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Rudy said, “I told you I was, and I will. But there ain’t no direct way between two spots in this city, and I’m real sorry if I’m not making the trip as spotless as you’d like. Forgive me, for Chrissake. I didn’t plan to get stuck with a knife or nothing. Plans change, junior. Detours happen. This is one of them. ”
“This is?”
“Yeah, this is. Right here,” Rudy said, stopping beneath a skylight and pointing at a stack of boxes topped precariously with a ladder. Where the ladder terminated against the ceiling, a round door was locked into place. “We’re going up. And it might be bad, I’m warning you now. ”
“All right,” Zeke said, even though it wasn’t all right, not even a little bit. He was having trouble breathing—more trouble with every passing footstep, because he could not catch his breath and there was nowhere to rest.
“Remember what I told you about the rotters?”
“I remember. ” Zeke nodded, even though Rudy was facing away from him and didn’t see it.
“No matter how terrible you’ve got them pictured,” Rudy said, “seeing them is twice as bad. Now you listen. ” He turned around and wagged his finger in Zeke’s face. “These things move fast—faster than you’d think, to look at them. They can run, and they bite. And anything they bite has to get cut off, or else you die. Do you understand?”
Zeke confessed, “Not really. ”
“Well, you’ve got about a minute and a half to wrap your head around it, because we’re going up before those vicious old slant-eyes catch up and kill us just for standing here. So here’s the rules—keep quiet, keep close, and if we’re spotted, climb like a goddamned monkey. ”
“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.
