Harvey passed Carlos another cigarette and offered him a light. He knew he was supposed to quit, but—as he’d pointed out to his oncologist—there was a famous saying about shutting a barn door after its occupant had escaped. No point adopting a healthy lifestyle with his prognosis. He was fifty-three and in pretty good shape. Other than the terminal cancer, that was. However, he increasingly found himself struggling to climb even small hills now. Stopping every few minutes, trying to catch his breath. And Sally had noticed, of course. He’d claimed a lingering case of bronchitis, but he knew she wasn’t buying it. That was a conversation he’d put off for too long. But how do you tell the love of your life that “til death do us part” was going to roll around a little sooner than planned? He promised himself he’d tell her in the morning. Just as he had every night for the last six weeks.
“You believe in the Monkey God, Carlos?” he said.
“Si,” said Carlos. “My father’s father saw him once. The whole town was sick, everyone sick. Dios Mono, he walk through the town in the dark. My father’s father was small. Young, yes? He saw him. Then every sick person get well. The day after, no one is sick. Dios Mono took away the sickness. Of course I believe.”
Harvey was silent for a minute, sipping the rum, feeling the warmth run down his throat. He struggled with conflicting emotions. The healing properties of the Monkey God was one of its most famous attributes. The other was its propensity for kidnapping women, impregnating them, then sending them back home where they’d give birth to strange half-human creatures. Harvey’s choice of Honduras for his last adventure owed more than a little to the healing legend. He could only hope Sally would escape the latter fate.
“Mr Foster, I-,” Carlos stopped, looked a little embarrassed. “I hope you don’t mind?”
“Harvey, Carlos. Call me Harvey. What do you want to know?”
“Are you sick, Harvey?”
Before Harvey could answer, the ground lifted itself about six inches, seemed to shake itself briefly, then settled with a low cracking sound and a small cloud of dust.
“What the-?” said Harvey.
“Terremoto!” said Carlos, jumping out of his seat, knocking the table, which had already thrown off their glasses and the bottle. “Earthquake!” He was heading for a large bell hanging from the corner of the porch. Before he got there, there was another shudder of movement and Harvey saw one of the supports holding the roof give way. As the structure collapsed, Harvey, moving with a speed he hardly credited possible, sprinted toward Carlos, crashing into him, his momentum carrying both the men off the decking into the street.
“No!” said Carlos, “I must ring bell.” He started to stand, then hurriedly pushed himself backward as the porch collapsed in a shower of plasterboard and concrete, the table they’d been sitting at quickly buried in rubble.
“Juanita!” shouted Carlos, crossing himself as another tremor, this one more violent than the last, shook the ground beneath them. The ground floor windows of the Soledad Hotel shattered and blew outward. Harvey got to his feet, his face ashen as he looked up toward the third floor window and Sally’s room. The ground underneath him rippled like water on a windy day and he stumbled, putting a hand on the ground in an attempt to keep himself stable. He looked up and watched in horror as the whole building in front of him cracked and crumbled with a great sound of tearing metal, splintering wood and exploding plaster. Then another shock, the biggest yet, shook the ground beneath him and he fell on his back. Looking up as the earth bucked and writhed beneath him, he had a perfect view of the hotel lurching forward suddenly, loudly, like a belligerent drunk, before passing the tipping point and falling toward his prone figure. He closed his eyes with a feeling of sudden calm.
Two hundred feet away, at the edge of the forest, stood a figure. The earthquake, despite its violence, seemed to have little effect on it. The figure was watching the chaotic scene intensely, one arm pointing toward the collapsing building. As it did so, the hotel, impossibly, stopped falling and hung at an unlikely angle as if held in place by a giant invisible hand.
Harvey looked over at Carlos, who, now that the shaking was dying down, had got to his feet and was hurrying over toward him in a kind of crouching half-run, his shoulders hunched as if that might prevent the hotel from completing its inevitable fall. He grabbed Harvey’s arm and pulled him to his feet. Together they ran out of the path of the hotel’s descent. As soon as they had done so, it continued its fall, but not in any way that tallied with either man’s grasp of basic physics. It lowered itself gently to the ground, settling there in a small cloud of dust.
Harvey’s ears were ringing, and as he began to recover his hearing, two sounds immediately became clear. One was Carlos muttering, over and over, “Madre de Dios, Dios Mono, Madre de Dios, Dios Mono, Madre de Dios, Dios Mono,”, the other was the muffled plaintive cries of people trapped in the ruins in front of him. He grabbed Carlos. When the man continued looking through him and muttering, he shook him.
“Carlos,” he said. “I must find Sally. My wife! The people, the children. Juanita. We must save them.” Carlos seemed to recover himself, but he still looked at some point in the distance over Harvey’s shoulder. Harvey threw a quick glance at the forest. He saw nothing initially, then a slight movement caught his eye. A man was standing at the edge of the tree line, holding his arms out. No, not a man, a gorilla or ape of some kind. A flicker of flame from a burning outbuilding revealed enough detail for Harvey’s mouth to suddenly dry up and his skin prickle. It was a monkey. A giant monkey.
“Ayuda! Por Favor! Ayuda!” Faint voices brought him back to the unfolding emergency. He looked at the collapsed building. Although it had somehow been saved from complete destruction, there was no way in or out as each door and window had fallen in on itself. For a split second, Harvey wondered how anyone could have survived, then he dismissed the thought and ran forward. Carlos ran beside him, but when they carefully climbed onto the rubble, they realized the hopelessness of the situation. They were two men, three miles from the nearest village, with nothing but their own hands with which to unearth the survivors before the aftershocks finished the job the earthquake had started, and buried them forever. Harvey shrugged. What choice did he have? He knelt and began pulling at bits of concrete and wood, his hands became cut and bruised within seconds as he desperately dug in search of his wife.
As he frantically worked, he saw a small figure move rapidly past him. He didn’t look up, but then another figure came past. Some kind of animal, perhaps. Then there was another, then another. Next there was a whole group, one of which brushed against him. He didn’t look up until he felt a tiny hand on his shoulder. He stopped, hands bleeding, hardly able to breath, his face coated in gray dust, pink skin only visible where the tears had rolled from his eyes as he tried to find Sally. He turned to see a monkey squatting beside him, a tiny thing with an impossibly human expression of sympathy and understanding on its minuscule features. It gently shook its head, then waved its arm around it as if to show Harvey what was happening. Harvey looked up.
The whole building was covered in the yellow-brown monkeys. They swarmed all over the rubble at an amazing rate, only stopping when they heard cries for help. Whenever that happened, there would be a rapid huddling of furry shapes, each one digging rapidly with tiny, unfeasible strong, arms, removing chunks of rubble in a blur of speed, then throwing them with near perfect accuracy into a pile about fifty yards away.
Within a few minutes, holes had appeared all over the stricken carcass of the hotel. As Harvey looked on in disbelief, the survivors began emerging, helping each other up onto the side of the building, which was now nearest the sky. One or two monkeys led each small, dazed group safely onto the ground and away to a safe distance. Whole families looked at each other and the scene from which they’d emerged in disbelief, hugging each other and weeping.
The monkey next to Harvey put its tiny hand onto his fingers and pulled gently. His hand tingled at the contac
t. Like a man in a dream, Harvey let himself be led carefully across the wreckage. The monkey stopped and pointed at the hole recently dug by its brothers and sisters. Harvey crouched at the lip of the blackness and peered inside.
“Sally?” he croaked. There was silence for a moment, then he called her name again, louder this time. He saw movement below. He could see a mattress in a corner and sitting up on it, the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen. His wife, stretching and yawning, eyes still half-closed, as yet oblivious to the chaos around her.
“Harvey?” she said, sleepily. “Is it morning already?”
At the edge of the rainforest, hundreds of monkeys formed up in a tight semi-circle in front of their giant counterpart.
“Everyone got out?” said the giant monkey. In perfect unison, they all nodded. Immediately after doing so, they all collapsed into piles of dirt, leaving twenty square yards of ground looking like it had been targeted by an army of moles.
The Monkey God smiled. “Best head for home, then,” he said, “I’m starving.” He turned away and vanished.
***
Two days later, Harvey and Sally Foster boarded the first of three planes that would return them to New York. Once home, they celebrated their close brush with death in the only way they could think of, barely leaving their apartment for four days straight. Besides enjoying himself immensely, Harvey was increasingly puzzled at his lack of breathlessness. An appointment to his oncologist on the fifth day home provided the answer. Harvey’s cancer was gone. No rational explanation, no apparent danger of it returning.
“A religious man might call it a miracle,” said the doctor, shaking Harvey’s hand vigorously. His particular branch of oncology made delivering news of this sort very rare indeed. His smile was broad and unforced.
“That he might,” said Harvey. “That he might.”
Chapter 3
Mexico City
Meera Patel drew heavily on the fat joint she’d just rolled, inhaling deeply, then exhaling a small sweet smelling cloud of blue-gray smoke. She picked up her beer and smiled through the haze at the woman opposite her.
“You know you don’t-,” began the woman.
“Don’t need to smoke this stuff anymore? Don’t need to drink this? Now that I’ve begun to use Manna? Yeah, I know, but I still like it.”
The other woman smiled and took a sip of water.
“Wasn’t what I was going to say. Far from it. I was going to say you know you don’t need to hide anything from me. You must know by now, you’ll find no judgement, no censure. The Order was never really a religious organization.”
Meera frowned slightly at this.
“Ok, I know what you’re thinking, Stephanie” said Kate, “but any social grouping based around communal meditation was bound to pick up some religious trappings after the first thousand years.”
Meera shifted uncomfortably in her seat. There were things she hadn’t told Kate, it was true. Her real name being one of them, along with her real face. But only because doing so would endanger both of them. She had finally accepted Seb’s admission of his immortality. Still didn’t know how she felt about it, but she had accepted it. However, letting Kate know Seb’s true identity, or any part of the incredible events that had led them to finally take refuge in Mexico City, was a risk she could never take. She thought briefly of the mysterious Mason, the man who had masterminded her kidnapping and torture; the man who had intended to keep her a prisoner for the rest of her life. If he ever found her, he would kill her. And he would kill anyone she’d been in contact with. She probably knew more about Mason than anyone outside his organization. Which was virtually nothing. But she doubted he would see it that way.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” said Meera, taking Kate’s hand, the older woman’s fingers darker than her own caramel skin. “You must know that by now.”
Kate returned her smile. “Of course. But I can feel it eating away at you, whatever it is. I’ll be ready to listen should you ever feel ready.”
“Thank you.”
Meera looked up at the stars, only a few of which were visible through the light pollution of the city. She remembered sitting on a roof with Seb back in LA. Back when she could still sing in public without risking her life. Back when Seb was a regular human being.
“Time to go home,” she said, getting up and stretching. They walked across the roof together and headed into the apartment building. The building was five stories high. The top floor had eight fairly traditional apartments, only three of which were occupied. The fourth floor had been knocked through to make a big open space. It was a meditation room. There were dozens of prayer stools and cushions stacked against one wall, but they were covered in dust. One small area near the center of the room had been kept clean and usable. The third floor would have been a huge surprise to anyone who had never encountered the Order and their abilities. It was a garden; lush, green and fragrant. Or, at least, it had been so, once. Now, like the floor above, it showed signs of neglect, many of the plants dead. Only one corner looked well-watered and lush, with healthy tomato plants alongside corn, eggplant, zucchini, onion and a selection of herbs. The second floor was a communal dining area, with long tables able to seat more than fifty people. A smaller table near a large picture window was clean, the rest in various states of disrepair and decay. There was a pile of soil in the corner. Meera had watched members of the Order use it to produce delicious food in seconds. It still looked like magic to her, when she saw the dirt transform into a plate of sushi or a bowl of dal. She herself had shown no ability to do the same, despite her training in Manna use. Her gifts with Manna lay elsewhere.
Kate and Meera stopped at the first floor door. This floor was a collection of offices with an uninviting waiting room, opening up to the street. The building had once housed an insurance office, and the Order had left the first floor as it was.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Stephanie,” said Kate. “Give my love to Peter.” ‘Peter’ was ‘Stephanie’s’ shy boyfriend. A writer. Somewhat eccentric. A bit of a recluse. Seb kept contact with anyone connected to the Order to a minimum. The unique Manna which filled his body, so much more advanced than any other sources of Manna, was invisible to even the most sensitive User, but he didn’t want to risk provoking any kind of curiosity.
Meera kissed Kate on the cheek. Kate was strikingly beautiful; tall, graceful and precise in her every movement. Meera constantly felt like a clumsy child in comparison. Kate looked like a woman who’d reached her fifties and had got to a point where intelligence and compassion showed on her features as plainly as her head-turning good looks. Meera looked into those dark eyes and wondered how old she really was. She gave Kate a quick smile and walked into the street.
The Order had fallen apart over a period of a few months during the previous year. Despite its lack of dogma, rules, ritual, and a complete lack of ‘holy’ scriptures, its members had reacted with awe, hope and excitement when, according to their most senior member in Northern America, the messiah they had been waiting for had arrived. Three words had underpinned the entire history of the Order, the only words left to them by their founder, who had lived in what was now modern-day Syria, a few centuries after the birth of Christ. The words were Learn, Teach, Wait. The Order had followed the implications of each word faithfully for centuries. The members learned by paying attention in meditation, or contemplation. They taught those who sought them out, passing on the simple timeless truths that led to inner engagement and a new way of encountering and shaping reality through the use of Manna. They waited for another Visitor to pass on its gift to another human being, just as it had to their founder. And—finally— it had happened. For a few glorious weeks, the Order was boiling over with excitement at the news from America. A new age was about to begin. Then, suddenly, a cell just outside of Las Vegas had disappeared overnight, as if it had never existed. Eleven members of the Order erased without trace. Diane, their leader and Lo, considered by many to be thei
r next leader, were among those who’d gone. And, a few days later, the almost incomprehensible news. Seb Varden was dead. The messiah had been killed.
Kate watched Meera walk away until she was out of sight. As always, the younger woman had started singing as she left. Meera was a bit of a mystery, even to someone with Kate’s long experience. She was the only person to actively seek out the Order in a year, just walking in off the street as if guided there. She just claimed she felt drawn to them, and Kate never questioned her further. Meera had seemed unsurprised by her initial exposures to Manna, which was very unusual. The revelation that the Earth was covered with sites containing an ancient power that certain individuals could manipulate was unsettling to everyone, at first. But not Meera, apparently.
Kate walked back into the office—that was how all members of the Order referred to their Mexico base—climbed the stairs to the third floor and used Manna to produce a large cup of green tea. It was late, and Miguel and Sarah—all that was left of the Order in Mexico City—were asleep upstairs. She sat alone at one of the long tables, remembering it full of people eating, smiling, talking. Despite her gifts for equilibrium and acceptance, she felt a small pang of regret for what they had lost.
Kate first exposed Stephanie/Meera to Manna eight months previously. The young woman had quietly and calmly accompanied Kate to the Thin Place they used near Casa Negra. The nineteenth century mansion was long abandoned and considered haunted, so it was given a wide berth by locals, and all but the most fearless tourists after dark. The tourists themselves were easily frightened off by some peripheral movements and some low growling. It made for a good story when they got home. The south-east corner of the building was out of sight of the main street and the most discreet place to absorb Manna. Kate had knelt on the floor and put both hands on the ground, like a Muslim at prayer. As she deepened her breathing and opened her senses, she felt the familiar tingling in her fingertips as the rush of power entered her body, every individual cell glorying in renewed contact with Manna. She’d noted the expression on Stephanie’s face as she’d stood up and brushed the dirt from her hands, still trembling slightly. Stephanie had seemed excited, yes, curious, a little scared. All of which was to be expected. But she had also seemed sad and distant.
World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine Page 2
