Monkey Wars (30 page)

They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.

—
J
AMES
R
USSELL
L
OWELL, “
T
HE
P
RESENT
C
RISIS”

R
eturning empty-handed was not an option.

Having failed to kill Mico, the assassin knew that his own position was now gravely compromised. In an attempt to shield himself from the worst of Tyrell's rage, the Barbary hastily gathered some reinforcements and stormed Mico's home, dragging the grieving Hister off to the interrogation cells.

She didn't put up any resistance. Her world had already fallen to pieces, and the physical pain inflicted by fists and sticks made no difference now.

Having Hister under arrest, though, made a big difference to the assassin. He stood anxiously in the summer house next to Hummingbird, who explained the situation to Tyrell.

“If she knows anything, she'll talk.”

“Even if she
was
involved, Hister couldn't have acted alone. She's nothing more than a pretty bauble.” Tyrell's paranoid mind quickly wove a web of intrigue from this single strand. “There must have been others helping Mico escape. Others who knew of our intentions…”

Hummingbird hesitated. If he agreed, he would inflame Tyrell's paranoia; if he disagreed, he risked a furious outburst. So he just reiterated, “I'll make her talk.”

“Press her hard.”

Hummingbird nodded, darkly amused at the way the more palatable “pressing hard” had become an integral part of the regime's vocabulary.

“For what it's worth, I think Mico's finished,” Hummingbird added, trying to close the whole issue down. “He's run for his life.”

“For what it's worth,” Tyrell replied with thinly veiled scorn, “I think whoever has even the slightest sympathy for Mico must be rooted out and dealt with. No dissent will be tolerated. None. Is that clear?”

Hummingbird lowered his head respectfully. “Perfectly.”

With a sweep of his hand, Tyrell dismissed the Barbaries and swung over to the window of the tower, where he sat, stroking his tail thoughtfully.

Of all the monkeys in the city, Mico was the only one who Tyrell feared. He tried to tell himself that he was being irrational, that Mico was insignificant. Why should the supreme leader of the langur troop, Overlord and Protector of the Provinces, be afraid of a refugee who had never even fought with the elites?

Intelligence. That was why.

Mico was the only monkey who could think on Tyrell's level. He might be an exile, but he was too clever for that to be the last anyone heard of him. Tyrell would never know peace until Mico's severed head was brought back to the cemetery.

But as the Barbary assassin had failed, who could now be trusted with the task?

In the days after the massacre, Papina led her shattered troop of monkeys away from the city.

They walked and climbed and scrambled.

They made their way past long lines of shanty huts, too crowded with seething humanity to afford any space; past the quiet, affluent houses of the suburbs, which would not tolerate a troop of monkeys…until finally they came to a sprawling steelworks.

The survivors crouched outside the chain-link fence, looking at the mess of huge, ugly buildings that grew around each other without any obvious logic; tangles of smoke-belching pipes burst from the roofs at random, and everything was coated with a grimy blackness that matched the mood of the monkeys.

Food would be hard to come by here as there were no markets to pilfer. On the other hand that would keep rival animals away, and as long as the monkeys could avoid the human factory workers and dodge the trucks that rolled in and out, they should be safe.

After some cautious exploration they found a disused water tower and clambered inside—it was dark and damp, but it was out of sight. For the time being, it would have to be home.

The survivors huddled together. Exhausted as she was, Papina only slept fitfully; she found it impossible to silence the urgent questions swirling around her mind.

But as she tossed and turned, she realized that she wasn't the only one who couldn't sleep—crouched in the darkness, Fig was rocking back and forth as if in a trance.

It was frightening to see her like this; Fig had withdrawn to some remote place deep inside herself. Watching her muttering incoherently, Papina realized that the murder of Fig's infants had smashed a hole in the center of her heart with the force of a monsoon flood, leaving her with nothing but twisted wreckage.

Papina knew there was nothing anyone could do to ease that unimaginable pain; she just had to hope that as the days passed, time would heal the wounds.

The next morning they set to work.

Determined to get the monkeys reengaged with the business of living, Papina divided the survivors into groups and set them tasks. Some carried out a reconnaissance of the steelworks, others tracked down food supplies, while she looked after drawing up a rota of lookouts.

Tentatively, Papina approached Fig and asked her to organize a safe area where the youngsters could play.

Fig ignored her. She just huddled silently in the shadows, untouched by anything around her.

Even Twitcher didn't know how to get through to her. All his confidence had been shattered by the massacre. He was now so hesitant and unsure it was hard to believe he'd once swaggered through the city with urbane charm.

The survivors weren't just outcasts; they were now lost from themselves.

Mico had to assume that a massive hunt was already in full heat, which meant his best hope was to stick to the maze of narrow backstreets where there were plenty of dark doorways and crumbling basements to scurry into for hiding.

But these streets had their own problems—l
arge, aggressive rats stalked the alleys, scavenging for food, and where there were rats, snakes were never far behind. So it was with ears bristling and eyes flashing nervously in all directions that Mico ran, not stopping to rest, relentlessly darting from shadow to shadow, putting distance between himself and the cemetery.

At least he had a plan, and that focused his thinking.

The city was criss-crossed with railway lines, but having always had the run of the streets, Mico had never learned his way around the tracks, so when he stumbled across the first set of steel lines he had no idea which way to follow them. He would have to do this the hard way.

He ran along the railway track until he came to a signal gantry, then clambered up the tower and waited. It wasn't long before he heard the heavy metal creak of a shunting engine groaning closer; Mico braced himself; then, as the engine trundled underneath, he leaped on top. But as soon as he landed, he started to slide off.

His hand reached out for something to cling to and found a pipe, but it was searingly hot and immediately his palm started to blister.

Forced to let go, he slid further along the roof, tumbled down onto the tender and finally slammed to a halt.

Mico gripped his hand as the pain throbbed through it. He couldn't even let the agony out with a howl for fear of alerting the engine driver; all he could do was lie there, willing the pain to subside.

Eventually the engine arrived at a massive railway junction where tracks from all over the city converged, and as it passed under another signal gantry, Mico leaped off and found a perch next to a red light.

His curious eyes took in the scene—trains of all shapes and sizes were being shunted relentlessly back and forth. It seemed so random, and yet the more he looked, the more he saw a pattern: the small shunting engines would pick up carriages and push them off into the darkness, then reemerge with a different load.

It gave Mico an idea: he could ride each of these engines in turn until he found what he was looking for, knowing that if he had no luck in one direction he could always come back to this junction and try a different line.

It was a long, fascinating process—the city he thought he knew so well looked totally different from the top of a moving train. The geography seemed quite alien, and areas that by road felt far apart suddenly connected in surprising ways. But train surfing was also dangerous. Several times Mico slipped or was jolted from his perch and nearly ended up under the thundering wheels. Then again, that was why monkeys kept away from trains, and right now other monkeys were the biggest danger Mico faced.

Finally his perseverance was rewarded—he found himself trundling through some sidings that were surrounded by hulking brick warehouses, and on one of the roofs stood a huge disc with holes in it—a button. This was the clue he'd been looking for.

As the train slowed to go over some points, Mico leaped from the roof onto a pile of coal, which crumbled under his feet in a black avalanche.

Directly opposite the button warehouse was a large, half-derelict engine shed. He would start searching there and work his way methodically through all the buildings around the yard.

As he drew closer, Mico saw that the shed was in a bad way—window frames were twisted at ugly angles, fragments of glass clung to the putty like decayed teeth; planks of wood, tired from the effort of hanging on, had dropped from the walls, and half the corrugated metal roof panels had been torn off by the monsoon storms.

Mico stared at the shafts of moonlight punching down into the gloom like pillars in a great temple.

And then he heard it—the gentle sigh of something falling through the air.

He glanced up—something was bearing down on him. His muscles tensed as he tried to jerk backward, but it was too late; suddenly the thing was all over him, tangling his arms and legs.

For a heart-stopping moment Mico thought he had been caught by a snake, but as his hands lashed out he felt something dry and fibrous.

Rope. He was caught in a net.

The weight of a body slammed down on his back and two monkey hands clamped around his throat. Mico rolled forward, clawing at the fingers, trying to prize them away, but they were impossibly strong. Suddenly two knees drove into his shoulders, forcing his face into the oily grime of the shed floor.

Panic trembled through Mico's body.

Mico had to cry out, make a last desperate appeal, but he only had enough breath in his lungs for one word. One word to save his life.

Summoning all his willpower, he managed to gasp into the darkness, “Spy!”

The attacker paused, trying to work out what it meant. Was it an accusation? Or a warning?

The hands grabbed his shoulders and spun him over. Mico blinked as he tried to make out the face in the darkness. It was a monkey, but covered in stripes of black oil and soot to camouflage his features.

And then Mico saw a flash of white teeth as his assailant spoke.

“Mico?”

The voice; he knew that voice.

“Gu-Nah?”

Anger flashed in Gu-Nah's eyes. “I knew they'd send an assassin.” He clamped his hands back round Mico's throat. “I didn't think it'd be
you
.”

“Wait!”

Gu-Nah's thumbs pressed on Mico's voice box. “One squeeze, and you're dead!”

“I'm on the run too!”

Gu-Nah looked around suspiciously, his eyes searching the shadows, wondering if this was all a trap.