Smoke Eaters

by Sean Grigsby

  “This’ll be fun,” I said.

  “Let’s look behind that one.” Naveena ran toward the back wall. At the top of numerous stairs waited a huge, double door.

  I spun my psy-roll around and headed for a ramp at the far side of the courtyard. Good thing this sacrificial chamber was wheelchair-friendly.

  Drums began to beat somewhere on the other side of the wall, so, with every psychic scrap of energy I had, I pushed the psy-roll as fast as it would go. My treads took the ramp with ease, but the incline quickly put hell on my squat little box.

  A deep reptilian roar joined the drums.

  “Hurry up, Brannigan!” Naveena shouted, already halfway up the steps.

  “Come on, you piece of shit,” I shouted at the psy-roll.

  My mind pushed so hard I got a headache, so hard I almost thought I’d sweat blood and break my teeth with the effort.

  Boom, boom, boom.

  My psy-roll took another curve in the ramp, and I tried to rid my mind of acknowledging how far I was leaning back and how easily I could have toppled backwards.

  I reached the top of the steps and helped Naveena burst through the door. We entered something resembling an arena, looking out onto a long, wobbly bridge that stretched over a chasm so deep and wide, I couldn’t see the bottom. Not until flames flew from the pit.

  Around the edge of the chasm and behind a thin wooden rail, drummers banged on oversized taiko drums.

  Cheryl stood alone in the middle of the bridge, directly over the hole. Chains held her arms in place.

  “Cheryl!” I screamed.

  The drummers kept up their tempo, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw a couple Mounties running for me. They didn’t look armed.

  “I’ll hold them off,” Naveena said. “You go get Cheryl.”

  I sped forward, toward the wooden bridge. Behind me, Naveena shouted for the Mounties to stay back.

  On the bridge, Cheryl looked up and stared at me, and although it was too far away to know for sure, I think she smiled as a dragon rose from the darkness below.

  The scaly was green and snake-like, tall as a building as it rested on a tail deep within the chasm. Its eyes shimmered golden from the fire flickering out of its mouth in small bursts. Long tendrils floated in the air from its snout, and at each side of its body, small claws flexed open and shut. It floated without wings.

  I guess I could understand why someone would revere something so large and nearly supernatural. But not me. All I wanted to do was wipe this bastard and others like it from the face of the earth.

  Just before I’d made it a third of the way across the bridge, gunshots rang out behind me. Several Mounties had entered behind Naveena and were having a hard time wrestling her to the ground. The other Mounties tackled my psy-roll. It took all of their weight to push me onto my side, and the bridge heaved violently to and fro. But I didn’t bother with that. I kept my eyes on Cheryl.

  She looked sad, like I’d let her down – I had. The dragon descended as I screamed. Cheryl never made a sound.

  And then she was gone.

  Chapter 24

  I was getting a firsthand experience behind one of those cages with lasers for bars. I’d initially thought they were meant for trapping dragons or wild dogs, but I guess they were also good for securing the big, bad American in a robotic wheelchair.

  The Mounties stood outside my cage, wearing their crisp, red uniforms and cracking jokes under their breath. I was sure their jollity was at my expense. You could call it a gut feeling – and because a few of them took aim at me with their submachine guns.

  I didn’t care. Nothing really mattered at that particular moment.

  Alan walked in, and the Mounties got quiet, straightening to attention at the sight of him. The older man dismissed them with a jerk of his head toward the door before dragging a chair over to my cage.

  He didn’t say anything for a while, and neither did I. We just sat there listening to each other breathe. His had a whine and crackle to it, a struggle to inhale. Well, it was one advantage I had on him.

  “Mounties,” I said. “An interesting choice for national defense.”

  Alan nodded. “There were certainly more of them than any soldiers, after the dragons came. Very loyal.”

  “So, what’s going to happen to me and Naveena? You going to sacrifice us, too?”

  “We don’t delight in the Drawing, or the sacrifice. We haven’t even needed it for the last two years. Then you came.”

  “You’re blaming me? I didn’t make those teen gangbangers release a dragon on us. You did the right thing taking that scaly down, and I was content to let you pout and whip yourself like a dusty rug. But when you feed an innocent girl to one of those things because you think it has feelings? I hope they swallow this country whole. You all deserve to feel their so-called wrath.”

  Alan raised his chin. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “But you won’t be here to see it.”

  So, that’s how it was going to be, huh? They were going to sacrifice the foreigner. Well, I’d put up one hell of a fight until the end. That’s one thing I could promise, for Cheryl’s sake at least.

  The door slid open, and Naveena walked in. “Is he ready?” she asked Alan.

  He nodded.

  “You’re going along with this?” I couldn’t believe Naveena would throw me under the hover bus. Sure, we had our tussles, but we were smoke eaters. She’d just run into a dragon pit with me and taken on a gang of Mounties.

  “We don’t have another choice,” Naveena said.

  Alan pushed a button on his holoreader and the cage’s laser bars disappeared.

  “Come on,” Naveena said. “Or would you rather they sacrifice your old ass?”

  “So, you called Donahue?” I asked Naveena on our long walk and roll to where Jet 1 waited for us.

  “Yeah. He sounded…”

  “He’ll understand.”

  The neon lights of Neo Toronto flickered goodbyes as we left the smothering buildings and skittish crowds. We must have made a name for ourselves in our short stay. Shop owners would close their floating carts when they’d see us coming, and blast down a back alley, leaving behind the smell of thruster ozone and the savor of whatever food they’d been peddling. No gangs bothered us on the way either. Good ole Canadian passive-aggressiveness.

  It’s the little things, I tell you.

  I looked up at Naveena, asked, “You tell Donahue about the wraith-trapping thing we supposedly bought?”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t want to overload him at once. I’ll tell him when we get back.”

  A holographic ad flew over us, promoting a new Godzilla movie featuring an enemy named King Ghidorah – a three-headed dragon.

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s a lot I need to do when I get out of this box.”

  “If he lets you out,” Naveena said.

  When she stopped walking, I stopped rolling, and she stood there, letting the wind push her hair over her face. She squeezed her hands into fists and all of a sudden it felt like Neo Toronto had piped down to hear what she was going to say.

  “Brannigan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry about Cheryl.”

  I lost any words. What do you say to something like that? Thank you? Didn’t seem to fit. Only a big slice of silence and the pain of guilt swirling within my psy-roll felt appropriate.

  Naveena shrugged. “It’s a good thing we’re never coming back here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s one of the things we had to promise for them to let us leave unscathed. We can’t come back to Canada. Ever.”

  “Good riddance,” I said.

  “And they’ll deny that we ever set foot here. They’re still giving us that nonlethal cannon, though. Free. At least Donahue can’t be mad about us saving the budget.”

  “It’s all about the bottom line.” I rolled ahead, and Naveena had to run to catch up.

  “I didn’t think a
nyone would do that,” she said, “sacrifice someone to a dragon. I’m sure in your heyday you saw the Aztecs do it. Quesadilla or something.”

  “Quetzalcoatl,” I said.

  She was trying to cheer me up, but I wanted no part of it. I deserved to feel like shit. I’d lost my house, my body, and a young woman I could have saved from this terrible country. No one was going to take my guilt away from me.

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” said Naveena. “They killed people to please that dragon.”

  “It was more like a winged serpent, but basically a scaly. And he abolished human sacrifice. To the Aztecs he represented humanity and progress.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s why a lot of Mormons think Jesus visited the natives in the Americas, and the Aztecs called him Quetzalcoatl.”

  Naveena shrugged. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that religion fucks people up.”

  I thought of DeShawn lying bloody on a funeral home floor.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It does.”

  Sergeant Puck and the other recruits were waiting for us outside Jet 1.

  “Brannigan, you could ruin a brass monkey,” Puck said. “I haven’t had a vacation in ten years and now I’m banned from the one country I actually liked besides our own. Get in the plane before I leave your wrinkled ass.”

  Return trips always took longer. Maybe it’s the excitement of a new place that makes going there fun, and coming back a drag. Add the weight of seeing Cheryl eaten alive, missing Sherry and Ohio, and the desire to leave Canada – the flight home was an eternity.

  Afu was the only one who showed me any kindness. When he tried to start up a conversation with me, Williams slapped him across the chest and gave him a look I was all too familiar with when Sherry didn’t want me doing something.

  I let Afu off the hook and shook my head, letting him know it was OK.

  Getting us banned from an entire country was entirely my fault – since nobody was lumping Naveena into the blame. The other smokies would get over it, and if they didn’t, oh, well.

  I asked Naveena to reload my medication, and then I slept the rest of the trip.

  I dreamed about Cheryl. We were somewhere up in the mountains, but everything looked bright and cartoonish. There were no trees, only the hard rock of the mountains and maybe a touch of crayon green here and there on a yellow, dirt path. The clouds had funny black squiggles in them as if someone had drawn them with a black sharpie.

  I was on some good drugs.

  Dream Cheryl beckoned me to follow with a single curling finger, and I began to cry. It was the kind of deep sobbing that, even though I was dreaming, I could have been crying in the back of Jet 1 for my fellow smoke eaters to see.

  I followed Cheryl to a dark cave, deep in the animated mountains. Of course, I knew there was a dragon in there, and of course it would be the three-headed one. A long, black dragon arm snaked out of the cave and snatched Cheryl so quickly I didn’t have time to stop it.

  I ran to the edge of the cave and hesitated before following into the darkness. I don’t know why; I would have gone in head first in real life. That’s one thing I hate about dreams. You always become the sniveling, little coward you try so hard not to be.

  As I forced my dream self forward, the Behemoth rushed out of the cave, knocking me onto the crayon-colored ground. All three heads surrounded me, but the scaly snouts and obsidian horns were gone, and in their place were the heads of Cheryl, Naveena, and Sherry.

  They snatched me up in their teeth and tore my body in three separate directions before I sprang violently awake.

  Naveena frowned at me.

  “Sorry.” My mouth had gone dry. I couldn’t wait to drink something. Anything. I still had another week in the psy-roll.

  Puck said, “What were you dreaming about, Brannigan? All the pushups I’m going to make you do?”

  “Sergeant,” I said, “if I can get the use of my body back, I’ll be happy to do as many damn pushups as you want.”

  Puck laughed. “I’ll remember that.”

  Through the porthole, Parthenon City stood below us, and it was the most wonderful thing I’d seen all week.

  When we’d landed, and as I rolled down the jet’s ramp, Yolanda, the propellerhead, called to me from across the apparatus bay. “Come with me.”

  “I really need to see Donahue first,” I said.

  “Chief Donahue wanted me to come get you in his place.”

  “What for?” I asked, rolling beside her into Smoke Eater Headquarters.

  “He said if he saw you, he’d probably kill you.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “I really need to talk to him, though. And then I really need to see my wife. You guys find that Behemoth yet?”

  “No, we haven’t had any luck.” She waved her card to open her lab’s door and let me roll in first. “And Chief’s been too busy trying to calm the public.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, after that dragon destroyed most of that neighborhood, the citizens have been pretty peeved, saying that those fire droids did a better job than we did.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Those metal bastards got stomped in seconds.”

  Yolanda shrugged. “People have been protesting all over the state for the last couple days. Demanding we be disbanded. Honestly, I’m surprised they haven’t tried yet.”

  “They’ll calm down as soon as we find that Behemoth,” I said. “Surely someone has seen it. Scalies aren’t very inconspicuous.”

  “This one is. We’ve even put out the word to smoke eaters in other states. Nothing has popped up yet, though some have seen strange shapes on radar. Then it disappears. I’ve even researched ancient three-headed dragons, like Zmey Gorynych–”

  “Gesundheit.”

  Yolanda smiled and shook her head. “I haven’t found anything different from your basic knight-saving-the-maiden dragon folk tales. We’re still up the creek on this.”

  “Can’t I get any good news?” I groaned and lowered my head.

  Naveena walked in. “You about to crack open this oyster?”

  “Just about to,” Yolanda said.

  “What the hell are you ladies talking about?”

  Yolanda was about to answer, but Naveena jumped ahead of her.

  “You’re getting out of your psy-roll.”

  My eyes nearly bulged out of my head. “You’re just messing with me.”

  “Nope,” Yolanda said. “I’m ready if you are.”

  “But you said I had to stay in this thing for another week at the minimum.”

  Yolanda wrinkled her lips and looked at Naveena, who laughed.

  “Well…” Yolanda said. “Chief Donahue… I mean, it wasn’t my idea to keep you in it for two weeks.”

  “That bastard wanted me incapacitated for as long as he thought he could get away with!”

  “Relax, Brannigan,” Naveena said. “I’d say you and Chief are even.”

  I turned to Yolanda. “Well, come on.”

  “It’ll take a little bit for your muscles to get back in the swing of things. Almost like a really bad case of your appendages falling asleep. And you’ll probably notice some… changes.”

  “I better still be able to use my dick,” I said.

  Naveena shook her head.

  Yolanda put fingers to her lips, looking down with a shy smile before clearing her throat and saying, “Everything will work. I promise. Now, with this first part, you might feel some discomfort.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Discomfort?”

  She took out her holoreader and linked to the psy-roll. “Here we go.”

  “Hold on a–” Feeling entered my body as I realized a tube was lodged in each of my lower orifices and along my spine. They were then forcefully yanked out.

  “Ow!” I yelled. “Holy shit!”

  Naveena laughed.

  “Laugh it up, asshole.” I was able to move my hand to rub one of the affected areas inside the psy-roll.

  A fe
w buttons later, and the front of the box opened like a casket. Instinctively, I covered my nether regions, not that it really mattered. Yolanda had already gotten a good look at me when she first put me inside the damn psy-roll, and Naveena… well, that was another story.

  I looked down at my body. Yolanda had been right about something appearing different. For one, she had shaved most of my body to connect all the electrodes and such, but now, my muscles swelled larger and more refined than before they went into the psy-roll. My chest looked like two boulders above a chiseled stomach, and my forearms and thighs were striated like an anatomical chart. It was more like a swimmer’s body than a bodybuilder’s, but… hot damn!

  I still had gray hair poking out from between my fingers where I covered my junk.

  I jerked my head up. “You Captain America’d me!”

  “Are you mad?” Yolanda frowned, genuinely concerned that I would be upset.

  I laughed, and it hurt a little as my body was getting used to functioning again. “Hell no, I’m not upset. Is this from that blue gel?”

  Yolanda nodded, handing me a thin, white robe from a cabinet.

  Naveena leaned in to get a look.

  “Hey, no free gawking,” I said. “Turn around.”

  She did as I asked as I wobbled to my feet and let Yolanda help me into the robe. I tried to step out of the psy-roll, but couldn’t lift my foot high enough and fell forward.

  Yolanda caught me and started breathing heavier – I don’t think it was from any physical strain. “You need to take it easy while your muscles wake up. They may look pretty, but they’re still not all the way useful.”

  Pretty, huh?

  “That Ieiunium curate is some powerful shit,” I said. “You guys need to give some to the hospitals, it could save a ton of lives.”

  Yolanda frowned. “Well, it’s still being tested, and by the time it goes through all the red tape, it wouldn’t be as effective. I say we just keep it in house.”

  I was about to argue with her, when a page came over the speakers in the ceiling.

  “All available staff report to the foyer,” the voice said. “All available staff report to the foyer immediately. If you’re hearing this, that means you.”