Second, their eyes glowed with a pale green light. It made the skin near their eyes look even more sickly, and it was a disturbing sight.
“Better stop here,” said Morelli.
No one argued with him. The van came to a halt, and we got out. This close to Chicago and its burning sky, the air had a dry, dusty smell. I realized that the dusty smell was coming from the undead wandering in front of the van. This close, I could almost see a faint haze in the air about six yards ahead of the van’s front bumper. That was the boundary. So long as we stayed on this side, the undead wouldn’t attack us.
But if we crossed it…
One of the undead looked at me, the glowing green eyes slicing through me. In life, it had been a man wearing a business suit of archaic cut and design. Now it was a grayish corpse in a dusty suit.
And then it started to speak.
“Behold,” it said. “The thread of destiny unravels. Many threads converge upon the path of one. Which path shall you take? The path of blades? The path of blood? Or the path of screams unending?”
With that, the undead turned and wandered away.
“Yeah,” I said. “Good thing that’s not creepy.”
“Damned things do that,” said Swathe. “No one knows why.”
No one did. The undead, if you came right up to the boundary, spoke in disturbing riddles. Sometimes the riddles seemed to be nonsense, and other times they appeared to be a form of prophetic foretelling. Nicholas’s research had discovered a documented case of a man who had come up to the boundary, listened to the riddles, and somehow managed to predict a rise in the price of grain that he exploited to become wealthy, though later the man had gone insane and murdered his family. After that, the High Queen had forbidden anyone from approaching the city.
It was an easy law to enforce because if you took one step over the boundary, the undead killed you and you became one of them.
“I’m going to try something,” I said.
I gestured, calling magic to me, and a fireball spun into existence above my right palm. I admit I gestured a bit more dramatically than necessary since the Rebels were watching me. It worked, since Swathe’s hand dropped to the butt of his gun, and Morelli took a cautious step back. I poured power into the fireball, focused my will, and threw out my arm.
The fireball soared over the heads of the milling undead and landed against a crumbling brick wall. It exploded in a flare of roiling flame and winked out, leaving a cloud of smoke and a few flames dancing on the cracked sidewalk.
As one, the undead whirled and raced towards the spot where the fireball had exploded.
“Hell,” I said. “Nick was right. They do see heat.” No one knew how the undead could see, but Nicholas had a theory that they used infrared and not visible light. It looked like that theory was correct.
“You won’t be able to burn them all,” said Swathe.
“Since you don’t have anything better to do than to point out the obvious,” I said, “why don’t you make yourself useful and get my bike?”
Swathe glared at me, but Nicholas had told them to listen to me, so he turned and opened the back of the van. He lifted out a ten-speed bicycle and a helmet and carried them over to me. I donned the helmet, which probably looked stupid, but I hadn’t survived the Eternity Crucible to crack my head open on the pavement.
Vass chuckled. “An elegant look, madam.”
“Said the man with the eye-bleeding taste in shirts,” I said. Vass laughed. “All right. I’m going to have a look around and see if I can find Shane’s tomb. Once I locate it, I’ll return, and we can head back to Nicholas and plan for getting into it. If I’m not back by this time tomorrow, you can assume I’m dead, and you can tell Nicholas to find someone else to do this.”
“Don’t worry,” said Swathe with a cold smile. “Hopefully the next thief will be more cooperative.”
I saluted him with my middle finger and climbed onto the bicycle. I braced myself against the ground with one foot, my left hand gripping the handlebars, and my right hand came up as I cast the spell.
A second later, I had Cloaked myself, and then I was pedaling forward and past the undead, who were still standing near the hot spot left from my fireball.
I don’t know if I could have chewed gum and ridden a bicycle at the same time, but as it turned out, I could Cloak and ride a bicycle at the same time.
It had been the best of the available choices. From this point, it was about six and a half miles to Willis Tower, and that was in a straight line. I would have to cross the Chicago River and depending on the state of the bridges, I might have to double back for two or three miles. At most, I could maintain a Cloak while moving for nine or ten minutes, and even if I ran flat-out, I could manage a mile in no more than seven or eight minutes.
That meant I needed transport. I would have preferred a motorcycle, but the heat of the engine would draw the attention of the undead. The same thing applied to an electric scooter.
So, that left a bicycle. Thanks to the Cloak spell, I suppose it looked as if an unattended bicycle was pedaling its way down the street, but it worked. The bicycle didn’t give off any heat, and my own body heat was hidden by the Cloak spell.
I pedaled into the ruins of Chicago.
I’ve had a lot of weird experiences in my life, but this was one of the eerier ones, let me tell you.
First, the burning sky reminded me a great deal of the Eternity Crucible, which just made my skin crawl. Fortunately, it was only a superficial comparison. Black clouds filled the sky over the ruins of Chicago, and they seemed to burn and writhe with harsh firelight. I wondered if that was an aftereffect of the Reaping weapon or if it was something that the exiled myothar had done.
The buildings were silent tombstones. Nothing living grew within Chicago, so weeds hadn’t torn the roads apart, and rain and snow never fell, so the buildings had weathered the centuries better than I expected. Yet many of them had collapsed into rubble, or their roofs had fallen in, leaving them empty shells. Ruined cars squatted on the streets, lining the curbs or left discarded on the sidewalks. The centuries had scoured away the rubber and the paint, leaving only rusted metal shells behind.
The undead were the worst of all.
They were everywhere, tens of thousands of them, shuffling endlessly through the streets, standing motionless on the corners, or walking at random. I had to take care not to hit any of them. All of them still had the clothes they had worn on the day they had died, preserved by the myothar’s necromancy, and I saw T-shirts with slogans for businesses and political candidates that had been dead for centuries. It was exactly like riding through a graveyard, only the dead were up and about.
And talking to each other.
“Five is the number of our fate,” said a dead woman in a tank-top and jeans. “Birth. Hope. Pain. Despair. Death. What is the sixth number of our fate beyond death?”
“Death descends,” said a man in an archaic blue police uniform adorned with the letters CPD. “Time unravels. What is the destiny beyond the void?”
“Flesh is dust,” said an undead child that couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven when he died. “Steel is dust. The mind is dust. What is stronger than entropy?”
Most of them repeated grim, cryptic-sounding riddles like that. A few of them just spoke nonsense. An old woman on the corner shouted over and over to buy chicken nuggets, eleven for the price of ten. A pair of men in business suits repeated what I thought was a marketing jingle for a cell phone company. A middle-aged man who looked Japanese walked in a circle, repeating “death” over and over.
It was creepy and very annoying, but it was harmless. I wondered why the myothar had its undead creatures do that. Maybe the myothar found it amusing. Maybe the myothar was insane. From what Nicholas had said, the myothars were extremely dangerous and universally feared, and if a myothar was so dangerous that its own kind banished it…
Yeah, I didn’t want to run into it.
After abo
ut seven minutes of pedaling, I felt my control of the Cloak spell start to waver. I found a deserted alley and rode into it, climbed off the bike, and dropped the Cloak spell.
I cast the ice wall spell, once in front of me, and once behind me. I sealed off the alley with walls of magical ice, and I suspected it was cold enough that the undead wouldn’t be able to detect my body heat through it. I waited, catching my breath, but I didn’t hear any undead approach.
As my breathing slowed, I brushed my fingers across my forehead. To my annoyance, my forehead was dry without a trace of sweat. I had been holding a Cloak spell while riding a bicycle and wearing a heavy coat, and I had been doing all of that in the torrid summer heat. I ought to have been drenched with sweat. Instead, I still felt a little chilly.
Just what was wrong with me? Well, besides the obvious. Why was I cold all the time?
I could worry about it later. I dug the map of Chicago out of my pocket, considered my route for a moment, and then nodded to myself. Once I had caught my breath, I dismissed the walls of ice, Cloaked, and rode off.
I found an intact onramp that led to the old Interstate 90 causeway, and I rode down the freeway on the bicycle. The road wasn’t in good shape. The asphalt had crumbled to the consistency of gravel, and here and there it had collapsed entirely through the rebar, with jagged holes leading to the streets below. Still, there were hardly any undead up here, and I made good time. Twice I created a cylinder of ice for myself, hiding while I caught my breath, and resumed travel when I Cloaked.
It wasn’t difficult, just a lot of work. It was kind of like magical strength training. Sort of like what I had done in the Eternity Crucible for a hundred and fifty years.
After about an hour, I got off the freeway and reached downtown Chicago. The dead skyscrapers rose around me, and navigating through the streets was a bit like riding through the bottom of a giant concrete canyon. Crowds of undead wandered up and down the streets, speaking their cryptic riddles to each other, and again I wondered what this place must have been like in its prime.
The Willis Tower rose on the other side of the Chicago River, broken windows dotting its sides like hundreds of jagged mouths. It took me a bit to find a way over the river. The Harrison Street bridge had collapsed, the broken concrete and rusted steel still jutting from the water. The Van Buren bridge still stood, but a lot of the concrete and asphalt had crumbled away, and it looked like a strong wind would send it into the water. But the Jackson Boulevard bridge was mostly intact, and I rode down it without any troubles. Once I was over the bridge, I turned left onto Wacker Drive, weaving my way around the undead.
At last, I found myself at the base of Willis Tower.
I took a moment to gape. Good Lord, but it was tall. If I craned my neck and arched my back, I still couldn’t see the top of it. I had seen skyscrapers before in Los Angeles and Cincinnati and New York and other cities I had visited, but those cities had been bustling and full of life. Not silent tombs like this one.
Speaking of tombs, I had to get to work. I propped the bicycle against the wall for a quick escape and headed for the entrance to the tower.
“Beware the herald!” announced one of the passing undead, eyes glowing green in her face. “Beware the herald. The watcher of the gate stands between worlds. What is the fate of those who enter the portal?”
I gave the undead a sharp glance. The High Queen had let the exiled myothar settle here to guard the Shadowlands gate. Nicholas thought the Reaping weapon had been used in Garfield Park, which was a couple of miles west of here, which meant the gate would be there. It sounded as if the undead had been talking about the gate.
Had it been talking about me?
I watched the undead woman, but she paid me no heed as she wandered down the street.
I walked to the entrance to the skyscraper. Once it must have been a splendid construction of glass and steel, but the glass lay in broken shards across the ground like jagged snow, and the steel framework stood like a skeleton. I picked my way through the broken glass and made my way into the lobby. It looked like a fancy mall, with a lot of polished marble and brass. Hundreds of tattered flags hung from the far wall, threadbare and fading and crumbling. I supposed it was supposed to represent all the nations of the world united in harmony, which was a grim joke because the High Queen had united the nations of the world and destroyed this city in the process.
I found an escalator descending into the depths of the building. It had stopped working long ago, but the treads were still intact. At the base of the escalator, I stopped and looked around. It seemed like this area had once been a shopping concourse, with various shops and restaurants, though everything was now covered in dust. Except I couldn’t be sure, because the lights weren’t working, and the sunlight from the wrecked entrance only extended so far into the basement.
Which meant I had a decision to make.
I needed light, and I couldn’t use magic to make light while Cloaked. Annoyingly, I couldn’t use a flashlight while Cloaked. The spell was so effective that it hid the light from the flashlight. The light would extend maybe an inch from the end of the flashlight, and then it would vanish.
That meant I needed to drop my Cloak spell. I didn’t like that thought. So far, I hadn’t seen any undead inside Willis Tower, but it was a big place, and there was room for thousands of them. If one of the undead saw me, I wasn’t sure what would happen. Could it alert the others? Or, worse, would it alert the myothar?
I didn’t want to find out.
I took a deep breath, released my Cloak spell, and drew a flashlight from my pocket. I clicked the beam on and swept it back and forth, but nothing stirred in the darkness.
So far so good.
From another pocket, I drew out an earpiece with a camera attachment, clipped it to my left ear, and synced it to the burner phone in my pocket. It would record everything the camera saw and save it to the phone’s storage. It had occurred to me that Nicholas might decide to kill me and claim the phone’s video, so I made sure to encrypt the phone and set it to erase the device if the incorrect password was entered more than three times in a row.
With that, there were no other preparations I could make.
I took a deep breath, the air stale and dusty, and started exploring the lower levels of Willis Tower.
The first basement level seemed to have been open to the public and tourists. I went through shops and restaurants, the merchandise rusty or long crumbled to dust, the stoves coated with rust and cobwebs. I found my way to the second and third levels, which seemed to have all been parking. The shells of ancient cars sat rusting in their stalls. The fourth level was a vast maze of long-dead HVAC equipment. I remembered leading Russell and Lydia Valborg to safety through the Ducal Mall’s HVAC room, and hiding in the air handler for days atop Lord Castomyr’s mansion in La Crosse.
It felt like it had been so long ago.
On the fifth basement level, I found what I had been looking for.
I suspected that this level hadn’t been advertised to the general public. It resembled the back room of a security-conscious bank. There were dozens of niches in the walls, sealed off with metal bars, and inside the bars were rows of safe deposit boxes. I made a mental note to examine those if I had time. Setting up in Gary had taken a lot of money, and I wasn’t exactly swimming in cash since Lord Morvilind never bothered to pay me. I suppose I could have sent Arvalaeon a bill, but I doubted he would pay wages for one hundred and fifty-eight years’ worth of billable hours.
At the end of a long corridor lined with sealed niches of safe deposit boxes, I found the tomb of Secretary of Defense Jeremy Shane. A little plaque marked his burial place, complete with dates of birth and death and a short paragraph about his life.
Naturally, they had buried him in a freaking bank vault.
Like, an actual bank vault, with a steel door that probably weighed more than the Marneys’ house. The surrounding concrete was reinforced and had been poured in place over a s
teel cage. Once the door had been guarded by electronic alarms, but those had failed long ago.
I pried open some of the access panels on the door and cursed.
Unfortunately, the corrosion from the alarms’ long-dead batteries had gotten into the mechanism for the locks.
The vault door was rusted shut.
I had no way of getting through that much steel. I suppose I could cast alternating fire and ice spells at the door or the wall until something shattered, but that would take hours, and I didn’t think I could maintain that kind of effort for that long, not if I wanted to have the strength left to Cloak and escape. When I had fought Rogomil in the food court of the Ducal Mall, he had used dark magic that rusted through any metal it had touched. I was willing to wager that either Nicholas or Hailey knew the spell.
I had found the damned tomb for them. They could get it open.
I took a moment to read the plaque bolted next to the vault door. It said that Jeremy Douglas Shane, Sec. of Defense and Lieutenant General, US Army (retired) had been born in 1958 and died in 2015, which would have been two years after the Conquest. The plaque further noted that it had been purchased by friends of the late Secretary and that he had died as a true patriot and defender of freedom.
There were two more lines at the end of the plaque, lines that looked as if they had been added after it had been installed.
OPERATION SKY HAMMER said the first line.
THE KEYS TO HUMANITY’S FREEDOM LIE WITHIN read the second line.
I blinked. Operation Sky Hammer? That sounded trite. Like one of those spy movies that Russell and James liked to watch, movies where the evil business owner who closed the local factory and put the protagonist’s family out of work actually turned out to be an evil elfophobic Rebel terrorist.
But that second line…
THE KEYS TO HUMANITY’S FREEDOM.
What the hell did that mean?
A disturbing thought occurred to me. Shane had been buried with that briefcase. Presumably, the people who had buried him in a bank vault had known what the briefcase contained. And whatever that briefcase contained was so dangerous that they had buried Shane in a freaking bank vault.
Cloak Games: Tomb Howl Page 11