Free The mayan prophecy (Timeriders # 8) by Alex Scarrow Page B

ground, festered and putrefied.
    Beyond the fence, a shanty town of corrugated iron roofs packed tightly together and punctuated by dozens of thin threads of smoke from cooking fires, which rose lazily into a breathless sky. Laundry lines stretched across narrow walkways and dangled threadbare T-shirts and sun-bleached floral-printdresses. The sound of packs of feral children playing catch-me as they chased each other along the barely shoulder-wide alleys between tin shacks and lean-tos. Dogs barked as they passed and a woman cursed the dogs.
    A transistor radio was playing Gloria Estefan’s ‘
Mi Buen Amor
’. The deeper thud of a boom-box played the Beastie Boys. And fainter, the
thup
,
thup
,
thup
of an army helicopter in the sky circling the shanty town.
    Not far from the scratching, snuffling, growling dog, a gentle gust of wind stirred the loose items of rubbish into playing their own circular game of catch-me. A Snickers wrapper chased a Coke bottle, a faeces-soiled nappy chased a bill poster. Dust swirled up into the air to form a modest six-foot-high tornado.
    Then, as if a magician had cast a spell from afar, the rubbish, the wrappers, the dirt, a section of the tyre, all of the rat and half the dog were replaced by a dark eight-foot-wide sphere that rippled and shimmered like an airborne oil slick.
    Several figures emerged from it. An enormous, muscular man, scowling warily at his surroundings, eyes shadowed beneath a pronounced Neolithic brow, his coconut-round head topped with an unkempt short and coarse thatch of dark hair. A much shorter lean, wiry figure: a young man with unruly hair, dark with a silver streak in it. Following him, a girl wearing glasses, strawberry-blonde frizzy hair pulled casually back into an if-I-can’t-see-it-I-won’t-fuss-about-it ponytail. Finally another young man, skinny to the point of being unhealthily so, and as pale as a ghost. As pale, in fact, as some deep-ocean creature scooped to the surface by a net and now flapping pitifully and quite unappealingly on the foredeck of a trawler. His head topped with a bird’s-nest mess of ginger dreadlocks. His mouth slung wide open.
    The sphere of undulating oil contracted and disappeared witha puff of air behind them, and the girl looked down at the ribcage and spilled intestines of the front half of the quite dead mongrel dog lying at her feet.
    ‘Ewww … that’s just so gross.’

Chapter 11
     
1994, San Marcos de Colón
     
    ‘… when we came here two years ago, there were still signs everywhere of the civil war going on next door in Nicaragua. Burnt-out tanks, mines, guns, refugees … I mean, it officially came to an end in the late eighties. But it was still kind of going on in places.’
    Adam led them through a busy market square, bordered on all four sides by the faded grandeur of colonial-era buildings that must have once upon a time glowed crisp and white in the sun, but were now a dirty vanilla colour, paint flaked away in patches revealing the dull grey stonework beneath.
    The square was busy this morning, noisy with the voices of traders attempting to out-yell each other. Noisy with the alarmed squawking of roosters and hens crammed into wire-mesh cages, the din of a hundred different buy-and-sell negotiations going on over impromptu counters made from stacked-up wicker baskets.
    ‘The Hondurans all along the border with Nicaragua, during the war, had to repeatedly leave their homes, their towns and flee north,’ continued Adam, shouting over his shoulder to be heard, ‘because the fighting kept spilling over.’
    ‘What was the fighting all about?’ asked Liam.
    ‘That’s a long answer.’ Adam smiled. ‘The short answer, I suppose, is ideology. In Nicaragua they had a communistgovernment come to power. They were called the Sandinistas. Voted in quite legitimately by the poor. But being a communist government it was a worry to the United States government.’
    ‘Why? What’s it to do with them?’