Smoke Eaters Read online

  “No, what you guys need is an attitude adjustment and more tact. I don’t know if you read up on me or not – though, the cloak-and-dagger thing you have going on says you did – but I’m retiring at the end of the week. In fact, I was going to cash in on the vacation days I had left, but now I think I’ll just use them to get on with my life.” I punched the glass wall in front of me. “How the hell do you open this door?”

  The chief drummed his fingers against the top of the chair, biting his lip and breathing a little heavier. He was trying to contain his frustration, not let it show. When I became an officer, I read a book on body language, thinking it would make me a better leader. It was pretty obvious Donahue was pissed. And that made two of us.

  “Smoke eaters are born, not made,” Donahue said. “This room we’re in, it’s where all smokies discover themselves, it’s where we test those who think they’ve got what it takes. Children whose parents saw them move a hand over a flame unscathed, or born to a mother who chain-smoked throughout the pregnancy. We indulge these fruitless tests because it keeps city hall’s checks coming and keeps them off our backs. But real deal smoke eaters aren’t carnival attractions. I believe nature or genetics has given us the means to fight the scalies, but we need every ounce of help we can get, every smoke eater we can find. I don’t know why you got into the fire service, but I don’t think you would have climbed the ranks if you didn’t care about people. It’s why you went into that house to rescue your crew. It’s why your hoseman is still alive.”

  “But it wasn’t enough.” I turned to Donahue. “Was it?”

  “Then make it mean something. Put off your retirement. Transfer over to the Smoke Eater Division and use your gift for the greater good. We can definitely use your fire experience. And you’ll get a big raise to go along with it. I’d say another twenty thousand more a year.”

  Holy balls.

  The man wasn’t going to let it go. I had to tell him what I told vacuum salesman and Jehovah’s Witnesses who wouldn’t get off my porch. “Let me think about it.”

  “That sounds fair enough.” Donahue stood and removed a card from his pocket. “This is my direct line.”

  I took the card and got a whiff of the strange gum in Donahue’s mouth. “What the hell is that you’re chewing on?”

  “Oh.” He laughed and spit it into his hand. “Nicotine gum. Trying to quit cigarettes. I thought about switching to a bubble vape, but people look so ridiculous blowing those glowing blobs from their mouths.”

  “Cigarettes, huh? Abusing your gift?” I made bunny ears with my fingers for the last word.

  “Wife’s making me. For the grandkids. You have any children?”

  “Wasn’t in the cards.”

  Donahue limped closer, with the sound of a metallic crab.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to your leg?” I asked. “I can hear it clank against the floor.”

  Donahue smiled as if I’d complimented his uniform, and knocked knuckles against his right leg. “Titanium alloy. Lost it to a dragon. If you transfer over here, maybe I’ll tell you the story.”

  “That might be worth it.”

  It was almost like looking in a mirror with Donahue. Obviously we looked nothing alike, but we were cut from the same cloth. Old hands still squeezing the Devil’s throat. Brotherhood is a word that gets tossed around the fire service a lot, but it’s always nice when you can feel it.

  Donahue stepped closer to the glass and pushed something in his pants pocket. Angel and Foam, the two smoke eaters from before, rounded the corner. Angel had her favorite little torture bag in hand. My guess about her being a redhead had been wrong. She was of Indian heritage and had hair darker than dragon smoke.

  I froze in my tracks and Donahue turned back when he saw I wasn’t walking beside him out into the hall.

  “I hate to do this to you,” he said. “But we’re going to have to put the mute bag on you again. At least until you’re sworn in. We like to keep our activities out of public knowledge – not many of them are happy with us, thanks to Mayor Rogola – and fire captain or not, in our eyes you’re a citizen.”

  “Couldn’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t like you guys.” I groaned. “What is this place?”

  Lowering my head to Angel, I gave her my best “fuck you” glare. She grinned as she put the bag in place.

  I was once again in the dark.

  “We’re the only line of defense against the dragons, Captain Brannigan.” Donahue patted my shoulder. “And you’re one of us. Sink or swim.”

  Chapter 3

  I should have been home twelve hours before. Fire families get used to loaning you out for twenty-four hours at a time, but anything more than that is hell for everybody.

  If I could have sat in my pickup a while longer, I think I might have come up with a good plan on what to say to Sherry. You might say telling the truth was the only thing I had to do. What else did I have to think about? I had a bad day and fell into a terrible situation. Why wouldn’t she be OK with that?

  But sometimes the truth has to be sold, and not long after your honeymoon phase, you learn that being married means being a good salesperson. Those who can’t wheel and deal end up losing half their shit and sleeping on a friend’s futon.

  The lights were off inside my house, but that didn’t mean no one was home or awake. I stared at the second floor window for a minute, where a bad storm had once sent sixty-mile-per-hour hailstones through the glass. Apparently, dragons scorching the earth didn’t stop natural meteorological events from occurring. The only difference now was that when it rained, we had to slog through wet ash as much as mud.

  I’d taped cardboard on the other side of the upstairs window, but hadn’t gotten around to putting in a new pane. That had been six months ago, and my plan was to use the first week of my retirement to finally get it fixed, along with other household projects I never had any time for.

  I couldn’t decide what Sherry was going to be more pissed about. Being gone all day or considering a new career. No, I was pretty sure it would be the dragon incident.

  Readjusting my overnight bag on my shoulder, I climbed the front steps to the door. I’d barely gotten my head inside when a baseball slammed into the door frame just centimeters from my ear.

  “Shit!” I jumped back.

  “Watch your language in this house.”

  The light turned on in the kitchen, and Sherry stomped away, humming a lilting song stuffed with frustration, the kind of noise combination only wives are capable of. I sighed. Sherry always asked me to leave my firefighter attitude at the station. I couldn’t help that foul language was as much a job-related tool as a spanner wrench.

  News about dragon emergences travels fast, especially between firefighters. And their spouses. Want to share something with the entire world? Tell one firefighter. I swear we have a gossip network that goes viral quicker than anything on the Feed.

  I should have called to let Sherry know I was OK, but with the smoke eaters kidnapping me, and spending the next several hours giving my battalion chief a verbal report of what had happened at the fire, and then being sent between different chiefs within the administration and then to a psych evaluator, I’d been too busy and had only snagged a half hour of sleep every time they dragged me to a new office and a new chair to sit in.

  I’d also tried like hell to tell my chief about the smoke eaters nabbing me, but he didn’t want to hear about it.

  “None of my business,” he’d said, waving it away and closing his eyes, like I was blowing bees in his face.

  I touched a few fingers to the dent Sherry’s baseball left in the door frame, taking account of the other two dings above it. In our whole marriage, Sherry had only been pissed enough to get out her old Rawlings ball – signed by Waterman Schultz, some major leaguer I’d never heard of – and show me she still had an abundance of power in her throwing arm. People still talk about her no hitter at the 2092 high school state championship. She could
have gone off to play college ball, and who knows after that? But instead she married me a year later.

  I dropped my bag at the door and followed my wife into the kitchen. Sherry sat at the table with her arms crossed. When she got upset her eyes would glow green and the pale areas around them would redden. She tapped her lips with a couple fingers, inviting me to kiss her. I did.

  Hunching over, she scratched a red-painted nail into the tabletop.

  “I’ve had one weird day,” I said. “I would have called, but I’ve been through the wringer.”

  “I thought you were dead.” She lifted her eyes to me, sparkling green. “I had to hear about it from Scott Pierson’s husband. And you know how he blows things out of proportion.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  She swallowed. “That you went into a house with a dragon. An actual dragon. That you lost your air mask and almost died.”

  It sounded like Scott Pierson’s husband had gotten the facts fairly correct for once.

  “Yeah…” I sat down across from her, rubbing my chin and trying to find a good way to tell her about what happened.

  “You didn’t really do that, right? He was just making it up. Right?”

  “I had no choice.”

  Sherry jumped from her chair. “Are you crazy? One week from retirement. One week! What were you even doing at a dragon fire?”

  “We didn’t know it was a dragon. The quake must not have been big enough to detect. And I wasn’t going to let my crew burn.”

  “Now you probably have that silicosis stuff or some black lung disease you’ll die from in a year.”

  I loved my wife with a fury hotter than a scaly’s insides, but she was really starting to tire me out. She’d brought up the whole “breathing smoke” thing, and it was as good a time as any to tell her.

  “That’s another thing.” I cleared my throat. “The smoke eaters took me today.”

  “What? What did you do?”

  “Nothing. It’s… it’s more about what I can do than what I did. This is going to sound nuts.”

  With a soft kick, Sherry toppled the chair she’d been sitting in. “We’re already in crazy town, so you might as well tell me.”

  OK, then.

  “I can breathe dragon smoke. And the smoke eaters want me to join up with them.”

  Her demeanor didn’t change a bit, but the rhythm of her chest looked to be calming. “You told them ‘no’. Right?”

  “I was heading that way. But in the end, I told them I’d think about it.”

  She trudged past me, heading for the front door.

  “Where are you going?” I turned to watch her.

  “To retrieve my baseball.”

  As if reading her mind, Kenji, our robotic dog, bounded in with the baseball in his metal teeth. He leapt onto my knees with his front paws and lifted his head with pride. The digital screen that acted as his eyes showed closed eyelids surrounded by dancing hearts and exclamation points.

  I took the ball from Kenji’s jaws and grinned at Sherry, who leaned against the wall, arms crossed.

  “Jjoh-eun achim, babo gat-eun namja!” Kenji said, panting happily with his rubber tongue dangling.

  The dog spoke nothing but Korean, and he used that same phrase every time he saw me. I tried looking up the translation after we’d gotten him, and after some rough research on the Feed, I was pretty sure it meant, “Good morning, dumb man.” I didn’t take too much offense to it. For one, it was rarely morning when he said it, so I knew he was confused. For another, I’d called him dumb first, so he probably took it as a term of endearment.

  I’d spray-painted gray spots on his blue steel, attempting to make him look like a robotic Dalmatian – which I always thought he resembled – but it only gave him the appearance of a mechanical mutt. I never claimed to be an artist.

  Just before the dragons emerged, and not long after the quakes of 2114, all of the dogs hightailed it somewhere they wouldn’t get chomped or burned, like they could sense something in the world had changed. I could just see someone’s Pomeranian finishing their last bowl of kibble and barking, “Thanks for the food and companionship, but you’re all fucked,” as it galloped into the sunset.

  I’d heard urban legends that massive packs of dogs took up residence in the Nevada desert, sneaking into open bedroom windows and dragging children off in the middle of the night.

  Man’s best friend my ass.

  Cats stayed around, and I’m convinced it was only to witness humanity’s demise and put in a bid to take over as the dominant species once the dragons had finished burning everything down.

  Sherry and I had never owned a pet. After the dragons emerged, some enterprising businesspeople saw an opportunity to fill the gap left by the dog exodus with artificial intelligence – I use that last word very loosely – and Sherry just had to have one. Two Christmases ago, the Feed had a sale on robo-dogs, so I folded. My wife came up with the name Kenji, said it fit his personality. I pointed out that he was made by a Korean company and that Kenji was a Japanese name, but it didn’t sway her a bit. So, Kenji it was. He preferred me over Sherry, much to her chagrin.

  “I have other things I can throw,” Sherry said, giving me her death glare.

  “Why don’t we talk about this instead of bludgeoning each other and getting reported for domestic abuse?”

  Kenji turned to Sherry and barked. “Eongdeong-i kkaji mueos-ibnikka?”

  I taught him that one. Translated: What’s up your ass?

  I laughed and petted Kenji’s gray-blue head. Wonderful invention. You didn’t have to feed it or walk it, and it took your side in marital spats.

  “I don’t know what he just said, but if you think you’re going to go fight dragons, you and the dog can find another place to stay.” Sherry was never one to argue with finesse. If it was a fencing duel, Sherry would pull out a submachine gun.

  I normally would just roll my eyes and ignore it, knowing she didn’t mean whatever hurtful thing she said. Not today.

  I stood, and Kenji perked up his ears. “The day I let you tell me what I can and can’t do is the day I’ll start crapping fire. All I said was that I’d think about it. These smoke eaters seem like consummate jerks, but they have top-of-the-line equipment, way better pay, and maybe I was meant to do it. The smoke eaters think I was literally born to do this. That scaly killed Theresa, burned her up and bit her head off – someone I trained from day one. And it also killed two other brothers. Did Scott Pierson’s husband tell you that? DeShawn almost died today, too.

  “I want to make sure that never happens again.”

  She didn’t say anything. For a few minutes, she just stared at me, eyes blazing green and swelling with tears hanging at the corners. It lasted an eternity, but I kept my eyes on her.

  She walked over to the kitchen counter and brought back a holopamphlet.

  “What’s this?” I stared at the thin metal in her outstretched hand.

  “It was going to be a surprise,” Sherry said. “I thought it would be a good time to have what we never could. What you never had time for with the department.”

  I took the holopamphlet from her hand and opened it. Moving pictures of smiling kids floated at me. One in particular caught my attention: a red-haired little girl with the bluest eyes. My gut twisted and sank. I could have cried. The pamphlet was from an adoption agency.

  “Oh, Sherry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “I love you,” Sherry said. Then, with a spin of her heels, she stalked away to our bedroom and shut the door.

  “I love you, too,” I said softly.

  For my wife, my retirement wasn’t just about me being home more often or having the time to fix the damn upstairs window. Sherry was looking forward to finally starting a family, something that nature had denied us, something the fire service and time had put a wall between. I’d always wanted to be a dad. And now that I finally could…

  What an ass I’d been.

  I patted K
enji again before raiding the fridge for some edible comfort. Then I dug out the bottle of bourbon I hadn’t touched in a year. It was far beyond the drinkable date, but I didn’t care. If super-heated, toxic smoke couldn’t kill me, it’d be a wonder if past-due booze could bump me off.

  I stayed up surfing the Feed on my holoreader. Instantly, I was inundated with words and images floating in the air in front of my face.

  People were resharing posts from Mayor Rogola about how the firefighters and the smoke eaters, and even the police were doing such a horrible job. I didn’t follow that idiot, but I still ended up seeing the bullshit he spouted on a continual basis. Someone should have taken away his holoreader. He would have still been a cowardly ingrate, but at least he wouldn’t have infected the public with his propaganda.

  Firefighters got paid too much. Firefighters caused more damage than help. Firefighters sat on their asses unless they were dicking around at the grocery store, all while tax dollars filled their pockets.

  Well, Rogola and his supporters had never been under a flipped hover car, trying like hell to dig a five year-old out of the wreckage while his mother lay dead beside him. That kid’s cries would never fill their heads and wake them up in the middle of the night for the next thirty years.

  They’d never had to fight a dragon.

  I flipped to the news, seeing if their drones had captured the house fire or me dangling from the ladder truck like a worm on a hook. Instead, they were doing a piece on Canada: The Mysterious White North.

  Such a play on words.

  “Shortly after E-Day, Canada severed ties and communication with the United States,” said a reporter with too much eye makeup. “Why? At a time when sharing resources and intelligence is most crucial, our northern neighbors have elected to deal with the dragons on their own. And, despite limited information, from all accounts they are succeeding. We took to the streets of Parthenon City to see what you think is going on up north.”

  The screen switched to a stubble-faced, ball-cap-wearing man in his forties, a microphone shoved in his face. “I tell you this much, if those dragon worshipers have something we need to kill these dragons, we should just storm the border and take it.”