CHAPTER 9

All smoke eater apparatus had been recently fitted with extendable hover-trailers that were stored underneath the chassis. They operated the same way the business end of a tow truck would. Patrice backed the cannon truck up to the sleeping leviathan and we slid the trailer under it. After the living, sleeping dragon was secured to the trailer with magnetic ties, the dead one burst into flames.

Patrice flinched so bad, she fell on her ass. “What the hell just happened?”

“Goddamn it,” I said. “Not this again.”

“You seen something like this before, Cap?” asked Afu.

I stared at the yellow flames and the disintegrating dragon. “Yeah. Same thing happened to the dragon I fought yesterday. I killed it and then poof. All burned up into ashes.”

Afu raised a bushy eyebrow as he looked at the leviathan strapped to our truck’s trailer. “This one isn’t going to do that is it?”

“I sure as hell hope not,” I said. “Only seems to happen to the ones we kill.”

I was about to tell my crew to hop into the truck so we could get the hell out of Sandusky, but an engine growl in the distance interrupted me.

Patrice got to her feet and tried unsuccessfully to brush off the wet ashes that had caked onto the seat of her armor. “Now what?”

A pickup truck rounded the corner and headed straight for us. Two men stood in the truck bed, carrying rusty poles with sharpened ends. The pickup truck parked just in front of us and the two men in the cab got out.

“How do you do?” said the one who’d been driving.

“Just fine,” I said. “But you guys need to clear out. This is a dragon scene and we’re closing it off for further investigation.”

They all looked like miners that had just crawled out of a hole, wearing hard hats with lights strapped to the base. They were dressed in flannel shirts and dirty jeans, dressed too similarly to be a coincidence. These were uniforms in some weird way.

The two in the bed hopped to the ground and jogged over to form a line with the others.

Removing his helmet and holding it under his arm, the guy who’d been driving scanned a finger over me and my crew. “You guys smoke eaters?”

I looked to the leviathan on the hover trailer, our black and purple cannon truck, and a shrugging Afu and Patrice in their power suits. “Yeah. We are. But like I was saying–”

“I’m Harold Pinch,” he said. “These are my men. We’re volunteers.”

Ah, I thought. Jolly volley firefighters. Makes sense.

“One of our guys,” Harold said, “Wilkins is his name, came out on his own when we first felt the quake. He’s not all there in the head, but he’s passionate about the job. Wondering if you might’ve seen him.”

Shit.

I stepped closer to Harold and kept my voice down. “He was wearing a cartoon bikini shirt.”

“Yeah,” Harold said in a gruff smoker’s voice, not trying to be as discreet as I was, “he never took that stupid thing off.”

Sometimes you just can’t take a deep enough breath before giving bad news. “I hate to tell you this, and I tried like hell to save him, but… Wilkins passed.”

Harold dropped his head. The other guys in his mining unit – or whatever the hell they were – caught the gist and either kicked the ground, covered their mouth with a grimy hand, or loosed a whispered swear word.

“How’d it happen?” Harold asked, nearly crying.

“I…” Did he really want to know? “Well, he was in the house over there for some reason and a dragon got him. This one right here, in fact.”

Harold cleared his throat and straightened his stance. “Has his wraith shown up yet?”

Now that was a weird question. “Um… yeah, but we took care of it.”

“We’d like to have it, please,” Harold said, as serious as could be.

“Captain, we should get back, yeah?” Patrice said, trying to help get me out of the heartbreaking bear trap I’d stepped into.

Afu added, “Yeah, we need to hurry before the Sandman wears off.”

“Look,” I told Harold, “we really have to load up. I’m afraid I can’t release his wraith to you. It’s for public health.”

“That’s his soul!” Harold shouted. “You don’t have the right to it. If any part of him is staying in this life, it should be helping his brothers in the cause he cared so much about.”

The others nodded and shouted their agreement.

Oh boy.

“Harold,” I said, “I get it. Volunteer firefighters like you have the same camaraderie as smoke eaters, but–”

“We’re not firemen,” Harold said.

“Oh.” I blinked, confused. “Sorry, I thought you said you were volunteers.”

“Yeah,” he said. “We’re volunteer smoke eaters.”

Patrice’s laugh cracked over the Sandusky ash like a bolt of lightning. Afu was doing only a little better with an armored hand over his upturned lips.

“What’s so funny?” Harold was now pissed.

“Don’t mind them,” I said. “It’s just… we’ve never heard of volunteer smokies.”

He raised his chin. “We’re the first.”

“Okay,” I said, throwing in the towel. “That’s not my jurisdiction to decide, but we’re going to get out of here.”

“Hold up,” he shouted to my turned back as I made my way to the cannon truck. “Give us Wilkins’ wraith! And what’s with these embers burning? You just going to leave ’em like that? They could start a fire.”

“Don’t touch those,” I yelled back.

“We out?” Patrice asked, following beside me.

“Hell yes,” I said. “I’m done with these wastelander wannabes.”

When I got into my seat, Harold was yelling for the others to jump into their truck. Patrice floored it and had Cannon 15 zipping down the road out of Sandusky, but a minute later Harold and his goons were racing along my side of the truck.

“Give us Wilkins!” Harold shouted through his window.

The guys in the bed of the truck pumped their weapons in the air while Harold and the man next to him continued to shout angrily.

Now, I don’t know if it’s because my daddy had told me stories about what used to happen in this country to people of my particular pigmentation at the hands of people who looked and acted just like Harold and the other rednecks, and it definitely didn’t help that I’d just fought two dragons and didn’t get the release of permanently ending either of them myself, but whatever the case, I wasn’t about to take any kind of bullshit from these motherfuckers.

“Stop the truck,” I told Patrice.

She did. And when Harold’s truck stopped beside us, I let him have it.

“Now look here,” I said. “I’m starting to feel threatened. So, if you sonsabitches don’t leave us alone, my crew and I will use everything at our disposal to fuck you up. Do I make myself clear? You’re obstructing our duty.”

Harold frowned, thought about it for a second. A rusty pole versus a laser sword should have been a no-brainer. “We’re going to talk to your chief about this,” he said.

“Feel free to do so,” I said, resting my arm more comfortably on the window frame. “But you better heed the words painted on the back of our truck and keep back at least three hundred feet.”

After securing my wraith remote inside our truck’s lockbox, I flicked two fingers toward the road ahead. Patrice nodded at the signal and we were back on our way with a leviathan in tow.

Unfortunately, Harold and the wannabe smoke eaters followed just behind.