Blame this.
Four to Six Weeks for Delivery OF YOUR SOUL.
OK, here’s the situation. About a month and a half ago, a Chinese counter-Cosmic Terror squad chased something into a Shanghai shipping facility. And then they promptly lost it, apparently. Nobody knows what it was that they were chasing, or why they were chasing it. What we do know is that the Chinese apparently decided that chasing it out of China counted as a win, so whatever-it-was apparently infested a shipping container and fled the country.
It appears that whatever-it-was ended up here. Reports are just now being collated, but there have been outbreaks of similar Cosmic Terror activities in Seattle. Seattle, Tacoma, Salt Lake City, and now Chicago: cultist activities and unusual homicides have spiked in all of those locations, in a manner consistent with the travel time of a typical railway shipment. Now all anybody has to do is figure out which shipping container has an extra occupant.
The situation isn’t apocalypse level, but it is problematic. Knowing the exit port, entry port, and basic route before Chicago will allow investigators to narrow down the possible infested shipping containers to something approaching a manageable number, but they’re all going to have to be checked out. And fairly quickly, too: the persistent worry here is that whatever-it-is that was in that container will decide to simply leave it and take up residence in the American countryside. If that happens then it may be a while before it starts to distort its surroundings enough for people to notice. So work fast, OK?
Oh, one last thing: we know that whatever-it-is is kind of infectious, metaphysically speaking. So it’s entirely possible that the shipping containers surrounding it are now going to radiate Cosmic Terror energies of their own. Which means that, just because your team encounters somebody making unholy zombie minotaurs or something, you shouldn’t stop working. Unholy zombie minotaurs may end up being relatively benign in comparison.
I have a friend who works for the Department of Agriculture in Northern California. He inspects Chinese ships on a regular basis. This would not surprise him at all.