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.”
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.
Meet the Author
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 A
ssociation, 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.
Also by Will McIntosh
Soft Apocalypse
Hitchers
Love Minus Eighty
Defenders
WILL MCINTOSH SHORT FICTION
“The Perimeter”
“The Heist”
“Watching Over Us”
“City Living”
If you enjoyed
CITY LIVING,
look out for
DEFENDERS
by Will McIntosh
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.
City Living Page 3