The Inexplicables

They walked down the Chinatown streets, among men who looked at Rector as if he’d just come visiting from the moon. Angeline ignored the small crowd and curious stares, reached over to Zeke, and ruffled his hair with one gloved hand.

Angeline said, “This boy here, his granddaddy was the sheriff back then. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.”

Rector nodded. “Maynard.”

“Right. I told him what’d happened, and he came out to my daughter’s home one night. We hunted for some kind of proof that Joe had been the one to do her in, but we never turned up nothing between us.” She sighed and stuffed her hands into her pockets. “And I knew Maynard was right. He couldn’t bring charges against Joe just on account of I said he was bad. It was my word against … against everybody’s.”

She paused. “Still, I appreciated the sheriff taking the time. He didn’t have to, and don’t I know it.”

“So … what happened to…”—Rector picked up on the name—“… Joe? Nothing?”

“A couple of years after the Blight, my no-good son-in-law picked a different name and came to live down here. He hired a right-hand man, a Chinese fellow named Yaozu—you must know of him. Yaozu tried to stop me from killing him, but he couldn’t. He stabbed me, though, and left me a bad scar. Between ’em, Joe and Yaozu wreaked a lot of havoc, as Miss Lucy might say.” She finished up fast, then changed the subject. Oh look, there’s Ruby’s,” she said, indicating an open door flanked by two open windows—glassless, like all the rest. From inside the establishment came a rush of steam, bearing with it the odors of unfamiliar food sizzling on a grill.

Rector said, “I thought there weren’t any women in Chinatown. Who’s Ruby?” but no one answered him.

Angeline went to order their food. When she returned, she sat on the bench and leaned forward over the table, her knees splayed and her fingers folded together. “Boys,” she began in a conspiratorial tone, “I want to run something past you, and I don’t want you to spread it around. Understand?”

Huey and Zeke nodded vigorously, but in Rector’s case, it was more tentative. After all, it depended on what she was going to tell them. There was always the chance he’d need to share it with his boss. Unless he didn’t go back to the Station … although he had a good idea that that wasn’t an option. Well. He’d see what he could do about that.

“Good, good. You’re good boys, I’m quite certain,” she said, flicking only a hint of a glance at Rector. “But other people might think it’s a little nuts. And by ‘other people’ I mean the Doornails and the rest of the white folks. Huey, I can’t say about you and yours.” She unfolded her fingers and placed her hands flat on the table before them. “Rector, Huey, I think you saw something that ain’t human. Something that weren’t never human. Something inexplicable, to use the word the Station men are throwing about. A monster, but not a monster.”

Rector said, “I don’t get it.”

She fished around for the right words, and upon finding them, she laid them out carefully.

“Imagine that none of you boys had ever seen a bear before. Now, if I told you there are bigger bears than the ones we got here—up in Alaska they have ’em twice the size of an outhouse—you’d believe me, maybe. Wouldn’t you?”

“Kodiaks!” Houjin exclaimed. “I’ve heard about them.”

“So imagine you didn’t know what a bear was, but you were out in Alaska, looking for gold or some fool adventure. And say a Kodiak popped up out of the woods, stood up on his back feet, and came right for you. If you didn’t know what a bear was beforehand, and if you survived the meeting, you’d run home and tell people you’d seen a monster, wouldn’t you?”

Solemnly, Zeke said, “Yes, ma’am, I believe I would.”

She continued. “But a Kodiak isn’t a monster—it’s nothing but a big ol’ bear, as natural as the sun rising in the morning. But no one sees Kodiaks much, because there’s never been too many of them. And the same applies here. My own people have been in this land for more years than you folks have been keeping history, and even we—”

Houjin interrupted, pointing at Rector and Zeke. “Longer than their history, maybe.”

“Oh, all right—I don’t know how long they’ve been writing books in China. But my people have been here an awful long time, and we barely know a thing about these creatures. But when we talk about them, they’re called ‘the elder big brothers.’”

“Elder … big brothers?” Rector repeated slowly.

“Yes, yes. Elder big brothers. That’s what their name means in Duwamish. Sometimes they’re called ‘sasquatch’ for short. The sasquatch are shaped something like you and me, but they’re covered toes-to-top in hair, just like the hair I picked up back in the alley, and they’re an awful lot bigger than men tend to grow.”

Houjin peeked over at the counter, but didn’t see their food yet. He chewed on his bottom lip. “That’s why you call them big brothers. They look like us, but they’ve been here longer than we have.”

“Right. Now, I think a sasquatch has gotten inside the wall, same as those foxes and raccoons. That’s what we’re looking for. And finding him won’t be easy.”

Before she could add anything else, Houjin’s spine stiffened, and one of his fingers shot into the air. “You know what this reminds me of?”

Rector was dumbfounded. “It reminds you of something?”

“In China, there is something like it that lives in the mountains. It’s called the Kang Admi. The Snow Man.”

Rector sniffed. “She didn’t say anything about snow.”

“They call him that because he lives in the mountains. I’ve heard him called ‘yeti,’ but it’s like you said, Miss Angeline … no one ever sees him. I don’t know how many people believe, and how many people pass it around because they like a good story.”

“Yeti, huh?” she mused. “We’ve sure enough got mountains here, don’t we? Not so much snow this far down against the ocean, but still. Same principle—a big hairy thing shaped like a person, living in high rocks.”

Zeke picked at what was left of the paint on the table. It peeled away in chips, lodging under his fingernails. “Maybe it’s the same thing,” he suggested. “Or maybe they’re cousins, of a kind.”

Someone called out from the counter and Houjin leaped up. “Food!” he announced, and before anyone could offer to help, he darted off to collect it.

When everything had been brought over, he dove in with a pair of sticks the size and shape of pencils. When he noticed Rector looking at him with utter bafflement on his face, he said, through a mouthful of noodles, “What? I brought forks for you people.” He used one stick to point down at the table, where three battered metal forks were wrapped together in a cloth.

Angeline retrieved a fork and flicked one toward Rector, who picked it up and used it to poke at the contents of his plate.

“Eat it,” Zeke urged him. “It’s good, and it’s hot. Hot food doesn’t come easy in the Vaults. We don’t have vents there—at least, none as good as the ones they got here.”

Rector wanted to believe him. It’d been a long time since he’d had a plate of hot food in front of him, and it’d be a shame to waste it. He scooped up a bite, held it under his nose, and shoveled it into his mouth. Chewing slowly, he tasted something sharp and salty—and something green, a vegetable he didn’t recognize. The second bite had more of the same, plus at least two other unfamiliar sources of crunchiness, and by the third bite he didn’t care anymore. He just ate.

Houjin ate more slowly (he could eat faster, Rector thought, if he’d put down those stupid sticks), and continued to grill Angeline about the sasquatch. “What will we do if we find it? Should we bring guns? Should we bring one of the men from the Vaults, or someone from Chinatown?”

Rector thought Huey might’ve been contemplating a suggestion Angeline wouldn’t have liked—that is, bring in someone from the Station—but he didn’t say so, and the princess shook her head, anyway. “No, we shouldn’t bring no guns. We don’t want to hurt this thing.”

“We don’t?” Rector paused mid-bite, his mouth hanging open. “Because I tell you what, it definitely wanted to hurt me.”

“Did it?” she asked. “Or was it confused, and sick, and scared? It followed you, and that’s all we can say for sure,” she said stubbornly. “Fellows, the sasquatch are few and far between. We can’t kill one. We have to try and save it.”

It was Houjin’s turn to be appalled. “Save it? We can’t save anything that breathes the Blight.”

“Why not? Just because no people have ever survived it, that don’t mean nothing else can recover.”

Zeke smiled optimistically at the princess. “Like that fox? You think we could save the other things that get inside, too?”

“Maybe,” she told him. “I sure would like to think so.”

Rector had concerns. He finished his next big mouthful and said, “I thought that if you get bitten by anything that’s Blight-sick, you have to cut off whatever it was they chomped on. Even if we had some way to save the sasquatch, and even if we let it loose … wouldn’t it go running ’round the woods biting other sasquatches?”

Angeline shrugged and looked down at her plate. “I don’t have any idea, but I’d like to give it a chance. We know the rotters can’t be saved or fixed, but we also know the crows do just fine, and the foxes and raccoons get mean, but they don’t die. We should try to catch something small; a rat, or even a fox like the one you saw. We could put it in one of the empty rooms in the Vaults. Give it some clean air and clean food. See if it gets any better.” ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">