Boneshaker

Briar pushed her ear to the door and she could feel air moving through it.

“Look out. And same rules as before — be quick. One, two… three.”

He didn’t need to unlock anything this time. The door slid sideways on a track, retreating into the wall with a squeak of its seals.

She jumped around it and into the next chamber, where candles were slowly melting down to stumps upon a table. Around the table six unoccupied chairs were pushed up close, and behind them there were more crates, more candles, and another corridor with the rustling leather curtains she’d come to expect.

The man wrestled with the door and finally snapped it into position.

He crossed to the far side of the room, where he began to remove his loosened armor. “Don’t take off the mask quite yet. Give it a minute,” he said, “hut make yourself at home.” The plated arm sheaths clattered as he folded them and set them down on the table. His tubular noise gun — Daisy — also sounded heavy when he plunked it down beside the protective garment.

“You thirsty?” he asked.

She said, “Yes,” in a dry whisper.

“We’ve got water down here. It isn’t very good water, but it’s wet. Got plenty of beer, too. You like beer?”

“Sure.”

“Go ahead and take off the mask now, if you want. Maybe it’s just superstitious of me, but I don’t like to whip mine off until I’ve had the filter door closed for a minute.” He reached inside one of the crates labeled STONEWARE and pulled out a mug. In the corner was a fat brown barrel. He popped the lid off and dipped out a mug full of water.

He put it down in front of Briar.

She gave the water a greedy look, but the man hadn’t removed his mask yet, and she didn’t want to go first.

He caught on and reached for the straps that held the elaborate contraption around his head. It slid down to his chest with a sliding scrape of leather being stretched and loosened, revealing a plain, wide face that was neither kind nor unkind. It was an intelligent face, with wild brown eyebrows and a flat nose, plus a pair of full lips that were smashed close against his teeth.

“There you go,” he said of his own reveal. “No prettier, but a damn sight lighter.”

Without the mechanical mask’s assistance, his voice was still low, but perfectly human.

“Jeremiah Swakhammer, at your service, ma’am. Welcome to the underground.”

Twelve

Rudy shuffled in a loping, lopsided walk that was faster than it looked. Through the crushing, smelly pressure of the mask Zeke wheezed and puffed to keep up; he struggled to suck in air through filters that had grown somewhat clogged since he’d first entered the city, and he fought with his own skin as it was pulled, stretched, and rubbed raw by the unyielding seal around his face.

“Wait,” he breathed.

“No,” Rudy replied. “No time to wait.”

He shambled on. Behind them, Zeke was certain he heard a new, rising commotion that came from anger, or grief. He heard the cacophony of consonants and unfamiliar vowels and the shouting, howling, screaming agreement of other voices from other men.

Zeke knew they’d been discovered — or, as he told himself, that Rudy’s violence had been discovered. But Zeke hadn’t done anything wrong, had he? The rules were different here, weren’t they? And all’s fair in war and self-defense, wasn’t it?

But in the back of his mind a small foreign man with glasses was bleeding and confused, and then dead for no reason at all except that he’d once been alive.

The tu

He hoped she wasn’t dead.

But he could still hear, when he thought about it, the rumbling thunder of the ceiling and walls folding in upon themselves and filling all the air space between them, and he wondered if she’d been able to escape. He consoled himself by remembering that she was old, and no one gets to be that old without being smart and strong. It gave him an odd pang, one that he couldn’t place as he watched the hobbling escape of the man in front of him.

Rudy turned around and said, “You coming, or not?”

“I’m coming.”

“Then stick with me. I can’t carry your ass, and I’m bleeding again. I can’t do everything for the both of us.”

“Where are we going?” Zeke asked, and he hated the sound of the begging that he heard from inside his mask.

“Back, same as before. Down, and then up.”

“We’re still going up the hill? You’re still taking me to De

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.