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They didn’t answer him any better than he’d answered them. “Where you heading off to? There’s rotters upstairs, boy. If you’ve got any brains in your skull, you’ll stick down here, where it’s safe. ”
“I wasn’t going nowhere. I was just looking around. The doctor said I could. ”
“Did he now?”
“Yeah, he did. ”
The thin, tall Chinaman leaned down to see Zeke better, and asked in a rough, hoarse voice, “Where’s Yaozu? Looking after boys, that’s not our job. ”
“Is it Yaozu’s job?”
The smaller man said, “Maybe he likes it, being the doctor’s right hand. Maybe he don’t. I couldn’t say, except that he puts up with it. ”
Zeke nodded, absorbing the information and filing it away in case it was important. “All right. Well, let me ask yo
u this, then. How do I get upstairs? I’ve seen pretty much all there is to see down here. ”
“Didn’t you hear me? Can’t you hear the commotion? Them’s rotters, boy. I can hear them all the way from here. ”
The tall man with the thin brown eyes said, “It’s dangerous, next floor up. Doornails and rotters are a bad, bad mix. ”
“Come on, fellas,” Zeke wheedled, sensing that he was losing their attention to whatever task they’d been chasing when he’d stopped them. “Help a kid out. I just want to take a look around my new homestead. ”
The men shrugged back and forth at one another until the taller of the two walked away, leaving the small man. He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. And don’t go upstairs, if you know what’s good for you. There’s trouble up there. Rotters been coming inside from all over the place, like someone’s deliberately letting ’em in. And there’s other problems, too. ”
“Like what?”
“Like your pa don’t have many friends outside the station, and sometimes they make a stink. You don’t want to get stuck in the middle of that. And I don’t want to be the one who gets blamed for putting you there. ”
Zeke said, “If I get up there and get killed, I won’t tell a soul it was you who sent me. Deal?”
The fat man laughed, and squeezed his thumbs into the band of his belt. “You’ve got me there, don’t you? That’s real fine, sure enough. I won’t tell you how to work the lift, because that ain’t my job and I don’t like pulling all them strings; but if you were to follow that hallway behind me, and take it all the way to the left, you’d find a set of stairs down at the end of it. But if anybody asks, I didn’t tell you anything. And if you stick around, then you remember who done you a favor. ”
“Thanks!” Zeke said brightly. “And I’ll remember, don’t worry. You’re a champ, man. ”
“You said it,” he replied.
By then, Zeke was already headed down the hall at a pace halfway between a jog and a sprint. He found the stairs a moment later, and he crashed up them with a newfound sense of direction. There might be trouble upstairs, but there might also be people with gas masks. It didn’t matter what kind, and it didn’t matter whom he had to sleal it from—Zeke was going to get his hands on one if it killed him.
There was no light in the stairwell, and he couldn’t find any obvious way to illuminate it, but he only needed to scale one flight and he could follow the noise that was rising steadily from above.
It sounded like heavy men running back and forth. Shouts added to the chaos, and as he climbed higher in the dark, stumbling over every other step, an explosion shook the floor.
Zeke flailed and grasped for a rail or a support, but found none. He fell down to his hands and knees.
The last vibrations thudded away and he scrambled to his feet. He dusted off his hands on his pants and felt along the wall until a white line on the floor revealed the bottom of a door with some light behind it. But if there was a handle, he couldn’t find it. As he pressed himself against the door and frantically fought to open it, the commotion outside escalated further, making him wonder if this was really the way he wanted to go.
The unmistakable percussion of gunfire joined the shouting and the running.
Zeke stopped searching for a way out and held still, jarred by the shots and on the verge of changing his mind. It sounded like open warfare up there, in contrast to the calm, rich, quiet surroundings just one floor below. Was this what Lester had been whispering about in Minnericht’s ear?
He hadn’t yet seen a rotter up close. Not a real one, not a hungry one—and certainly not a pack of them.
An irrational burst of curiosity sent him seeking the handle again.
His fingers wrapped around something that could’ve been a lever, set a little higher than an ordinary doorknob. He squeezed it and yanked, and nothing happened. He tugged again, using his weight to pry the thing downward, but the door didn’t budge.
But then it was hit from the other side.
