrance at the barbecue – like popping out of a cake. But I didn’t see any over-sized baked goods either.
Harribow was a few feet away, animated hands in the air as he talked to Naveena, who was looking at the ground and nodding.
“I read that New York and Boston have brought in the Ne
w US Army to handle the scalies,” he said. “They won’t have smoke eaters anymore.”
“I can’t see that happening,” said Naveena. “Not here.”
I couldn’t either. Soldier girls and boys had their shot on E-Day, and they let us down. You can’t replace an ass-kicking municipal force that can breathe dragon smoke with a bunch of messy loose-cannons more accustomed to shooting other people. It’d be like sending a cop to get a cat out of a tree. Firefighters have ladders, the police have guns. Both tools can provide a way to put a feline on the ground, but in drastically different conditions.
A slight bump against my thigh got me to look down. Kenji sat there with his rubber tongue dangling out of the side of his metal mouth; his body was gray and painted with polka dots like a Dalmatian. He happily barked once and the dark screen above his nose displayed hearts and shimmering digital blue irises.
I patted him on the head, because what else do you do to an excited dog sitting in front of you, metal or otherwise.
“Moduga sul-e chwihaeissda!” he said.
My holoreader instantly spoke to translate. “Everyone is getting drunk!”
“Not everyone,” I told Kenji. I raised my cup. “Not yet.”
Kenji was a regular at headquarters. Brannigan liked to take him along on big calls, especially dragon-caused building collapses. You never knew if someone was trapped, and the dog also helped calm down scared kids.
The robot’s chest ejected a plastic bone which he snatched up and raised to me. His voice came out clear from behind the fake bone. “Nalang nol-a, tteugeoun geosdeul.”
Translated: “Play with me, hot stuff.”
I laughed, despite being slightly harassed by an AI K9. Throwing the bone across the yard, I wondered what other irreverent bullshit the dog could say. Kenji sprinted across the yard, kicking up mounds of dirt and faux-grass. He had to have been going thirty miles an hour.
“Kenji, slow the fuck down!” Brannigan shouted at his dog, before looking around to see if Sherry had heard him cuss in front of their guests.
My mama headed over to coo over the kids. Daddy was wheeling up to the grill to park beside Chief.