CHAPTER 14

“I bet you it’s some damn Satanists,” my daddy said from the back seat.

“Carl!” My mama’s eyes about popped from her head as she spun to glare at him from the passenger seat beside me. “Don’t say that word.”

“What, ‘damn?’”

“No, the ‘S’ word.”

I hunched over the steering wheel a little more. I’d already been in full-Quasimodo mode since starting this joyous trek to Chief Brannigan’s house. At least there would be beer and other people to distract me from my parents once we got to the barbecue.

I’d traded in my coupé for a hover-van after I’d broken up with Afu and moved in with my folks. Yolanda had generously given me the psy-roll wheelchair, the one Brannigan had been locked in on our trip to Canada. My daddy was hesitant at first and unbending against receiving any ieiunium curate, but he finally gave in on using the psychicallypowered wheelchair when I assured him he could get in and out of it anytime he wanted and that I would drive him to his Friday night card game when I wasn’t on shift.

The propellerheads had helped me trick out my van with an extendable ramp where Daddy could roll in and out. They even installed a holoreader into the psyroll so my dad could watch the Feed, controlling the volume and channels with his mind. All it took with the upgraded version was a few sticky pads to his head.

The Feed is what had brought up my daddy’s outburst about Satanists. There’d been another suicide arson fire. It had happened in broad daylight in the middle of a hospital while I’d been fighting the phoenix. The fire department had successfully contained the blaze, but there were still casualties. The only video of what happened showed the torcher engulfed in flames and walking into a janitor’s closet full of chemicals that had advanced the blaze.

“These idiots that are blaming the new people moving to the city have got it all wrong,” Daddy said. “They’re just regular folks trying to get help, even if they’re wanting that devil juice.”

‘Devil Juice’ is what he called the dragon blood curate. I was conflicted on his position. An infusion would have my dad walking on his own again and breathing normally in a day’s time, but I also understood where he was coming from. It was weird to put a foreign substance in your system to begin with. Given that it was the blood of the monsters that were trying to burn and eat every last one of us, you could multiply the strange factor a hundredfold.

I looked at my daddy through the rearview mirror. He was shaking his head and had his eyes glued to the holoreader.

“A few people have said these arsonists might be a part of some cult,” I said.

“Satanists!” he shouted.

“Carl Williams!” My mother put a hand to her face and leaned against her window. “We don’t have to say that name. And you don’t even know if that’s true. I tell you something, though. Nothing has changed since the beginning of time. Fire, lasers. When I was growing up it was bullets and automatic rifles. Terrible people would walk into a church and start shooting. Or go into a school and kill babies. Evil people have been around forever. Evil people with sick minds and souls. This world needs Jesus.”

This was nowhere near the conversation I wanted to be having on a Saturday afternoon. I tried to imagine how crisp and cold Brannigan’s keg beer would be. My mom would have to drive us back, because the way it was going now, I was planning on getting blitzed.

Cars and trucks filled the street outside Brannigan’s house when we pulled up. When I got out the smell of burning meat and kids’ screaming filled the air. As a smoke eater you get used to that kind of thing but it was usually in a completely different context.

“Now you stay away from any red meat, Carl,” my mom said as Daddy rolled out of the van and onto the sidewalk. “You don’t want your gout acting up.”

“Woman, I’ve lived long enough to have earned the right to eat what I want.”

Rather than stay around listening to a five-minute argument, I shoved my hands into my jeans pockets and trudged toward Brannigan’s backyard.

Chief was at the grill, tongs in one hand and a plastic cup in the other while he talked to Afu and Harribow. Everyone was wearing polo shirts or tank tops. It was kind of weird to see us all together outside of uniform, even though I hung out with one or two of them off duty.

Brannigan’s adopted daughter, Bethany, and a few other kids were chasing their robot dog around the party. The dog’s name was Kenji and he only spoke Korean, but he was more faithful than any biological pet I’d ever met. And given that real dogs couldn’t speak English either, it wasn’t that big of a deal not to understand what he was saying. But I’d recently installed an automatic translation app onto my holoreader for just such an occasion.

Brannigan’s wife, Sherry, walked out of the house with a tray of deviled eggs – there wouldn’t be enough for everybody, given that all chicken eggs came from one of the farming skyscrapers downtown, and every citizen of Parthenon City was only allowed a dozen a week. These farms of glass and steel were the only way to get fresh produce and non-chemically-created animal products in a country with toxic soil and nothing but ashes covering the ground. Part of me felt bad for the cows and chickens stuffed on each floor, but the greater part of me would be pissed if I didn’t get a burger every once in a while.

Sherry placed the tray of eggs onto a long table that had been covered with a cheap red cloth and other trays of food. Above the table, a holobanner flickered in the sunlight, saying, “Thanks, Ash Kickers!”

Goddamn it.

I walked over to Sherry. “Need help with anything?”

Her red and gray hair swung over her shoulder when she turned to smile and hug me. “Hey, Tamerica! No, I’ve pretty much got everything taken care of. Get yourself a drink. Keg and cups are at the end of the table there. As soon as Cole is done taking his sweet time at the grill, we should be ready to eat.”

“I’m definitely hitting the keg.” I gestured my head toward Mama and Daddy making their way into the backyard. “My parents came with.”

“That’s great!” She spun away from me as if a spider had bitten her on the ass. “Bethany! Stop riding Kenji like a horse and go wash your hands.”

Little Brannigan, with fist raised to the sky as she galloped around the yard on the back of her metal steed, jumped off with a malicious laugh and ran into the house.

Back to me, Sherry grinned, as happy as she could be, and said, “I love being a mom.”

At the keg, the ice-cold beer filled my cup – a golden brown with beautiful foam. Chief had gotten the good stuff. I stood there sipping on it while I got a lay of the land, keeping back before I had to start mingling with people I didn’t feel like talking to, or having to explain my parents.

Patrice hadn’t shown up yet. For the last few days, I’d been calling Yolanda almost constantly to see if my driver was back to her old crazy self. Yolanda was so good natured, she would have never come right out and told me to shut the hell up and let her do her job, but when she started rattling off figures and million- dollar words in reference to Patrice’s condition, I knew I’d bugged her about it enough. I just told Yolanda to call me when things had gotten better.

She never called me.

I tried not to worry. I sold myself on the notion it was because Yolanda had forgotten. Knowing Patrice, my driver would probably want to make a big entrance at the barbecue – like popping out of a cake. But I didn’t see any over-sized baked goods either.

Harribow was a few feet away, animated hands in the air as he talked to Naveena, who was looking at the ground and nodding.

“I read that New York and Boston have brought in the New US Army to handle the scalies,” he said. “They won’t have smoke eaters anymore.”

“I can’t see that happening,” said Naveena. “Not here.”

I couldn’t either. Soldier girls and boys had their shot on E-Day, and they let us down. You can’t replace an ass-kicking municipal force that can breathe dragon smoke with a bunch of messy loose-cannons more accustomed to shooting other people. It’d be like sending a cop to get a cat out of a tree. Firefighters have ladders, the police have guns. Both tools can provide a way to put a feline on the ground, but in drastically different conditions.

A slight bump against my thigh got me to look down. Kenji sat there with his rubber tongue dangling out of the side of his metal mouth; his body was gray and painted with polka dots like a Dalmatian. He happily barked once and the dark screen above his nose displayed hearts and shimmering digital blue irises.

I patted him on the head, because what else do you do to an excited dog sitting in front of you, metal or otherwise.

“Moduga sul-e chwihaeissda!” he said.

My holoreader instantly spoke to translate. “Everyone is getting drunk!”

“Not everyone,” I told Kenji. I raised my cup. “Not yet.”

Kenji was a regular at headquarters. Brannigan liked to take him along on big calls, especially dragon-caused building collapses. You never knew if someone was trapped, and the dog also helped calm down scared kids.

The robot’s chest ejected a plastic bone which he snatched up and raised to me. His voice came out clear from behind the fake bone. “Nalang nol-a, tteugeoun geosdeul.”

Translated: “Play with me, hot stuff.”

I laughed, despite being slightly harassed by an AI K9. Throwing the bone across the yard, I wondered what other irreverent bullshit the dog could say. Kenji sprinted across the yard, kicking up mounds of dirt and faux-grass. He had to have been going thirty miles an hour.

“Kenji, slow the fuck down!” Brannigan shouted at his dog, before looking around to see if Sherry had heard him cuss in front of their guests.

My mama headed over to coo over the kids. Daddy was wheeling up to the grill to park beside Chief.

Afu, seeing my father on the way, decided to move on to another part of the back yard. He’d always thought my dad hated him, but I’d never heard my father say anything about Afu one way or the other, or any of my boyfriends for that matter. He just let me wade through my own relationships by myself and then listened to me gripe or cry when they didn’t work out.

I sighed and downed my beer. Here we go.

“That’s not dragon meat you’re cooking is it?” Daddy asked.

Brannigan, of course, laughed. But you could never tell if my daddy was joking or not, especially when it came to dragons or smoke eaters.

Chief held up a piece of meat that dripped red juice. “City-grown rib eyes. Might as well chew on one of my wife’s old baseballs, but old habits die hard. Scalies have ruined enough of this country already. I’ll be damned if they take my cookouts from me.”

“I hear that,” Daddy said, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “Save one of the big ones for me, but don’t tell my Rebecca.”

Brannigan nodded, the firm, between-us-men kind of head movement. “How are you, Carl? That wheelie box working out okay? Watch when you nod or move your head. I banged my chin more than twice. And I’m not going to lie, I still have nightmares about being stuck in it, but it’s good you can get in and out as you please.”

“I like that I only have to blink to change the TV channels.” Daddy smiled then, as if he’d been holding it in and finally relented to having a good time.

All older people still called the Feed ‘TV.’ And my dad didn’t even need to blink to change the Feed stations, he just thought he did, and I’d gotten tired of telling him otherwise.

“Glad you made it, Williams,” Brannigan said as I walked up.

“Beer is good,” I said.

My daddy grunted. “Don’t get messy around these folks, Tammy.”

I tossed Brannigan wide eyes and tight lips, a visual SOS, as I finished off what was left in my cup.

“Hey, Carl,” Brannigan said. “Why don’t you go find a place to park? This should be done in a minute or two and I’ll make sure Sherry distracts Rebecca so you can eat your meat in peace.”

Daddy smiled and zoomed off. “All right, then.”

“Thanks,” I told Brannigan when we were alone.

“It’s a strange thing being a parent,” he said. “You want your kids to be their own person, but you also want to influence them enough to not fuck up their life.”

I pointed to Bethany, who picked up a deviled egg and fast-balled it into another kid’s face. “You seem to be doing okay with it.”

“Yeah, one can only hope.”

“Is Patrice coming?” I asked.

Brannigan dropped the ribeye he’d been tonging and sighed. “I talked to Yolanda just before you showed up. She’s still not any better.”

I chunked my empty plastic cup into a trash can. “Thanks, for the invite, Chief, but I’ve got to go.”

“Hold your damn horses.” Brannigan slammed the grill lid closed. “You can’t do anything better than the propellerheads can. I get it, you feel responsible, but you’re not.”

“I don’t feel right, drinking beer and eating steaks while she’s burning up in a sick bed. You said she’d be better. All of you. What’s going on?”

Brannigan shrugged, shook his head, a man with no answers. “Yolanda said the curate isn’t taking. They’re filling Johnson with fluids and trying their best to keep her fever down, but nothing they do is working.”

I glanced at my parents – Daddy at the end of the picnic table, smiling with the lid of his psy-roll opened like an old, gull wing car door, my mom bouncing a kid on her lap.

“I’ll be back in a few to pick up my parents,” I said.

Brannigan nodded. “Okay, Williams. You’re a good captain.”

When I turned toward the exit, a droid was walking in to the party.

“What the fuck,” Brannigan said behind me.

Body painted to make it look like it wore a twopiece suit, the droid scanned the area with its head swiveling left to right – until it spotted me and Brannigan. Its leg hydraulics hissed as it lumbered over to the grill. I backed up and Brannigan lifted his grilling tongs like a weapon.

When the droid’s blaring blue eyes zeroed in on me, it spoke with a digital Australian twang. “Captain Tamerica Williams.”

Droids could be programmed to know exactly who was who, like walking societal archives. There weren’t that many people left in Ohio to sort through, and the droid could scan through a million records a second.

The droid stood there for a moment, as if waiting for me to confirm.

“Yeah?” I said.

A compartment ejected from the droid’s leg, where a gun would have been holstered. Brannigan threw an arm across me and slapped the droid across the metal jaw with his tongs.

The droid, not fazed at all, besides steak juice splattered across its flat face, removed a stack of plastic paper from its leg compartment and handed the bundle to me.

“You’ve been served,” the droid said in a cheerful voice, before turning around and leaving the barbecue with heavy, clanking steps.

And that’s when I remembered something. “Mother of fuck,” I muttered, not caring if my mama or daddy heard. With all the chaos the phoenix had brought, Patrice getting sick, it had slipped my mind completely.

I’d never turned in the wraith I’d caught in Sandusky. It was still in my remote.