The Joshua Files - a complete box set: Books 1-5 of the young adult sci-fi adventure series plus techno-thriller prequel

by M. G. Harris

  Still shaking, I find myself moving my right hand, reaching for my left arm, under the sleeve. Ixchel sees the movement of my hand and her eyes widen, just for a second. I see her acceptance. My fingers find the sharp edges at the heart of the Bracelet of Itzamna. I press down on the Crystal Key, feel the moving parts of the Bracelet of Itzamna engage, metal slithering over metal.

  The countdown starts.

  Then I’m on the ground, punching Madison, loosening his grip. It’s like an iron bar around Ixchel’s neck. Fists fly, legs kick, the three us wrestle for a second. I open my arms, trying to get a hold on Ixchel, but Madison wedges his feet against her stomach and shoves hard. Ixchel is sent flying backwards, mouth open in a cry of shock and despair.

  I launch myself into a full-on cartwheel to build up momentum, and spring out of it into a handstand twist – the au cortado. My kick falls just shy of Madison’s shoulder as he dodges, gasping. I drop backwards into a queda de quarto, flip over and slam his knees with a scorpion kick, then pivot and scissor his legs with mine for a takedown. As Madison falls, he throws a weighty punch, which catches me in the side of the head. For a second or two I’m wobbling, ear ringing with pain.

  We’re both breathing hard as we face each other. There’s a calculating glint in his eye.

  Madison throws himself at me, hands open like a butterfly’s wings, grabbing for my head. A fire of rage lights his eyes. The tough plastic of his cycle helmet smashes against my forehead. I see a dizzying array of stars.

  Then the Bracelet rips time and space open and we go hurtling through. Trees and the blue chinks of sky are ripped out of my field of vision. The world around us explodes, reassembles into patterns of green and brown.

  A subtle shift, the same position as before. But suddenly, there is silence. It’s noticeably darker, too. Almost dusk.

  The helicopter is gone.

  The police sirens have gone.

  Ixchel is gone.

  Simon Madison collapses beside me. He rolls on to his side, shaking violently, groaning. He vomits.

  My head pounds with the impact of his headbutt, and when I stand I’m shaky, almost as unsteady as Madison. On all fours now, Madison lifts his head for a second. He stares past me, bleary with confusion. Another retch heaves through his body. I turn in the direction of Madison’s gaze: the motorbike. There’s only one in sight – I don’t know what’s happened to the one that Madison was riding.

  But the motorcycle is still where I remember.

  Madison struggles, starts to get to his feet.

  Instantly, I understand what he’s doing; he’s going for the bike.

  I spin around, vault across the distance between us and the motorbike. By the time I’ve dragged the bike into a standing position Madison is already upon me. We’re both still groggy, me from his headbutt, him from the time-jump, so for a few seconds we stagger as if in slow motion, like two drunks in a pub brawl. But I have the advantage; I’m already on the bike, shoving a foot in his chest, fumbling with the throttle, jolting the motorbike into life. The machine and I leap forward, unsteady at first, until I regain my balance.

  Then I’m away. Tearing through the pine forest, the rumble of the motor like a fire in my belly, every vibration going straight to my bones. Madison, left behind, calling uselessly, his voice reduced to nothing more than a faint whimper in the woods.

  And the undeniable, the riveting thrill of time travel. Energy coursing through me, the residue of an unimaginable journey through the space-time continuum. I’m learning to recognize this feeling for what it is: overwhelming, alluring.

  Totally addictive.

  The urge to return to my own time is pretty acute for the first half hour. It would be so easy: zap back to the woods and return to Ixchel. Madison would be out of the way. And then?

  Then I’d have Ixchel urging me to try again, to bring her with me this time. But every single usage of the Bracelet carries a risk of being stuck in time, of getting hit with amnesia. As well as being flooded with adrenaline, I’m almost overwhelmed with relief.

  I got away with it – again.

  Somehow, the fact that it isn’t working out how we planned makes it feels as though this was meant to be. I wanted to bring Ixchel, and yet she isn’t here and I am. Deep down, I’m afraid to tempt fate again. What if there’s a reason for me being alone on this mission?

  I retrace our steps, heading back for the Muwan. It’s closer than Ek Naab but also – I feel too vulnerable on the motorbike. Thoughts of Ixchel keep threatening to break my concentration. I keep telling myself that now that I’m in another time, everything is suspended. Ixchel is still back in those woods, alone. But for her, hopefully, only a minute will pass before she sees me again. The real worry is this – how much will I have changed by the time we meet again?

  The silence all around me is my first clue that something is wrong. Even in the pine forest of the state of Chiapas, you don’t get silence, not on a road, not during the day. It’s a while before the silence registers, however, because the roar of the Harley dominates the landscape. Only when I slow dramatically to take a hairpin bend do I realize just how relatively quiet it is.

  People talk of the romance of the open road, but the thought that you might really be all alone isn’t as romantic as you might imagine.

  The second clue is the fact that the motorbike’s satnav doesn’t work. It turns on and then just sits there trying to connect to the satellite grid. The network is down. Either it’s just very bad luck or else . . . the 2012 plan failed.

  I check both my mobile phones – Ek Naab and my old UK phone. Neither of them work either.

  NO SIGNAL.

  It doesn’t take me long to come across my first casualty. A huge delivery truck for a supermarket, rear doors gaping open. And by the doors, something gleams white. I catch my breath when I see it’s a collection of human skeletons, their bones picked clean.

  Someone held up that delivery truck, forced the employees to open it and surrender the contents, and then killed them in cold blood.

  After the initial instinct to bolt passes I simply stand, motionless and silent, watching the road around me. I begin to suspect there won’t be any other cars on the road, probably none between here and the Muwan.

  If the Muwan has been found, then I’m out of options. I’ll be forced to return to my own time.

  Something stops me getting too close to those human bones by the truck; I don’t want to know exactly how those people were killed. There must be something primitive in your brain which makes you fear a sight like that. It’s as though a sixth sense is triggered.

  The fear of being hunted.

  I’m suddenly hyper-aware of the smells around me, the combination of grasses and pine, the faint scent of spilled diesel and oil on the asphalt. I sniff the air for a trace of anything that might be alive. Once I’m aware of it, the smell of my own sweat seems like a loud announcement of my presence. I steer around the supermarket truck without getting off the bike. I take a decision not to stop until I reach the Muwan. Something tells me that if I were to become separated from the Harley, there wouldn’t be much chance for me.

  Every ten minutes or so I come across another abandoned vehicle. One of them is a motorbike, rusting badly, slung on its side by the edge of the road. I stop my own bike, lean over and unscrew the petrol cover. Even with my nose close to the opening, I can’t detect any petrol fumes – they must have run out of gas. And then what? Walked away?

  What if there is no fuel – anywhere?

  Hastily, I check my own bike’s petrol gauge – almost full. If I hadn’t refuelled just before Ixchel and I entered San Cristobal, at one of those cheap edge-of-town petrol stations, things could be getting bad right now. At any rate, there should be enough to get me back to the Muwan, near Mount Tacana.

  But a new fear has just been added to my list: in a world where people have abandoned their cars and motorbikes on the road because they’re out of fuel, a full tank of petrol might
get you killed.

  I ride onwards, fully alert, watching the road ahead, listening out for sounds behind me.

  The Honda eats up the road, cruising through the forest, into the valley, past roadside shacks and shrines and shops, not one with the tiniest sign of human occupation. Or even a loose chicken.

  When I see signs for Comitán, the first town on the route, my knuckles tighten around the handlebars. If there are still people around, they’re probably in the towns. And the people are almost certainly dangerous.

  But when I reach the place, it dawns on me how totally wrong I am. The town is still there. But it’s empty. A proper ghost town; broken-down doors in most houses, shattered windows. Shops are the worst; every single one has been cleaned out, that much is very obvious even from the road. I slow down as I pass through, filled with a combination of horror and fascination. Part of me wants to look around and see if there’s anyone hiding. But the need to keep going is beginning to dominate my thoughts.

  Comitán is done for. I don’t know how long ago but it looks to me as though no one has lived here for a long while. Anything that could have been used, burned or eaten has been taken. There is a giant garbage pile on the other side of town, the size of a house. It doesn’t even smell.

  It’s June 2014. The skies are still – not a single aeroplane has passed overhead since I left Madison vomiting in the woods. Everywhere I look – Armageddon.

  The town of Tapachula is next, but I’m already anxious about what I’ll find. I remember driving through a fairly big town in 2012. Will Tapachula have faced the same fate as Comitán? Or has everyone in the state moved to the biggest centre of civilization around?

  I’m tempted to risk avoiding the town by going around the country roads. But without a satnav to guide me, it’s dangerous, uncertain. Even though the roads are littered with abandoned vehicles, it still makes sense to get to my destination as fast as possible.

  So I keep going. All the way to Union Juarez, where the highway runs out, to the tiny villages in the foothills near Mount Tacana. And not a person in sight.

  They’re all hiding, or they’re all dead. Either possibility is enough to set my nerves on edge.

  By the time I reach the village where the hiking trailhead starts, it’s too dark to see the road. I’ve been reluctant to use my headlamps, because in the dark the beam is going to stand out for a long way. And even though I haven’t actually seen anyone, the hairs on the back of my neck and arms, the gripe of my stomach and the tension in my throat make it impossible to forget: there are predators around.

  But the predator I’m really scared of is the human.

  What happened to everyone?

  As I pull my bike off the path and find some meagre shelter under some trees, I open up the bike container that carries the tent and sleeping bags. Both are a bit of a surprise. They’re not the standard-issue equipment that the Muwan carries, but a brand I don’t recognize. I’m too tired to spend much time wondering about it, and once I’ve got the tent up, I crawl inside, zip the mosquito net closed and slide into the sleeping bag. I check both mobile phones one last time.

  Nothing.

  Images of the fractured roads, deserted, rusting vehicles, those grey vacant towns linger on, flicker behind my closed eyelids. The sense of solitude is overpowering.

  The urge to chicken out and zap back to my own time begins to well up again. The future looks like a bad dream. I could make it just disappear, use the Bracelet and return to where I started. Rescue Ixchel, take the police bike.

  But I resist. I’ve been given a glimpse into the future. Something catastrophic has happened. I’ve ridden for hours and seen no sign of human life. There are no satellite networks. I can’t shake a pervading sense that this is just the tip of an iceberg.

  It’s going to get much worse.

  This future awaits me and everyone I know – unless something is done to fix the 2012 plan. I need to find out exactly what went wrong. If I can get to Ek Naab, there’s a chance I can do that. All I have to do is hang on here a little while longer. Then it’s back to June 2012 with whatever intelligence I’ve found.

  The secret path to a different outcome, a more optimistic timeline.

  In the dark, I fumble in my pocket for an energy bar, tear the wrapper and stuff chunks of it into my mouth. I drink from one of my water bottles. My muscles start to relax, but I can’t fall asleep. It might be dark in 2014 but it’s less than eight hours since I woke up in 2012. I’m still wide awake and alert. With all the thoughts of what might have happened since December 2012, there seems little chance of dropping off.

  How’s a guy supposed to sleep with a mind full of films like I Am Legend and 28 Days Later?

  I find myself mumbling a couple of Hail Marys and a very simple prayer:

  Let it not be a zombie apocalypse.

  The night is pure torture. In the darkness every single sound seems to be magnified. I daren’t even plug in my earphones and play my dad’s iPod. As ominous as each wilderness noise may be, I need to remain alert. Dawn begins before I manage to sleep.

  When I wake I’m drenched with sweat, starting to roast in the blaze of early afternoon heat. I emerge from the tent gasping for a bit of cool and drain all but the last drops of my water bottle.

  Nothing to drink now until I reach the Muwan.

  Apart from a few small-animal tracks near the Honda there’s no sign that anything disturbed the camp. So if there are any crazed zombie vampires hanging around, they’re probably not anywhere close. . .

  I pack up my little camp, eat a few more strips of beef jerky and an energy bar, then hop on to the Honda. The next bit is going to be pretty difficult without satnav. But at least there’s a compass in the survival kit. Even with that, it takes me an epic three hours to reach the hill underneath the cave where we left the Muwan. By then I’m so parched that water is all I can think about. I’m easily the thirstiest I’ve ever been in my life. It takes three days to die of thirst. I can’t even begin to imagine what suffering you go through before that happens, if it feels this bad after three hours.

  The slope towards the cave is pretty steep; I remember Ixchel and I came blasting down like a bullet from a pistol. When I reach the opening of the cave, I make the bike crawl along the rough track, preparing myself for what could be a crashing disappointment.

  If the Muwan is gone then bang goes any chance I have of finding out what happened to create this timeline. Gone will be any hope of changing things when I return to 2012.

  But as I creep closer to the craggy, shadowed shelter of the cave, I spot the smooth metallic surface of the Muwan, about twenty metres inside. I’m a little surprised to find the craft tucked quite so far into the cave, because I remember thinking that ten metres would be enough. I guess I overrode my first decision, after all.

  The Muwan remote is still in my back pocket. When I try to use it, I get a seriously unpleasant surprise.

  The Muwan doesn’t respond. I press the button repeatedly. But nothing.

  It seems impossible that this could be happening to me now, yet the remote batteries must be dead. I check in my survival pack for spares, change them using the Gerber multitool to open the remote casing. When I press the button, this time using fresh batteries, still nothing.

  Inconceivable. Maybe the lock mechanism is jammed; maybe some dust or something got inside in the past two years. I position the motorbike underneath the wing and stand on the seat, then step on to the handlebars and launch myself at the wing. Once I’m there I crawl over the surface of the craft until I’m on top of the cockpit. I run my fingers all along the opening until I find the culprit.

  It’s not what I expected. The Muwan isn’t closed. It’s open, but lightly jammed into the closed position with a piece of folded paper.

  Now I’m totally mystified. I unfurl the folded paper. It’s a flyer, a simple black-on-white printed sheet of A5 paper, written in Spanish, inviting people to come to a health testing centre for genetic prof
iling.

  Weird. Who’d leave a notice like that on something as strange as the Muwan?

  Now it’s a hundred per cent certain that someone has tampered with the Muwan. Kneeling on top of the craft, I close my eyes and prise the cockpit lid open. No booby trap. The window pops up, as fresh and well-oiled as if I had left it here yesterday and not two years ago.

  I stare inside. There, on the co-pilot seat, is a second Muwan remote. Bewildered, I lower myself into the pilot seat and pick up the second remote.

  If I press the button, will the whole thing blow up?

  Ixchel could have done this, or even my future self – left the craft ready to be flown. But why a new remote control? It doesn’t make sense.

  Still, I can’t risk everything on the hope that someone friendly did this. I climb out with the Muwan’s own metal-fibre ladder, take the Honda to a safe distance, from where I activate the Muwan with the new remote.

  It doesn’t blow up. Instead, the running lights come alive, and the craft begins to purr.

  Tentatively, I park the Honda against a wall of relatively smooth rock about ten metres from the Muwan. It’s almost out of petrol anyway, and without a refuel the bike is just extra weight.

  Back on board I find the head-visor in its resting position and put it on. In another minute I’m running through the pre-flight checks. Everything seems to be working fine. Only my remote was faulty.

  Someone knew that mine wasn’t working. Someone replaced it. Someone is helping me – or setting me up. Without some kind of hint, it’s tricky to know which.

  I manoeuvre the Muwan into a hover position, then fly out of the mouth of the cave. I programme the location into the navigation systems so that I can return for the motorbike. I try to pull up the Internet on the screen. The browser returns an error message. I try some other websites. It’s the same story everywhere.

  The whole Internet seems to be down.

  I take a long look out of the window at the rugged green landscape that flashes beneath. From up here you’d never know there was trouble.