Houjin solemnly agreed, but added, “I wonder how many are left.” And then, more brightly, “I wonder if we could use them against the tower men!”
Rector liked the idea. “You mean, if we could wrangle them—like a herd of cattle—and drive them up the hill? That’d be a hell of a sport.”
“But there aren’t enough of them, not anymore,” Zeke said.
“We don’t know that for sure. They sometimes bunch up in pockets,” Houjin countered. “And Yaozu’s making more of them—we saw that for ourselves.”
Angeline shuddered. “That man, I swear. He’ll go straight to hell someday and feel right at home.”
They wandered and searched, ultimately creeping down along the hill’s incline because it was easier going down than up, and because the old city prison was that direction, too.
“It’s another few blocks that way”—Angeline indicated east—“and lucky for us, it’s no farther.”
Lucky for them indeed, Rector thought, when a rhythmic bluster of faint background noise became loud enough to catch his attention. With the mask rubbing against his hair, making static sounds against his ears, it was hard to say at first, but eventually—yes—he detected the draw and puff of something breathing. And it wasn’t one of his fellow party members, he was fully certain of that.
He stopped without noticing he’d stopped. He stood in his tracks like an animal aware of a predator, like a small thing wanting to become smaller for fear of a big thing.
Everyone looked at him.
Rector held up a finger, pointing at nothing but the gray-green sky beyond the Blight. He tried to ask if they heard the noise, too, if they knew where it was coming from, and was it close—was it as close as it felt? But when he opened his mouth, it was too dry to speak.
Angeline backed up against him, readying her net. Over her shoulder, she said to him, “I hear him, too, Red.”
He pushed himself against her. Knowing that something was coming for him yet again, he felt better with her beside him.
“Stay calm,” she urged. She passed her net to Houjin, who didn’t quite know what to do with it except to hold it ready. She pulled a wrapped, fresh fish out of her pack. It must’ve weighed ten pounds, Rector thought wildly—it could’ve fed a family of four, or half a dozen orphans in a Catholic home outside the wall. Why hadn’t they ever gone fishing to feed the kids? Did nobody in the church know how?
Frantic, disjointed thoughts scattered through his head, tumbling in all directions as his fear stirred them up and shook them.
“He wants me,” he breathed.
“Red, my boy … he doesn’t know what he wants.”
The fish was still on a line as thick as a cable, with a great metal hook fastened through its mouth, jabbing through its cheek. If there’d ever been any blood, it was gone now. And Rector didn’t know what fish blood looked like, anyway, or if they even had blood … and now his mind was racing so wildly that the thoughts came faster and faster, each upon the heels of the last one. He could not remember having ever thought so quickly or so clearly about nothing at all of any importance.
He wanted a hit of sap worse than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. That’d slow his mind down, wouldn’t it? Sap would fix it. It’d temper his fluttering heart, drag his thoughts down, keep him calm. Keep him ready for any kind of action that required more thought than running and screaming, in case running and screaming weren’t enough.
The princess thrust the heavy fish toward Zeke, who hesitated. She changed her mind, retrieved the net from Houjin, and gave the fish to him instead.
Louder and louder came the breathing, from something so huge his wheezing gasps filled the whole block. The creature was hidden in the foggy air, but he was moving; the source of the sound slipped from left to right, accompanied by heavy footsteps.
Zeke backed up against Rector, too, not for protective purposes, but from the ordinary, human need to band together for defense. Houjin joined them, and soon they were in a nervous back-to-back circle, everyone facing outward … everyone looking through the fog, straining to see what lurked inside it.
Angeline shifted the net in her hands, and elbowed Houjin so he’d hold up the fish.
“Hello out there,” she said softly. “We know you’re watching us. Are you hungry?”
Zeke tried it, too. “Hey out there, Mister Sasquatch. Miss Angeline says you don’t mean us any harm.”
In response, they heard a loud huff or cough. It was the chuffing sound of something with a stuffy nose, a congested torso. It was off to their left. Everyone calibrated accordingly, twisting to observe the location without leaving anyone’s back undefended.
Angeline picked up the thread. “You’re stuck inside here, aren’t you? You’re just trying to go outside, isn’t that it? You’ve got a lady friend over there, beyond the wall. I seen her when I went fishing. She got up close to me, and didn’t make a sound, but she watched from the trees.”
“You saw her?” Houjin whispered.
She lowered her voice. “Sure did. She’s a pretty-colored thing, smooth and brown-red, like cedar.”
The big thing groaned, or roared feebly. Rector retreated as deeply as possible into the tangle of his friends, wanting nothing more than to bolt for the nearest shelter; and if he had the faintest idea where that might’ve been, he might’ve done so. But he didn’t, and the only thing keeping him from being by himself in the Blight, in the wrecked city, was this knot of humanity.
His mask fogged. His eyes watered.
“He’s coming,” he said, and he hated himself for how much it sounded like whining.
Angeline’s cadence was steady as a rock, and her words poured like honey into the fog. “That’s all right. Let him come. How about this, boys—all of us, now. Let’s start moving toward the jail. Let’s see if he’ll follow us. But don’t make any fast moves, or sudden gestures. We don’t mean him any trouble, and we want him to know it.”
In a bunch, all four of them began a retreat. “Which way?” Rector asked.
“Follow me. Don’t take your eyes off the fog.”
“Couldn’t if I tried.”
“You know what I mean.”
If the footsteps, scrapes, and ragged breaths from deep within the fog could be believed, the sasquatch trailed them. Not closely, but without much space between them, either. “How much farther to the jail?” Rector asked.
“Not so far, Red. Keep your calm. The sasquatch don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then why’d he try in the first place?”
“Don’t know. Maybe he didn’t.”
There she went, harping on that again. Well, she wasn’t there when it happened. Rector was there, and he knew when something or somebody wanted to tear off his head and play catch with it. Frankly, the sasquatch hadn’t been the first to consider it.
Inch by inch, foot by foot, they clustered and sidled and ambled along, no one breaking from the group. When it seemed as though the sasquatch might be falling behind, or losing interest in armed prey that outnumbered him, Angeline reminded him of the fish. She urged Houjin to hold it up and let it sway back and forth.
“Come on, big fellow,” she told him. “Don’t you smell that? Don’t you want to come in close, and take a big bite of it? There ain’t much to eat inside the wall, I know. You must be hungry as can be.”
Houjin waved the fish like a pendulum, his arms straining against its weight. “You think he can actually smell this?” he asked.
“Don’t see why not.”
“Because the Blight smells like rotten eggs and cat piss, that’s why,” Rector murmured. “If he can smell the fish through the gas, then his nose deserves a blue ribbon.” You didn’t have to breathe the stuff day in and day out to know the reek of it. The odor permeated everything—clothing, wood, and supplies. And of course, Rector had burned enough sap to have a much more intimate familiarity with the concentrated stink.
“He can see the fish, even if he can’t smell it,” Zeke tried.
“Then his eyes need a blue ribbon, too.” Rector couldn’t see more than a dozen feet in any direction, and sometimes not even that far.
“Boys, don’t argue. The jail’s just at the end of this street. Keep yourselves focused. We’ve almost got him.”
Rector didn’t recognize the street. It looked like any other neighborhood inside the swamped city: low, squat buildings that were sometimes houses, sometimes stores, and occasionally something else. The taller structures were all farther to the southwest, down nearer to the water. There weren’t any hotels this far up the hill, or train stations, either.
This corner of the wall-wrapped space hadn’t been developed much. Rector supposed that was why they put a prison here. And when the prison came into view, it wasn’t an imposing sort of place, or a particularly cruel one in appearance. It was flat and single storied, built of stone gone slimy with the years and the gas.
“There it is,” the princess said.
“That’s it?” Rector asked. “Don’t look like much.”
Angeline said, “It ain’t much. The main jail was downtown, on Third Street at Jefferson. But that one was emptied before the Blight got too bad. The people who were here … they were the ones left to die.”
Zeke turned his head to stare at the unimpressive rectangle with the tiny barred windows. “So these were the ones my granddaddy saved. I always thought it was the big jail, the main jail down on Third Street.”
She shook her head. “No. He’d have saved more than a couple dozen folks if he’d emptied that one.”
“Stories get bigger in the retelling,” Houjin noted.
“Doesn’t matter.” Zeke shifted his grip on his old fireman’s ax, which he’d reclaimed from Rector. Like the fish Houjin wielded, it was almost too big for him to swing and it looked ridiculous, but Rector had gotten tired of arguing with him. “He saved them. Including Captain Cly—he was there. Him and his brother. He told me about it.”