City Living (4 page)

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.

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.

Paul Harrison

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.

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.

“Lieutenant Lucky?” Quinto turned to see Macalena, his platoon sergeant, making his way to the front of the carrier. Quinto wished he'd said something the first time someone called him Lucky, but it was far too late now. Most of the troops he was leading today probably didn't know his real name.

“One of the new guys shit his pants,” Macalena said when he drew close, his voice low, giving Quinto a whiff of his sour breath.

Quinto sighed heavily. “Oh, hell.”

“The kid's scared to death. He hasn't been out of Philadelphia since this started.”

“No, I don't blame him.” Quinto looked over Macalena's shoulder, saw the kid perched on the side of the carrier, head down. He was about fourteen. The poor kid didn't belong out here. Not that Quinto couldn't use him; they called raw recruits “fish food,” but sometimes they were surprisingly effective in a firefight, because they were too scared to think. The starfish could get less of a read on what they were going to do, which way they were going to point their rifles. Usually the newbies didn't shit their pants until the shooting started, though. “Does he have a spare pair?”

Macalena shook his head. “That's the only pair he owns.”

Quinto reached into his pack, pulled out a pair of fatigue pants, and handed them to Macalena. “I hope he's got a belt.”

Macalena laughed, stuck the pants under his armpit, and headed toward the kid.

What an awful thing, to be out here at fourteen, fifteen. When Quinto was fourteen, he'd spent his days playing video games, shooting bad guys in his room while Mom fetched fruit juice and chocolate chip cookies and told him when to go to bed.

They reached the end of the little downtown, which was composed of that single road, and the landscape opened up, revealing pine forest, the occasional house, mountains rising up on all horizons. There was little reason for any Luyten to be within eight miles of this abandoned backwater town, but they were all out there somewhere, so there was always a chance they'd be detected.

Quinto tried to access his helmet's topographical maps, but the signal still wasn't coming through. He pulled the old hard copy from his pack, unfolded it.

The carrier slowed; Quinto looked up from the map to see what was going on. There was a visual-recognition drone stuck in a drainage ditch along the side of the road. As they approached, the VRA drone—little more than a machine gun on treads—spun and trained its gun on each of the soldiers in turn. When it got to Quinto, it paused.

“Human.
Human!
” Quinto shouted, engaging the thing's vocal-recognition failsafe. It went on to the next soldier.

It was always an uncomfortable moment, having a VRA drone point a weapon at you. You'd think it would be hard to mistake a human for a Luyten.

Failing to identify anything that resembled a starfish, the gun spun away.

“Get a few guys to pull it out of the ditch,” Quinto said. Four troops hopped out of the transport and wrestled the thing back onto the road. It headed off down the road, continuing on its randomly determined route.

Pleasant Street dead-ended close to the mouth of the mine, about half a mile past an old hotel that should be coming up on their left. When they got to the mine they'd have to unseal it using the critical blast points indicated on the topo map, then a 2.5-mile ride on the maglev flats into the mine, to the storage facility.

If someone had told Quinto two years ago that he'd be going into an abandoned mine to retrieve seventy-year-old weapons and ammo, he would have laughed out loud.

It wasn't funny now.

The locomotive and five boxcars were parked right where they were supposed to be—as close to the mouth of the mine as the track would allow. They were late-twentieth-century vintage, the locomotive orange and shaped like a stretched Mack truck. Quinto called Macalena and his squad leaders, instructed them to set the big recognition-targeting gun they'd brought along in the weeds on the far side of the road, and place two gunners near the entrance with interlocking fire. When that was done, they got the rest of the squads moving down the tunnel. The quicker they moved, the sooner they'd be out of hostile territory and back in Philly.

Quinto took up the rear of the last carrier for the ride down into the mine. He was not a fan of deep holes with black walls, and when his CO had first laid out the mission Quinto had nearly crapped his own pants.

Macalena climbed in and took the seat beside him.

“So what are we looking for? I cannot for the life of me guess what we're doing in here.”

Quinto smiled. It must seem an odd destination to the rest of the men, but they were used to being kept in the dark about missions. The fewer people who knew, the less likely the starfish were to get the information. Or so the logic went.

“The feds have been sealing huge caches of weapons in old mines for the past two centuries, waiting for the day when Argentina or India or whoever took out our more visible weapons depots. They coat them in Cosmoline and pretty much forget about them.”

Macalena frowned, sticking out his big lower lip. “You mean, old hand grenades and machine guns and shit?”

“More or less. Flamethrowers with a pathetically limited effectiveness range, eighty-one-millimeter mortars, LAW rockets, fifty-cal MGs.” Most were outdated weapons, but simple, easy to operate.

Macalena shook his head. “So we're that desperate.”

In the seat in front of them a private who was at least seventy was clinging to the bar in front of her seat. She was tall—at least six feet. The slight jostling of the carrier was clearly causing her old body discomfort. It was true what they said: There were no civilians anymore, only soldiers and children.

“Yup. We're that desperate,” Quinto said. “They've destroyed or seized so much of our hardware that we have more soldiers than guns.”

“What's Cosmoline?” Macalena asked.

“I didn't know, either; I had to look it up. It's a grease they used back in the day to preserve weapons. Once you chip away the hardened Cosmoline, the weapons are supposed to be like new.”

Macalena grunted, spit off the side. “Dusty as hell in here. And cold.”

“Let's be glad we're not staying.”

Macalena's comm erupted, a panicked voice calling his name.

“What have we got?” Macalena asked.

“Vance is dead. Lightning shot, from the trees to the left of the mine.”

“
All stop!
” Macalena shouted. The carrier slowed as Quinto dropped his head, covered his mouth as the implications sunk in.

Lucky no more.

“Where are you now?” Macalena asked the private.

“Inside the mine, about a hundred yards.”

“Stay there.”

Quinto looked up at Macalena, who raised his eyebrows. “What do you want to do?”

He wanted to get as deep in the mine as he could, and stay there, their backs against the wall, weapons raised until the starfish came to get them. Of course the Luyten would never come down, because they were reading his thoughts right now. Plus it was far easier to blow the mouth of the mine and leave them to suffocate.

Quinto ordered the small caravan to turn around and head toward the mouth.

They barely got moving before they heard the flash-boom of a Luyten explosive. The cave shook; bits of dirt and debris spewed at them, then everything settled into silence, the cave now truly pitch-black, save for the carriers' headlights.

They climbed out of the carriers. Some of the troops cried, and there was no shame in that. One woman went off to the side of the tunnel and knelt in the rubble to pray. Quinto didn't know their names, because he hadn't served with them long. Troops came, and died, and new troops came. Only Lieutenant Lucky went on, mission after mission. Quinto realized he'd begun to believe he really was lucky, or special. Destined to see the war to its end.

It killed him, to think he wouldn't get to see how things turned out, whether the bad guys won, or the good guys pulled something out of their asses at the eleventh hour.

Quinto used the walkie to apprise HQ of their situation, so HQ wouldn't wonder when Quinto's platoon never returned.

“Lieutenant?” Macalena said. He was studying the topo map he'd borrowed from Quinto. “Did you see these?” A few of the enlisted came over to look at the map over Macalena's shoulder as he ran his finger along black lines set perpendicular to the mine. “There are five vertical shafts sunk along the length of the mine. I'm guessing they were escape routes in case of collapse, or ventilation, or both.”

Quinto looked up from the map, impotent rage rising in him. “Jesus, Mac, couldn't you have waited a half hour to notice this?”

It took Macalena a second to understand. When he did, he grimaced, curled his hand into a fist, crumpling a section of the map. He turned and walked a dozen paces down the shaft, cursing quietly, viciously.

Even Macalena was too green for this war. He'd been in the infantry for only four months; before that he'd been writing military technical manuals. The army needed fighters more than writers these days.

If Macalena had waited even fifteen, twenty minutes before examining the old map, chances were the Luyten would have been out of range, and they could have climbed out of this hole and gone home.

“We need to move,” Quinto said. “The fish are going to find those exits and seal them up. Spread out, find the exits. When I get to the surface I'm going to set off a Tasmanian devil, give us some breathing room. As soon as it's spent, get out there. Understood? Let's move.”

“Couldn't we just stay down here? Dig our way out when they're gone?” It was the kid who'd crapped himself, looking absurd in Quinto's big pants. “If we go up there now, they'll kill us. I mean, maybe they'll get distracted by something and leave…” He trailed off.

Everyone stared at the ground, except for the soldier who was praying.

“Let's go,” Quinto said.

Quinto grasped the cold rung of the ladder that had dropped down when they unsealed the iron hatch.

“Good luck to you, Lieutenant,” one of the troops waiting to follow him called. It was Benneton, the old woman. The kid who'd crapped his pants was there as well, along with four others.

Quinto looked up into darkness. “Here we go.” He headed up the ladder. A lot of people who'd been as lucky as Quinto might have been tempted to believe the streak would hold, but Quinto knew his past held no hint of his future. More to the point, he knew he had no future.

It was a forty-foot climb according to the map, but adrenaline made it effortless. When he reached the top, he twisted the seal on the hatch, then pushed with his back and shoulders to force the hatch open. Daylight flooded into the dusty shaft as dirt and moldy leaves rained down on him.

The kid, who was just below him, passed up the Tasmanian devil. Reaching among the big spines jutting from the central carbon-fiber sphere, Quinto activated it, tossed it outside, and pulled the hatch closed.

The buzzing of razor-sharp shrapnel hitting, and then burrowing around inside everything within five hundred yards, would have been reassuring if Quinto weren't absolutely certain the starfish had retreated outside the Tasmanian devil's range as soon as Quinto thought about using it. At least it would back the fish up so they wouldn't be able to pick off Quinto and his troops as they climbed out of their holes.

“Here we go,” Quinto said to the boy. “Have your weapon out. Run as fast as you can. Try to take one with you.” His guess was that Benneton would stay behind, shoot from the cover of the shaft until the Luyten cooked her. That's what Quinto would do in her situation; it would probably afford her a few more minutes of life. He took a deep breath, trying to grasp that this was the end, this was the moment of his death, but he couldn't.

As soon as the Tasmanian devil went silent, Quinto threw open the hatch, his heart thudding wildly, and ran.

Their carriers were trapped in the mine, so his best chance would be to make it to the locomotive. Of course the Luyten would have fried the locomotive, so really there was nothing to do but run, and when the fish closed in, turn and fight.

Two hundred yards ahead, he spotted four of his troops running north, into the woods, toward the nearest cover. That probably made more sense than what Quinto was doing, but all of the moves open to them were losers. It was always the same: The fish knew their exact location, but they had no idea where the fish were. If you could catch a fish out in the open, it couldn't dodge automatic weapons fire, but you almost never caught them out in the open.

Quinto glanced back, saw the kid was two steps behind, his dirty cheeks tracked with tearstains.

The locomotive had been melted to a lump. He kept running. Everyone but he and the kid had headed north. Since Quinto wasn't dead yet, it was safe to assume the fish had gone after the larger group first. If he could get outside their range, which meant seven or eight miles, he and the kid might have a chance. Quinto pushed himself to pick up the pace, but when he did the kid started to fall behind, looking panicked. Quinto slowed.

In the distance, Quinto heard the worst sound in the world: the sizzle-crackle of a Luyten lightning stick, a sound as much felt in your body as heard by your ears. Then another. He was spared the pungent, unearthly sweat smell of the weapon. He was too far away.