Chapter Text
Chicago
One Month after the Treaty
It’s pandemonium.
Worth had thought, over the course of his sufficiently numerous years, that he’d long ago figured out what pandemonium looked like. Christmas shopping two days before the holiday, the malls crammed with wild-eyed, snorting suburban mothers. A riot at a concert with drinks splashing five feet above your head and spiked bracelets in your shoulder. A drug raid on a poorly kept meth lab.
Fuck. That. Shit.
He’d never seen pandemonium like this. In Chicago, the riots had been going on since that first week with only the crackling lull of a fire settling down into its embers between frenzied refuelings. A month. Almost an entire month, and the city was seething under its own black smoke, burning out its own husk at an impossible rate. They shouldn’t have come here; that had been obvious about an hour ago. What wasn’t obvious was why they hadn’t left.
Worth toed a blackened corpse out of his way. It crinkled dully and refused to budge.
Not too far away, Hanna was leading a shaking woman up into the Cadillac—eerily glittering and untouched by the smog. Bright as the day he’d stolen it. There was just barely enough room for the lady to squeeze in next to her children, but the shaking stopped as soon as her hands closed over a miniature shoulder, and that was a relief. Worth was beginning to notice a pattern with women he’d never really had a chance to observe before. Namely, that on average they’re a hell of a lot easier to keep calm than men.
“Y’think this’ll work?” Worth called over, finally stepping over the corpse. He might have been stalling.
Hanna glanced back at him, blue eyes wide, pupils shrunken, ash and blood smeared in ugly streaks down his cheek and chin. He grinned the most unsightly, mirthless grin Worth had ever seen.
“Of course it will,” he yelled back, vaulting over the door and into the convertible. “It’s like… one of those chase scenes that’s in every movie ever. Pick a movie!” he insisted, teeth glittering. “Any movie!”
The pistol in Worth’s hand felt unfamiliar, heavy. There was a smoke in his throat that felt wrong and sticky, and Hanna’s eyes were too blue, too huge and fucking blue, and the sky was all red.
“Pride’n Prejudice,” he said, at last.
Hanna blinked, once, and then a hoarse laugh clawed its way up out of his throat. “Right!” he shouted, fumbling with the ignition. “Right. We’re gonna have a car chase like Pride and Prejudice. I might even be able to keep us on the road.”
Worth watched him, motionless. The rumble was getting closer. The zombie was going to have something to say about letting Hanna drive, but hell, Worth had something to say about letting Hanna drive. There just wasn’t any choice. If anything, Worth was a worse driver than him.
They took off like a rocket, one more streak of cherry red fire racing down the Chicago streets. They shouldn’t have come here. But they’d spent the last month in the cold, ethereal cocoon of Salem, emerging too late into the blazing reality of the situation. They’d passed through countless small towns in the way here, past the endless string of abandoned cars on the interstate, and they had thought… well, they hadn’t thought much of anything. It had seemed bad enough, only Worth bothered to pause with his hand against the glass and wonder why it wasn’t worse.
The rumbling in the distance was building, the thunder of cars and motorcycles alike, and Worth thought that their best chance would be these people’s unmitigated stupidity, more than the modest speed the Cadillac could muster up. With any luck, they’d all run each other off the road before they could catch up with Hanna.
But first.
Worth lifted the gun and took a step back, and then another, and set his sights on the road where it twisted straight just in front of him. He hadn’t used a gun in a long time. A long time. But you never really forget, and by the time they braked for the wreckage Hanna and he had dragged into the road, it wouldn’t matter so much that he’d never been too good with moving targets.
His finger twitched on the trigger. This would be the first man he’d killed in cold blood, if anything could be cold in this roaring hell-pit of a city. But at least Hanna wouldn’t have to do it.
It didn’t bother him too much, though it would be better once he got it over with. He was well aware that whoever he managed to kill, in the flurry of seconds between first shot and regroup, would probably be some mook he had no real grudge against. Starving people looking for protection, frightened boys trying to keep their mothers safe, all mixed in with the trash and the monsters. There was no good side, not even a worse side, and he knew that. They just had the bad luck of wanting the same thing Hanna wanted; the bad luck to be trailing along behind the wrong bastard.
As the rumble bloomed into a thunder, Worth spared a moment to be glad that Conrad was asleep somewhere on the edge of town, and out of all of them, at least somebody would never have to see this.