Rector was glad for the gas mask—he didn’t want the other boys to see him go green around the edges. He gulped, sniffed, and coolly said, “I’ve heard that before, and I’ll take it into consideration. Say, what’s that you’re carrying, Huey?”

Huey turned the bar in his hand, twirling it like a baton, but more slowly. It was over three feet long, and appeared to be cast iron. “It was for wagon wheels, I think. To pry them on and off. I like it. It’s a good size and a good weight, and I can stab with it”—which he demonstrated—“or hack with it,” he showed, by jerking it from side to side.

“Or just beat somebody to death,” Rector observed.

“True.” Again he rested it on his shoulder. “But you have better luck stopping rotters if you can smash their brains or knock their heads off. Go in through an eye socket, if you’ve got the aim to hit it. Or hack at their necks, if that’s an easier target.”

“Jesus.”

“It sounds harder than it really is. Most of the rotters inside the city have been here for years, and they’re starting to get mushy.”

Zeke chimed in. “And most of them don’t run very fast.”

Rector held the pickax and looked over the side of the roof. “This is a god-awful way to get around your own neighborhood. And you two talk like it’s just an everyday thing, hacking people up and putting bars through their eyeballs.”

Houjin muttered, “Don’t like it, don’t have to stay here.”

“I’ll get used to it,” Rector countered.

He hefted the pickax and followed him over to the roof’s eastern edge, where a drawbridge was laid out flat and ready. It groaned beneath their feet, and small splinters of old paint and decaying wood went dusting down to the dangerous, deserted streets below as they crossed.

Chapter 14

Fourteen

They walked single file through more windows turned into doors, navigating along balconies and over storefronts for eight blocks until they were forced to drop to the ground and sprint across one street and down into a storm cellar. Then they went up through an empty grocer’s, scaled more stairs, and emerged on another roof, only to trip lightly down another long bridge made of doors.

These makeshift devices swayed under their feet enough that more than once the boys agreed to cross one at a time, so as to not strain the walkway.

Finally they ran out of structures; there were no more roofs or bridges to hold them aloft. Without a word, they scooted down an old iron ladder that had once been part of a fire escape. Its rusted bolts creaked, and as they descended foot by foot, hand by hand, brick dust rained down onto the dead grass and cracked streets below.