The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) (7 page)

Easy-peasy.

He climbed onto the roof’s edge and placed one foot gingerly on the creaking, cracking, splitting boards. Before he could talk himself out of it, he began to run, sending the bridge swinging in the process. He launched himself through the window with such speed that his candle blew out as he landed inside the other space.

Hands on the top of his legs, he bent forward and gasped to catch his breath in the dark of the closed-off room. The only light was what straggled in through the broken window, so he paused to relight the candle, his hands shaking so hard he could barely strike the match.

When he did, he was downright stupidly happy at what he saw.

“This might work after all,” he marveled to himself—and to the ghost, in case the ghost was listening.

He’d entered some kind of storage area, or refueling station, or whatever it was you called a place in an abandoned, destroyed city where you stashed helpful items to make sure you could keep on surviving.

Lined up on pegs against the far wall, Rector found a collection of big canvas satchels with proper straps and everything. Several of them had names stenciled or written on them, but two were unmarked and one of those was empty. Rector took that one. He smushed his candle stub onto the floor and picked its wick free while the wax was still runny. He then untied his blanket and moved its contents into the satchel.

Off to his right, three good oil lamps were keeping one another company. He seized one, filled it up with oil from the bottles that lined a shelf near the satchels, and took an extra bottle for good measure. Now the satchel was so heavy it was a chore to heft it onto his back. But Rector had been too long conditioned by poverty to leave anything useful just lying around for somebody else to find, so if it meant he’d have a sore back for a few days, he’d be all right with it.

He grunted and settled the satchel as best he could. It was definitely easier to hold and carry than the blanket bundle, even as overloaded as it was.

Speaking of the blanket, he didn’t want to leave
that
behind. The June Gloom would linger yet for weeks. He’d need something to keep him warm, and the blanket wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. Bending down and adjusting his center of gravity to keep the satchel from toppling him over, he folded the blanket in half and rolled it up as tight as it’d go. Then he stuffed it through the bag’s straps.

If he could’ve reached his own back, he would’ve patted it.

The lamp in his hand was a rusty contraption left over from when the city was walled off, but it gave far better light than his candle stub and Rector was delighted to have it. Emboldened by the great, glowing halo of the swinging lantern, he surveyed the room and settled on the stairwell as the most obvious path out.

Into the stairwell he stomped, taking strange pleasure in the feel of ordinary stairs beneath his feet. No peculiar boards, beams, or wobbling improvisations to support him—just the regular rhythm of evenly spaced steps leading down in the usual fashion.

The jostling lantern filled the space with a bonfire glow that shook his shadow as he descended.

One story, two stories. Three.

He was on the ground level now; he sensed it before he knew it as a fact.

It wasn’t merely the long hike from the roof, and it wasn’t simply the wider passage or the paths in the dust swept clean by the regular intrusion of feet. It was the way the windows had all been covered. They were sealed with sheets of wood, planks, corrugated tin, and a hundred other scraps of building material that had been scavenged from the city.

Rector exited the stairwell, and held his lantern up and forward. He investigated the nearest amalgam of reinforcement, and was convinced that yes, this had all been accomplished from the inside. Big nail heads jutted from piles of sturdy trash, and braided steel cables were lashed from corner to corner.

Not keeping anything in. Keeping everything
out
.

Rector spoke quietly to himself, since there was no one else to hear him. “They shore up the first floors to keep out the rotters. I get it.” So the rotters couldn’t climb. It was good to know.

He couldn’t tell what the building had been in its original incarnation. A hotel? A bank? A boardinghouse, or other residence? He scanned the scene for some hint but didn’t see one. Every identifying piece of furniture or signage, every useful scrap had been stripped and repurposed from elsewhere.

He stood still and listened, but heard nothing except the lantern’s sizzling wick and his own raspy, warm breath straining through his filters. He ducked back into the stairwell and shoved his lantern out in front of himself as if it were a sword. It led the way farther down, one more flight, and it stopped in a basement.

The basement wasn’t anything more complex than a freshly excavated root cellar. The timbers that held up the weaker points looked like railroad ties, and there were tracks laid down in the mud.

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.