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Some of the traffic lights were on, some were off. Most buildings sat dark. A few random windows glowed against the darkening sky.
Vehicles littered Michigan Avenue’s six snow-swept lanes. Some of the cars, trucks and buses looked fine, save for smashed-in windows and dented doors, while others were crumpled, knocked on their sides or even resting upside down with snow acc.u.mulating on their upturned tires and dark underbellies. Many were burned-out husks, blackened and misshapen from long-dead fires.
Light from the setting sun slipped through the packed, gray clouds, reflected off the tall skysc.r.a.pers. Broken windows looked like missing teeth, black spots marring the smooth gla.s.s faces.
Winter wind ate at Cooper and Sofia, cut into jeans and slacks, drove through coats to chill their bones and bellies. The snow kept falling, met in the sky by whirling bits of burned, blackened paper. Everything smelled like a day-old campfire. Icy flakes melted against skin, stuck to hair, clung on Cooper’s four-day stubble.
So many dead. Blackened corpses sat inside of blackened cars. A cindered bus sagged from the heat that had scorched it. A scattering of five corpses spread out from its twisted door — people who made it out of the vehicle, but still succ.u.mbed to the flames. Bloated and frozen bodies lined the sidewalks, lay between the ruined cars that filled and blocked the streets. It was as if G.o.d had picked up a graveyard, turned it upside down and rattled it, scattering the dead like a child dumping out a box of toys.
Cooper began to hear occasional sounds through the wind — a clank of metal, distant tinkles of breaking gla.s.s, the screams of the hunted and gleeful cheers of the hunters. He stayed close to the buildings on the west side of the street, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.
Nothing came out to stop him, but he and Sofia weren’t entirely alone. Here and there, Cooper saw the little pyramid-shaped monsters, sometimes scurrying across the street from one building to another, sometimes through ground-floor windows where they built their walls of solidified s.h.i.+t.
He also saw flashes of movement from deep inside buildings, through smashed storefronts and from behind windows higher up the towering buildings. He was being watched, watched by something bigger than the hatchlings.
Cooper had carried Sofia north on Wabash and cut east on Hubbard. At Michigan Avenue, he looked south. The snow-covered Michigan Avenue Bridge led over the Chicago River. He wondered if they should go that way instead, but Sofia tugged on his jacket to get his attention.
She raised a shaking hand, pointed at a twenty-story building a half block up on the left.
Fire had raged through the smooth gla.s.s tower, covering what windows remained with waving patterns of soot. At the bottom of the building, he saw a broken overhang that once had s.h.i.+elded Chicagoans from rain or snow. It, too, was twisted and blackened by the fire. A warped script W and one e were all that remained of bra.s.s letters that had spelled out “Walgreens.”
Cooper’s heart sank. He kept walking, kept carrying Sofia. Maybe the fire damage was only superficial.
It wasn’t.
Nothing remained of the drugstore. Through broken and blackened gla.s.s, Cooper saw melted metal shelves and powdery paper ash. The smell of burned plastic poured out of the place as though it was still actively ablaze.
Sofia s.h.i.+vered in his arms.
“s.h.i.+t,” she said.