Rector dragged his fingers along the hastily erected wall, feeling the contours rise and fall, dip and crumble into a dry mortar crust. He dusted his hands off against his pants and shivered—even though it wasn’t as cold as it had been a few days earlier, it still wasn’t warm. It was almost never warm, and the wall’s imposing shadow drained the tepid sunlight of what little relief it offered. Up above, and somewhere past the boundaries of what they could see through the pallid air, even the flapping wings of the Blight-poisoned birds were sluggish and slow.

“You hear those?” Rector breathed. “Getting closer.”

“I hear ’em,” Zeke replied, so faintly that if Rector had been even another step away, he wouldn’t have heard him.

“I don’t like them.”

“They’re only birds,” Zeke assured him. Then he faced forward and softly called, “Huey?”

“Right here.”

“Thought I’d lost you for a second.”

“Keep up, you two,” Houjin urged.

“How much farther?” Zeke asked.

“A quarter mile?” he guessed. “Then we’ll hit the next drop down into the underground.”

“Are there carts?”

“Yes. Now shhhh.”

“Don’t you tell me—”

Houjin came to a sharp stop and turned around. Zeke ran into him, but bounced back. Huey held out his weapon—not to brandish it, exactly, but to make a point. “Hush! I told you, I hear something.”

Rector was mad, and he was scared, and he didn’t like having a younger kid (or anybody else) put a long metal pole in his face. He smacked the pole away with the back of his hand with a clang. It hurt, and it’d certainly bruise. He wished he hadn’t done it. “I don’t hear anything,” he fussed.

“Wait,” Zeke said, holding out both hands. The hand that held the big fireman’s ax drooped low. “I hear it, too.”

Houjin lowered his pole, pointing the sharp end at a spot barely a foot off the ground. Still in his softest voice, he said, “Coming from down here.”

Zeke readied his ax, holding it down at a similar level and getting ready to swing. “Raccoons?” he tried.

“Could be.”

Rector heard it, too. It scratched against his ears, a hoarse, hushed breathing sound coming from knee level a few yards away. He tried to take comfort from the fact that the breather didn’t sound very big; whatever it was, its inhalations and exhalations came fast and short, like a dog.

But what if it was something worse? Rector braced himself against the wall, which was cold, terribly cold, and a bit damp with condensation. “Could be a little kid,” he said. The words were almost a horrified gasp, squeezed out of his mask and into the open air. “A baby, or something. There are kid rotters, aren’t there? That’s what I heard.”

Neither of his companions responded.