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scrape the invaders off on the sharp edge of the angled ceiling, but they just flattened themselves against her pale skin or took refuge under her wings. A growing restlessness drove her from her perch, and she fluttered through the terminal once more. She had known fear for so long, it was simply a part of her now, but the disorienting panic kept her moving.
    She found a sliver of a crack near the top of the vast wall of windows that faced north, and tasted unfamiliar air. Wanting only to leave the stale, dry atmosphere of the terminal behind, she squeezed through and immediately panicked. The temperature hovered around twenty-eight degrees, and she had never been this cold. She beat her wings harder, swooping through the hurricane of flashing red and blue lights that covered the inner drive of O’Hare.
    She rose higher, soaring out over the parking lot. She could sense the tectonic vibrations emanating from the city below, urging her higher and higher. The bat had never encountered snow before, and the drifting flakes wreaked havoc with her echolocation organs. A roaring filled her ears, and the horrible, shrieking engines of an incoming jet drove her away from the airport.
    She turned east, instinctively drawn to the vast stillness of Lake Michigan. For a while, she simply glided, surfing the bitter winds that pushed her to the southeast. The adrenaline that had surged through her compact body began to ebb. Her tiny heart hitched twice, her wings folded, and she dropped, tumbling through snowy skies into the vast forest of concrete and steel and harsh lights of downtown.
    The free fall squeezed the last dregs of adrenaline into her system and she found the power to spread her wings and soar, whirling in an ever-downward spiral. She smacked into a frost-covered window, bounced off, and plummeted to the street. She found her wings once again, and tried to aim for the darkness along the Chicago River, but the draft from a passing El train sent her spinning into the girders that held up Upper Wacker Drive.
    She fell like a stone into the frozen gutter along the edge of Lower Wacker.
    Her heart convulsed again, and she pulled her wings close. Headlights splashed over her and moved on, leaving her bathed in the sickly yellow light from the irregular fluorescent bulbs. The panic and sickness had driven her consciousness deep into the recesses of her mind, and she was only dimly aware of the icy concrete.
    She was still alive when the first of the rats emerged from the sewer drain and scurried along the gutter. It was soon followed by several more. Farther down the street, even more rats appeared in another drain. Waiting for the relative darkness between the passing headlights, they crept along toward the bat.
    The first rat seized her in his huge incisors and scurried back into the darkness of the sewers, leaving nothing but splayed footprints and long, wormlike tracks from their tails in the gray slush.
    The parasites, commonly known as bat bugs, sensed the life slipping out of their host and crawled off of her body as it was ripped apart and the pieces grew cold. They smelled the carbon dioxide exhaled by the rats and crept onto their new hosts. The rats, eyes bright with hunger and muzzles wet with the bat’s blood, felt nothing as the bat bugs wriggled through their coarse hair and gorged themselves.

C HAPTER 7
    10:44 PM
    December 27
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    Tommy’s first night on the job started in a bar, a dim hole in the wall on the West Side. It wasn’t anything fancy. A few flat screens hung around the place, tuned to sports. A dozen tables were spread out over a greasy linoleum floor. A thick haze of smoke hung throughout the bar; these guys didn’t pay much attention to the no-smoking ordinance either. It didn’t even look like the place had a name. The only notable attribute was an extremely large parking lot in the back, with at least three exits leading to major avenues and expressways.
    The parking lot was