World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine Read Free Page B

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.
    “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?