Red Circus: A Dark Collection

by John L. Campbell

  He sipped his coffee and stared out at the storm. The dash-mounted radio was a soft hiss, and there hadn’t been any chatter in half an hour. Not as a result of the foul weather, either.

  That green glow in the sky to the southeast was the reason.

  Where Gary, Indiana had once been.

  Even through the storm the emerald shimmer could be seen painting the sky, steady most of the time, rippling at others, but always there. It was difficult to make out in the daylight, but any time before nine a.m. or as the dimming light of evening settled in, it made its appearance, and had become a constant for coming up on a decade now.

  “Sector Nine, Central, any available unit.”

  Franklin didn’t reach for the radio handset. He was one of three units in the sector, someone would get it. Maybe that young guy, Rodriguez, the one who insisted that the sector cars should be equipped with assault rifles and grenade launchers.

  “Sector Nine, any available unit.”

  Franklin drank his coffee and watched the snow. His blue and white Crown Vic was pulled to the curb on the southbound side of Michigan Avenue, just north of the Water Tower, the historic structure’s medieval stone finger an anachronism amid the modern skyscrapers. This was the city’s famous Magnificent Mile, the stretch of Michigan Avenue between the Chicago River and Lakeshore Drive, renowned for high ticket shopping, upscale restaurants and high rise luxury living rivaled only by the lofty condos of the elite up on the Gold Coast. To his right was a Marc Jacobs boutique. Its windows were boarded up and someone had spray-painted “END OF DAYS” across one of the plywood panels.

  None of the other sector cars were responding to the call, and he could hear frustration in the female dispatcher’s voice. A new voice came on, another woman but this one sounding with more authority. “417, this is 21 Sergeant, I show your unit stopped on North Michigan. Respond.”

  Franklin made a face and set his coffee in a cup holder. 21 Sergeant was Sgt. Alberta Royce, a real ball breaker, and she was obviously looking at the screen which displayed each unit’s location through GPS. How was it that the radios only functioned sporadically, but the GPS seemed to work just fine?

  “Copy 21, 417’s on. I was out of the unit.”

  A long pause. He knew she didn’t believe him.

  The dispatcher’s voice came back on. “417, respond to a 10-11 at West Chicago and Huron…” a long static hiss. “…possible TA….cab…..” More hissing.

  Franklin called back for clarification, but received no reply. He tapped his gloved fingers on the steering wheel for a moment, thinking. Sgt. Royce had jumped on, singled him out, and the message was clear. It was his call, and he knew she wasn’t above checking up on him to make sure he answered it.

  “417 en-route,” he said, then eased the Crown Vic out into the street. The tires spun for a few seconds as they dug for purchase, then held and in a moment he was rolling south on Michigan Ave. A 10-11 was an ‘Animal Problem’ without details. Answer the call and find out what’s going on when you get there, he thought, as usual. He wondered what kind of animal problem there could be in this weather?

  Wide, empty sidewalks flanked the famous street, barren concrete planters running down the center and dividing northbound lanes from southbound. Absent were the pedestrians moving on those sidewalks, leaning into the wind as they made their way to bus stops or stores, and no traffic moved either north or south. No cabs or limos, no delivery vans, no snow plows or sightseeing buses, not even a National Guard hummer or a panel truck from the Center for Disease Control. Franklin had the road to himself, and he cruised at a placid fifteen miles-per-hour while his wiper blades slapped out their rhythm. A few long-abandoned cars sat along the curbs gathering snow, the city long since giving up on towing them. In a mini van he saw a flicker of orange, and as he cruised past he could see through the missing sliding door that a pair of vagrants had built a fire in the interior and were huddled over it.

  Saks was boarded up like most of the other stores, and the Bloomingdales was a burned-out shell occupied by squatters and rats. As evening came on, the once-enchanting dazzle of lights from boutiques and restaurants was noticeably absent, and only the dull yellow glow of street lights and the low beams of Franklin’s car revealed the heavy snowfall.

  “Dispatch, 417,” he called, peering through the windshield. “Any further info on that 10-11?” The radio hissed at him in response as he approached the intersection at West Chicago Ave.

  The impact in Gary sent hot, green-glowing chunks of comet and molten earth raining in a thirty mile radius. They landed everywhere, in fields, city streets, Lake Michigan, back yards, apartment buildings. One truck-sized piece derailed a moving elevated train, and another crashed through Loyola’s basketball arena roof during a packed game. Gary took the worst of it, but Chicago suffered its own casualties.

  The comet debris, even after removed by government types in protective suits, was said to leave a cancer-causing residue. Franklin snorted, taking a sip of his coffee while he kept one hand steady on the wheel. Cancer. Right. Early exposure victims swiftly developed a scaly, greenish skin condition over their entire body, and grew increasingly aggressive and unbalanced. CDC officials quickly collected the afflicted and spirited them away to who knew where, but not before some unpleasant incidents. Most notable among them was when the Honorable Mayor Stephen R. James, infected when a glowing comet shard chopped through the roof of his suburban home and landed in his bedroom. Suffering from a rapidly advancing dose of exposure, he went berserk in his downtown office and killed three staffers with his hands and teeth before a city cop on security detail shot him down.

  Franklin’s patrol car slowed to a stop at the intersection, and he looked in every direction. Empty streets, vacant stores, deserted high rises. Something that turned you into a crazed lizard was hard on the economy and the population, and once a city of millions, Chicago now had fewer than 500,000 residents. Between the comet and the other…unusual events…there had been an urban exodus on a grand scale.

  He accelerated, feeling the car fishtail before regaining its hold on the road, and moved further south. He passed Superior, seeing nothing, then braked as he came upon the intersection of Huron and Michigan. Snow steadily cloaked the wreckage of a yellow cab, which sat at an angle in the middle of the street, its rear end pushed up onto a concrete planter. It was flattened, as if it had been put in a junkyard crusher before being deposited here.

  “Dispatch, 417…” Franklin called, but dropped the handset when the radio let out a high pitched squeal and rush of static, forcing him to dial down the volume. He sat idling twenty feet from the cab, wipers thumping, while he considered his options.

  Franklin Platt wasn’t a coward. He had learned, however – especially since December of 2012 – that if you stayed in the car as much as possible, then, mathematically, fewer bad things could happen to you. He had never failed to back up a fellow officer when called, but he had also never gone looking for trouble. In not quite thirty years he had never been shot or stabbed, had only been bitten once, had never been in a high speed car accident, and had never discharged his service weapon outside the range. He had never risen above Basic Patrolman, and had no desire to do so. He supported the union and was a member in good standing of the African American Officers Association. He banked his sick and comp time, and fattened his pension level by grinding out as much overtime as came his way. He wrote the expected number of tickets, made arrests when they were unavoidable, never took a payoff and steered clear of politics. Although it had been less than a spectacular career, he was nonetheless certain that it was this unwavering strategy which had allowed him to last twenty-nine years, eleven months and six days.

  He switched on his light bar, turning the falling snow alternately blue and red, and looked around once more. There were no other vehicles in sight, no helpful citizens waiting to talk to him, not even pain in the ass bystanders. Who called it in? The cab must have had a driver, maybe it was him.
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br />   Franklin had received two commendation ribbons, both for life-saving. One was for saving an infant with CPR, and the other for pulling a motorist out of a burning Cadillac. He didn’t consider either act particularly heroic. With a sigh, he opened the patrol car’s door and climbed out.

  The wind slammed into him like an icy wall, snow blowing into his eyes and up his nose, and he raised an arm to shield his face. Less than eleven degrees, and with the wind chill definitely below zero. His lungs ached when he pulled in breath, and his eyes watered instantly. Clenching his teeth, he trudged through the deepening snow towards the crushed taxi, crouching near what had been the driver’s side.

  There had been a cabbie, had being the operative word. Now he was so much squash behind the steering wheel. Franklin used his maglite to see into the back seat, looking for a passenger, finding it empty. Thank God for that, at least. He straightened and squinted into the storm, turning in a slow circle. What was a cab doing here? Probably cutting across to Lake Shore Drive. But what could have done this?

  The mastodon’s snort from thirty feet away was his answer.

  It was about the size of an elephant, maybe a little larger, covered in a thick coat of shaggy hair from which hung clumps of ice, and snow was piling up on its back. A pair of long, upward-curving tusks flanked a thick trunk, which was at the moment pushing and snuffing through a snow-filled planter along the northbound sidewalk. One big eye rolled towards Franklin, the flashers on the roof of his car reflected in it.

  He didn’t know why he’d decided it was a mastodon, because he really didn’t know the difference between that and a wooly mammoth, or if there was any difference at all. His nephew would have known. The kid had been crazy about all things prehistoric when he was younger.

  It snorted again, a deep, rumbling sound, and plumes of steam puffed from its mouth as its trunk continued to probe the planter. Franklin backed slowly to the patrol car and got in, closing the door gently and immediately switching off the emergency bar.

  “Dispatch, 417, I’m going to need military support at Huron and Michigan…”

  The radio hissed and popped.

  The mastodon turned from the planter and shuffled south in the northbound lane. Franklin could feel its footsteps vibrating up through the car. He let it get a good half block away before putting the car in drive and following slowly on the southbound side, barely at an idle, deciding the 10-11 had turned into a 10-59, an escort. He also decided the light bar, or God forbid the siren, might agitate the animal, and having no desire to end up like the cabbie, switched off his headlights and turned on his yellow flashers. They were subtle, and were enough to provide a warning in the unlikely event another vehicle came upon him. He tried the radio again, without success.

  What he really wanted to do was pretend he hadn’t seen the flattened cab, hadn’t seen the mastodon-mammoth-whatever-it-was, and just find a quiet alley where he could coop until the end of his shift. But the sergeant knew he was out here, and it might be hard to claim he hadn’t seen something this big. As if to emphasize the point, the mastodon used its tusks to flip a derelict car onto its roof on the sidewalk, its trunk exploring the bare asphalt underneath.

  If it kept heading this direction, it would reach the river. It might try to get down to the frozen water for a drink, go crashing through the ice and drown. That would be the best scenario. Or, it might wander across the bridge and into another sector, making it someone else’s problem. That worked too. In the meantime, Franklin would follow it and do his duty by keeping the public safely back, while doing nothing to attract its attention. The mastodon continued south, ambling past the long-closed Allerton Hotel.

  After lengthy stonewalling, the government’s scientific experts announced that they believed the comet had somehow torn a hole in a “dimensional fabric,” and that sometimes “things” got “pulled in” from other places or times and were deposited in the Chicagoland area. Their answer didn’t sound particularly scientific to Franklin.

  An example of such an occurrence was when the Lusitania appeared on Lake Michigan, steaming towards the Chicago harbor instead of lying rusting on the bottom of the sea eleven miles off the Irish coast, where it had been sunk by a German submarine in May of 1915, taking 1,198 lives with it. Shortly after its appearance, and true to history, the u-boat U-20 surfaced off its port side and sent her under with a torpedo, the entire incident witnessed by the crews of an inbound Kuwaiti oil tanker and an outbound Japanese car carrier. The submarine had submerged, and it had taken almost a full day before a Navy helicopter out of Great Lakes showed up with its own sub hunting gear, located and destroyed the offending u-boat with a torpedo of its own.

  The mastodon paused to inspect another planter in the median, and Franklin stopped to wait.

  Another “thing” got “pulled in” through the “hole in the fabric” a year later, something big and hairy and bipedal, only glimpsed by witnesses as it loped through the dark of the Lincoln Park Zoo, ripping its way into the primate enclosures and savaging every species of ape found there before vanishing into the nearby park. The news later reported that it had been located and killed by a “government agency” (neither Franklin nor anyone he knew in the department had been involved, or knew which agency was being referenced), and immediately removed for research. No one was talking much about it, but the rumor was yeti.

  It was events like that which put troops in the streets and started to empty out the population. That and a general fear that something really nasty, like the Black Death, might scamper on over from somewhere in the Middle Ages to see how well it did in a modern metropolis.

  The mastodon moved on, crossing into the southbound side at West Ohio Street, but thankfully still moving away from Franklin. He continued to pace it.

  The comet had also played havoc with his retirement. Franklin should have been allowed to exchange all those banked sick days, comp days and unused vacations for days off his thirty years, permitting an official, full pension retirement fully six months ahead of schedule. And he should have been assigned a desk out of respect for his length of service. The city, however, crushed those plans. They stated that in light of the crisis, the martial law under which the city operated, the severe lack of police manpower (a couple thousand cops had simply quit and moved their families), and the federal government’s inability to contain the situation, all bets were off. Any cop who left his post forfeited all pension. Anyone in line for retirement, either at the twenty, twenty-five or thirty year mark, was required to work out their service in full to the day, or lose their pension. And anyone fit for patrol, would go out on patrol. City Hall and the department told the union to go pound sand, and that was that.

  Franklin had plans for a nice little house in Louisiana, not far from his wife’s family, someplace where a dollar went a whole lot further. He had plans to buy a boat and run a little charter fishing service. He was going to get away from Chicago winters, and he wasn’t about to throw all that away. So he followed the mastodon, just in case Sgt. Alberta Royce decided to check on him.

  Twenty-four days to go.

  The big animal had stopped again. It was nosing around a rusting, overturned hotdog cart at the corner of West Grand Avenue, in front of a Kate Spade boutique with broken windows. Snow was collecting in drifts where fashionable footwear had once been displayed.

  “Keep going, big fella,” Franklin said, stopped over half a block away. A little further and it would be at the river. Then there would be either a big splash, or a stroll down into the loop where someone with more than a S&W .45 and a shotgun could deal with it.

  He caught the movement out of the corner of his left eye, furtive and quick, a group of men trotting along the far sidewalk in single file, ducking against the wind and snow. They were small, dressed in skins and fur, ice clinging to their long hair and scruffy beards. All were barefoot, and each of them carried a spear. They paused near an abandoned Giorgio Armani store and squatted, intent upon the mastodon.
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br />   After spending the last hour trailing an animal that first showed up around three and a half million years ago and had been extinct for millennia, Franklin wasn’t particularly surprised to see it being stalked by a band of Cro Magnons (or were they Neanderthals?) A more educated observer would have corrected him and called them Upper Paleolithics, which wouldn’t have diminished the fact that some new “things” which had no business being here had crossed over into Cometland.

  “Go get him, boys,” he murmured, then suddenly realized that if they attacked it, the mastodon would probably just get pissed off and become dangerous. It didn’t matter, because as the group started forward again, one of them chanced to look towards the Crown Vic with its blinking yellow lights. They stopped, and now all of them were looking, shifting from foot to foot, heads bobbing and arms gesturing. One of them started across the street, still moving in a crouch, but now with his spear gripped in both hands and pointed at the patrol car. The others followed.

  “Uh-oh,” Franklin said, reaching for the handset. “Dispatch, 417…”

  The radio squealed and shrieked at him, and the hunters must have heard it even over the storm because they started running, fanning out in a line, bare feet thudding through the fresh snow. One of them raised his spear and threw, and a second later it slammed into the driver’s door, the sharpened flint head punching through sheet metal and plastic and vinyl and sinking into the meaty part of Franklin’s left thigh.

  He cried out and jerked right, pulling his leg off the tip of the spear, and then another crashed through the left rear window, showering the interior with glass fragments. A Cro Magnon leaped onto the hood, slipping in the snow and landing on his rear end, caving in the metal, then scrambled to his bowed legs and started stabbing into the windshield with his spear, starring the glass. Another beat on the driver’s window with his fists, cracking the glass and grunting wildly.