Chicago is what passes for an old city in America, and I’ll give the place this much—in its lifetime it has lived a lot. Rapid changes in technology, demographics, economics, industry, and politics have built the city in layer after layer of repurposed construction, which, for the most part, has resulted in a busy metropolis. Here and there, though, there are loose ends. Purpose-built locations that simply could not be readily made over to suit current needs. One of those places is a complex of old grain silos on Damen.
An explosion in the late seventies left the site unusable, and it simply never caught up with the rest of the town. Several hundred yards square of gutted red-brown brick buildings, steel girder skeletons, tunnels, and round concrete towers create one of those spaces where graffiti artists, urban explorers, and shady investigators go to pursue their craft. In the middle of a thriving city, it is an island of silence and stillness where weeds and trees have begun to reclaim the ground.
It just wouldn’t have been believable to the ghouls following me if I hadn’t noticed them in the morning stillness, so I waited until I was a few blocks away, glanced over my shoulder, goggledtheatrically—ghouls not being known as the brightest pixels on the screen—and began to pedal quickly in an obvious attempt to escape.
The property was fenced off, of course, and I drove right to the sign that read “State Property, No Trespassing” to ditch the bike and climb the fence. The cars roared up and the ghouls piled out, while I dashed into the abandoned cityscape.
I broke visual contact and opened up into a full sprint, maybe forty, forty-five miles an hour. I found an entrance to the tunnels, tossed my shirt and jacket one way, and went the other. I’d gained enough ground to take a moment, and I did.
Little changes, faces, hands, feet, they don’t take a lot of effort. Compare it to a regular person jogging up a couple of flights of stairs. Even becoming a completely different person, height, weight, and so on, that’s only moderately difficult. Run a mile at a moderate pace.
Turning yourself into a monster, though. That’s harder. A lot harder. And it hurts. It hurts a lot.
The part of me inside that isn’t so nice, the part that wants to tear limbs and rip flesh, capered about in glee as the pain started. My face burned and ached and twisted. My spine lit up viciously as every single vertebra dislocated simultaneously. Bones in my arms and legs cracked and stretched and swelled. My heart rate went up enormously. Heat bubbled through me, my flesh covering itself in sweat even as hair dropped away and scales began to slide out of the pores and unfurl.
Objectively, it took seconds. From my point of view, it was a bad, bad hour. My body pulled in energy from everywhere, drawing extra mass from the spaces between realities. And when I was done, I was nine feet tall, covered in black scales, a thousand pounds of muscle and claws and fangs.
Steam curled up from my scales. Air heaved in and out of my massive new lungs, pluming in the cool subterranean air. Slabs of gorilla-like muscle quivered to be used.
And I was feeling grouchy.
The ghouls showed up a minute later.
They’d done some shifting of their own. Arms had lengthened, backs gnarled, claws extended. Muzzles had thrust out from their faces, fangs growing. Hungry, slavering, carnivorous monsters.
But when I came out of the dark, half a ton of steaming black scales, ripping claws, tearing fangs, and red, glowing demonic eyes, the monsters found out the difference between amateurs and professionals.
It got ugly.
It also got all over the walls and ceiling.
One of the ghouls got away by tearing itself loose from its own arm, clenched in my jaws. It ran while I finished off a couple of wounded. Ghouls are like roaches. They take a lot of killing, generally by dismemberment. I made sure the job was done, and about the time the fleeing ghoul got to the surface, there was a loud boom, and then two more.
I ambled up to the mouth of the tunnel, where Viti stood, holding a semiautomatic shotgun over a badly wounded ghoul. It had taken one round to the chest and one to each leg and was trying to drag itself away on its remaining arm.
I came out of the tunnel, bloodied, because you don’t tangle with half a dozen ghouls without paying a price. Viti’s eyes widened, and she almost raised the shotgun. Hard to blame her.
I grabbed the wounded ghoul’s leg and dragged the ghoul back down into the tunnel with the others. It yowled weakly, thrashing.
Then I finished the job.
Later that night, I met with Sheryl Petty on the waterfront in the Port of Chicago. Barge shipping traffic from the city isn’t what it was back in the town’s heyday, but it still exists. It’s slow. Which suited my purposes perfectly. You work with the shady side of Chicago, you know guys at the port, especially the ones there late at night. I made sure she got let through.
Mrs.Petty pulled up in her sporty little European car (pink, obviously), tires crunching on gravel as she stopped under a buzzing halogen light outside one of the many, many warehouses. She’d dressed for the part, in a long coat, sunglasses, and with a kerchief over her hair, as if she’d been sent over from central casting as “clandestine meeting Barbie.”
“Mister Grey,” she said. She tried to look cavalier as she fitted a cigarette into her holder and lit it, but her hands were shaking. “Are you going to make me a happy woman?”
“Depends on your point of view,” I replied. My arm and belly burned silently from wounds that would take a few more meals and several more hours of sleep to heal, and it might have made me ill-tempered. Even so, she’d hired me. She deserved a chance to turn aside. “You want bad things to happen to your husband?”
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s right,” she snapped. “That’s right, I do.”
“And you’re sure about that?”
“Completely.”
I exhaled through my nose. “So be it. Come and see.”
I led her into the warehouse, past a clerk’s office, and into the dim, cavernous main storage area where cargo containers and large shipping crates were stacked twenty and thirty feet high.
