Ash Kickers

by Sean Grigsby

The smaug dropped Kiesling. He landed with an “Oof!” and power jumped to the other side of the Slayer. He was limping before he leapt, but our thrusters don’t necessarily need our legs at full function to work.

  Now it was just the smaug and me. I planted my feet and readied my laser for a killing shot. The dragon whimpered – or as close a sound as I can describe it – as it looked over its damaged wing. I almost felt bad for the damned thing. It was just an animal after all. It wasn’t sentient. Nor evil. It was just following its nature. Then again, before cancer was wiped out fifty years ago, it had been following a natural design, too.

  My compassion sizzled away when the dragon snarled, its nostrils trembling and puffing out smoke. It gave me goose bumps. The good kind.

  “Come on, baby,” I said. “You know you want it.”

  The smaug inhaled and puffed out its chest. When it tried to breathe fire it hacked against the foam still stuck in its throat. I laughed and put my hands on my hips, where I remembered my new toy was holstered in a container on my power suit. The device, what the propellerheads had dubbed a “haymo” after some famous dragon slayer, was round and the size of a tomato. I pulled it out as the dragon growled and kicked ash away with its hind claws. I pressed the button on the top of the haymo and charged toward the dragon, hollering as hard as my lungs would let me.

  This excited the dragon. It sprayed spit with another of its roars and galloped for me at full speed. Claws kicked up ash. Golden eyes flickered with hunger. Teeth, dripping with drool, spread wide before surrounding me on both sides.

  I chunked the haymo into the smaug’s mouth and power jumped away before the jaws clamped down. But I hadn’t properly directed the jump and was soon pointing headfirst toward the ground. My helmet took most of the impact, but that didn’t mean much to my aching body, especially my neck and back. It felt like a herd of scalies had done the cha-cha right on top of me.

  And then the smaug was right on top of me. The haymo hadn’t worked. All I could do, as the scaly reared back to chomp, was lay on my back and say, “Fucking propellerhea–”

  Fierce blue rays of light shot from the smaug’s neck. The dragon froze mid-bite and remained motionless as the blue rays began to spin… just like a propeller.

  Nice touch, I thought, rolling out of the way.

  With a heavy and wet flop, the smaug’s head fell to the ash beside me. Its golden eyes were no longer glowing, replaced by the stare of a dead fish. The scaly’s body stayed upright for a second longer before tipping over and landing harder than a drunk white girl at a club.

  “That’s how we do it,” I said, but it came out sounding too tired to be cool. Besides, there was no one there to high five.

  As I got to my feet, the haymo plopped out of the dragon’s severed neck, rolling across the ground and collecting ashes in the sticky blood. It stopped at my power suit’s right boot. I picked up the device and turned to my approaching captain and driver. Kiesling, guarding an arm across his chest, limped and frowned. Wincing from his burns, Zhao was wide-eyed and looked at the scene as if he was on another planet.

  I held the haymo above my head. “I love this thing!”

  Flames erupted behind me.

  I spun around, grunting against the pain in my neck, ready to shoot more lasers. How the hell could a decapitated dragon could breathe fire?

  The smaug was still dead. Flames sprang from its body and severed head. I had to back away from the blaze as it grew and hungrily ate away at the dragon. I’d never seen such a thing. Night was pretty much upon us and the bright flames seemed to be the only thing that existed. After a few seconds, the smaug had been reduced to a pile of glowing yellow embers.

  Then Kiesling spoke.

  “You’re in so much damn trouble, Williams.” He tried to point at me with the arm he’d been coddling, then cried out in pain. “I think I broke my arm.”

  I bent over to look. “I can make you a sling for the ride back. I’ve seen Yolanda fix worse in a day or two.”

  “Ride back?” Zhao said. “The Slayer is trashed.”

  I turned and looked at our apparatus. It looked like a crushed and burned can of soda. “I guess we’re going to have to radio for someone to come get us.”

  Kiesling’s voice trembled with a serious heaping of anger. “If you think you can do whatever you want, that you can’t get fired because we need smoke eaters, you’re dead wrong. We can make smoke eaters now. You almost got us killed today, and I’m going to have your badge for it.”

  “Fuck all that,” I said, turning to Kiesling and hiking a thumb over my shoulder. “Did you not just see that dragon burst into flames?”

  CHAPTER 2

  I don’t know what it is about deep voices on the other side of closed doors, but it drives me crazy. Sunk into a blue cloth chair – it felt like wool – outside Chief Brannigan’s office, I wasn’t able to understand anything Captain Kiesling and the chief were saying. I mean, I knew they were talking about me, but that sure as hell didn’t put me at ease.

  Was Brannigan defending me? Was Captain Kiesling being diplomatic and not burying me in too much shit? Maybe he’d dumped all his anger on the ride back?

  After the smaug had self-destructed out in the wastes, Kiesling radioed Smoke Eater headquarters and asked them to send somebody to pick us up because a member of his crew had gotten Slayer 10 demolished. The propellerheads, as calculating and even-tempered as ever, didn’t ask him to go into any more detail.

  That wouldn’t stop rumors spreading like a plague. About me, about what had happened. Smoke Eater Division is an offshoot of the fire department, and from everything Chief Brannigan told me about his days with the FD, the traditions are the same. Gossip just happens to be one of those traditions. Want everyone on the planet to know something? Tell a smoke eater. It had probably reached every ear before the smaug’s head hit the ground. It would get blown out of proportion, too, more than likely. By the time it got back to me, they’d be saying I rammed the dragon with the Slayer truck, lit Zhao on fire, and shot Kiesling in the arm.

  I’d hoped like hell headquarters wouldn’t send Captain Jendal and Renfro, and whatever rookie had taken my spot on their crew, to pick us up. It was slowly creeping in that I might have screwed the pooch, and I didn’t want to face my old crew until my guilt had faded to a manageable level.

  Kiesling didn’t wait around for the en route apparatus to arrive. Without a word to either me or Zhao, he limped off toward the road. Of course, Zhao and I followed. Kiesling said nothing the two miles or so we walked until Cannon Truck 8 – a smoke eater crew I knew but never worked with – showed up and gave us a ride back. That’s when Kiesling released all the words he’d been holding in.

  His verbal assault went on and on, which made me feel worse. The other crew listened with wide-eyes as he ranted and raved about how I’d taken my sweetass time shooting the dragon and that I was a loose cannon, yadda, yadda, yadda. The usual shit.

  I chose to keep quiet, which wasn’t my regular way of doing things. Usually, if someone comes at me or is throwing shade where I can hear, I go on the offensive. That wouldn’t have improved things at all in the back of Cannon Truck 8. Neither would blubbering out excuses and apologies.

  I’d been fully-prepared for the cannon truck crew to crack jokes about me, if only to lighten the mood, but they never asked for my take on what had happened, didn’t even respond to Kiesling after he’d finished bitching. Kiesling seemed to be cool with that, because after he was done he stared out the window until we pulled up to the front of headquarters. The cannon truck folks told us to have a better day before they drove off.

  Outside Brannigan’s office, I’d been yanking on a loose thread in the blue chair. I was getting bored and needed a distraction from the muffled voices, so I pulled out my holoreader to see what was new on the Feed. There was a chance I made the news, slaying the smaug. If it made me look good, I’d show Brannigan. If not… well, I hadn’t seen any news drones flying around. Then aga
in, I’d been busy doing my job, and plenty of Ohio smoke eaters had been captured on film without them ever knowing.

  I clicked on the news thread. An anchor lady hovered above my holoreader’s screen. “It was only completed a few months ago, but the Theresa Renee Parker Memorial Wraith Enclosures have brought about a huge spike in immigration to Parthenon City.”

  What a mouthful.

  Theresa had been a firefighter under Brannigan, before he became a smoke eater. She’d been eaten by dragon at a house fire they’d been fighting. Later, she was also the first wraith Brannigan trapped in this weird, Canadian ghost remote we now use. Brannigan had plans to pass out wraith catchers to the general public and have us smoke eaters teach them how to use it in the unlikely event they ran into one of those ugly fuckers.

  Wraiths are the ghosts of people killed by dragons. My mama and daddy never understood it and would always ask me to explain wraiths to them, since I had to learn about them in smoke eater academy. After a lot of trial and error, I came up with a simple explanation that seemed to satisfy my parents.

  Everybody thought dragons were make-believe until they emerged from below ten years ago. I figure it’s the same with ghosts. They go together like a crocodile and the plover bird that cleans its teeth. Dragons need wraiths to protect their ash nests while they go back underground, or fly, or crawl off to burn down some more shit.

  I hadn’t given the smaug a chance to use it, but all dragons can shoot electromagnetic pulses. It kills our equipment, forcing us to use ancient backup like lances and shields. And if you consider human souls to be made of energy, it’s easy to see that a dragon could manipulate it to basically create an electric ghost guardian that would claw your throat open if you got too close.

  That’s not what I finally told Mama and Daddy, though. To them I said that dragons were created by the devil and if they kill someone, they enslave their souls.

  They accepted my explanation, but that’s because they’re all about the churchy shit, and don’t really watch the news. But it created a new problem: Daddy didn’t want me to be a smoke eater anymore.

  “It’d be terrible enough to lose you,” he’d said. “How do you think I’d feel if some ugly-ass dragon turned your everlasting soul into one of those things? Our people were slaves long enough.”

  He had a point. It hurt to hear my daddy beg me to quit being a smokie, mostly because I’d been thinking about it myself and it just made it that much harder not to turn in my resignation.

  The newslady on my holoreader said, “We met up with Ted Sevier, who led construction of the enclosures, along with input from Chief Cole Brannigan of the smoke eaters, and newly-elected Mayor Tilda Ghafoor.”

  A wraith wall appeared on my holoreader. It was like a long aquarium tank where the ghosts floated around inside, baring their electric teeth and clawing at the glass. Where legs should have been, the wraiths only had tattered flesh that trailed under them like a beat-up flag.

  “This is it,” said a skinny white guy with thick blond hair that touched his shoulders.

  The words that floated under his image told me it was Ted Sevier, but I knew him well enough. We’d seen him every so often when we’d dropped off sleeping dragons.

  He spread his hands as he stood in front of the glass-encased wraiths, smiling like he was showing off a brand-new hover-car. “It’s one of four enclosures, but we see all of them acting as a single unit. North, south, east, and west.”

  The Feed cut to a news drone’s view of the enclosure from above. Shaped like a hexagon, the top of the enclosure was covered by –

  “Reinforced steel and a laser-field cover the top so no dragons can fly out,” Sevier kept yapping as the image moved to show each enclosure at different points surrounding Parthenon City. “The ground is obviously open so the dragons can emerge when they’re attracted to each enclosure’s wraith energy – we have plenty of that – and the dragons can return below if they want. But we’ve found something very interesting as we’ve studied them inside the enclosures. Most of the dragons stay. They mate, fight, live their scaly lives. I think they feel safe with all of the wraiths in the walls. They don’t have to kill people, we’ve provided the wraiths for them. They sometimes cannibalize each other for food, of course, but we let nature take its course. When we need to, we tranquilize the dragons and go in to draw blood for the hospitals.”

  I shook my head. These people were trippin’. Sure, dragon blood saves lives. I’m not against that. But this was going to go to shit someday and the scalies were going to make up for lost time and kill way more people than their blood had saved. I just hoped I’d be long gone when it happened.

  The Feed cut back to Sevier, who was still grinning smugly. “Now, a question we get a lot is how we refill the wraith walls when they disappear, especially when dragon fatalities are at an all-time low. The answer is that we don’t. We’ve instituted a constant electrical current within the walls to keep these same wraiths floating around for good.”

  Wraiths out in the wild tended to disappear within a couple months of being created, kind of like a battery running out of juice. By then, the scalies’ eggs are hatched and there’s no more use for the wraith to prowl the ash heaps.

  “We’re the first city in the country to implement these enclosures,” Sevier said. “Many other cities, even internationally, have been in contact with us so they can have their own wraith enclosures. I do have to give credit to Canada for providing us with the means to do this, although we’re unable to contact them to give our thanks.”

  Brannigan was the reason for that when he attempted to stop one of Toronto’s dragon sacrifices. Canada had given us the means to take down dragons without killing them, but they shut their doors to us for good after that. A little bit later, they decided to do the same to everybody else. Chief B must have really given them a bad impression about how the rest of the world acted. Then again, the rest of the world didn’t hold a lottery to see who would be dragon victuals.

  The news lady reappeared in the air above my holoreader. “And since Parthenon City is the sole source of both dragon blood and the means to keep dragon attacks to the lowest anywhere in the world, many from all over the country are flooding in to receive the benefits.”

  A man wearing a Robot Football League polo replaced the news lady. He held a little, frizzy-haired girl in his arms who couldn’t stop staring at the camera.

  “I came here for my family,” the man said. “There are too few cities spread out nowadays. Everything else is just ash. I came from Little Rock. They did their best, but they couldn’t stop these monsters. And my Sadie here,” he nodded to the little girl, “she was born with a heart defect. She’s needs the medicine they make with the dragon blood. Nothing else can help.”

  Back to the news lady, “That’s just one family, but there are hundreds more that have recently arrived. More are expected. Mayor Ghafoor, in a statement this morning, had this to say.”

  The mayor, a small woman in a pink hijab, floated in front of my face, standing behind a podium. “Parthenon City welcomes our new citizens. We hope you find happiness, and I look forward to all of us working together.”

  I liked our new mayor, especially compared to the asshole in office before her, who’d nearly gotten me killed. Ghafoor had taken a page from her predecessor’s book in implementing fire droids, much to Brannigan’s disappointment. But the robots were being used as supplemental manpower instead of replacing firefighters and leaving them jobless. It was a compromise even Brannigan agreed to, despite his hatred for metal men.

  What I liked about Ghafoor was that she actually seemed to give a damn, even if I didn’t agree with how she went about things sometimes. I guess that’s the thing about politicians: you never get the perfect person to represent you. But Ghafoor listened to us and other emergency services, to the civilians. That went a long way with me.

  “However,” the news lady reappeared, “not everyone is optimistic about the influx of new Par
thenians. Former Droid Factory executive, Duncan Sharp, has formed a group he calls PC First.”

  A man in a black turtle neck stood in front of a line of men who looked exactly like him: hair longer in the front than the back and slicked to the side, cheeks red with fury, and neon holotorches in each of their fists.

  “Not that asshole again.”

  I paused the Feed and looked up to see Patrice Johnson, a smoke eater on Slayer 4, poking her bald head through the doorway.

  “Hey, girl!” Smiling, I jumped up and pulled her into a hug.

  She danced me around in a circle. “You all right? I heard you knocked your captain the fuck out and then drove your Slayer into a dragon hole.”

  “You know damn well that’s not what happened.” I plopped back into the blue chair.

  Patrice sat in the one across from me, laughing. “Ah, I’m just fucking with you.”

  She was shorter than me, but stout. She could easily throw me over her shoulder and run a mile before her legs gave out. Everyone called her Dynamite.

  One day, when Patrice walked in on her crew talking about shaving their heads as a sign of brotherhood, she’d been excited to join in. But the dudes on her crew told her she was excused from participating. Only the men had to do it. Next shift, the crazy bitch walks in with a head as smooth and bald as a fire droid’s. And what’s better, the men had been too chicken shit to do it themselves. Patrice kept the bald look ever since. It worked for her, honestly.

  I nodded toward the man’s image floating above my holoreader. “So, you know this guy?”

  “Know of him. We had a false alarm at the Conlin building the other day. Him and his people were across the street running their mouths. Talking about putting Parthenon City first. Hating on the folks moving in from other cities. You know the type.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  “Fool starts calling these new people rats. Rats, T. Saying they’re this generation’s greatest plague, eating up all the food, taking all the medicine. Talking ’bout how the mayor is too soft and won’t protect the true citizens from dirty out-of-towners.”