CHAPTER 24

I woke up in the back of a speeding vehicle. The first things I recognized were the sounds and sensations of the hover wheels sensing the rough terrain below. Daylight flashed on the other side of my eyelids.

“He’s waking up,” a man said.

I sat up and blinked awake. Lot sat in the seat in front of me. I’d been laid out in the third row. The power suit was gone, and they’d haphazardly bandaged me in spots I hadn’t known to be injured before I passed out. Yolanda was behind the wheel. Ahead of us were a few other cars. I assumed it to be morning and, based on the position of the sun, that meant we were headed west.

“Heading back to Brannigan’s?” I asked.

“No, we’re heading south,” Lot said. “One of the smokies they were holding has a town with enough space down in Arkansas.”

Yuck, I thought.

“Oh my gosh! You’re alive.” Yolanda bounced in her seat. “I remembered what I’d meant to tell you about the suit, but you’d already left.”

I looked to Lot and asked, “Am I going to be okay?”

He snaked his head left and right, as if he wasn’t sure. I could feel my pulse quicken. But then he smiled and his uncertainty morphed into a nod. “You had us scared there for a minute, but as far as I can tell, yeah, a little more sleep and some food, I think you’ll be just fine.”

“You guys have gallows humor worse than the smoke eaters.” Back to Yolanda I said, “It’s okay. Honestly, I wish we had another suit just like that. But more durable. It fell apart after only a few hits.”

“Oh, I had another prototype that was better in balancing energy and protection.” She had to slow the van as the vehicles ahead were coming to a fork in the road. She didn’t continue speaking.

“What happened to it?” I asked. “This other prototype.”

“It’s on Cannon 15,” Lot said. “Just relax, man. They told us to take care of you. We’ve got snacks and water in the back. Even a little morphine Yolanda snagged from Big Base.”

I blinked at him. “What happened with the Nusies?”

“The signal worked,” Yolanda said. “You saved the day.” She looked more alert and oriented, but she sounded loopy. Me? Save the day?

“I don’t know about that,” I said.

The last image of Reynolds flashed before my eyes. She was engulfed in red and golden flames. Screaming. I hadn’t saved a damn thing.

I brought myself back to the present and looked around and confirmed I was in a hovering minivan. It was just the three of us.

“Where are the others?”

“We lost a few,” Lot said. “Hey, if you want to go back to sleep you can have a bump of morphine.”

“No, I’m good.” I watched the cold wastes fly by the window. “Where are the other smoke eaters? Brannigan and Tamerica?”

The propellerheads looked at each other.

“What the hell?” I said.

Cannon 15 pulled up beside us. Afu was behind the wheel and waved at me before the road forked and took him, the other smoke eaters, and Cannon 15 away, down the other path.

“Hold on,” I said. “Where are they going?”

“They didn’t want you to worry,” Yolanda said.

“Brannigan didn’t want him to get hurt,” Lot corrected. “Said he’d earned a vacation. They left you this. Said you should keep it as a souvenir.”

Lot handed me my helmet. The one I’d been using since Brannigan gave it to me. I squeezed it in my hands. With angry, jerky movements, I strapped it onto my head.

“Like hell.” I crawled over the seat and plopped down beside Lot.

He leaned back and combed his hair behind both ears. “What’s your problem, man?”

“I’m not going to fucking Arkansas.” I leaned toward Yolanda. “Please turn around and go after that truck.”

“But we’re in the middle of the caravan.” Yolanda’s eyes widened. “Oh my goodness! That’s where the word ‘van’ comes from.”

“Yolanda, go after Cannon 15!” I yelled.

She flinched and jerked the steering wheel. We pulled out of the line of cars and made a u-turn off the road. The hovering minivan left behind a cloud of ashes and bounced as it crept back onto the pavement. In less than two seconds, we were zooming toward the fork at ninety miles per hour.

“Sorry I yelled at you,” I told Yolanda.

“No worries,” she said. “We’re about to be even.”

I opened my mouth to ask what she meant just as she took the turn to follow Cannon 15. She didn’t slow down. The force of the turn threw me into the side of the van and held me there. My vision was too blurry to tell, but I was sure the van had hovered completely on its side before Yolanda straightened it.

My shoulder ached as I sat up. “What the hell?”

“You said you wanted me to go after the truck,” Yolanda said with a small grin.

I couldn’t help smiling back. At least she hadn’t refused. Her foot was to the floor, driving the engine to maximum octave. Cannon 15 was just ahead.

“They’re not going to like this,” Lot said. “You’re supposed to be grieving your family and your friend.”

I turned to Lot and opened the van’s sliding side door. “My family and friends are in that truck.”

Yolanda put the van’s bumper just behind Cannon 15’s rear wheel. “What do you want me to do now, Mister Bossy?”

“If you would please,” I said, “get on their right and stay beside them.”

“Holy cow, man.” Lot’s long hair tussled around violently in the wind. “You really going to do it? You don’t even have a suit on.”

Yolanda sped up the van.

Sneakers planted firm, I grabbed the sides of the open door and watched the truck’s black and purple metal pass by, until I was in line with the rear window. Brannigan’s gray head leaned against the glass. His eyes were open. When he saw me, he sat up and…

Was that a smirk on his face?

He rolled down the window and yelled over the rushing air. “Can I help you?”

“Open the door,” I shouted back.

Brannigan put a hand behind his ear and squinted his eyes. “I didn’t catch that. Sorry. I’m old and hard of hearing.”

“Brannigan, you motherfucker. Either tell Afu to stop or let me come aboard.”

“Come aboard?” He laughed. “Are you a smoke eater and a pirate now?”

“You can’t leave me behind,” I shouted. “I’m one of you. We’re… we’re family!”

The door swung open. Brannigan stood there leaning on it. “Well, then jump over here, Guillermo.”

“Call me Gilly,” I said.

Brannigan smiled.

“I’ll help,” Yolanda said.

The van hovered closer to the truck. I looked into the cab ready to take me off to another adventure, and all the people inside who I’d looked up to most of my life. I didn’t hesitate. I jumped. Brannigan caught me and closed the door once we were both inside.

“Goddamn, guys,” Tamerica said from the captain’s seat. “We could have just stopped and let him get in.”

Brannigan mussed up my hair and patted me on the shoulder. “What took you so long?”

I took the chair beside him and buckled up. Then I glared at him. “You were going to send me to Arkansas to grieve?”

“Why do you assume it was me who made that decision?” Brannigan said.

When I didn’t say anything, he shrugged.

“I gave you a choice,” Brannigan said. “You could have gone and relaxed, took some time. But you chose to come with us. You want to be here. That’s what makes you a real smoke eater.”

Naveena, sitting in the seat across from me, leaned forward, touched my knee, and said, “Don’t listen to anything that man just said. Brannigan is full of shit.”

Afu laughed and hit the horn to say goodbye to Yolanda and Lot, whose blue, red-cross-covered minivan slowed to fall away and turn back to catch up with the others heading for the Natural State.

“Of course Brannigan’s full of shit,” Tamerica said. I could hear her through my helmet speaker now that the radio had synced with theirs. “He was always full of shit, he’s always going to be full of shit, and there isn’t any geritol or stool softener powerful enough to clear that bastard out of all his cockstrong shenanigans.”

“I love how you say shenanigans,” Afu said.

“That’s not the word I was focused on,” Naveena said.

Everyone laughed.

“What’s the plan?” I asked.

“Well we’ve got to get you a suit,” Brannigan said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll take the one Yolanda gave you. The prototype.”

Brannigan squinted. “She told you about that, huh? Okay. When we stop, I’ll arm wrestle you for it. Loser gets my old one.”

I mirrored his look. “Where are we stopping?”

“Fort Bragg,” Afu said.

“What?” I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him right. “North Carolina?”

“I mean, eventually.” The big man put a stick of gum in his mouth. He reached back to offer me a piece, which I took. “I found a whole box of these at the base. Every flavor you could think of. Why the hell would they need all that gum?”

“Why the hell do we?” Brannigan asked.

“That’s not all we found, though, Gilly,” Tamerica said. “Your Big Base was only the big base for the midwest. There are still a shit ton of Nusies out there. All over the country. We only took out a rung in the middle of the ladder. We’re going to start from the top and work our way down.”

“And that means North Carolina,” Naveena said. “Fort Bragg.”

“I got the coordinates,” Tamerica said. “I’m thinking there’ll be a whole lot of dragon riders. Experienced killers. We need to scope it out to know what we’re dealing with.”

“Just the five of us?” I asked.

“At first,” Brannigan said. “Then my daughter, Yolanda, Lot, and an army of smoke eaters are going to ride in and help us kick some Nusie ass. You would have been there either way.”

“So I wasn’t going to be left behind.” I nodded to him.

He nodded back. “We don’t leave family behind, Gilly.”

As the truck rolled on, I looked out to the wastes and remembered that spring was even closer. I wondered if it would look any less gray this year, if we were any closer to a time where things weren’t left to ash. It was worth a shot. We could try.

I guess that’s what the smoke eater motto is really all about. Sink or swim. Sometimes you don’t know what’s going to happen but like my Uncle Pedro, you say, “Let’s do it!” and jump in anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. Because it isn’t just about you.

Maybe someday I’ll sink. Maybe we all will when the dragons have their fill. But until then, I’m going to try like all hell to swim.