Last Descendants
“I have a duty to this city,” Tommy said. “Once you are safe, I mean to wage war on these rioters, and I don’t plan to make any arrests or take any prisoners.”
Adelina said nothing to that, and together they moved south in the same way they’d made their way uptown, staying inconspicuous and out of sight. As they approached Thirtieth Street, they saw looters and houses aflame ahead, and dodged eastward a block to avoid them, toward one of the largest smoke columns. As they moved down Sixth Avenue and reached Twenty-Ninth Street, they saw the smoke rising from the charred and smoldering remains of the provost marshal’s office. Fortunately, the mob had moved on from it, their work accomplished, so Tommy guided Adelina toward the ruined building.
Smoke burned Tommy’s eyes, the air filled with fluttering scraps of ash. Adelina coughed and covered her mouth with her sleeve as they passed the building, now a jumble of splintered and blackened bones, the ground around them littered with scraps of wood and iron, bricks and paving stones.
When they reached Broadway, they turned downtown, heading toward the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Tommy didn’t know what they would find there, but he planned to move back over to Sixth Avenue when he felt it was safe and follow that down to Christopher Street.
“Tommy, look,” Adelina said.
Up ahead, through the smoke, Tommy glimpsed a group of four thugs viciously kicking and beating a figure on the ground, an old black man by the look of it.
“Stay back,” he whispered.
“What are you going to do?”
“Crack some heads,” he said. He skulked back to the wreck of the provost marshal’s office and snatched up a crowbar and an iron pipe, a weapon for each hand. Then he sneaked forward, advancing on the ruffians as quietly as he could.
“Filthy nigger!” one of the men shouted, planting a boot in his victim’s stomach. “I’ll kill every goddamn nigger in this city!”
“Kick his eyes out!” another of them shouted.
When Tommy was as close to them as he thought he could approach without alerting them, he broke into a full, silent charge. The thugs looked up at him, but not in time. Tommy threw all his weight behind the iron in his hands and barreled through the rioters. The crowbar caught one of the ruffians by the jaw. The pipe knocked the skull of another. Tommy’s momentum carried him a dozen feet before he skidded to a stop and spun around to rush the remaining two.
They stood in shock, staring at their fallen comrades, who would be of no use to them now, but had their guards up before Tommy reached them. One had pulled a knife and the other held a brickbat.
Tommy laid into the one with the brickbat first, disarming him, and immediately swiveled to take on the other. But the knife stabbed Tommy in his side before he made it around. Pain blazed from the wound, but Tommy suppressed and ignored it, and hooked his opponent’s neck with the crowbar, yanking him forward as he hit his face with the pipe.
The brickbat hit Tommy in the shoulder, throwing him forward. But the ruffian had missed his one shot at Tommy’s head, which meant Tommy had no trouble turning around and felling the fool with a succession of blows that broke the man’s forearm and shoulder.
All four thugs down, Tommy dropped his weapons, which clanged to the ground, and did a quick probe of his knife wound. It was bleeding heavily, but not at a life-threatening pace. The blade had pierced the muscle at Tommy’s waist, but not his abdominal cavity.
The victim groaned on the ground, and Tommy knelt down to inspect him. The poor man was conscious, but nearly ruined. A broken jaw, broken cheeks and eye sockets, bleeding from one of his ears. Tommy was certain the man had multiple broken ribs, and possibly more internal damage to his organs.
“Is he alive?” Adelina asked, running up.
“Barely,” Tommy said.
The man whispered something, but Tommy couldn’t hear what he’d said.
He leaned closer. “What’s that, friend?”
“Tweed,” the man said, gasping. “I work … for Tweed.”
“Tweed?” Tommy said. “William Tweed?”
The man nodded a fraction of an inch. “Thirty-Sixth Street,” he said. “Fifth and Sixth.”
“Fifth and Sixth Avenues?” Adelina asked.
“I think so,” Tommy said. “I think it’s an address.”
“We should take him there,” Adelina said.
“He needs a hospital,” Tommy said. “Soon.”
“No.” Adelina shook her head. “I think we should listen to him. I think he knows what he needs.”
Tommy looked again at the old man and thought maybe she was right. With his injuries, at his age, he wasn’t likely to survive the night, no matter what the doctors at the hospital were able to do for him.
“All right,” Tommy said, and then he spoke to the old man again. “What’s your name, friend?”
“Abraham,” the man whispered.
“Abraham, I’m going to sit you up.” Tommy wedged his hands under the man’s shoulders. “It’s probably going to hurt. Are you ready?”
Abraham nodded again.
Tommy raised him as gently as he could, and Abraham whimpered all the way into a sitting position.
“Hold him up,” Tommy said to Adelina.
She knelt down and put her arms around Abraham in an embrace, keeping him steady, while Tommy turned around and presented his back.
“Now,” he said. “Adelina, gently raise his arms, one at a time, and lay them on my shoulders.”
Abraham groaned behind him, and then one of the old man’s hands came over Tommy’s head, past his ear. Tommy reached up and took hold of it so it wouldn’t fall, noticing that Abraham’s knuckles were bleeding and bruised. He had put up a fight.
Abraham groaned again, and Adelina placed his other arm on Tommy’s opposite shoulder. Tommy took hold of it as well, and then he gently pulled both of Abraham’s arms forward until he had his elbows, folding Abraham’s arms around his neck.
“Don’t be afraid to choke me,” Tommy said. “Hold on tight.” Then he shook his head and said to Adelina, “Christ, this is going to hurt him if his ribs are broken.”
But when he heaved upward, rising to his feet with Abraham hanging on his back, Tommy felt a sharp pain in his knife wound, as if he was getting stabbed again. He grunted and flinched, and Adelina noticed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You—my God, you’re hurt!”
“I’ll be fine,” he said through gritted teeth. He still had to carry the man on his back seven blocks.
“But you’re bleeding!”
“I’ll be fine,” Tommy said. “Trust me. I am acquainted with injuries.”
He bent at the waist to a severe angle, hoping to take the pressure off Abraham’s arms and ease the old man’s pain. Then he set off, back up Broadway, then over to Sixth Avenue, then uptown, struggling with every step. Tommy knew he was strong, but he also knew he had his limits. Two brawls in two days, a sleepless night, and a knife wound.
He would soon find out if those were his limits.
Cudgel watched the city burn from the top of the Fifth Avenue Church’s bell tower. After defeating the Assassin, he had brought the stolen relic here to wait until sunset, when he was to deliver the dagger to the Grand Master. Cudgel had planned to involve himself fully in the day’s excitement, but after acquiring his prize, he dared not the slightest risk losing it.
So from his vantage two hundred feet above the streets, he had witnessed the mob unfold a red tapestry of fire, blood, and fear over the city.
Through it all, Javier had felt utterly helpless. He wanted to do something to stop it, but he didn’t dare leave the church tower, remembering Monroe’s warnings about desynchronization. Now that Cudgel had the Piece of Eden in his possession, Javier wouldn’t risk blowing the whole reason they’d come into the simulation. So instead he had to watch, and he had to experience Cudgel’s satisfaction at the chaos and destruction he had partly caused.
Much of it had been strategized and executed accor
ding to design. Both provost marshal’s offices, the one on Broadway and the other on Third, had been put to flame before they could carry out the draft. That was the entire pretense for the protest, after all, which became the riot Cudgel expected even more quickly than he’d thought it would.
Other stages did not go as planned. The attempt to seize the Second Avenue Armory had failed, perhaps because Cudgel hadn’t been there to lead the assault. Instead, he’d watched the building burn from a distance, destroying thousands of rifles, carbines, and other guns, aware that it was probably the mindless rioters who’d set it afire, taking with it their only chance at true victory. Without guns, the mob would not succeed in taking control of the city, no matter how long Sanford kept the army out of it.
But the mob didn’t need to take the city.
Cudgel looked down at the dagger in his hand. If the weapon was what he believed it to be, a Precursor relic, then the Grand Master would no longer need the mob.
Though the mob had done its work well. As evening approached, fire and smoke rose up from all quarters of the city. None of it bothered Cudgel. It was necessary work that had to be done. The city had become too unwieldy, and there were larger issues at play in the war. A few lives lost and a few buildings burned could not compare to the peace and prosperity of the nation.
Away from that battlefield, Javier didn’t know what to make of Cudgel’s absolute certainty. He was in the Templar’s mind, so he couldn’t help but at least partly see things Cudgel’s way, while at the same time he deplored what the Templars were doing.
Then evening came, and it was time for Cudgel to take the dagger to the Grand Master. He wrapped the relic up and slipped it into a pocket of his coat, and was about to descend to the street when he noticed a new fire to the north. He’d thought the rioters had moved downtown, so he pulled out his Herschel spyglass and used it as a telescope to see what the mob had done.
It was the Colored Orphan Asylum. The mob had set fire to it.
Cudgel put the spyglass away, his mouth dry, his stomach sick. While he believed in the cause of the Order, and would follow any command given to him, the idea of murdering children gave him pause, and in that moment, Javier felt his mind and Cudgel’s to be at peace, rather than at war.
Cudgel descended the bell tower rapidly, sliding and dropping from ledge to ledge, until he reached the street. After struggling to move north a block and a half, he scaled a building to escape the throng in the streets, and then made his way over the rooftops.
The orphanage had never been a target. Cudgel’s personal objections aside, it didn’t make sense as one. The Grand Master had made it clear: The riots would only succeed if held forth as a popular uprising, and fail if judged as evil and barbarous. Some degree of looting was acceptable and expected, but the burning of an orphanage had gone too far. Cudgel had to do something, and it had to be done quickly.
He descended to the street again when he reached the Croton Reservoir, but climbed its walls and raced along its wide, brick embankment, the man-made lake on his left, the ghostly ruins of the Crystal Palace just to the west.
The column of smoke ahead of him grew bloated on the fire’s feasting, and by the time Cudgel reached the orphanage, the building was completely engulfed in flame and lost. A dozen firemen stood by, helpless, held back from their duty by the mob shouting curses.
“Burn their filthy nest!”
“Murder every last monkey!”
The scene horrified Javier, and angered Cudgel, and they both hoped the children had escaped.
Looters churned in the street, their arms full of bedding and furniture and other goods they’d managed to haul out before the fire took charge. Cudgel moved north along Fifth Avenue through the throng, searching for the children, and turned onto Forty-Fourth Street just as the orphans emerged from an alleyway, having apparently exited the burning building through a back way.
As the children filed out, Cudgel counted some three hundred or more of them, and they had walked right into the waiting hands of the thick mob. Before the rioters could turn their aggressions on the orphans, Cudgel had to create a diversion to give them time to escape, something to draw the mob’s fury, and the only thing he knew to be more maddening to the mob than blacks would be a sympathetic white.
“If there’s a man among you,” he cried, “with a heart within him, come and help these poor children!”
The response came as swiftly as Cudgel had expected it to. The mob seized hold of him, swearing and cursing him for an abolitionist and a Lincolnite, and he allowed them to pull him away, keeping hold of his rifle, even as the officers of the orphanage moved the children west, away from danger.
Cudgel withstood a few painful kicks and blows, waiting until the children were well underway before he went to work on his captors. Some were half-hockey, and none were seasoned brawlers. With a few throat punches and hard elbows to kidneys, Cudgel slipped away and up the wall of the nearest building.
From there, he raced along with the children, keeping watch from on high as they marched west, mostly likely toward the Twentieth Precinct police station house. When a group of twenty or more orphans got separated from the main body, Cudgel descended to the street once again.
“Come along,” he said to them, approaching with his arms spread wide. “I won’t hurt you. Come this way.”
They looked up at him, cheeks smudged with tears and soot. Some were perhaps ten or eleven years old. They held hands with the smaller ones, some as young as three or four.
“All will be well,” he said. “I’ll protect you. But we need to hurry.”
He pushed them forward, ushering them down Seventh Avenue two blocks, through a crowd that sneered and eyed them like feral cats. The street was a tinderbox, and it would only take one spark for all those children to die. Farther down the road, Cudgel spotted a few horsebuses from the Forty-Second Street line parked against the curb. Most of the city’s drivers hadn’t dared to run that day, out of fear for their animals and their vehicles, but Cudgel knew one of the men up ahead, a Tammany informant.
“Paddy McCaffrey!” Cudgel shouted.
The driver looked up.
“Boss wants these children unharmed!” Cudgel said, leading the children to the bus.
“That a fact?” Paddy asked.
“It is a fact,” Cudgel said. “Get them on these buses and take them to the Twentieth Precinct. Now.”
Paddy’s face blanched. “This mob’ll skin me alive if I do that!”
“Oh, yeah?” Cudgel stepped closer to him and poisoned his voice with menace. “And I’ll open you up right here in the street if you don’t. Understand? Now, hurry.”
Paddy scowled but nodded, and Cudgel helped usher the children up into the bus, and when they filled that one, he put them on the next, until they were all aboard. The mob took note as Paddy spurred his team forward through it, and some of the men shouted, shaking their fists.
“Let me through!” Paddy bellowed.
“Come on, boys!” A red-faced barber stepped toward the bus brandishing an axe. “Let’s break this stage open and wring some necks!”
Cudgel pulled a slender blade from his belt and moved to intercept the man. Just as the barber raised his weapon over his head to strike, Cudgel knifed his liver, a quick thrust, and the axe tumbled to the ground. The mob around them barely noticed until the barber collapsed, but Cudgel had already stepped away, and the horsebuses had trundled on.
The violence of that memory didn’t trouble Javier, and he wondered if it should have. He had begun to ally himself too closely with Cudgel, who stayed with the vehicles for several more blocks until he was sure they were out of the worst of the riot, and then he broke away, turning toward the Grand Master’s house. He kept his perception honed as he moved down Broadway with the relic, as if feeling ahead with the point of a sword.
He doubted the Assassin would be of any further hindrance. It had proved an easy thing to defeat him, but Cudgel wondered now if he s
houldn’t have just killed him. The decision to let the Assassin live had been strategic, and undoubtedly arrogant. Cudgel wanted the Brotherhood to know there was another Hunter in New York, a Cormac. But it may have been better to take no chances with a relic at hand.
When he reached Thirty-Sixth Street, he turned east, the setting sun at his back barely visible through a thick curtain of charcoal clouds. The day’s heat hadn’t surrendered yet, but the air wasn’t quite as lifeless. The sky threatened rain, which would aid the city and the police in controlling the fires, another unfortunate turn in their plans.
Cudgel approached the Grand Master’s brownstone, and, from a distance, he felt something amiss. He drew near enough to see the front door stood open, apparently kicked in, and immediately climbed up to the roof of a neighboring house. From there, he found an attic window into the Grand Master’s residence, broke it open, and slipped inside.
Dust and shadow stifled the air within. Cudgel crept forward through the attic, head ducked, careful of the creak in the wooden floorboards. He found the attic door and opened it a crack, finding the hallway empty, but heard voices coming up from somewhere in the house below. A woman crying.
As far as Cudgel knew, the Grand Master didn’t live here, but maintained the house for meetings. The only people present should have been the servants, and for a moment, Cudgel wondered if some of the mob had done the unthinkable and invaded the Grand Master’s property.
He crept along the hallway to the staircase and peered downward through the square spiral of the banister. The voices seemed to be coming from the first floor, so Cudgel descended two flights of stairs and waited in the shadows of the second floor.
“I’m so sorry,” a woman was saying as another woman cried.
“He wanted to be brought here,” said a man’s voice. “He wanted to see you.”
Cudgel didn’t recognize either of them, but they didn’t sound like rioters, here to loot the house.
The sobbing woman broke into a scream that rent the air all through the house and chilled Cudgel to the deepest reaches of his chest. It even sent him back up the staircase a step, and nearly distracted him from the shadow moving toward him.