World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine (2 page)

The hostages broke into applause and cheers. A few of them brought out their phones and started to film. Seb moved quickly and tried to avoid anyone getting a clear picture. For the most part, he succeeded, but a kid, his face puffy from crying, managed to get a reasonable photo as Seb turned back to the other hostages. That was the one the media used.

Seb pulled up his hood, his face now in shadow. He raised his hands for quiet.
 

“They may have brought explosives,” he said, indicating a couple of heavy bags near the gang members. There was a moment of renewed panic, and Seb raised his voice to be heard. “Let’s just get out quickly,” he said. He helped a couple of people up and they all headed toward the doors. As he followed the group out, Seb sent short bursts of Manna toward the three unconscious men. They would sleep for a few more hours and wake up in custody.

Reports of shots fired meant the sound of sirens was finally audible as they left the bank and made their way across the parking lot, some crying, some laughing, a few slack-jawed and silent, stumbling as they made their way to safety. Seb caught up with an old, grizzled man in a checkered shirt.

“Sir? Do me a favor?”

The man looked at Seb, grinned and shook his hand.
 

“Helluva thing you pulled off back there,” he said. “Wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t see it with my own damn eyes.” He gave Seb a playful punch on the shoulder. “Always thought that kung-fu stuff was bullshit, myself. Guess I was wrong. What d’ya need?”

“You got a car?”
 

The old man nodded toward a battered Chevy truck. “Will that do?”

Seb nodded. “Can I borrow it?” he asked. “I, er, don’t really want to be here when the cops get here, if you catch my drift.”

The man pressed the truck’s keys into Seb’s hand. “It’s stick,” he said. “You ok with that?”

“No problem,” said Seb. “I’ll leave it at the bus station. Keys on the front tire. If you could just delay telling the police that for an hour or so.”

“Far as I’m concerned, you can keep it,” said the man as Seb jogged across the lot and got into the Chevy. It started with a cough and a plume of blue smoke. “Good luck!”
 

Seb waved his acknowledgment and pulled away. By the time the other hostages realized their rescuer was missing, he was a mile away. The pickup truck now looked like a Hyundai Elantra and Seb was caucasian, middle-aged and half a foot taller, with a full beard. He drove to the bus station and found a parking garage where no one would see the saloon transform back into a pickup. As soon as it was done, he Walked and was thousands of miles away before the Chevy’s engine had even started to cool.

Chapter 2

Soledad Hotel

La Moskitia Region, Honduras
 

Harvey Foster shifted uneasily in his bed and glanced at the clock. 3:37am. The heat still got to him, despite years spent trekking through the humid rainforests of South America, and the sound of rain battering the shuttered windows made sleep impossible. He sat up, eased the mosquito net aside and made his way to the door. Sally was still sleeping soundly as he quickly pulled on his pants and grabbed his cigarettes from his jacket. Apparently, heavy rainfall and howling wind were as effective as sleeping pills for his wife.

Outside the hotel, he offered a cigarette to Carlos, the hotel owner, who waved him toward an empty chair. Carlos was also the chef, bellboy, cleaner and taxi driver, sharing his duties with his wife, Juanita. They smoked in silence for a while, Carlos passing him a glass of surprisingly good rum, considering the cheap looking pint bottle he poured it from. He put the rum on the table between them and indicated that Harvey should help himself.

After about ten minutes, Carlos spoke. He kept his voice low, as the hotel was full of families who were staying over after celebrating Children’s Day with a concert that afternoon.

“You think you find Monkey God
templo
tomorrow?”
 

Harvey chuckled self-consciously and took another sip. The legend of the Monkey God had just enough anecdotal evidence to make him want to take a look. Ten years of treasure hunting in South America every vacation had brought him little reward. Two broken ribs, eight cases of dysentery, a malaria scare, two snake bites, one scorpion sting and a close call with some heavily armed bandits, but very little actual treasure to show for it. A conservative estimate put him over $30,000 down over the last decade of hacking through jungles, climbing trees, kayaking deserted stretches of river, and hiking snowcapped mountains. His income as a history teacher hardly began to cover his expenditure. Lucky, then, that his movie producer wife thought his expeditions were the best vacations she’d ever taken. It was how they’d met, Sally vetting locations for a movie about drug smuggling, Harvey about to go home after a fruitless search for a legendary diamond. She’d been the first woman he’d ever met who didn’t mention Indiana Jones when he told her why he was there. He told her later that was the moment he’d fallen in love.

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 contact. 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.