"Frat, you've been a great help. You know what to do now, right?"
"Drive fast with all the lights on, like I'm hurrying somewhere," Frat recited. "Put the car in a ravine and then walk to that bridge. Go cross-country and keep out of sight. I think I can manage."
"I'm sure you can."
"All you have to do now is go south, and you'll hit the railroad tracks. They curve where they run along the Sugar River, and I bet they'll slow down. Lots of guys bum rides. As long as you got identity papers, you're okay getting into Chicago. Just take my advice and don't cause any trouble until you're sure you can get away with it. Getting out again isn't so easy. They check the trains heading out for runners."
Valentine offered his hand, and Frat shook it. "Listen to Gonzo on the way back, pup. You can learn a lot from him."
"Yeah, he's cool. He thinks a lot of you, by the way. Says the Wolves in Zulu Company call you the Ghost."
"The what?"
"The Ghost. On account of you walk so smooth and quiet, like you're floating. And there's another reason: Mr. Gonzalez says you can tell when there are vampires around. He says it's spooky, but kinda comforting."
"The Ghost, huh? Well, have Gonzo tell them to keep their rifles clean and oiled, or I'll come back and haunt them. Good-bye, Frat."
"Good-bye, Lieutenant Valentine. Don't worry, I'll get everyone out, if Mr. Gonzalez just points the direction. You ain't the only one good at smellin' out Skulls."
* * *
While Valentine waited for the train in the morning shade beneath a willow, he ate from a bag of crackers and a brick of cheese he had taken from Flanagan's kitchen. He had already improvised a shoulder strap for his pillowcase of loot and admired the manufacturing on the stolen Remington rifle; he figured it would bring enough money for a bribe or two, or serve as one itself. He studied his map of Chicago, memorizing as many of the street names as he could. It must be quite a city, he thought. Over a hundred Reapers. Great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to die there.
Chicago, October of the forty-third year of the Kurian Order: The SecondCity is still a town on the take. A resident twentieth-century Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist once suggested that the motto for the city should be "Where's Mine?" Nowhere is the art of bribery, corruption, and widespread beak-wetting more common than in the-Kurian-controlled, Quisling-runCity of Big Shoulders. No one is even sure exactly how many Kurian Lords run the city, as the Kurians divide it not by geography but by business and property ownership. A Kurian Lord might control a steelworks in Gary, an automobile-parts plant on the West Side, several apartment buildings on the Gold Coast, and a few antiquated airplanes that fly out of O Hare. His Reaper avatars will travel among holdings, going into the Loop for regular feedings.
To prevent the Reapers from taking too much of an area's vital labor force, the Loop system was developed lifter twenty years of fractious and chaotic rule. The Kurians had little use for the high-rise business centers of the downtown, and after emptying the assorted museums and stores of anything they fancied, they created the walled enclave as a dumping ground for undesirables. Here the Reapers could feed without worrying about taking a vital technician or mechanic and starting a series of inter-Kurian vendettas that might escalate into a full-scale feud.
The workers of Chicago enjoy a security that few other communities under the Kurians know. But their existence depends on paying their way in old federal greenbacks. The destitute receive a quick trip into the Loop. But the elite Quislings who run the city for the Kurians amass sizable fortunes in a variety of barely legitimate ways.
One might wonder what the point of wealth is with the Kurians in control, but the Kurians have become infected with the viruslike corruption that seems to thrive in Chicago and are often bought off by their ostensible slaves. The top Quislings use their money to bribe the Kurians not with cash, but with 'tital auras, the one thing the vampiric Kurians prize above all else. The Quislings buy captives from a soulless body of men and women called the Headhunters, who in turn buy them from wandering bounty hunters who lurk on the fringes of the Kurian territory, grabbing everyone they can. These latter-day fur trappers pick up strays in a circle moving clockwise down from northern Michigan, across southern Indiana and Illinois, and then up the eastern shores of the Mississippi to the northern woods of Wisconsin.
When a wealthy Quisling has turned over enough vital aura to the Kurians, a brass ring is awarded. Only in Chicago is this practice of "buying" brass rings allowed. With the security of cash and a brass ring, these robber-baron Quislings then retire to Ringland Parks, a twenty-mile stretch of stately homes along the shore of Lake Michigan just to the north of Chicago, the only large area of suburbs to survive the flames that desolated greater Chicagoland. But as brass rings cannot be passed down to sons and daughters, their progeny are left with the tiresome task of doing it all over again.
Chicago has become what Vegas was to the pre-Kurian world: an anything-goes city where anything, including human life, can be bought or sold if the price is right.
The Chicago skyline looked to Valentine like the bones of a titanic animal carcass. His position atop the freight train gave him an unobstructed view as the train bore southeast, straight as an arrow in flight, toward the city. He would have felt naked and defenseless riding the rocking platform, clattering across the uneven points on the rail line, but for the companions scattered across the last few boxcars. Now and then other hitchers made the run-and-vault onto the line of cars.
He first spotted the skyline in the blackened ring of former suburbia that encircled the city like a burned-out belt. It reminded him of a picture of the town center of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb: nothing but rubble and cracked pavement. He wondered what the Kurians had done to the ground to poison the plant life; just dry-looking brown weeds and the occasional withered sapling grew from the bare patches of soil. He wondered why the Kurians wanted to create this vista of desolation. He asked an Illinoisan, a thirtyish man who had hopped on as the train left the hills north of Rockford.
"The Chicago Blight?" the man said, looking at the expanse as if seeing it for the first time. "You got me. My brother is in the Iguard, and he says it's a no-man's-land between the Chicago Kurians and the Illinois Eleven. They depend on each other, but they had a big fight back when I was just five or six. Anyway, the Blight makes them refrain from wandering out of their territory to feed. Then I got a sister-in-law in Chicago, and she says it's to make getting out of Chicago harder. Guess burning everything was easier than building a wall that would have to run for fifty or sixty miles. But I've still heard of a few people managing to run across it in daylight. If they get lucky and dodge the Security Service and make it out by nightfall, I've heard of people escaping Chicago just using their legs. A lot of times they run right back, though; it's more dangerous downstate. I've been trying to get a good-paying job in Chicago for years, but I don't have the toke for a good position."
"You don't have the toke? What's that?" Valentine asked.
"You must be on your first trip to Chicago, blue boy. A toke is like a tip, but it's more of a bribe. Money's the best, but it's got to be their authorized stuff. You try to palm off a bill you picked up in Peoria, and you're asking to get your face smashed in. Cigarettes are good tokes, too. And if you are doing anything major, like getting a cab ride or checking in to a hotel, you toke twice, once when you arrange it and again when you're done. If the first one is too small, they might blow you off and look for someone else. If the second is too small, they'll just swear at you, but you'd better not expect any more favors. I've seen fistfights over too small a toke at the end of a cab ride, so be careful. But getting back to my point: For me to get a decent factory job, I'd have to toke the doorman, the union boss, and the manager. Maybe a couple of managers. And those would be big tokes, in the thousands. Hard to scrape up that kind of money on the farm."
Valentine reached into his bag and extracted one of the major's cheroots. "Thanks for the tip," he said, handing it to his fellow traveler.
"Hey, you catch on fast. Listen, if you want, you can come with me when we get off. I know a good route out of the railroad yard. That's a fine rifle, and some Chicago Security Service officer is gonna quote regulations and take it off you if you go through channels. Unless you can cough up about a hundred bucks worth of toke, that is."
"You're a pal. My name's Pillow," Valentine said, using the name on his identity papers.
"Norbu Oshima. Most of the guys call me Norby. Pleased to meet you, Pillow."
"My friends call me Dave. It's my middle name."
They made small talk as the city grew steadily larger. At last the train pulled into a bustling rail yard spread out over several square miles and dominated by a thick concrete tower. The train eventually switched to a siding near a series of livestock pens. Produce trucks and horse-drawn carts waited nearby, ready to accept the contents of the boxcars as the shipping clerks sorted them.
"C'mon," Oshima said as they jumped off. "Through the cattle crushes. There's a storm drain to the HalstedBridge."