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He shook his head some more, for all the good it did him. He told the ghost, “I’m coming, as soon as I can find you. Why don’t you make yourself useful, and tell me where you are?”
When he received no answer, he sniffed. The candle danced. “That’s what I thought. Just like a useless kid. Making demands and refusing to help. Hey Zeke, you dummy—think about this, will you? If I die before I reach you, then neither one of us gets any grave except this miserable city. ”
He stepped with defiance toward the doorway, which was raised up out of the roof, and he gave the knob a stern, confident tug.
It came off in his hand.
He stood there stupidly, holding the rotted old piece of cheap metal. Then he looked at the hole it’d left and tried to reinsert the thing, in case such a simple act could magically repair it.
No such luck.
“Fine,” he said. Maybe that wasn’t the way he was supposed to go anyway.
Rector set the candle down and gave the door a solid kick, then a second one. His foot connected a third time, and each percussion was louder—the beating of a forlorn drum, banging out a low echo that drove the curdling gas away in fleeing puffs.
Nothing budged. All right. Time to look for something else. People didn’t come and go from that ladder just to die on the rooftop, now did they? No. No bodies, no bones, no rotters. There was some other way down.
Methodically, he began a survey of the roof. Pools of water collected and gelled nastily in the places where the surface sagged, but Rector avoided those because he didn’t want his already-filthy socks to suck up anything worse than what they’d already gathered. Every step felt like sneaking through something that was on the very verge of collapse.
He dragged his free hand along the edge overlooking the street.
Ah. There. Yes.
His hand stopped against a plank covered in splinters—no, only partly covered in splinters, and partly covered in peeling, chipping paint that sloughed away at his touch. He held the candle up over this newfound object and discovered that it was affixed horizontally to a space immediately below the edge, where it could be easily seen from the roof.
“One of them fellows might’ve mentioned this. Might’ve made things easier,” he grumbled. As he examined the plank, he realized that, in fact, it was a collection of doors laid end to end. They’d all been lashed together, braced from underneath, and affixed with guide ropes intended to serve as rails, for all the wonderful good they’d do if this rigged-together bridge were to break. But Rector couldn’t get too upset about that, because that’s what it was—a bridge. A bridge that went straight into the open window of a taller building next door, perhaps thirty feet away. Not far at all. A hop, a skip, and a jump.
Easy-peasy.
He climbed onto the roof’s edge and placed one foot gingerly on the creaking, cracking, splitting boards. Before he could talk himself out of it, he began to run, sending the bridge swinging in the process. He launched himself through the window with such speed that his candle blew out as he landed inside the other space.
Hands on the top of his legs, he bent forward and gasped to catch his breath in the dark of the closed-off room. The only light was what straggled in through the broken window, so he paused to relight the candle, his hands shaking so hard he could barely strike the match.
When he did, he was downright stupidly happy at what he saw.
“This might work after all,” he marveled to himself—and to the ghost, in case the ghost was listening.
He’d entered some kind of storage area, or refueling station, or whatever it was you called a place in an abandoned, destroyed city where you stashed helpful items to make sure you could keep on surviving.
Lined up on pegs against the far wall, Rector found a collection of big canvas satchels with proper straps and everything. Several of them had names stenciled or written on them, but two were unmarked and one of those was empty. Rector took that one. He smushed his candle stub onto the floor and picked its wick free while the wax was still runny. He then untied his blanket and moved its contents into the satchel.
Off to his right, three good oil lamps were keeping one another company. He seized one, filled it up with oil from the bottles that lined a shelf near the satchels, and took an extra bottle for good measure. Now the satchel was so heavy it was a chore to heft it onto his back. But Rector had been too long conditioned by poverty to leave anything useful just lying around for somebody else to find, so if it meant he’d have a sore back for a few days, he’d be all right with it.
He grunted and settled the satchel as best he could. It was definitely easier to hold and carry than the blanket bundle, even as overloaded as it was.
Speaking of the blanket, he didn’t want to leave that behind. The June Gloom would linger yet for weeks. He’d need something to keep him warm, and the blanket wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. Bending down and adjusting his center of gravity to keep the satchel from toppling him over, he folded the blanket in half and rolled it up as tight as it’d go. Then he stuffed it through the bag’s straps.
If he could’ve reached his own back, he would’ve patted it.
The lamp in his hand was a rusty contraption left over from when the city was walled off, but it gave far better light than his candle stub and Rector was delighted to have it. Emboldened by the great, glowing halo of the swinging lantern, he surveyed the room and settled on the stairwell as the most
obvious path out.
Into the stairwell he stomped, taking strange pleasure in the feel of ordinary stairs beneath his feet. No peculiar boards, beams, or wobbling improvisations to support him—just the regular rhythm of evenly spaced steps leading down in the usual fashion.
The jostling lantern filled the space with a bonfire glow that shook his shadow as he descended.
One story, two stories. Three.
