CHAPTER 9

The ground rumbled as it moved across the lake shore. It took a leisurely gait and why wouldn’t it? There was nothing that would threaten something so big.

Big? More like titanic. About three stories tall from what I could estimate. Even a three-headed Behemoth would be dwarfed. The sunlight hit it at just the right angle and lit up its golden scales, casting just enough of it in shadow to make it look majestic and mysterious and everything I thought it would be when I ever encountered one.

What a day.

Most scalies had a sinister look. Slithering tongues, sharp spikes along the back, teeth that showed even when their mouths were closed. You knew they would try and kill you just by looking at them.

Golden Drakes, sometimes referred to as “Luck Dragons”, had more peaceful faces and even their horns were curvy and smooth, decoration over decimation. They usually kept to themselves, from what I’d read. But if they were provoked, or if another dragon encroached on their territory, GD’s were worse than any dragon on record.

It wasn’t just their size – though being as big as a skyscraper could do cataclysmic damage, even by accident. Golden Drakes flew at incredible speeds. Whole towns could be ripped up in two flaps of its wings. Given its size, the GD was as destructive as an F5 tornado to anything within a decent range. A tornado all right; a twister that breathed fire. It hadn’t been studied enough to determine whether its breath burned hotter than other scalies or if the flames were just so big it didn’t take as much effort.

If someone ever had the misfortune to piss off a Golden Drake, it really wouldn’t matter. Once the dragon went into attack mode, somebody was going to die. They were like hornets in how they attacked. It was like temporary psychosis or rabies. They might as well have been called “Jekyll and Hyde” dragons.

But somehow they got the “luck” label. The books and Feed documents said it was because of their regal and magical appearance. Their rarity caused some to believe they were like shooting stars you could make a wish on. I was more convinced it was because, if you ever saw a Golden Drake, you were lucky if you survived the experience.

We were driving the slayer truck along the western shore of Lake Michigan as we watched the dragon. Soon we’d be in Chicago city limits.

The Golden Drake had its wings tucked close to its sides. The sunlight lit them up like colorful, stained-glass windowpanes I’d only ever seen in churches. Its huge feet created small, frothy waves as it ventured into the lake. The scaly lifted its head toward the sun and chirped a song that sounded like a combination of nails on a chalkboard and a thousand people burning alive.

I couldn’t think of anything to wish for.

“Shit,” Seabee said. “If they were all that calm, we wouldn’t be driving through ashes and I could stop to get a beer.”

“Please tell me we’re not going to feed the tracker to the GD.”

“Hell. No.”

The Golden Drake continued moving into the water and we drove past, letting live and living. What used to be the Windy City lay a few miles ahead. It looked more like a bunch of crumbling rocks from that distance. Towers of gnawed-on coal.

At the corner of my eye I could tell Seabee was taking glances at me. “You okay, kid?”

“Yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Life has a bad way of giving you the good shit and the bad shit all at the same time so you can’t fully enjoy either.”

“I think you just defined what life is.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to accept that definition.”

“Let me tell you something. I tried my damnedest to settle down with my wife and relax for the rest of my days, not once but twice, and each time Life grabbed me by the balls and dragged me off the path. This last time I really got reamed by Life’s big, veiny dick. I lost my wife, and all my plans didn’t mean shit. So yeah, I agree with you. Life, existence, whatever you want to call it, it’s a bitch. But you can either keep going, to spite the cunt, or if you don’t like what you’re seeing you can always…” He made a gun with his hand, held it to his temple and made pew, pew noises.

“So Life has both a dick and a… ‘c’ word?”

Seabee laughed.

He’d told me there was no time for grief. Maybe that was true. But how the hell did you get through the day, let alone the next minute?

“Hey,” Seabee said. “What I said before, about my smoke eater days? I changed my mind. You can ask me whatever you want.”

I perked up, slightly.

When we’d left the cheese castle, I’d been hoping to pass the time on the road with great conversation. I wanted to hear all of Seabee’s stories. The old man had quickly squashed that. Now, something had changed.

He raised a finger to my face. “But if I don’t feel like answering something, I won’t. And you can’t push the issue. Deal?”

“Gee, thanks,” I said. “You know, your timing could have been better. I could have asked you all kinds of stuff earlier. Now I’ve got five minutes before you tell me to shut up.”

“I’m just trying to get your mind off other things, and it’s not entirely selfless. I need you focused. In the present. We’ll both get flambéed if your mind is all…” he moved his hand to make it look like it was talking, blabbing. The armored fingers of his power suit clanked.

We passed an overturned hoverbus on the overpass. It had been burned so badly it looked like a papier-mâché model that had been scorched and then pissed on.

“Here’s a question,” I said. “When you were a smoke eater, did you do the same kind of crazy, stupid shit we’re about to do?”

He laughed, checked the side view mirror a few times. Must have been an old habit. “Once a smoke eater, always. And yeah. We used to do dumb shit all the time. Sometimes it was the only option besides letting a bunch of good people die. And did I detect a note of smartassery in your question? Shouldn’t this be a dream come true for you? You’re in a slayer truck, wearing a power suit, and on your way to find a horde of fire-breathing scalies. Right?”

He playfully shoved my shoulder. “Right?”

A smile crept onto my lips. He kept shaking me until I’d answered him four times. “Okay. All right. Yeah. This is pretty cool.”

“We have to get you talking like a smoke eater. This mission isn’t ‘pretty cool,’ this is fucking badass!”

I laughed. “Not all smoke eaters talk like you do.”

“Oh no? And what other smokies do you know besides me?”

“I mean… none.” A mishmash of faces ran across my mind. None of them had been smoke eaters. “But I read about a few of them.”

“Yeah? Like who? Who do you know the most about?”

“Captain Jendal?”

“Naveena?

I sat up and turned to face him. “Did you know her?”

He shrugged. “I might have met her a couple times.”

“Are you serious? What was she like?”

“Damn, kid. Do you have a crush on her or something?”

“Not everything involves Ds and Cs, old man. No, I just really look up to what she did. She killed the Behemoth, rode an ice dragon, had the most confirmed dragon kills out of any smoke eater in the world. Then when Ohio stopped slaying and did the whole tranquilizing thing, she still nabbed the most scalies.”

“Yeah, well… smoke eating is a team effort…”

“And saying I have a crush on her, I mean come on. She’s like ten years older than me.”

“…and they said I was a loose cannon…”

“No one knows where she is, but I’ve heard stories–”

“Stories?” He’d been babbling, off in his own world, but now I had his full attention.

“Yeah. Whenever I thought I could get away with it, I’d talk to people in whatever town my platoon had stopped in. Other secret smoke eater fans. I had to barter a lot of my shit, but some of them had great stories to sell.

“Plus, you know, the Army had probably robbed the same Swiss Army knife from the guy I gave it to for a few believable rumors. So, I didn’t even care if they were lies. But that’s the thing about stories and especially the people telling them. You never know if they’re true.

“One thing I heard was that she was going around the country finding all the smoke eaters in hiding, collecting them like a militia to take down the Army. But a lot more people think she’s at Big Base and being experimented on.”

“Big Base?”

“Yeah, it’s what the Army calls their headquarters. Just outside the place Parthenon City used to be. I’ve never been there.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it. I just have a different name for it. Anyway, these storytellers, none of them ever said she was dead?”

“No,” I said. “That would be most likely. But who wants to hear that? We want to think our heroes are still alive… if no one else. Hey! Why are you getting to ask all the questions?”

He pointed ahead. “We don’t have time for any more jaw jacking.”

I couldn’t see the lake any more. Towering ash nests rose above us. The remaining chunks of skyscrapers seemed to shift like labyrinth pieces and seal any escape. Was the sky getting darker or was it just me? It was always disorienting speeding along the road, seeing a city in the distance like a mirage, and then suddenly finding yourself in its belly. Even more so when there were monsters crawling the streets and sewers to swallow you in a more literal sense. Welcome to Chi Town.

“This is bullshit,” I said.

“Don’t worry, kid.” He sighed. “You’ll have plenty more opportunities for memory lane. We’re going to be spending more time together than I thought.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Because, once again, Life is yanking on my balls.” He turned the slayer sharply to the right. We flew off the road onto rough terrain, mainly ash. A crooked sign grazed my window. We were going too fast. In the blur, I thought it said SUBWAY.

A giant hole burrowing into the earth lay ahead of us.

“Holy shit we’re gonna die!” I grabbed the closest handholds I could find.

Seabee just laughed.