Ghost Town

There is a ghost town in Illinois. It was once a big modern city, full of apartments and skyscrapers and cars and highways. It was once teeming with birds and shouts and lots and lots of people. Now, the same skyscrapers are decrepit and crumbling, and the apartments that were once home to much of the population have been raided again and again, leaving untouched only the bare walls and the sorrowful, grieving ghosts of a happier time.

There is a sign outside the city. It lies crooked on its post, like the crooked, haunted smile on a man who has seen and done much too much. The paint is faded and cracked, the metal rusted and riddled with bullet-holes, but if you know what it says, you might be able to make out the name of the once-famous city: CHICAGO. But the name has no meaning anymore, and no one cares enough to try and read it, anyway.

Nearly 3 million people lived here once. The first wave only killed about one out of every fourteen thousand people. Still, two hundred people died that day in the city that was still called Chicago. A small amount in the grand scheme of things, but most people don't live their lives looking at the big picture. To the people who died when the lights went out, it seemed very big and very, very real.

Broken glass litters the street. Cars are piled up at intersections and one-lane roads. A crashed airplane lies in the street, one wing buried in rubble and the other lifted towards the never-ending sky. Once, smoke polluted the air and fire devastated this town of ghosts. But the four winds have blown the smoke to another world, and the second wave took care of the fire.

Lake Michigan should have ended it. It was a miracle that anyone survived at all. Still, the hardly-damaged population was reduced to the amount of people able to fit into the top floors of the dozen or so skyscrapers in Chicago, then again to the amount of people able to get there. Debris is scattered everywhere, a reminder of the raging destruction of the second wave.

Around eighty species of birds live in this ghost town. They once amazed and delighted the citizens, but with most of the citizens gone, the birds became the remaining people's downfall. The stench of blood soon covered everything. It hung in the air and clung to clothing, and sometimes it became so thick that it seemed like the walls themselves were bleeding.

Some of the dead were buried. Most were piled in the streets and set on fire, making room for the new bodies that were bound to come. A few of the infected recovered. Some were immune. Most were not.

Fire destroys. Fire purifies. But even fire could not wash away the fine red mist raining down from the sky.

The sound of gunshots still rings in the city streets, loud and haunting. A memory is encased in each splatter of blood on a wall, or each shell casing left behind on the ground. Once the fourth wave hit, it was every man for himself. Everyone was your enemy, and you couldn't trust anyone but yourself. People lie dead on their own driveways, shot through the head by the little old lady who wasn't an alien but thought that they were.

There was once a lone survivor wandering the city, a little boy just one year old, a miracle child in a world of betrayal and death. He heard the helicopter before he saw it, hidden away behind the place he once called home. He was saved, he was sure of it; they would find him here, whoever they were, and take him somewhere safe, somewhere he wasn't constantly living in fear of the blood staining his own little hands. The children heard his hopeful cries first, and then they saw the green fire surrounding his head.

There is a ghost town in Illinois. It was once a big modern city, full of apartments and skyscrapers and cars and highways. It was once teeming with birds and shouts and lots and lots of people. Now, the streets are covered in broken glass and concrete and ashes and blood. An infant lies behind a charred, crumbling house, killed by a little girl no older than six. Smoke once again pollutes the air, and bullets are embedded in nearly every wall you turn towards.

There is a ghost town in Illinois. It was once called Chicago.