The Joshua Files - a complete box set: Books 1-5 of the young adult sci-fi adventure series plus techno-thriller prequel

by M. G. Harris

  “Your friend,” Camila says with a jab of her manicured finger, “has fallen asleep. Right there.”

  I follow her pointing finger and see to my astonishment that she’s right. Tyler is fast asleep, nestled just out of sight beside the swamp.

  “How long have we been here?” I say aloud, but mainly to myself.

  The ghost shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine, sweetie.”

  We stare at each other. “So you are a ghost?”

  She doesn’t answer, but purses her very real-looking lips. “Jump in.”

  Somehow I do, without any serious thought for Tyler.

  The next thing I’m aware of is that we’re driving. We’re far down the road, the swamp long behind us. I gradually notice that the air is filled with Brazilian jazz. I know this song – it’s another of my dad’s favourites, by Tom Jobim.

  “So close your eyes, for that’s a lovely way to be

  Aware of things your heart alone was meant to see.”

  I hear my own voice say clearly, “What’s going on?”

  The ghost doesn’t take her eyes off the road.

  In a soft voice she says, “How did you think this was gonna work, hotshot?”

  I’m even more confused. “How what was gonna work?”

  “Hermanito, there are no happy reunions here.”

  “But you are Camila. . .?”

  I’m actually still not sure. She looks and sounds so real. . .

  The ghost says, “I’m an echo; a last breath. A sigh.”

  “Why am I here? Why are you here?”

  “Because there is something I need to show you.”

  “My mother’s been kidnapped!” I yell, only now remembering. “And my friend! Do you know where they are?”

  It’s amazing, but for a few long moments, I’d actually forgotten all about them . . . and Tyler. There’s something very wrong with my thought processes, but I can’t tell what.

  “All I know is that I need to tell you something. Something I should have told you that day. . .”

  Even the ghost seems to have trouble talking about the day Camila died.

  “So now, well, now it’s time to tell you.”

  “There’s something you want to tell me from that day? But why now?”

  “Actually . . . I don’t know,” she tells me thoughtfully. “It never even occurred to me to wonder.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask. “Where are you taking me? What about Tyler? And . . . who are these people walking along the road? They look like. . .”

  Then I flinch in horror. I’ve only just now realized that the people we pass every so often, limping along the road with arms and legs at strange angles – are the walking dead.

  Zombies.

  “The worst thing about all this,” Camila’s ghost tells me, “are the ones who don’t know they’re dead. Believe me, they’re everywhere. You can’t imagine what a pain they are.”

  I want to scream. The more I look around, the more I see them. Crawling out from the edges of the roads, sometimes staggering around in the middle of the carriageway. At least one every five hundred metres. Sometimes she has to swerve to avoid them.

  “They can’t hurt you,” Camila says grimly, “except maybe by boring you to death. You’d think they’d get over it, but no. Telling you all the details of how they got hurt, asking you to take them to the hospital, every detail of their tragic lives.”

  I stare at her in horror. When I look very closely I notice that she’s got a thin stream of blood trickling from her head.

  “You’re dead.”

  “It’s kind of rude to remind me.”

  My own voice sounds hollow when I ask, “Where am I?”

  I can’t even tell if she heard the question, because she keeps talking. “I was so happy to meet you that day, Josh. All I wanted to do was to look at you and talk to you and hear about our daddy. But we had that mystery to solve . . . can you understand how I was torn?”

  Before I can answer, we suddenly arrive at a junction, which seems to have appeared out of nowhere. There are more people wandering. I watch as one obvious road accident victim stops to buy a bag of fresh pineapple from a street vendor. But the vendor just ignores him, until the zombie starts to wave his arms in despair.

  “He can’t see him. . .” I say. “Why doesn’t the dead guy know he’s dead?”

  “Road accident spirits,” she says, “are the worst ones for not knowing they’re dead. Must be the shock.”

  I look around in steadily mounting horror. The road does seem unusually crowded.

  “How many of these people are dead?”

  “Oh . . . as many as half,” Camila says.

  I want to be sick. My skin actually crawls with revulsion. My lips move but no sound emerges.

  I am so not cool with this.

  We turn off the main road and down an isolated side road. The trees open out in front of us to reveal a long expanse of shimmering water stretching to the left and right as far as the eye can see. So many shades of blue – everything from midnight blue to aquamarine.

  “What is this place?” I ask, unable to drag my eyes from the impossibly blue water.

  “It’s Lake Bacalar,” Camila says. “Quite popular for real estate. It’s become fashionable to own a nice lakeside property.”

  Slowly I ask, “Why are we here?”

  “It’s like I said, Josh, there’s something I should have told you the day we first met. That guy in the blue Nissan – I’d seen him once before. I’m pretty sure I told you he was stalking me . . . but until the day I met you, I just thought he was a regular stalker, you know? The kind that wants to date you.”

  I struggle to grasp what she’s saying. “You’re saying you met Simon Madison before?”

  It’s not clear that she’s even heard me as she continues, “I showed him around a house. On Lake Bacalar. Well, to be accurate, him and a woman. A woman he called ‘Professor’.”

  “Madison and the Professor looked at a house? A house, around here? A house near Becan?”

  “Lake Bacalar is less than two hours from Becan,” she says. “A few weeks before he chased us off Highway 186, that blue Nissan guy was about to rent a house.”

  She slows the car to a crawl outside a broad, carved mahogany gateway polished to a gleaming finish.

  “It’s right here,” she says. “Don’t you think I should show you?”

  Then we’re walking up an empty driveway. Me and my super-glamorous sister.

  My dead sister.

  We’ve been together for what – an hour? I’ve started to see dead people. And the strangest thing is happening: it’s all starting to feel almost normal.

  Camila opens the main door without a key. The house is a large two-storey villa, pure white with narrow pillars, arches on the balcony. There are high arched windows in every wall. A wide stretch of deep green lawn leads to the edge of the water, where a wooden jetty extends deep into the clear azure waters of the lake. Inside, the house is almost unfurnished, a grey marble floor with a few pieces of white furniture. The walls are also white, decorated with an occasional piece of abstract art.

  Camila leads me to the second floor, the heels of her golden shoes clicking on the marble. We pass open doors that lead to yet more scarily white rooms containing only beds (made up in white bedclothes) through to a room that looks like an office. The arched window looks out over the back garden down to the lake. It’s a stunning view, all those shades of blue against a stretch of unspoilt green wilderness on the opposite bank.

  The desk is clear except for a pad by the (white) phone. There are three numbers written there. All begin with 55.

  I look up from the desk. “This is the Professor’s office?”

  She shrugs. “Go figure. None of this was here when I showed them the house. But you can be sure of this – that ‘Professor’ woman is the one in charge. I thought maybe the guy was her son.”

  I run a finger along the top of the flat screen monitor. N
ot a trace of dust.

  “He works for her,” I say. “His name is Simon. He’s an idiot.”

  She allows herself a smile. “I knew you’d get the better of him. Good for you, lil’ bro.”

  I force myself to look straight into Camila’s eyes. That’s when I know for sure that she’s not alive. When she looks back at me I see nothing – no depth of expression. It’s like gazing into a hard, frozen space. After a second I can’t bear to look.

  Why has she brought me here? If this isn’t about finding my mother and Ixchel . . . then what?

  A horrible thought occurs to me. Hesitantly I ask, “Do you need me to . . . get revenge for you?”

  She shakes her head with an ironic grin. “Oh, you think you’re Hamlet now? Of course not.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief. I’m not sure what she means with the Hamlet thing, but I know this: I can’t handle a revenge quest on top of everything else.

  “Then . . . why bring me here?”

  “Those numbers, Josh.”

  I stare at the numbers by the phone. “What. . .?”

  “Remember them.”

  “Huh?”

  “Memorize them. Now.”

  “Why. . .?”

  She stretches out a hand. Gently she says, “Will you let me touch you?”

  I freeze. The ghost withdraws her hand. “I’m sorry, kiddo. Some impulses don’t completely go away.”

  I feel suddenly cold, as if the air conditioning just kicked in.

  I stare at Camila’s ghost. When I speak, I can actually see my breath in front of my face. “If you’re just an echo, then where’s Camila?”

  She takes a deep breath. “Josh . . . this is only one part of existence.”

  “I miss Camila,” I blurt. “And my dad, too.”

  The ghost’s eyes glisten, brimming with expressionless tears. She backs away.

  “The numbers, Josh. Remember.”

  I force myself to look down at the numbers, obediently memorizing the digits.

  When I look up again, I’m all alone. Yet somehow I’m very calm. My fingers trace the numbers on the pad by the phone. I can still hear the strains of jazz from Camila’s car stereo.

  “So close your eyes, for that’s a lovely way to be,

  Aware of things your heart alone was meant to see,

  The fundamental loneliness goes whenever two can dream a dream together.”

  I’m still hearing it when I wake up.

  I’m lying in the scratchy undergrowth, face up, no shade. Tyler is next to me, still snoozing. It takes me a full thirty seconds to realize that Benicio is stabbing at me with his shoe.

  “You idiots!” he’s saying. “Wake up, wake up now! Montoyo’s guys are gonna be here any minute. What’s wrong with you, what kind of stupid game were you playing?”

  I sit up, still woozy. “Game?”

  Benicio shoves the tranquillizer-dart gun into my face. “Playing with this. You shot each other! Idiots!”

  He pushes Tyler hard until, like me, Tyler struggles to his feet.

  “What’s going on, hmmm?”

  “Less talking, more moving,” Benicio says. He leads the way back to the Muwan, hurrying. I follow in silence, thinking. Mainly about numbers.

  “Did you shoot me?” Tyler asks. He doesn’t sound angry, only fascinated.

  “I might have,” I admit.

  I open my palm to see a streak of blood there. My last clear memory is of wiping my cheek, where a mosquito was gorging itself on my blood.

  Truthfully, I don’t know or remember who shot who or why. But like Tyler, I had a tiny tranquillizer dart in the back of my hand when I woke up.

  Numbers.

  When we get back to the Muwan, Benicio calls in to Ek Naab. In the background of my thoughts, I hear him telling Montoyo that he’s very sorry, that I made a big fuss about the Camila thing, that we’d be back in a bit.

  “Can you check a number for me?” I tell Benicio the second he finishes the call.

  “Can I what?”

  I tell Benicio the first number. “Just check it. Does it mean anything?”

  He doesn’t even bother to type it into his computer.

  “It’s a telephone number. In Brazil.”

  I struggle to keep my voice calm. “Can you tell where in Brazil?”

  “Of course.”

  “Benicio. Check it.”

  He’s silent, tapping the numbers into his keyboard. “It’s a place called Gesolo. Never heard of it.”

  “There’s another number,” I tell him. He checks that too. “Gesolo, again.”

  The third number is for somewhere in Natal.

  Without a trace of doubt, I say, “They’re in Gesolo.”

  Benicio looks at me hard for what seems like ages. Then he says, “You saw your sister.”

  I nod.

  “She gave you these numbers?”

  “She showed me a house she sold to the Sect. On the shore of Lake Bacalar. The numbers were by a phone.”

  “Bacalar. We knew the Sect had to have somewhere local. All that time they spent visiting the Revival Chamber under Becan. . . We never found it, though.”

  “I know where it is. I could take you there.”

  Benicio considers this. “That’s a good idea. But it’s a little soon. Would be smarter to wait. To let them believe their house is still a secret. Anyhow, Montoyo wants you locked up until this kidnap situation is over.”

  I say nothing, too stunned by the idea that Montoyo would actually do that.

  “Are you still willing to trade yourself for Ixchel?”

  I can’t speak, so I just nod.

  Benicio looks thoughtful. He takes his pilot’s seat properly. “Then let’s go to Gesolo.”

  I lean back into my chair as the Muwan takes off. It takes some effort to avoid Tyler’s anxious stare. I really try, though. I want to be alone to think. This might be my last hour of freedom.

  Eventually Tyler breaks his silence. “What’s he mean – you saw your sister?”

  “I dunno how, Ty, but she came to me. It was like a dream. But it felt totally real.”

  He groans. “Pure madness. Your sister’s ghost spoke to you in a dream?”

  “It was pretty messed up,” I admit. “Like in that film, The Sixth Sense. I could see dead people. They were just wandering about among the living people. Most of them didn’t even know they were dead.”

  Tyler hesitates, then, voice heavy with doubt, he says, “You’re never giving yourself up to those Sect people. For real, I mean?”

  I stare out of the window, watching as the craft plunges deep into the stratosphere. In a tiny voice I say,”What choice do I have?”

  Tyler glances in Benicio’s direction. His voice drops to a whisper. “We could try to rescue them.”

  “How?”

  “Just you and me, man,” he breathes. “With Benicio as the getaway guy. We’ve got these tranquillizer darts. We’ve got your memory-wiping injection pens. We’ve got this climbing-nanotube stuff from Lorena – she said you put it on your hands and it forms some rubbery bond thing with walls. Plus, if we have to, Josh, we use our capoeira.”

  Now I can’t help staring at Tyler. “Are you serious? You’re walking around with a three-inch gunshot wound and, like, fifteen stitches.”

  Tyler lowers his voice. “Look . . . what’s the worst that can happen? The way you want to run things, they’re already getting you.”

  I gasp. “It can get plenty worse. You could get caught too. They might not keep their promise to free Ixchel.”

  “Think it through, Josh. They’re after you. Once they have you, we’re no use to them.”

  “Yeah – what if they kill you all?”

  “I don’t think so. Why? They haven’t done much killing so far, have they?”

  I’m indignant. “My sister? My dad?”

  “Your sister and dad – they both died by accident. At least the way you explained it to me. Madison could have killed you, plenty of times.
”

  “I think they have killed people,” I tell him. “There was a story in the paper about this scientist from Oxford – from the same college as my dad. They killed her.”