by Todd McAulty
“Yes.”
“Huh. Are they . . . still occupied?”
“No. But some of them were, until recently. The businesses on the lower floors left eighteen months ago, in the first Chicago evacuation. But if you were a private resident, you had the option to stay. The building has power, and water, and it’s not far from some of the food markets.”
“Sure,” I said. “Looks a lot better than the refugee camps, anyway. Why’d they leave?”
“Got too hot,” she said. “Six weeks ago the Penton Building took a shell, right on the nineteenth floor. You know the one?”
“Big white building, two blocks west?”
“That’s the one. Nine hundred residents. Whole building went up in a matter of hours.”
“Oh my God.”
“Couldn’t get enough fire trucks to respond. And when they did, they didn’t have enough water pressure to pump above the fourth floor. Lot of the sprinklers failed.”
“Did you have any clients in the building?”
She turned to meet my gaze. “I did. Most of them made it out. Some . . . Anyway, that was the first heavy ordnance the neighborhood had seen in a while, but it was enough. After that, most of the remaining residents in this building cleared out. I had a few clients here. I come back to check on the properties every few weeks.”
She stopped in front of 1717 and fumbled with her keys for a minute as I watched. She had a very focused look. I had to admit, she really was lovely. I don’t know, maybe I’d judged her too harshly, with all that black market stuff. I started to mull over the best way to ask her out when our little errand was finally over. Maybe a drink, back at the hotel. There was a click as she unlocked the door. Before she opened it she fixed her eyes on mine. “You need to be quiet,” she said. “She’s scared.”
“What?” I said.
She put her finger to her lips, and pushed the door open.
A sour reek hit my nostrils as soon as I crossed the threshold. The place was dirty, unfurnished; most of the lights were on, and the glare on the stark white walls after the dimness of the corridor left me blinking. Mac padded quietly into what looked like a kitchen on the left, motioning for me to follow.
There was a dry yellow stain on part of the kitchen tile, next to what looked like a water bowl. I was about to dump the sack on the counter, finally give my shoulder a break, when I heard a noise from the next room—a scratching, followed by what sounded like a whimper.
“What was that?”
“She’s scared,” Mac repeated. She knelt down, peering around the corner, into the next room. “It’s okay, girl. It’s okay,” she said in a low, soothing voice.
I heard rapid scratching, the sound of claws on tile, receding deeper into the apartment.
“Is that—?”
She gestured frantically for me to shut up. After a moment, she got to her feet. She refilled the water bowl in the sink, then carefully lowered it to the floor. “Open the bag,” she whispered.
I moved to obey, casting around for something to pour it into. In the corner was a plastic bowl, this one overturned, and with evidence of having been chewed. I leaned over to pick it up, and as I did I glimpsed several dried, brown husks on the floor under the dining table. Dog turds. A week old, from the look of them.
That explained the smell. Straightening up, I tore open the bag and poured food into the bowl.
“How much?” I whispered.
“All of it,” she said.
I held up the bowl, already half full, and gestured meaningfully at the bag. Forty-pound bag. Two-pound bowl.
She took the bowl with obvious impatience. She set it down on the floor, and then poured twenty pounds of food on top of it.
She stepped away, satisfied. A moment later, I heard claws on the tile again, coming closer.
“She can smell it,” Mac said quietly.
We waited. Minutes crawled by. From the next room came a low, desperate whimper.
“It’s okay, girl,” Mac said, her voice heavy with emotion. “We won’t hurt you. Come on. It’s okay.”
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Mac said, and the despair in her voice nearly broke my heart.
The dog whimpered again, louder now.
I took Mac’s elbow, guiding her gently but firmly out of the kitchen, back to the hallway. “She won’t eat while we’re here,” I said. “She’s too scared.”
“But I want to see her,” Mac said, sounding close to tears. “I want to make sure she’s okay.”
“One thing at a time,” I said. “Let her eat first, maybe get less scared. After that, it’ll be easier. Let her come to trust us.”
She nodded, unable to speak.
“We’ll come back, yes?” I said, taking the half-empty bag of cat food from her.
She nodded again. She wiped her eyes, hesitated for a moment, looking into the kitchen. But finally she relented. We moved toward the door, careful not to step on any of the dried packages on the floor.
There was a long mirror in the hallway. As we passed, I got a glimpse behind us, into the kitchen. I tapped Mac’s shoulder, pointing to the bottom left of the mirror.
In the bottom corner we saw an emaciated corgi, peeking around the corner, watching us leave. She would glance down at the floor, back to us, and down again. Her legs trembled unsteadily, and a thin line of drool escaped her mouth. But she made no move toward the food in the bowl yet.
We opened the door, stepped into the hall. As I closed the door behind me, just before I heard the lock click into place, I heard the sudden rush of claws on the tile floor as she raced into the kitchen, to the food.
I set the half-empty bag of food down beside the door. It would probably be safe here. Mac stood beside me, her hand to her mouth and her eyes squeezed shut. Her shoulders rocked for a moment.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“People just left them,” she said, with sudden venom in her voice. “When they ran off. I found her when I came to check the apartment. They just left them, in their apartments. Dogs, cats, just abandoned.”
“God, that’s awful. How long have you been feeding her?”
“Two weeks. I’ve been keeping her alive with bread and other food I steal from the hotel. But my brokerage key only allows me access to the Hamilton one day a week.”
“That’s why you needed dry food. So you could leave her enough to survive for a week.”
Mac nodded. “Yes. For her, and the others.”
“Others? There are more abandoned pets?”
“Oh, yes,” she hissed.
“Where?”
“I found three cats in the Grand Mayral, plus a Labrador in a penthouse of the Lee building. And there are others. There’s a dog who howls on the eleventh floor of the Continental. Not in one of my properties, but close. Just howls, goes crazy whenever he hears me in the hall. He’s slowly starving to death.”
“That’s goddamn horrible.”
It was horrible. The thought that there was another innocent victim of this stupid war slowly dying barely a block away made me feel angry and helpless. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Mac said, and the fire was back in her eyes. “He’s there. At least he was . . . he was quiet when I went over this morning. I could never find him.”
Her hand was on my shoulder. It lingered there, almost unconsciously, as she looked at the door to 1717. “I didn’t want her to starve, too.”
Mac’s eyes were wet. After a moment she wiped them angrily. “Are you okay?” I asked.
She nodded. “It’s not just her,” she said. “It’s the damn war. It’s the clients I lost in the Penton Building. It’s everything—”
Her voice cracked. She shut her eyes and stopped speaking. She took a moment to compose herself.
“The truth is that I wake up every damn day in a world where monsters are real,” she said. “Inscrutable, diabolical, and nearly all-powerful machine monsters. They�
��ve seized power around the world, and no one can stop them. They’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people, and we still don’t know what they want. Human governments are falling like dominoes, to one manufactured crisis after another. And now fear is causing us to turn to machines to protect ourselves.”
“Like Britain,” I said.
“Like Britain,” she said. “How did all this happen?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Mac roused herself with an effort. She forced a smile and put her arm through mine. We started walking toward the elevator. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes it just all gets to me.”
“I understand, believe me.”
“Anyway, I want to thank you. You’re a hero.”
“Hardly. If you think a hero is someone who can procure forty pounds of cat food, you need to hang out with more capable people.”
“No one else could do it.”
“No one else knew who to ask.”
“Well, I hope you’ll let me thank you by procuring a drink or two for you at the hotel bar.”
“That would be lovely,” I said. We were standing by the elevators now, and I was staring out the windows to the west, at the dark shape of the Continental Building. Where Black Winter’s friend Machine Dance had gone missing, and where a dog was slowly starving to death on the eleventh floor. It really would be lovely to have a few drinks, and forget about the world for an hour or two. To enjoy the company of a woman who—at least for tonight—thought I was a hero.
But the sight of the Continental Building reminded me I had other commitments to honor. “Sadly, I’m afraid I have plans,” I said, and the regret in my voice was genuine. “Some other time?”
Mac looked surprised. She didn’t seem like someone accustomed to rejection, but she handled it gracefully enough. We walked back to the hotel, watching the skies together. But other than a persistent shadow that seemed to be tailing us whenever I turned my head, the return trip was uneventful.
Mac made one final try when we reached the hotel. “Sure you won’t join me for just one drink?”
It was tempting, but I needed to find Martin. I made my excuses, and said good night.
I found Martin at the bar not ten minutes later. “Man, what a night,” he said jovially. “Everybody’s in the mood to buy drinks.”
“A little adventure will do that, I guess,” I said. “Everyone okay?”
“Mostly, yeah. Everybody’s got a near-death experience or two they want to relate, though. Carter and Mwandu said they saw the mech bookin’ south, down Field Boulevard. Said it was in a helluva hurry.”
“Anyone else in the city attacked?”
“Not that we’ve heard. There are a few Venezuelan detachments just south of here, near the Field Museum and the Yacht Club.”
“Did it hit them?”
“Nope. Clean getaway south, from what we’re told.”
“Wonder why it retreated,” I said.
“The prevailing theory is that it was just lost, and wandered into the wrong neighborhood. It saw a chance to hit the enemy and make a quick retreat, and that’s what it did.”
“Makes sense.” I doubted that was the whole story, but it was probably the most sense we were ever going to make out of the incident.
“What about you?” Martin asked. “How’d you make out tonight?”
“What do you mean?”
Martin leaned a bit closer. “I mean, as a lover, you’re a bit rubbish, aren’t you?” he said. “I just saw Mac head out for a drink with Mike.”
“Seriously? Mike?” I said glumly.
“And I thought you had it in the bag, with your big kettle of dog food,” Martin laughed.
“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, Martin, you’re still connected with the urban survey team, right?”
“Yeah, sure.” Like several folks in the hotel, Martin had been contracted by the City of Chicago to get an accurate assessment of how many survivors were still in the city, and where they were. The Venezuelans likely had most of that information, of course, but they weren’t exactly tripping over themselves to share it.
“Can you help me get into the Continental Building?”
“The Continental?” He scratched his chin. “It’s completely abandoned, that one. You’d have to talk to Buddy Green. How’s that for a one hundred percent American name? Buddy. Green.”
“So it’s possible?”
“I suppose it’s possible. Depends on how determined you are.”
“Let’s imagine,” I said, “that I’m pretty damned determined.”
V
Wednesday, March 10th, 2083
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VI
Thursday, March 11th, 2083
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“I just want to be clear on this,” said Black Winter. “We’re doing this to impress a woman?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said, as I shone a flashlight around the deserted living room. It landed on an ugly purple couch.
“My God that’s hideous,” said Black Winter. “No wonder these people evacuated.”
“Check the bathroom, will you?”
He clanked off obediently toward the small bathroom on my right. I could still hear him as I shone my flashlight into each of the two small bedrooms. They were empty, like all the others we’d searched tonight. They looked like they’d been that way for a while.
“Anyway, what’s complicated about it?” he said. “Seems simple enough to me. You meet a hot young lady with a thing for dogs. Next thing you know, you’ve got a sudden interest in dogs. This has been a proud tradition among hard-up men for thousands of years. Least you can do is be honest with yourself about it.”
“For the love of God—I am not hard up!”
“That’s a matter of opinion. Do you like her?”
“Yeah, I like her. She’s beautiful and she’s got a good heart.”
“If you like her, why not just tell her? Because that’s what we’re really doing here, right? We’re sending her a message that you love dogs?”
“I’m not sending her any kind of message,” I said. I pulled open a pair of cupboards underneath a sink, shining my light in the dark corners. “I just . . . I really want to find this dog.”
“You know what I think we’re doing right now? I think you’re insecure around attractive women. You’re afraid to ask her out until you’ve done something to really impress her. Saving this dog would certainly fit the bill, wouldn’t it?”
“You know what I think?” I said. “I think I prefer dogs to robots. They don’t talk so damn much.”
“When we get back to the hotel, you should ring her. Invite her out. Show a little courage.”
“Oh my God. Am I really listening to dating advice from a friggin’ robot?”
“Well, you better listen to somebody. Because, son, you are hopeless.”
After I’d talked to Martin about getting into the Continental Building Tuesday night, he’d set up a meeting the next morning with Buddy Green, who coordinated the North Side urban surveyors. I had a story all set for Buddy, but turns out I didn’t need one. Buddy and his staff were so short-handed he didn’t even question me, just slapped me on the back, thanked me warmly for volunteering, and handed me a set of keys for the building.
“I’m sure Martin gave you the safety talk,” Buddy said. “But let me reiterate: You are not an inspector. You are an observer. You count bodies. Right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Right. Don’t make any commitments, no ma
tter what they ask you for.” Buddy shook his head. “These people. They see a guy with a clipboard, they start demanding we fix the air-conditioning.”
“Right,” I said.
“And, listen,” said Buddy. “The Continental . . . it’s a weird property. We’ve walked it a few times, and it’s always empty. Should be an easy gig for you, in and out. But lately . . .”
“Lately what?” I asked.
Buddy forced a smile. “Nothing. Like I said, should be a quiet few hours. But do me a favor . . . you see a machine? Anything weird, or flying, or bigger than a bread box? You get the hell out of there, pronto.”
“Right,” I said.
“Good man.” Buddy slapped me on the back again. “Easy gig. We’ll get you something more challenging next time.”
“Appreciate it.”
As soon as I had the keys to the Continental in my hands, I dashed off a note to Black Winter and had it couriered over to the Manhattan Consulate. He responded immediately, surprised and pleased. I had expected he wouldn’t want to waste any time, and I was right. He proposed an expedition to the building that same night. To get around the curfew, he suggested a Consulate car drop us off. Which was a relief, because I didn’t look forward to lugging another forty-pound bag of cat food ten blocks. I mentioned my desire to couple our search for his friend with a search for the dog Mac was worried about, and Black Winter, trooper that he was, had no objection. “We can start by looking for Machine Dance,” I said when we were in the car.
“I have no idea where she might be,” Black Winter admitted. “And it’s a big building. If your dog is on the eleventh floor, we might as well start there.”
So late last night, me and my highly compensated machine consultant were on the north side of the eleventh floor of the Continental, working our way around the building. So far we’d opened nearly two dozen apartments with the keys Buddy had given me, poking into empty rooms, whispering, “Here, doggy, doggy.”
I lugged the heavy bag of cat food with us from room to room. When I suggested that Black Winter take a turn, he just laughed. “You’re the one trying to impress a woman,” he said. “You carry the damn cat food.”
