CHAPTER 8

“Y’all alright in there?” Patrice asked through my helmet.

“The fucking dragon just dragged Afu underwater.”

She said something else but I didn’t hear it. I was too busy grabbing my aqua respirator from another pocket. Brannigan had suggested that I might have to do some water aerobics shit like this. Well, here it was. I should have told Afu to be ready to swim. He was horrible at holding his breath at the best of times.

Please be okay, I thought.

I strapped the respirator around my nose and mouth, and then extended my therma-goggles to create a seal around my face. Smoke eaters can breathe smoke, sure. But water is a little more of a bastard.

I let go of the rope and shot feet first into the lake.

The water was as warm as a Jacuzzi, so I had a hard time detecting any blobs of heat signatures, but I could see a bit better than inside the house. I swam through chunks of wood and other debris. The back part of the structure had been completely ripped off. I passed over a cluster of glowing translucent sacks that were huddled together. Eggs. I didn’t have time to destroy them, and given leviathan biology, there was no way to know if they’d even been fertilized yet. The dragon had made only one wraith so far… that I knew about. Along the way, deeper into the lake, I bumped into the gnashed and boiled carcass of oldman Wilkins. His glow stick was still shining from his ragged hand.

The only reason my power suit wasn’t dragging me to the bottom was because the thrusters sensed we’d gone into aqueous operations and puttered out a very low level of power to propel me through the water. I could have swum faster in my own skin, but at least I wasn’t sinking. Afu and the leviathan were nowhere to be seen.

Swimming in an expanding circle, I tried to figure out how I would save Afu or get revenge on the leviathan if I couldn’t. Afu was too heavy to drag, and lasers were shit in water. I needed to get Patrice to come look with me. It would take too long – more time than Afu or I could afford – to search by myself. My respirator prevented me from radioing a call to him.

What a shit captain I was turning out to be.

Shifting toward the shore, I puttered along slowly until I got to where I could crawl out onto the beach beside the wrecked stilt house.

“Patrice!” I called as soon as the goggles and respirator were off my face. “We need to look for Afu. He’s in the lake.”

“Uh oh. Uh oh,” Patrice repeated in heavy breaths.

Big splashes came from behind and I flipped around with my laser ready to sear off chunks of scaly flesh.

Afu was on hands and knees, removing his own aqua respirator. I ran and grabbed him in a bear hug. He was almost as tall as me on his knees.

I laughed, nearly crying. “Fuck, I thought it got you.”

Then, realizing what it looked like I was doing, I dropped my smile, wiped my eyes, and backed away. “You didn’t kill it did you?”

Afu quickly got to his feet and began chugging for the cannon truck. “No, it’s still out there. Probably coming–”

The full force of the leviathan came roaring out of Lake Erie – an enormous gray snake of a dragon. It slithered onto shore, dripping its slimy spit onto our helmets. Instead of wings, it had blue-green fins on each of its sides.

“Patrice,” I said low into my helmet mic.

No answer.

“We’re going to have to slay this thing,” Afu said. “It’s not like there’s a pool at the wraith enclosures to dump it in.”

The leviathan snapped its teeth twice and raised its head to the rain, chugging out a bubbling call from its throat.

“We can’t kill it,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s not even attacking us,” I said.

The leviathan remained raised on its eel-like middle, singing its siren song like a drunken accountant on karaoke night.

“Patrice, shoot this thing already. What’s the hold up?”

“I was getting suited up to look for Afu,” she said. “Stand by.”

Afu put a hand to my armor and pulled me backwards with him, away from the crooning serpent. “This ain’t good,” he said. “Something isn’t right.”

“I got this,” I said. “Just–”

The lake surface exploded again.

Slithering out of the water to snap and snarl beside the one leviathan came a second.

“Hurry, Patrice,” I said. “There are two of them!”

“I’m moving as fast as I can,” she said.

The leviathans circled us, swollen bodies blocking either of us from escaping. Afu extended his laser sword, and I didn’t stop him. The dragon in front of me attacked, snapping for me with a hungry mouth. I power jumped out of the way and landed outside the scaly blockade.

But now Afu was sandwiched between the twin leviathans and both of my weapons were useless unless I wanted to clip the dragons’ fins or coat them in foam – both of those weren’t going to do shit.

“I have to kill them, T,” Afu said.

There have only been a few moments in my career as a smoke eater where I didn’t know what choice to make. Oh, I’ve cautiously paused to evaluate a situation, hesitated even, but there on the Sandusky shore, watching two sea monsters surrounding my ex-boyfriend, I was at a loss.

I hated being a captain already.

“Cap?”

“Fine,” I said. “We don’t have another choice.”

Afu laughed and power jumped to get eye-level with one of the dragons. He wrapped himself around its neck and began plugging its flesh with his laser sword while I fired shots at the other scaly’s back.

A few chunks of flesh dropped to the ground like charred fish, but it wasn’t doing enough damage to be fatal. Afu’s dragon fell to the ground. The other big eel-like monster hissed and flopped around to face me.

A huge green laser flew over my head and pelted the remaining leviathan in the face. It swayed to and fro for a second before falling toward me. Afu dove out of the way in time, but I’d been too slow, only able to turn and land on my face. The dragon’s weight crashed onto me, beating me into the sand. Afu ran over and began digging granules away from my face.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I grumbled, but gave him a thumb up. Not only had Patrice robbed me of a justified dragon slaying, but Afu had gotten one without me.

Patrice sauntered over like the hero of the incident, singing a song that went, ‘You ain’t never seen a badder bitch than me.’

“What’s next, Captain?” Afu asked.

I turned my head toward him – or as much as I could with a fish-gut-stinking, unconscious dragon on top of me.

“Get this fucking thing off me.”