World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine Read Free Page A

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