Rector faced in that direction and waited for Angeline to take the lead. She paused to turn around and remind them, in a soft but penetrating voice, “From here on out, we whisper. And unless it’s real important, don’t even do that. Just keep your mouths shut. We’ll work our way along the wall, same as you were doing yesterday, and if the sasquatch comes out to watch us, so much the better. If it doesn’t, then we’ll keep looking for holes.”

She left the trap near their starting point, baiting it with a piece of horseflesh she unwrapped from a packet of paper. The meat wasn’t terribly fresh, and Rector was glad he was wearing a mask so he couldn’t smell it. They covered the whole setup with some dead, brittle brush, but kept the camouflage light. The odds weren’t great that any creature inside the wall would know a trap when it saw one, or that it’d necessarily care.

And from there, they returned their attention to the wall.

Chapter 17

Seventeen

The farther up the hill they explored, the harder it became to hug the Seattle wall.

When it was built seventeen years previously, it had been thrown up as hastily as possible, using whatever was at hand and cutting through anything in its decided path. Houses were severed; trees were knocked over; buildings torn down and left in pieces, their exposed foundations jutting out from the wall’s base. Whereas before Rector had grazed the structure with his fingers to keep tabs on it, now he could keep to it only so closely without falling into an open cellar or climbing over a crumbling old home.

Rector tried to contain his revulsion at the dank, sick press of the air. He kept hoping he’d grow accustomed to it, but familiarity bred only more contempt. He didn’t like the darkness, the constant shroud that hung over everything. He loathed the revolting fog that dripped off every branch of every dead tree, like tattered ghosts or decaying moss. He would have preferred anything else to this, even the muddy tunnel beneath the root cellar. At least he could scratch his nose in the root cellar.

But onward they climbed, and upward, because Angeline told them, “I’ve heard a lot of animal noise and whatnot a little ways from here, at the northeast edge of the wall. Maybe we’ll find our breach there, maybe we won’t. But it’s worth looking.”

Beyond simply breathing in the masks, they also worked against the steep angles of Denny Hill. It was easy to keep from talking. No one had the stamina for it.