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“Never had any China food. ”
“You wouldn’t want to walk there, not in your shape. And the carts running between them … they’re mostly for supplies, not people. I have an idea about that, though…” he said. He almost picked up his pace, as if his bright idea were fuel that moved him even more swiftly, but remembered Rector in time to keep from launching down the corridor like a firecracker. “I think we should use pump cars down here, like they do on the railroads above. We have a few, but not enough to keep a regular set of routes. ”
“I’ve seen those. I know what you mean. ”
“Or maybe streetcars. Not diesel ones like Texas makes—there isn’t anywhere for the exhaust to go; it’d make everyone sick. But maybe something crank powered. The neighborhoods aren’t very far apart, but if you’re injured or carrying something, it’s a hard hike. And we can’t have horses and carts down here, obviously. ”
“Obviously,” Rector echoed. Then he wondered aloud, “Wait, why not? Any special reason, other than that horses don’t like living underground?”
Houjin paused and considered this. “Horses don’t do stairs very well. And no one wants to clean up all the shit, and it’s hard enough to feed people, let alone horses. Anyway, the Blight is funny, what it does to animals. ”
“It kills them, don’t it? Same as people?”
If a good idea was fuel to make Houjin run, then a good question served as the brakes. He stood stock-still, and Rector could almost see the gears turning between his ears. “That’s hard to say. I don’t think anyone’s ever studied it, like a scientist counting birds or drawing plants. But it’s definitely different. Take the birds, for example. ”
“The birds?”
“The crows. We have hundreds, maybe thousands, inside the walls. Their eyes turned a funny color—a weird shade of orange, kind of like your hair. But other than that, they seem all right. And the rats … we used to have rats, but the Blight kept them from making baby rats, or that’s what Dr. Minnericht said. So after a couple of years, there were no more rats. ”
“Weird,” Rector observed.
The hike down to the kitchen was hard, but Rector made it without too much wheezing—then realized upon arrival that he was so appallingly hungry that he could scarcely eat anything at all. It was an unusual sensation for someone who’d spent his life leaning against the edge of hunger, and he wondered if this wasn’t a case of simply being too tired to eat.
He ate anyway.
In the large, carefully lit kitchen he gnawed on salmon jerky while Houjin rifled through the drawers, cabinets, and boxes for foods which would be good for somebody on the road to recovery. A great deal of dried fruit was on the menu—mostly apples and berries—but there were also cloth-wrapped hunks of bread, and a knifeful of fresh butter that tasted so good it made his eyes water. And he found his jar of pickles too, already opened but mostly full.
As he nibbled, he listened to Houjin natter on about the comings and goings of the underground, and the Doornails, and the residents of Chinatown, and Yaozu’s men, who clustered around the old King Street Station. Rector knew he would only retain fragments of what he heard, but he didn’t mind; it was nice to have an excuse to be quiet and think about things he dare not say aloud.
First and foremost: Zeke was alive. So had there ever been a ghost?
He narrowed his eyes and chewed thoughtfully, pretending to listen. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen or heard from the ghost since waking up. Granted, that was less than an hour of ghost-free awake-time, but still, it felt significant.
A brief, spontaneous thought flew out of his mouth, interrupting whatever anecdote Houjin was passing along. “Hey, how long was I out cold?”
Houjin paused mid-sentence, calculated, and said, “It’s been four days since you fell down the chuckhole. ”
“Four days,” he mused. Four days without sap. It was the longest he’d been sober in ages, and he wanted some now, but not with the same god-awful fervor as before. It felt more like a routine he wanted to indulge, or a habit he merely missed. It didn’t feel like a gaping hole that ate his chest and his brain like a flame chewing through paper. Rector wasn’t the very picture of health, that was for damn sure, but he had to admit there was a certain feeble glimmer of clarity—a candle’s worth of awareness—that was catching hold, and his thoughts were lining up more easily, more cleanly.
By the light of this new and unfamiliar awareness, he recalled something else that made him shudder. He blurted out another question. “When I fell down the chuckhole, I was running away from something, wasn’t I? Something was chasing me. ”
Houjin carefully masked his emotions so that Rector could barely see his uncertainty while he thought about his response. He sure did a lot of that: thinking before talking. Given how much talking he did, it made you wonder how fast his brain worked.
“You were running, yes. And I saw … something. ”
“Oh, don’t give me that. You saw it, plain as I did,” Rector asserted, despite the fact that he hadn’t seen anything plainly. He’d heard it, and sensed it, and even smelled it—or he fancied he did, despite the gas mask. When that foul, dank breath had come so close to his skin he thought he’d die from fright, the odor had oozed like wet dog and moldering pine needles. Like dirty feet and sour water.
Houjin hemmed and hawed. “Well, you have to understand … there are many dangers inside the wall. Many things that will chase you, and try to hurt you. ”
“Rotters. I’ve heard about them, and I heard some scraping around. Never actually saw any. But this wasn’t a rotter, what I was running from. ”
“No, it must’ve been a rotter. ”
“Couldn’t have been,” Rector argued. “Rotters were people once, weren’t they? And they don’t grow, after they’ve gone all dead and rotty. ” Or so he assumed.
“No, they don’t grow. And yes, they were people first. ”
“That thing that chased me was bigger than a person. ”
