The Inexplicables

by Cherie Priest

Page 9

  The lantern wasn’t strong enough to tell him how far back the tracks might go; its beams surrendered to the unnatural walls and other lines, showing nothing but a large, cleared space that could’ve been the bottom of any silver mine or saltworks. There, three different sets of tracks stretched out in three different directions, all disappearing within ten yards. Rector didn’t hear any rolling wheels, creaking carts, or squealing brakes. If these tunnels were ever used, nobody was down there now.

  He closed his eyes again and backed up to the stairwell, struggling to determine which of the tracks might head off in the general direction of north. Instinct told him it was the middle set, which curved off to the left. He let his instinct win, swung his shoulders to adjust his pack, and set off.

  So this was the underground.

  Dark, close, and eerily quiet. After twenty minutes of exploring, seeking some exit other than the way he’d come in, Rector spotted a byway tunnel. The edge of his lantern’s light brushed up against something that looked promisingly like a staircase.

  He adjusted his mask. If he was going to hit the great outdoors again, the seal needed to be snug. He hated the seal, he hated the snugness, and he hated the way the rubber line against his face was itching something awful—a combination of ordinary friction and the Blight’s irritation. Sometimes he forgot that he shouldn’t scratch the seam, and one hand would reach up mindlessly to give it a vigorous scrubbing with his fingernails. But then he’d remember that it would only make the itch worse, and he’d stop himself, and swear about it.

  Resisting the urge to take the steps two at a time, he let his lantern lead the way. Up he climbed, slowly enough that his chest didn’t hurt and his breath didn’t fog up the mask’s interior.

  At the top he found a trapdoor of sorts, the kind used to cover up root cellars and basements when they need an outside entrance. These doors were doubled, and they were latched from within—just like the windows in the other building.

  “They probably want to keep people out, too. Not just rotters. ” But he suspected the security system wasn’t so great, if any dumb kid from the Outskirts could let himself inside. “Or maybe I’m just lucky. ”

  He laughed out loud at that, and tried to rub at an itchy place on his nose, only to be reminded that the gas mask blocked any serious relief.

  The door’s fastener wasn’t too complicated. It was just a system of levers on a crank, so when he turned a wheel, the lock slid aside and the doors would swing … in? No. They swung out. He lifted the right-side door and raised his head a few inches to look around.

  Ah, daylight. Or what passed for daylight in Seattle, which was good enough for Rector. But the milky white sky did nothing to warm the low-lying clouds of fog and gas; instead, it made the air look colder—as if it were the frozen, blowing breath of some preposterous monster.

  He considered a strategic retreat. He thought about shutting the doors and ducking back underneath the city. It was close and dark and smelled weird (or maybe that was his mask), but there weren’t any flesh-eating creatures roaming its corridors. Up here, dead things walked.

  But dead things walked in his head, too.

  At the far reaches of Rector’s vision, the flickering, twitching shade of Zeke Wilkes gave a disapproving shake of its head.

  You promised. I won’t wait much longer, Wreck. I’ll come for you, if you don’t come for me.

  “You come for me all the damn time anyway. ”

  Outside the air was scratchy and dense. He’d known that already, but had forgotten it in the short time he’d been beneath the streets. He shuddered and climbed up to the last stair, and with all the patience he could muster, he drew the doors back down behind himself until they clicked into place.

  Now. Where was he?

  An alley.

  Navigating half by touch and half by squinting through the thickened air, he struggled to the left … where he encountered a fence, so he turned around to try the other way out of the alley. Hugging the building’s exterior wall, he crept to its edge.

  A corner. Excellent.

  The steady patter of dripping water sounded nearby, and someplace not too far away he heard a building settle on its foundations, creaking and moaning. No other sound broke the spell. No footsteps. No shuffling. Nothing to indicate that he wasn’t alone …

  For one brief, alarming instant he second-guessed whether or not people survived inside at all, Doornails or Station men or anyone else.

  He dropped to his hands and knees. The sidewalk was smooth and cold under his probing fingers, but he investigated every stone, every gravel- and dirt-littered brick until he found what he was looking for.

  There, a few feet out. An engraving. A name.

  Commercial.

  And now he finally knew where he was.

  Six

  Rector was on Commercial Street, the street which had once run closest to the Sound and the piers. Now it ran closest to the wall, and parallel to it, all along the western edge.

  Rising to his feet, he fought to find his bearings. The street ran north and south, but where had he emerged? The air was clumped and uncertain, and he was surrounded by tall shadows. He had no idea where the wall was.

  But he remembered now: North went uphill. South ran downhill.

  “Psst!”

  Rector froze.

  He swiveled his head, compensating for his reduced vision in the mask, looking from corner to corner and up above the street. He saw nothing. Only the fog, and straight lines where buildings punctured briefly through it.

  “Psst! Hey, you!”

  Rector unfroze and flung himself into the nearest alley. It wasn’t his imagination. It wasn’t a ghost. In his experience, ghosts never made spitty noises and called him “Hey you!” The ghosts all knew his name.

  “Go away!” he fiercely whispered back—hoping he projected more menace than fright.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?” asked the unseen person.

  It was hard to tell with such an echo bouncing off the Seattle wall and all its encompassed buildings, but Rector was pretty sure the voice came from a nearby rooftop.

  The hidden speaker asked again, “Who are you?”

  “None of your goddamn business!” Rector replied more loudly than he meant to.

  The silence that followed was stifling. It pressed up against his mask and pushed against his eardrums as the whole block listened to see what damage had been done. Had anything heard him? Was anything coming?

  “Don’t holler like that,” the distant voice responded. The words were soft, lobbed with just enough of an edge to penetrate the space between them. This was the voice of someone accustomed to speaking where speaking was dangerous.

  Any sound too sharp and the floodgates would open—Rector knew that much; he’d heard all about it. But there he’d gone, babbling regardless. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Go away, would you?”

  Above Rector and somewhere to the right he heard the scraping push of feet. Someone scrambled, and the footsteps stopped, then came again—this time sounding against metal. The speaker was descending a ladder. Coming closer.

  “Stay. Away. From me. ” Rector leaned on the words, wanting them to sound deadly and figuring they probably didn’t.

  “No,” came the response.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ll die down here, running around like an idiot. Can’t imagine how you’ve lived this long. Let me help you. ”

  “I don’t want any help!” Again, the words were too hard. They scratched against the relative quiet of dripping water, creaking steel, and the patter of a single set of feet.

  Getting closer. A lot closer. And definitely not a ghost.

  Panic crept up Rector’s spine, gripped his neck, and warmed the back of his head. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said to himself.

  The other guy heard him anyway. “Not a bad idea.
Come with me. ”

  “Like hell,” Rector said, and he started to run.

  Three steps into that retreat, he collided with the corner of a building, bounced off, and caught himself just before falling down. His gas mask slid—not far enough to let in any of the toxic air, but one of his lenses had cracked, rendering his left eye’s view a mosaic of confusion. It was hard enough to see when everything was clear, including his head. Now he was half-blind in one eye, his ears were ringing, and he felt a warm, wet trickle of blood dripping down behind his ear.

  He pulled himself together, picked a different direction, and ran that way. He bolted around the offending corner, tore to the right, stumbled on the uneven paving stones, and recovered. Then he ran forward some more, faster, up the hill … because that was the correct direction, wasn’t it?

  “Oh for Pete’s sake,” complained the voice behind him. The voice was still coming, moving on feet that were very light and very fast in comparison to Rector’s.

  He ran on anyway. The blood from his ear soaked the top of his collar and made the leather of his mask feel pulpy where the straps rubbed against the sore spot, but he ignored it. He also ignored the shuffling sounds that reached him over the pounding gong of his own heartbeat and the frantic skips and jumps of his hole-pocked shoes against the street.

  He spied some stairs from the corner of his eye, swiveled on his heel, and climbed them, not knowing where they went and not caring much. All he had to do was get out of the other fellow’s line of sight, far enough away to hunker down and hide.

  One of the stairs cracked beneath his foot and gobbled him up to his shin. He pulled his leg out by his knee, tugging with his hands to extract the boot and keep on climbing.

  He wondered briefly why these stairs were on the outside of a building, then noticed, when the fog parted enough to let him notice anything, that these were interior stairs after all. The building had fallen away, leaving its insides exposed. Flight by flight, he passed big stretches of shattered flooring eaten up by holes. He huffed and puffed upward while hugging the rail, which rattled in his hand and surely wouldn’t hold him if he were to fall. It barely gave him balance enough to keep upright.

  The Seattle city wall loomed up to his left, and that didn’t seem correct. He’d gotten turned around somehow.