Smoke Eaters

by Sean Grigsby

  A black woman in a tank top said, “I bet it’s all that snow. The dragons don’t like it.”

  The reporter’s voice cut in, saying, “Mayor Rogola recently released this video, explaining his take on the situation.”

  Rogola’s ugly mug floated from my holoreader. “We need to put America and Parthenon City first. Whether Canada has something or not, it doesn’t matter. We need to take care of things ourselves. I am the only one who knows how to move forward. Droids are the best–”

  I turned off my holoreader, couldn’t listen to another damn word. The quiet of my house, the wood settling with the occasional creak, the sound of Kenji humming next to me, was way more comforting. I cracked open the bourbon and reminisced about all the memories Sherry and I had made in that house. How many more there could be. Maybe a red-haired little girl running through the halls.

  That was the last night I stayed in that house. And it was on the couch.

  Chapter 4

  Sherry had already left for work when I woke up the next morning. I brewed an entire pot of coffee with the intention of drinking every last drop by myself. While the coffee dripped (all our advances in society and we still had to wait), I grabbed my holoreader and Donahue’s business card.

  As the old advice suggests, I’d slept on it, and decided that I didn’t want my marriage to end over some job opportunity. Boiled down, that’s what it was.

  I’d done my time. Society owed me for thirty years of carrying morbidly obese people out of houses full of hoarded junk, for waking up at three in the morning because someone’s knee ached, for seeing death more and more increasingly over time. I was done, and that’s what I’d tell the smoke eaters.

  My finger hovered over the first digit in Donahue’s number when the holoreader rang.

  The caller ID said “unknown.”

  I hit the button to answer the call with audio only. It was quickly overridden. I hate when people do that.

  “Brannigan.” It was the floating, holographic head of my battalion chief, Tom Elwood, looking to be in as shitty a mood as ever – wide nostrils and ruffled, white mustache. “You must have really screwed the pooch yesterday. You need to get downtown. Right now.”

  I wasn’t going to lie down and take that. “I’m off the clock. You called on a restricted number?”

  “You wouldn’t have answered otherwise.”

  He had me there. “Well, I already told you everything yesterday.”

  “You’re not coming to see me, you cocky son of a bitch. The mayor wants you in his office, like yesterday.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. But you shut up and listen and do what he says. If this makes me look bad, I will ruin your retirement in every way I can.”

  Parthenon City, Ohio, hadn’t been attacked by dragons since the first scaly emergence, what everyone began calling E-Day. I guess D-Day was taken. Sherry and I were visiting family in rural Minnesota, a coincidence that still plagues my mind. Sherry was thankful I hadn’t been on duty, but I wished I could have been with my brother and sister firefighters that day. Maybe some of them would still be alive.

  In any case, the city put a ton of money into making downtown “dragonproof,” which drove real estate sky high. I don’t think they did anything different besides slap a few safety stickers on stuff. Those who couldn’t afford big-city living had to make do in the suburbs scattered across the ashen wastes, or in the more rundown parts of Parthenon, where some joked that a dragon would be an improvement.

  I’ve always been a firm believer in cause and effect. Things don’t just happen without reason. The scalies didn’t just decide to quit hiding underground and pop out to say hello. Thing is, the dragon emergence was only the most recent calamity that struck our planet. What do they say about things happening in threes? First it was the earthquakes. They weren’t huge, but they happened all over the globe. I can still feel phantom quakes when I walk down the street sometimes.

  Our part of the country was fortunate not to be close to a fault line. We lost most of the west coast to the Pacific, and I heard Japan had split in half.

  Then the dragons hit us.

  It was chaos. The world governments went to pot, only some of them maintaining the illusion of control. Most Americans huddled toward the major cities, and normally that would seem like a bad idea, but I guess they figured there was safety in numbers.

  Each US city became its own little nation in a way, abiding by its own laws and way of life, even though nothing was ever made official. Besides, calling it the United City States of America was more than a mouthful, and it would be too much work to change the flag and all that government stationery.

  Farm highrises were built to grow crops and raise livestock indoors. Soon, the ashen land between the cities was abandoned and left to time and dust and rednecks. Sometimes I would imagine scavengers and marauders flying in aircars over the wastes like some bad apocalyptic movie. But it hadn’t really been an apocalypse. People were still living and surviving, being kind to one another. It was just a change in scenery, and eventually the earthquakes became rarer.

  Any time there’s a tragedy, people look for someone to blame. Well, our glorious leader, Mayor Rogola, decided that the fire department would be the first place to direct everyone’s extended fingers. He said we had been ill-prepared to face these attacks.

  You know, because ancient monsters crawling out of the ground to scorch a Wal-Mart is something we’d been training for.

  The city took our pension to help fund the effort to rebuild and fortify the city. The smoke eaters were placed under the umbrella of the fire department – presumably for budget reasons – even though they had complete autonomy. After the active dragons were hunted down – only about fifty in our state – all that was left to do was wait for a dragon to rear its ugly head. The smoke eaters had some classified tech to monitor seismic activity. And we firefighters just had to be good little boys and girls, transporting people to the hospital and putting water on the occasional conflagration.

  All this lowered my opinion of city hall and Mayor Rogola to even less than it had been before the scaly crisis. And now I was at the hub of my hatred, sitting in a leather chair that smelled brand new, listening to the Muzak version of a tune I was ninety-nine percent sure was a heavy metal song, and watching the receptionist exhale multicolored bubbles after taking hits from her bubble vape.

  It amazed me how human beings would continue to invent strange things to put in their mouths for no purpose.

  After the second pass through a six month-old gossip holo-magazine, I stood up. “I’m leaving.”

  The receptionist had been in the middle of blowing a ridiculously large, green bubble that burst when I’d spoken. “Let me check with him again,” she said with a huff.

  This was a power play on the part of the mayor. He’d had my chief rush me here, only to keep me waiting. Any other person would have been fidgeting and wondering why they were there to begin with. Not I, said the cat. I’d run out of fucks to give.

  “He’ll see you now,” the receptionist said.

  Imagine that.

  The receptionist pointed toward the large door behind her desk as she sucked up a blue bubble from her nicotine vape.

  I went in without knocking. A skinny man with glasses and a bowtie jumped at my entrance, shaking as if I was a dragon. I didn’t know who the guy was. He stood at the front of the mayor’s desk holding a holoreader, carrying the weak obedience of an assistant.

  Mayor Rogola sat at his desk, greasy black hair split down the middle, hunched over and leaning on crossed arms. My body language book would have said he wasn’t happy to see me. His frown made him look just like the shī, Chinese guardian lion statues, at either side of his desk.

  “So you’re Captain Brannigan,” Rogola said.

  I nodded to him. “And you are?”

  Rogola turned to the skinny assistant, who dropped his jaw and shivered even more. Then, going from a stern r
onin to a happy monk, the mayor laughed in a slow, gravely bark. “He’s funny, Jenkins.”

  Jenkins didn’t look so sure, relaxing his quaking, but keeping his eyes wide.

  I once saw a video on the Feed of a dragon that had emerged in the middle of an emu farm. Jenkins looked just like one of those birds spazzing out before getting torched and eaten.

  “Have a seat,” the mayor said.

  I shrugged and took the one farthest from Jenkins.

  “Funny, yes, that’s you.” Rogola ran his tongue behind his upper lip. “That must be what you were going for yesterday. When you spoke to the man with the fire droids. Right?”

  So that’s what this is about.

  I smiled. “It was such a chaotic scene, I don’t remember what I said.”

  Rogola pointed to Jenkins, but kept his eyes on me.

  The assistant poked his holoreader. “Captain Brannigan stated, ‘The mayor can eat a dick.’”

  Mayor Rogola raised an eyebrow as Jenkins turned red and blinked his eyes at hummingbird speed.

  “Am I in trouble?” I was ready for another shit sandwich to swallow.

  Rogola sniffed. “You’re here because you interfered with city property. I wanted those droids tested in a real fire situation.”

  “Those droids don’t belong on a fire scene, much less one with a dragon.”

  “Don’t you think, Captain Brannigan, that if you’d told your crew to back out of that house and let the droids do their job, your coworkers would still be alive?”

  This asshole had gone below the belt.

  “We call each other brothers and sisters,” I said. “So the loss hits me more than if it was just a ‘coworker.’ And my point is that it’s not the droids’ job in the first place. You already took our pension away. Now you want to take our careers?”

  Rogola turned to Jenkins. “Give us a moment alone.”

  With a nod, Jenkins left the room.

  “That’s what guys like you don’t understand,” I continued. “A robot can’t make the tough decisions in the heat of the moment. Have you even been out of your office in the last few years? Do you do anything but fill the Feed with your bullshit? Or are you too much of a coward to do the right thing?”

  All of the mayor’s appearances on TV had been from his office or via hologram. Rumor was the dragons had turned him into an agoraphobic. He never left. I didn’t mind making cracks that went below the belt either.

  “See these?” Rogola pointed to the shī statues.

  “I know what they are.”

  “They’re a family heirloom.”

  “I thought Rogola was Italian or something.”

  The mayor groaned. “My mother’s parents were from China. They believed these guard lions warded off evil spirits.”

  “Is that what you think the dragons are?”

  “I know what the wraiths are.” He soured his face as if he’d bitten into a lemon.

  The rumors just might have been true.

  “Sometimes it’s best to hang up your helmet and let others do the guarding,” Rogola said. “Do you see what I mean?”

  “What do you want from me?” I yawned. “I’ve got a long day of doing nothing ahead of me.”

  “I wanted you fired,” Rogola said.

  I thinned my eyes. “For the droid thing?”

  “I don’t like bumps in my road. You represent everything holding this city back. You hold on to tradition like a life preserver and you can’t see that your time is done. But it looks like the smoke eaters want you. So, I can’t interfere.”

  “Well, they do love to help the elderly. But I was retiring anyway. Firing me would have just simplified things.”

  “Yes,” the mayor nodded. “But that other captain who was there at the fire. He was hoping for a few more years of pay.”

  Truck 1’s captain, the guy who’d saved my life. Rogola, the prick, wouldn’t dare lay him off.

  “You had him fired?”

  “I can’t make Donahue do anything, but your current fire chief works directly for me, and does what I tell him. If you want to blame anyone, blame yourself.”

  I stood up, ready to flip the desk. “You asshole! He did nothing wrong.”

  Rogola laughed. “Let me give you some free advice, Brannigan. Don’t become a smoke eater. Their short time is over just like any other firefighter. The people of this state are tired of losing their homes because of such slow response. Technology and society are moving forward. Your kind is old news. We can save money and lives by using droids instead of grumpy old men like you.”

  “Let me give you something for free.” I held up both of my middle fingers and backed toward the door.

  Rogola grinned from his seat and waved goodbye.

  Back in my truck, I pulled out my holoreader and Donahue’s card.

  “Chief D,” he answered.

  “I’m in. But only on one condition.”

  “Hello to you, too, Brannigan. Go on. I’m listening.”

  “At the fire department, get Truck 1’s captain his job back. You do that, and I’ll slay any damn dragon you want.”

  Donahue laughed on the other end. “Is that all?”

  Chapter 5

  Donahue said he’d send some smoke eaters to retrieve me, and that I wouldn’t need my truck. So I left it at city hall.

  There was someone I needed to see, so I asked them to pick me up at my DeShawn’s house. I gave Donahue the address and he told me to be ready by three o’clock.

  I tried calling Sherry, but she didn’t answer.

  Taking the hover bus was always something I avoided. It smelled, and the other people onboard would constantly hack into their facemasks or argue about what a wraith was made of. Or there’d be some guy blowing a bubble vape – there was one in every crowd. That day’s two o’clock bus to the south side of town was sparse though, and it gave me plenty of time to think.

  Maybe some coughing, bubble-blowing companionship wouldn’t have been half bad.

  After a while of looking out the window at the ash blowing in like a blizzard, I changed my gaze to the advertisements posted along the bus’s ceiling.

  Dirt won’t settle when you leave it to a man of metal!

  Stop by the Droid Factory today to talk about payment plans.

  Everyone can afford some help around the house.

  Droids make life easier!

  What the fuck was this? The 1960s?

  Rogola had secured a deal for the Droid Factory to be the sole provider of municipal droids. That was just fine for the company, since most of Parthenon City’s citizens couldn’t afford a droid, or were too creeped out by the bastards to allow one in their home. Of course, there was the offhand socialite who owned a droid butler.

  I could just feel the singularity on the horizon, when that socialite would wake up to find a metal hand squeezing the pearls around her neck.

  Rogola liked to spout about how he wanted the best for the city, yadda yadda yadda. It was all about money, and that meant it was ultimately about power. Sniveling bastard couldn’t leave his office, so he’d probably get some kind of hero hard-on by replacing all of us with his robots.

  DeShawn was single and lived in a duplex in a part of the city where the ash only blew in every other week. When I pulled up, an older black woman wearing a face mask was hugging him in the doorway, patting his back and refusing to let go. I recognized her as Mama P – I never found out what the P stood for.

  When I walked up to the edge of the driveway, Mama P turned to give me the evil eye.

  DeShawn smiled, embarrassed, and raised his hand in greeting. “What’s up, dub?”

  “I’m telling you,” Mama P said to DeShawn, “I can stay here for awhile. So you can get better.”

  DeShawn shook his head. “Go on home, Mama. I’ll be fine.”

  She sighed and turned away. When we crossed paths in the middle of the walkway, Mama P grabbed my arm. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Mama,” DeShaw
n called from the door.

  Mama P shook her head. “You should have known there was a dragon in there. My boy almost died because of you.”

  She bent over in a coughing fit, holding a hand up that told me to stay back.

  My heart, guts, and every other organ sank to the ground. If it had been the mayor or my battalion chief, hell, maybe even Sherry, I would have smarted off and walked away, knowing I was justified. But not with DeShawn’s mother. I guess on some level, I knew she was right.

  “Captain saved my life, Mama,” DeShawn said. “Don’t blame him.”

  “I’m sorry,” was all I was able to say to Mama P.

  She stared up at me with watery eyes and pocked, aged skin. She pulled down her mask, and when she pursed her lips it looked like she was gearing up for an extended ass-chewing. Instead, she let go of my arm, walked off to her tiny, spherical smartcar, and told the vehicle, “Home.”

  It zoomed away.

  “Don’t mind her, Cap.” DeShawn said.

  I waved my hand, like brushing away dirt. “Nothing to mind, dub. She has a right to be upset.”

  DeShawn had a good heart, and I didn’t want to put him between his captain and his mother. Whenever there was the typical station drama at our firehouse – arguments about someone’s cheeseburger getting eaten or a lazy shift not pulling their weight – it would upset DeShawn to the point he would shut down and stay quiet for a few days, no matter what I said to cheer him up. He liked everybody and only wanted the same in return.

  “I wanted to come by and check on you,” I said.

  He smiled. “Thanks. There was something I wanted to tell you anyway.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  “Come on in.” He held the door for me.

  Inside, he’d turned on every light and had set up dozens of extra lamps that hadn’t been there the last time I’d visited. I don’t think I could have cast a shadow if I tried.

  “Sorry about all the lights,” DeShawn said. A box of folded firefighter-related t-shirts sat on the couch, and he was quick to hoist it into his arms. “Go ahead and have a seat. Can I get you a drink or something?”