The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [81]
They could find no coherence to the nesting of the tenement's corridors and stairways, each floor a jumble of demolition and shoddy reconstruction; as they stumbled from room to room, none of its denizens offered any protest at their presence: Accustomed to invasion, they owned no sense of borders worth defending. No furniture aside from huge rough beds where multiple sets of dull eyes stared at them fearfully out of the darkness. Bodies slunk away from them like swollen insects. Aggressive rats the size of terriers stopped to regard them with less alarm than the humans. Opening one door that threw baleful light into a murky room, they were shocked by the sight of the far wall melting away, until they realized what they saw moving was a solid blanket of cockroaches.
In one cavernous space, Doyle lost count after estimating at least sixty people lived there, most seeking solace in a sleep indistinguishable from death. The smells thickened the farther they descended, and everywhere they ventured lay a dread and dreary silence. They found a family of six huddled around a candle in the crawl space under a flight of stairs, all stamped with the same hollow-eyed expression, their poor possessions scattered around them. Doyle had read Dickens's devastating accounts of poverty in midcentury London, but nothing he'd ever witnessed could match this intolerable misery. The violence of this cold hell was first and foremost spiritual. With what high hopes had these damned souls journeyed to the New World? wondered Doyle, his feelings a hot whirl of pity, sympathy, and horror.
They picked their way down three floors before realizing they had heard no sounds of the gang following behind them: There were apparently some places even the Houston Dusters wouldn't go. Easy enough to stake out the rooftop while the rest of their war party waited on the street below, and, yes, when the four men looked out a filthy staircase landing window, there they stood, fifteen strong, outside the front doors.
"What do we do?" asked Stern.
Jack did not answer, took a reading on their location to set his internal compass, then led them to the western extreme of the tenement, into a room lined with six dark masses huddled on wooden pallets; entire families, they discovered, staring at them like wounded herd animals waiting for predators to finish the job. Doyle noticed one group sheltering the frail shrouded body of a dead child. Jack threw open the room's single window and measured the distance to the next building; eight feet away across an open air shaft. As the cowed inhabitants scurried away, Jack pulled a short iron bar from his jacket and pried loose a sturdy length of planking from the floor. He worked tenaciously, his expression never changing, the only one of them outwardly unaffected by their journey down through the tenement; his actions under fire, which had once seemed to Doyle the model of dash and heroic vigor, were now ruled by a brutal efficiency.
They laid the plank from one ledge to another across the air shaft and Jack went across first, testing his weight; the plank bowed slightly as he reached the middle but held firm. He smashed the window of the far tenement and hissed ferociously at the darkness inside, discouraging its residents, if there were any, from defending their territory. Stem followed, clutching the Zohar to his chest, then Innes, in three vaulting steps, and finally Doyle, whose bulk strained the plank to its limit. He could not sensibly close his eyes, but neither could he bear to look down; when the plank cracked, he was exactly halfway across and his response was to shout once in alarm, stand perfectly still until the board stopped bouncing, and then to stand still some more.
In spite of the others' frantic prompting, Doyle seemed