Three steps into that retreat, he collided with the corner of a building, bounced off, and caught himself just before falling down. His gas mask slid—not far enough to let in any of the toxic air, but one of his lenses had cracked, rendering his left eye’s view a mosaic of confusion. It was hard enough to see when everything was clear, including his head. Now he was half-blind in one eye, his ears were ringing, and he felt a warm, wet trickle of blood dripping down behind his ear.

He pulled himself together, picked a different direction, and ran that way. He bolted around the offending corner, tore to the right, stumbled on the uneven paving stones, and recovered. Then he ran forward some more, faster, up the hill … because that was the correct direction, wasn’t it?

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” complained the voice behind him. The voice was still coming, moving on feet that were very light and very fast in comparison to Rector’s.

He ran on anyway. The blood from his ear soaked the top of his collar and made the leather of his mask feel pulpy where the straps rubbed against the sore spot, but he ignored it. He also ignored the shuffling sounds that reached him over the pounding gong of his own heartbeat and the frantic skips and jumps of his hole-pocked shoes against the street.

He spied some stairs from the corner of his eye, swiveled on his heel, and climbed them, not knowing where they went and not caring much. All he had to do was get out of the other fellow’s line of sight, far enough away to hunker down and hide.

One of the stairs cracked beneath his foot and gobbled him up to his shin. He pulled his leg out by his knee, tugging with his hands to extract the boot and keep on climbing.

He wondered briefly why these stairs were on the outside of a building, then noticed, when the fog parted enough to let him notice anything, that these were interior stairs after all. The building had fallen away, leaving its insides exposed. Flight by flight, he passed big stretches of shattered flooring eaten up by holes. He huffed and puffed upward while hugging the rail, which rattled in his hand and surely wouldn’t hold him if he were to fall. It barely gave him balance enough to keep upright.

The Seattle city wall loomed up to his left, and that didn’t seem correct. He’d gotten turned around somehow.

Didn’t matter. Kept running. Heard nothing behind him, but the quiet might’ve been an illusion brought on by his stuffy ears. He wondered when it’d be safe to stop, and then he wondered what he’d do if he reached the top and there was nowhere left to go.

He didn’t wonder long.

The stairs ran out.