It's all different after dark. It's not just respectable citizens who don't come out after dark any more.

I'm not saying it's perfect by day either, you understand. Just last week somebody - I guess he was from out of town - wandered into the PPG plaza. Most locals won't even look straight at those buildings. They say if you stare at those angles too long, you start trying to figure out how something could fold like that and why the towers are one shape from Stanwix and Third and a different shape a short block down at Stanwix and Fourth, and then you just go full-tilt insane and that's the end of it.

They haven't found him yet. They're not even sure how he got into the plaza. Must have come at it exactly the right way. I hear Primanti Brothers is thinking of naming a sandwich after him.

And even by day you don't want to go into Panther Hollow, though I hear some of the CMU kids put together a little side business sponsoring hunting tours. No firearms. The city never did suspend that rule. So they use crossbows. I'm not sure what they do - use the pelts as trophies maybe? I can't imagine those things are good to eat.

But at night is when it all really goes to hell.

At dusk CMU slams shut its titanium-steel gates and activates the sentry turrets. The sniper team ascends the Cathedral of Learning and readies its searchlight. The witches of Squirrel Hill cast their wards for the night. The buses rush to the garage, racing to not be caught last on Forbes Avenue. On Mount Washington the funicular will have long since finished its last run of the day, and if you look closely you can already see silhouettes of rangers atop the ridge line, watching the Fort Pitt and Liberty bridges anxiously.

And then they come out. The weirding packs from the ruins of Duquesne University, the half-worlders from the decaying houses of Polish Hill, the living dead from the paths of the Allegheny Cemetery, and the others. After dark the city is theirs, and the good and true stay behind their wards and their walls, or perch on high ground and wait until they can say, without smiling, that they survived yet another night. Everyone with any sense has a nest to flee to after dark here, a safe haven.

Everyone but me.

I wouldn't do it if I hated it. Contrary to what you may have heard, I'm not crazy and I'm not suicidal. I just feel I was given a job to do, and the tools to do it. I take precautions. Last time any weirding actually hit me, it was my own fault. I'd forgotten to prepare one sock. One sock. What difference could that make? I thought. Well, it took two weeks for my foot to go back to its usual shape and that was after I tried just about every dispelling ritual I knew.

You know, you can't find any shoes to fit on a chicken foot, and it was December, and it's pretty damned cold here in December.

No, I won't lie to you. I love my job, even if the bounties are shit, which they are. I love it every time I dispel a half-worlder and watch their confused expressions as they come apart into those little greasy particles that take two washings to get out of your hair. I love it every time I hack a zombie into little gooey non-reassemblable bits. I love it every time weirding bounces off me and the kid doesn't know what to do next and freaks out.

Sometimes, I admit, it all gets a little much even for me. Usually I go to the Point then. I stand there for a while, watching the thick, purple-red Monongahela trying to mix with the thin, sickly green, acid-smelling Allegheny, running side-by-side for a quarter mile before merging into graphite-colored sludge. I look up to the north shore at the collapsed shell of Heinz Field and my heart lifts. Then I turn and scan the skyline to find the beacon of the Grant Building, flashing its Morse obliviously all night no matter what may happen in the streets below.

P-I-T-E-T-S-B-K-R-R-H.

I love this town.