Smoke Eaters

by Sean Grigsby

  I love people.

  Several speakers towered among the crowd, as if it was a music festival. A woman with dirt-stained blonde hair and a bandana shouted into a microphone. When she saw us traversing the angry mob, she pointed and told them all that, “Here come some more of the very people letting you down, letting your homes burn and your children be eaten. They destroy orphanages and entire neighborhoods!”

  The crowd threw rocks and tomatoes, and I think I saw a few coconuts hit the windshield. Really, it was one big waste of pricey produce, but Donahue’s truck held up under the assault. The chief grumbled curses as he held tight to the steering wheel.

  I’ve never been flipped off so many times at once in my life. The whole scene twisted my guts pretty badly. I mean, people were supposed to protest the police, politicians, oil barons. They never came after firefighters, or smoke eaters. We were the good guys.

  “Citizens of Parthenon City.”

  The crowd turned from us to see who’d spoken. Donahue drove us toward a sealed entrance around the side of the building, but I was able to take a quick look behind us.

  Mayor Rogola hovered above the crowd, flickering in hologram blue. “I’m sorry I can’t be here with you in person, but I want you to know I stand with you. This is our city, and we can’t stand by and let reckless individuals allow monsters from below destroy our homes and terrorize our communities. They have to go!”

  The crowd roared in agreement, as the secret door closed behind Donahue’s truck.

  Chapter 30

  Donahue marched straight to the cafeteria, clinking his false leg hard against the tile floor. He made a huge pot of coffee and wouldn’t allow me to say a word while he brewed it.

  “I guess you saw the mess outside.” Naveena ran in, out of breath.

  Donahue had his back to us, bending over the counter. He raised a finger and proceeded to chug a mug of black coffee. Then he refilled and repeated. Being a smoke eater was also good for not having to wait on coffee to cool.

  I straddled a chair backwards and just shook my head. “It’s been a day full of disappointing news.”

  Donahue received a message on his holo-reader and turned away to read it.

  “We need to find Rogola,” I said. “Lock him up and make him confess. We have to be the better people here.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Well, I don’t want to kill him.”

  “No,” Naveena said. “I mean, why would he do all of this? He’s already the mayor. What more does he want?”

  I thought about it for a second and said, “The way the world is now, there really are no more rungs on the ladder to climb. So if you can’t grab more, you just squeeze the fist tighter.”

  Donahue turned sharply. “We’re needed in New Mexico.”

  Naveena blinked a few times in silence.

  I dropped my jaw. “What the hell are you talking about? We’re losing the city here.”

  “This is important.” He waved the holo-reader in his hand. “The smokies out there found something of ours.”

  I was about to yell at my chief about how it wasn’t the time to be performing any mutual aid or interstate relations bullshit, when he expanded the video feed of one of the propellerheads in our dispatch center.

  Donahue held out the holoreader. “Go ahead and tell them, Vicky.”

  Vicky blew a strand of blonde, curly hair from her eyes. “Hey, guys. We’ve been hearing reports of burned communities with no sign of what did it and no quakes in the area either. I’ve only recently detected a southwesterly pattern in these burnings, relative to us. Well, New Mexico smoke eaters just outside of Carlsbad called in on that three-headed Behemoth. They’d take care of it themselves, but they’re busy with a bad scaly season and knew we were on the lookout for it.”

  “How did it get all the way out there?” I asked.

  Naveena nudged my shoulder. “It can fly, remember?”

  Vicky continued. “They’ve tracked it to a cavern called Lechuguilla Cave.”

  “Thanks, Vicky,” Donahue said.

  “Fun fact,” Vicky said, “Lechuguilla is the deepest cave in the US and–”

  “Thanks, Vicky!” Donahue closed the feed. To us, he said, “So, how about that? This is exactly what we need to boost public support.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I want to nail that three-headed bastard more than anyone, but we’ve got a shit storm in full downpour right here in Ohio.”

  Donahue harrumphed. “Well, it’s a good thing you’re not in charge. Get Afu, Williams, and Renfro, and suit up.”

  God damn that smoke eater contract.

  “Can you at least go pick my wife up and bring her here. Shit is getting worse and I don’t want her by herself.”

  “Done,” Donahue said.

  “You sure about this goose hunt, Chief?” Naveena asked.

  Donahue sighed and looked a little betrayed. “Those protesters aren’t going anywhere. If they’re not afraid to cross the ash to get here, they’re in it for the long haul. And, Brannigan, you said it yourself, we had the Behemoth and Rogola both off our radar. Now that one has reared its head–”

  “Heads,” I corrected.

  He sighed. “I don’t intend on letting it get away again. The people out there will ease up once they’ve seen we’ve retrieved the one that got away. Fair enough?”

  There went those two terrible words that got me involved in this hullabaloo in the first place. I still wasn’t so sure that the angry mob outside would think it was “fair enough.”

  “Fine,” I said, following Naveena out the door. “Wait, what do you mean ‘retrieve’?”

  Chapter 31

  Yolanda was ratcheting something onto the nose of Jet 1 when we entered the bay. It was a huge cannon that smelled like a new toy.

  “Hell yeah,” I said, standing underneath her. “That big sucker is sure to blow the Behemoth into a million evil pieces. But why are you fixing it to the front of the jet?”

  She returned my smile, but guiltily, as if she knew something I didn’t. Well, my body language book hadn’t been wrong yet.

  I thinned my eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  “This is a nonlethal cannon we got from the Yūrei Corpo–”

  “No.”

  Yolanda was just following orders, there was no reason to unload on her, so I stomped away to gripe at someone else.

  Naveena had just finished putting on her power suit and was attaching something to the back of Williams’.

  “We are killing this thing in New Mexico, right?”

  She answered without turning. “If we have to.”

  Williams looked over her shoulder to give me a wary glance.

  “So, this is what ‘retrieve’ means,” I said. “What a crock. We’re supposed to fly down there, kill that bastard, and then get back here to save our jobs before the city runs us out of town.”

  Naveena turned and slapped Williams on the back to send her away. “Get in the plane, smoky,” she said to me. “Now.”

  “You don’t have anything to say?”

  “Sink or swim.”

  “I hate that motto,” I said.

  “The propellerheads want a live dragon, subdued. This Behemoth is like nothing we’ve ever seen, and they’re going bonkers about it being cannibalistic. If there are more like this three-header, or worse, I want to know the quickest way to take them down. Don’t you?”

  Reluctantly, I nodded.

  “Plus, you can look at this trip to New Mexico as a make-up for the shit you pulled in Canada. You can walk around now, and you don’t have to worry about human sacrifices–” She covered her mouth with both power gloves. “Oh, fuck, Brannigan, I didn’t even think about what I was saying.”

  I shook my head and stomped onto the plane.

  Before E-Day, I never thought I would’ve appreciated staring at the desert. Back then, I would have told you I didn’t see the big deal. It’s just a bunch of sand and tan-colored rocks, maybe a patch
of grass here and there. There was nothing in the desert.

  But after the dragons, I relished seeing any landscape that wasn’t covered in ash. I was still correct about there not being shit in the desert, for sure, but that meant there wasn’t shit for the dragons to burn. They didn’t call New Mexico the Land of Enchantment for nothing.

  “All right,” Naveena called out as Jet 1 slowed in its descent. “Everybody stand up.”

  I looked from Afu to Williams, standing at either side of me. They stood up without hesitation.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “We haven’t landed yet.”

  Afu widened his eyes. “You guys told him, right?”

  “Damn it, Naveena…” I started to say.

  “That’s Captain Jendal to you, Brannigan.” Naveena stepped past me and hit the button to lower the hatch.

  “Oh, hell no!” I backed toward the cockpit.

  The air rushed in and beat against my face. I stayed glued to my seat, trying to refrain from vomiting or peeing myself. As scared as I was, it might as well have been a dragon that bit off the back half of Jet 1.

  “Come on, Dragon Blood,” Williams shouted at me. “Sink or swim.”

  This wasn’t the time for nicknames.

  Naveena motioned for everyone to get closer to the lowering door. “Thirty seconds and we jump.”

  “Jump?” I stood, but my legs wobbled under my weight. New muscles were no match for pulse-stopping fear. “Jump with what? Where are the parachutes?”

  “You’ve fallen from up high like three times.” Afu grinned, showing all of his teeth. “What’s the matter?”

  “I only fell twice,” I said.

  “Go, go, go!” Naveena ushered Afu forward.

  “Sink or swim.” Afu jumped. The big man was gone in an instant, not slowly gliding like birds or feathers on the wind. He dropped like a stone.

  Did he not realize we were thirteen thousand feet in the air? There would be no swimming and a lot of sinking.

  Williams took a few deep breaths through puckered lips, as if she was in Lamaze class. “Sink or swim,” she shouted, before throwing herself into the sky.

  Renfro went next without saying anything. Naveena motioned me toward her, but I shook my head.

  “We have to go now,” she said.

  “You should have told me we were jumping. Did you even fit me with a parachute or whatever the hell you think I’m going to–”

  Naveena grabbed me in a bear hug and leapt out of the plane. My mind went completely blank, even though I screamed for a few seconds. I just couldn’t believe Naveena had done it.

  She tried to tell me something, but the pressure and wind in my ears prevented me from hearing. While I’m great at reading body language, I never learned to read lips. It would’ve come in handy right then. As we plummeted toward the rocky desert, I started shaking and squirming. Naveena pushed me away.

  Wait!

  Maybe I could engage my power jump just before I hit the ground, and that would buffer the incredible amount of force I was building up.

  No. How stupid was that?

  My mind raced for a solution, no longer in holy-fucking-shit-I-am-going-to-be-a-pancake mode. A rapid beeping interrupted my thoughts, and my power suit took on a mind of its own.

  I felt it in the shoulders and my suit’s upper back. The momentum shifted, and instead of dropping down, I glided in a slight diagonal line. Then, I turned just a bit to the right. It was as if God had snatched me with two fingers and corrected my course.

  Breaking through a small cloud, I saw the other smokies flying in front of me. An apparatus on the backs of their power suits extended almost like wings, and a burning flow of orange energy burned out of it like jet exhaust.

  “You motherfuckers!” I shouted, even though I knew none of them could hear me. So, I cast a radio signal through my helmet and said it again.

  Afu’s laughter came through the speakers first. “Man, you should know we wouldn’t let you die. Did you not see Captain Jendal putting the gliders on the back of our power suits?”

  I hadn’t.

  “I wish I could’ve seen the look on your face,” Williams said.

  Later, I would kick myself for not taking the chance to appreciate the view and the act of flying over southern New Mexico like Iron Man, but all I could do at the moment was pray my suit kept working, at least until I made it safely to the ground.

  “All right, Captain Jendal,” I said. “You’ve had your fun. Can you fill me in before I fill this suit with piss?”

  “Our suits are following the GPS we set,” Naveena said. “Our suits will land us just near the entrance to the cave, and then we’ll go hunt down a dragon.”

  “What about Jet 1?”

  “They’re circling, so we have to make this quick.”

  I refrained from lifting my head to search for the jet. “We have to make what fast, finding the Behemoth?”

  “Yeah. And luring it out in the open. Into the sky. That’s why Jet 1 isn’t landing.”

  “Ah, shit.”

  “Hey, Brannigan.” It was Renfro. “Don’t open your mouth too big. You don’t want to lose your dentures.”

  Everyone keyed up to laugh.

  Bastards.

  In front of me, the other smokies rose and then dropped altitude. It was kind of like riding in the back of a roller coaster and seeing the front cars drop down first. You knew you were next. And I remembered the last time I was around these people and roller coasters.

  I held my breath.

  My suit rose on the wind and spiraled down to follow the others. The ground looked like a bunch of giant serpents had coiled through the sand – and that wasn’t too far of a reach for the world we lived in. All of us began to circle like a flock of buzzards above a corpse, lowering a little at a time with each pass.

  I was the last to land, and I would have kissed the ground if I wasn’t afraid a scorpion would sting me on the lips. My glider retracted with a click.

  “Lechuguilla Cave is just a few yards this way.” Naveena jogged ahead of us, holding a holo-reader.

  We all followed after our captain. Afu and Williams hurried to catch up to her, but Renfro and I took our time. One of the things you learn as you get older is to conserve your energy.

  Naveena led us to a paved path that wound its way deep into the mouth of the cave. Mouth – that was too accurate. It looked like a deep throat ready to swallow us. When we were just outside the cave, rock rose high above and surrounded us like we were in a stone cup.

  “Are we sure it’s in there?” Williams asked.

  A thin trail of smoke flowed from the cave. The scaly was in there alright, we just didn’t know how deep we’d have to go.

  “That answers that,” I said.

  “All right, circle up.” Naveena twirled a finger in the air for added effect.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked. “Walk until we find it?”

  “This cave is over a hundred miles deep, Brannigan.”

  Never mind.

  “We’re going in, but no farther than the Chandelier Room.” She brought up a picture on her holo-reader. The image showed white crystals hanging from the cave ceiling, looked like enormous snowflakes. “This is where we’ll have to draw it out if we don’t find it sooner.”

  “Draw it out how?” I widened my eyes as understanding hit me. “You don’t mean…?”

  Naveena pulled out the wraith-catcher and handed it to me. “You’re in charge of releasing it and re-trapping it. You’ve done it before, so…”

  “We’re going into a deep, dark hole and putting ourselves between a ghost and a three-headed dragon?” Williams sat down, looking like she was going to puke.

  “That sounds about right to me.” I clapped my hands. “Come on, guys. I’m slowly starting to realize there’s no point in arguing logic within this organization. Sink or swim, yeah?”

  Afu was zoned out, but this time I think it was from being terrified, and not his usual attent
ion deficit disorder.

  I slapped his metal chest. “Yeah?”

  He nodded slowly and turned to Naveena. “I’m ready, Captain Jendal.”

  “Use your therma goggles,” Naveena said, “but only occasionally. I don’t want one of you tumbling off into the dark because you were too focused on heat signatures. We are not here to kill the Behemoth.” She stared at me for a few seconds, until I nodded. “Renfro and Williams will stay at the entrance and will fire off some shots to wrangle it toward the sky. Then, Jet 1 will do their thing. Any questions?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Naveena tilted her head toward me. She should have known I wouldn’t follow orders blindly.

  “What happens if this thing doesn’t scare from the lasers? Didn’t seem like it gave two shits about what we threw at it last time. And even if we manage to pull this off, how the hell are we going to lug it all the way back to Ohio?”

  “We have the technology,” said Naveena. “Hope you’re fresh on your rope-tying skills.”

  “I can go in there with you guys,” Williams said, although she still looked sick to her stomach. “I’ll be fine.”

  Naveena said, “I need your lasers out here. You and Renfro are the most important part.”

  I would have utilized Renfro’s night vision, but I didn’t want to completely crap on Naveena’s leadership. Renfro also happened to be an ace with the lasers, so it wasn’t like she hadn’t put any thought into it.

  “Enough yapping.” Renfro pushed past us and leaned against the rock, urging us on with a jerk of his head. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The cave was really beautiful when you stopped to look at it. I was glad the propellerheads took my advice and added flashlights to our helmets. After all, therma goggles didn’t help you see everything. We passed pools so clear and deep, I almost stopped to drink from them. The rock formations were like works of art – the ones still standing, at least. The Behemoth had made no effort to tread carefully. Stalactites and stalagmites – I can never remember which is which – lay shattered and crumbled to dust. We passed a few piles of burned bones that made an elephant graveyard seem like Legos.