Smoke Eaters

by Sean Grigsby

  “But then we have to see Alan. We’re meeting with Yūrei’s president today, and he’s going to show us this new tech – the one we actually came to look at.”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” I said. “Cheryl’s coming back with us on Jet 1.”

  Naveena’s reaction was… expected.

  Cheryl had been called away for business, but had an employee deliver a disk on wraith-catching for us to watch. I groaned when I saw it was Professor Poltergeist again. He held some weird remote thing and kept blathering on about safe distances and the remote’s capacity. He was just about to get into the good stuff, when one of Yūrei’s teen board members showed up to take us to see the president.

  “Relax, Brannigan,” Naveena told me as we rode the elevator.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  The Canadian youngster flirted with Naveena, smiling too big and asking if she liked such-and-such rock band I’d never heard of. He smelled like mothballs, but my disgusted face went unnoticed. Or ignored.

  When the doors opened to the thirteenth floor, a gust of cool air greeted us from a dim passageway. The escort wouldn’t leave the elevator, but told us Alan waited farther ahead. Naveena and I moved slowly at first, but when the elevator doors closed behind us, we hurried. The blue, metal walls cast our reflections like funhouse mirrors, and the floor lit up in bright white as we passed over it.

  The end of the hall opened into a large room, where an enormous apparatus, shaped like an upside down triangle, hung from the ceiling. Wires draped from the top of the triangle and connected to huge computer towers. Like a helmet, the bottom of the apparatus covered a man’s head, who sat in a cushy white seat.

  Alan Hamdel and the other teenagers stood in a semicircle around him. When I got closer, I saw the seated man also wore metal gloves that were connected to the apparatus by even more bulky, black wires.

  None of them spoke or even moved. My psy-roll wheels were the loudest thing on the entire floor. Cheryl was absent.

  One of the teenagers saw us and whispered into Alan’s ear. Hamdel nodded and spoke to the helmeted man, who didn’t move, but the room filled with a booming voice, amplified through speakers.

  “Welcome,” he said. “I am Shane Hamdel, President of Yūrei Corporation.”

  “What the hell is that thing on his head?” I blurted.

  Naveena snorted, but quickly put a hand to her mouth.

  Alan and the others looked at me as if I’d taken a dump on the floor. Shane’s gloved hands flexed as if he was strangling a rabbit in each fist.

  I had no right to talk trash about someone apparently confined to a machine, but shit, it was weird. I knew the Canadians had developed some strange technology we’d never seen, but this was ridiculous.

  “My son,” Alan said, “is present both here and in cyberspace. Our best ideas come from the digital frontier, where all mankind’s collective consciousness has been gathering since the invention of the internet. The Source.”

  “Does he ever get out of that thing?” I asked.

  “I can speak for myself, thank you,” Shane said. “And no, Mr Brannigan, I never leave. I can assure you it’s much more civilized in here than it will ever be out there.”

  “Hell, I’ll give you my psy-roll when I’m done with it, to complete your transformation.”

  The board members shifted on their feet, avoiding my gaze. I don’t think they quite got my humor, but I’d apparently set them on edge. Alan dismissed the others.

  “Thank you,” Shane said. “Although I have no idea what you mean. My father will now take you to our Research and Development department in order to demonstrate our newest product. I think you’ll be very excited to see what we have to offer. In fact, we’re offering it to you at cost. We all want to make the world a better place. Right?”

  Naveena kicked my psy-roll and cleared her throat. “Thank you, President Hamdel. We appreciate your hospitality.”

  Shane squirmed in his seat, as if hearing a female voice sent slugs up his ass. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I hate to be away from the Source for too long. Good bye.”

  And with that, lights flickered throughout the apparatus, as Shane leaned back in his chair and began to move his gloved hands through the air like a drughead. Alan hurried toward us and extended a hand toward the elevator.

  On our ride to yet another floor I asked, “How did your son surpass you in the company?”

  A blood vessel twitched in his temple. “This is a democracy, much like your country. The board saw him as the best choice to lead our company. I agree.”

  “Yeah, but with his head essentially stuck up a robot’s ass–”

  “Shut up, Brannigan.” Naveena said, but the hint of a smile was there.

  Alan cleared his throat. “The corporate government views youth and bold ideas as the currency of our age. My son is the embodiment of those ideals.”

  I was about to make a witty retort, but the elevator doors opened, and the bright yellow sparks of lasers shut me up. I’d been wondering why almost all of the people I’d seen in Canada had been in their teens to late twenties. A ton of older folks – people my age, at least – filled this new floor, constructing cages with laser bars, holographic ads that projected from hovering discs that followed the nearest pedestrian around the room.

  “This is our R&D department,” Alan said, leading us through all the cool tech.

  Naveena and I had to hurry to keep up with him. We came to a large, silver door at the back of the room. Alan scanned his hand over a sensor and the door slid to the side in a blur.

  “Please, step quickly.” He frowned at me. “Or roll.”

  We did what he said, and as soon as we’d passed through, the door slid behind us like a knife. The space we’d entered was small, and if I hadn’t already been in a psy-roll, I’d have been squatting under the ceiling like Naveena and Alan. A window lay in front of us, looking into another room similar to our propellerhead labs.

  Alan hit a button and said, “We’re ready to begin.”

  On the other side of the window, two older people, a woman and a man, worked on some kind of cannon. At the other end of the room, what I’d assumed to be a wall slid open, and another man brought in a yellow-scaled dragon on the end of a chain. A muzzle covered the scaly’s snout. It was the kind with only hind legs – a wyvern, I remembered from one of Sergeant Puck’s lectures. Even bound, it thrashed with malice, as if it was trying to find a way to kill everyone in the room. I’m pretty sure that was exactly what it had in mind.

  “So, you’re selling us another laser cannon?” I asked. “It’d be nice if this one didn’t take so long to charge.”

  “Just watch,” Alan said.

  The man leading the wyvern connected the leash to a ring bolted into the floor. The scaly snapped its head forward, trying to bite him. What the dragon lacked in the use of its jaws was made up for in sheer force as the muzzled snout sent the man sailing into several carts of electronic devices.

  Still connected to the chain, the wyvern swung its neck to and fro, trying to pull the muzzle off. One of the researchers ran to help the fallen man, while the woman frantically powered on the cannon.

  “Is this supposed to happen?” I asked, but Alan said nothing.

  “They need to get out of there,” Naveena said. “That’s a fully mature wyvern. They’re smarter and meaner than most dragons.”

  “Our researchers know what they’re doing,” Alan said with an expressionless face.

  Just then, the wyvern stared down at its muzzle. Within seconds, the muzzle glowed bright, golden orange as the dragon’s flaming breath heated the metal.

  “Oh, shit,” was all I could say.

  The wyvern didn’t stop shooting its flames, even when the muzzle fell in black clumps onto the lab floor; it merely redirected the fire at the two men standing closest.

  “Get them out of there!” I yelled.

  Alan just stared in surprised terror, a hand to his mouth. Naveena shook her he
ad in disgust, backing toward the door.

  One of the burning researchers fell helpless onto the ground, while the other ran for an emergency shower. He hit a button to release streams of foam to cascade onto his body. When the foam had done its job and extinguished the flames, he collapsed.

  The woman researcher screamed as the wyvern reared back to breathe more fire, but she pulled a trigger at the back of the laser cannon before the scaly could attack. A large ring of blue energy shot from the cannon and enveloped the wyvern, instantly dropping it to the floor.

  “I apologize for that,” Hamdel said. “Both of you know how unpredictable dragons can be.”

  While other researchers poured into the lab to collect the burned men and the distraught woman, I turned to Alan.

  “Two men died so you could show us a different way to kill a scaly,” I said. “What a waste of a trip.”

  “No,” Alan said, pointing to the window. “Something better.”

  I followed his finger to the wyvern as researchers raced around its bulk to haul their dead coworkers out of the room. The dragon was still breathing.

  “Now you don’t have to kill the dragons,” Alan said, with a smile of zealous pride.

  “It’s like some kind of energy tranquilizer.” Naveena thinned her eyes.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You want us to immobilize the scalies and, what, put them in a zoo? Maybe follow your example and have school buses roll up to sacrifice kindergartners to them like popcorn?”

  “Why kill them if you don’t have to?” Alan asked. “This way, you can eliminate the problem without destroying an entire species.”

  Naveena leaned on my psy-roll. “Because they’re a threat to every life, human and otherwise. Entire ecosystems have become ash because one dragon created one wraith that drew in dozens more dragons.”

  Alan looked surprised. “But surely you’ve been using the wraith containment devices we made for you last year. There should be no threat of attracting more dragons.”

  Naveena turned to me. I raised my eyebrows to say, I told you so!

  “I think we need a better handle on how to use the wraith-trapping stuff,” I said. “Cheryl said she’d show us how it’s done. That video she gave us isn’t that great.”

  Alan nodded. “I can have Masaki or one of the others show you.”

  “No,” I said. “Cheryl said she would.”

  Alan looked down and cleared his throat, fixed his tie. “I’m afraid she is no longer employed with us.”

  “What?” I said. “Why? Because she’s coming back with us stateside? You can’t do that.”

  “Brannigan, even though you think the world revolves around you, I’m afraid there are more important things I have on my mind besides policing my employees’ travel plans. And I had no idea.” His jaw trembled as he fought to keep it still.

  “Where is she, then?” Naveena asked.

  “I can’t release that information.” Alan rubbed his eyes. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll let you finish your stay in our country and we’ll be glad to load your plane with our non-lethal cannons. As my son said, we’re providing them at cost.”

  “Let’s just go,” Naveena said.

  But I couldn’t let it go. I rolled toward Alan, stopping just in front of him. “Tell me where Cheryl is and we’ll leave. We’ll even buy your stupid cannons.”

  “You can’t make that call, Brannigan,” said Naveena. “And you should just accept that Cheryl isn’t coming. It was a bad idea to begin with.”

  “Naveena,” I turned to her, “I will never ask you for anything else if you do me this one solid. Smoke eater to smoke eater. Please.”

  I didn’t know if it was what I’d said, or that I’d said it without a shred of my usual smartass flavoring, but Naveena’s face softened.

  Alan moved to leave, but Naveena stepped in his way.

  “I don’t like violence, Hamdel,” Naveena said, “but I’m very good at it. Normally I wouldn’t care about what you guys do, but I smell a rat. So tell us where Cheryl is.”

  The wrinkles at the sides of Alan’s eyes deepened as he looked from Naveena to me, and then back. He sighed. “They held the Drawing.”

  Anger flared from deep inside my psy-roll. “Where did they take her?”

  “It’s too late,” Alan said. “I never wanted–”

  “Wait,” Naveena said. “What drawing?”

  “They took her because of that dead dragon,” I said. “They’re going to sacrifice her to the scalies. This bastard probably made sure it was her, so she couldn’t leave the country.”

  “I never wanted it to be Cheryl!” Alan said. “It was just a… coincidence.”

  Coincidence. I’d just spoken with Cheryl about that very thing. Despite my doubts about a benevolent universe and all evidence showing that Sherry and I would never get what we wanted, I’d caved to the hope that maybe it was time to do good for someone and fill a decades-old hole in our hearts at the same time. Well, fuck coincidences. You have to take life by the balls and do it yourself.

  “We’ve got to stop it,” Naveena told me.

  “Damn right,” I said.

  Naveena grabbed Alan by the back of the neck and pushed him to the door. “Open it.”

  He waved a hand at the door, and it slid open. Naveena and I barreled through research and development like a dragon out of hell. I didn’t even know the psy-roll could go that fast, tilting slightly as we took a corner, and almost throwing me onto my side. We were in the elevator and on the street outside before Alan could send security.

  The same hover van driver from before leaned against his ride, blowing vape bubbles when I rolled up.

  “Take us to where they’re doing the sacrifice,” Naveena shouted.

  The driver started and dropped the bubble vape from his mouth. He blinked a couple of times before saying, “What?”

  I said, “I’d do what she says.”

  “I can’t leave,” the driver said. “I’m waiting for Mr Hamdel.”

  “Lower the lift and take us to where they’re sacrificing the girl!” Naveena pulled out a pulse gun and aimed it at the driver’s head.

  “Where the hell did you get that?” I asked.

  The driver thought he’d be fast enough to lean into the van and dig for the gun in the glove compartment.

  Naveena fired the gun straight up, static crackling the air afterward. “The gun isn’t there, dummy. I took it after our last joyride.”

  Who the hell was this woman?

  The driver squatted to the ground with his hands up.

  In the next minute, we were speeding down the street to where they fed the dragons. I only hoped they hadn’t yet rung the dinner bell.

  Chapter 23

  Far outside of Neo Toronto, Canada looked more like the outskirts of Parthenon City, but darker, and not just because night was coming. Brown clouds had blocked our singular star from touching any scrap of this shithole, and the twitchy glow of holograms would be the only light to navigate by.

  Then I saw it. Many politicians over the years – before the dragons came, anyway – had run on platforms of building a wall. First, they shouted about a wall to keep Mexicans from crossing in the south, then, later, a wall to keep Americans from crossing into Canada.

  Well, we certainly weren’t changing their opinion of us now.

  The wall ahead was unlike any brick-and-mortar barrier I’d ever seen. If Hell had a gate, it would look like that wall. The thing was made entirely of glass and, like a macabre aquarium, wraiths floated inside, trapped, crammed in like sardines, and giving off their eerie white glow. They clawed at the glass, wailing for anyone who’d listen. The wraith wall had to be at least twenty feet high and as wide as a city block. That’s a shitload of ghosts.

  The driver stopped the hover van. “I can’t drive any closer.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Flat tire?”

  He turned to give me a confused look. “This van doesn’t have tires. It–�
�

  “He was being facetious,” Naveena said, gun ever present.

  That just made him scrunch his face more.

  “We need you to keep going,” I said. “Take us beyond that wraith wall.”

  He pointed to where a horde of guards in red uniforms, brown Mountie hats, and sunglasses stood outside the wall, carrying what looked like Uzis. “They won’t let you inside. Not only are you Americans, but you kill dragons for a living.”

  A couple of the Mounties rode mechanical horses that blew steam from their nostrils.

  The driver had a point. And I certainly couldn’t roll up in my tiny tank with Naveena trotting beside, expecting to be let through without a couple bullet holes to our heads.

  “I can tell them she’s my date,” the driver said. “That I want to show her inside the wall. I’m in good with them.” This guy was starting to be a team player. With the teen gang attack, it was probably the most excitement he’d had in years. He pointed to me. “But you…”

  I looked to the floor. Several empty metal boxes lay beside me.

  “Put one of these boxes on my head,” I told Naveena.

  She glanced at the boxes on the van floor and looked back at me with wide, incredulous eyes. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But it just might work.”

  She sighed, but put the box on my head. Soon, we were moving again. The driver turned the corner and stopped before rolling down his window. The Mounties whistled at Naveena, who had to have been exercising some serious restraint. Thankfully, most of the catcalls and flirting was Canuck slang I didn’t understand. The driver said he and Naveena would only be a few minutes. With whoops of praise, the Mounties let us through, and after another few minutes, we stopped. Naveena took the box off my head.

  “Get out,” the driver said, hitting the lever to lower me out of the van. “Please don’t expect a ride out of here. I’ll be leaving.”

  I grinned. “Stay where you are, Chuck. We’ll be fine on our own from here.”

  But as I looked around the courtyard, surrounded on three sides by thick, glossy black walls, I quickly realized how big of a clusterfuck Naveena and I had jumped into.