The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) (26 page)

“Why didn’t they just wait for new dead people?” Rector asked.

“They were moving the old boneyard, making way for businesses and such. I even planned for a plot at the new place, thinking I’d be here forever. And my girl’s there, so I figured I’d stay with her. But the wall cuts through that new cemetery full of old folks—slices it right in half.” She fell silent for a moment, then said, “She’s just outside the city, now.”

“But there’s a park?” Zeke prodded her.

“Oh, sure. It was supposed to be a real nice one, if they ever got it finished. But the fellow who was working on it also had work in New York City, so he took his own sweet time dealing with us. I don’t know if the place was finished by the time the wall went up … but
most
of it…” She took a few steps and peered at the wall from another angle, then assessed it from a third position. “Most of it ought to be inside the wall here, and real close by. Huey, you said the park was at Fourteenth Street?”

“Yes, ma’am. I saw it on a map once.”

“We just passed Twelfth Street, so we ain’t got far to go. You boys think you can handle another two blocks?”

Without hesitation, they each said, “Yes, ma’am!”

“All right, then, let’s look. And same rules apply, you hear? We hit trouble, you three run like the devil knows your name.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they agreed with somewhat less enthusiasm.

“So long as we’re clear on that. I think we’ll have the best luck if we dodge the rubble this way, and go around—”

She stopped, and in the sudden silence the boys heard the tumbling, rattling, and pinging of falling rocks.

Everyone stood still, and no one breathed.

The rocks were small and they spilled down like a stream, just a trickle for the moment. Rector’s voice shook as he said, “It’s the wall. It’s going to come down on our heads, ain’t it?”

But Angeline put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Wait,” in her quietest whisper. She was looking up—they were all looking up—but her eyes were tracking something Rector couldn’t see. He tried to chase her gaze, but saw nothing except for the cornstarch-colored air.

When the pebbles started falling again, Angeline’s eyes darted to their source, narrowing as they did. “Boys…” she said, and how she fit so much warning into four letters, Rector would never know.

“I see it,” Houjin told her. He retreated a few feet and kept his face aimed skyward. “It’s moving, back and forth.”

“Where?” Zeke asked.

Rector echoed him. “Yeah, where? I don’t see anything.” But he could
hear
something, and it worried him. The scuttling patter of sliding rocks came with a structure, a rhythm. A pace, like uncertain footsteps. His chest clenched with fear, and without meaning to, he drew himself up closer to Angeline. “Is it the monster?”

“Not a monster,” she reminded him gently.

He fought the urge to press his back against hers, and he struggled against the impulse to run for cover. He couldn’t see the thing, but he could sense it. Did it remember him? Would it come for him again?

He didn’t want to look; he couldn’t help but look. So when a gust of high wind stretched and broke the stringy yellow air, he gasped, pointed, and stumbled backwards.

“Settle yourself, Red.”

Zeke gasped, too, only just now joining them. “It’s … it’s … that’s not a person!” he squeaked.

Angeline’s words were level and calm. “No, not a person.”

“Not a person,” Rector repeated, saying it like a mantra. “Not a person.” He hadn’t been nuts. It hadn’t been a person who’d scared him half out of his skin and chased him into the chuckhole. “Not a person; never a person. And, oh God…” His stomach sank, tying itself into a complicated sailor’s knot. “It’s right on top of us!”

But the princess said, “No,” and squeezed the back of his neck.

Her strength astonished him, though it shouldn’t have. He’d been climbing through the city with her for two days, after all; it shouldn’t be a surprise that her grip was as firm as the nuns at the orphanage. He wanted to turn and run, but her hand was steady, and he had a feeling that it’d yank him back like a dog on a leash if he tried.

The creature up on top of the wall moved slowly from side to side, pacing back and forth. It maneuvered deftly along the blast-loosened bricks. And as the fog parted and congealed, the elongated, person-shaped creature watched them.

“She sees us,” Angeline declared softly.

Zeke’s eyes crinkled into a frown. “She?”

“I believe so.” The princess turned to Rector and said, “I think I know what’s happening here. She ain’t sick, you see? She ain’t coming down inside. She’s smarter than that. She knows what’s here.”

“Then what’s she doing up
there
?” Rector wanted to know.

“She’s looking for the thing that jumped on you, Red. Dollars to dice, he’s her mate.”

Rector watched hard as the long-limbed, hair-covered creature up above—which looked almost tiny, all the way up there—came and went, out of focus. Moments later, as the fog twisted into a knot, it vanished.

More rocks and dried mortar came skittering down; and when the low-lying cloud cleared again, the wall was unoccupied. No leggy, shaggy thing glared down, and no more debris rained down, either.

Whatever it was, it was gone.

Rector let out his breath in a long, shaky shudder. He hadn’t even noticed he’d been holding it.

The princess released her grip on the back of his neck and patted him there, as if to reassure him. “She’s headed back to the woods for now, I expect. I don’t know if we can help her or not, but at least now we know what we’re up against.”

Zeke kicked at a fallen rock. It tumbled into a pile of bricks and was still. “I got a fairly good look at her, and I
still
don’t know what we’re up against.”

“Oh, you silly things. Right now, she’s not the worst of our problems. Let’s swing by the park before we call it a day. I’d hate to get so close and not even see our biggest one.”

Nineteen

The boys agreed to stop by the park, and after a brief pause to change their gas-mask filters, they followed Angeline farther up the hill. All the way along the edge of Seattle the fractured wall kept them company, looming off to their left and casting a mighty black shadow. The rest of the way, it was as solid as ever.

Houjin breathed hoarsely into his mask and muttered, “It could be worse. I only see the one hole.”

“Yeah, but it’s a
big
one,” Zeke said, and in the muffled silence Rector heard how worried he was.

The princess said, “It’s fixable.”

“How can you be so sure?” Rector asked.

“Because the wall was buildable in the first place. Now hush up, all of you. We’re here.”

A long row of tattered hedges reared up before them, skeletal and sad. What few leaves remained were withered and brown. No doubt they’d once been cut into tremendous blocks and lovingly pruned to keep their shape. Now they were as ghastly and lifeless as an ironwork fence gone to rust. But they marked a boundary, and Rector made a note of it.

Angeline led the way, pushing through the brittle flora, which crunched in pitiful snaps. The twigs were as light as dust, and they fluttered to the ground to join the nasty mulch where everything else had fallen.

And on the other side they saw more dead things—larger dead things. Trees that had once been mighty were now reduced to crumbling trunks, and the odd monument or piece of statuary had gone streaked and pitted from prolonged exposure to the gas. To the left they saw curving walkways with seams that had succumbed to rubble, and a large round pond with nothing inside it but a yellow-black muck. They noticed signs that had gone unreadable, the paint blistered to illegibility and the colors bleached to an ugly gold. Running through all this wreckage were paths that were once graceful, veering prettily between patches of manicured lawns and gardens, and were now uniform in their unkempt ugliness—though they retained their expensive, precise shapes. Nothing could grow in the Blight gas, and therefore nothing became overgrown. It could only rot where once it had thrived.

In the center of all this cheerless, colorless misery, a tremendous structure jutted from the center of a circular path. At first glance it blended into the wall, which ran a few yards behind it. “What’s that?” Zeke asked.

He was too loud, and Angeline shushed him. But she answered as she gathered them to her like a mother hen. “This way, boys. Stay close to the wall. Zeke, that’s the old water tower they was building when the Blight came. It’d look bigger if it weren’t standing in front of the wall.”

The tower looked plenty big enough. Perhaps half the wall’s height, the water tower was a cylindrical, very tall turret made of bricks and capped with a metal roof like a boy’s hat. The roof was rusting, and red-rimmed holes both large and small were eating their way through the original material, but Rector could see that someone had tied flaps of canvas down over one pitted segment. Another large sheet hung loose, having lost its moorings. It flapped against the building like a ghost clapping slowly.

From within the smooth brick tower came the noises of men at work.

Rector picked out snippets of conversation and the occasional hoot of laughter. He heard heavy things being lugged and lighter things being thrown, or hit. He detected metal on metal, and the scrape and whine of wooden crates being shoved about and pried open, their nails squeaking against the wood that held them.

Spiraling up the tower ran a series of tall windows, too narrow for a man to crawl through but big enough to let light inside. Now they let light
out,
and beneath the rust-ragged cone that topped the structure, the brilliant electric buzz of man-made bulbs and high-powered lanterns made the top floor glow.

At the tower’s base, a white-painted gate had been left unfastened.

Rector watched Angeline out of the corner of his visor. She was eyeing that gate, and he knew she was probably calculating the value versus the trouble of pulling it open and investigating.

She caught him watching her and she winked. “Don’t worry. I won’t go for a climb without you.”

“Stairs?” Houjin asked, keeping his chatter to a minimum for once.

“Stairs. Spirals of them, bottom to top. There’s two ways in, I believe. The one you see right in front of us, and one on the other side.” She was still thinking about it. Rector knew the look of someone weighing a bad idea, and knowing it was a bad idea, and thinking maybe it wasn’t the worst idea in the world—all evidence to the contrary.

But she was as good as her wink and her word. Maintaining their best efforts at utter quiet, the four of them edged back behind the tower, between it and the wall.

There, the shadows were thicker than the fog, and it felt like night.

Rector shivered, but hid it by adjusting his satchel. “Now what do we do?” he asked. In truth, he wanted to go back to the Vaults. Badly. He itched all over, gloves and long sleeves and tall socks be damned; and his ribs were on fire from the stress of breathing so hard through such sturdy filters as the ones he now kept in his mask.

“I just want to watch. Just a few minutes,” she told them.

From their new vantage point, they could see both entrances. They were closer to the “front,” but it’d be difficult for anyone to leave the tower via the other door without walking past them, so Rector felt like they had everything covered. Apparently Miss Angeline did, too. She crouched down and urged them all to do likewise, squatting behind the detritus of old gardening equipment and the rubble of decorative benches that had never been assembled.

Soon the clang of footsteps on metal echoed through the tower and oozed out with the fog-diffused light. Then they heard a crunch and a loud stream of profanity, followed by, “We need to fix these goddamn stairs!”

“What do you expect? They’re metal. The gas is hard on metal.”

“So we should replace ’em, or repair ’em.”

“Or you should be more careful.”

“Go to hell.”

“This isn’t it?”

The front gate slammed open, ricocheting against the tower and kicking up a puff of dust that might have been brick and might’ve been rust. A man emerged, stomping and waving his right leg as though it was hurt and he was trying to shake off the pain. The gate’s metal bars cracked and creaked on their hinges, and as the portal slowly rocked shut, a second man pushed it open again.

“You all right?”

“I’ll survive. Went straight through the stairs, did you see that?”

“You did it right in front of me.”

“Stop being so all-fired smart, would you?” He patted down his leg, and Rector saw that his pants were torn and there was a smear of blood above his ankle. The man was not badly injured, and he knew it, but nobody liked to have an open cut outdoors where the Blight could get to it. He planted the hurt foot down on the ground and stood up straight, looking around.

The four voyeurs all ducked down lower, not that it mattered. What their position didn’t hide, the wall’s shadow obscured well enough.

“Where’s Otis? Ain’t he supposed to be here by now?”

“What time is it?”

“Don’t know. My watch stopped working yesterday. The gas seeped inside it and rotted out the innards.”

“Son of a bitch, this place is miserable. Can’t believe anybody lives here—I don’t care how much money there is to be made.”

The man with the bloodied pants leg snorted. “If you really didn’t care, you wouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t plan to move inside and set up a homestead. I’m not a goddamn fool. And I don’t know if Otis’s late or not, but he might be. Maybe he got lost.”

“It ain’t six blocks from the hole to the tower. If he got lost, he ain’t got the sense God gave a speckled pup.”

“It’s hard to see,” the other fellow insisted. “If you ain’t used to running around in a mask, it can mess you up. Gets you all turned around. Maybe we should go down the hill and look for him.”

“Maybe you should kiss my ass. See if Jay and Martin will go.”

“They just got back from pissing down by the side of Denny Hill. Nobody wants to climb that thing twice.”