City Living (3 page)

There was a commotion behind us; we turned to see soldiers rushing toward us, some carrying rifles, some pulling cannons.

We took the fella from Chicago, whose name was Perry, to a diner on Eighth Avenue. We offered him scotch, but he wanted tea. He was a wispy sort, skinny and small with nervous hands and a mustache that had grown in too thin, leaving spaces where the skin showed through. He didn't want to talk about Chicago—he held the cup close to his face like he could hide behind it and kept shaking his head and saying, “You don't want to know.”

I did want to know, so finally I reminded him that he'd be nothing but roadkill if it wasn't for us, and that maybe he owed us an explanation.

“All right.” Perry put the cup down, leaned back on the couch. “I'll tell you. But I don't want to.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out with a wheeze. “I don't want to think about it. I want to pretend it was a bad dream.” He looked like he was going to cry.

He collected himself, and finally started talking.

“One of the five lived in Chicago—Crowley, the conjuror. He didn't hold any office, but he may as well have been king the way people did what he wanted. What he wanted was more life fluids for the city. He pressured Mayor Cermak into raising the requirements again and again, until we were all being siphoned on a weekly basis.”

“Oh, my,” Lois said, shaking her head.

Perry shook his head in a ‘You ain't heard nothing yet' way. “Then people started dying. In their bathtubs, elevators, the subway. At first it seemed like a rash of freak accidents, but then word spread that there was a detail being covered up by the coroner: the victims were dry—they'd been drained.”

Willard opened his mouth to speak, but Perry waved him silent.

“There was panic. A lot of residents would have fled, but Chicago was moving, and it kept moving. And people kept dying. More ‘accidents.'” He stopped, fixed me with a stare that dared me to hear what he was about to say. “Then the city began killing openly. Gouts of steam might come up through a grate in the sidewalk as you walked over it, boiling you alive. The corner mailbox might close on your arm and squeeze until it cut your arm right off—”

“Stop it!” Lois leapt to her feet. “You're lying. Obviously you're lying. If you're not going to tell the truth, why—”

Perry laughed. “What a wonderful thought. God, how I wish I was lying. How I wish all the things I've seen…” He balled his fists and rubbed his eyes, like he was trying to erase all the things his eyes had seen.

“Go on, Perry,” I said, nice and soothing.

Perry dragged his hands down his face, making pink pockets under his eyes. “Those of us who managed to stay alive have been sleeping in the parks, keeping away from the places where the city gets you.”

Lois snorted, like she thought it was nothing but a fish story, but the rest of us ignored her. I believed the man, crazy as the story was. Maybe I believed him
because
the story was so crazy—no one would make up such a yarn and expect anyone to believe it.

“There aren't many people left alive in the city to provide fluids. But it keeps going. I'm not sure how.”

“You talk like the city is alive,” I said. “You don't mean that, do you? That Crowley fella's got to be down there pulling the strings.”

“Oh, the city's alive,” Perry said.

Nobody said nothing for a while. I sipped my scotch, glad to have something stronger than tea to soothe my nerves. Now I wasn't sure if I believed Perry or not. The whole durn city was alive? That was a big acorn to swallow.

I'm not the sort of man who likes to hear things secondhand—I like to dig right into the incision and see what's going on under the skin. But there was no way I was going to get into Chicago to see for myself, even if I was crazy enough to want to.

“For the longest time I didn't understand what Crowley needed all that extra fluid for,” Perry said, breaking the long silence. “The city didn't move
that
much faster than before. Then it came to me: That's how Crowley brought the city to life. Or more to life, anyway. I think they're all a little bit alive. I think that's how the dream team got them to move.”

That got me thinking: If I couldn't see what was going on under Chicago, seeing the engine that drove New York City was the next best thing. I needed to figure out how to get down there.

As the others jawed about Chicago, I thought it through. There's usually a way to get where you want to go if you're persistent enough. And I was a persistent son of a gun. My momma said that to me all the time.

“Lois?” I said, interrupting the conversation. “You've honestly never seen the engine that drives New York?”

Lois shook her head. “No one is allowed down there except the people who run it. I once tried to talk my boss into getting me a tour, and he claimed that even
he'd
never seen it.

“Who's your boss?” I asked.

“I'm a secretary for the commissioner of the Department of Sanitation.”

She looked like she wanted me to act impressed, but I was too busy thinking about that engine. Now I really wanted to see it. How does a person get under a city? The trains ran under the city. I thought about the story I read about tunnels, about people living down there and not coming up for years. Maybe some of them tunnels led to the engine room? It was worth a shot; sitting in a diner sure wasn't getting me anywhere.

There was a bowl on our table filled with matchbooks. I dug out a handful and headed for the door.

“Where you going?” Willard said, standing.

“You stay here.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “I'll be back soon.” Willard protested, probably because he didn't like the idea of being left with a couple of city folk he didn't know, but I insisted.

On my way to the subway station, I thought about Chicago. Most people looking at a city that sucked up more and more of its residents' juices would think of it like a drug addict or some such, but it made me think of a virus, because of my doctoring background and all. A virus sucks the juices out of its host, but knows if it sucks too hard the host will die and it'll starve. Chicago reminded me of a virus that had developed too big an appetite, draining off the hosts. Of course that was only if Chicago really was alive, and Crowley or some other fella wasn't down there steering. I still wasn't convinced of that.

I took the train to the Garment District. The article I read in
Life
magazine about New York City said the engine was underneath the Garment District. When I got to my stop I walked to the far end of the train platform, where the tunnel opened up. I hopped off the platform when nobody was looking and ducked into the tunnel, easy as pie.

About a hundred feet in, I lit a match. There wasn't much to see besides the tracks, concrete walls, and a couple of Coke bottles probably dropped by track workers. I shook the match out and moved on another hundred feet.

The fifth time I lit a match I spied a ladder disappearing into a hole in the floor near the wall. I climbed down.

I spent the next two hours winding through a maze of sewer tunnels, maintenance tunnels, stairways, ramps, and such, every so often hitting dead ends that forced me to back up and try another way, all the while lighting matches so I didn't break my leg. I didn't see no people living down there, only rats and bugs. Finally, I heard a faraway thumping sound that was so deep I felt it in my guts more than my ears. I followed the sound. It kept on getting louder until I felt like I was standing next to someone beating on one of them big parade drums.

I saw beams of light squeezing through a crack in the side of the sewer tunnel I was walking in. The crack was big enough for me to squeeze through as well. I ended up in a little room with a couple of tables, some cabinets, and an icebox. I thought maybe it was a break room for workers. I went to the door, opened it just a little, and looked out.

Looking through that door was like being tossed off a thousand-foot cliff. My legs lost all their standing power and I nearly fell on my backside.

The electrical currents made the most sense to my eyes. They were jumping through the air like lightning bolts, crackling and dancing, but at least I knew what they were.

Below them were people lying on tables with their eyes taped shut. Their lips moved like they was trying to form words, or from the looks on their faces, maybe screams. There were tubes feeding out of them—fleshy, like intestine, but you could see partly through them so the color of what was in them came through. Some were dark red with blood, some milky white with I don't know what. There was black, and rust, and green.

Big pools with geysers of colored liquid spurted from the floor toward big colored balls that spun in the air like little planets in a solar system. As far as I could see they weren't hanging from strings, they were just spinning in thin air.

There were long tubes of skin wriggling like angry babies, glass chambers filled with bubbles, a cube made of water spinning in the air. I couldn't figure out what the walls were made of. It was soft and shiny, wrinkly in places. Faces climbed the walls, then disappeared at the top, replaced by more faces down below.

One of the faces winked at me; or at least, I thought it did.

The sounds were just terrible. Moans and groans, burbling and boinging. Burps and farts so loud they nearly busted my eardrums. Everything I'd read about cities talked about the
machines
that drove the cities, the
engines
. These weren't machines, that was for damned sure.

People ran around in this mess, crawling underneath things, climbing up things, shouting back and forth. They looked exhausted. The one closest to me—a gray-haired man—was tugging on fat nipples all hanging in a row, like he was playing an instrument. Different color liquids squirted from each one he tugged and fell into a hole that looked like a big mouth, toothless like my grandpa's.

He looked my way, did a double take, and stopped what he was doing. “Hey!” he shouted. “Who are you?”

I closed the door and ran. I'd seen enough anyway. Enough to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. Quivering like a newborn piglet, I traced my steps back to the train station and headed back to the diner.

I had no trouble believing that Chicago was alive. These people were playing with things they didn't understand—living things.

I burst through the door of the diner, found my friends where I'd left them. “We got to take Perry here to see your boss.” If her boss was the commissioner of something, then he was important, and someone important needed to hear what Perry had to say, and what I had to say too.

Like I suspected, Lois's boss led us right in when we explained who Perry was. Perry told him what he knew about Chicago, and lickety split, Lois's boss was leading us to
his
boss, who was the mayor of the whole danged city.

The mayor wasn't in his office. He was on the roof, watching Chicago. Lois's boss took us up.

“Oh Lord,” Willard said when we reached the roof and looked beyond the city walls.

Chicago was chasing us. New York was high-tailing it, but Chicago was closing in.

“Jost,” the mayor said to Lois's boss, “set up extraction stations all over the city. Send out a directive to the citizenry: We need fluids, all sorts, as much as we can get.”

Jost looked big-eyed scared, like he didn't think he knew how to do what the mayor was telling him to do. “Should I set up events to stimulate adrenal flow?”

The mayor jerked a thumb toward Chicago. “There's a mad city chasing us. I think everyone's scared enough.” He noticed us for the first time, looked us up and down. “Who are you?”

Jost ran off, leaving us to explain ourselves to the mayor. We watched as Chicago closed in. Every so often it changed course so it could run over a farmhouse or a pasture full of cattle. I wondered about that—why would it waste time wrecking things if it was trying to catch us? Off in the distance, I heard people scream as Chicago bore down.

Then it came to me. “It's eating!” I said out loud.

The mayor grunted, the way people do when they aren't really listening to you but pretend they are.

“I'm telling you, it don't have any nourishment left inside its own walls, so it's eating.”

Chicago was closing in. It was so close I could see people on its streets. Looked like there were even less than there'd been before. New York started a wide turn, trying to shake Chicago, but it wasn't working this time.

“It's going to hit us!” Lois cried, covering her mouth.

We all took a step back, away from the edge of the roof as Chicago plowed right into the tail end of New York. Stone and concrete flew as the underside of Chicago lifted up, sliding into New York. Two New York skyscrapers toppled back into Chicago's own buildings as Chicago jerked forward like it was gonna mount New York. It crushed buildings and people, trying to climb right on. It was an awesome, terrible sight.

New York jolted forward, a burst of speed that pulled it free of Chicago and dropped Chicago back to the ground with a
boom
. Chicago sat there a minute, like it was catching its breath.

I turned to Lois. “Do you know where we're headed?”

“No,” she said as Chicago started moving, coming after us again.

“Well, where are we now? Do you know?”

She looked up toward the blue sky, trying to recall. “Mississippi, I think.”

I checked the sun. We were heading northeast. “If we go this way, there's gonna be more and more people for that thing to feed on. Hey!” I grabbed the mayor's shoulder. He looked at me for real now, startled. “Where are we going?”

“New Jersey. Detroit and Baltimore are there.”

“No, no,” I said, shaking him like I could shake sense into him. “Don't you see? You got to starve it.” I pointed southwest. “If we head that way we'll hit Kansas, Texas. Nothing but dirt and the occasional possum.”