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“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. ”
“Fine, then you go. ”
