“I’ve seen those. I know what you mean.”
“Or maybe streetcars. Not diesel ones like Texas makes—there isn’t anywhere for the exhaust to go; it’d make everyone sick. But maybe something crank powered. The neighborhoods aren’t very far apart, but if you’re injured or carrying something, it’s a hard hike. And we can’t have horses and carts down here, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Rector echoed. Then he wondered aloud, “Wait, why not? Any special reason, other than that horses don’t like living underground?”
Houjin paused and considered this. “Horses don’t do stairs very well. And no one wants to clean up all the shit, and it’s hard enough to feed people, let alone horses. Anyway, the Blight is funny, what it does to animals.”
“It kills them, don’t it? Same as people?”
If a good idea was fuel to make Houjin run, then a good question served as the brakes. He stood stock-still, and Rector could almost see the gears turning between his ears. “That’s hard to say. I don’t think anyone’s ever studied it, like a scientist counting birds or drawing plants. But it’s definitely different. Take the birds, for example.”
“The birds?”
“The crows. We have hundreds, maybe thousands, inside the walls. Their eyes turned a funny color—a weird shade of orange, kind of like your hair. But other than that, they seem all right. And the rats … we used to have rats, but the Blight kept them from making baby rats, or that’s what Dr. Minnericht said. So after a couple of years, there were no more rats.”
“Weird,” Rector observed.
The hike down to the kitchen was hard, but Rector made it without too much wheezing—then realized upon arrival that he was so appallingly hungry that he could scarcely eat anything at all. It was an unusual sensation for someone who’d spent his life leaning against the edge of hunger, and he wondered if this wasn’t a case of simply being too tired to eat.
He ate anyway.
In the large, carefully lit kitchen he gnawed on salmon jerky while Houjin rifled through the drawers, cabinets, and boxes for foods which would be good for somebody on the road to recovery. A great deal of dried fruit was on the menu—mostly apples and berries—but there were also cloth-wrapped hunks of bread, and a knifeful of fresh butter that tasted so good it made his eyes water. And he found his jar of pickles too, already opened but mostly full.
As he nibbled, he listened to Houjin natter on about the comings and goings of the underground, and the Doornails, and the residents of Chinatown, and Yaozu’s men, who clustered around the old King Street Station. Rector knew he would only retain fragments of what he heard, but he didn’t mind; it was nice to have an excuse to be quiet and think about things he dare not say aloud.
First and foremost: Zeke was alive. So had there ever been a ghost?
He narrowed his eyes and chewed thoughtfully, pretending to listen. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen or heard from the ghost since waking up. Granted, that was less than an hour of ghost-free awake-time, but still, it felt significant.
A brief, spontaneous thought flew out of his mouth, interrupting whatever anecdote Houjin was passing along. “Hey, how long was I out cold?”
Houjin paused mid-sentence, calculated, and said, “It’s been four days since you fell down the chuckhole.”
“Four days,” he mused. Four days without sap. It was the longest he’d been sober in ages, and he wanted some now, but not with the same god-awful fervor as before. It felt more like a routine he wanted to indulge, or a habit he merely missed. It didn’t feel like a gaping hole that ate his chest and his brain like a flame chewing through paper. Rector wasn’t the very picture of health, that was for damn sure, but he had to admit there was a certain feeble glimmer of clarity—a candle’s worth of awareness—that was catching hold, and his thoughts were lining up more easily, more cleanly.
By the light of this new and unfamiliar awareness, he recalled something else that made him shudder. He blurted out another question. “When I fell down the chuckhole, I was running away from something, wasn’t I? Something was chasing me.”
Houjin carefully masked his emotions so that Rector could barely see his uncertainty while he thought about his response. He sure did a lot of that: thinking before talking. Given how much talking he did, it made you wonder how fast his brain worked.
“You were running, yes. And I saw … something.”
“Oh, don’t give me that. You saw it, plain as I did,” Rector asserted, despite the fact that he hadn’t seen anything plainly. He’d heard it, and sensed it, and even smelled it—or he fancied he did, despite the gas mask. When that foul, dank breath had come so close to his skin he thought he’d die from fright, the odor had oozed like wet dog and moldering pine needles. Like dirty feet and sour water.
Houjin hemmed and hawed. “Well, you have to understand … there are many dangers inside the wall. Many things that will chase you, and try to hurt you.”
“Rotters. I’ve heard about them, and I heard some scraping around. Never actually saw any. But this wasn’t a rotter, what I was running from.”
“No, it must’ve been a rotter.”
“Couldn’t have been,” Rector argued. “Rotters were people once, weren’t they? And they don’t grow, after they’ve gone all dead and rotty.” Or so he assumed.
“No, they don’t grow. And yes, they were people first.”
“That thing that chased me was bigger than a person.”
This gave Houjin an idea. He brightened. “Not necessarily. Captain Cly, he’s much bigger than a regular man.”
“You think your Captain Cly chased me and tried to kill me? Because I don’t, and I haven’t even met the guy. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. And it wasn’t ever human,” he said with certainty. “You saw it, too. You already admitted you did, so don’t go taking it back, now.”
“But there’s the fog, and the Blight—it’s so hard to see anything that isn’t right in front of your face. All I saw was a shadow, coming up behind you. And yes, it was big, but…”
“What was big?”
Both boys jumped as if they’d been shocked. They turned to see a slender female figure in the doorway. Her hair was almost solid silver, and she wore it long down her back, but tied in a leather thong. She was Indian, Rector could see that at a glance, and he guessed she must be old enough to be somebody’s grandmother, but she didn’t look ready for a rocking chair. Everything about her was efficient and tough, from the fit of her clothes, which he guessed had once belonged to a man, to the rifle slung over her back.
Tough or no, she greeted Houjin with a toss of her head and a grin, saying, “Hey there, boy. Found yourself some company, I see. Where’s your usual shadow?”
“His mother wanted him over at the fort. I don’t know what for. This is Rector,” Houjin declared. “Rector, this is Miss Angeline.”
“Ma’am,” he acknowledged.
“Huey pulled you out of the chuckhole, didn’t he?”
“Yes, ma’am, that was me.”
She laughed. “Those damn holes. Half of them are older than the wall. Hit your head up good, I heard.”
“Yes, ma’am.” When in doubt, stay polite; that was Rector’s policy.
Miss Angeline came into the kitchen and helped herself to some of the salmon jerky, then pulled a bag off her shoulders and dumped its contents on the counter. “Picked up some cherries down south a bit, past where the Blight makes them taste funny. I ate some on the way here, but you kids are welcome to whatever’s left.”
“Thank you, Miss Angeline!” Houjin jumped off his stool and helped himself to a handful. He offered a few to Rector, who accepted, then told the native woman, “It’s funny, right before you got here we were talking about just that—the chuckhole, and how Rector got there.”
“Running through the dark in the Blight, I gotta assume.”
“Yes, but running from something strange,” he replied, every word dripping with conspiracy. “Tell her, Rector.
Tell her what you saw.”
“Neither one of us saw it too good. As you were saying.”
“Rotters?” she guessed.
Rector shook his head. “No, not rotters. Something bigger, and something that still had some brains in its head. It didn’t just chase me, Miss Angeline.” Rector relayed the rest quickly, and with a shiver he hadn’t expected. “It stalked me.”
Silence fell between the three of them. Rector gazed nervously at Miss Angeline, trying to figure out if she thought there was any truth to his story. She was thinking about it, which he appreciated. In his experience, ninety-nine people out of a hundred would dismiss any given claim out of hand when it came from someone like him.
She asked, “You said it still had some brains. How could you tell?”
It’d been an impression, really. An understanding he’d reached at some point, but when? Oh, yes, now he remembered. “It figured out which way I was running, and it got ahead of me.”
She nodded. “Might’ve been thinking. Then again, maybe it was too big to follow the way you were headed. How big was it?”
“Big,” Rector said passionately, if uselessly. He attempted to clarify. “Bigger than a person, but smaller than … than … smaller than an elk.”
“Is an elk the biggest thing you ever set eyes on?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Huh. Mind you, bigger than a man and smaller than an elk—that could be Captain Cly.”
Houjin grinned. “That’s what I said, too.”
“Not that I think he’d come after you,” she was quick to add. “Huey, you saw this thing, too?”
Houjin replied around a mouthful of blush-colored cherries. “Saw it about as good as he did, through the fog, and the Blight. I don’t know what it was.”
“But you don’t think it was a rotter.”
“No,” he said. Then, with more confidence, “No, it wasn’t a rotter. It was shaped different. Arms were longer, and legs were shorter. It … it’s hard to describe. Do you believe us?”
“Do I believe you? A bit, mostly because the thing you described reminds me of something. Not something very likely, so don’t get your hopes up, but let me look into it. We can talk about it later.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rector said, more disappointed than he cared to admit. It was nice that she hadn’t called him a liar outright, but it would’ve been nicer if she’d simply said, Oh sure—that’s something I know all about, and you’re not a loony case or anything.
After Angeline left, Houjin and Rector munched quietly on the cherries, each lost in his own set of thoughts. Finally, there was nothing left between them but a pile of pits and stems, which Houjin swept away with his palm.
“You want to go find Zeke?” he asked, spitting the last pit into his hand, then tossing it over his shoulder.
“Sure,” Rector said. But the more he thought about it, the less sure he was.
Eight
The meal made Rector feel almost human again, which was good, because Houjin intended to show him every single sight in the underground at top speed. Rector tried to keep up, and he tried to respond when a response was called for; but the underground was full of stairs. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Surely thousands of them, maybe just in the Vaults alone. And since people don’t just fall their way underground, unless they’re being chased by long-armed monsters and happen to land in a chuckhole, the residents put in stairs. That was fine—even sensible—but Rector would’ve given anything to stumble upon one of the “elevators” Houjin mentioned in passing. Apparently there had been hydraulic lifts installed in King Street Station. They sounded wonderful.
“So where are we going, again?” Rector asked, trying to keep the gasping out of his voice as he followed behind Houjin, his cane adding an extra beat to the rhythm of his pace.
Houjin, thereby reminded of his slower companion, dragged his footsteps back to a more followable level and replied, “Fort Decatur. Zeke’s supposed to be helping Captain Cly, but he’s more likely getting in the way. Given his druthers—did I say that right? That’s how people say it, isn’t it, druthers?—he’d be off with Miss Mercy making the rounds, but his mother said he had to give that poor woman a break from his company, so he’s off to the fort.”
“Miss Mercy … the nurse, right?”
“Right. She’s twenty-four, and Sheriff Wilkes says that’s too old for Zeke, but Zeke follows her around anyway, pretending to have an interest in medicine.”
“Pretending?”
“As long as he makes himself useful, Miss Mercy doesn’t mind him. But it’s pretty obvious,” Houjin declared, reaching up for a large lever beside a big round door, “that she doesn’t like him half so much as he likes her. Hey, put your gas mask on.”
“Are we almost outside?”
“Almost. You’re all right running around under the city, most places. But not topside.”
Houjin pulled the lever and heaved his full weight onto the huge round door, shoving it outward. It slipped on perfectly quiet hinges that moved without a squeak. The door looked far too large to be moved by someone so small, but something about the angles let it swing open despite the imbalance.
“Follow me,” the kid prompted, taking a mask out of some pocket Rector hadn’t noticed.
Rector fished his own mask out of his satchel, then mumbled, “Hey, this isn’t mine. Mine got all busted up.”
“I know. That’s one of mine. Put it on.”
“Like I’ve got a choice.”
“Everyone has a choice.”
As Rector climbed up the last set of stairs (he hoped), he watched the other boy slip the mask over his face with the practiced ease of someone who did this a dozen times a day, every day. With somewhat more difficulty, Rector put his on, then went over the threshold, joining Houjin outside the vaults.
The scenery wasn’t terribly interesting—there was just a dark roof made of earth and reinforced timbers where the sky ought to be. Basement walls and building foundations disappeared upward like ordinary building fronts without windows, and the streets between them were packed and damp. The walkways were littered with barrels and buckets, stones, brooms, tracks, bricks, ladders, bird skeletons, rusting junk, and handwritten signs that advertised directions or left messages.
Houjin scanned those messages, some of which were written in Chinese, and shrugged to indicate that none of them were directed at him. “Let’s go,” he urged, his voice muffled by the filters.
Already, Rector hated the masks. They were uncomfortable and tight, and they made it hard to see and breathe.
Houjin used his foot to shove the door closed once more, locking it with a loud, low clank and pop. He explained, “It’s easier to shut it than push it open. Are you ready?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” He might’ve been grinning behind that mask, but Rector didn’t like it.
“Your first trip into the city didn’t go so great, that’s all.”
“The second time’s a charm.”
“I thought that was the third time.”
Rector sniffed, and caught a whiff of a sour mixture of charcoal, sweat, and mildewing leather. “Once in a while I get a second chance. I’m never lucky enough for a third.”
Down short, meandering paths and around crumbling corners, he stuck close to Houjin, who knew his way around as if he had a map burned into his brain. Rector tried hard to pay attention, to note his surroundings and let his internal map keep track of them. Sometimes he thought he had a handle on it, but other times he was sure he couldn’t have found his way back to the Vaults without a native scout and a fistful of cash.
“This place is a rabbit warren,” he complained, holding his side. “Hey, can we slow it down a little?”
“Sure. Sorry. We’re almost to the top, anyway. Catch your breath.”
“We’re near the fort?”
Houjin said, “Practically under it. I didn’t want to take you the overhead way. You were griping about the stairs, so I thought this wo
uld be easier. One more set, and then a ladder. But that’s all for now, I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
Rector wondered why they’d worn their masks underground all this way, but then he noticed the tumbled walls and sunken places in the ceiling. The city was settling around them, on top of them. Slowly, he assumed—but surely. Inevitably. But for now, that dim, worrying thought was mostly tamped down or drowned out by another dim, worrying thought: Zeke was alive. And he was nearby.
Rector found himself stalling without really knowing why.
“Tell me about this fort,” he started to request, but Houjin had already gone ahead.
“Right up here. Come on!” He made a show of climbing the stairs slowly, to let Rector catch up. At the same time, it was clear that the Chinese boy was impatient. He was probably always impatient with people who were slower than him. If that was the case, Rector thought the kid must spend a great deal of time frustrated out of his gourd.
One more door waited—a double-wide portal that slid sideways on a track. Long, loose flaps of rubber were fastened around its edges, and these retreated stickily. “They’re seals,” Houjin explained. “We need new ones on this door, but the rest of the block needs some maintenance before new seals will do any good.”
So that answered one question: why the extra caution was in order.
Now to answer another one. The big one.
Now to confirm for himself that he hadn’t been haunted by some scrappy kid he’d once known, because that kid wasn’t dead.
He did his best to hide his creeping, almost choking reluctance. He didn’t want Houjin to know how badly he feared confirming the truth—that his own mind had been toying with him all this time. So he did his best to scramble up in the other boy’s wake, making a fumbling mess of it, but getting up to the surface all the same.
Houjin indicated a ladder that had been nailed, braced, and repeatedly affixed to a wall that didn’t seem overly inclined to hold it. “The captain says we’re putting in stairs here, soon. But for now, this is all we have. After you.” He gestured grandly.
The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) Page 8
