“Climb?”
“You heard me. Climb. If the rotters are motivated enough they can scale a ladder, but not easily, and not very fast. If you can reach a windowsill or a fire escape, or even just a bit of overhanging concrete… do it. Go up.”
Zeke’s stomach was swishing and filled with lava. “What if we get separated?”
“Then we get separated, and it’s every man for himself, boy. I hate to put it that way, but there you have it. If I get picked off, you don’t come back for me. If I see you get picked off, I ain’t coming back for you. Life’s hard. Death’s easy.”
“But what if we just get split up?”
Rudy said, “If we get split up, same rule: Go up. Make your presence known from whatever rooftop you reach, and if I can, I’ll get you. So really, the number one point is, don’t get far from me. I can’t protect you if you take off like a lunatic.”
“I’m not going to take off like a lunatic,” Zeke sulked.
“Good,” Rudy said.
Back down the corridor the sounds were rising again, and maybe coming closer. If Zeke listened hard he could track an individual voice or two, lifted in rage and sounding ready to retaliate. Zeke felt absolutely sick, both for watching a man die and for knowing he’d had some part in it, even if he’d only stood by and not known what to do. The more he thought about it, the worse he felt; and the more he thought about a city above that was packed with gangs of the lurching undead, the worse he felt about that, too.
But he was in it now, and up to his eyeballs. There was no going back, at least not yet. Frankly, he had no idea where he was anymore—and he couldn’t have left the city on his own accord if he wanted to.
So when the sealed doorway unfastened with a giant gasp, he followed Rudy up through it and into a street that was every bit as bleak and unforgiving as the tunnel below it.
Ezekiel did just like Rudy had told him.
He stayed close, and he stayed quiet. It was easy to do, almost; the silence above was so alarmingly complete that it was easier to keep it than to break it. Once in a while a pair of wings would catch the sky overhead and flap hard, and fast, up above the Blight that filled the walls. Zeke wondered how they did it—how they survived, breathing the poisoned air as if it were the cleanest spring day.
But he didn’t get a chance to ask.
Instead, he almost cuddled up against the injured man who led him onward, and he copied everything he did. When Rudy pressed his back up against a wall and scooted himself along it, Zeke did likewise. When Rudy held his breath and listened, Zeke did the same, choking himself inside the mask and hanging onto every bit of oxygen. He used it up and waited for more until he saw stars flickering across his visor, and then he breathed because he had to.
He couldn’t see more than a few yards in any given direction. The Blight had a density to it, and a color that was somewhere between shit and sunflowers. It was not quite fog, but it was some toxic kin, and it blocked their view as surely as any low-lying cloud.
Around the edges of Zeke’s clothes—at his wrists where his gloves didn’t meet the sleeves, and around his neck where his coat didn’t close all the way—he began to itch. The urge to rub it was tough to fight, but when Rudy caught him dragging his wool-clad knuckles back and forth, he shook his head and whispered, “Don’t. It’ll make it worse.”
The buildings were shapeless stacks in different squared-off heights, and their windows and doors were either broken altogether or boarded and reinforced. Zeke assumed that the boarded-up first floors indicated safe places, more or less, and that if he needed to, he could perhaps get to relative safety if he could find a way inside one. But that was easier to speculate than accomplish. He saw fire escapes here and there—great ironwork tangles of stairs and rails that looked as fragile as doll furniture; and he thought he could climb them if he had to, but then what? Could he break a window and let himself down that way?
Rudy had said there were lights, stashed along the way.
And here was Zeke, already plotting ways to get away from him.
It surprised him to realize that this was what he was doing. He knew no one else in the city at all, and he’d only seen two other people—one of whom Rudy had murdered outright. The other one had tried to murder Rudy. So if Zeke was trying to assign the benefit of a doubt, he supposed that a fifty-fifty shot of getting murdered was a good-enough excuse to get proactive. But that didn’t make it feel any better.
As he towed along in Rudy’s wake, he wondered again about the Chinese man. The contents of his stomach threatened an escape attempt.
No. He wouldn’t have it. Not in the mask. Not when he couldn’t take it off, not without dying. Forget it.
He willed his belly to settle down, and it did.
Rudy ambled forward, his back hunched and his shoulder cringing. He led the way with his cane, which—as Zeke now knew—held only two shots. And what were two shots against a slavering pack of rotters?
He’d no sooner thought of them than he heard, somewhere close, a softly grunted moan.
Rudy froze. Zeke froze behind him.
Rudy’s head swung left to right, up and down, seeking some obvious escape or path.
Rotters? Zeke mouthed, but inside his mask Rudy couldn’t see the lips forming the question, so he didn’t answer.
Another moan joined the first, like a question added to a conversation. It came with a different timbre and a more jagged edge, as if the mouth that made it was no longer complete. After the groans came the footsteps, tentative and slow and so perilously nearby that the fear felt like a boot on Zeke’s chest.
Rudy spun around and grabbed Zeke’s mask, pulling it close to his own and whispering as softly as he could manage. “This road.” He waved a hand at the nearest intersection and pointed down to the right. “Several blocks. Big tower—white building. Climb up to the second floor. Break what you have to.”
Rudy closed his eyes for a full second and then opened them again. He added, “Run for it.”
Zeke didn’t know if he could run for anything. His chest was as tight as if it were wrapped in ropes, and his throat felt like it was wearing a noose tied from a scarf. He looked down the road Rudy indicated and saw almost nothing but a slow, sloping grade that he was nearly certain must dip farther away from the hill he wanted.
Through his head a parade of memorized maps flipped a page at a time, reassuring him that this was the wrong way—but could he run uphill? Where would he go to escape, if not to this tower that Rudy had told him about?
Panic was filling his mask and blinding him, but it didn’t matter. The groans, moans, and shuffling steps were coming closer, and he was confident that soon, very soon, they’d be upon him.
Rudy took off first. Bum hip or no, he could run, but he couldn’t run quietly.
At the slapping of his feet the moans took on a higher, keening pitch, and somewhere in the depths of the fog a press of bodies began to organize. They began to assemble. They began to hunt.
Zeke panted, trying to draw in enough breath to catch himself up or calm himself down. He pointed himself down the hill and took a last look over his shoulder. Seeing nothing but the swirling, grasping fog, he took heart. And he ran.
The streets under his feet were uneven and split, from the earthquake or simply from time and terrible wear. He tripped and recovered, stumbled and caught himself on his hands—which bruised and bumped, but worked like reflexive spiders and threw him back up to his feet. Then he ran some more.
Behind him in the fog he could hear them coming in a rushing tide.
He did not look. He focused hard on the shrugging, pushing figure of Rudy—who was moving ahead, gaining speed, though Zeke didn’t know how. Perhaps the older man was more accustomed to wearing the suffocating masks, or perhaps he was not as crippled as he seemed. Regardless, he was closing in on the white building that rose up suddenly out of the murky air.
Fog crashed against it like waves, as if it were a boulder in the ocean and the tide had come in to stay.
As soon as Zeke could see it, he was nearly on top of it—and this was a problem. He had no idea how to reach the second floor. He didn’t see a fire escape or a set of stairs. He only saw the front entrance—huge tarnished bronze doors that had been barricaded with split logs and chains.
His forward momentum was uncontrollable and unstoppable until he slapped his hands against the structure and forced himself to a halt. The force of his collision ached and stung against his already battered hands, but he used them to feel his way around the boarded windows and their intricate frames, where the stonework wasn’t covered with boards or sheets of metal.
Looking around, he saw no sign of his guide. “Rudy!” he squeaked, too frightened to yell and too frightened to keep silent.
“Here!” Rudy called from someplace out of sight.
“Where?”
“Here,” he said again, much louder because he was right beside Zeke. “Around the side, come on. Hurry up, they’re coming.”
“I hear them. They’re coming from—”
“Everywhere,” Rudy said. “That’s right. Feel that?” He took Zeke’s hand and pushed it up to a ledge somewhere around chest-height.
“Yeah.”
“Up, boy.” He threw his cane over the side and hauled himself up after it, then began to crawl even higher with the aid of an improvised ladder. Zeke could see it, once he knew where to look: It was made of boards and bars bolted directly into the stone.
But it wasn’t so easy for him to get up to that point. He was shorter than Rudy and not as strong; and he was gagging from lack of air and the stink of rubber mixed with leather in every breath he drew.
Rudy reached back and grabbed Zeke’s arm, yanking him bodily up onto the ledge and then pivoting the boy to aim him at the ladder built into the wall. “How fast can you climb?” he asked.
Zeke’s only answer was to scale the wall like a lizard. Once he knew where the handholds were, he trusted them to hold because there was no time to test them one by one. He wedged his feet against the boards and wormed his hands around the bars and climbed. Rudy came up behind him, moving slower. Though he acted comfortable enough in a straight stretch, rising was hard on his hip, and he groused and grunted with every step.