Will McIntosh - City Living

In no time, we got the word: Chicago was dead.

The mayor turned and offered me his hand. “I’m very grateful, citizen.”

“I ain’t a citizen,” I said, holding up my arm to show him the bracelet I’d all but forgot. “I’m just a visitor.”

The mayor looked left and right, found the fella in the black suit. “Get someone to take that bracelet off him.” He turned back to me, held up his hand like he was a priest set to benedict me. “By the power vested in me, I proclaim you a citizen of New York, with all of the benefits afforded by said citizenship.”

I thanked him. It was a right friendly gesture on his part. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to stay and be a citizen, though. I motioned at Chicago. “So, what are you gonna do about the thing living under your own streets?”

He gave me a puzzled look.

“You know, the one with all those faces and tubes and such.”

Now the mayor looked stunned, but he didn’t ask me how I knew what it looked like. Maybe he figured it was a lucky guess. “What do you mean, what am I going to do about it?”

I ran a hand through my hair, trying to pick out a way to say something that wouldn’t be polite if I didn’t say it just right. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you keep on feeding those mouths down under the streets, what’s to keep the same thing from happening to New York?”

The mayor chuckled, polite-like, the way you do when someone says something ignorant.

“From what your friend Perry tells us, Chicago got greedy. We’re not going to make that mistake. We’ll take it slowly, maintain control. And one day…” He held up his hand, flat, with the palm down, and swept it around like it was a bird. “One day we’re going to fly.” He opened his eyes wide and smiled at me.

I smiled back. “Well, good luck with that. But I think I’ll sit that one out on good old Mother Earth.” I clapped him on the shoulder and headed for the stairwell. Lois, Willard, and Perry followed.

“Do you realize what the mayor just did for you?” Lois said, catching up to me.

“I ain’t staying in this city if y’all intend to keep on feeding that thing in your basement.”

“We can’t just stop . This is the future. You heard what he said, we’re being careful.” She stopped walking. “Charles, slow down!”

I stopped, went back and put my hands on Lois’s shoulders, and looked her right in the eye. “You need to stop. This ain’t safe. We were desperate when they created these things. I ain’t sure anyone really knows what could come of this.”

“So we should just go back to being a lump?” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Like those towns back there that Chicago ate?”

There was something in her eyes, a look I’d seen somewhere before. Maybe in my uncle Ed, when he was looking for a dollar to buy his next bottle. “Didn’t you hear the mayor? He wants to fly this thing!”

“The mayor knows what he’s doing,” Lois said. She didn’t sound all that convinced.

It suddenly struck me that city living had pried Lois’s senses right from the hinges. The same with everyone else in New York. Did the president know what had happened to Chicago, what might happen to New York and the others? Surely he knew. I tried to imagine the US Army’s bitty little howitzers, its planes like gnats, taking on New York. What was easier to imagine was another of these cities gone insane, plowing over little old Siloam, eating me and Willard, Momma and Daddy, everyone, like it was nothing, then moving on to find the next town.

“I guess I’m just not a city boy, Lois.”

She looked at me with her big, brown, crazy eyes. “Maybe you could be, if you tried.”

I shook my head. “No. I’m just a country doctor.” I gave her shoulders a squeeze, then headed for the city gates with Willard huffing to keep up.

“How we gonna get home, Charles? We ain’t got but a few dollars left.”

“We’ll figure something out, Willard. Don’t you worry.” It was the least of our worries. We needed to leave the country, move to some island that needed doctors and didn’t have any living cities. I needed to convince as many of my friends and kin as I could to come along.

There was a crowd gathered in the middle of the street on Eleventh Avenue, looking down at something in the road. Police officers were detouring traffic down side streets while a couple of other officers kept the crowd back. We went over and eased ourselves to the front to see what was going on.

A fellow had fallen into an open sewer while crossing the street, and workers were down there trying to bring him up. I eyed the manhole cover, lying in the street a foot from the open hole. Probably some yahoo had pulled it off as a prank. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that the mayor had fed the city a heap of fluids so they could outrun Chicago. A heap of fluids.

“Let’s get going,” I said to Willard, tugging on his shirt.

Through the gates I drank in the sight of solid, unpaved ground. Planting my feet on grass and dirt would make me feel at home enough for now. I turned to get one final eye-level look at New York City. I squinted toward the skyscrapers on the far end, where Chicago had taken its bite. I’d swear some of the ones Chicago knocked down were looking a little less knocked down. It was a long way off, though, and it might have been a trick of my eyes.

Will McIntosh is a Hugo award winner and Nebula finalist whose latest novel, Defenders , has been optioned by Warner Bros. for a feature film. His previous novel, Love Minus Eighty , was named the best science fiction book of 2013 by the American Library Association, and was on both Io9.com and NPR.org’s lists of the best SF novels of 2013. His debut novel, Soft Apocalypse , was a finalist for a Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Compton Crook Award. Along with four novels, he has published fifty short stories in venues such as Asimov’s , Lightspeed , and Science Fiction and Fantasy: Best of the Year . Will was a psychology professor before turning to writing full-time. He lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, with his wife and their six-year-old twins. You can follow him on Twitter @willmcintoshSF, or on his website, www.willmcintosh.net.

Soft Apocalypse

Hitchers

Love Minus Eighty

Defenders

“The Perimeter”

“The Heist”

“Watching Over Us”

“City Living”

Our Darkest Hour.

Our Only Hope.

The invaders came to claim Earth as their own, overwhelming us with superior weapons and the ability to read our minds like open books.

Our only chance for survival was to engineer a new race of perfect soldiers to combat them. Seventeen feet tall, knowing and loving nothing but war, their minds closed to the aliens.

But these saviors could never be our servants. And what is done cannot be undone.

Lieutenant Enrique Quinto

June 26, 2029. Morris Run, Pennsylvania.

It was a quaint Pennsylvania town, many of the buildings well over fifty years old, with green canopies shading narrow doorways. Even the town’s name was quaint: Morris Run. If not for the abandoned vehicles, filthy and faded by two years of exposure to the elements, and the trash stacked along the sidewalk, Quinto might have expected someone to step out of the Bullfrog Brewhouse and wave hello.