The stadiums came into view next. He had not lied when he said there were more clans than he could remember. Each had found their own stronghold that made taking them impractical. Not one inch of the city was unclaimed or undisputed. The stadium was the exception. By unanimous agreement, the clans left it a neutral territory. Anyone who violated the neutrality immediately forfeit their lives to the games. Resh had only seen the games a few times, and each had been a thrilling trial for survival. An old, self-proclaimed historian had called them gladiators, and they fought to the last man.
The skyscrapers appeared minutes later. The Columbia building was the largest of them, standing among a forest of other buildings that looked like stunted trees under its immense shadow.
A barricade stretched across the north and southbound lanes of the interstate in front of them, drawing Resh’s attention away from the Emerald City. Sandbags, fencing, and broken-down vehicles made it impassable.
One man standing near the sole gated entrance had an Interstate 5 sign on a pole hoisted above his head. Barbed wire framed the sign, and Resh wasn’t certain if it was a banner or a weapon. Perhaps both.
A sour-faced man called out from his perch on one of the rusted cars behind the fence.
“Hey Ales, you up for a game of target practice? I bet you I could get the crippled one to dance.”
“Give you dime if you trim the hair off the big one’s head,” replied the man with the sign.
“Uhh, Resh?” Thursday said, his voice rising in pitch.
Resh said nothing and continued toward the barricade.
When the man perched on the car lifted the rifle from his shoulder and stared down the scope at them, Resh raised an eyebrow.
The man started and lowered the barrel of the gun, his eyes bulging. He brushed a hand across his dirty shirt in a futile attempt to smooth out its wrinkles, and hopped down to the hood of the car, and then the street. He joined the man with the sign on their side of the gate.
“Sorry, Boss. Didn’t recognize you from a distance,” he said when they neared. “What were you doing out in no-man’s land? It’s dangerous out there.”
Thursday looked up and over his shoulder and mouthed the word “boss?”
Resh ignored him and forced a devious smile for the two men.
“It’s only no-man’s land if nobody stakes a claim on it.”
The two men looked at each other blankly before the man with the sign, Ales, raised an eyebrow.
“You thinkin’ of expansion, Boss?”
“Plenty of land out there. Fires cleared out most of the forests, so there’s plenty of room for farms. Might be enough trees left for firewood.”
“Don’t we already get a cut of veggies and chickens when the Tacoma caravans come through?” The first man asked. Resh thought his name was Jess.
“It’s one thing to control the trade route, and another to control the trade.”
This got them thinking, a process that creased their dirty faces with strain.
In truth, Resh had only just considered the possibility on his journey south. In recent years, the city’s population had grown enough for the rooftop gardens and handful of fishermen to be inadequate. When the colder months arrived, he wouldn’t mind a wealth of firewood either. It wasn’t a terrible plan, and it gave him an excuse for being outside the city.
“We could have come with you, Boss. Dangerous to be out there alone. Trader came through last week tellin’ of a winged wolf that came to scoop up two of his sheep,” Jess said, his hands wringing together. “One guy swears he saw an alien.”
Resh just managed to resist rolling his eyes, and Thursday visibly shivered.
The aliens had all died off after the invasion, consumed by mold and other diseases to which they had no resistance. Resh had been among those born right after the invasion, a part of the early attempts to repopulate. That was before men remembered how much they enjoyed killing each other. The war with aliens was over, but many others had taken its place. These men were right to be worried for his safety.
“Do you doubt that I can handle myself?”
The men shook their heads at Resh’s daring tone, but then their eyes strayed lower, taking in the condition of this charge.
“Who is he,” Ales asked, while at the same time Jess said, “what happened to him?”
Thursday looked back, his expression seeming to say “You got us into this; you come up with something.”
Resh considered telling them what they expected to hear, a tale of how a giant winged beast had mauled him before his eyes, but he didn’t think he could tell it with a straight face.
“He’s a scholar from the W Clan. I needed someone who knows how to read the street signs. Turns out the bookish types can’t run very fast. A wolf nearly mauled him to death by the time I noticed he wasn’t behind me.”
Thursday’s scowl deepened.
The men guffawed, and waved Resh and Thursday in through the gate.
It was another mile after the barricade before they reached a small market on the road with tents and stands erected on both the north and southbound lanes, the barrier separating them removed.
Only a handful of people recognized Resh and dipped their heads or lifted their hands in greeting. The sun was just beginning to fall below the Peaks of the Olympic mountain range and most of the stalls had already packed up for the night.
The scent of fish stew assaulted them as Resh pushed Thursday through the cloud of steam coming off a cook pot. Thursday watched it pass with longing.
Just after the market, an exit ramp descended onto street-level. They encountered yet another barricade at the end of it, but didn’t pass through. Instead, they walked along side it until they reached the base of the first skyscraper next to the interstate. Windows comprised the whole of one face of the building, while the other side was mostly concrete, as if the architects only cared about its appearance from one angle.
“You asked me where I called home? This is it.”
“Jesus. Which floor?” Thursday asked, his neck craning back to take in the immensity of the building. Yet even this one was dwarfed by others just blocks away.
“The top one.”
A pained expression crossed the man’s features.
“I’m not exactly in stair-climbing shape.”
“Nor am I,” Resh said. He pushed in through the glass double doors and to the opposite side of a marble-floored lobby.
A man in a surprisingly tidy and wrinkle-free suit greeted them in front of an elevator.
“Good evening, Headsman. Kyli was asking after you this morning.”
“Thank you, Bryson.”
“To your residence?”
“Yes.”
“It’ll be a moment before the lift is lowered. Would you like a refreshment?”
Thursday’s expression seemed sufficient to answer the question, and Bryson caught the attention of a woman wearing a floral dress and a hatchet at her belt. Resh unclipped the canteen from his belt and handed it over, and she left the lobby to fill it. The canteen had belonged to Stiles, the former Headman’s, a brass oval flask with a band of leather encircling it. Resh had always admired it and had had no qualms making it his own, just as he had the man’s title and residence.
“You can’t possibly have electricity, not with the swarms, so how do you operate an elevator?”
“Gravity, of course,” the operator said, looking down at the man in the chair like he would a small child.
“Counterweights,” Resh clarified. “Getting up is pretty easy so long as we weigh less than the counter weight in the other elevator shaft.”
“How do you get down then?”
“Put a few more people on the elevator coming down.”
“That would mean someone has to take the stairs at some point.”
“Not me,” Resh said, smiling weakly.
Just after the woman with the floral dress returned with his canteen, the elevator slid into view in the empty elevator sha
ft.
A stream of people stepped off the lift and exited the building, but some of them went to the stairs to begin another ascent. These men would serve to weigh down the elevator on their way back down. It couldn’t have been an exciting job.
One of the men looked surprised to see him, gawking for a moment before schooling his expression. Resh guessed his absence hadn’t gone entirely unnoticed.
Resh pushed Thursday onto the lift, and the operator followed in after them. Bryson disengaged the brake, and they rose swiftly.
Thursday’s eyes flicked up and down as they tracked the floors they passed. Occasionally, they were treated to a brief view of a dim, vacant corridor or one that bustled with clansmen.
“Do people live here?” he asked.
“Most of the Five Clan. It’s one of several buildings we’ve managed to occupy near the Interstate.” Resh’s voice soured. “Most of this section of the city is controlled by the Pioneer Square Clan.”
“You aren’t at war, are you?”
“Where have you been?” Bryson asked, looking at Thursday like he was a simpleton.
Resh cleared his throat and gave Thursday a significant look.
“Ohh, I uh, I don’t get out of the library much. I’m from the W Clan,” Thursday said. Despite having remembered the details of Resh’s cover story, his voice rose at the end in question.
“The Pioneer Square Clan is at war with everyone. They are spread thin, but they are impossible to root out entirely with their underground,” Resh said.
“Underground?”
“The city burned down in 1889, and when they began their reconstruction, they decided to fix the sewer problem they’d been having. To make sure tides didn’t make their toilets run in reverse, they planned to elevate the streets by a couple dozen feet. That would take some time, of course, so they told everyone to build their businesses, but to keep in mind that the first floor was soon going to be their basement once the streets rose, and their second floor was going to be their first floor. Now there’s a labyrinth beneath the sidewalks of those streets. That includes a bank vault they built to store gold from the gold rush in the 1890s.”
The elevator operator even looked a bit surprised by this bit of history.
Resh had spent far too much time prying out the history of the city in recent months, but there had been so few people with which to share the information. He supposed few of them cared. Once, he wouldn’t have cared either.
“We are always at war with one clan or another,” Resh continued, trying to move the conversation to safer territory. “But most clans have an allegiance with ours so they can use the trade routes.”
When the elevator reached the uppermost floor, it thudded to a halt.
The corridor beyond was not nearly so long as the others they had past, and Resh pushed Thursday out of the elevator and to the first door on their right.
A traditional doorknob and lock had been installed on the door in place of the non-functioning hotel card readers. He unlocked the door and pushed Thursday inside.
The room was brighter than the corridor, with long windows stretching from one side of the room to the other. The extra light revealed plush carpets, a desk made of pale wood piled high with rolled-up maps, and a thick mattress covered in a white comforter. Everything was clean and fresh-smelling, in stark contrast to the two of them.
The only thing that stood out from the cleaned and polished room was the thing mounted on the wall above the desk. Hollow eye-sockets sat below a broad forehead, which extended upward and out. Bluish skin pulled away from the mouth and eyes like dry, cracked leather. The thing was hideous, but a rare and remarkably preserved alien specimen.
Headsman Stiles had found it a couple years ago in during a dive in Lake Union where an alien ship had purportedly crashed. He had been looking for alien tech, but found instead a sealed room with the desiccated remains of an alien. He’d carved off the head and hung it here.
Resh had killed Stiles in this very room, sitting at this very desk.
Thursday looked to be reliving his own sour memories at the sight of the alien, but he did not recoil from it like so many others Resh had brought into this room.
Through the windows, the sun was making its final plunge below the Olympic Mountains.
“I’ve seen a fair number of sunsets on my journey,” Thursday said when Resh parked him beside the window. “But this one tops them all. Maybe because I am finally here. Or maybe because it could be one of the last I ever see.”
Resh shrugged off his pack and the extra layers of clothes. When he sat on the bed, he wiggled off his shoes with grunts of pain. Ruptured blisters had dried to his socks and he worried them free with silent curses.
“What is that?” Thursday asked. His gaze had shifted downward, taking in a large polygonal building a few blocks over. A latticework of triangular frames made the structure look like a crumpled spider web. What glass remained in the frames caught the light of the setting sun like beads of dew.
“Used to be a library. Now it’s little more than a playground.”
“Are there still books?” Thursday asked, his tone eager.
“The only books left in the city are in the W Clan’s library. Those kept here were burned in the first years of the invasion to keep warm over the winter.”
“My Grandfather had quite a collection himself,” Thursday said with longing.
Thursday spent a few more moments at the window, before he asked, in a grudging voice, if Resh could show him to the bathroom. Resh pushed him in and closed the door behind the man. He was not about to help with any of that.
Resh had just finished changing into a more comfortable pair of jeans and a t-shirt when the sound of a key in a lock reached him.
He relaxed. Only one other person had a key to this room. He sat on the bed, and bent to push his pack beneath.
A woman with black hair and pale skin entered and closed the door behind her. She wore a leather jacket with a wolf pelt draped around her shoulders. A few straps secured a sheathed knife between her breasts. Only the hilt was visible. Even when the two of them were together and wore little in the way of clothing, the knife was always close to hand. Resh barely registered any of this; all he saw was her scowl.
“Kyli.”
“Where have you been?”
Resh stood from the bed and walked to his desk where he struck a match and lit a candle.
“I went on a little scouting expedition.”
“That’s what scouts are for,” she sputtered. “You know the dangers. Another clan, hell, even one of your own clansmen could have tried to off you.”
“Isn’t that what you’re for? Preventing that kind of thing?” Resh said.
Her eyes darkened. It always infuriated her when he spoke calmly when they argued.
“You aren’t making it easy. Do you hear what they say about you?” She said, her voice softer, but still thick with vehemence. “They all looked up to you when you stood up to Stiles, but now that you’re Headsman, you act like him: flighty, distracted, looking like you’d rather be anywhere else. They need leadership, but instead you go off and explore, or worse, send our men into dangerous situations just to do research for you. If you don’t do something, someone is bound to—”
The door to the bathroom opened, cutting off her tirade. She wheeled to see Thursday sitting in his wheelchair. He was shirtless, and he had managed to clean the blood off his arms and legs, though the bandages were still dark with it. His long hair was wet and slicked back. With the whole of his face visible and cleaned of ash and grime, he looked younger than Resh had originally guessed, perhaps in his late teens.
Kyli looked back at Resh, her eyebrows climbing out of site behind her bangs.
“This is Thursday,” Resh said, gesturing at the scrawny and sunburned man. “I’m helping him find something in the city.”
“Resh,” she said, exasperated. “Let someone else do it. You have better things to do than cater to vagran
ts.”
“It’s in exchange for something. Something good for the clan,” he lied. But maybe it wasn’t so much a lie. The sooner Thursday taught him to read and gave him the book, the sooner he would leave. Maybe they were right, and he was a weak leader. Leaving would be for the best for everyone.
For Thursday’s part, he looked accustomed to people speaking about him while he sat in the same room.
Kyli tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling, and she breathed out a quiet prayer to whatever god might be listening. After a moment, she faced him again.
“What is he looking for?”
Surprised, Resh looked to Thursday.
“Do you still have that paper?”
Thursday withdrew the slip of paper, and Kyli took a single step toward him and stretched out a hand to snatch it.
Resh gave him an apologetic shrug.
She glanced at it.
“What is it? What does it say?”
Thursday told her, and as he did, she took a step further away from him.
“Why would you bring him here, Resh? We’ve gone so long without any serious illness in the clan and you decide to bring him into the heart of it.”
“I’m not contagious,” Thursday said in exasperation as if he’d said it far too many times. “It says so in the letter. The powder was a lyophilized virus, but it isn’t self-replicating.”
Resh also had a response ready, but one that used fewer big words.
“If that virus could turn him into this, imagine what it could do if we weaponized it against our enemies. If SSS has a cure, we can control who it kills and when.”
She stared at him and then looked back at the note.
“The Pioneer Square Clan?”
Resh nodded, and tried to ignore the frown that twisted Thursday’s face.
“We’ve already cut off trade, but it’s impossible to starve them out of their tunnels with Harbor island and the Pike Place market supplying them. But a sickness? It will drive them out in months. We can claim their territory without a fight.”
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Seattle Page 2