Southside Chicago. October 9th, 2072. 5pm - one and a half hours until twilight.
This is where fool's gold goes when it dies. A heaven of once shining glass, promising everything but delivering only disappointment. The Elevated, as it used to be called, was the largest concentration of Chicago's wealth before the quarantine came down. Now it's just another ruin. After the 9 towers of the Sears fell into the Shattergraves, burning the old business heart of Chicago into a toxic pit, those businesses left functional had transplanted their heart down here. The building in question was a fine bit of architecture, in the form of a tapered cylinder with a semi-circular bite cork-screwing up the side. The bottom floors were filled with the usual squatters, hard enough to hold their own, but smart enough to have lived these last 17 years in isolation. Smart enough to know not to pick a fight when they could instead get a bribe. A case of batteries and some water-purification tablets had paid your way past them up to the fourth floor.
The next twenty flights had been filled with nothing at all. Doors and desks all gone for firewood. Everything that could be lifted had been thrown in to that slow Chicago pyre - the long funeral of winter where a dead city burned, little by little. Already in this fall month you could feel the desperation growing again. That terrible cycle that swallowed up more and more natives each year, first in the hundreds of thousands the year the wall went up - Uncountable dead filling the city with the smell of rot come spring - (And some people wonder why no one has cleaned this place up yet) - These years it's different. Long gone are the supply drops and the running gun battles which followed them. Today's Chicago is a gaunt thing, which eats itself much more slowly, and does so much more grimly.
Around the 26th floor, the filmy smell of melted plastiboard began to hint at what was already apparent from outside. The next thirty five floors were a burnt out mess, windows all shattered by the heat from the blaze. Toxic chemicals everywhere. It was time for gas masks. Cresting the stairwell on floor 28 brought you out into the open air, staring up into the skeleton of a building above you, and the untouched penthouse floors perched in the darkness somewhere above that.
True to Mike's word, it all seemed stable enough from here. Mike was an architectural engineer before the troubles hit in '55. That's why he still manages to put shit like this together. Combing through some old data disks you lifted off a broken down old Local Telelcom server a few months back, Mike had found building permits indicating the wine cellar's installation shortly before the quarantine. The building had belonged to Cross-Sim industries before it stopped belonging to anyone. The name implied that it was related to the now-devastated Cross Applied Technologies, but it didn't seem to be mentioned anywhere in the feeding frenzy of takeovers when CATco was divided up during the Crash of '63. So, like most of Chicago, it was no man's land, and anything inside was up for grabs. Good news all around so far.
