“Dammit, Dresden,” she said, poking me in the forehead with one thick finger. “Focus.”
“It’s just possible I’ve taken on ghouls once or twice,” I said. I rubbed my head. It hurt less than it had the night before. “I’ll be fine.”
Bear gave me a skeptical look, her whole weight balanced easily as she crouched on her heels and looked back out at the night.
Footsteps sounded on the street outside the alley, and Fitz appeared. He slipped quietly into place beside us and crouched down. The kid looked short and slight, given his company. “I think something’s out there,” he said quietly. “Hairs on my neck are standing up. The people in the camp are nervous. They told me to move along.”
I grunted. We were waiting in an alley near Michigan Avenue, where a lot of the destruction had happened during the battle. The corpses of a number of skyscrapers covered pretty much everything. An encampment of tents, barrels, and various storage boxes of all kinds stood across the street in the shadow of the ruins.
Scavengers had descended upon the ruined buildings in the weeks after the battle. They’d begun as volunteers looking for the remains of the dead, but now they mostly seemed to be taking whatever had survived the destruction. The police had a lot to do. They hadn’t gotten around to breaking up the scavenging camps yet. A number of spots like this one had sprung up, and the ghouls had been vanishing people from them for weeks.
The news was calling the scavengers “ghouls” for taking the possessions of the dead. I didn’t have strong feelings either way, given what I knew about actual ghouls. People were just people. When things got bad, they did what they needed to do to survive and protect their families. Some of them were in it to make easy money, I supposed. I just didn’t feel like I was in a position to pass much in the way of judgment when it came to random people scooping up whatever they could from the ruins of their world.
Monsterseatingpeople was a lot less murky. About the time something was making men, women, and children disappear, it was time for some avenging.
“All right, kid,” I said. “The campers have any arms?”
“Handguns, most of them,” he said. “Nobody wants to carry a rifle climbing around the ruins. Saw a shotgun in someone’s tent, but that was it.”
Sidearms weren’t too much use against ghouls. About as effective as bear spray was for grizzlies. A pistol would discourage them. Mostly.
“Good work, Fitz. You remember the plan?”
“Stay within arm’s reach of you,” he said dutifully. “Stay under my veil. Warn you if you’re about to get flanked. Don’t try anything unless there’s no other choice.”
“There you go,” I said. “Got your knife?”
He opened his coat and showed me the heavy blade at his belt. Fitz had lived a tough life. He knew how to use a knife. He stared across the street at the encampment. The kid had lived like those people for years. His expression looked…complicated. “What do we do now?”
“We wait,” Bear said patiently. “Ghouls will want people to get drunk and sleepy before they come in. Easier targets.”
“Settle in, kid,” I said. “A lot of the game is like this.”
And we waited.
Waiting in the dark and the cold isn’t easy. There’s a need to get up, to move. Tired muscles want to stretch. Chilled flesh wants to shift and ease. But when you’re hunting, stillness is imperative. Movement is the first thing the eye tends to notice, and we didn’t want to reveal ourselves to our would-be prey.
The problem, for me, was that sitting and doing nothing left too many thoughts running around my head. That could have gotten me to bad places, so I let my eyes mostly close, slowed my breathing, and focused exclusively on what I could hear, paying more and more and more attention to the sounds around me, Listening.
I overheard conversations in the camp across the street. Most of them happened around the barrel fires, where a dozen men and four women were cooking some pretty basic food, mostly soup. A couple were being carnal in one of the tents, though not loudly enough for the other people in the camp to notice. There was a pub a couple of blocks away that apparently had its doors open, and the distant sound of singing drifted through the air. We might have had a local end of the world, but the Irish just poured another round and made more songs. On the far side of the nearest ruined skyscraper, someone was working with tools, maybe banging something back into shape. In the very far distance, the clang and clatter of a passing freight train echoed through the air.
For a Chicago night, it was really quiet. It was the lack of auto traffic,I think. The Guard was still limiting who could take the interstates through the city.
I breathed slowly and Listened and waited, until almost an hour after the scavengers had turned in, and when the ghouls came out of their tunnel somewhere in the ruins, I heard the scrape and scuffle of gravel sliding over gravel.
My head snapped up, and Bear glanced at me. Her green eyes gleamed in the shadows, and she nodded slowly.
“What?” Fitz breathed. To my adjusted hearing, his voice was all but a shout.
“They’re here,” I whispered.
“How many?” Bear asked.
“Few. Less than half a dozen, I think.”
Bear nodded slowly.
“Remember,” I whispered. “I’m first. You stay in my shadow, Fitz. Bear, you’re riding drag.”
