Ash Kickers

by Sean Grigsby

  But the foam was doing a lousy job, sizzling away like cream on a stove top as it made contact with the crispy forms lying on the dance floor. By the time I realized I couldn’t extinguish those who’d caught fire, they were already dead. The ceiling caught next, and the smoke quickly followed, banking down in thickening layers. I looked toward the exit where people had crammed into the doorway, trying to flee all at once. Bodies stacked on each other five high, where no one could get in or out.

  I tried pelting the yellow flames rolling above me, but it was too high. Blinded, coughing people kept bumping into me, throwing off my aim. It had taken too much foam to cover the people who’d caught fire, and I didn’t have a spare foam cartridge with me to keep shooting.

  Repeating the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. At that moment, if my foam wasn’t doing a damned thing to extinguish the fire, then I needed another plan, one where pointlessly fucking around with the disco inferno wasn’t a part of it.

  I hit my power jump and sailed through the dark smoke, taking in big gasps of it before landing near the door, accidentally crashing into Drunk Becky, and sending her to the floor. I held a hand out to pick her back up, but she sat on her ass, wrapping her arms around her knees, and refused to get to her feet.

  Afu pushed through the crowd as the mass of bodies thickened near the door. “What do we do?”

  “You keep these people away from me,” I said. “I’m going to relieve a little pressure.”

  Afu immediately stuck out both of his enormous arms and gave me some room to work by shoving at least ten people back.

  The doorway was a packed cluster of kicking stilettos and dress shoes. There were other emergency exits in the club, but in a panic, people don’t think clearly. Everyone had come through the front door, so that’s where they’d run to escape. They probably hadn’t even noticed the other exit signs.

  “Clear the way,” I shouted, pointing to the group beside the door. All but one of them obeyed, so I grabbed the remaining whimpering man and shoved him toward the others.

  I kicked at the wall beside the door. With my power suit’s added strength, my boot made a huge dent in the wall, but it wasn’t anything the building occupants could run through. A few more times I kicked, only breaking through a little each time. I was worn out, but the smoke and fire weren’t going to give any of us a break, and using my lasers would have been too dangerous with so many people so close to the line of fire.

  I squatted into a football player’s stance and leaned my right shoulder forward.

  “What are you doing?” Afu shouted.

  I waited for the ding of my power suit and hit the jump button, crashing through the wall at what felt like a hundred miles per hour into solid rock.

  Skidding to a stop on the asphalt outside, I sat up and watched the crowd burst from the extra wide opening I’d created. The people who’d been caught in the doorway were no longer trapped, although it took a few of them to realize it after the ones on top of them finally crawled out.

  Afu broke ahead of the rest as they poured out of the club like rice from a busted bag. He was fast for someone so large. He hefted me to my feet and said, “Are you, okay?”

  My eyes were looking into Afu’s but what I was seeing in my mind were the burned bodies of the people who hadn’t made it out of Club Infinity. I saw blackened heaps that couldn’t be recognized as human beings any more. And I cried, falling into Afu without caring about staying upright on my own.

  He wrapped his arms around me and let me cry into his chest as he held the weight of both me and the power suit. Anyone else would have toppled over.

  Several feet away, the club had become “fully involved” as Brannigan would say. Which means that the roof, walls… everything… had caught fire, and anyone still inside wouldn’t be coming out alive.

  Sirens howled from too far away, the regular fire department responding. Dark smoke drifted across the illuminated windows of surrounding buildings as flames licked at the night sky, more orange now than the neon yellow that had started it all.

  CHAPTER 16

  Club Infinity was another venue added to the list of places I wouldn’t be able to DJ. Scratch that. My turntable and the rest of my gear were now spinning in the charred great beyond, so I wouldn’t be performing anywhere. My lifeboat to a different career had gone up in flames as much as everything else.

  I’d bought all the equipment on credit and hadn’t even paid it off yet. At least I’d been smart enough to grab my holoreader, thanks to the unnatural relationship we all have with our personal electronic devices.

  Life sucks.

  Don’t think that way, Mama would say. You’re alive and the same can’t be said of a few folks who were there tonight.

  The fire department had finally put the fire out, although by the time they arrived, there wasn’t much club left to burn. It was the first time I’d felt helpless on an emergency scene. With no dragons present, I was the one who had to stay behind the blue hologram ribbons keeping citizens out of the hot zone while the firefighters worked.

  Imagine that. Me, a normal citizen. Just the thought of it made me sick. Well, that and the smell of burnt construction.

  I sat on the bumper of one of the on-scene fire engines with my power suit standing beside me, answering questions first from the fire marshal, and then a detective. The fire marshal was white haired and bespectacled, could have been a mall Santa Claus come Christmas time. The detective, with a thin goatee, looked more like he could have been Satan a few months earlier. I don’t know if I was much help to them. I mentioned the sweaty guy, but didn’t mention what I thought he’d mumbled. The phoenix was dead and burned, after all.

  The detective and fire marshal had taken Afu to the other side of the parking lot so we wouldn’t get our stories mixed up, helping each other remember things and coming up with a completely imagined scenario. It was typical procedure to separate witnesses to avoid that kind of mental telephone game. Staring at the smoldering ashes and bones of the building, all I wanted to know was how this could have happened.

  That guy, the sweaty one. I’d seen him in the crowd just before the fire started. On the surface, he could have been one of those suicidal arsonists the Feed kept talking about. But even if he was, how did he do it? He was coated in liquid but hadn’t smelled of accelerant. It was sweat. I could still smell it on the mental wisps of memory.

  Even if he’d been able to mask the smell of an accelerant, that didn’t explain how the fire had grown so large so quickly. Gasoline didn’t act like that, and

  I couldn’t think of anything else that could. Was he wearing a device of some kind? No, I would have felt it underneath his clothes when I bumped into him.

  “He said we’re all ‘Children of the phoenix’.”

  I snapped out of my thoughts and looked toward who had spoken; a woman in a black skirt sitting in the back of an ambulance. The fire marshal and detective were consoling her.

  “And then the fire started?” the fire marshal asked. She nodded.

  “Did he have anything in his hands? A button, a lighter, some kind of remote.”

  “No,” the woman said with a cough. Black finger streaks ran down the sides of her face. The whites of her eyes had turned red. “I didn’t see anything like that. He just… caught fire.”

  All the advances in technology, but fire was still fire. And there were a million and one ways to start it.

  The fire marshal sighed and looked at the detective. He jerked his head back toward me before thanking the woman and trudging over to where I sat, cradling my holoreader and wondering if I should call my parents or Chief Brannigan first.

  Great. More questions I didn’t have any answers to. I fought dragons, goddamn it, not arsonists. From what I’d seen happen in that club, though, I had it easy in my career. People: those are the real monsters everyone should be worried about. A dragon burns and eats because that’s what it was born to do. You can pr
edict its movement and behavior, for the most part. They’re natural. Humans on the other hand; you never knew what sick shit lay hidden between the folds of their gray matter.

  “Captain Williams,” the fire marshal said. “Sorry to keep you here so long, I know you’ve had a rough night.”

  “Hell, I’ve had a rough year,” I said. “This sucks, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

  He hadn’t seen me crying into Afu’s chest.

  “Right.” The fire marshal cleared his throat and looked at the detective beside him like he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, but was pretending for my benefit.

  “We’re trying to make sense of all of this,” the detective chimed in. “This is the fourth incident like this and from what we heard from other witnesses, this guy sounded like he had an agenda.”

  “You think it’s some kind of terrorist group?” I asked.

  The detective made a clicking noise out of the side of his mouth. “More like a cult.”

  “Should you be telling me all of this?” I asked.

  “You’re a smoke eater, Williams,” the fire marshal said. “We don’t have to hide anything from you. We just need your help.”

  “I certainly appreciate the interagency confidence,” I said, “but I’ve told you everything I saw in there. I wish I knew more, but it happened so fast. It sounds like you know who did it. Hell, half the club could have called that one. As far as finding out how and why, sorry fellas, that’s on you. I’m stumped.”

  The detective breathed out of his nose, sounding like a mixture between sigh and grumble. He sat down on the engine bumper beside me. “Your fellow smoke eater over there, the big fella, said you guys had an incident the other day that might drizzle a little more sense onto what happened here tonight.”

  Afu, you fucking moron.

  “We were keeping that under wraps,” I said. “Confidential, you understand? What did he tell you?”

  “That’s all he told us,” the fire marshal said. “He wouldn’t say anything else without his direct supervisor’s approval.”

  “Which is you,” the detective said.

  I made my own grumble-sigh. “Okay, what I’m about to tell you doesn’t leave this circle of three. I don’t want to see this shit on the Feed later today because one of you couldn’t keep your mouth shut. I know how cops and firefighters like to talk.”

  “You have our word,” the fire marshal said.

  I told them about the phoenix. Not right out of the gate. I told the whole story from when we arrived in Sandusky, met the crazy volunteer smoke eaters, and then everything that happened afterward. Who knows? Maybe in some roundabout way, having these two know my side of the story would help with my pending lawsuit.

  Probably not.

  They listened to everything I said, widening their eyes when I got to the part about the phoenix, but otherwise stayed quiet and treated it as normally as if I’d told them a droid had a metal ass.

  “And the suspect was heard saying something about ‘Children of the Phoenix’?” The detective nodded like he’d figured it all out.

  “Sounds like a cult to me,” the fire marshal said.

  I shrugged. “It’s a nice story, but it would mean he knew about the phoenix to begin with, and we haven’t released that information to anybody but the victim’s families, since they’re suing me. I mean, they could have started talking about it, but we sure as shit had no idea anything like that could have existed before now. How would anyone else? That witness you talked to must have heard something through the grapevine and pulled it out of her ass. She’s clearly shook. Besides, that bird is dead now, so what does it matter?”

  It would matter if there were more of them. I shivered at the thought.

  “So, the volunteer families could have been talking. Or maybe one of your own,” the detective said. “I know how firefighters like to gossip.”

  “We’re not the fire department,” I said.

  The detective shrugged. “Cut from the same cloth.”

  “Maybe this supposed group was the one to summon the phoenix,” the fire marshal said. “And they concocted this arson spree to show devotion to their deity or something.”

  “Summon?” I asked. This wasn’t Dungeons and Dragons for fuck’s sake.

  “Mayor Rogola did something similar,” the detective said. “He used wraiths to draw dragons up. Maybe there’s a group that learned about the possibility of a phoenix down below and one thing led to another and they got religious with it all.”

  “Guys,” I said, “I’m telling you, that’s not possible. I could concoct a ritual to summon a leprechaun, but that doesn’t mean it would work. I mean the fire in there was…”

  “Was what?” The detective wrinkled his brow.

  Unkillable.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It was just really crazy. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  But I had seen neon yellow fire like that before. No way in hell I was going to tell these chumps anything about, though. Not yet. Brannigan might have been convinced we were all a back-scratching group of civil servants, but until I knew why the hell some sweaty dude came up into the club shooting yellow flames like a phoenix, I wasn’t going to give the cops a reason to start arresting innocent people and causing a state-wide panic.

  But the phoenix was dead. Wasn’t it? Something deep down told me not to count my firebirds before they resurrected, despite Yolanda’s assurances.

  The detective got to his feet and shoved fists into his pants pockets. The fire marshal followed and they talked in hushed tones. I might have been able to hear what they were saying if I’d tried – if I gave a damn. Instead, I turned on my holoreader to check in on Patrice.

  She lay in bed while Yolanda was scrolling through holographic charts beside her. I hated that Patrice was still out of commission, but at least she had people looking after her round the clock.

  Yolanda got up from her stool and turned her back to Patrice, getting really involved in whatever she was reading. Patrice sat up as if an invisible rope had been tied around her and ten people jerked on the other end.

  “What the fuck?” I said aloud.

  The detective and fire marshal turned to me. “What is it?” they both asked.

  “Oh, nothing.” I lied with a laugh and flitted a hand in the air. “Just a dumb comedy show on the Feed.”

  They nodded, annoyed, and walked away as they went back to their conversation.

  I stepped into my power suit and ran to the other side of the parking lot, hoping Afu had stuck around. Mostly keeping my eyes on the holoreader, I looked up only every so often to make sure I wasn’t running into a fire truck or a chunk of burned dance club.

  On my holoreader, Patrice turned slowly on the cot, dragging her feet off to hang just above the floor. Rising, she stood, wobbly, taking one step at a time, leaning from side to side like a zombie out for a walk.

  Yolanda hadn’t heard Patrice get up; she was too involved in her studies. Patrice looked like a drunken predator stalking a kill.

  I shrunk the video feed to a smaller square and dialed Yolanda’s number. On the screen, Yolanda fiddled inside the pocket of her lab coat, but she never got to answer my call. Patrice lunged for her, wrapping arms around Yolanda’s neck and jerking her from side to side. Yolanda’s holoreader dropped to the floor and skittered across the tiles before coming to a stop.

  I ran faster.

  Afu stood against the side of an aerial ladder truck with his eyes closed and mouth open. He snored once when I shook him and stared at me glossy-eyed, so I shook him again.

  “What? What?” he said. “I’m awake.”

  I shook my holoreader in his face. “Patrice just attacked Yolanda.”

  “Say what?”

  I handed him the holoreader and he raised an eyebrow, but not in the loveable, confused way he was known for. Afu looked scared.

  “We have to go,” he said. “Let’s take my truck.”

  Jogging
alongside Afu, I took glances down at the holoreader. Yolanda lay on the floor. I couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. Patrice bent over the propellerhead’s limp body and reached into her lab coat, ripping away a key card. When she stood, Patrice shivered. She moved toward the door leading out into the hallway, where I wouldn’t be able to see what terrible thing she was going to do next.

  Before Patrice left, she stopped, stone still, and raised her eyes toward the camera. She… looked at me. But the creepy thing, what sent my guts into a knot and turned my skin to ice, was that whoever was casting a death glare at the camera before charging out into the hallway, it wasn’t Patrice.

  CHAPTER 17

  The propellerheads answered my call on the first ring as Afu sped down the highway toward headquarters. It didn’t take much to convince them Yolanda had been attacked. The drawback was protocol made them gather every scientist inside the watch room and lock it down with impenetrable titanium alloy doors.

  Every smoke eater crew was out of the building. The propellerhead I spoke to said a behemoth emerged outside of Cleveland and everybody had gone, including Brannigan and Naveena – which answered the question of why neither of them had answered their holoreaders.

  When Afu and I pulled up outside of headquarters, the whole building looked dark, quiet, as if nothing was amiss, a regular Saturday night out in the ashes.

  “What do you think Patrice is going to do with that key card?” Afu asked as we raced up the front steps.

  “I hope we find her before we find that out.”

  A propellerhead messaged me through the holoreader, saying they detected a heat signature on the roof. I told Afu to go put on his power suit while I made my way to the roof.

  “Armor?” He opened HQ’s front door and let me through. “It’s just Patrice we’re talking about, right?”

  “Call it a hunch,” I said. “Grab my helmet while you’re at it.”

  He nodded and jogged off toward the Slayer bay.

  The only way to the roof was through a laddered hatch on the top floor, at the end of a hallway. From what I’d seen on the video feed, Patrice had barely been able to walk. How she could have gotten onto the roof was beyond me, but then again, it was even more fucked up of an idea that Patrice would attack anything that didn’t have scales or ghostly tatters. I’d never heard of a fever making people go rabid. Even if that was a possibility, I’d think Patrice would be too sick to raise an arm, let alone wrap it around Yolanda’s throat.