NO MATTER WHAT Huxley and Chantale had told him about Citй Soleil, nothing could have prepared him for the horrors that paraded past his windshield as he waded into the slum. A small part of him, once hard and rigid in its ways, broke off and drifted toward the place where he hid away his compassion.
At first, as he was going in, driving down the narrow, soot-covered track that served as a main thoroughfare, he saw a shantytown maze, thousands of densely packed one-room shacks stretching out as far as the eye could see, east and west, horizon to horizon, no clear way in or out, just trial, error, and lucky guesses. The more he saw of the shacks and the closer he looked at them, the more he realized that there was a sort of pecking order in the slum, a class system for lowlifes. About a quarter of the homes were adobe huts with corrugated-iron roofs. They looked fairly sturdy and usable. Next down were huts that had thin planks of wood for walls and light-blue plastic sheeting for roofs. A medium wind would probably carry them and their inhabitants out to sea, but at least they were better off than the bottom layer of the slum's housing pyramid-homes made out of patched together cardboard, a few of which collapsed as soon as Max looked at them. He supposed the adobe huts belonged to veteran slum dwellers, those who'd survived and crawled to the top of this shit heap. The cardboard shacks belonged to the new arrivals and the weak, the vulnerable, and the almost dead, while the wooden ones were for those in-between gutters.
Thick plumes of black charcoal smoke came out of crude holes in the middle of the roofs and dispersed into the sky, forming a zeppelin-shaped pall of gray smog, which hung over the area, churning but not breaking up in the breeze. As Max passed, he felt the stares coming his way from the huts, hundreds and hundreds of pairs of eyes falling on the car, cutting through the windshield, peeling him down to his basic core-friend or foe, rich or poor. He saw people-thin, wasted, bone shrink-wrapped in skin, clinging to the edges of extinction-leaning against their hovels.
Randomly spaced between blocks of shacks were areas that hadn't yet been claimed and built on, where the ground was a cross between a mammoth garbage dump and a snapshot of World War I killing fields, postconflict-broken, muddy, blasted to fuck, strewn with death and despair. In some areas the muck was piled into imposing great mounds where children with insect-thin legs, distended bellies, and heads too big for their necks played and scavenged.
He passed two horses, hooves buried in muck, barely moving, so emaciated he could clearly see their rib cages and count the bones.
There were open sewers everywhere, gutted cars and buses and trucks serving as homes. All the windows in his car were shut and the air-conditioning was on, but the sharp stench of the outside still crept in-every bad, evil smell mixed into one and multiplied by two: month-old dead bodies, fermenting trash, human shit, animal shit, stagnant water, stale oil, stale smoke, crushed humanity. Max started to feel sick. He pulled on one of the masks he'd bought in the supermarket before he'd set out that morning.
He crossed over the "Boston Canal" on a makeshift bridge made of lashed-together metal girders. The thick sludge river of used oil split Citй Soleil down the middle, a permanent wound on the slum's poisoned soul, bleeding its black venom into the sea. It was simply the worst place he'd ever seen-a circle of hell served up to earth as a warning. He couldn't believe that the UN and U.S. had occupied the country for two whole years and done nothing about Citй Soleil.
He was looking for signs of Vincent Paul-cars, jeeps, things that worked, things that didn't belong here. All he could see was misery living in misery, sickness sucking on sickness, people trailing their shadows.
He reached an elevated stretch of ground and got out of the car to look around. Mindful of what Chantale had told him about walking in the slum, Max had bought some throwaway footwear-a pair of scuffed army boots with ground-down heels-from a woman selling a basket of the things on the sidewalk near the Impasse Carver. He was glad he had, because with every step he took, his feet were sucked a little into the ground, which, in spite of the raw, blistering sunlight, was soft and gooey instead of baked rock-solid.
He looked over the chaotic mess all around him, at the multitude of hovels erupting from the ground like metallic pustules, giving the landscape the texture of a battered and corroded cheese-grater. The place was home to over half a million people, yet it was eerily quiet, with barely a noise heard above the sound of the sea, a quarter of a mile away. It was the same cowed stillness he recognized from the worst parts of Liberty City, where death struck by the hour. Here, he supposed, it came by the second.
Could Vincent Paul really have a base here? Could he live in a place so defiled?
His feet suddenly plunged deep into the ground with a thick, slurping sound and he was instantly up to his ankles in muck, feeling it pulling at his soles. He yanked his feet out and got back on solid ground. The deep footprints he'd left where he'd gone down immediately began to disintegrate as the ground corrected the break in its smooth, sticky surface, and oozed thick, poisonous treacle over the blemish.
Max heard the sound of approaching cars.
In the distance, off to his left, he saw a small convoy of military vehicles-three army trucks topped and tailed by jeeps-heading off toward the sea.
He ran back to the Land Cruiser and started the engine.