Anybody who said that Chicago wasn’t segregated wasn’t paying attention, or they were full of horse manure. They’d never ridden the Red Line south of Jackson, that was for sure.

Another reason her backpack was so heavy was because LaRissa carried her cousin’s U-shaped bike lock in the outside pouch. And it wasn’t just for looks. She had no problem jerking it out and using it if any fool was dumb enough to try and mess with a studious black girl. Tonight, though, was quiet. She thought for a moment about whether she could take out her biology homework, and thought tonight it might be okay. Sometimes she worried if she looked vulnerable if someone saw her with her face in a book. Since most of the shooting and problems took place when the weather turned much hotter, she thought it would be okay. She wanted to get a head start on her homework.

She did not put in her earbuds. She wanted to keep her ears wide open, and looked up from the text often to make sure she was alone. She did not, however, check under the bench.

The bugs came bubbling through the cracks where the concrete floor met the tiled wall like clotted oil escaping from a pressurized pipe. They had smelled her breath from inside the wall, and it was nearing time for another molt. Obeying an instinct older than man itself, they surged up the wall, looking for a chance to feed. Their excitement released pheromones that signaled a food source, and more bugs flooded to the surface.

LaRissa scratched her ear absentmindedly. She couldn’t wrap her head around how these protein chains were supposed to function, but her report was due next week, and she would just as soon start stripping than wait until the last minute to start the paper.

By the time she looked back down at the book, it was too late.

The bugs were already flowing up her legs like some sticky, viscous liquid. They poured over her shoulders from the wall, slipping inside her collar. She screamed then, and her cry bounced off the concrete and tile of the subway station, but no one heard except the rats.

She jerked to her feet, hands flailing at the bugs, but it was like trying to swat snowflakes away in a blizzard. Her backpack fell on the concrete with a thud. She spun, slapping her chest, her neck, her hair. The bugs were everywhere.

LaRissa stumbled forward, feeling them invade her mouth as she kept screaming. The momentum carried her to the edge of the platform. Bugs crawled up into her nose, across her eye sockets, tiny legs struggling to find purchase on the slick surface of her eyeballs.

She kept spinning, flailing, until her left foot stepped off into space and she tumbled over the edge. She landed facedown, arms outstretched. Her right hand flopped against the third rail. Electricity rocketed through her, jerking and sizzling her small frame.

The lights in the subway station dimmed for a moment, then returned to normal.

Smoke curled gently from the body. The bugs that had survived the electricity dropped off and shuffled away, not liking the taste of cooked blood. The rats however, did not mind, and started gnawing at the body.

They had eaten most of her face and torn into her stomach, dragging her entrails across the wooden cross ties between the steel tracks when the next southbound train roared into the station. The driver was half asleep, and did not spot the body on the tracks until it was too late. He hit the brakes, but the train’s momentum carried it across LaRissa’s corpse. Over the scream of the brakes, he felt, rather than heard, the wet crunch that split the body into five pieces. He stared at a single drop of blood on the window and trembled for a moment, then vomited over the controls.

Within half an hour, the station was full of emergency personnel, cops, and equipment. The light and noise drove the bugs back into the darkness, back into the cracks in the wall, until it was as if they had never existed.

PHASE 3

CHAPTER 20

1:36 PM

August 11

Qween Dorothy moved her great bulk ponderously up the sidewalk, using her shopping cart to split the relentless waves of people that flooded downtown at lunchtime. The bloom had worn off of summer, and now people wanted to get out, grab food, and retreat back into their air-conditioned offices as quickly as possible. The sticky heat even had people thinking back wistfully to the chill of winter.

Something moved in a canvas bag atop her cart.

Head down, she stared out at the scurrying workers through heavy-lidded eyes. They all seemed to be moving at accelerated speeds, like one of those chase scenes in old movies where the characters are all moving in fast motion. Sometimes, if she’d had enough gin, and she was feeling low enough, she wondered if somehow she inhabited a slightly different time and space than the rest of humanity. She lived in a world where time moved a half second slower, and her atoms vibrated to a slightly different rhythm, rendering her invisible to everyone that surrounded her.

But that was just pure foolishness, she would scold herself the next day. She had enough troubles and she didn’t need to be adding bullshit science fiction yammering to her load. She sure as hell didn’t want to end up like the babbling head cases that wandered along Lower Wacker, gibbering wildly and pointing to empty spaces in the air.

No, sir. Qween Dorothy might be a lot of things, like homeless, an unrepentant alcoholic, and a firm believer in Jesus Christ, but there was nothing wrong with her mental faculties, thank you very much.

Everybody went through bad times. You endure them. Got no other choice. ’Cause things will get better eventually. Just like the old blues songs said.

For the most part, she was quite content. She had freedom. Lot of folks couldn’t say that. A clock told them where to be and when. Always rushing somewhere. She’d been in a few places where the people always pooh-poohed her ideas on being able to sit outside and breathe the fresh air. Those were the same people who assumed she wanted a damn bath. Even though Dorothy tried her best to follow the words of Christ, these people tried to shove their own version of religion down her throat. And of course, those were the same people who tried to take her bottles of gin away.

No, thank you.

No, fucking thank you.

The humid summers didn’t bother her. She knew places to stay where the wind cooled her in the summer and where it was warm in the winter, places where skyscrapers vented billowing clouds of tropical heat. The rest of the time, the world was hers. And she had her friends, some in the regular world of nine-to-five jobs, mortgages, and clocks, and some who had fallen or jumped through the cracks and ended up living on the other side of that regular world.

The canvas bag moved again. It twitched.

Nobody noticed. Qween Dorothy knew it wasn’t because she was invisible, as reassuring as that might be. The uncomfortable, real reason was that people simply didn’t want to see her. Their gaze slid around her and her cart like oil over a light bulb.

She pushed her cart across Washington, ignoring the light. Brakes squealed and horns split the air. She paid little attention to all the racket. The last time a cab driver had gotten impatient and nudged her cart with his taxi, knocking it over and spilling her possessions into the street, she’d hauled the little bastard out of the car and kicked him until she got too tired.

Most of the homeless in the Loop didn’t bother with a cart. It was easier to just leave their stuff under whatever ledge or overpass they’d claimed; pushing a cart across the wildly uneven asphalt and concrete of downtown was too much work. At least, this was the tendency of the folks that were truly homeless.