“Heebie Jeebies,” Tripp babbled. “I’m having the Heebie Jeebies. I need to go lay down.”
“I can see it too, idiot,” I snarled.
He stared blankly at me and asked, “You’ve got them too?”
My brain went into overdrive. The best call here would have been to get in the car and drive the hell away—but Tripp Gregory, the blithering moron, had made that impossible. A simple circle would have protected us from the furious spirit, but with a high tech explosive device about five feet away, I didn’t dare use my power. It killed cell phones at the best of times, and I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t set off the bomb. Nor could I just depart and leave the damned thing where it was—there were too many people around, passing by in cars and on their way down Chicago’s streets on a muggy summer evening.
But all the potential bystanders meant that whoever had planted the bomb hadn’t had a lot of time. A couple of minutes, top. Odds were good that it hadn’t been wired to blow if removed—that could have been suicide for the bomber if someone had interrupted him, for example.
I decided to chance it. I reached under the car, seized the device, took a breath and then yanked it free. It had been held to the old metal gas tank by strong magnets and came loose readily enough, and suddenly I was holding a big fistful of kaboom in my hand. I straightened as the spirit bear closed to a dozen yards and—
--and thought about leaving Tripp to the thing.
It would solve so many problems.
But it was no way to live.
So I grabbed him by the jacket, screamed, “Run!” and hauled him into a sprint with me.
I’ll give Tripp this much: he was in shape. Though he was considerably shorter, he burst into a run that carried him half a step ahead of me within twenty yards, his eyes wide and panicked.
Behind us, the otso crashed out of the alley and slammed into the side of the Munstermobile, crumpling its front quarterpanel as if it had been made of aluminum instead of Detroit steel. The car jounced a foot out into the street, causing horns to honk and brakes to squeal. A jogger staggered to one side, staring in shock as the only semi-visible form of the otso regained its balance, shaking the very visible skull with a dazed-looking gesture, then oriented itself on us and set out in pursuit. Lights exploded into showers of sparks as it galumphed past them, leaving a swath of darkness and screams in its wake.
“Heebie Jeebies!” Tripp squealed, casting a terrified glance over his shoulder. “This is Heebie Jeebies! This isn’t real!”
“Come on,” I growled. There was a spot close where I might have a chance to handle the thing, if we could make it there. I took a left, sprinted diagonally across an intersection and nearly got us hit by a fancy town-SUV. Horns blared—at least for a few seconds. Then the otso came sprinting its ghostly way across the intersection in pursuit of us, blowing out lights and engines (and horns) with equal disdain.
I glanced down at the bomb in my hands and gulped. The otso was apparently as disruptive to tech as me when I was working. If it got close enough to set the thing off…
I needed open space.
The Battle of Chicago had left a lot of wreckage. The Titan’s arcane superweapon had collapsed forty-four buildings, most of them of the very tall persuasion, and dozens more had been damaged or destroyed when they collapsed. In the month that had gone by since then, they’d mostly gotten the streets cleared out where possible, but there were still entire blocks covered in rubble and wreckage, and the city had been forced to resort to simply walling off those blocks with sheets of plastic until the reclamation and salvage crews from the city’s rebuilding project could come through and start digging them free. The news estimated that it would be at least a year before all the rubble was cleaned up, and maybe another one before all the reconstruction could begin.
Come to think of it, Marcone was making them look incompetent with what he was doing. Good to know it wasn’t just me he did that to.
Two blocks away was a wall of eight-foot high orange and white plastic sheeting covered with environmental hazard warnings, and I headed for it the only way I thought could slow down the otso behind us:
I ran straight through traffic.
Headlights flared in my eyes. Cars honked and swerved. I had to stagger to one side, hauling a babbling Tripp with me to avoid a garbage truck, and I heard the thing hit the indestructible flesh of the spirit bear with a shockingly loud crunch of metal and breaking glass and exploding headlights.
“Come on!” I screamed and flung myself at the plastic sheeting with the full weight of my body and Tripp’s hitting it at a dead run.
We crashed through the plastic, and into the ruin the Titan had wrought upon my city.
It was like walking into a different world.
A forty-story building had fallen a block away from the plastic walls. Broken concrete and shattered glass and the twisted and torn ends of rebar had washed out like a tsunami over the adjacent buildings in a wave seven or eight feet deep, partially collapsing them. A gas station convenience store leaned at a forty-five degree angle near at hand. I scrambled up a slope of treacherous gravel toward its canted roof, dragging Tripp with me.
“We shouldn’t be here!” Tripp howled. “We’re trespassing! There was a sign!”
Behind us, the otso smashed its way through the plastic sheeting and crashed into a pile of rubble like a small locomotive. It hesitated for a second, head whipping around at all the urban carnage, and I felt bad for the spirit of the creature that had been trapped in the skull—it probably wasn’t having any better a time than I was. It opened its mouth and let out the ghostly echo of a bear’s roar, before its glowing eyes focused on Tripp again and it began rumbling toward us.
“Come on!” I shouted. “Get higher!”
We climbed the roof of the old gas station as the otso began slamming its way over the rubble in pursuit.
“This isn’t happening!” Tripp shrieked. “This isn’t happening!”
