Grayland: Chapter Three of the Dark Chicago Series

by David Ghilardi

  “Do you think you are more important than the ways of our Lord? You arrogant killer of men? You have seen more blood than most in this world. Lessons learned in you travels have taught you brutal lessons. You may still be useful. Be satisfiied with that.”

  Doug tried to see who was speaking. Yet in a way, he didn’t have to. In his gut, he knew who it was. She must be well over a hundred now. It was the old nun he feared all throughout his childhood.

  Everyone was cowed by her. Sister Mary Roberta croaked her sermon from the shadows. “You are trusted. Be satis fiied with that. Go forth and do the Lord’s bidding. Being a part of this parish solidifiied your moral compass. You’ll need to draw on that. Chicago taught you more about what you fiight for. Love, honor, being a decent man. Is this not so?”

  The gure rose, sliding silently forward offf the pew. Doug could see the white crown of her habit, this oldest of all brides of the Lord. She spoke as she moved.

  “Come back for answers after, Bellator.” The words disappeared along with the diminutive fiigure. “… That is, if you survive.”

  Another heavy door slammed o fff the side of the church. All the pair was left with was the sound of the heavy winds. Angry coils of the snakes rasping harder against the walls. Doug looked up to see the huge organ in the balcony above. Brass pipes shot to the ceiling disappearing into shadow. There came hollow notes from there, as cold drafts found their way through cracks in the glass. It sounded the wailing of lost souls.

  Thousands of unhappy beings forsaken in the cold. Votive candles flickered suddenly, a few extinguishing themselves.

  Doug shivered. Damn catholic school, he thought, always eliciting the deepest, saddest thoughts imaginable. He hadn’t missed bring here at all. How depressing it all was. What he would give to be plugging strippers on the beach in San Diego right now. Pussy, guns and booze. Life! That’s what he’d been doing before coming back home to this chilly ass city. Coming back to this frozen anus of existence. What a great notion that had been. Doug frowned.

  “Don’t give in to temptation, kiddo.”

  The old woman smirked at him as if she was reading his mind. Doug shrugged.

  He walked up to Mavis. She was smiling at him. “She likes you, kiddo. Who’da think it? She doesn’t like anyone.” Mavis tightened her jacket, adjusting her armor and scarf before striding away, heading for the front doors. Douglas did the same. He rubbed his face. Flesh was tender but intact. He felt drained from all the fiighting and exposure to the cold. He slaked his thirst with another water bottle leaving its plastic husk on a pew bench. The old woman turned back towards him, her weathered face all cracks in the harsh overhead light. It was like leather talking.

  “You ready gorgeous? We ain’t done. Some heavy lifting to go yet.”

  Doug nodded.

  “Haven’t seen her for years. It was weird. It was like she remembered me.”

  Mavis spared another glance over her shoulder. “Kid. She saw what you were years ago. People around here been keeping an eye on you for a long time.” The old woman genu flected, making the sign of the cross before kicking open the heavy outside doors disappearing into the driving winds once more. She shouted before the doors closed.

  “Mind the hole so you don’t fall in.”

  Doug rushed to follow suit.

  “Wait. What?” He mumbled, as he shoved open the oak doors, being enveloped by a white wrathful world and constantly hungry Arctic wind.

  Chapter 29

  Joan could barely move. Her vision was blurred. Closing her eyes for brief seconds allowed her sight to clear, but her head continued to hurt. The tiny man who led her away from Doug’s crazy friend disappeared into the foliage awhile ago. Joan knew she was close to her own home, but damn if anything looked familiar to her now. Besides, going back there wouldn’t be safe. Who knew where that naked maniac was?

  The whole neighborhood felt alien to her now. The irony wasn’t lost on her that as a history teacher, she knew of Shackleton’s failed arctic trip way back in the early 1900s. Now she could be fated to a similar end.

  She bit her lips to wake up.

  What were one of his men’s last words? ‘I am going out and may be some time’, Joan recalled. The explorer had ventured out into unknown wasteland, a white hell on Earth.

  God, was she thirsty. If there was any moisture lef t in her reservoirs, her aquifers would fiill with tears. Nope, dry as a bone. It felt like Shackleton’s words would be upon her cemetery stone when they found her frozen body come Spring.

  Hell with that. Her head buzzed furiously. I’m not going to sit in a drift and die by inches. I’ve just got to fiind the nearest landmark. The problem with fiinding it though was everything was buried under ten feet of snow. Ice pellets assaulted her corneas which were already sore from exposure. She needed water. Warmth too. Food as well.

  It took thirty minutes to trudge fiifty yards. Winds were stifff and unyielding.

  She took another rest. Joan wedged herself in the small space between the front end of a jack-knifed car and its adjoining garage. She’d followed the small man who had led her between homes and under canopies of trees, and that had been hours ago. And blocks back. At least it felt like hours. Nothing made sense anymore. Joan was in shock. If she laid down, fell asleep, it would all be over. The world was so strange. She recognized nothing.

  She had no choice but to get up and crunch forward. Movement was life. Joan forced her thin body to unwind from the created crevasse. Warm sweat under her arms and in the spaces beneath her knees cooled instantly. That was bad, she thought.

  It was like a lead anchor o fff a boat, plummeting toward placid darkness jettisoning any hope harbored in the recesses of her mind.

  Slowly she pushed o fff the weight of the truck pulling free her gloves which stuck themselves to the metal as she moved past. Ice pellets continued raking her eyes. She held up one arm ahead of her. That helped for the immediate ten feet in front of her. Joan grimaced as she crunched through the snow.

  There now, not too hard was it? Joan smiled as she began to pick up her pace coming out from behind the barrier of the smashed up vehicle. She was in an alley somewhere in old Irving Park.

  Was that Kildare Street offf of Grace? Garages huddled on either side of her, their small mounds appearing like white chocolate snowballs. Joan had hoped their proximity would offfer succor against the gusts. Many sheds and exterior building were flattened or leaning towards utter collapse.

  She grit her teeth. Everything was numb. Joan always like to play games with her thoughts in time of duress. It was how she had gotten through an unhappy marriage. Candy Cane Lane, she thought. I’ll run it. Population of one. She’d be the Dorothy of a frozen OZ. Joan continued to stagger. She knew she would turn into the fiirst yard with a fallen fence. Knocking on doors could yield some good Samaritan open to the idea of letting her warm up. Even in Chicago, there still were decent people she could count on.

  Gusts of wind blew top layers of snow from the nearest two garages on her right, obscuring the entire length of the alley. Joan paused having learned to let the waves of snow blow over her. She was too cold for much of the ice to stick to her body.

  “Icy Candy Cane Lane”, she tittered. “Ice Queen Follies.”

  When the wind calmed, a naked fiigure stood in the middle of the alley blocking her. Joan quickly gulped down snow caught in her mouth. Its red eyes were the only things that stood out amongst the white landscape. It was the maniac from earlier.

  Joan grew furious. She was nobody’s fool. She’d never be a victim again. The pale thing stood a bit watching her.

  “What the hell are you waiting for?” countered Joan. “Beat you once. I’ll do it again.” Cray Lamb was a block of ice. He felt nothing. His head was clear. The Dark man had released him to do what he wished. He watched Joan, hearing her wrath. The woman was a waif. She could barely stand.

  The cold white dead thing smiled.

  As Cray lunged, Joan screamed.
r />   Chapter 30

  Did that guy’s body just move? Honest John, hands bloodied, bleary eyed and parched for water thought the skinny gang member he’d checked ten minutes ago jerked his left hand.

  Bodies of dead men and women lay with tarps over their chests. Respect dictated their faces be covered. John had never dealt with so many corpses before. He was beyond exhausted. No news had come in over the radios. Static and nature ruled the night. The young paramedic dared not sleep. Work was the only panacea after the horror show which occurred the night prior.

  John plunked down in a chair. The teen whose torso had been ripped open apparently by claws or at least something very sharp, had his hand at his side.

  Did that hand twitch? The row of restaurant patrons, ferried over by the two soldiers he’d met, lined up across the entire back of the fiirehouse. John had worked until insensate, arranging and trying to identify the mangled people struck down the night prior. Granted most of them had been hard types or rough trade as his Grandpa would call them, but all the people deserved respect in death.

  John had only gotten a brief gist of what caused such mass carnage. The two veterans who’d been there when it had happened had promised that they would return to help. At least, the skinny soldier had. Guy looked like a pixie-stick. John had only seen that there was another snowmobile close by.

  The wounds were atrocious. John refused to believe that one woman had caused all this carnage. How could this all happen? One female had broken into the fiirehouse and slaughtered his co-workers. But John had scampered like a yellow coward, before she could get to him.

  John had escaped into the blizzard, even as his pals fell before him. Shame hung on him like a shroud. The moment kept repeating in his addled thoughts.

  He was working sel flessly because he felt the guilt. He couldn’t even look at himself in the bathroom mirror upstairs. John glanced up as a particularly strong gust whipped ice pellets into the open fiire house.

  The bodies were kept cold now from exposure to subzero temps. You couldn’t even smell them, it was so cold. Sturdily built in the 1920s, made of brick and thick wood, the Olde Irving Park fiirehouse was kept up by the city of Chicago. It stood the test of decades,even though it was not modernized as such. It was far too small to accommodate a larger truck like a hook and ladder, but still useful as a satellite location. Ambulances and smaller vehicles would be a neat fiit. One of the alderman promised Old Irving Park that it would have its own fiire house and damn it, they sure did.

  John was too young to be warehoused. But he loved the boutique feel of the place. One small engine, and two ambulances. The old ambulance was faded red, used back in the 70s. John loved keeping the antique around as convenient place to keep stores of medicine and bandages. Odds and ends too, like hard liquor the boys enjoyed so much. No need to tell the alderman.

  The sheet ve bodies down began to flap a bit. John looked out the opening of the fiire house. The heavy tall doors lay splintered, crumpled on the apron of the fiirehouse. The thirty by thirty opening presented a picturesque image of the blizzard white with ice.

  Honest John was beyond tired, hands shaking as he wiped his face. It was a good -60 wind chill out there, yet he was soaked with sweat. The efffort it had taken to check and catalog each victim was thoroughly exhausting. He didn’t think he could trust his vision any longer. If he could only rest for three of four hours. He was so warm, and out there was so cold.

  John adjusted his blue Chicago Cubs cap. brim pointed backwards. Sleeves rolled up sweat dripping down his face, the young paramedic was at a loss fiinding any more objects to weigh the sheets down that were covering the restaurant victims.

  The sheet moved again right where the teen’s arm was weighed down with old manuals found in abandoned lockers. The wind was strong yet didn’t have the reach to move that particular sheet while the others were still.

  He wiped his face. There, steady flexing of the teen’s hand. Had John, in his exhaustion made a mistake? John had seen plenty of corpses in medical school and during training on Chicago’s South Side. But the teen under the sheet moving his arm was not a natural occurrence. The dead kid had a tattoo. Wrapped around his left arm was Zulu vine design. Every millennial seemed to have inked himself with that tat. It was a generation X, Y or Z thing. John was not into that crap.

  The teen sat up. The tarp had caught over him. Slowly, as if discovering he was no longer alive, the teen pulled offf the blue covering. He had been an attractive Latino in Life. But now, half his lower jaw missing, his organs falling out an open chest due to gravity, the pale thing began using unstable legs to stand. John remained seated. Too shocked to move, his eyes widened as he watched the creature struggle to rise.

  Vampire creatures in Chicago, John thought. He remembered what Erna had done to his friends the night before. Before the teen rose to his feet, he had to do something.

  There. Against the wall, what was left of tools for cleaning the grounds remained. John stood up as if in a trance. A man of medicine he was, he could not discount what was happening before his very eyes. The Latin teen had pushed himself up to his knees, one hand holding his intestines together. Even now, his ruined body had begun knitting itself back to together. The unholy spawn was watching his chest heal.

  “Hey.” Whispered John.

  Sharp teeth exposed, the teen began to hiss, an exposed danger ready to strike. John took the sharp end of a shovel stabbing its edge into the teens opened mouth. The young exanimate thing rolled its eyes down towards its maw. John exerted all the pressure he could muster, jamming the sturdy metal down, snapping offf its vicious fangs. Wriggling the iron spade around, John cut through the teen’s jaw, snapping its spine. He flipped the top half of the head forward away from him out the doors into the night. The horror started smoking, its head separated from its body. Its headless body had stopped moving, roiling in conflict with itself.

  John watched, fascinated. Flesh seemed to be rearranging itself, then collapsing, losing structural integrity. It was as if all the molecules of this fetid thing suddenly decided to give up, fleeing for parts unknown. Flesh bubbled, its bowels farted, releasing greasy green black pus. A whole human body turned rotten in front of him, dissolving away into useless sputum. He leaned on the shovel, shaking as his nerves frayed. How many more of these fiilthy things were out there?

  What about these people?, he asked himself. He didn’t think he had it in himself to do anymore killing. Killing that unlucky teen took all he had lef t in him. He could still hear the sizzle of fleshy skull-matter burning upon the concrete apron outside.

  Something moved then out in the twisting wind. A fiigure emerged from the maelstrom. John remembered her. The woman appeared from whirling ice gusts. like an old Polaroid developing as you shook it.

  It was Dee. John started towards her. She was the waitress at the restaurant that had been attacked. A nice lady, John remembered how she flirted with him, always opening that third button on her uniform when she waited on him. From where he stood now, Dee’s open throat and cascading blood flow staining the entire front of her uniform quashed any warm fuzzies. Still, John couldn’t help notice her blouse was torn open. Dee was flirting with him now from the lip of hell. She stood listing unsteadily in the bufffeting wind.

  Her fanged smile offfered sharp relief.

  Chapter 31

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” Mavis seemed quite small wrapped in the crazy colored quilt. Her body disappeared into its folds. Her face was bloodless. George, even as he’d ceased hunching, standing six feet, lip quivering under that mousy ‘stache, looked lost and confused. His nose dripped. Years had dropped away from him. He looked again a mere 9 years old, desperate for his mommy.

  “The dead bastard chopped the top of his head offf. I tried to stop it, mama. I did.” They’d both just gotten back from the trek to that damn old church. How long had it taken them? Doug stared at the blood splatters over the walls in the living room. Red swaths were thrown across
the ceiling above. Jimmy’s blood had seeped into shag carpet fiilling it like a pond for ten square feet. No body. The Gray had taken it with him. Insult after injury.

  Jimmy was just removed from the earth. The younger brother had been the better fiighter. Where was Gray now? There were so many questions swirling in his mind.

  “How did he get in?” Asked Doug. “Don’t these things have to ask permission? Don’t any rules apply?”

  “Yeah.” Agreed George. Both men looked to Mavis for answers. “He owns us, boys. That’s what the Brits were trying to tell us. All this land was Gray’s in the last century. He can come and go as he pleases.”

  The old woman’s voice was quiet. She looked up at Doug. He understood.

  “Then. All these families here. Hundreds of innocent people ...”

  Mavis nodded.

  “Thousands. Unaware. Children.” Doug looked at Mavis seeing what was coming next. And it did. Mavis collapsed with a sigh. A faint stopped thankfully by Doug’s quick hands. Mavis fell like palm fronds bending across Doug’s outstretched arm. Her flesh held a sickly pallor. Her eyes fluttered. Liquid dribbled out of her mouth. Doug reclined her body, cradling her head next to a large pillow. Weighing no more than 110 lbs, he was amazed what fiierce life force her body retained. George looked down at both, drying his eyes.

  Mavis’ living room was painted with so much red, it was as if Benjamin Paints had had a gallon blood sale, pennies on the ounce. No human remains were evident. What was left of Jimmy looked to have been consumed by the thing called Gray. Doug hoped parts of Jimmy weren’t strewn in the snow nearby, but odds were good, nothing positive would come from his demise.

  “Gone. He’s just not there anymore.” George wept.

  “Getting hysterical won’t help your mother. Get a grip.” George stomped his feet like a little boy. He rushed to pick up pieces of bloody clothing, bits of crimson curtain. Remnants of his brother’s gore piled up in his hands. Doug watched George snifffle, moving about picking up remains.