This time when he ran, it began as a wobble, but he picked up speed as the slope worked in his favor. One more block down, and he asked, “How much farther? Was that one block or two? I can’t tell where the break is, in the dark.”

As if someone on high had heard his complaint, a billowing blast of vivid orange flame erupted to his right. He could actually feel the warmth of it radiating outward in a roiling thunder of superheated air, slapping against him and rippling his clothes.

He and Zeke shielded their eyes from the wall of flame, for the amazing light burned through the fog like nothing they’d ever imagined. It was a perfect, steady flare, a pure barrier that closed off the crack in the wall so that nothing would enter, and nothing would leave. Nothing would survive the passage.

“So that’s what Houjin wanted the diesel for,” Rector mused.

“What?”

“Diesel. It’s fuel. We stole some from the tower. He said it burns.”

“He wasn’t half kidding,” Zeke agreed. He lowered his hand and squinted into the light. “They won’t let any of them go, will they? All those fellows are going to die.”

“One way or another. If there are any survivors, I bet you we’ve got new rotters in the morning. Yaozu will see to that.”

“And we helped kill them.”

Rector did not say that he expected that he’d helped kill more than a few people, given how long he’d been selling sap, and how many people he’d watched it kill. “It was us or them, you know.”

“I know. But still. It feels…”

“Don’t worry about how it feels, ’cause that don’t matter right now. What matters is we routed ’em, and they can’t touch us—or the Vaults, or the Station, or Chinatown either. Maybe it’s dark and wet, and maybe it’s full of hungry dead things, and maybe it smells bad and the food tastes weird and the place is falling down around our ears. But that don’t matter, Zeke. It don’t matter because Seattle is ours, and they can’t have it.”

Rector sniffed and wiped a smudge of sooty sweat from under his chin.

“Now help me find the Sizemore House before any more rotters find us. Let’s go home, all right?”

Chapter 29

Twenty-nine

Come morning, everyone was battered, bruised, singed, and uninterested in getting out of bed … except for Zeke, who shoved at Rector’s stiff, unhappy shoulders. “Get up, you. Come on, we’ve got to go get the inexplicable.”

Into his pillow Rector mumbled, “I don’t have to go do shit.”