by Sean Grigsby
Afu, seeing my father on the way, decided to move on to another part of the back yard. He’d always thought my dad hated him, but I’d never heard my father say anything about Afu one way or the other, or any of my boyfriends for that matter. He just let me wade through my own relationships by myself and then listened to me gripe or cry when they didn’t work out.
I sighed and downed my beer. Here we go.
“That’s not dragon meat you’re cooking is it?” Daddy asked.
Brannigan, of course, laughed. But you could never tell if my daddy was joking or not, especially when it came to dragons or smoke eaters.
Chief held up a piece of meat that dripped red juice. “City-grown rib eyes. Might as well chew on one of my wife’s old baseballs, but old habits die hard. Scalies have ruined enough of this country already. I’ll be damned if they take my cookouts from me.”
“I hear that,” Daddy said, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “Save one of the big ones for me, but don’t tell my Rebecca.”
Brannigan nodded, the firm, between-us-men kind of head movement. “How are you, Carl? That wheelie box working out okay? Watch when you nod or move your head. I banged my chin more than twice. And I’m not going to lie, I still have nightmares about being stuck in it, but it’s good you can get in and out as you please.”
“I like that I only have to blink to change the TV channels.” Daddy smiled then, as if he’d been holding it in and finally relented to having a good time.
All older people still called the Feed ‘TV.’ And my dad didn’t even need to blink to change the Feed stations, he just thought he did, and I’d gotten tired of telling him otherwise.
“Glad you made it, Williams,” Brannigan said as I walked up.
“Beer is good,” I said.
My daddy grunted. “Don’t get messy around these folks, Tammy.”
I tossed Brannigan wide eyes and tight lips, a visual SOS, as I finished off what was left in my cup.
“Hey, Carl,” Brannigan said. “Why don’t you go find a place to park? This should be done in a minute or two and I’ll make sure Sherry distracts Rebecca so you can eat your meat in peace.”
Daddy smiled and zoomed off. “All right, then.”
“Thanks,” I told Brannigan when we were alone.
“It’s a strange thing being a parent,” he said. “You want your kids to be their own person, but you also want to influence them enough to not fuck up their life.”
I pointed to Bethany, who picked up a deviled egg and fast-balled it into another kid’s face. “You seem to be doing okay with it.”
“Yeah, one can only hope.”
“Is Patrice coming?” I asked.
Brannigan dropped the ribeye he’d been tonging and sighed. “I talked to Yolanda just before you showed up. She’s still not any better.”
I chunked my empty plastic cup into a trash can. “Thanks, for the invite, Chief, but I’ve got to go.”
“Hold your damn horses.” Brannigan slammed the grill lid closed. “You can’t do anything better than the propellerheads can. I get it, you feel responsible, but you’re not.”
“I don’t feel right, drinking beer and eating steaks while she’s burning up in a sick bed. You said she’d be better. All of you. What’s going on?”
Brannigan shrugged, shook his head, a man with no answers. “Yolanda said the curate isn’t taking. They’re filling Johnson with fluids and trying their best to keep her fever down, but nothing they do is working.”
I glanced at my parents – Daddy at the end of the picnic table, smiling with the lid of his psy-roll opened like an old, gull wing car door, my mom bouncing a kid on her lap.
“I’ll be back in a few to pick up my parents,” I said.
Brannigan nodded. “Okay, Williams. You’re a good captain.”
When I turned toward the exit, a droid was walking in to the party.
“What the fuck,” Brannigan said behind me.
Body painted to make it look like it wore a twopiece suit, the droid scanned the area with its head swiveling left to right – until it spotted me and Brannigan. Its leg hydraulics hissed as it lumbered over to the grill. I backed up and Brannigan lifted his grilling tongs like a weapon.
When the droid’s blaring blue eyes zeroed in on me, it spoke with a digital Australian twang. “Captain Tamerica Williams.”
Droids could be programmed to know exactly who was who, like walking societal archives. There weren’t that many people left in Ohio to sort through, and the droid could scan through a million records a second.
The droid stood there for a moment, as if waiting for me to confirm.
“Yeah?” I said.
A compartment ejected from the droid’s leg, where a gun would have been holstered. Brannigan threw an arm across me and slapped the droid across the metal jaw with his tongs.
The droid, not fazed at all, besides steak juice splattered across its flat face, removed a stack of plastic paper from its leg compartment and handed the bundle to me.
“You’ve been served,” the droid said in a cheerful voice, before turning around and leaving the barbecue with heavy, clanking steps.
And that’s when I remembered something. “Mother of fuck,” I muttered, not caring if my mama or daddy heard. With all the chaos the phoenix had brought, Patrice getting sick, it had slipped my mind completely.
I’d never turned in the wraith I’d caught in Sandusky. It was still in my remote.
CHAPTER 15
I should have been sitting beside Patrice, to be the first person to apologize for what she’d been through. Yolanda had done me a solid, though, setting up a live feed camera in the sick lab so I could keep an eye on Patrice through my holoreader. I’d been checking the camera at least twice every thirty minutes. Propellerheads would come in, check her vitals and mess with a computer in the room. Patrice just laid there.
It would still be better to be there in person.
But that’s the thing about trying to work as a professional club DJ – if you cancel a gig, you’re inevitably cancelling your career. So, waiting for my turn in the DJ booth, I sat my ass down on a stool at the neon-lit bar, between a group of loud and obnoxious patrons who were blowing glowing bubbles into the air after every hit from their vapes. One neon yellow boil floated too close to my face and I popped it with a stab of my finger.
I was surrounded by assholes and a thumping bass track.
The droid at Brannigan’s party had served me a subpoena to appear before a hearing with the mayor of Parthenon City, the families of the deceased “volunteer smoke eaters” and both sides’ legal representation. They were suing for wrongful death due to my negligence and also to have Mr Wilkins’ wraith returned to them.
They’d gotten a copy of my incident report, so there was no denying that I’d trapped the wraith. But I never mentioned turning it in to one of the enclosures. For all they knew, Wilkins was floating around with other ghastly ghouls like himself, protecting Parthenon City with their electric glow.
So do I own up and tell them I still have the wraith? Or do I keep it my little secret?
The longer I sat on it, the higher chance my ass would be in a lot more trouble than it already was.
After the droid left the barbecue, Chief Brannigan had told me a hundred times that I shouldn’t let it worry me. That I’d done nothing wrong and it would be crazy to hand over wraiths to the public. No judge would allow it. But he didn’t know I still had it in my possession either.
He was trying to make me feel better, but the thing about people offering condolences and kind words is that it was more for the speaker than the intended recipient. When someone’s in a real pit, no one can say a damned thing to get them out. They have to build their own ladder and take each rung when they’re good and ready.
And I was hip-high in shit, thank you very much.
The subpoena droid had found me pretty quickly. It first stopped by headquarters and the helpful smokies who’d been on shift tol
d it about Brannigan’s barbecue. My co-workers hadn’t even thought to warn me ahead of time. The on-duty folks probably just thought the droid was delivering a package or something. Then again, I thought a droid wearing a painted-on suit and riding in a smart car should have tipped them off.
It was a great idea, though, using a droid to serve subpoenas.
Most people, angry at receiving a summons, would think twice about punching a metal face, and those who might say fuck it and take a swing anyway would only break their hand in the attempt. Outside of that, the bot could take any onslaught of fourletter words in absence of fists.
“You wanna dance?”
I’d been hunched over the bar, staring at the top of my drink, when someone touched my shoulder and spoke into my ear. When I turned around, a blonde woman stood there, wearing a light-up tank top. She put her hand on my forearm as she moved her hips to the music.
“I would destroy you on the dance floor.” I gently removed her hand. “Besides, I’m the next up in the DJ booth.”
“Oh!” She removed a beer bottle she’d been keeping in the back of her white jeans and downed what was left. “Can you play me a song? I want to hear Melting Thunder.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Something I’d learned quickly, doing these gigs, was that people have horrible taste in music, but they’re also contributing to your pay for the night. You don’t want to say no, but you also don’t want to lie to them. So, you saw what you could do, and I saw myself not ever playing the cocked-up song she’d requested.
“You know,” she said, breathing alcoholic funk in my face, “I’ve always wanted to be a DJ. Maybe you can teach me.”
“DJing is nothing,” I said. “You have a more impressive talent.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, you can apparently pull beer bottles out of your ass.”
My holoreader vibrated in my pocket. Afu was calling. I’d never been happier to see his name in digital green.
“Nice knowing you,” I told Drunk Becky, and stepped over to a corner to hear better.
“I’m at the door,” Afu said. “Can you get me inside?”
I put a finger in my free ear. “You break your legs or something?”
“Guy at the door says the place is at capacity.”
I turned and looked at the crowd. There was barely enough room to scratch your ass let alone dance. I wasn’t about to tell Afu he should have gotten there earlier and that he was on his own. No, I wanted him there with me. Not as an ex-boyfriend, and it wasn’t even because he was a fellow smoke eater. I wanted him with me as a reverse wingman – someone to help keep people away from me. He’d also be the voice of reason, encouraging me to get up on the decks and kill it, to do it for Patrice if that’s what it took to get me through the night.
“I’ll be right there.”
I pushed my way through the gyrating horde, shoving a path to the beat of music that sounded like lasers getting strangled by cats. DJ Asmodeus was spinning at the moment and he liked to play bangers that had the ambience of stereotyped 80s dance hits – and I mean the 1980s.
I was almost to the door when a sweaty man bumped into me, nearly causing me to set off a domino effect of dancing idiots.
“Watch it, man,” I said.
The guy was coated in sweat, soaking his clothes. Even under the spastic flash of laser lights, I could see he was as pale as a leviathan’s underside. He’d probably taken too much of whatever substance they were passing around the club. This wasn’t a spark high, this was something a lot worse.
“You okay?” I asked. “Maybe you should go home.”
He ground his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut, as if he was losing a deadly battle with constipation. “Ph… phoenix.”
“What did you say?”
He turned and disappeared into the crowd.
I must have been hearing things. Some mild form of PTSD or something. A flashback. No one knew about the phoenix – no one outside my pending litigation, anyway. And it was so loud in here, there was no telling what he’d said. I shook it off and pushed my way to the front door.
Outside, Afu was at the front of a line of people who had taken to drinking from flasks previously hidden in their purses, or playing on their holoreader. The man guarding the door was dwarfed by Afu. I could tell it bugged the bouncer to have to turn away someone who could have easily thrown him into Canada, because he was looking anywhere but at the smiling Polynesian in front of him.
I tapped the guy on the shoulder. “Big one is with me.”
“Oh, good,” he said, releasing the breath he’d been holding. He relaxed his puffed out chest, waving Afu in as he nervously scratched his three-day beard shadow. “Enjoy yourself, pal.”
“He just call me ‘pal?’” Afu asked as we squeezed back inside.
“Maybe he can call you sweetheart. Take you to the VIP area for some necking.”
Afu laughed. “Beard scruff breaks my skin out.”
The people in the line outside began shouting complaints, and I felt bad that the doorman had traded a giant for an angry band of club-hopping mercenaries.
I led Afu to the barstool I’d been sitting on, but Drunk Becky had taken it.
“You brought the big guns,” she said, looking Afu up and down.
“And I bet you have a bull’s-eye tattooed on you somewhere.” I turned to Afu. “You can hang out here. I go on in about,” I checked my holoreader’s clock, “five minutes.”
Drunk Becky clung to Afu’s arm like a piece of unwanted jewelry. “What’s your name?”
“He’s mine,” I said.
Afu snapped his head to me, raising an eyebrow so sharply it could have flown off.
“I mean, he’s with me,” I said.
Before shit got any more awkward, I stomped off to the DJ booth and secured myself behind its short swinging door. Squatting in a corner, I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. A club is not the most conducive environment for meditation, but if I didn’t quit thinking about my personal shit, I’d flub the music.
“Crowd is jumping!” DJ Asmodeus said, thumbing toward the dance floor. “I’m ready for you to mix in if you’re ready.”
He hadn’t taken off his wireless headphones – or sunglasses, for some dumb reason – so I just gave him the OK sign. Asmodeus was a thin white dude I knew almost nothing about, not even his real name, but he looked like the kind of guy who sold dragon insurance during the day.
My smoke eater power suit stood in the corner, and I stepped into it before I talked myself out of the gig. It wasn’t technically against the rules to use smokie equipment for outside endeavors, but I wasn’t about to advertise it in a department newsletter. The suit was all for show. It looked cool and menacing and the laser lights looked awesome bouncing off of the green metal.
As I turned on my DJ deck and connected it to my holoreader, Asmodeus introduced me.
“All right, party people! We’re out here making Summer 2123 the best ever. Next up is one of your favorites. Let me hear you make some noise for Funky! Cold! Medea!”
No, I didn’t pick that name. I’d been happy to spin using the name my mama gave me, but the club owner had suggested it because it sounded cool – only to him – and it was the name of the woman from Greek myth who’d put a dragon to sleep so Jason could steal the Golden Fleece.
The crowd roared, though, when I stepped up and lifted two armored fists into the air. I jumped onto Asmodeus’s last track with a thumping, steady beat – I liked mixing old school hip-hop with electronica – and turned on the hologram machine.
Two digital blue dragons swirled through the crowd and the people lost their minds. It was my signature, probably what drew a lot of the crowd out. Who could resist a real-life smoke eater playing tracks while ghostly, electric dragons danced on the floor beside you? Maybe that was another thing holding me back from leaving the dragon-catching business. I was scared that my pull as a DJ would die with it. I wanted to be a DJ, no
t a smoke eater who happened to play music every other weekend.
Through a few songs, I glanced over at Afu at the bar. Drunk Becky was hanging onto him talking his ear off, but he kept his eyes and bobbing head toward me. I was surprised Becky hadn’t tried her magicbeer-appearing trick on him.
Goddamn it, why did I care?
I diverted my gaze to the mass of people churning five feet below on the dance floor. The sweaty drughead who’d bumped into me earlier shuffled, zombie-like, through gyrating hips and flapping elbows. His skin looked a dozen shades worse than before. Someone was definitely not having a good time.
The crowd swallowed him. Someone yelled indiscernible words from the dance floor, and then flames exploded in the middle of the crowd.
I immediately stopped the music, but the sound of screams replaced it in equal volume. It was like watching eels squirm in a drained fish tank. None of them could find space to run, so a few of them shoved others down to make room. At least three people were on fire, and everyone else was trying like hell to get away from them.
Holy shit. The flames were neon yellow.
I leapt over the DJ booth, leaving Asmodeus to cower in the corner. People pelted against my suit like fleshy bullets. To my right, Afu was pushing in from the outer ring of the fleeing crowd with a huge bucket that sloshed with liquid and chunks of ice. He’d made it only a few feet when someone bumped into his back, causing him to toss the bucket.
The water hit most of its mark but it did nothing to the flames. In fact, the fire was rising higher, almost touching the ceiling. In no time, the entire top of the club would be engulfed, the smoke would fill the room, and all the people inside would be incinerated, whether they could breathe smoke or not.
Fuck that.
I raised my foam gun into the air, hoping the arc would be high enough to coat the people who’d caught fire and prevent anyone else from ending up the same way. The sticky goop shot into the air and rained onto the flames. A few of the dancers trying to escape slipped on the foam and dropped to the floor. I couldn’t help that. Besides, it was a shit ton better than catching fire.