Smoke Eaters

by Sean Grigsby

  I raised an eyebrow. “You mean Cheryl? She seems like a good kid. I like her. You think it’d be alright if she came back with us?”

  Naveena rolled her eyes. “No, Captain Savior.”

  “If she wants to come, I don’t see any reason to deny her. And what’s with all the damn teenagers? Did all the old people in this city die?”

  Naveena tilted her head, and her hair fell across her neck. “One of the staff here told me teen gangs have cropped up in the last few years. They think they’re rebelling against the evil corporations in charge.”

  “I haven’t seen anyone who could be over thirty. Besides Alan. Even his board members are test tube babies.”

  Naveena took a drink and winced. “You’re just being a paranoid old man.”

  “No, I–” A flash of pain echoed throughout my muscles.

  “Your meds starting to wear off?” Naveena asked.

  I closed my eyes and waited for the agony to dissipate. “I think so.”

  Standing and stretching her long arms into the air, Naveena turned and placed a thick metal case onto the bed. “These are supposed to last you for the rest of the week. Don’t become a druggy.”

  She was one to talk.

  “And I’m not looking forward to emptying your waste at all. I’m writing you a bill. A big bill. So beneath me.”

  “It’s just as embarrassing for me to let you handle my shit.”

  Naveena lifted a canister that contained the blue gel, studying the glowing slop before shifting her eyes toward me. There was a lot in that look – mostly an evil mischievousness. Tossing the canister between her hands, Naveena walked around to sit on the bed, giving me a good look at her legs.

  “How bad are you hurting?” she asked.

  I was about to say it wasn’t that bad, but then another flash of agony quaked through me, as if my nerves were waking up and realizing a dragon had dropped me from the sky. “It’s… starting to hurt a lot now.”

  She tongued the inside of her cheek. “I’ll give this to you,” she held up the canister, “if you answer some questions honestly.”

  For fuck’s sake.

  “OK,” I said, partly out of curiosity, but mostly because I didn’t see how else to get my pain-killing juice.

  She held the canister like a gun. “What did you think of our kiss?”

  Why, God? Why?

  I’m not sure if you’ve seen many lists of firefighter attributes, but honesty and integrity are right up there on all of them.

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  She harrumphed. “You think it’s OK to take advantage of women in an inebriated state?”

  “Sweet Jesus, no! You kissed me. I tried to pull away.”

  Sweat beaded on my forehead, and I was beginning to think dealing with my pain would be a hell of a lot better than this strange interrogation.

  I rolled away from her. Just a little. “Look, we haven’t exactly been friendly. But I do think you’re good at your job and you’re smart. I’m a married man and twice your age. I would never, ever put the moves on you. I swear.”

  She walked to the window and opened it.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Shut up.” She held the canister outside. One slip of her fingers and my medicine would drop eight stories to splatter against Canadian asphalt. “I’m asking the questions. Did you consider how I’d get you back for leaving me at that amusement park?”

  She pulled the canister back in. Her lips moved into something I’d never seen on her face – a very slight grin.

  “Oh, you bastard!” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “Very funny. Now, can you put my medicine in before I run you over with this miniature tank, please?”

  “Calm your tits, Brannigan.” She walked around to the back of my psy-roll as another burst of pain hit me. The pain waves were lasting longer each time.

  I heard a click and then a warm, numb feeling chased away the pain from my head all the way down to where I guessed my feet were.

  “Thanks.” I rolled toward the door as fast as I could.

  “Don’t screw anything up, rookie,” Naveena called.

  The door slid closed behind me, and I began roaming the building like some cyborg security guard. I could roll until dawn if I had to. Yūrei Corp had a lot of space.

  The “night-time” lights were on. Anyone still in the building had gone to sleep. The whole place smelled strange, and I was suddenly homesick. A clock ticked somewhere, but I could never find it. Then one of their weird holographic ads popped around a corner and scared me half to death.

  This was the worst one yet – a cartoon dragon that looked like someone on LSD had drawn it. The ad was selling a fizzy, yellow energy drink called Sulfurge! Which, coincidentally, is the sound you’d make while throwing it back up.

  I cursed the hologram for a sonofabitch and rolled on.

  After riding the elevator to the top floor, where the rooms were spaced out much wider, I rolled by a door where it sounded like someone was punching a slab of meat.

  The door slid open, and Cheryl stood there, red around her soft eyes. In the room behind her, Alan was on his knees, shirtless, and whipping himself across his bloody back with a cat o’ nine tails. After each hit, he’d grunt and mutter something.

  “I’m sorry,” Cheryl said to me, stepping into the hall and shutting the door behind her. “Please, follow me.”

  I rolled with her to the elevator. “Everything OK?”

  “Mr Hamdel is in pain.”

  “Yeah, I could see that.” I rolled my eyes. “All that over a dragon.”

  “They’re sacred animals. He feels terrible about what he had to do.”

  In the elevator, I got a better view of the Neo Toronto lights.

  “If you guys really had that big of a hard-on for the scalies,” I said, “none of this would be here. It would all be ash.”

  “Like your cities in America?”

  She had me there. Despite the enormity of vacant spaces, Neo Toronto was thriving better than the neighborhoods surrounding Parthenon City.

  I hummed defeat. “So, how do you keep the dragons from destroying everything?”

  Cheryl shook her head, on the verge of tears again. “You smokers know how we do it.”

  “Smoke eater. And you guys have made it very difficult for anyone to know what you’ve been up to. All we have is rumors. I mean, I watched a Professor Poltergeist video, but I knew most of that stuff. This tech Naveena and I are here to look at, is that what keeps your dragons away?”

  “No, you and Captain Jendal are here to look at something else.”

  The elevator opened, and she led me onto the roof in slow steps. The wind blew her red hair in a million tendrils across her face as I rolled beside her.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “how old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” she said, turning to me. “Old enough for the drawing.”

  The red and blue lights lining the roof reflected off her face, making her look half-angel and half-demon. I looked at the sky and was surprised to see a few stars.

  “Is that like a military draft, or a lottery?” I asked.

  “Both. Now that Mr Hamdel has killed a dragon, we have to appease them by offering a sacrifice.”

  Without meaning to, I spun my psy-roll violently, around and around. When I got it under control, I shifted to face Cheryl. “You can’t be serious.”

  She stared at me, and I don’t know if it was the wind or her eyes, but the back of my neck shivered. If the Canadians wanted to blame somebody, why not blame Alan? I wasn’t for killing people over a scaly, but if we were pointing fingers…

  The Canucks were taking this dragon thing a little too far.

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “These dragons don’t hold grudges. They’re just animals, like you said.”

  “Divine animals. And most in this country would disagree with you.”

  “People over dragons.
That’s my motto.”

  “What would be worse?” She dropped her stare to the rooftop. “One death? Or thousands? Thousands of yūrei to haunt our streets.”

  “You mean wraiths?”

  “Or ghosts,” she said. “Whatever you want to call them.”

  “Wait a minute. Yūrei. That’s the name of your corporation.”

  She smiled, and it made me feel a little less sick that her country sacrificed people to dragons.

  “It’s Japanese. A playful name, before the dragons came. Our company started in holographic advertising. Neon ghosts.”

  “Yeah, I met some of those creepy things.”

  “Very successful. They have retinal detection, so if someone sees the ad, it zeroes in to pitch the product one on one.”

  “In America we’d shoot at those things if they came at us selling pudding. Most people wouldn’t even realize they were ads until their laser cartridge was spent.”

  Her laughter was electric.

  I couldn’t believe I was high above Neo Toronto stuck in a wheeled box. If only Sherry could see me now. She’d love Cheryl. Sherry would have said it was a sign that I’d met this girl. That I should bring her home, no matter what Naveena or the others said.

  “Anyway,” Cheryl said. “Shortly after the emergence, Mr Hamdel developed the yūrei containment beam, and we’ve recently voted in favor of dropping our embargo to sell the technology overseas to certain groups. It was very successful. So we’ve decided to move on to other products. To prevent any more dragon deaths.”

  “Wait. Containment what?”

  She sighed. Even Canadian patience had its limits. “You should know all about this. Your city was one of the first customers of the wraith remotes. Surely you’ve used them.”

  The metal of my psy-roll clanged from my jaw dropping onto it. Donahue hadn’t said shit about knowing of a way to trap wraiths. And there was no way he’d keep something like that from us, or the city. Would he?

  I regained my composure and cleared my throat. “Oh, you know, we have a learning curve to work through,” I lied. “But I think we’re getting the hang of it.”

  “Ah.” She nodded. “I told that Mr Jenkins it would be beneficial for you smoke eaters to come train with us, but he wanted the equipment rushed to Parthenon City. I’d be happy to go over it with you sometime if you’re having trouble.”

  “I’d like that.” On the outside I was smiling.

  Inside, I was fucking fuming. Jenkins. Mayor Rogola’s lackey. I’d smelled a rat for a while, and across the border I’d finally found it.

  As far as Cheryl and the rest of Yūrei Corporation went, I’d play along as if Parthenon City had been a regular ghost-busting haven of the Midwest. The only problem would be getting Naveena to go along without her blowing her top.

  Easy, right?

  “I did have one question,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “I get catching the wraiths, but is it possible to uncatch them?”

  “Well, sure. What good is it to trap the nasty things without depositing them? You just need a containment area with connected electrical current and glass. They can break out of any other material. We explained all of this to Mr Jenkins. He seemed very nervous, maybe he wasn’t paying attention.”

  Rogola. That bastard had burned my house down, nearly killed my wife. He’d… Theresa and the others, too.

  I’d let the cops have a head start, but if they didn’t get to him first, throw him in the darkest jail they had, I’d be pounding his face in. It was time to fly assholes and elbows back to Home Sweet Ohio. But this time, we’d have an extra passenger.

  “You should come back with us,” I told Cheryl.

  She widened her eyes. “Oh. I… I don’t know. That’s kind of a big deal.”

  “Just a visit. I just want you to see what America is like. You can pack for a week and then we’ll fly you back.”

  “Do you have the authority to make that decision?”

  “I’ll tell you this,” I said, “after I take care of some business, they’ll owe me a favor.”

  Cheryl laughed.

  “So what do you say?”

  She looked away, biting her lip. “I would have to get permission from Mr Hamdel. The company.”

  “For crying out loud, you’re fifteen.” I rolled to her other side and took a big breath of night air. “This is going to sound silly, or crazy, but you remind me… you look like the daughter I never had. And normally I don’t believe in coincidences or any of that astrological bullshit, but it feels like I was meant to be here, to meet you. It can’t be just to see some doohickey you Canucks invented.”

  She was going to think I was crazy. I stopped before I got ahead of myself. And since all I had was a head, in the functional sense, that would have been bad.

  She stared at me while the wind blew her hair around. Then she said, “Did you really just say ‘doohickey’?”

  We both laughed.

  But then she choked up and looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It must be this medicine I’m on. Makes me extremely spontaneous.”

  “No, it’s all right.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “It’s just that my papa used to call everything a doohickey. You brought back a lot of memories.”

  “Now that is a coincidence.”

  “OK,” she said. “After we present our new product, I’ll go with you back to America. Just to visit. It’ll give me a better understanding of how you operate, and I can share it with the board.”

  She’d also be a great witness to put Rogola away.

  “And you have to pay for everything,” she said. “Deal?”

  “Done.”

  I looked out over Neo Toronto and smiled.

  But everything changed the next day.

  Chapter 22

  Cheryl escorted me back to my room. I felt like an idiot to ask, but Cheryl was kind enough to place my holoreader on my psy-roll and change the settings to allow for voice commands. She left me with a pat on the cheek and enough silence to drown a brontosaurus.

  I searched the Feed for anything on wraith containment technology and came up with a generous amount of fan fiction and conspiracy theories – nothing worth a damn. Everything I could find out about Yūrei Corporation had to do with its holographic advertising before they went lone wolf.

  After giving up on that thread, and still unable to go to sleep – because of the recent juice-up on my meds – I decided to look up the history of the smoke eaters. For all their secrets, my new job had a lot more information than the wraith-catching stuff.

  Chief Donahue had been on the Cincinnati Fire Department – when there was still a Cincinnati. Shortly after E-Day, Donahue led the campaign to set up a national program to combat the dragon threat. It burned a lot of asses in the National Guard and even the main branches of the military, but seeing how rapid intervention was the greatest factor, the government agreed that dragons would be better handled on a state level. And so, the smoke eaters were born.

  The Feed mentioned nothing about our ability to breathe smoke, which I guessed was for the best. The public was already calling for our heads. When they found out we could breathe smoke like the scalies, it would only turn things into a bad X-Men situation.

  I hadn’t realized how long I’d been surfing the Feed until the sun crept from behind a building and nearly blinded me. It was time to talk to Naveena.

  I should have known her door wouldn’t slide open for me. So I rammed my psy-roll into the metal until she opened up.

  Naveena wore her usual bedtime attire. “What the hell are you doing? It’s too early for your shit, Brannigan.”

  “Grab some coffee,” I said, rolling past her into the room. “I have some bombs to drop on you.”

  She rubbed sleep from her eyes and hit the button on the coffeemaker, grabbing two cups before remembering I couldn’t drink anything.

  “You can’t freak out when I tell you this
stuff, OK?”

  She draped her arms over the kitchenette counter. Her eyes were half-cracked.

  “And you have to believe me,” I said.

  “Just tell me already.”

  “Yūrei invented wraith-capturing technology.”

  She groaned and covered her face. “Really?”

  I tried to nod, but slammed my chin against the psy-roll. “Fuck! I keep doing that.” I wiggled my jaw. “And they’re under the impression we already know about it. That we’ve already been using the tech. Know why? Because Mayor Rogola bought it from them a while ago, and that means he’s behind the recent dragon attacks with the white fire coming out of appliances.”

  I proudly tucked in my lips and breathed a deep victory. That was it. That was my grand conspiracy theory laid out. Perfect? No. But I thought I covered most of the finer points of my hypothesis.

  Naveena rested her chin in a palm. “You know how stupid that sounds?”

  “It makes perfect sense!”

  Naveena poured her coffee and added a few ice cubes from the mini freezer. “I don’t like Rogola or anything, but why would he summon dragons? Even if there is such a thing as this wraith trapper whatever, how does that mean he can put it in…?”

  “A TV or a holostereo?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” She raked fingers through her bed-mussed hair.

  “I don’t know all the specifics. Something to do with electrical current.”

  “Who told you all of this?”

  “It was in passing, but, Cheryl.”

  Naveena laughed.

  “What?”

  She wasn’t taking this as seriously as I’d hoped.

  “When I was her age,” Naveena said, “I would lie to everyone, too. Just make shit up to see if they’d go for it. Made me feel like I had this superpower.”

  “It’s not like that at all!”

  Naveena hummed her disbelief.

  “Look, play along if they mention it. I asked Cheryl to show us how they can catch a wraith. After she shows us, we can figure out what the hell is going on. Fair enough?”

  She took a long sip from her coffee, then winked. “All right, Brannigan. I’ll play your game. But you owe me.”

  “Sure,” I said, just happy she didn’t completely write it off.