The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) Page 5

  Immediately, his boot slipped on a slick piece of jutting stone. He didn’t slip far, and not too badly … at least, not so wildly that he went careening down forty-odd feet to the street level below, to whatever terrible things prowled down there. He couldn’t see the street itself. Forty feet of Blight and early morning shadow obscured the bottom, which made looking down easier. He saw nothing he could crash-land on, nothing but wispy, filmy clouds that would surely be softer than pillows.

  Rector felt for the wall and fought across the mildew and slime until he found a big enough crack to anchor himself. Carefully, using every remaining bit of his brainpower to balance himself and his bag, he inched forward from the first step to the next, and then to the step beyond it.

  Some of them shook. Some of them wobbled and splintered, sending tiny shards of wood or rock down to the streets below.

  When he stood as still as a statue, catching his breath and feeling the dampness of the stones bleed through his clothing, he heard soft moans and groans coming from somewhere not half so far away as he would’ve liked. He’d never seen a rotter, not up close and personal, and he’d like to keep it that way. But it was hard not to be curious when he was well out of their reach. Maybe the gassy fog would part and he’d catch a glimpse of the shambling dead.

  They wouldn’t see him—not all the way up there. Would they?

  Rector kept moving, swinging one foot in front of the other, using the wall itself as a brace for his shoulder, his bag, and his hips.

  While he climbed, he struggled to recall where he was headed. What was it called again? The place where the tunnel that Zeke took would’ve emerged? Surely he wouldn’t have survived an hour beyond that.

  If Rector had ever even known the name, he couldn’t remember it now.

  But north felt like a good enough direction, so he’d stick to that. There was always a chance, he mused, that the Doornails weren’t as bad as all that. He might be able to ask around, find out if anyone had spotted the body of a boy about his own age, some newcomer who hadn’t made it far. Somebody might know. For all he knew, they might have a place where they put bodies. The dead have to go somewhere, don’t they?

  Yes. They come here.

  He steadied himself and kept moving until the path dropped away in front of him.

  With a gasp, he jerked himself back against the wall, pushing like he could shove himself right through it and back to the Outskirts. Maybe this was all an awful idea. His breath froze in his throat and for a few seconds he couldn’t breathe at all—or didn’t dare to try.

  Then he noticed a ladder continuing his path downward.

  It wasn’t the usual kind of ladder—rungs and sides and whatnot—and it wasn’t a rope ladder like the one he’d climbed to the platform. This ladder was made of iron, and bolted to the side of the wall.

  Rector crouched and reached for the top rung. His bare hands were already warm and reddening with a rash brought on by the Blight, but he ignored the discomfort and tried to give the bar a good, solid grip.

  Gripping was trickier than it sounded. The metal had been coated with … tar? Pitch? Glue? He didn’t know, but it was thick and mucky, and probably intended to work against the corrosive power of the tainted air. And indeed, he could see how some of the bolts without this protective goop were rusting with alarming vigor.

  The metal groaned under Rector’s boot. He pivoted so that he faced the wall, then brushed the side of the ladder with his free hand until he could reach, and lean, and get a good hold.

  With his back to the ruined city, his arms and legs shaking with effort and fear and the unfamiliar posture of the forced vertical … he began to descend.

  As he dropped himself one rung at a time, not knowing what was at the bottom—or how far away that bottom might be—he watched the rusting bolts scroll past his visor. He winced and squeezed tighter as the iron’s covering made his hands gummy; he flinched as the fixtures wobbled in their settings, puffing soft red dust into the yellow air. Finally, after what felt like forever, the ladder came to a stop—giving Rector another fresh infusion of terror when he realized that the rungs had run out, and nothing but open air awaited his dangling foot.

  Now it was time to look down. He did, and he gave a wheezing bark of relief: Below him, just a short hop away … he saw a flat surface.

  With something akin to joy he released his grip on the nasty ladder and spun, dropping himself down. It was farther than it looked, enough to throw off his balance when he hit, landing oddly on one set of toes and the back of his other heel. He stumbled, swore, and recovered—then stood up straight and proud, feeling accomplished for the first time in recent memory. He’d made it to the roof.

  “Now what?” he asked himself, and the words echoed wetly around in his mask. “Got to sort myself out, that’s all. Got to find which way’s north.”

  Rector had spent several years trafficking in maps, and he knew what the city ought to look like. There’d been a big Sanborn survey right before the Boneshaker happened, and the resulting charts told him where all the roads went and what they were called. But those black-and-white diagrams weren’t a whole lot of help when he couldn’t see the streets.

  He thought hard. He could do this.

  All the downtown corners had their intersection names cut into the stone curbs, but Rector concluded, with no small amount of irritation, that he’d have to be sitting right on top of one to see it, much less read it. Still, the wall was at his back. Given where he entered, that meant he was facing east. If he wanted to go north, toward the spot where the old water runoff tunnels came out, he’d have to go left, up the hill and along the wall.

  He walked around the roof in small semicircles, taking in his surroundings and making sure that nothing horrible lurked in any of the corners or shadows. He saw only bits of trash—newspapers wadded and soaked, broken bottles, discarded rags, and a stray shoe.

  He also found a doorway that no doubt led down inside whatever building this was—not that he wanted to go down into the darkness, because he didn’t. But he had a plan again, and it was easier to stick with one plan than figure out a second plan. He opened his tied-up blanket-bag and retrieved a box of matches plus one of the taller candle stubs he’d pilfered on his way out of the orphanage.

  The little candle struggled, flared, and settled into a steady flame that gave him another few feet of sight. It told him that yes, he was right—and no, there was nothing else on the rooftop with him.

  He didn’t really believe in God, but he thanked Him anyway on the off chance it’d do him good to be polite.

  You never know. You might find out, soon enough.

  “Stop it,” Rector hissed at the wispy forms that came and went, billowing and eddying between the roof’s raised corners, and against the wall behind him. “You’re not really there.”

  You’re getting closer. You’d better keep your promise.

  “I’m working on it, ain’t I?” he asked almost frantically, searching the swirling air for some sign of the familiar phantom, and seeing nothing. Except there, perhaps … at the edge of … something. The edge of the roof. His vision. His sanity.

  He shook his head some more, for all the good it did him. He told the ghost, “I’m coming, as soon as I can find you. Why don’t you make yourself useful, and tell me where you are?”

  When he received no answer, he sniffed. The candle danced. “That’s what I thought. Just like a useless kid. Making demands and refusing to help. Hey Zeke, you dummy—think about this, will you? If I die before I reach you, then neither one of us gets any grave except this miserable city.”

  He stepped with defiance toward the doorway, which was raised up out of the roof, and he gave the knob a stern, confident tug.

  It came off in his hand.

  He stood there stupidly, holding the rotted old piece of cheap metal. Then he looked at the hole it’d left and tried to reinsert the thing, in case such a simple act could magically repair it.

  No s
uch luck.

  “Fine,” he said. Maybe that wasn’t the way he was supposed to go anyway.

  Rector set the candle down and gave the door a solid kick, then a second one. His foot connected a third time, and each percussion was louder—the beating of a forlorn drum, banging out a low echo that drove the curdling gas away in fleeing puffs.

  Nothing budged. All right. Time to look for something else. People didn’t come and go from that ladder just to die on the rooftop, now did they? No. No bodies, no bones, no rotters. There was some other way down.

  Methodically, he began a survey of the roof. Pools of water collected and gelled nastily in the places where the surface sagged, but Rector avoided those because he didn’t want his already-filthy socks to suck up anything worse than what they’d already gathered. Every step felt like sneaking through something that was on the very verge of collapse.

  He dragged his free hand along the edge overlooking the street.

  Ah. There. Yes.

  His hand stopped against a plank covered in splinters—no, only partly covered in splinters, and partly covered in peeling, chipping paint that sloughed away at his touch. He held the candle up over this newfound object and discovered that it was affixed horizontally to a space immediately below the edge, where it could be easily seen from the roof.

  “One of them fellows might’ve mentioned this. Might’ve made things easier,” he grumbled. As he examined the plank, he realized that, in fact, it was a collection of doors laid end to end. They’d all been lashed together, braced from underneath, and affixed with guide ropes intended to serve as rails, for all the wonderful good they’d do if this rigged-together bridge were to break. But Rector couldn’t get too upset about that, because that’s what it was—a bridge. A bridge that went straight into the open window of a taller building next door, perhaps thirty feet away. Not far at all. A hop, a skip, and a jump.

  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.