Andrew Cheng wanted to be a Counter Demon Response officer ever since The Transformations. His high school teachers were surely surprised to hear that. “Young man,” they’d say, “you’re smart enough for an Ivy! Why in the hell would you settle for something so dangerous?”
Maybe that was the allure: the danger. The high-paying jobs of 2034 revolved around a computer, an office, or random internet calls. His heart never skipped a beat when he stared at Hello World on a Tuesday afternoon.
Long story short, Andrew found his happy place.
Standing in the New Changan train with his fresh officer uniform, he smelled the fresh air of a city ready to please him. From the Chinglish in his ear, the diverse food around him, and the heavenly sun in the sky, he felt like this was the perfect city for him.
The perfect city for him to save, of course.
“Now arriving at: Tian Boulevard,” The intercom echoed in English.
“Xianzai daoda: Tian Dadao.”
Andrew got off his stop and stepped out of the train with his shiny shoes. Countless pedestrians looked at his fresh blue-and-black uniform with smiles. The girls were covering their mouths, while the men gave respectful nods.
He made his way through the streets, where the electric cars zoomed through the streets. Billboards did their usual advertising above him as he walked along the clean streets. Andrew even waved to the machines that wiped along the sidewalks all night.
He approached the Counter Demon Response building with a grin. He had heard of CDR-4 throughout basic training. “The Demonbusters have some of the highest casualty rates, but also some of the highest success rates too,” the sergeants yelled. “If you want some dead demons, you call them.”
Andrew didn’t really think about the casualty part. He mainly thought of the prestige of being in the CDR-4. He wouldn’t just be some cop; he’d be a real trooper who’d go toe to toe with demons.
He could only imagine what kind of people were in that elite group. Maybe he’d see squared-away sergeants who kept their silverware shiny. Or maybe they were some real tough bastards who could do a billion pull-ups—while asleep, of course.
“Hey, you lost?”
“Excuse me?” Andrew asked. He looked at what seemed to be a sweaty Hispanic man with a twang. He had cracked skin that looked as rough as sandpaper, while his eyebrows looked like complete forests. Andrew also couldn’t help but notice the little gap between his front teeth.
“I said, are you lost?”
“N-No, I’m supposed to be heading to CDR-4.” Andrew handed him the documents, even though part of him wondered if he was just speaking to some random homeless man. “Can I help you?”
He spent some time looking at the papers. Then spent some time looking at Andrew. “Hm.” He finally handed the papers back. “They teach you how to make coffee at basic? You can start helping with that.”
***
It didn’t take long for Andrew to realize that he was working with a group of characters. Each one of them made him stick out like a splinter on sticks. Just when he thought he understood one guy, he was confused by the next.
Marcus Gutierrez was a Mexican who did time in the US Army. But since they haven’t done any wars after China, there wasn’t much for him to do other than run around fields and dig holes. As such, the New Changan Counter Demon Response sounded pretty good, especially since the independent city paid better than the American ones.
Alex Smith was an American who got bored after college. His degree did no good, especially since he spent all four years drinking the life out of himself. With plenty of debt on the line, he figured fighting demons wasn’t too bad.
Avni Singh was an Indian girl who was tired of being yelled at by her parents. She thought about joining the military, but being in the same country as her family wasn’t enough. An ocean away was good enough.
Peter Kang was some valedictorian who could’ve soared as some towering CEO. But, like Andrew, that didn’t seem to be his calling. Instead, he wanted to “do God’s will” and kill demons all day.
Then there was Sergeant Yang. Andrew actually never learned her first name. He just knew that she was somehow leading this strange group of outcasts through hell, and would somehow make it back. A real soldier, if he ever saw one.
“She hasn’t said a word to me,” Andrew muttered.
“Eh, don’t take it personal,” Smith replied. “She hasn’t had a good reason to like you.”
To be fair, none of them had a good reason to like Andrew yet. Despite being his first day, doing his best to have a professional impression, there wasn’t much but cold shoulders. He got descriptions. That was it.
“So… how often do we… ya know…”
“Fight demons?” Smith asked.
“Yeah.” Andrew looked and sounded more like an awkward schoolboy than anything. Around these elbow-greased workers, who spat tar by day and kicked ass by night, he felt like a real tenderfoot.
“Hm…” It took Smith a second to reply. “Your name was Cheng, right?”
“Actually, it’s Andrew–”
Singh rolled from under the bottom of the armored truck, interrupting her routine maintenance. “Last names,” she reminded. “Nobody gives a fuck about first names here.”
Stolen novel; please report.
She rolled back inside; Smith continued answering. “Anyway, Cheng, each of the CDRs does a week of duty before rotating to the next team. So next week, CDR-1 takes over, then CDR-2, then… you get the idea.”
Andrew nodded. Outside of shooting and fighting, basic didn’t really teach him the actual life as a CDR officer. “So we basically swap with each other, and someone ends up sleeping in my bed?”
“Well, you’d be sleeping in someone’s bed.”
Singh rolled back out. “It’s nobody’s bed, idiot.” It was almost comical to see the short, stocky girl roll in and out from under the truck like a working dwarf. “That means you shouldn’t be wetting it.”
“Or fucking in it,” Smith continued. “You’re paid enough money to get an apartment in the area, anyway. That’s when you can actually live life and stuff. You did get yourself an apartment, right?”
Andrew nodded. He had a nice condo in the city that a family friend recommended. “Wait, so if you’re not on duty right now, why are you all still here and not out?”
Singh rolled back out with glaring eyes. “Maintenance…” She said that word like it was a curse.
Smith sighed. “Like it or not, most of the shit we do requires some high grade equipment. The truck has to be capable of surviving medium-level threats, the suits have to be foolproof, and the weapons have to be clean. That’s without mentioning the random, countless toys that the lab keeps throwing at us.”
“The lab?”
“Yeah, the lab,” Smith continued. “A bunch of guys with glasses, clipboards, and gaming chairs. They try studying the demons and how to best kill them. Key word here being try. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were secretly playing solitaire on those computers all day.”
To be fair, studying something that nobody understood sounded tough. Even now, people didn’t know if the demons were caused by a virus or a ritual. Sometimes, it just seemed to happen. There wasn’t an exact rhyme or reason to it.
“Anyway, that’s not in our paygrade,” Smith sighed. He sipped on Andrew’s fresh coffee with a smile. “Holy shit, this is actually pretty good. Were you a barista before this?”
“No, but my mom owned a cafe.”
“Crazy,” Singh mumbled from under the truck. She finally rolled back out for a final time as her maintenance finished up. Her face was covered in sweat, her gloves with grease, and her bottle with brown fluid. From here, Andrew could see her abs peeking through her white tank-top.
She spat her dip in the trash before grabbing the cup of coffee from Smith’s hands. With one sip, she was giving a nod of agreement. “God damn. You’re an artist,” she chuckled.
“Th-Thanks…”
“Just wait until Kang hears of this. He’ll be in love with you real quick. Well, to be fair, I also wouldn’t be surprised if he was a little gay. I mean have you seen him? The fruitiness is overloading the gaydar.”
Smith shrugged. “He works out, doesn’t he?”
“Just because a man works out doesn’t mean he isn’t gay,” Singh countered. “I mean, come on. A man who is meticulous about his skin, eats to the exact calorie, and consistently trains like that? Nothing short of gay.”
“Is it gay to care about your shit?” Smith was ready to debate with her on this one. “I know plenty of straight guys who act like that. Have you watched American Psycho? The main character–”
“Is probably gay.”
“What?”
“I’m fucking with you. I haven’t seen that movie,” Singh chuckled.
Gutierrez then entered the room with his own face full of sweat. Despite having probably worked like a dog, he still looked as bored as anyone else. “What’re we talking about right now?”
Smith yawned. “We’re talking about Kang, and how Singh thinks he’s gay.”
Gutierrez stopped for a moment. Then nodded. “Yeah, that boy is gay as fuck.”
Singh was livid, like a kid proven right. “That’s exactly what I’m saying! That motherfucker is probably the world’s best top, and we’d have no way of knowing it!”
“A top?” Gutierrez scoffed. “Eh, I think he’d prefer being a bottom.”
“A bottom?!” everyone exclaimed.
“Yeah,” Gutierrez continued. “I feel like he’d act all high and mighty, but secretly like taking it up the backdoor. Probably explains why the fucker is so meticulous. What’s the term people have for meticulous guys?”
“Being anal?” Smith scoffed. He looked ready to give everything up right there. “Are you really trying to use Freudian theory right here? Gonna add that Kang is into guys because his workout routine secretly reveals his lust?”
Singh and Gutierrez shared a look. “Yeah,” they both said. “That makes sense.”
With the mere mention of his name, Kang walked inside the room. Before everyone could pretend to look busy, he said something that immediately ruined the mood, “We’re back on duty.”
Frozen faces looked back. Each one of them could see their plans foil right in front of them. “What the hell?” Smith muttered. “Can they do that? Hell, why would they even do that?”
“Sergeant told me CDR-1 has malfunctioning equipment. They’ll need a couple more maintenance days before they can get it back and running,” Kang coldly replied. “Since the other two teams are mostly on rotation, the Sergeant told the chief that we could take it.”
Singh gave a deep groan. “So that’s what this is all about. She wants to make it in with the chief, so she’s trying to get another day of duty to curry some favor. Like come off it, girl! We aren’t trained like cops, equipped like cops, or treated like cops. So why the fuck do we have to listen to them?”
That was something that always stuck in Andrew’s mind. Despite having a completely different pipeline than even the SWAT, the CDRs still revolved their command structure around the police. That means they still answered to them, at the end of the day.
Suddenly, the alarm sounded as the sirens blared around. If Singh’s first reaction wasn’t enough, her new reaction trumped it tenfold. “God damn it! I was supposed to be on a date with a fine Asian chick! I would’ve been eating her out already!”
“Hey, maybe you’ll eat out a demon,” Gutierrez joked.
“Fuck off!”
They all rushed into the armored vehicle, where the APE suits waited for them in the rear. Cheng looked ready to slip one on, but Smith was good enough to keep him in line. “Those things have limited power. We put them on when we get there.”
Sergeant Yang quickly briefed them on the situation. “The cops are dealing with a shootout with some terrorists on the eastside. They’re said to have demons they have tamed for their side. I wasn’t given many details, but we’ll have to be ready for small arms fire. Any questions?”
There was nothing. Despite Singh’s earlier protests, nobody had any inkling of defiance towards the sergeant. Maybe it was the way her skin sharpened around her jaw, the way she kept her hair in a perfect bun, or maybe how she projected that commanding voice.
In any case, her word was law.