When they had no choice except to speak, they whispered.
“I’ll light the lantern,” Rector breathed. His voice was shaking, and so were his hands.
Equally quietly, Houjin said, “No.” He put a hand on Rector’s arm.
Rector yanked it away. “Why not? It’s getting dark.”
“No, it’s not,” Zeke joined in. “We’re coming up to the wall. We’re in its shadow.”
Looking up, and squinting hard—through his visor, and through the foggy air—Rector could see the great Seattle wall peeking past the thick yellow Blight. It loomed and leaned. It crowded him, all two hundred feet of it, cobbled from stone and mortar and anything solid that had been lying around when it was built.
If he’d had any breath left after riding and climbing and hiking the mile to get there, the view of the wall from here on the inside would’ve taken it all away.
“It’s still dark,” he murmured. “Still can’t hardly see.”
Houjin shook his head. “Wait until later. The light will only bounce off the fog. It’s hard to see out here no matter what you do.”
Zeke nudged Rector’s shoulder and said, “Trust us. We live here,” and he set off toward the wall.
Houjin followed him, calling back to Rector, “Don’t just stand there—we need to stick together.”
“Why’s that?” he asked, but he still hurried to catch up.
His pickax was already heavy; it already slowed him down and made him want to stop walking. Everything felt dense around him: the Blight, the humidity, the oppressive silence. His breathing came harder, and although the ache in his chest had become familiar, it rose up to something sharper. He clasped one hand across his chest and wondered what it meant, this stinging difficulty with every breath.
“Hey fellows, can we slow down?”
“You getting tired?” Zeke asked.
Houjin sighed. “Should’ve changed his filters when I told him to.”
Zeke said, “Rector, get over here by the wall. We’re not up high and safe, but at least you’ll have your back to something.”
Rector almost said, Whaddaya know—Zeke’s got more sense than I gave him credit for, but he restrained himself. And he did go to the wall and back up against it, leaning there partly for support, and partly to feel that big, solid thing at his back. It didn’t feel safe, not exactly. Not at all. But it meant that nothing could sneak up behind him.
One side at a time, he unscrewed the filter portals on his mask and replaced the used filters with clean ones from his pack. His gloved hands fumbled with them, but he refused any help and finally got both of the round charcoal disks properly installed.
The improvement was immediate, but it wasn’t vast.
His chest still hurt when he took a deep breath, and his arms were beginning to feel the stretching sting of having been worked too hard in an unfamiliar fashion, but he’d fixed something himself. “I’m all sorted out. Let’s get moving. We can start off … that way.” Still pressing his back against the wall, he indicated a direction to the right.
Houjin cleared his throat. “I might recommend the other direction.”
“Oh, might you?”
“Another fifty yards that way,” the Chinese boy clarified, “and there’s nothing on the other side of the wall but the Puget Sound.”
Grouchily, Rector argued, “Well, maybe the rotters are headed out to sea.”
“But the rats and raccoons aren’t coming in that way,” he pointed out. “Your first idea—that the animals are coming inside the same way the rotters are getting outside—was a better one. If I were you, I’d stick with that theory.”
“Yeah, it was a pretty good thought.” He worked one finger under the itchiest mask strap and rubbed, figuring he could get away with it since his nails were covered by soft leather. If he felt like being honest with himself, he might’ve admitted that he didn’t have good thoughts every minute of every day, so he ought to stick with the ones that made it through. But he didn’t feel like being honest.
In the minute or two he’d kept his mouth shut thinking about it, he’d begun to hear the soft swish and roll of waves off to his right. “Rector?” Zeke asked, in exactly the same tone you’d use to talk a dog into putting down a bone.
“All right, that’s fine. You two live here, like you keep telling me. We’ll go your way, and see what we can find.”
The fog pooled and collected like snow. It drifted and gusted against the vertically stacked stone and twisted in small eddies; it spiraled and spun in tiny tornadoes that tugged at the boys’ hair and tickled the spots where their clothes didn’t cover their skin. Rector, Houjin, and Zeke moved without speaking, except to double-check that they were all together. Sometimes the air was so thick that they couldn’t keep track of one another unless they held hands. When they seemed to be hiking through a rich cream soup, they would spit one another’s names between their teeth, calling back and forth with as little sound as possible.
Rector dragged his fingers along the hastily erected wall, feeling the contours rise and fall, dip and crumble into a dry mortar crust. He dusted his hands off against his pants and shivered—even though it wasn’t as cold as it had been a few days earlier, it still wasn’t warm. It was almost never warm, and the wall’s imposing shadow drained the tepid sunlight of what little relief it offered. Up above, and somewhere past the boundaries of what they could see through the pallid air, even the flapping wings of the Blight-poisoned birds were sluggish and slow.
“You hear those?” Rector breathed. “Getting closer.”
“I hear ’em,” Zeke replied, so faintly that if Rector had been even another step away, he wouldn’t have heard him.
“I don’t like them.”
“They’re only birds,” Zeke assured him. Then he faced forward and softly called, “Huey?”
“Right here.”
“Thought I’d lost you for a second.”
“Keep up, you two,” Houjin urged.
“How much farther?” Zeke asked.
“A quarter mile?” he guessed. “Then we’ll hit the next drop down into the underground.”
“Are there carts?”
“Yes. Now shhhh.”
“Don’t you tell me—”
Houjin came to a sharp stop and turned around. Zeke ran into him, but bounced back. Huey held out his weapon—not to brandish it, exactly, but to make a point. “Hush! I told you, I hear something.”
Rector was mad, and he was scared, and he didn’t like having a younger kid (or anybody else) put a long metal pole in his face. He smacked the pole away with the back of his hand with a clang. It hurt, and it’d certainly bruise. He wished he hadn’t done it. “I don’t hear anything,” he fussed.
“Wait,” Zeke said, holding out both hands. The hand that held the big fireman’s ax drooped low. “I hear it, too.”
Houjin lowered his pole, pointing the sharp end at a spot barely a foot off the ground. Still in his softest voice, he said, “Coming from down here.”
Zeke readied his ax, holding it down at a similar level and getting ready to swing. “Raccoons?” he tried.
“Could be.”
Rector heard it, too. It scratched against his ears, a hoarse, hushed breathing sound coming from knee level a few yards away. He tried to take comfort from the fact that the breather didn’t sound very big; whatever it was, its inhalations and exhalations came fast and short, like a dog.
But what if it was something worse? Rector braced himself against the wall, which was cold, terribly cold, and a bit damp with condensation. “Could be a little kid,” he said. The words were almost a horrified gasp, squeezed out of his mask and into the open air. “A baby, or something. There are kid rotters, aren’t there? That’s what I heard.”
Neither of his companions responded.
“Where is it?” he asked. His friends didn’t answer that, either.
The question answered itself when the low-lying clouds thinned and stretched, revealing a pair of glimmering gold eyes. The eyes did not glow, but they flashed, flickering like a cat’s, or like any nighttime thing that roams and stalks.
Houjin stayed steadiest. He kept the point of his sharpened bar aimed at the thing’s face. Zeke took up a defensive position at Huey’s shoulder, prepared to swing the huge ax at anything that came close enough to hit, assuming he could lift it off his shoulder.
Rector plastered himself against the slimy wall, his pickax hanging from one hand. It knocked against his thigh. He clutched the weapon higher, up against his chest.
The bright-eyed thing came forward in a slinking crouch. It snarled and slathered as it crept, its joints stiff and its ears flattened. It approached them unhappily, nervously, curiously.
Hungrily.
“Mad dog,” Rector wheezed.
Houjin disagreed. “No. A fox. It’s a Blight-poisoned fox.”
“Never seen one of them before,” Zeke marveled, still arched and primed for battle.
Rector asked, “Is it dead? A rotter fox?”
Zeke shook the ax. “Go on, you. Get out of here.”
Huey said, “Not dead. Real sick, though. The birds fight off the Blight—they live with it. Four-footed things don’t handle it so good.”
The ragged creature paced forward slowly and stopped within a few feet, as if considering what to do. Three people to one small, ill animal … it weighed the odds, and weighed its own hunger. It growled, yipped, and shook its head, but did not retreat.
“You see.” Houjin planted his feet apart, ready to strike if he had to. “It’s thinking. Or it’s trying to. Rotters don’t think.”
Zeke swung the ax in the fox’s general direction. “Get along, you dumb thing. Get out of here. Don’t bother us, and we won’t bother you.”