The place with the most ghosts I’ve ever seen was in Hong Kong, where Kowloon Walled City had stood just a year before. Originally a fort built in the ninth century, it was beefed up in the late 1800s when the British took over Hong Kong. Seems the Chinese didn’t really trust the Brits. Who’da thunk?

Time goes on. Ownership of the fort goes back and forth. The fort gets torn down when the Japanese invade, but there are still enough chunks left that when the war ends a couple thousand squatters show up and camp out and the population keeps growing. Fire nearly burns the whole thing to the ground in the 50s, kills a whole fuckton of people.

Not a group of people to let wholesale death keep them down, the remaining residents start building on top of the remaining bits of the old. And build. And build. And build. Homes on top of homes. Places sealed away from the sun when somebody builds a new walkway above it. And all this time more and more people move in.

By the time it was cleared and torn down, it was an urban maze of huts and shacks stacked one atop the other and crammed side by side until it filled a six acre space 150 feet high and held 50,000 people. It survived on stolen electricity, illegal wells, and a black market economy.

A place that had been occupied almost two-thousand years that finally ends as a squatters’ paradise. That’s gonna leave a ghost or two. Or a couple hundred thousand. Haunts stuck wandering rat warrens that weren’t there anymore. It was like getting rid of an anthill but leaving all the ants behind.

Too many ghosts and the barrier between our world and their world thins out. Some spots in Kowloon, the barriers might as well have been made of tissue paper. Ghosts passing between worlds from one step to another. Fortunately, most of them were Haunts and Echoes. They weren’t going anywhere. But a couple Wanderers got out while I was there.

I did not enjoy my stay in Hong Kong.

I don’t know if we’ll get anything like that here. L.A.’s so spread out we’re not going to get that kind of density. But before this whole mess is over, the death toll is going to be astronomical.

We get into Letitia’s car, a wash of ash following us inside. Letitia swears, turns on the radio, and listens. It’s like they’re speaking a different language—I don’t know the codes. But after a little while it starts to make sense. It helps that a lot of the calls include some form of the word “fire.” Then one stands out.

“Any Central unit, 480, 487, and possible 502, exiting 110 Freeway at 6th Street. Blue Porsche, license plate 2ZUB069. Code 3. Incident 994 in RD 151.”