Ash Kickers

by Sean Grigsby

  “What?” I said, voice hoarse. “It’s not that big of a deal. Just a scratch.”

  But I hadn’t seen it yet. It hurt like a motherfucker, but so did a paper cut. Dropping my head to the injury… well, there it was. My arm was pouring blood. If there was a metal piece in the gaping gash of my flesh, I didn’t see it. My head got dizzy and the surroundings seemed farther away, both in sight and sound. I felt hungry and in desperate need of a nap.

  “Stay with me, T.” Afu took out a rapid tourniquet and slipped it above the gash that was steadily spewing blood. He hit a button and the strap cinched tight.

  I screamed. But I wasn’t bleeding to death anymore.

  “Patrice,” Afu called through his helmet. “Get the medical bag.”

  “You know,” I said, sitting up in the ashes. “You always had the prettiest eyes.”

  What the fuck was I saying!?

  “Then focus on my eyes,” said Afu. And he focused his on mine.

  “Wait,” I said, snapping out of my delirium. “That fucking bird.”

  I jumped to my feet, wobbling like a drunk. Afu tried to sit me back down, but I shoved him away. The net that Patrice had snagged the phoenix with was gone, completely melted and shattered into bits. The phoenix had cremated itself. All that was left of the bird was a pile of glowing, neon-yellow ashes.

  My anger returned. This fucking thing couldn’t even stay alive while we were trying to keep it that way. I swung a foot into the ashes, scattering the glowing mess across the ground. I was stomping on them, kicking them. I fell back, too weak to stand.

  Afu caught me in his arms, always there for me, even when I’d been such a shit to him. “What the hell are you doing?” He was angrier than I’d ever seen him. “The thing is dead. Gone. There’s no point kicking its ash.”

  “Hey,” Patrice said, walking over hefting our truck’s medical bag. “But that’s just what we are, boo. We’re ash kickers.”

  Jet 1’s engines filled the air as it crested the horizon. Afu took the lead and told them we’d taken care of things, but needed immediate evacuation for me. He must have gotten the message in too late, though, because when Jet 1 was directly overhead, they dumped a fuck ton of foam on top of us.

  All of us looked like we’d been shit on by a very big bird. I looked at Afu and spat out a wad of foam before saying, “I don’t know who’s flying that plane, but theirs is the only ash I want to kick right now.”

  CHAPTER 12

  It was Renfro.

  “You get transferred to another crew and the world goes to shit.” Renfro walked down the lowered hatch of Jet 1, spreading his arms, like he’d won the day all by himself. His smile made his ruby red eyes sparkle even in the cloud-blocked sunlight. “What’s up with that?”

  Ever since E-Day, when the dragons first emerged, certain people had developed a rare ability to see in the dark, which changed their eye color to blood red. Doctors called it dracones tapetum, but everybody referred to the condition as dragon eye, and it was even rarer than being born a smoke eater. Renfro was the only person I knew with both qualities. There were plenty of times he’d spotted an emergency means of egress inside a house or a deep hole in the floor that our therma-goggles didn’t catch.

  Renfro had also taught me most of what I knew about shooting foam and lasers – banking them off walls in tight spots and such. I wouldn’t say this to Afu or Brannigan, but any dumbass can swing a laser sword around. Us foam-and-laser shooting smokies had to be more accurate with our weapons.

  Afu and Patrice helped me toward the jet as propellerheads poured out with equipment and flying video drones that buzzed around them like over-sized flies.

  I scooped a big handful of foam off my chest and flung it into Renfro’s face. “We had it handled and pretty well cleaned up before you dropped this shit on us.”

  Renfro laughed, wiping the foam out of his eyes. “I’m just messing with you, T. I’m glad you’re okay. And I’d already dropped the foam when Afu radioed me. Sorry.”

  I flipped him the bird. And maybe it was because of blood loss and exhaustion, but I wondered if you lit a raised middle finger on fire, you could call it “giving someone the phoenix.”

  “She needs to rest,” said Afu.

  “I’m good,” I said. “This is nothing.”

  Patrice gave a scolding hum. “Girl, you need to sit your ass down and take it easy for a while. Hell, I do too. I’ll slab you with some of this curate, but then I’m done for the day.” She patted the med bag on her shoulder, which was still covered in foam. “So quit trying to be Captain Tough Bitch.”

  Renfro raised his eyebrows and stared at Patrice with those eyes that were probably a lot scarier for someone not used to seeing them.

  “Um,” Patrice said, “I mean, Captain Williams.”

  “Right,” said Renfro. “Get her inside and treat her wound. You both need rehab yourselves it looks like. This must have been some dragon.”

  He jogged off to catch up with the propellerheads before any of us could correct him on that last part. Oh, well. It was going to come up soon enough.

  My crew sat me down on a seat at the side of the jet and began working on cleaning and treating my arm.

  I watched them for a minute before saying, “I love y’all.”

  “She must have lost a lot more blood than I thought,” said Afu.

  “No.” I shook my head, but the motion was way slower than I had meant it to be, like life was a gelatin mold and I was barely moving through it. “You both did great work today. I don’t think I’ve ever had to face such an avalanche of shit in my entire career. I’m glad that I had both of you beside me. Sink or swim.”

  They both nodded. I think Afu might have even teared up a little, the big pussy.

  “I’m still so confused,” Afu said.

  “What’s new?” I laughed, trying to brighten the mood.

  “Seriously,” said Afu. “What the hell is going to claw its way out of the ground next? That phoenix wasn’t like any dragon, even though I kept telling myself to fight it like one. And did you see how that leviathan was acting?”

  “And I don’t think that was the Sandman wearing off.” Patrice coughed and sighed, her eyes getting heavy. “That big ass bird… was messing with its head somehow. Scaly… was trippin’.”

  “The phoenix ate the dragon, though,” I said. “Barely even had to move. Wasn’t even a fight, it was a goddamn execution.”

  Afu held out a contemplative palm, as if the answer he was looking for would flop out of the sky and into his hand. “And another thing, birds don’t come from underground!

  “Bats live in caves,” I said.

  He dropped his chin at this and puckered his lips deep in thought.

  “Burrowing owls,” Patrice said. “They love underground.”

  Afu and I both turned to her, impressed and confused.

  Patrice shrugged. “I watch old animal shows on the Feed sometimes… when I can’t sleep.”

  She moaned and touched her head.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I think some of those ashes got in my mouth when you were kicking them around.”

  Fuck me. I’d been too angry to notice what my dumb actions would do to my crew. There was no telling what kind of toxins were in those ashes.

  Sirens filled the air outside and the green and purple strobes of Slayer 5 followed shortly after that. Naveena jumped out of the captain’s seat, fully suited up and rushing around the dragon scene looking for something to do.

  The rookie that had taken my spot on Naveena’s crew got out of the driver’s seat and followed behind his captain. His name was Harpo – no, Harribow, or something like that. He never said much and constantly looked around at the world like it was going to bite him.

  Maybe he had the right idea.

  He wasn’t a born smoke eater like most of us. Like Patrice, he had joined up after a dragonblood infusion gave him smoke eater abilities. We
didn’t treat created smokies like him any differently. We needed the manpower, and the scaly juice allowed them to do everything we could. So what did it matter?

  Giving up on talking to the propellerheads, Naveena ran over to Renfro, who pointed her toward me in the back of Jet 1. She power-jumped over, not wasting any time in coming to check on me. That’s the type of person, and captain, that Naveena was. It’s one of the reasons she would always be a legend in my book – not how efficiently she had slain scalies or the crazy things she’d overcome on some of the most chaotic scenes we got thrown into. Naveena always put her crew and fellow smoke eaters first.

  “You’re late,” I said. I tried smiling, but by the way Afu frowned and blinked at me, it probably looked like I was having a stroke.

  “Are you guys okay?” Naveena kneeled beside me.

  “I’m fine,” said Afu. “Captain Williams got nicked pretty bad by some shrapnel. How are you, Patrice?”

  Patrice huffed and ejected from her power suit before falling into the seat beside me. “I don’t know… what it is, but I’m burning the hell up. Like… I caught an instant flu or something.”

  Harribow, the rookie, put a wrist to Patrice’s forehead. “You’re very feverish.”

  “It’s probably just you,” Patrice said, making goo-goo eyes at him. “I’ve always wanted to try a white boy.”

  Harribow dropped his arm and turned his scared face to Naveena.

  I belted out a hard laugh, like I was high. The ieiunium curate had kicked in and the icy tingles were working their way from where Patrice had coated my injured arm with the blue goop.

  “What happened here?” Naveena asked, throwing concerned eyes toward me, to Afu, to Patrice.

  “Coming through!” Yolanda, who I hadn’t seen rush out of Jet 1, was carrying a glass container filled with fiery yellow ashes that had yet to quit burning. Ignoring our little smokie huddle, Yolanda carried the phoenix ashes to the front of the plane, securing it inside a high-tech lockbox.

  “And what the hell was Yolanda carrying?” Naveena asked.

  “I don’t want to be flying with that stuff,” Afu said. “What if it comes back?

  As Yolanda attempted to explain that Afu’s suggestion was impossible, Naveena put a hand to my face. “T?”

  “Okay,” I said, the curate perking me up a little. I could almost feel my wound sewing itself back together. “I’ll tell you everything. But you’re not going to believe it.”

  Brannigan was waiting for us in the Slayer bay when Jet 1’s hatch lowered to the ground.

  “What in the name of all lording fuck! Are you okay?” Then he hugged me. I didn’t return it, only because I was so surprised and confused by it.

  Brannigan released me and I stared at him with widened eyes. “Are you okay?”

  “I am if you and your crew are. I’ve been hearing the craziest shit. You know how rumors go around the fire service, can’t believe any of it. A few more days and people are going to be saying you fought a snake-haired medusa that popped out of the ground.”

  Goddamn, the news had beaten us back to headquarters. Smoke eaters have the biggest mouths.

  “So are you well enough to tell me about it?” Brannigan asked.

  I was about to tell Brannigan I’d rather do it sitting down with a cold drink in my hand, but Afu yelled for help behind me.

  “Captain!”

  He’d been walking Patrice down the ramp out of Jet 1. She’d told him she wasn’t a grandma and could walk without his help. A few steps later, she face-planted onto the Slayer bay, knocking over a propellerhead’s wheeled cart.

  Everyone within the vicinity shouted or gasped. I ran over and turned Patrice onto her back, cradling her head in my lap. Her eyes were slits, but she was breathing – groaning, really.

  “Patrice.” I shook her shoulder. “What the hell?”

  She tried to say something but it came out mush.

  “Let’s get her to sickbay,” Brannigan shouted so everyone could here. “Now!”

  Afu and Renfro grabbed different ends of Patrice’s limp body and hustled into headquarters. Brannigan walked beside me with a hand at my back.

  “Chief,” I said, “she took some ash in the mouth. But she’s a smoke eater. That couldn’t hurt her. Could it?”

  He didn’t answer because he didn’t know. He could only shake his head.

  “We’re going to give her a full workover.” Yolanda zipped past us, spinning on her heels to jog backwards as she continued telling us the plan forward with Patrice. “Probably some antibiotics and I’m going to recommend another curate infusion to speed things along.” She pointed at me, hopping backwards on the balls of her feet. “Please don’t go anywhere until I’ve gotten a chance to talk to you about what happened out there.”

  Yolanda twisted back around and ran off to the sickbay.

  “Why would I go anywhere?” I told Brannigan. “That’s part of my crew in there.”

  “Come on,” Brannigan said. “This is going to feel like shit – not being able to do anything – but at least you’ll be there for Johnson. That blue stuff will have her better in no time. It’s not your fault, whatever it is.”

  That’s where he was wrong. If it was the phoenix ashes, ashes probably filled with poison, I’d been the one to dance a two-step on top of them and send them flying into the wind and directly into Patrice’s system.

  The propellerheads lay Patrice on a bed while Brannigan, Afu, Renfro and I all stood outside, watching the busy scientists through glass windows as if Patrice was a pet turtle in a terrarium. Her eyes were closed and her skin had turned a strange color – darker in most places but bright red in others. The propellerheads stripped her down to her underwear before engaging a wall of throbbing light on the other side of the glass to block us from seeing what they were doing.

  “And here I thought I’d be the one getting tossed into a sick lab.” I leaned my back against the glass window and crossed my arms. A heat filled my head, but it wasn’t like the fever that had taken hold of Patrice. This was a pure wad of pissed off.

  “Relax, T,” said Afu. “This ain’t about you right now.”

  “I’m not trying to make it about me!” I shouted. “Patrice barely came in contact with those bastards out there today. She shouldn’t be going through this.”

  “Everybody calm the fuck down,” said Brannigan.

  Naveena rushed in from the double doors at the end of the hall. She walked straight to Chief, but he kept his eyes on the sick lab, despite the light curtain.

  “They tell you yet?” Naveena asked. “What they fought?”

  “We’ll get to that later,” Brannigan said. “Not really the time.”

  Naveena shook her head, rolling her eyes slightly. “She’ll be fine, you guys. Chief, I don’t think you understand what emerged out there today. It was–”

  “A fucking phoenix.” Brannigan turned to her, now visibly as miffed as I felt. He even put his hands on his hips to look more intimidating.

  “How’d you know about the phoenix?” Naveena said. “News travels fast around here, but not that fast.”

  Brannigan quickly dropped his hands and replaced his tough guy attitude with the face of someone caught with his hand in the vending droid.

  “Yeah,” I said, walking over to stand beside Naveena. “We barely said anything over the radio, and Naveena was the first person I told.”

  “Wait.” Renfro rubbed his face, as if trying to quickly wake up. “Did you say ‘phoenix’? Like the fire bird?”

  Brannigan tucked in his lips and nodded.

  “What the hell, Williams!” said Renfro. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You ran off before we could, brah.” Afu shrugged.

  “Don’t none of y’all try to derail this conversation,” I said. “Chief? You want to tell me how you knew?”

  He took a deep breath through his nose as he toed a piece of tile with his boot. When Brannigan looked up, he said, “I placed a camera
on the front of your truck.”

  “Goddamn it, Brannigan!” I slammed a fist against the glass of the sick lab. “It was that black square on the grill.”

  I knew, somehow I knew this motherfucker was going to pull something like this on me. In my mind it would have been something a bit less ‘Big Brother.’ Having Naveena keep an eye on me or calling me into his office to talk every week or so would have been expected. But this?

  “Now, chill out,” Brannigan said. “I’m still the chief, remember?”

  “Uh uh.” I began pacing in front of him. “Not right now you’re not. When you start spying on me, you’re back to being the same asshole who stole my car and left all of us stranded at Cedar Point.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Brannigan said. “You’re still pissed about that? A dragon destroyed my house and almost killed my wife and dog.”

  “Your dog’s a robot!”

  “Still!”

  Afu burst into laughter and it caught all of us off guard. For a while we just stared at him as his eyes watered and the gu?aws grew louder. Then, one by one, we all were laughing.

  “I missed this,” Afu said. “All of us, like when we first started working together.”

  “I’m sorry, Williams,” Brannigan said.

  I looked at him, this old white dude who was like my dad here at work. “I’m sorry, too, Chief.”

  Secretly, I hoped all of this would bring back the old Brannigan. That is, the one who was cool with slaying monsters. Chief was beyond the regular “old,” no matter what his dragon blood infusion had done for his physique. He was a born smokie, but he’d pulled some crazy shit going after a three-headed dragon and had been dropped from a height that would have killed or paralyzed anybody else. Two weeks of riding around in a psionic wheelchair and daily infusions of curate later, Brannigan came out better than before.

  Hadn’t done shit for his attitude, though. I could only hope that the dragon blood would heal Patrice just as good.

  Yolanda came out of the sick lab and jogged over. “Patrice is resting for now. Not much you can do. You guys will want to come with me, though. This stuff is still burning.”