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

  Through the stillness there’s the creak of insects, a rustle that might be a fox chasing invisible prey. To our left, the woods loom on the crest of the hill, across a field.

  Pointing, Harry says in a low voice, “Over there. That’s where I saw the UFO land.”

  We’re probably less than five hundred metres from where I hid the Muwan. At the place where the river meets the edge of the wood, we disembark. When we’re about thirty metres inside the woods, we find a path. Tyler calls an abrupt halt. He holds up a hand for absolute, unmoving silence. Then I see and hear what has stalled him.

  Ahead there’s hot orange light flickering between the trees. Tyler hears me gasp; he clamps a hand over my mouth. Then I listen.

  There’s a rhythmic sound: unmistakable, chilling. Someone’s being beaten – viciously, from the sound of it. The victim, a man, begins to cry out with every blow. We listen, appalled, immobile.

  Tyler takes his hand from my mouth. “Is this some kind of trap?”

  “No. . .!” I begin, indignant.

  “Shh. Zip it.”

  The beating stops. The victim’s cries reduce to faint moaning. A lone female voice speaks, announcing something; I can’t quite catch her words. That’s followed up with a group response. A low, measured chant.

  “It’s one of their ceremony things,” murmurs Harry.

  “Of course,” Tyler says. “We should have checked the calendar. It’s close to the solstice.”

  “Solstice?”

  “Midsummer. It’s a big deal in the new religion.”

  “New religion?”

  “Yeah. All the other ones are banned: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hindu, everything. The EG don’t like all that, they say them religions divide us. ‘One Truth for One People’, that’s what they want. So now they invented a religion, made up of ancient stuff. Worshipping Ceres, and Minerva, and I don’t know who else. Like in the days of ancient Rome. Basically, worshipping trees and plants and the moon.”

  “That’s why Wytham Woods are sacred. . .”

  Tyler puts up a hand again, for silence. “Harry’s right – this is a ceremony. I bet it was a laugh back in ancient times. Horse racing, games and that. We learned about it during blue-blood ‘education’. This new mad version of the religion, though, it’s nothing to laugh about. They always start with the punishments. That poor bastard probably had an unauthorized shower.”

  “Showers are rationed. . .?” I murmur.

  “Everything is rationed. Water, food, electricity.”

  We follow Harry deeper into the trees. She slinks along with practised ease. Tyler’s right; it’s incredible how well she knows her way around here. We begin to move parallel to the path, roughly ten metres away. The drone of their ceremony gets louder. A dull sensation seeps into my chest, cold horror at what’s happened to the world in only two years. At the edge of my thoughts are the terrors I recall when Ixchel and I were trapped in the ancient Mayan city. Midnight ceremonies with chanting and ritual violence. Doesn’t seem far from human sacrifice.

  Harry leads us in silence to a clearing and whispers, “It’s here.”

  You almost have to walk into the Muwan to find it in the dark. It takes me a few moments to find the tree where I hid the Muwan remote and my two mobile phones. But once I’ve retrieved them, I use the remote to open the cockpit and then climb up the ladder to clear away the tree debris I’d arranged as camouflage. Down on the ground, Tyler and Harry wait, motionless silhouettes.

  Finally, it’s ready. I’m about to invite them aboard when three beams of light appear in the woods. They stretch out across the clearing, pick up Tyler and Harry. A beam catches me right in the eye, holds steady for a second and then flashes down on to the Muwan.

  There’s shouting, panic, the sound of gunfire. I squash myself flat against the rear of the Muwan, absolutely rigid. The torches go out. The sound of heavy footfall surrounds us. The torches scatter. I lose sight of Tyler and Harry and guess they’re under the plane.

  Two more shots. Footsteps rushing at the Muwan. I slither across the skin of the craft, fall head first into the cockpit, turn on the running lights. The clearing floods with hard blue light. My fingers tremble as I start the engine, tap instructions on the control panel. Someone scrambles up the ladder – it’s Harry.

  “Get in the back,” I hiss, and give the girl a helpful shove. “Where’s Ty?”

  One of the torch crew reaches the Muwan. He starts up the ladder, staring at me, his face half-lit by the running lights. He gives a sudden gasp, seemingly yanked away by someone else underneath. He cries out, once. Then silence. More shots are fired; one cracks against the cockpit window. I turn off the running lights. There’s another tug at the ladder.

  Seconds later Tyler’s voice rasps into my ear. “See, didn’t I say there’d be blood?” He shoves me hard, exasperated. He slumps into the co-pilot seat. I retract the ladder, and the cockpit slides into the closed position. In another second the Muwan is surrounded by an enraged huddle, banging the outside of the craft with tree branches. Bullets ring out, ricocheting against the bulletproof glass of the cockpit windows.

  I touch a finger to the navigation controls and raise the craft to a height of ten metres. The weight limit warning light goes on. At least two people are hanging on to the metal stands, which I can’t retract into the belly of the craft.

  Tyler shifts in his seat. “What’s going on? Why don’t you just go. . .?”

  “Can’t. Two of them are hanging on. We can’t take off properly.”

  “Lose them.”

  “If they fall, they’ll die.”

  “Then fly nice and low!” Very slowly and deliberately he says, “Now, shift this flyin’ saucer.”

  I take off gently, giving the hangers-on a chance to let go. At around five metres, one of them does. The second one seems to have decided to tough it out. Brave guy. He hasn’t a clue where we’re going.

  We’re back in Jericho three minutes later – our first chance to drop off our unwanted passenger and warn Tyler’s gang. I put the Muwan down in the playground of the nearby primary school. Before we land, the weight sensors register that the second guy has dropped off. By the time I’ve opened the cockpit he’s bolted at least fifty metres across the playground, into the night. Tyler watches him go, cursing.

  “Pity he didn’t fall off during the flight. He’ll bring the rest of ’em over.”

  Tyler rolls up his left sleeve and removes the Bracelet of Itzamna. “OK, bro, your end of the arrangement seems to be holding up. So here’s your time machine.”

  I accept it without a word, remove my jacket and place the Bracelet of Itzamna into position on my own left upper arm.

  “We gonna have to get everyone into the evac bunker.” He pauses. “I think I might have killed one of the chippenpins out there tonight. You know what happens next; they’ll be here soon. Don’t expect mercy. Harry, you’re gonna get everyone underground, OK?”

  “Not a problem, Ty. What about you?”

  Tyler nods towards the Muwan. “Me and Josh gotta get this thing out of Jericho until they’ve looked the place over. We’ll be back in a day or so.”

  “No – wait. I need to get inside the EG Centre,” I say, anxiously. “I have to get access to the Sect’s computer records. . .”

  “If you want to get in there, you need me. In a bit, there’s gonna be angry chippenpins all over this place. We have to leave.” He claps Harry on the back. “Don’t let no one refuse to go into the bunker. OK?”

  Then Tyler turns to me with a heavy sigh. “All right, Mariposa.”

  A grin breaks out on my face. “You called me Mariposa!”

  “You could have been one of us, you know. All my main guys were from the capoeira group.”

  “That’s why you’re called ‘Caps’?”

  “Ha – no. It’s cos of where we hid – with the captain. Harry’s family had a nuclear bomb shelter. Her dad was ex-Army.” Reflectively he muses, “Captain Donnelly. Co
mpletely mad, but brilliant. He was our leader at first. They killed him, of course; captured him. Tortured him to find out where we was hiding. Left his corpse out for us to find.” His eyes meet mine and he smiles grimly. “It was meant to be a lesson.”

  “God, that’s horrible. Poor Harry. . .”

  “Yeah. Harry’s only twelve, but she’s in this to the death.” He hesitates for a second and then says, regretfully, “You could have been my right-hand man, Mariposa. But you knew best. Had to stay with your girlfriend. Girls! Always was your problem, man.”

  “Wait, wait. Ty, I’m not the Josh Garcia you knew.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. . .?”

  “No, no. I mean, I’m from, like, a parallel universe.”

  Tyler looks mystified.

  “Look – you didn’t recognize the Bracelet of Itzamna. You’d never heard of Muwans. But the Tyler I know, he knows all about that. He knows all about the ancient plan to stop the 2012 superwave.”

  “You’re doing my head in a bit, man.”

  “This time-jumping thing doesn’t seem to be straight time travel, past and future and such. There are many universes. And the Bracelet of Itzamna seems to move you between them.”

  He shrugs. “Whatever. But I’m still getting this spaceship, yeah?”

  “Of course, we had a deal. I can’t take the Muwan back in time with me.”

  Tyler nods. “In that case, I’m fine with whatever you want to do.”

  “So you’ll help me?”

  “Said I would, didn’t I? But not yet. Got to get your UFO out of here before the zombiefied Moon worshippers get here. Right now, us Caps, we’re just an irritation. They’re happy to wait until we starve to death. But if they find your aeroplane, they’ll call for backup.”

  “Where do you want to go? Would you like to scout for somewhere safe to take your gang?”

  “I was thinking exactly that. Your family had a place, didn’t they? A holiday house in the Lake District somewhere. Glencoe, Glenride, something with Glen. It’ll come back to me in a bit. Smart guy; we should all have listened to your dad.”

  I’m speechless.

  Tyler looks into the blackness of the field that divides Jericho from the Controlled Zone. Pinpoints of moving light appear just at the edge. Now and again the beams lengthen. Torches; the invasion is coming. Tyler turns towards the Muwan. “Come on, then. Chop chop.”

  He tugs at me and I find myself following.

  You family had a place.

  What’s Tyler talking about – a holiday home? Not in the world I remember. . .

  When I’m seated in the Muwan, I start the system checks. Tyler’s more alert this time, intently examining the control panel.

  “I’ll start flying north. When you remember the name of the place, I’ll programme it into the system.”

  “Programme it into the system,” Tyler says, admiringly. “This is incredible, you know that? How did a guy like you get a machine like this?”

  But I ignore his question. “What did you mean, we should all have listened to your dad’?”

  “About 2012. He was saying something was going to happen ages before it did. Well, to be fair, he wasn’t the only one. But your dad, he said he had proof. Some ancient letter he’d found from a Mayan king.”

  The Calakmul Letter – my father’s first clue to the existence of the Ix Codex.

  “So . . . what happened after my dad died?”

  “Died? What you talkin’ about? Your dad didn’t die, man. He left town. Tried to warn everyone, then he left. Went off to that place your family had, like I said, in the Lake District. The holiday cottage. The one you’d all go off to in the summer holidays.”

  My father is still alive. My father is still alive.

  The shiver of anticipation I’m getting feels familiar. If I keep time travelling, this is going to happen again and again. I’m going to run into my father, as I have before.

  Tyler’s memories seem to be cheering him up. “Your dad, he was some sort of archaeologist, weren’t he? He became obsessed with 2012, actually. And some ancient civilization. Not the Mayans, some other group.”

  The Erinsi. . .

  “Yes,” I say. “The Erinsi. They made the time-jump bracelet.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m starting to believe you. But your dad, back then. . .”

  “People would have thought he was a nutter. . .”

  “Who’s laughing now?”

  “Well . . . where I come from, my dad died saving my life. Just before he gave me the time-travel bracelet.”

  Tyler whistles. “Man, that is so, like, destiny!”

  “That would be amazing,” I say. “My dad, alive!”

  Tyler becomes thoughtful. “Do you think, then, that your dad giving you that bracelet is meant to help you change things in your own time?”

  “I dunno,” I groan. “I think the time-travel bracelet might have caused enough trouble. It’s more a case of fixing the damage that someone else did.”

  “There are other time travellers? That’s mad!”

  “I’m getting a bit fed up of them, to be honest. One of them – a joker called Arcadio – leaves me messages in code.”

  “Why’s he do that?”

  “Trying to make me do things, I guess.”

  “How do you know he’s not messin’ with you?”

  Tersely I reply, “I don’t.”

  My dad, still alive. In this world, he didn’t disappear whilst flying over the jungles of southern Mexico. He may have found the Calakmul Letter, maybe even the fragments of the Ix Codex at J. Eric Thompson’s house. But if he never tried to find Ek Naab, then Andres Garcia’s search ended with some scraps of ancient parchment.

  Which could mean that the Ix Codex was never returned to Ek Naab. The 2012 plan could never be completed.

  My heart sinks. If this world doesn’t even know about the 2012 plan, then how can I find out the missing piece of information – the location of the moon machine?

  My trip here could turn out to have been waste of effort for me – and a dangerous bit of tampering with Tyler’s reality.

  I activate the holographic route map to show the terrain below. Tyler watches with interest for a few moments. Then he seems to slump. It’s as though I’m watching the energy bleeding from him.

  “I killed a man tonight,” he says in a soft voice. Almost embarrassed, he turns to me. “He wasn’t my first.”

  “Ty. I don’t . . . know what to say.”

  “You ever kill anyone, Josh?”

  “No. “

  “Didn’t think so.”

  My cheek muscles tighten, and so does my throat.

  “You know what ‘apocalypse’ means?” Tyler’s gaze is unflinching. “It means revelation.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I mumble. The emptiness of his tone sets my nerves on edge.

  “There’s a badness inside us all, Josh. When it all went down, some people weren’t afraid of that bad; they made a friend of it. It gave them strength. They learned to kill without feeling, without judgement. Ordinary people like you and me. That’s what happened at the end of the world. It weren’t very pretty.”

  For a few minutes I’m still, trying not to imagine the things he’s seen, things I hope I never see. I think of the Tyler back in my own timeline, of Ixchel, and everyone I care about. Maybe I can save them, if there’s a way back for me.

  More than anything, at this moment, I want to find a way to save the Tyler who’s beside me, too. Listening to Tyler’s unsteady breathing, I realize that I was wrong. Whatever else happens before I jump back to my own time, if I can help Tyler and his friends escape, it’s been worthwhile.

  The horizon lights up with the edge of a rising moon. It casts an ashen glow over the rest of the night sky. Normally I’d play some music, but Tyler’s melancholy is so dense that I doubt anything could penetrate it.

  In brooding silence, he leans deep into his seat. I think about the blood that’s on Tyler’s hands, jus
t from today. I get to wondering how much death he must have seen by now. How every act of violence I’ve seen seems slightly less horrifying that the last. At least for me, it still jars to see blood spilled and bones broken.

  “Glenridin,” says Tyler eventually. “Now I remember. That’s the name of the place.”

  Tapping a few buttons, I find a town in the Lake District called Glenridding.

  The England beneath us is wreathed in darkness. Major urban centres like Birmingham and Manchester are terrifyingly blank, like a black hole ate them up. But I notice pinpricks of lights clustered around some small cities, like Warwick, Lichfield, Derby.

  “I rode on my motorbike through Mexico for hours, you know. And didn’t see one person alive.”

  “They were there, no doubt. Hiding from you. Anyone with fuel is dangerous. That stuff is rarer than blood.”

  “You know, my first night in this time . . . I was even scared there might have been a zombie apocalypse.”

  This finally draws a low chuckle. “Living dead? Not so much of that, just lots of your everyday dead.”

  “What happened?”

  “Plague. Some genetically engineered superbug, that’s what people said. Got released from a lab by mistake when the computers went down. The security systems failed. There was a lot of bad things, Josh.”

  “How many people died?”

  “Millions. There wasn’t even anywhere to bury them. We took them to the stadium. Were going to burn them. Then people got worried that the ashes would spread the plague even further. So we just left them there. Can you imagine that, Josh? Tens of thousands of bodies, all wrapped in bin liners.”

  I couldn’t imagine it, didn’t want to.

  “You know what the worst thing is? It’s what you get used to. How it all seems to become normal. It’s like in that book The Outsider, where he says that even if he’d been made to live his life inside a dead tree, he’d probably get used to it.”

  “Haven’t read that. Who wrote it?”