by Sean Grigsby
Crossing his arms, Afu sat back, raising an eyebrow. I sighed. “Look, with the phoenix and… and Patrice and everything else going on, I forgot. Okay? By the time I remembered, I was getting served with a subpoena. Then I decided fuck them, I should hold onto it. And now Yolanda needs a wraith, so it all works out.”
Grumbling, Renfro said, “I guess you’re right.”
“So you’re with me on this?” I looked from him to Afu. “This is just between us?”
“Yeah, I’m with you,” Renfro said. “Right up until this bites us all in the ass.”
A tank rolled past us on the street as we walked up to City Hall. A gunner stood at the turret on top and nodded toward us. Every instinct in me wanted to flip off this guy and everything he stood for, but professionalism won out and I nodded back, even though it was coupled with a disdainful frown.
“Fucking army,” I said under my breath.
“You think they’re going to take our jobs?” Afu asked.
Renfro hummed in the negative. “But I don’t like the look of it. Feels like I’m in some fascist state.”
“Like Texas?” I said.
We had to wait thirty minutes before we could see Mayor Ghafoor, and I sat in the waiting room the entire time, jiggling my leg and thinking about hurrying to Central Station and getting Yolanda her wraith.
Afu had been restless, too, but it wasn’t until Renfro left to use the restroom that I found out it wasn’t from the waiting.
“I want you to know that I’m sorry for what I said before. I’m glad to be on crew with you.” He smiled with a hint of nerves.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
Lord, please don’t let this be some weird way of him trying to patch up our relationship. After all, matter could never be destroyed, only changed. When fire turns a house to ash, you can’t rebuild it using the same charred particles. Then again, the phoenix had kind of fucked up that scientific fact.
“I was just upset,” he said. “I just want to feel like I’m appreciated. That you want me on your crew.”
“I got to pick everyone I wanted to take out the phoenix. Make a note that you’re wanted.”
It was true. Personalities clash, but at the end of the day the only thing that mattered was if you could do the job. Afu most certainly could.
He cleared his throat. Then a second time. “I, uh, I want to take you out for dinner some night when we aren’t worrying about flaming eagles and stuff.”
When I widened my eyes, he raised his palms to me in defense.
“Just as friends and coworkers. I just miss being your friend.”
I tapped a finger against my knee as I thought about it. Maybe going to dinner with Afu – just as friends – would be the last push for our relationship to be fully-platonic. Closure. Closure was good.
“Ask me again when this phoenix business is behind us,” I said.
“Done,” Afu said. The nervousness left his smile as it grew across his face.
“What’s done?” Renfro walked in from around the corner.
I hesitated to answer. Thankfully the mayor’s receptionist turned to us from behind her desk.
“Mayor Ghafoor says you can go in now.”
Lots of things had changed since the old mayor was torn to pieces by wraiths. The most evident was Ghafoor’s new décor. Mayor Rogola had had twin Shi statues at either side of his desk, leaving the rest of the office bare. In Ghafoor’s office, the statues had been thrown out and she’d lined the walls with photographs of old Ohio, when Parthenon City was once called Ashland. Seemed extremely ironic they’d traded names not long before we were living in an actual land of ash.
Mayor Ghafoor paced in front of her desk, dictating notes into her holoreader. When she saw us, she put on a smile to shame Afu and set aside her device. “Parthenon’s bravest! How are things going? Are you all managing the tight fit at the firehouses?”
She must have recently slammed a jug of coffee because she was going ninety to nothing. I paused before I spoke so my brain could catch up with her question.
“Um, we’re trying to make the best of it,” I said. “But we’re looking forward to getting back to having our own place.”
I knew Brannigan would appreciate that.
“All in good time,” said Ghafoor. “So, what can I do for you?”
I waved for Afu and Renfro to take a seat in the two chairs in front of the mayor’s desk. I leaned against the wall.
“We think this phoenix is driving the wraiths and dragons crazy,” I said. “It’s basically sending out a signal to draw them to it. We are suggesting that we temporarily shut down the enclosures until the phoenix is no longer a problem.”
Ghafoor dropped her smile. If it had been made of glass, it would have shattered across the newly-waxed hardwood floor. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I’m afraid not, mayor,” Renfro said.
I touched my engineer’s forearm and looked into his glowing, red eyes. “I got this, Renfro.”
He looked embarrassed and then nodded before leaning back into his seat.
“Mayor Ghafoor,” I said, “these enclosures are going to provide the phoenix with a lot of energy.”
“How?” The mayor crossed her arms.
“Well, the phoenix burns both dragons and wraiths and eats the ashes left after. That’ll give it more fire power, and that’s not even a pun. It grows bigger and hotter with each dragon it eats.”
“So, the phoenix feeds on creatures we’ve been trying to put a stop to for ten years, and you’re wanting to prevent that?”
My mouth hung open as I tried to think of something smart to retort with. But she had a point. The phoenix would take care of a huge problem. Countering that, though, the phoenix was a problem itself.
Ghafoor blinked at me. “And wouldn’t the dragons try to dig back underground if they had any desire to leave the enclosures?”
She had me there. The scalies were going bonkers, but they weren’t trying to escape to find the firebird. I’d clearly come to the mayor prematurely, and I was looking like a complete dumbass.
“I’m not sure why the dragons haven’t left. My guess is that they’re affected but not to the level of wanting to find the phoenix.”
“Guessing,” the mayor said, nodding and walking back to sit at her desk. “I’m not going to make a decision based solely on a guess. The way I see it, if the phoenix shows up at one of the enclosures, it’s saved you the time and effort to find it. I suggest you smoke eaters put units at every enclosure to be on the safe side. That way, if the dragons do finally break out and run amok, you’ll be there to stop them.”
“Ma’am,” I said, “there are at least fifty dragons in every enclosure. Some have more than a hundred.”
“I’ve made my decision, Captain Williams. If you find anything more concrete, more convincing, please come tell me and I promise I’ll listen and change course accordingly. Until then, you have a bird to catch.”
As soon as I was outside City Hall, I kicked a fire hydrant with my heel. The pain didn’t even bother me. In fact, it was welcome fuel for my anger.
A hover-car slowed as it passed in front of City Hall. A white guy in a yellow t-shirt stuck his head and two thumbs out the window. “Nice going, smoke eaters! Way to burn your own house down!”
“Fuck you!” I shouted to the car as it sped away.
“It’ll be alright, Cap,” Renfro said.
“I looked like a fool in there with the mayor.” I spoke through clenched teeth.
“You’re right, though, Cap,” Afu said. “Having that many psycho dragons in one place can’t be good.”
“The mayor had a point, too,” I said. “This phoenix eats what we’ve been fighting for so long. I have to wonder if it’s nature’s way of balancing the scales.”
“Is that what these arsonists are doing, though?” Renfro asked. “Balancing the scales?”
“Those were innocent people,” I said.
�
�Just like Patrice. The phoenix made her go crazy.”
“Yeah, but why Patrice?” Tears were collecting in my eyes, but I’d be damned if they would move any farther. “Why not me or Afu? We got closer to the thing than she did.”
“I don’t know.” Renfro huffed, shook his head. “But we can’t let it be. Too many lives are at risk. We take down the phoenix, it’ll put a stop to the arsons, and maybe then we can shut those PC First assholes up. I don’t know if y’all have been watching the Feed, but people in this city are starting to give them support.”
“It’s just a fucking animal,” I said. “That bullshit Herj… whatever the fuck his name was. That stuff about demons? Possession? I don’t believe in that. Certain people are affected and others aren’t. We need to find out what the difference is. Maybe… maybe we don’t have to kill it.”
“Are you running a fever?” Afu reached out to touch my forehead, but I slapped it away.
All three of our holoreaders went off at once. I knew that could only mean one thing: dragon call.
The red flashing alert floating up from the holoreader screen said some teenagers might be trapped in FirstEnergy Stadium, where the Cleveland Browns used to play.
“Some dumbass kids went messing around out in the wastes?” Afu said. “Place is a death trap.”
“Why are we getting the call, then?” Renfro asked. “That’s fire department business.”
I read the last line of the dispatch message and my heart leapt one way and then another. “That’s why,” I said, and held it up for Renfro to read.
Some wasteland scavengers had found a newer model hover-car outside the stadium. They ran off and called us when they saw a giant, flaming bird burrowing its way into the debris.
CHAPTER 23
FirstEnergy Stadium lay rusty and folded in on itself. I couldn’t imagine that anyone had scored a touchdown or eaten an overpriced hotdog here. The overpass near the front of the arena had crumbled in the middle, even now dribbling bits of concrete onto the road below. Lake Erie spanned wide and far behind the football stadium, but it wasn’t a leviathan that destroyed FirstEnergy Stadium on E-Day.
I’d first heard about what happened while I was working the desk at a mechanic shop. Later, I watched video of the incident. We even broke down the chaos clip by clip in smoke eater rookie school, seeing how dragons attacked and how to evacuate on a mass scale.
Of course, they didn’t know jack shit about dragons when the stadium was destroyed. It had been an off-season game between the Browns and Kansas City. Normally it wouldn’t have been the kind of game to fill the stands, but most of Ohio had shown up to boo down the Chiefs, because they had worked some loophole with the NFL to allow a droid on as a player. Every Browns fan had called foul, signed petitions, posted angrily and endlessly on the Feed about how it was unfair to play a robot against flesh and blood players. The NFL saw good publicity, no matter what the majority of fans had to say about it.
It was mid-way into the second quarter when the quakes came. Huge slabs of concrete and steel beams fell over like toy blocks. That’s what killed most of those in attendance, that and the stampede that followed. Then the kraken showed up.
It wasn’t squid-like at all, which had always confused me. Krakens were supposed to be giant squids, right? Our instructor, Sergeant Puck, told us the name came from some ancient story about a guy fighting a monster on the back of a winged horse.
All I know is the dragon was fat and uglier than sin, scaly tendrils hanging from its head and the sides of its mouth. First, it bent over the top of the stadium like a five-year-old playing with a sand bucket. Then gallons of slime poured from its mouth and nostrils, trapping a bunch of football fans in gobs of acidic spit. Those poor dissolving people it would save for later, while it scooped up a bunch of other fleeing attendees and popped them down its throat like a clawful of candy. Players on the field were squished under its fat claws, except for the second-string bench warmers who had wisely run for the exit. Unfortunately for them, they were soon crushed by the tons of steel and stone that eventually all came down when the kraken had had its fill.
So, needless to say, I felt a little anxious being here in the flesh.
A new hover-car sat by an overturned concrete pillar. A bumper sticker said the owner was “Done with school and out the door. We’re the Class of 2124!” Inside, I found a couple of backpacks and a floor covered with food wrappers, so it was safe to assume there were indeed teenage wannabe archaeologists somewhere under all the crumbled shit they used to call a stadium.
Naveena and her crew pulled up in their Slayer truck as I was scoping out the scene with my therma-goggles
“We’re going to need way more smoke eaters than just our two crews,” she said.
“I already requested more companies and Brannigan,” I said. “But these kids aren’t going to last for long if we don’t hurry.” If it wasn’t already too late. Naveena nodded in agreement and clapped her armored hands together. “All right. We’ll take the right, you take left?”
“Done,” I said.
We began our initial search, calling out for the trapped civilians, even though we didn’t know their names or how deep they might have been. Shouting, “Smoke eaters! Call out so we know where you are!” usually did the trick. But after five minutes, with no other companies showing up yet, and a phoenix somewhere deep below us, I was beginning to get worried.
“Cap,” Afu said, “I think we need to go deeper into the debris. We’re not going to hear shit from out here.”
“Renfro, you mind taking lead?” I asked. “We’re going to need your vision if we don’t pick up anything on the goggles.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Come on.”
He led us up the rubble. We had to power jump once to get over a ragged gap. Then we had to crawl under a broken sign displaying an advertisement for pineapple flavored soda. The farther we slid and crawled, the darker our surroundings became. The debris now lurched over us and blocked out the sun. We were getting deeper by the minute.
Renfro drooped to one knee and put armored fingers against the unstable ground just ahead of him. “Oh, shit.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Come here, Cap,” Renfro whispered. “And be as quiet as you can.”
My guts twisted. That was never a good sign. Retracting my therma-goggles, I stepped lightly over to Renfro and knelt beside him, looking at his fingers and trying to see what had got him so worried. I turned on my helmet light and saw…
…‘Oh, shit’ indeed.
Black oily drops had splattered the ground. It looked like ink – if ink were made of soulless, pure evil. Regular ink didn’t give off the ethereal aura this stuff did, and this stuff meant only one thing. There was a jabberwock slithering through the rubble, somewhere very close.
“Look.” Renfro pointed ahead and I followed with my flashlight.
The ink splashes followed a path that wound up to a hole that was big enough for a van to drop into. From where I stood, the hole looked like it led straight down, into the middle of the collective destruction.
Renfro’s next breath sounded like a gasp. “Why am I always the one to rescue some dumbass kids?”
“Oh, man,” said Afu, staring at the ink spots calling us forward. “I’ve never fought a jab–”
“Don’t even say it!” I snapped.
Smoke eaters, like most emergency service folks, were a little superstitious, and we were already kneedeep in a shit swamp, so it wasn’t like saying the jabberwock’s name was going to make things any worse. But we had kids to extricate, and a phoenix. Adding a jabberwock to the mix felt like the universe was planting a foot into every one of our asses.
They were disgusting creatures. Rare, as far as dragons went, but the few times smokies had gone up against them, there were always casualties. Always.
“Come on, you guys.” I slapped a hand against my helmet. “Sink or swim. Let’s do this for Patrice.”
That bolste
red them a little bit, and maybe they were faking, but they stiffened their lips and bobbed their heads, like athletes before a big game.
I tried not to think about where I stood and the last sporting event that took place here.
Walking beside Renfro, I slung off my foam shotgun and scanned the area behind us. We circled the hole and each took a turn cautiously peering into it.
“I got nothing on my goggles,” whispered Afu. “You getting anything, Renfro?”
“Just a long, dark tunnel,” he said, without a single shred of enthusiasm.
“Naveena,” I called over my radio. “We’ve got a Code J on scene. You find anything worth a damn at your location?”
“Negative,” she responded. “And fuck me in the ass. I thought those things were more in Colorado’s area. Send me your location and we’ll catch up.”
Turning on my suit’s beacon, I told Naveena to stay off radio until I told her otherwise. The wrong sound could have both the jabberwock and the phoenix coming after us, and radio feedback wasn’t the most subtle of noises.
I closed my eyes. My crew probably thought I was saying a prayer, but I was really trying to calm my nerves. “I’ll go first. Get your axes ready, but don’t turn them on unless you have to.”
I swung my legs over and dropped into the hole. I landed on slick ground. My light showed the jabberwock’s ink had collected in a shallow pool that covered my boots. I frowned, disgusted, and tried to shake most of it off, but the damage had already been done.
I whispered up to my crew as loud as I could without having my voice echo through the tunnel. Any time someone had tried to do that to me, it sounded like an old cat hissing at ghosts, but I didn’t have much of a choice.
“Watch your landing,” I said. “There’s a pool of−”
Afu came barreling down. One of his boots slipped against the ink and sent him backwards into it.
“Goddamn it.” I grabbed Afu by the wrist and hauled him out of the tarry pool.
Afu held out his arms and looked at his sides. Shadows deepened in the grooves of his face as he realized what he’d just landed in. He looked at me with a tremble in his lip. “What the hell?”
