Smoke Eaters

by Sean Grigsby

  “What do they have you doing?”

  Her interest took me by surprise. I’d fully expected her to explode and berate me about being away from home.

  I was about to tell her about the poppers at Buzzard’s Roost, but instead I said, “It’s been hell. I’ve done more pushups and other… strains I never thought I’d have to mess with. I’m feeling my age.”

  “Are there women there?”

  I turned again to Yolanda, who looked up from her work to smile briefly. “There are a few, yes. One of them is my instructor. She’s the one who made me do all the pushups.”

  Sherry made some kind of humming noise, almost a laugh. “Well, you need a woman to put you in your place.”

  “Don’t I know it?” I stood there for a second with my eyes thinned. “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah,” Sherry said with a sigh. “I’m still mad at you. Fixing the upstairs window and buying me a holostereo helps, but it’s not a cure.”

  “Say what?”

  A holostereo was one of the hottest new products in stores. A crazy Finnish invention that played music you selected off the Feed, but it also projected holograms of the artist, putting a concert right in your living room, or a digital dance floor complete with a crowd of partiers for when you wanted to go clubbing in the comfort of your pajamas. Movies would come to life in front of you. The price was also astronomical and not anywhere close to my budget’s orbit.

  “The delivery men and the repair guy just left,” Sherry said. “I’m going to try out the holostereo here in a minute. You think Kenji can dance?”

  “I don’t… What’s going on?”

  “I’m trying to enjoy the makeup presents you got me, dum-dum.” She said it like I was the one confused.

  Maybe I can help you get out of the doghouse somehow, Donahue had said.

  I looked up to the empty window, where Donahue and I had been talking and overlooking Yolanda’s work.

  No reason not to play along. After all, it was my ass Sherry would have otherwise been chewing on. “I hope you like it,” I said. “I love you.”

  “Love you!” She hung up.

  I stared at Yolanda’s holoreader for a few seconds, confused as hell.

  “All done?’ Yolanda said, putting the headphones around her neck.

  “Yeah, thanks.” I returned her holoreader and then pointed to the dead dragon. “Hey, is it OK if… I touch it?”

  “Sure.”

  I ran my hand along the tough scales, keeping away from the gash made by Naveena’s sword. The Fafnir’s tail hung off the slab and curled into a pile on the floor. When my hand trailed down to the dragon’s side plate, I knocked on it for good luck.

  “Strange, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I still don’t get how these help it move underground.”

  Yolanda frowned. “Some think that.”

  “I guess I’m not the only one who thinks that theory makes no sense.”

  Yolanda brought over a handheld circular saw. “Every time we,” she began cutting around the side plate, splattering dragon flesh, “try to examine one of these,” she directed me to help pull the plate off, “it ends up like this.”

  I didn’t have the benefit of latex gloves, but I helped Yolanda remove the side plate. After we yanked it free, the inside of the Fafnir smoldered; I leaned in and saw only charred bones and ash.

  “What’s that about?” I asked.

  “I’m not entirely sure. It’s almost like a self-destruct mechanism. And I can’t x-ray it, because the plate is so darn tough. It’s impossible. There’s no way of knowing what’s behind the plates. Besides my own crazy theory.”

  I strained with the plate in my hands. “Where do you want this?”

  “Oh,” Yolanda said. “Over there on the counter.”

  Shuffling the whole way, I dropped the plate onto the counter and leaned against it to catch my breath. Glass cubes lay off to the side, with insects frozen in them.

  “What are these?”

  Yolanda picked one up and held it out to me. “Cicadas. Periodical cicadas, to be specific.”

  “You like bugs?”

  “No, I hate the darn things. But that doesn’t mean I don’t find them interesting or less relevant.”

  I studied the glassed cicada, its large wings and ugly red eyes. “I haven’t seen a bug since E-Day.”

  “They’re relevant because I think the dragons follow a similar pattern.”

  “Yeah, both are considered plagues.”

  Yolanda shook her head. “You’re thinking of locusts. Cicadas are completely different. You see, cicadas spend most of their lives underground until they mature and come out to mate.”

  That did sound relevant.

  “But I heard cicadas come around every seventeen years,” I said.

  “Or every thirteen years. It all depends on the brood, and there are at least twenty-three broods of cicada so they can pop up at different times in different areas. But with the dragons, I think it’s more like every seventeen hundred years.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well,” she put a finger to her lips, then said, “Nessie.”

  “As in the Loch Ness Monster?” I cracked a smile.

  “Don’t laugh. It was sighted about fifteen hundred years ago. Last known sighting of something scaly-like. All the dragon stories from before, maybe they were all based on true accounts, but time just buried them in fantasy.”

  I nodded. Yolanda had put a lot of thought into her theories. Having heard the dumbest ideas around the firehouse table and on the Feed, hers were reasonable.

  “So they’ll just go back underground. We just have to wait them out?”

  “I don’t think we have that kind of time. The dragon broods are growing bigger and more destructive. Our seismic monitoring system can barely keep up. Best thing you guys in the field can do is stop the scalies when they emerge, and destroy any eggs before the offspring find their way into the earth.”

  “That sounds exhausting.”

  “Yeah, sometimes the egg teams don’t get to an area in time, especially since wraiths stay around the nests like guard dogs.”

  “So why don’t we find a way to trap wraiths? Get ’em out of the area so dragons don’t destroy any more houses. No mating. No more scalies.”

  Yolanda laughed, sounded like a puppy bark. “Now that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

  “What?” I couldn’t help my smile.

  “That kind of technology doesn’t exist. Wish it did, but it doesn’t. Except maybe in Professor Poltergeist’s made-up world.”

  “Who?

  “Oh, you must have missed that day in class. Here.” She walked over to a filing cabinet and pulled out a small disk. “You can watch this on your holoreader. The Canadians made it. For kids, but it does cover wraiths pretty well. They don’t get into anything too complex, but it’s not like you’re ever going to need it.”

  If it had anything to do with stopping the dragons, I wanted to know about it. When I got hooked on a subject, I absorbed as much information as I could. Ignorant people pissed me off, and I never wanted to be the guy who mindlessly accepted and repeated things he heard off the Feed. Those were Rogola’s constituents. But the contents of that disk scared me. Who knew what kind of weird cult shit the Canucks were teaching their kids? I took it anyway.

  I set the cicada cube down beside the dissected Fafnir side plate. “You said you had a theory about the side plates.”

  “Oh.” Yolanda laughed, embarrassed. “You wouldn’t want to hear about it.”

  “Sure I would. As far as I can tell, you’re the smartest person in the building and maybe the country.”

  She crossed her arms but smiled even bigger. “The others think I’m grasping at straws.”

  “I’m not them.”

  “OK. We were talking about cicadas?”

  I nodded.

  “Cicadas come out of the ground as nymphs, only able to crawl –
dragons are the same way, except they can mate as ‘nymphs’. When a cicada finds a spot to molt, they shed their old exoskeletons and flaunt wings.”

  “Wings?” I asked, hoping she’d said something else.

  Yolanda nodded, completely serious. “Wings.”

  She was right. I didn’t want to hear about it.

  Smoke Eater Headquarters had a hell of a cafeteria. There were no chefs on staff, of course, but their pantries and fridges were fully stocked, and you could eat whatever you wanted as long as you cooked it yourself and cleaned up afterward.

  I made a four-egg omelet with mushrooms, pepperonis, and cheddar cheese. Since they also had a waffle maker and instant batter, I also made a couple – OK, three – waffles with blueberries and whipped cream.

  At my age, I’d eat whatever I damn well pleased.

  I hunted down Sergeant Puck and got a full issue of uniforms: three green duty shirts, two button-up Class A shirts, a few pairs of pants, some damn comfortable boots, and even a couple pairs of green workout shorts.

  Puck then showed me to the commissary to grab some toothpaste and other toiletries on credit. I even found an old paperback book collecting dust in the back of the store. They didn’t know it had been there and gave it to me for free.

  After a long, hot shower by myself, my body was comfortably numb as I plodded down the hall to the dorm room Puck had assigned me. She’d said I would have a roommate. I had guessed as much. In the fire service, bunking together built camaraderie, and was also cheap on the department’s budget.

  I passed Afu in the hall, who fist bumped me before entering his own, separate room. So if Afu wasn’t my roommate…

  Sweet Jesus, don’t let it be Thomlin, I thought.

  I found my room and fumbled with the door’s hand scanner as I balanced my stack of clothes and boots. When I walked in, Naveena stood by a bed in nothing but a sleeveless duty shirt and a pair of red panties.

  “Well, if it isn’t Old Man River.” She gave me her classic smirk, but this time it was different. This time: panties.

  Whatever I said sounded like, “Abudee-abudee-abudee.”

  “You got a problem?” She crossed her arms, and I could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  I shook my head, swallowing, trying to keep my eyes above her neck.

  “Then close the door. Your bed is over there.” She motioned her head toward the already made bed across from hers.

  I threw my clothes on top of the crisp, green blanket before inspecting the room I’d be living in for the foreseeable future, and not looking at my foreseeable roommate. The bare white walls were made from some kind of plastic, not the dirty, pale bricks I remembered from fire academy. A desk stood between beds placed too close together, but there was no other furniture. With all the advances in technology I’d seen over the years, you’d think they could have given us better living quarters.

  Naveena pulled out a holoreader and scooted onto her bed. On her right shoulder, a “Sink or Swim” Maltese cross with crossed lances had been tattooed with indiglow ink, making her arm look like a neon sign.

  “This dorm room is kind of plain, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Donahue believes these rooms should be for studying or sleep. Nothing else.” Naveena didn’t look up from her holoreader.

  I opened the plastic commissary sack and tossed the paperback book onto my pillow.

  Naveena looked up. “What’s that?”

  She rubbed her bare feet together, and I looked away quickly, grabbing the book and holding it up for her to see.

  I’m not a dirty old man, I told myself. I’m not a dirty old man.

  “Old Man’s War,” she read the book’s title, and snorted before returning to her holoreader. The blue, floating letters made her lips sparkle. “How appropriate. A paper book, huh? That thing must be three hundred years old.”

  I flipped to the copyright page. “It was first published in 2005. This edition is from 2085. Found it lying in the back of the commissary.”

  “So you were, what, forty when it first came out?” She smirked.

  “What about you?” I asked. “What are you reading?”

  “The report on a dragon dissection.”

  “The Fafnir?”

  She cocked an eyebrow and tilted her head. “Well, you’re sharp as a tack.”

  “You don’t get this old being a fool.”

  She laughed a little and it made her chest jiggle slightly.

  Why are you looking at her chest? The thought was in Sherry’s voice.

  What the hell was I doing?

  “So…” I cleared my throat, “…do they usually put…” I waved a hand between the two of us “…together?”

  She sighed and dropped her holoreader. “Donahue lets me live here rent free. It works out great, since I don’t have to commute and miss out on any good dragon calls. The only catch is that they sometimes put new recruits in here. I guess they think it helps some rookies get adjusted, and I can impart my wisdom or some shit.”

  I pursed my lips and nodded. “Yeah, that’s good to know and all, but I mean… why put a man and woman in the same room?”

  She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Did you have female firefighters on your crew, in your fire station?”

  “Sure. But I didn’t see them walking around in their underwear. They had their own rooms. Department policy.”

  “Smoke eaters are–”

  “Different,” I finished for her. “Yeah, I know.”

  She tensed the muscles around her eyes. It was scary. “Are you not going to be able to control yourself around me? Are you some kind of rabid dog in heat?”

  “Of course not. I just–”

  “You wouldn’t try to fuck Afu if he was your roommate, would you?”

  I grinned. “The way that dude’s built, I’d be the one trying to fight him off.”

  Naveena didn’t laugh.

  “No,” I said, dropping my smile.

  “So don’t come into my house and judge me for getting comfortable. You’re a guest in here, and I don’t need any lip. Especially from some geriatric rookie who’ll probably get killed soon anyway. Lie down and read your old-ass book or go to sleep. Either way, I don’t want to hear shit out of you for the rest of the night.”

  She picked up her holoreader and covered herself with a blanket.

  I’d been married long enough to know when it was better not to say anything else. So, I lay down and opened my old-ass book.

  The long day and the hell I’d put my body through in Buzzard’s Roost draped over me like a ton of bricks. I read maybe a paragraph in the paperback, about a seventy-five year-old man who joined the space military, before exhaustion dragged me into a deep sleep.

  I dreamed of dragons.

  And panties.

  Chapter 10

  I’d arrived at Smoke Eater Headquarters on Tuesday, and the rest of the week dragged on forever. The next morning in class, Puck handed me a holoreader, like Naveena’s, and told me I had to use my own time to get up to speed with the rest of the class.

  “Will I get kicked out if I fail the test?” I asked her.

  “No one gets kicked out, Brannigan,” she’d said. “Read your contract. And the only test is the dragons you’ll be facing. Pass or fail. I bet you can guess what failing looks like.”

  An image of my burned body impaled on a big scaly’s tooth came to mind.

  Yeah. I’d study my ass off.

  Wednesday was all class time. If a dragon call came in, we were unaware of it. We were just the backup anyway. I’m sure Donahue gave us a day to… well, “relax” wasn’t the right word – my brain was fried from all the scaly knowledge – but a day where we could wear a clean uniform and feel like we were at least a tiny bit closer to knowing what the hell we were doing.

  If I was honest with myself, that popper business was sheer, dumb luck.

  “Who can tell me what the lightning theory is?” Puck asked.

  Williams’
hand shot up. “That dragons have been surviving underground by absorbing energy from lightning strikes.”

  “Very good,” Puck said.

  I raised my hand. “Hold on. What? That makes no sense.”

  “Looks like I have to educate Brannigan on basic science,” Puck said, turning to expand a screen. “When lightning strikes, it loosens nitrogen from the air and plants take it in as nutrition.”

  A helpful animation showed lightning jiggling nitrogen atoms to the earth and smiley-faced trees gobbling them up as they fell.

  “The lightning theory suggests that dragons absorb electrical energy the same way,” Puck said.

  Thomlin raised his hand. “It coincides with dragons shooting EMPs and wraiths being made of electricity.”

  “Also might be why they’re attracted to houses,” Puck said. “All that juice running through our homes.”

  I thought of cicadas sucking up xylem from the dirt.

  Puck taught us about Leviathans and how the propellerheads didn’t think they were confined to the ocean. She said there was always potential for one to pop up in Lake Erie.

  “Is that like the Loch Ness monster?” Thomlin asked, with a shit-eating grin. I wondered if he’d heard Yolanda’s theory, was making fun of her. I wanted to sock him in the eye.

  Puck grabbed a holographic image and expanded it. “Does that look like some stupid legend to you?”

  Hell no, it didn’t.

  The picture was taken from the deck of a battleship. In the water swam the biggest scaly I had ever seen, and most of it, from what I gathered, was hidden below the surface. It had a wide head like a really ugly tortoise, and an open mouth full of beak-like teeth as it roared at the ships surrounding it. Several rockets were either exploding against its cloud-gray hide or in mid-flight when the photographer chanced a photo-op.

  “The Japanese lit this thing up with everything they had the day this photo was taken. Thanks to the camera’s instant loading to the Feed, we have the benefit of knowing what these things look like. Unfortunately for the men and women onboard these ships, they were never heard from again. The Leviathan, however, has been spotted a few times since.”

  “I still can’t believe those rockets didn’t make a scratch.” Williams said.