He has come late to the city’s fall. The attack has been in progress for months, the once-men and their demon masters laying siege to the makeshift walls and reinforced gates that keep the people within protected. Chicago is one of the stron-, gest bastions remaining, a military camp run with discipline and skill, its people armed and trained. But no bastion is impregnable, and the attackers have finally found a way in. He is told they gain entry through the sewers, that there is no longer any way of keeping them out. Now the end is at hand, and there is nothing anyone can do but flee or die.
Bodies line the streets, flung casually aside by those who , leave them lifeless. Men, women, and children-no exceptions \ are made. Slaves are plentiful and food is scarce. Besides, a \ lesson is needed. Feeders slink through the shadows, working \ their way’from corpse to corpse, seeking a shred of fading life, of pain, of horror, of helpless rage, of shock and anguish on which to feed. But the battle moves on to other places, and so the feeders follow after. Ross works his way along a brick wall fronting the postage-stamp yards of a line of abandoned brick homes, searching for a way out, listening to the screams and cries of those who have failed to do so. The attack shifts to a point ahead of him, and he recognizes the danger. He must turn back. He must find another way. But his options are running out, and without the magic to protect him he is less certain of what he should do.
Finally he begins to retrace his steps, angling west toward the outskirts of the city, away from Lake Michigan and the downtown. It will be nightfall soon, and the hunters will not find him so easily. If he can reach the freeways, he can follow them into the suburbs and be gone before they realize he has escaped. His throat is dry, and his muscles ache, for he has not slept in days. His coming to the city was in response to a dream that foretold of its destruction. But he is mistrusted everywhere, a Cassandra crying out in the wilderness of a crumbling Troy, and his warnings are ignored. Some would imprison him as a spy. Some would throw him from the walls. If they did not fear his magic, he would already be dead. It is a pointless, debilitating life he leads, but it is all he has left.
He comes up against a firefight at an intersection in the streets and spins quickly back into a shadowed niche to hide from the combatants. Automatic weapons riddle wooden doors and pock brick walls and take the lives of everyone caught in their field of fire. The feeders frolic through the carnage, leaping and twisting with unrestrained glee, feeding on the rage and fear of the combatants. Killing is the most powerful form of madness and therefore the feeders’strongest source of food, and they are drawn to it as flies to blood. No sounds come from them, nor is any form of recognition accorded them, for they are a silent, invisible presence. But in their lantern eyes Ross sees the pleasure they derive from the dark emotions the killing releases, and he is reminded of the Furies in the old Greek myths, driving insane those who had committed unconscionable crimes. If there were Furies in real life, he thinks, they would be mothers to these feeders.
When the fighting dies away, he moves on, running swiftly toward the confluence of freeways that lead into the city from the west, anxious to find his way clear. Night slips down about him like window shades drawn against the smoky, fiery light of the city’s destruction. The smells that assail his nostrils are acrid and rank-charred flesh and blackened blood. Disease will follow, and many of those who do not die in the fighting will die in the aftermath. Thousands are driven from this city into the wilderness. How many will survive to take refuge somewhere else?
He reaches the arterials winding into the main east/west freeway, but the attackers throng from all quarters before him, lining the four-lane, gathering for an unknown reason. He edges back cautiously and works his way down the backyards of houses and the shattered glass fronts of businesses to where those who celebrate do not mass so thickly. He finds a rise on which an abandoned housing development is settled, and he enters a house that gives him a clear view of the freeway leading in. From an upstairs window, he looks out on a grand procession approaching from the west. He uses his binoculars to get a clearer look, a cold suspicion beginning to surface.