The Last Book in the Universe (5 page)

 

 

SHIKA-TIK-TIK
, shika-tik-tik

I'd give anything for a chetty blade or a splat gun, but all I've got is my carrybag. Better than nothing, but just barely. It has a rope loop on it, so I can swing it when the thing comes within range. “Thing” because it doesn't sound human. Too delicate and steady to be the Bangers. Too large and loud to be a rat.

Unless it's a rat the size of a wild dog. Just thinking about that makes me shrink up inside myself.

Ryter and me are both hugging the curved wall of the Pipe, in hopes that whatever it is will go right by us.

shika-tik … tik

No such luck — it's slowing down.

I'm staring into the dark so hard, it feels like my eyes are bugging out.
Tik … tik …
closer and closer, until it sounds like I could reach out and touch it. Or it could reach out and touch me.

The shadows move, and I see it has the shape of a hunched-up monster. It spots me or senses me somehow and veers in my direction.
Tik … tik
must be talons dragging. Claws as sharp as needles. Icy water floods through my guts. My heart slams. I've forgotten how to breathe. The thing is reaching out for me.

I rear back with the carrybag and start to swing with all my strength.

“Chox,” the monster says.

 

Just what we need tagging along, a five-year-old kid who only knows one word. What happened is Little Face found himself a walking stick like Ryter's and dragged it along,
shika-tik-tik.
We're stuck with him because there isn't time to take him back, or anybody there to keep him even if we did. It seems like no matter what I do, the kid keeps finding me in the dark.

I figure it's the gummy's fault somehow.

“If you hadn't come along, the little brat would still be there,” I tell him.

“You're the one who fed him,” Ryter says. “The poor child has been hungry all his life, so it's no wonder he's fastened on you, Mr. Choxbar.”

The gummy speaks true, but that doesn't make me any less angry. Why should I care what happens to the little brat if nobody else does?

“Don't be discouraged,” Ryter says. “The child can look out for himself. That's how he survives.”

“Running a latch is hard enough alone,” I remind him. “With three it's impossible.”

“Oh,” says Ryter, raising his feathery white eyebrows. “So you're an experienced latch runner, are you?”

The way he looks at me makes me want to tell the truth.

“I've never left the latch,” I admit. “Not since they brought me here.”

“Then perhaps you'll take my word for it. What we're attempting to do is far from impossible. Dangerous, yes. But hardly impossible. After all, a runner crossed three latches to get the message to you, didn't he? If he can do it, so can we. And with three of us we're less likely to be mistaken for professional runners or smugglers.”

What he says makes sense, although I hate to admit it. I'm out of choxbars, but I give Little Face a chunk of proov edibles and he gobbles it down like he's starving, flashing a smile that eats up his whole face.

We wait until the sky is all the way light, and then check out the end of the Pipe. There's no stairway, but Ryter figures we can skinny down the pylon somehow. “We haven't much choice,” he says. “We'll have to risk it.”

As it turns out, Little Face shows us the way. He slips over the Edge and then crawls down, using the rusty steel bars that stick out of the concrete. About ten seconds later he's standing on the ground below, shouting, “Chox! Chox!” which I guess is his name for me, or maybe just a way of saying,
I did it!

Ryter's saggy old face is pale and worried, but I know better than to say anything. He goes next, and it takes him a lot longer than Little Face, but he manages to get down without breaking any bones.

Now they're both looking up at me. “Come on!” Ryter calls out. “You can do it!”

I think about Bean, how she's waiting for me, and how it doesn't matter if I'm scared of heights. About halfway down, my feet slip and I have to hug the concrete to keep from falling. Don't move, I'm thinking, if you move, you fall.

“You're almost there,” Ryter says, right below me. “Reach down with your right foot.”

I do what he says and he keeps telling me where to put my feet and after about a thousand years I make it all the way to the ground and stand there shaking.

“What if the spaz had hit me?” I say, more to myself than anybody else.

“It didn't,” Ryter says. “And we don't have time to worry about things that didn't happen. We better get a move on; it's a two-hour hike to the next section of the Pipe. Assuming it's still there.”

“What?” I say with a gasp. “You don't know?”

“The last time I came this way was many years ago,” he admits. “Things change. You never know a thing for certain until you've seen it with your own eyes.”

What I do see is pretty amazing. In this latch the old scrapers come all the way out to the Edge. They say in the backtimes the scrapers were made of glass. Giant glass buildings a hundred stories high, maybe more. They say people went inside the glass buildings, traveling up and down in electric boxes, and that toward the end the people never came out or walked on the ground, but lived and died inside. The scrapers are just twisted steel skeletons now, enormous, eerie-looking things that disappear somewhere up in the smog.

Tons and tons of crumbled concrete surround the base of each scraper, stuff that must have fallen when the Big Shake rocked the world and split open the earth and dried up the rivers and stuff. When the light hits it the wreckage glitters like diamonds, but Ryter says that's only chunks of broken glass, and that many a man has died looking for treasure that doesn't exist.

“The only real treasure is inside your head,” he says, tapping the side of his skull. “Memories are better than diamonds, and nobody can steal them from you.”

Staring up at the scrapers makes me feel extra small. “Why did they build them so high?” I ask him.

“Because they could, I guess.”

“But weren't they afraid of earthquakes?”

“Not afraid enough,” he says. “I don't suppose anybody really knows how bad a thing can be until it actually happens.”

The sun is barely visible through the smog, but Ryter says if we keep it over our left shoulders and walk straight ahead, we'll get where we're going, no problem. We trudge along for a couple of hours and in all that time we don't see another living thing. No weeds, no insects, nothing. Just ruins melting into dead sand. Not even the rats are dumb enough to live this close to the Edge, which is fine with me.

We seem to be alone, but I keep getting this creepy feeling that something is watching us. Maybe the scrapers themselves. I don't know if the old buildings can see or not, but they sure can moan when the wind goes through the steel. Moaning like they know they're slowly dying and can't do anything about it.

As it turns out, the Pipe is right where Ryter thought it was. Sitting up there on its crumbling pylons, ready to take us where we're going.

We're almost there when the howling starts.

“Ah-hee-hoo-hoo! Ah-hoo-yip-yip!”

It sounds like wild animals, but somehow I know it isn't, not exactly. Little Face hugs my leg. I can feel him shivering, which scares me almost as much as the howling.

“Ah-hee-hoo-hoo! Ah-hoo-yip-yip!”

They come pouring out of the ruins, howling and scampering and waving their arms.

“Monkey Boys,” says Ryter. “Don't move.”

They swarm in, surrounding us, and I can see their faces painted to look like monkeys, and their wild eyes that want to kill us.

 

 

M
ONKEY
B
OYS
. I've heard of them. Monkey Boys control this latch like the Bully Bangers control theirs. But the creatures pouring out of the ruins no longer act human; they've become as wild as the paint on their faces. And it isn't only the face paint — their teeth have been sharpened into fangs, and their fingernails are like yellowed, curving claws.

“Something's wrong!” Ryter hisses to me.

“No kidding!” I hiss right back at him.

As the crazy clawed hands reach out to grab us, Ryter twists around and looks me in the eye. “Do not resist,” he warns. “They'll tear us limb from limb.”

I figure that may happen anyway, but fighting won't do any good: There's way too many of them and not enough of us. I try to keep hold of Little Face, but as the swarm lifts us he gets separated. The little guy yells, “Chox! Chox!” and it means
help me!
but I can't help him or Ryter or myself because we're being carried away by a hundred howling madmen with ferocious snapping fangs.

I'm thinking the Bangers never act like this, not even when they're canceling a victim, but the Monkey Boys don't seem to have a leader making rules and telling them what to do. The old gummy's right — something
is
wrong. The Monkey Boys don't just look like animals and act like animals — they've
become
animals.

The screaming swarm carries us back into the ruins, under the long steel shadows of the giant scrapers, to a place where the air smells of blood and rust.

They bring us to a strange dark structure, a fortress made from the iron bones of a fallen building. Great iron beams hammered into the ground and bound together with woven steel cable. Splat guns and cannons stick from slots in the walls. The swarm of wild Monkey Boys surrounds the fort, leaping and howling,
ah-hee-hoo-hoo, ah-hee-yip-yip!

The howling becomes a word.

“Mongo!” they howl. “Mongo! Mongo! Mongo!”

They keep screaming for Mongo until a section of the great iron wall is lowered by cable, and we are carried into the fort. The entire swarm tries to get inside, but a squad of teks is guarding the fort, and the teks hold their ground, chopping at the mob with chetty blades and stunstiks, driving them back.

The Monkey Boys drop us to the dirt and back away. The great door is raised behind us, shutting out the swarm, and for the first time since we've been seized, the howling stops.

For some reason the quiet is even more terrifying.

The teks point their weapons at us and indicate that we get up.

Ryter can barely stand, but he waves me off when I try to help him. “Show neither aggression nor fear,” he whispers to me urgently. “Just play along.”

Play along? I've no idea what the old man is talking about. How do you play along with a dozen armored thugs who communicate by grunts? The best I can do is keep Little Face close by as the teks herd us deeper into the fortress.

The smell is terrible and gets worse. No plumbing, obviously. Very little power, because the lights keep flickering. Whoever is in charge of this place, he's not paying attention, that's for sure.

We pass a stockade crammed with prisoners who stare at us with dead eyes. They're all bone thin, wearing tattered rags. They don't even have the strength to moan or beg for help or keep themselves clean.

“A good sign,” Ryter says out of the side of his mouth.

A good sign? The old gummy must be losing it. But then I realize what he's getting at. If they keep prisoners, that means their victims aren't canceled immediately. Which means we might have a chance to survive, at least for a while.

The teks shove us down dark, winding passageways, and we make so many turns, there's no way I could find my way back, even if we did manage to escape.

As it turns out, we hear Mongo before we see him. A loud voice booms through the passageway: “HEAR MONGO AND OBEY … HEAR MONGO AND OBEY …,” over and over, like an old 3D stuck on replay.

Which, as it turns out, is pretty close to the truth.

When we get closer to the booming voice, lights begin to glow, reflecting off the walls. Then at last we turn the corner and there he is.

“To your knees!” the tek boss shouts, shoving us down with his stunstik. “Pay homage to Mongo the Magnificent! Hear him and obey!”

We drop to our knees and look up at Mongo. He's a fierce, powerful-looking latchboss with bright, blazing eyes, huge, muscular arms, shoulder-length hair the color of midnight, and a snarling, blood-red monkey tattooed on his enormous chest. He thumps the tattoo with his fists and goes, “HEAR MONGO AND OBEY … HEAR MONGO AND OBEY.”

It's crazy, but I almost laugh out loud. Mongo the Magnificent is nothing more than a hologram. A short loop from a 3D, repeating over and over again. It wouldn't fool a two-year-old kid, and it doesn't fool me.

Ryter murmurs, “I'm going to try something. Whatever you do, don't interfere.”

Before I can stop him, the old gummy stands up slowly, leaning on his stick.

“On your knees!” the tek boss commands. “Homage to Mongo!”

All the weapons aim at Ryter. It's hard to tell with the masks they wear, but the teks look nervous, uncertain.

“You must take us to the real Mongo!” Ryter tells them, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the repeating hologram.

“Knees!” cries the tek boss. “Homage!” But he sounds uncertain.

“Does Mongo live?” Ryter demands.

“Mongo lives,” says the tek boss. He sounds puzzled, as if he's not quite sure why he's talking to the old gummy instead of canceling him.

Ryter walks up to the tek boss. I'm sure he's about to die, but the tek boss doesn't move. “Take off the mask,” Ryter suggests. “Let me see your face.”

Much to my amazement, the tek boss takes off his armored security mask. Under the mask he's just another young guy with a round face and worried eyes, and he's looking at Ryter like he can't decide, should he listen to the old man or cut his red.

“You must take us to Mongo,” Ryter tells him. “Maybe we can help.”

The tek boss hesitates, and his face gets all wrenched up like he's in pain. “I don't have the authority.”

“Does anyone have the authority?” Ryter gently asks. “No? I thought not. Think about it, son. What would Mongo want you to do?”

“Hear him and obey,” the tek boss responds instantly.

“Yes, of course,” Ryter says patiently. “And you've done a splendid job of obeying him, under very difficult circumstances. Keeping your squad together, defending the fort, and so on. But now you must do more. You must help Mongo. Take us to him.”

“I-I-I'm afraid,” the tek boss stammers.

“We're all afraid,” Ryter says soothingly. “If the situation continues, the fort will be overwhelmed and you'll all be destroyed. I think you know that. Something must be done.”

The tek boss speaks uneasily, as if afraid of being overheard. “What you say is true. But what would you have us do?”

“Let's start with trying to help Mongo, shall we?” Ryter suggests.

The poor tek boss looks like he's being tortured, but finally he nods and goes, “Follow me. But if we all die, don't say I didn't warn you.”

“Warning acknowledged,” Ryter says. “Now proceed.”

It's one of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed: an old gummy — an intruder into the latch — persuading a tek boss to disobey his orders. When I look at Ryter it's like he knows what I'm thinking, because he gives me a wink and makes it clear that we just go along while we've got the chance.

“Chox?” Little Face asks, tugging at my leg.

“Sssh,” I tell him. “We'll be okay.”

And for the first time since the Monkey Boys grabbed us, I really do think we might make it out alive. Of course I'm assuming Ryter intends to overpower the young tek boss when we get the chance, and then shoot our way out of the fortress. As it turns out, he's got an entirely different plan: The crazy old fool really does want to see Mongo — the real one, not the hologram version.

We follow the frightened tek boss into a much smaller passageway — barely room to move, really — and then up a set of metal ladder steps.

At the top of the stairs the tek boss glances furtively around, takes a deep breath, and then wrenches open the lock on an overhead hatch. He gives Ryter a mournful look, then cautiously pushes open the hatch.

“Inside,” he whispers.

Without hesitation Ryter climbs up the last few rungs of the ladder and disappears through the hatch.

What choice do I have? I follow him inside, into the secret lair of Mongo the Magnificent, boss man of the Monkey Boys.