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 completely unable to manufacture another step forward; a massive short circuit between his brain and feet. When the cries and war whoops from the ground below indicated that his shout had drawn the Dusters around the side of the building to them, he was still unable to move. Even when rocks and debris began flying around him, he could not convince his legs that one more step on this plank wouldn't splinter it and send him crashing to his doom, but as he waited the rift in the wood spread through it like a spider web.
'Come on, Arthur...'
'Two steps, old man.'
The plank seemed to shrink down to the width of a toothpick; a single move in any direction will spell your end, Doyle's brain screamed at him. The three men in the window flapped their lips and waved their arms at him but he seemed to neither hear nor recognize them, resigned to spend the rest of eternity locked in this moment. A rock thumped into his shoulder, setting him swaying; the stinging bite of the blow had the salutary effect of unscrambling his mind and returning to him control of his limbs.
'Good Christ!' he shouted, realizing his predicament.
He took one long stride forward on the board and it caved in toward the middle, forming a momentary V before collapsing altogether; his hands desperately groped forward and found something to grab as the plank fell away beneath him. He looked up into Jack's face, framed in the window, felt something cold in his hands, and realized he held the hooked end of the crowbar that Jack was grasping. Jack and Innes pulled him up through the window and over the sill like an exhausted trout.
'I'd forgotten about your fondness for heights,' said Jack.
'Like riding a bicycle,' said Doyle. 'You never forget it.'
Bricks and bottles smashed against the walls, spraying shards of glass around them, and a second barrage angled down through the window from above; the Dusters on the roof of the Gates of Hell had discovered their position as well.
'We're not out of it yet,' said Jack.
Doyle nodded gamely and climbed to his feet, the knees of his worsted trousers shredded, the toes of his shoes scrubbed raw. They moved into the hallway of the new building, ran down the first flight of stairs they came to, and immediately heard the Dusters breaking through the doors two floors below. Thumps and war cries from above told them that the rooftop contingent had bridged the gap as well: both feet in the jaws of a trap with nowhere to run.
Another sound took over: a low rumbling that increased with shocking suddenness, bearing down on them from every direction at once. The walls shook, plaster clogged the air, banisters and light fixtures rattled, and the intensity of the turbulence grew to a deafening roar. Jack threw a shoulder to the door directly before them; they rushed through an unoccupied apartment and were astonished to see the lurching, illuminated interiors of a train whipping by a few feet outside the window.
'The elevated train,' said Stern. 'Thank God; that's Second Avenue, I'd nearly forgotten where we were.'
After the train passed, they leaped from the window to the train platform, resting a floor above the empty shop-lined street, running north and south as far as the eye could see. No sight or sound of the Dusters.
'Two questions,' said Jack, staring down the narrow tracks. 'Where's the next station and when's the next train?'
'The next station is north, Fourteenth Street, that way about nine blocks,' said Stern, pointing ahead. 'The trains run every few minutes.'
Jack took off running to the north, stepping nimbly between the rails and ties, and the others tried to match his pace. Doyle could not accommodate his longer stride to the awkward width of the gaps, misstepped frequently, and was soon lagging behind, so he was the first to hear the yelps of the Dusters as they discovered the path they'd taken to the platform. Glancing over his shoulder, Doyle saw hoodlums pouring out of the window onto the elevated tracks two blocks behind; they ran after him right along the top of rails, their unnerving whoops and hollers echoing through the artificial canyon of the street.
'Come on, Arthur; don't look back,' said Innes, slowing to run alongside him.
Doyle nodded. Lungs on fire, speech beyond their capacity now, the brothers devoted every last effort to following Jack's lead, but the relentless hunters held the edge of local knowledge: As they moved north, the gap slowly and steadily closed. Runners following on the street below actually began to pull ahead. On the parallel south-running tracks across the street, a train lumbered by, momentarily obliterating the scuffling of their footsteps in the cinder bed, the rasp of their breathing. Rocks and bottles began to crash around them as the Dusters pulled within range. Doyle caught a glimpse of a gingerbread Swiss chalet built onto the margins of the platform and wondered if he was hallucinating. A street sign popped into his field of vision: still three blocks to go.
Jack stopped abruptly ahead of them and tossed back a cannister into the narrowing span between the Doyles and the Dusters: White pepper smoke billowed, but the Dusters had learned from their earlier engagement and either sprinted quickly through or waited for the cloud to dissipate: a net gain of only seconds.
Now the station came into sight ahead, but the gap between groups was less than fifty yards and closing fast—on the verge of collapse, Doyle's muscles seizing up, Jack apparently out of tricks—when the platform began to rumble and hum. A hot white beam of light sharply outlined the churning Houston Dusters as the train bore quickly down on them. A hundred yards to the platform: Innes grabbed Doyle's arm and urged him to the finish like an Irish jockey.
The booming sonic horn of the speeding engine blasted the Dusters off either side of the elevation, some
