CHAPTER 15

Captain Naveena Jendal. The woman I’d looked up to for most of my life. The Army had her locked up at Big Base, probably torturing her in all sorts of experiments, drawing her blood, slicing off her flesh, putting her through hell to see what she could endure. But she was real. She was alive. Yolanda had made it sound like she was still alive, but for how much longer?

“Fuck me sideways,” Brannigan said. He kicked a rack of iron plates and ended up limping away, cursing. “You know what we have to do, right?”

“Did you see Yolanda’s face?” Renfro said. “She looked half dead.”

“We have to do something,” Tamerica said.

Afu nodded. “I’m sick of hiding from these shit bags.”

“We’ll have to get our people somewhere safe,” Tamerica said. “But after that, all of us, we’re going to get her out and raze that base to the ground.”

Brannigan clapped his hands together. “I’m in. You got a plan?”

Tamerica put a hand to my shoulder and moved me closer to the others. “Gilly is going to help us figure it out.”

I blinked at each of these smoke eaters’ faces. They were itching for a fight. They’d been chased and ostracized for years and felt this was their return from the shadows. But how the hell could I help?

“I’ve never even been to that base,” I said. “I’ve only heard about it.”

Renfro and Afu’s faces sank a bit.

“Doesn’t matter,” Brannigan said. “You know how the Nusies operate. We can get what’s-his-face to hack that holoreader.”

“Lot,” Tamerica said.

“Yeah,” said Brannigan. “I’m sure he can get a lot out of it.”

I shook my head and backed away from Tamerica’s grip. “I don’t know, guys. I’m done with the Army and everything, but apparently Big Base is loaded with soldiers. Guys just itching to shoot something. From what I heard, there’s more spider tanks and rifles there than on the road. And now they have dragons. It would be suicide.”

“Then we won’t pull an all-out assault,” said Tamerica. “We just need to get inside and get Naveena out.”

“But how?” I said. “They’ll have the place guarded on every side.”

“We can figure it out,” Brannigan said. He lowered his head to look at me under his gray eyebrows. “If you help.”

“I’m not a smoke eater!” I was shaking. So tired. I still hadn’t had a shower. “I just want to go home.”

“Guillermo,” Brannigan said, “you would have a home to go to if there’d been smokies in Peoria. Where were the Nusies?”

“There are good people in the Army, you know.” I couldn’t believe what I was saying. I was thinking of Reynolds. “I know at least one of them who’s probably just… confused. She actually wants to help people. I’m sure there are more like her. They can’t all be bad apples.”

“When you’re a Nusie, you support everything the Nusies do,” Brannigan said. “It doesn’t matter your intentions. You should know better than anybody. You broke rank and got punished for it.”

“But she wouldn’t…” Yes, she would. She’d already tried to kill me. Who was she helping on the back of a scaly? I wondered if that counted as one of the life debts I owed her.

“She?” Brannigan said. He gave Renfro a look. “Okay, it makes sense now.”

“It’s not like that,” I said.

“It’s all right,” Tamerica said. “Leave him alone.”

Looking at me, she motioned toward the door with her eyes. She began walking and I followed her out.

“It’s not that I don’t want to help,” I said, as we entered the hallway. “Captain Jendal is like my personal hero, it’s just–”

“Shut it.” She said it gently. “Your job right now is to shut up and listen. Shut up. And listen. Nod if you can do that.”

I nodded.

We walked into the darker, more sparsely-lit crevices of Wrigley Field, around white walls splattered with yellow water stains. I smelled ammonia and other stale funks. The air was cooler here. As we walked my sweat grew chilled against the back of my shoulders. Tamerica led me up a series of stairs and then we stopped outside a room lined with dark-tinted glass.

She turned to me. “I want you to talk to Lot.”

I shook my head hard enough to conjure up an ache. “No way. He doesn’t want to say anything to me. He’s going to punch me the first chance he gets.”

“You said you would shut up and listen,” Tamerica said. “Remember?”

I sighed. I didn’t want to talk to Lot or anybody else at that moment. I just wanted to cry in the shower and feel a little cleaner, but I decided the only way I was going to get that was to go along with Tamerica for a little while longer.

Again, I nodded.

“All right,” Tamerica said. She knocked on the door.

A voice inside shouted, “Who is it?”

“Captain Williams,” Tamerica said.

“Come in, I guess.”

Tamerica walked in first, but extended a hand to my back to lead me in behind her. We were inside the Wrigley announcer box. It had been outfitted with all kinds of computers and wires and screens. I could see what remained of the baseball diamond from where I stood. The windows in the announcer box hadn’t been covered.

Lot sat on a cot against the wall. When he saw me his face went red. “What the hell?”

“Just stop.” Tamerica held up her hand. “He’s not going to say anything. He’s just here to listen.”

“But–”

“And you,” Tamerica bulldozed over Lot’s retort, “are going to talk. To make him realize the importance of things. He was in the Army, yeah. But he left. He has no love for any of them. I don’t blame you for feeling the way you feel, but I think you should give him a chance. I’m giving him a chance. And you know I don’t give those out for nothing.”

I realized I’d been clenching my teeth. I loosened my jaw but held my lips together.

“And what am I supposed to talk about?” Lot asked.

“Tell him about what happened to your brother.”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said.

“I know,” said Tamerica. She sighed. “How about this: you tell him about it, I’ll wipe out everything you owe me from our card games.”

Lot’s eyes sprang open. “You what?”

“I’m being for real,” said Tamerica. “Clean slate. Deal?”

Lot leaned back and lay on the cot, draping an arm on his head. He hissed out a stream of air through his lips. It lasted a long time. I looked to Tamerica but she kept her gaze on Lot. Finally, the propellerhead spoke. “It was Memorial Day. My brother Floyd had all of us over for a cookout at his place in Elgin. Both of us were out of a job, ’cause this was the year after the smoke eaters had been made illegal. Bastards turned our headquarters into a damn bank. Anyway, Floyd was a smoke eater. We weren’t really close growing up – I liked quantum physics and he liked action movies – but that changed when we ended up working together. Shit, we’d see each other every shift and then off duty at least once a week. He was my best friend, and even though he was born to be a smoke eater, he always wanted to be a dad. Said he was going to share some important news with us after we all ate.

“Since we didn’t have much money for the cookout we ended up grilling the chemically-grown hotdogs that taste like burnt tires. You know the ones. We didn’t care, though. He had his girlfriend there at his side while he turned the franks. Our parents came over and drank their cheap wine. Couple friends were there, too. Good time.

“But everyone was out cooking that day. I mean, on Memorial Day who isn’t grilling? But somebody across the street must have had an accident or something because we start seeing this huge cloud of smoke over Floyd’s house. We ran to the front yard and saw the place across the street was burning down. This old man was standing on the yard, all ash-stained and delirious, screaming about his wife being trapped inside.

“Floyd just gives me this look,” Lot said. “Takes off toward the house, all arms and legs. He was a lanky guy. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. We all knew he had the ability to go into that smoking house when none of us could. Some people just have it, you know. And I’m not talking about the breathing smoke thing. Some people just have that drive to help no matter how horrible things get around them. I look over and see his girlfriend holding her stomach, with two hands. And that’s when I knew what he was planning to tell us. I was going to be an uncle.”

Tears came to his eyes.

Lot sniffed. “He goes into the house. Front door was open. Old man is screaming, please, please. We all watch, it feels like hours. But it was only a couple minutes until Floyd comes out with a woman over his shoulder. He lays her on the ground, checks her breathing, few pushes to her chest and a blow into her mouth and she’s coughing. Breathing.

“I smiled. God, I was so proud of him. Slaying dragons is scary and noble, but there’s nothing like seeing someone save another human life. It’s like watching someone being born. It makes you realize how precious life is. Floyd wasn’t even out of breath.

“Us and all the other neighbors tried our best to spray the flames with water, using garden hoses and buckets we’d pass in a line. It wasn’t doing anything, so we just focused on cooling the houses beside it. Save what we still could. The old man and his wife held each other and cried while their place burned down. We waited and waited for the fire department to arrive. They never did. Instead, a bunch of spider tanks showed up.

“Soldiers scrambled out of those tanks like they were going to war. I couldn’t understand why the Army would respond to a house fire. Maybe they thought it was a dragon. They started shouting at us like we’d done something wrong, telling us to get down on the grass. Most everyone did what they said. We were scared and confused. Not Floyd.

“He stood there with his hands up, like he could shoot lasers at them with his eyes. They pointed their rifles at him and told him to lay on the ground or they’d shoot. My parents begged him to listen, but the soldiers told them to shut up, and if Floyd was anything, he was stubborn and didn’t like being told what to do, especially for no good reason.

“But he stayed calm, told the Nusies that there was clearly a fire and that we’d all been working to put it out. I think where he messed up was when he mentioned that the old woman needed medical attention. He said he’d carried her out. Then all the Nusies started looking at each other, like they had telepathy. Floyd kept talking. He said they had to tell us if we were being detained and if we were, they had to tell us why. He just wanted to clear the air, for them and for us. We didn’t know what was going on, why it was happening. Everyone just wanted answers. For whatever reason, that just pissed the Nusies off.”

Lot made a noise like he was going to throw up.

“It’s okay,” Tamerica said. “Take a second and then tell him what happened next.”

“I don’t need a second!” Lot sat up in a blur. I thought he was going to charge toward me, but he stayed on the cot. His face was red and filled with hate. “They shot him. No warning. No reason. They filled him with holes and let him bleed all over his front lawn. His girlfriend screamed. I still hear it in my head most nights when I can’t sleep. When my dad tried to get up and go after them, they knocked him down and put a rifle to his head and told him he’d be next if he didn’t stay down.

“And the whole time I went somewhere else in my head. It was like I was watching a movie. I couldn’t believe it happened, didn’t feel real, wasn’t my brother, not my family. By the time it started sinking in, they’d put us all in resist-o-cuffs.”

I’d seen the devices Lot was talking about. They were like handcuffs, except they tightened around your wrists if you squirmed or moved too much. One of the guys in the platoon said he’d seen someone’s hands squeezed off because they’d been so scared they couldn’t stop shaking.

“They brought all of us into my brother’s house,” Lot said. “I’m guessing the neighbors ran inside and were glad it wasn’t their family. One by one they interrogated us at Floyd’s kitchen table. Several of them dug into the fridge and took whatever they wanted. I said nothing when they brought me into the kitchen. They threatened to torture me, my parents, even Floyd’s girlfriend. They didn’t leave out the fact she was pregnant. It was just another angle they tried to use, but it didn’t move me. I was numb. I wasn’t even talking to myself in my head, so I sure as shit wasn’t going to talk to the Nusies. They hauled me away and locked me in the bathroom. I lay in the tub, handcuffed, staring at a crack in the ceiling, hoping it would split open and swallow me so I wouldn’t have to be there, feeling and hurting. At some point they came and got me and brought me to the living room with everyone else. I found out that my parents had let it slip that he’d been a smoke eater, so they wrapped it up as a job well done, uncuffed us, told us that they’d be back if we didn’t mind ourselves, then zoomed away in that fucking bug-looking tank.”

Lot went quiet and all I could think to say was, “Fuck.”

“You know what happened to Lot isn’t unique,” Tamerica said.

“No,” I said. “It’s not.”

Had I been just as bad? Whose fault was it that dragons had been allowed to destroy Peoria?

“I’m so sorry,” I told Lot.

He lay back down and turned toward the wall away from us.

“Come on,” Tamerica said.

We walked back outside and I closed the door behind me as softly as I could.

“I never…” I was trying to gather my thoughts. The man in the room had lost his brother, his whole family ripped apart, for what? “I’m not like that, Captain Williams.”

“Call me T,” she said. “And I know. I can tell about certain people.”

“All I ever wanted to do was help people,” I said. I felt like a failure in every possible way.

“You think it’s too late?”

I leaned against the wall. The cheesy t-shirt Brannigan had given me was soaked in sweat and felt like ice against my back. I wanted to sink to the floor and not get up for a few hours. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m a smoke eater. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what’s real and true any more.”

“I’ll tell you what’s real and true,” Tamerica said. “Everybody always wants to talk about compromise and shades of gray. Everybody wants to talk about how it’s not about us versus them or choosing a side, that we can all meet in the middle. The truth is that’s bullshit. Because the other side is going to push their line as far as they can and they don’t care who it slices in half. This, right here and right now, is your time. This is where you decide what you believe in. So what’s it going to be?”

I closed my eyes and felt the burn of exhaustion in my eyelids. After a few breaths, I looked up at her and knew deep in my bones and guts and everything in between that I’d made the right choice when I said, “Sink or swim.”