Filing down and reaching the bottom of the stairway, he found himself in a completely different environment. Unlike the sixth floor which—on the face of it—could pass as a perfectly serviceable hotel on the bad side of town, the fifth offered no consistency in design and layout.

  Elijah wondered what curse had befallen the structure. The entire floor looked as if it had been bombed out, eaten away by fire and its walls aged by centuries of neglected degradation. A heavy darkness loitered as electricity seemed dead. The only light resembled the chilly kind of moonlight diffused through frosted winter window-glass, but he couldn’t place where those windows would be. The unsourced illumination was a ghostly mystery.

  Time seemed to eat the place alive. Even Death forgot this place existed. The wall sconces were shattered and the wiring long cold. The plaster walls were porous and shredded and the exposed lath strips jutted out like skinned ribs on a carcass. Unfortunately, the floor’s structural integrity was largely unharmed, denying Elijah the ability to slip down to the next floor. It was a contained, decrepit urban crypt that offered no concessions.

  Elijah felt like a fly trapped in a terrarium. But where was the lizard? He tread carefully, thinking it unlikely that the flesh-train he’d just evaded would slither about down here, although little surprised him within the confines of the hotel. Doors weren’t even necessary here as the broad gashes in the rotted walls provided convenient access.

  As he quietly strode about the ruin, looking for a stairwell in quiet desperation, a commanding voice called out.

  “Freeze!” the strange voice commanded as shafts of hard light danced around Elijah. The deep, guttural profile wasn’t the Broker, but drew his attention as he spun around to face the owner of it. A flashlight’s illumination blasted him in the face and he had no recourse but to use the pistols to shield his eyes.

  “Lower that iron, citizen!” the voice ordered, triggering Elijah’s curiosity.

  “Who are you?”

  “Lower ‘em!” the voice barked again.

  He slowly holstered the cannons as he realized the lone voice wasn’t alone after all. Several silhouettes descended on him, each figure carrying a flashlight of their own.

  “You wanna get that out of light out of my eyes, mister?” Elijah’s voice boiled.

  The beam dropped, allowing Elijah to focus on the visitors. The silhouettes were undeniable, even in the relative darkness of the level. Cops. Local PD. He couldn’t see their faces, but their authoritative swagger identified them as easy as an oink in the dark. It was the first time he was ever glad to see coppers. He sighed aloud.

  “What’re you doing in here?” one of the badges asked.

  “I wish I knew. Just wanna get the fuck outta here. There’s a guy talking through speakers. Givin’ me the runaround. You seen ‘im?”

  The cops, their faces still shielded by the darkness, merely bounced concerned glances at each other.

  “You drunk?” one of the cops asked with a suspiciously deep, baritone voice. In fact, each of the cops spoke like they gargled gravel.

  “No. Wish I was havin’ a drink right now,” Elijah said, remembering he was talking to cops. “I mean, if I could.”

  “Why couldn’t you have a drink?”

  Elijah chortled. “Prohibition, of course,” he said, unable to contain his mild disarray.

  The cops seemed genuinely confused. “Prohibition?” one asked.

  Elijah was increasingly baffled by their confusion. “Yeah…” his eyes darted across each of them, looking for clarity. “Prohibition of drinkin’ alcohol.”

  “Prohibiting consumption of alcohol? Where’s that happening? Dry counties?”

  Elijah chuckled nervously. “It’s umm—nation-wide.”

  “I think this one needs a drink. I’m buyin,” one of them said, drawing baritone chuckles from the rest and prompting them to approach Elijah.

  When they stepped closer into the soft, disembodied light, Elijah saw that their faces resembled the elevator operator’s: creased, pasty and their milky eyes were awash in dull gray. Their uniforms looked shabby, as if baked in the desert sun for years, and their badges were rusted out. They clearly didn’t know that Prohibition was the law of the land. But how couldn’t they? He felt the need to break the tension.

  “And what are you boys doin’ here?”

  “Lookin’ for some local riff-raff. Market Street Boys. You know ‘em?”

  Elijah’s eyes glazed over. Yeah, he knew ‘em.

  “Hey, what’s the malarkey?” a cop asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Those cannons you’re carryin’ there. You goin’ to war?”

  “Just came back from one,” Elijah offered.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Yeah? Which one?”

  Elijah was teetering on exasperated disgust. “Which one? The one. The big war.”

  They were genuinely confused, as Elijah was by the entire exchange. The realization washed over Elijah: they were cops… once. The same way he was out of place, they were out of time. Like antiques plucked out of a museum.

  The first cop eyed Elijah with a growing suspicion. “Hey, what’d you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You look familiar,” another of the cops remarked.

  The mood darkened. Elijah felt the pressure clamping down as the cops’ body language chilled.

  “Wait… I remember you. You went to St. Mary’s.”

  Elijah quietly lamented seeing the cops assemble evidence as he breathed.

  Another cop chimed in with implied accusation on his tongue. “Yeah, St. Mary’s. You know who else came from St. Mary’s?”

  Just as Elijah thought he heard the sound of the guillotine blade sliding to kiss his neck, a rustling was heard over his shoulder. Deeper into the building behind them, layered movements mumbled from the silence. Aggressive footfalls. Plaster crunching under weight. Suppressed muttering between male voices. A group strategizing as they descended. The cops’ attention was yanked from Elijah as they drew their sidearms and aimed past him towards the unidentified commotion.

  Silhouettes skittered past the gaps in the decayed, eroding partitions. The unseen footfalls became hurried and erratic as the cops moved past Elijah to pursue the trespassers.

  “You there! Identify yourselves!” a cop barked.

  Elijah slid away in the confusion, letting the darkness envelope him as he hustled behind a corridor wall to assess the situation out of sight. The cops chased the noises down one of the narrow hallways, sidearms trained ahead.

  Directly down their line of sight, several bodies darted out into the hallway. In seconds, the cops—and the iron clenched in their quivering grips—honed in on the targets. The anonymous interlopers had iron of their own and leveled those sidearms at the cops. Too quick to negotiate or interrogate. Loud pops resounded. Gunshots. The cops barked incomprehensibly as they returned fire. Bullets tore through the walls and released puffs of loose plaster-dust.

  Other voices interspersed and melded into a chaotic cacophony. The bright blades shining from the cops’ flashlights danced around, casting a multitude of amorphous shadows through the perforated partitions.

  “Cook some pigs!” a young, undisciplined voice rattled out among the unintelligible muttering.

  “You wanted Market Street? We’re bringin’ it to you!” a disembodied interloper growled.

  Market Street Boys. Elijah remembered that name all too well. He ran with them as a kid before signing up for the army and getting tossed into the European theater. While he was charging around the Western Front for the last half of the war, the Market Street Boys terrorized the North Side of Chicago. They were street urchins, disaffected youths who never saw a pocket they didn’t want to pick or a window they didn’t want to smash.

  Elijah peeked from behind a wall and saw the Market Streeters scattering through the complex like grimy, shivved-up rats. They were still kids on the verge of adulthood; boys in mens’ bodies whose impulsive rage had no filters. The would’ve made great cannon fodder during the war but opted to carve up their part of the city. Mostly for fun.

  The cops ducked and shifted, getting kissed by blossoms of plaster debris as bullets pecked the haggard walls around them. Leveling their iron into the fray, the cops returned fire, filling the cramped corridor with fluttering bursts of light that purged the dark for fractions of a second.

  Elijah heard the searing lead smacking the walls and the powdered, sandy plaster sifting onto the deck. Men screamed epithets through the haze, crisscrossing through rooms and taking cover. Between the cops the Market Streeters, there were easily twenty men vying for kill-shot advantage.

  Elijah slid into an empty room, staying low as the gunfire traded back and forth. Piles of dust and cracked chunks of plaster littered the torn and tattered carpet. The constant exchange of gunfire pulled him back into the war.

  The Meuse-Argonne offensive was Hell on Earth. 33rd Infantry. Prairie division. In his youth, he dreamed of setting foot on France’s shores, but the granting of that wish was an ironic gift. Those dead black trees sprouting up out of a sea of fog as bullets whizzed overhead; the sounds of groaning men singing pain into death. The claustrophobic nausea of the trenches. Desperate, gaunt faces.

  In the months of fighting there, men never saw their killers. Bullets came unannounced and kissed without consent, inviting Death to claim the recipients. It was a theater of wicked delights where demons danced and mocked Man for his iniquities. Prayers went unanswered and dreams were dashed. Many a widow was made in the mud in the months of slow despair that played out there. The idea of victory was transitory as survival from one moment to the next was its own precious victory.

  Elijah was always quick to make friends, but in that time he was just as quick to lose them. He wondered if angels’ wings deflected the German bullets that cursed at the 33rd persistently as his body never saw a killing wound.

  He hoped to never again feel that oppressive, hopeless angst that stripped away human joy. Here, in this strange, shifting abode, the oppressive hopelessness was the primary furnishing. The hotel refused to share him with his own thoughts and he found himself back in his boots.

  Bathed in darkness and momentarily distracted, Elijah rounded a corner and inadvertently drove his shoulder into a meaty body that toppled back. As Elijah steadied himself and the man before him rose, he recognized the face lit by the dim, diffused light. It was a Market Streeter. Jimmy Cooper. Bad seed. Last Elijah heard was that Jimmy got into a knife fight with someone faster and bled out in the alley behind Pop’s General Store over on Maxwell Street. This skin sleeve that wobbled gently before him wasn’t Jimmy. Jimmy was six feet deep in an unvisited grave somewhere. Like everything else about this dreadful hotel, this was something else wearing Jimmy’s skin. This thing wearing Jimmy’s visage was like the other native inhabitants of Hotel Erebus: pasty, desiccated skin, dead eyes that emitted a dull gray glow and a mouth filled with yellowed teeth. He resembled a corpse pulled out of the ground after a week and slapped until his eyes yawned open.

  “Elijah?” Jimmy asked with that same, off-putting baritone voice the cops sported. It was inhuman; a marionette trying not to sound like the puppeteer. “Ya never come around anymore...” Elijah knew a threat when he heard it. That’s what a guy like Jimmy said before he put a shiv between your ribs.

  As Elijah thought this, Jimmy bared his yellowed fangs and slowly moved to bring his pistol up. Time seemed to slow and compress. The ringing of adjacent gunfire stretched and warbled. Elijah’s pulse began to rise. Jimmy’s dead eyes glared evilly. Purely on a soldier’s instinct, Elijah leveled the war-happy pistols into Jimmy-thing’s center mass and simultaneously pulled the triggers.

  Pure, unadulterated chaos ensued. The muzzle flashes expanded like concussive dragon breath; the blasts rippled into Jimmy’s gelatinous chest and pulverized him, sending the ventilated corpse tumbling backwards, end over end until it crumpled into a pathetic heap.

  The relative lack of recoil baffled Elijah. The pistols didn’t roar like concussive explosions funneled through lead barrels; they sung like angels bellowing triumphant through brass pipes. The soldier’s instinct suddenly overwhelmed him and he was fueled to push into the fight.