The chain reaction began at once, as smaller stones dropped out of the places where they supported the larger stones. First one or two, then dozens at a time.
Within a moment, the rocks fell like rain, and the tunnel was crushed under the weight of tons of stone.
DAVID AND SHAKO AND the youths were at the surface by then, watching. They heard the grinding sound of rock breaking far below, and saw a dust cloud rise out of the cave’s hidden entrance.
David was still not entirely sure where he had gone, or how he’d come back. He had a deep, nightmarish sense of being swallowed, being absorbed like a drop of water in the ocean, becoming part of a current that flowed through vast reaches over and through the earth. He grasped, if only for an instant, how small a part of the whole he carried. And then he had been violently cast out again, where he found himself holding Simon off the ground.
He looked at Shako and decided it did not matter.
They were alive. They held each other tightly.
This day was a gift. And so were all the others that would come after it, however many they had left, wherever they would reach an end.
EPILOGUE
SAINT PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
ONE MONTH LATER
“Anything eternal is probably intolerable.”
—CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
HERE HE COMES,” Jenny said. “Same time, every day.”
“Back off, he’s mine,” Mia told her. Jenny laughed, but Mia was not entirely joking.
They were behind the reception desk of Three Graces Nursing Home, watching the young man walk up the steps to the front doors.
He’d visited every day since he’d brought the old woman here. It was more a nice gesture than anything else. The old woman was too far gone to notice anyone. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts and she was mostly deaf as well. Not that she would have been able to respond. She was well on her way to the final stages of Alzheimer’s, unable to drag herself from old memories long enough to focus on anything in the present day. When Mia dressed her and bathed her every day, it was like handling a fragile paper doll.
No one was quite sure what her relation was to the guy, David Robinton. He looked nothing like her. He sat with her quietly, or sometimes read to her, or occasionally pushed her wheelchair on the paths around the manicured lawns of the facility.
Mia and the other nurses had taken an interest in him. Three Graces was amazingly quiet. Most of the patients were there to wait comfortably for the inevitable. Every few weeks, another one was taken away in the ambulance that always came to the back entrance and never used its lights or sirens. So David was a mystery she and the other staffers could use to pass the time. He was ridiculously good-looking, but that wasn’t all. Three Graces was not cheap. It was more like a high-end hotel than a hospital. There was no stink of urine or death, like some of the holding pens where Mia had worked before. The halls were spotless, the walls dotted with nice prints of Cézanne, Chagall, and Monet, and the rooms had fresh flowers every day. A singer came into the atrium and played a grand piano every afternoon. She knew that whoever he was, David was probably quite wealthy. And, on the forms he signed, she saw that he was a doctor of some kind.
She kept an eye on him while he visited. She was supposed to stay close to the patients, especially when visitors were around, to make sure that they didn’t need anything or have any medical emergencies. And if that gave her a little more time to talk with the nice, handsome, rich, young doctor, well, that wasn’t a bad thing.
Today, he didn’t leave the old woman’s room. She checked on them several times, and he only sat by her bed in the chair. She didn’t seem to notice he was there.
After an hour, he walked by the front desk to sign out. Mia came around the desk and stood close to him. He rubbed his eyes, wiping away the tears that had formed there. She saw that a lot.
“Same time tomorrow, David?” she asked.
“Same time,” he said.
“Good. It gives us something to look forward to,” she said. She leaned in closer. “It gets incredibly dull here. You’re the most exciting thing that happens all day.”
He laughed politely. “I’m not exciting. Believe me. I prefer the peace and quiet.”
“Oh, it’s good for the old people, sure. But after a twelve-hour shift, I could use a little more noise.”
And this is where you ask me what I’m doing after work, dummy.
But David just said, “See you tomorrow.”
She tried one more time. “It’s so nice of you to visit—your grandmother, I guess?”
David smiled at her and showed her his wedding ring. He didn’t say anything. Then he walked away, and out the door.
Mia was blown away. You arrogant bastard, she thought. Maybe she was flirting with him a little, but for him to assume that she was going to leap on him and desecrate his marriage vows right in broad daylight, that was truly a spectacular amount of ego.
She tried to shake off her irritation. It was time to deliver the meds.
She went to the old woman’s room first. Mia still had no idea how David was related to her, but now she didn’t care. She didn’t need to worry about someone that full of himself, that was for sure.
She never noticed that the old woman was wearing a wedding ring that matched David’s exactly.
Instead, she asked herself the same question she always did as she helped the old woman choke down her pills:
What kind of a name is Shako, anyway?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, many thanks are due to Alexandra Machinist, my brilliant agent. Thanks as well to my peerless and patient editor Rachel Kahan; Tom Jacobson; Monnie Wills; Dr. Kira Chow, for her read of the manuscript and medical advice; and to Kerri Keslow, for the use of the names of her sons, Parker and Weston.
This is a work of fiction. However, there was a survivor of the ill-fated Narváez expedition named Juan Ortiz who lived among the Uzita. Ortiz was reportedly saved from a horrible death when the daughter of the Uzita’s chief pleaded with her father to spare him.
The search for a cure for aging—a biological fountain of youth—is also very real, as detailed in Jonathan Weiner’s excellent Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality. It describes the work of Aubrey de Grey and other gerontologists who seek to solve what de Grey calls the Seven Deadly Things, the ways in which our bodies break down and age and betray us. For anyone investigating the possibilities of an engineered immortal lifespan, that book is the place to start.
The horrific toll of the ongoing drug war in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is described in Charles Bowden’s remarkable book Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields.
The number of deserters and resignations from the U.S. Army during the Second Seminole War, as well as other facts about the Seminole wars, are taken from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present.
Shako and Simon’s language lesson is not in Uzita but in Creek, which I took from http://native-languages.org, the website of Native Languages of America, an organization dedicated to preserving Native American languages. The websites for the Creek Language Project at the College of William and Mary (http://lingspace.wm.edu/lingspace/creek/) and the Seminole Tribe of Florida (http://www.semtribe.com/) were also helpful.
Any errors are mine alone, as are any alterations I’ve made in history and geography.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A former journalist and screenwriter, CHRISTOPHER FARNSWORTH is the author of the Nathaniel Cade/President’s Vampire series of novels, which was optioned for film and TV and has been published in nine languages. Born and raised in Idaho, he now lives in Los Angeles with his family.
www.chrisfarnsworth.com
facebook.com/authorchrisfarnsworth
@chrisfarnsworth
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ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER FARNSWORTH
The Burning Men
Red, White, and Blood
The President’s Vampire
Blood Oath
CREDITS
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph © by Paul Nicklen / Getty Images
Title page image © by Trucic/Shutterstock, Inc.
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
THE ETERNAL WORLD. Copyright © 2015 by Christopher Farnsworth. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-228292-7
EPub Edition August 2015 ISBN 9780062282934
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