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 bolstered 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?”

“It’ll be alright,” I said. “Just be careful and stick with us.”

Renfro eased down the hole and hopped over the pool of ink to stand beside us. “Big Boy here jumped before I had a chance to tell him what you’d said.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you had supersonic hearing, too!” Afu mocked.

“Shhh!” I said. “Therma-goggles and Renfro’s eyes only. Scan every inch as we go. The trapped kids are what we’re here for. I don’t give a fuck if the phoenix escapes again. But on that note, don’t do anything to spook it either. I’d like to kill two birds with one stone.”

“That still leaves the Code J,” Afu said. “And it’s not a bird.”

I shook my head and moved deeper into the tunnel, hunching low and taking care with each step.

Several times the debris above us shifted and my heart almost flew out of my throat. You can’t run from a structural collapse. All you can do is accept your future as a bloody pancake. We had to squeeze through a tight opening to enter what we discovered to be one of the locker rooms. It still somehow smelled like sweaty balls.

We took a break here and Renfro decided it was the best time to coat Afu’s back with foam. “This might help a little,” he said. “But act like you’re covered in highly-flammable ink.”

“I am covered in highly-flammable ink.” Afu took a seat against the wall with his legs bunched against his chest.

If he was going to be down on himself this early, the operation was already fucked. Taking a seat beside him, I moved to put an arm around him, but dropped back when I remembered the ink.

He looked over at me and sighed. “I’m sorry, Cap.”

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “Where’s happy-go-lucky Afu?”

“This is serious business. I have to step up and be serious, too. I don’t want any more bad shit to happen.” This would normally have been where Naveena or Brannigan would have said that the job is always dangerous and serious, and that bad things happen even if you nail everything correctly.

But I didn’t fucking feel like saying that.

So, instead I asked, “Where are you taking me on our date?”

Afu’s face instantly morphed from defeat into surprise. “Date? But–”

“Don’t ruin this for yourself, motherfucker. Tell me where we’re going.”

“Um.” Afu blinked a couple times. “I was thinking about that new seafood place. They grow their own tilapia and shrimp in these huge aquariums. They even let you catch the ones you’re going to eat if you want.”

My change in subject was working a little, getting his mind out of the shitter. I didn’t even care if it was giving him any grand ideas about rekindling our relationship. If we made it out of the fucking stadium alive, I would gladly have given Afu another shot and wouldn’t feel weird about it at all.

“Shut up, y’all,” Renfro hissed, raising his hand. “Do you hear that?”

Afu and I both stood, staying still and listening to the darkness. I wasn’t sure whether we were listening for a teenager screaming for help, or the phoenix screeching from deeper down, or…

Ooh… ooh… ungh…

Even stuffed inside my power suit, my skin went icy. It sounded like a pervert stroking one out while he watched us in the dark. Hushed but biting at the same time, goblinish.

“Is that what I think it is?” I put my back against Renfro’s and waved for Afu to stand beside us.

“I don’t know,” said Renfro. “But I don’t like it.”

Ooh… ungh, ungh… ooh.

We turned in a circle, a tri-sided reverse huddle. I scanned the walls and floor and even the hole we’d crawled through for heat signatures.

“I can’t see anything,” Renfro said.

Afu flicked his head from left to right. Moisture flew off of him and splattered against my cheek. I hoped it was sweat and not ink. “Where’s it coming from?”

Something hit my shoulder. At first, I thought it might have been Afu gripping me for added courage, but the sound had been too wet and the accompanying smell was like a sewer rat that’d gone on a week-long booze bender.

Touching fingers to my shoulder, I drew up long, sticky streams of black sludge. I lifted my head but the jabberwock was already on us.

I shoved the others out of the way and my ink coated boots slipped on the tile as I ran toward the toilets.

Renfro started to say, “What’d you do that for?” but he stopped short, seeing all seven feet of why I’d done it. “Holy shit, it’s on two legs!”

I’m not sure why Renfro had found that particular aspect of the jabberwock to be so crazy-weird, or why he had to say it out loud.

But, yeah, the jabberwock was standing on two legs and flexing long-fingered claws at the ends of its arms. That’s where the human similarity ended. With no nose, and tendrils rising from four points out its head, it had protruding, bucktoothed teeth that reminded me of a rat. Its eyes had no irises, just dingy white balls stuck in its head. Standing crooked and bent on the jabberwock’s back were two disgusting looking wings that wouldn’t have helped an ant fly. Ink dripped from every pore on its body like rotten sweat.

Ungh, the jabberwock moaned. Ooh… ungh.

Seriously, was it trying to eat us or molest us?

“Watch its mouth,” I said. “Afu stay back!”

The jabberwock jerked its head in my direction, drawn by my voice. Its pervy grunting grew louder as it pounded its feet against the locker room tile in a dead run.

Afu slid and kicked the dragon in one of its knobby knees.

“No laser weapons,” I shouted. “We don’t want to ignite the ink.”

And all I had left was foam. The Impulse gun might have done a little damage to the jabberwock, but not enough to kill it, and just the right amount to piss it off. Plus, I was saving it for the phoenix.

Renfro jumped at the dragon as if to tackle him, hitting his power jump to put some extra force behind the punch he was about to deliver to the jabberwock’s head, but the scaly spun around and caught Renfro by the forearm. My engineer cried out in pain as the metal of his suit whined under the pressure of the jabberwock’s grip. The dragon lifted Renfro off the ground and held him there to hang in front of its face.

Ooh…

Renfro squirmed in the monster’s claw. “Let go of me, you ugly, cold-kickin-breath motherfucker!”

Renfro brought his other arm up and hit his foam gun’s button. The white stream filled the jabberwock’s mouth, covering its soulless eyes. It kept making that terrible grunting sound, but was now gargled against the wad of fire-prevention dripping from its maw.

“Run,” I said. “We need Naveena’s crew.”

“It’ll just follow us,” Afu said, slamming a fist into the jabberwock’s gut.

The punch made the dragon spew up the foam, and when it rose again to its full height it was not a happy camper.

“We need to end this here and now,” said Afu, preparing for another go at the scaly.

The jabberwock slashed toward Afu. He ducked the claw, but then the dragon reared back, a hissing sound escaping from its throat, past its buckteeth.

“Afu, get away!” I ran and slammed into Afu as the jabberwock shot a loogie that looked like a piece of flaming coal. It bounced off the wall and I sat up in time to see it rolling toward my boots. My inkcoated, highly flammable boots. On contact the coal ignited my feet and I leapt up, dancing a horrible two step as I tried to stomp out the fire.

“Give me your hands,” Afu said.

In the chaos, I did what he asked, not thinking about what he was planning to do. With his two huge hands, Afu grabbed my arms and swung me. My flaming boots plowed into the side of the jabberwock’s head, sending it crashing into the nearby lockers.

After he set me down, I punched Afu in the chest. “What the hell was that?”

My boots still on fire, Renfro ran over and dumped a couple gallons of foam to put out the flames.

“Seriously,” I said, flicking away the last of the foam. “Let’s move.”

“Help!” a cry came from somewhere in the dark. “We’re down here.”

“The kids,” Renfro said, turning toward the hole we’d crawled through.

I was exhausted, and fear urged me to piss myself. My hair probably smelled like ink and smoke, and I’d promised Afu a date. And now the teenagers wanted to call out for help.

Groaning, I said, “Looks like we’re going back the way we came.”