Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,9
little poison in it. “Yes. Which we will discuss, when time serves.” She raised her voice and called, “Freydis.”
The Valkyrie came up the stairs from the cabin and vaulted lightly to the dock. Lara nodded, murmured, “Good luck,” and then the two of them darted off toward the city, Lara in the lead, running in almost complete silence. They were out of sight in seconds.
Murphy exhaled slowly. “Hey, Harry?”
“Yeah?”
“My everything is broken,” she said frankly. “How the hell am I going to keep up with you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Um. Work with me, here.”
She arched an eyebrow at me.
* * *
* * *
Murphy gripped the edges of the shopping cart with both hands as I ran, pushing it down the middle of the street. “If you tell anyone about this, Dresden,” she said, “I will murder you slowly. With dental implements.”
I leaned down and kissed her hair. “Now, now. If you’re good, we can get you a piece of candy at checkout.”
“Goddammit, Dresden.”
I grinned, and then the wheels of the shopping cart hit a crack in the road and Murphy hissed in pain. I tried not to flinch in sympathy and to pilot around the rougher bits that I could see.
Murphy could limp along, but there was no way she could have moved through the city quickly enough to keep up. I could have carried her, but it would have bounced her around even worse than the shopping cart. So we just had to make do.
It wasn’t hard to move, really. The cars that had died on the streets blocked them to vehicular traffic, but there was plenty of room to maneuver around them for pedestrians, bicycles, and lanky wizards pushing shopping carts.
CPD had come out in force, armed and armored to the teeth. There were at least four officers posted at every major intersection, where they had lit the streets with road flares and trash-can fires. It didn’t make the streets less dark or threatening, really, but it did the most important thing it could have done—it threw a spotlight on the police officers themselves. If you were looking around outside that night, practically the only thing you could see reliably was the police in their uniforms and badges, standing their posts at each intersection. They were showing the flag for civilization and law, reassuring people that there were still boundaries that would be defended.
But the looting had started, here and there. I saw several window fronts that had been broken out, though not as many as it could have been. Officers were advising people to get home and get off the streets, and we got the fisheye from more than a few uniformed guys as we went by. Murphy made me stop to talk to a couple of the uniforms she knew, and she passed on warnings for the people in law enforcement whom she still had contact with—that this was a Special Investigations problem, and that this was a time for all hands on deck, fully armed tactical teams on standby, right the hell now, and why are you still standing here?
Things hadn’t gotten bad, at least not yet. But there was something in the air that hadn’t been there before—the psychic stench of a widespread terror that was slowly gathering momentum.
The city’s residents had begun to realize that something was very, very wrong.
The firelight, almost alien to mortal cities for a century or more, cast high, deep shadows that made buildings loom threateningly in the night and turned alleyways into pits of blackness. The presence of the police had to be reassuring—but it was also a warning, that things were bad, and that city hall was worried. The people who were walking on the street did so briskly, in tense silence, and tended to move in groups of three or four. I saw very few women out in the open.
I felt myself getting more tense. You couldn’t have fear spreading like this without building up considerable psychological pressure. Sooner or later, that pressure was going to cause something to burst.
They say civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism.
Chicago stood waiting for the first tearing sound.
* * *
* * *
We arrived at McAnally’s Pub to find it . . . well, like always, only a lot more crowded.
Mac’s place was a basement pub underneath an office building. You had to descend concrete stairs from the street to get in, and it featured a constantly irritating combination of a fairly low ceiling and ceiling fans. The entire place was