Will McIntosh - City Living

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.”

The mayor squinted, like he was thinking hard. “What is this again?”

I took a deep breath, trying to keep my patience. “Chicago is sucking up the people it runs over in them houses. That’s where it’s getting the nourishment to keep moving. You need to go where there ain’t many people.

He looked back at Chicago, watched it veer to run over a little hamlet set along a lake. People ran from their houses, screaming.

The mayor put a hand on his forehead, then nodded real slow. “My God, I think you’re right.”

He shouted to a man in a black suit and hat who was hanging back by the building’s water tower. The man ran right over. The mayor told him to send word to change course.

“Watch it, watch it!” Willard cried.

Chicago was closing again, moving fast.

Cannons flashed and boomed from atop some of the buildings along the edge of New York, hitting the front end of Chicago. A few shots hit directly on the wall in places where it hadn’t been crushed in the collision. Bricks and mortar sailed into the air.

Chicago kept on coming though, like a shark smelling blood in the water. In the spaces between buildings I caught glimpses of people in downtown New York fleeing uptown. They were running, riding bicycles; cars and buses were jammed in the intersections, honking and bumping into each other.

Below us the street was one long line of people waiting to donate fluids. Mommas with their babies, soldiers, old folks, everybody was out there. I watched a kid who couldn’t have been fourteen running with something in his hand. It must have been some of the fluids they were collecting, because he was shouting something, and people got out of his way like he had smallpox or something.

The mayor shouted orders; New York left the wide trail we’d been following, plowed into virgin forest. Chicago clipped us as we turned, taking out a half dozen tenement buildings and a green rectangle of park.

“Come on!” the mayor shouted. “Where’s the extra juice?”

We watched Chicago close, close.

A jolt came that nearly knocked me off my feet. A couple of people on the roof did fall down. Everyone cheered. Chicago faded behind us as our extra juice kicked in.

Our little gang left the roof, went to the closest extraction station to do our part. There weren’t no monsters to scare us, but the needles and tubes scared me pretty good by themselves. They stuck me in all sorts of places. It was terrible, but I gritted my teeth and took it.

By the time we got back to the roof, there were a dozen people up there with the mayor. He gave me a big friendly hello and slapped me on the back as we turned to watch Chicago. It was half a mile behind.

“My navigators are plotting a course through the most sparsely populated areas,” he told me, his words a mite hard to understand because he was chomping on a big cigar.

Waiters brought us dinner on the roof—beef wrapped up in pastry dough, and champagne. I never had champagne before. I never had beef wrapped up in dough neither, come to think of it. By the time we got to dessert (a sort of cake filled with a chocolate pond), Chicago was a good mile behind. The mayor told the man in the black suit to get them to slow New York down, so Chicago wouldn’t give up following. We watched Chicago gain on us for a while. It was moving a good deal slower. It was getting hungry.

It kept on slowing, and so did we. The landscape got scrawnier, and by the time the sun set there was nothing out there but scrub pines and jackrabbits reflecting in the moonlight.

We stayed on the roof, and it was like a party. They brought up three musicians with fiddles and I danced with Lois, who was surely paying me more attention than she had before. I looked into her eyes as we danced, enjoyed the feel of her waist. On other rooftops other people were having parties of their own. None of them was as fancy as ours, but they looked like they was having fun.

Just before sunrise, Chicago jerked to a stop. Cheers rose up from the rooftops. New York swung around and pulled near Chicago, though not too close. We watched soldiers trot across the open ground, shoot ropes over Chicago’s walls and climb up and over.