Kyli bit her lip, but not in uncertainty. She looked hungry, and Resh swallowed. He knew the look. Had it been any other night, he would ask her to stay with him.
Thursday looked increasingly uncomfortable.
“Have you seen that symbol? Heard of this group?” Thursday asked.
Kyli finally tore her powerful gaze from Resh and looked down at the paper again.
“I think so. Once.”
“Where?” Thursday asked.
“You remember that illness that went around a couple years ago? A rash around the hands and face?”
Thursday sat up straighter.
Resh vaguely remembered seeing such a thing and he nodded.
“It never got too serious, but word got around that someone had a cure. I saw a flier once, not too different from this. It had the same logo, and instead of words, they had pictures: Red hands and one of those hospital symbols, the snake around the pole? Well, they also had a map. From what I heard, everyone who went there was cured.”
“Do you remember where the map led?” Resh asked.
She shook her head.
“I remember where I saw the flier though. Pike place. Maybe there are still some around?”
Resh nodded and smiled in appreciation. If they could just find an old one plastered to a wall, it could speed up their search by days.
“Thank you, Kyli. If you don’t mind. Thursday and I have had a long day. We’ll discuss this more tomorrow.”
She looked dubious, but could see she wasn’t going to get the answers she wanted.
“Tomorrow.”
She left and locked the door behind her. He wanted her to stay, he wanted to tell her he was leaving and ask her to come with him.
Thursday was watching him, and Resh came back to himself.
“You aren’t really planning on weaponizing whatever did this to me, are you?” Thursday asked.
“I couldn’t care less about clan wars,” Resh said with a snort. “I just want to leave.”
He still looked skeptical.
“Now. Before I find you some dinner and a room for the night, how about that reading lesson.”
Thursdays winced as he grasped the wheels of the wheelchair with his bandaged hands and wheeled over to him. Resh sat down at the desk, the candle now the only source of light in the room.
Resignedly, Thursday set his journal on the desk between them. He pointed with a trembling finger at one of the first letters that appeared on the page.
“This is the letter A. It makes the ahh, aww, and aye sound.”
~~~
The next morning, Resh lay beneath his thick comforter staring at the plaster ceiling and thinking of his next move.
He contemplated taking the book from Thursday, and ending their bargain. Surely someone within the clan could teach him to read, and he wouldn’t have to push an invalid through the dangerous streets. But no, if word got around that he was learning to read, he’d have assassins on him by nightfall, eager to take his place. Better that they think he’d crafted some genius plot to gain more power for the clan.
Still, that need to leave pulsed within his skull. It was almost painful in its intensity.
He threw off the comforter and rose. He had to see this through.
After he dressed and ate breakfast, he retrieved Thursday from his room and pushed him down the hall.
A group of men stood from their chairs beside the elevator. They were all burly men by necessity to outweigh the elevator’s counterweight.
The men eyed Thursday and Resh, confusion and a hint of disdain cracking their stolid demeanors. Resh should have had another clansmen accompany them to push Thursday around. Seeing their leader play nurse to a cripple, would not inspire confidence.
The men let them step onto the elevator first when it finally arrived. Then they stepped on, one by one, until the elevator began to lower. They traded out one man for another to prevent the elevator from dropping too rapidly, and then stood in silence as they descended.
“Where is Pike Place anyway?”
“Water front,” Resh said. A tension in the air put Resh on edge, but he couldn’t identify the cause of it. “It’s a large market for fishermen and farmers. The Elliot Bay Clan uses it as their stronghold, but we’re on friendly terms with them. They…”
The reason for his discomfort registered slowly, like a swelling storm detected by the hint of ozone in the air. The men around him were standing stiff and straight, their muscles clenched. He had taken the elevator more times than he could remember, and they had always appeared relaxed and even a bit bored.
One turned his head slowly as his words trailed off, and he looked Resh up and down.
Resh’s hand darted to the hilt of his knife, but before he could draw it, an elbow flew up and connected with his temple.
Resh staggered back against the wall of the elevator. When his vision snapped back into focus, he saw hands reaching out for him. He crouched and then sprang forward, diving headlong into the attackers.
He drove two men back into the open door of the elevator just as they passed a floor. One’s arm was pinned between the floor of the hallway and the ceiling of the elevator. It separated from his body at the elbow with a sickening crunch and made the elevator lurch. The other hit his head on the lip of the passing floor and crumbled to the ground, unconscious.
Resh was momentarily paralyzed by the horrific scream of the man whose arm had been severed and the sight of the blood spurting from the wound. The moment of hesitation was his undoing.
The two remaining men closed in. One wrapped his arm around Resh’s neck and leaned back. Blood pounded in Resh’s ears, and he clawed at the arm that strangled him.
The second man approached with a knife, but Resh kept him at a distance with the occasional kick. In moments, a black haze condensed along the periphery of his vision, and he stopped caring about the attackers, wanting only to take in a breath of air. His head pounded, his muscles spasmed, and before he knew what was happening, the arm slackened, and Resh gasped.
Falling to his knees, Resh shook his head to disperse the black fog. When sight returned to him, he scrambled back to the wall of the elevator and searched for his attackers. The burly man lay on the floor, a knife buried to its hilt in his eye socket. It was his knife, though for the life of him, he couldn’t remember drawing it.
“You okay?”
Resh jolted around to see Thursday sitting in his wheelchair. Red dots, like the acne of youth, peppered his face. Resh looked for the other attacker only to see him on the floor. A fountain of blood bubbled out from a hole in his trachea, sending up a fine spray of blood with every breath. A bloody pencil rested on the floor beside him.
They had already reached the first floor, and a small crowd of clansmen stared in, paralyzed by the sight of the dead and dying men littering the floor of the elevator.
Resh gulped, but none of the spectators seemed interested in killing him. He used the handrail of the elevator to lift himself to his feet. He retrieved his knife, straightened his jacket, and then wheeled Thursday out of the elevator without a word. The crowd parted to let them through.
Only when they were out of the door and a block away did Resh speak.
“We shouldn’t have survived that,” then belatedly, “Thank you for helping.”
“You took out three by yourself.”
Resh frowned. He had no qualms about killing, but he couldn’t even remember killing the last one. He had not consciously drawn his knife or driven it over his shoulder and into the man’s eye, but somehow, he had.
“Why did they do it? You’re their leader.”
“Clan leaders don’t inherit the title, they take it. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to remove me.”
“Is it that bad? I mean, what did you do to deserve that?”
“It’s not what I’ve done, it’s what I’ve failed to do. Our last Headsman, Stiles, was savage. He was known to eat the hearts of his enemies because
he thought their courage would become his own. He took over half of the territory our clan holds today. But in his last few months, he just stopped caring about the clan. He left the city more often and wouldn’t return for days. He was weak. So I killed him.”
Thursday looked back at him with uncertainty.
“And they think you’re getting weak too?”
Resh tightened his jaw in indignation, but then nodded.
“I just can’t find it in me to care about the clans and their squabbles. All I want to do is leave, put all of it behind me.”
They passed the old library Thursday had seen from the window the night before, and Thursday opened his jacket to pull out his travelogue. Only then did he realize his pencil had been left in the elevator, next to the body of the man he’d killed. Cursing quietly, he clenched his trembling hand into a fist several times before closing the book.
Was he shaking from the recent shock or from his illness? Resh did not ask.
They continued to the northwest, keeping the interstate in sight to avoid straying into Pioneer Square Clan territory. Towering skyscrapers, or the bones of them, blocked all view of the bay. Soon, the scent of fish emanating from the market told Resh they were nearly there.
He paused at one intersection as a caravan of horse-drawn wagons passed. The wagons were made from the chassis of cars hollowed out and hitched together. The men and women that drove them were a ragged bunch, with leather and metal plating adorning their clothes like a patchwork armor. They carried bats and crudely whittled planks of wood bristling with nails.
As they waited for the caravan to pass, Resh examined one of the few street signs nobody had gotten around to stealing yet. He found he recognized all of the letters now. The one that looked like a hatchet was called a ‘P’ and the one beside it, an “I”.
“Pike,” he said, grunting with amusement and pointing at the sign.
Thursday pulled his eyes away from the caravan to follow his finger and then nodded approvingly.
Resh cleared his throat and lowered his finger, ashamed by how much pleasure the act of reading such a simple word had given him.
They followed Pike for another block and soon reached a large sign which Resh read as Pub-something, Mar-something, and another word made of letters he couldn’t quite remember.
“Public Market Center,” Thursday said helpfully after watching Resh try to sound it out.
Resh nodded as if that was exactly what he had been about to say.
The early morning crowd amassed around a dozen stalls to the right of the sign. A small girl with long hair in an elaborate braid straddled a large pig made entirely of brass. Thursday stared as they passed, and Resh wondered if the man worried the girl would hurt herself, or if he had an inherent distrust of pigs.
“The market started in 1907. Originally, farmers would sell to some merchants who then sold it to the public at increasingly higher rates. The public got wind of the corruption and started buying directly from the farmers when they brought their goods into the city. Now the Elliot Bay clan owns it. They are no better than middlemen, in my opinion. A historian told me once that we must learn from history so we don’t repeat its mistakes, but I don’t think that applies here. If they don’t make money at the market, they’ll just take it from people anyway. What this city needs is a clan to restore law and order.”
“And what clan is that?”
Resh shook his head.
“Don’t know. And chances are I won’t be leading it.”
They stopped at one of the stalls, and Resh bought Thursday a pencil. His companion thanked him and immediately jotted down something he must have been holding in his head. The shapes of his letters were visibly different from the earlier pages. His hands still shook.
“Why bother? Assuming we find your cure, the journal will be mine.”
“Oliver Lawrence, the man in Louisville who tasked me with writing this travelogue, said he’ll pay me extra for however many pages are used. That money will be yours if you deliver it to him. It’s the least I could do for your help.”
Resh couldn’t remember the last time someone had performed an unnecessary kindness for him, at least not without wanting something in return. Was he trying to earn another favor?
“If it is worth so much. Why don’t you come with me when you are cured? Claim it for yourself?”
“I have some other tasks to complete before I go home.” He elaborated when Resh grunted, unconvinced. “I have reason to believe the nanoswarms can be controlled. I need to find the alien tech responsible for creating and controlling them.”
The swarms. The aliens had used them to bring humanity to its knees during the invasion. They were drawn to all forms of electricity, devouring them and those that operated them. Even with the aliens gone, the swarms continued to be a plague on the world.
“For what purpose? A weapon?”
The look Thursday cast him was almost disapproving.
“If we can stop them, we can use the old-world machines again: lights, electricity, cars, everything we lost during the invasion.”
Resh did not argue with the man’s humanitarian motives. He had already decided he would deliver Thursday’s travelogue to Louisville if he managed to make it that far.
“Stiles used to think as you do. He was always searching for alien tech, but never found any. You know that alien head mounted on the wall to my room? He once scraped out what must have passed for a brain from that skull. I watched him eat it. He said it would give him their knowledge.”
“The same guy who ate the hearts of his enemies?”
Resh nodded. That hadn’t worked either as far as Resh could tell. When he had burst in on Stiles in his room, he had been pale, frightened, and drooling as he pleaded for his life.
A few of the Elliot Bay Clansmen recognized him as he walked down the length of the market, but they let him pass, perhaps assuming he was there on official business with their clan headsman.
Eventually they reached a stairwell and an adjacent wheelchair ramp. As they headed deeper into the market, they scanned the walls for any fliers plastered to the wall or pinned to bulletin boards. After an hour of searching beneath newer fliers and in drifts of paper, cloth, and other refuse, Resh had had enough.
The next person he saw, an old man with long, grey hair and barely any clothes to speak of, said he remembered such a sickness. After handing over a quarter, the man’s memory stirred up some additional details. Eventually he directed them to the bottom most level of the market where a family of four sat in a circle, cutting and weaving rags into garments and blankets.
The youngest of them, a boy of about seventeen, said he’d had the sickness.
“Yeah, I followed the map. The guys that met us wore white coats and white cloths over their mouths and noses. They were strange. They told me I was lucky, that I was one of them. They seemed to distrust anyone who showed signs of getting better on their own, those whose hands and cheeks weren’t nearly as red. They told them to leave.”
“But they gave you something? Something to make you better?” Thursday asked.
He nodded, barely looking up from his weaving.
“A shot,” he absently jabbed a finger into his upper arm. “And then they sent me away. I was better in a day or two.”
“Do you remember where it was?”
“It was a parking lot. But they came from somewhere else. Hold on a minute.” He handed off the bundle of cloth to an older girl, and dug through one of his packs. After a minute, he withdrew a small piece of paper.
Resh could make out several words and numbers but couldn’t make sense of them. A logo printed on the paper, though creased and faded, was identical to the one on Thursday’s letter.
Synapse Sentries of Seattle.
He leaned down to Thursday and whispered.
“What does this say?”
“Zymo Genetics building?” Thursday read. He spotted the logo and his eyes widened. “That’s it. That’s them.”
“I’ve seen these words before. I know where they are.”
Thursday addressed the boy once more.
“Anything else you can remember?”
“They offered me a job,” he said with a shrug. “When they gave me that paper. I was needed here, so I didn’t take it. Ohh, and one other thing. They kept telling me to only drink water that was filtered or that was collected from rain. They told us that repeatedly before they let us go.”
Thursday and Resh exchanged glances and shrugged. Perhaps water was how the disease was transmitted? But why offer a job to a boy that couldn’t be more than fifteen at the time?
Before they left, Resh asked for one of their blankets and paid them well for it. Thursday’s knit brow relaxed, and he smiled appreciatively as Resh laid the blanket over his legs, which were still exposed to the cool air through holes in his ratty jeans.
They were beginning their trek back up the levels of the market when a familiar voice called to them.
Resh’s heart leapt when he saw Kyli skipping down the stairs to reach them.
“Resh, I’ve been searching everywhere.” She jumped into his arms. “I heard about the attack. When I couldn’t find you…”
“I’m alright,” he said, wrapping her in his arms. “It’s over.”
“Over? What makes you think it won’t happen again?”
“I…”
“We need to get you back to a safe place, surround you with loyal clansmen. What are you doing out here anyway? They could have followed you.”
Resh sighed, put his hands on her shoulders, and held her back at arm’s length.
“We can’t go back now. We have a lead on the company that made the virus. We are so close.”
“Where is it?” she asked, and that same intense look of hunger came over her.
“I think it’s that old building in Eastlake, the one with the smoke stacks. You can see it from the Five. We were headed straight there.”
“We can’t walk,” Kyli said with a shake of her head. “It’s all contested territories between here and there, and at least one of our barricades. If you think you can get this weapon, we should get it before you face the clan again.”
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Seattle Page 3