Maker Messiah by Ed Miracle

Author:Ed Miracle [Miracle, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780999516270
Published: 2019-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-NINE

Otavio’s Apartment. Thursday, May 21

Day Thirty-four

Otavio woke them at dawn—middle-of-the-night, California time—and had his cook serve them a black bean stew with rice and melon slices. No time for coffee or chit-chat before he led them downstairs and out through a security gate. Otavio wore the same cloth jacket as yesterday, but against a cold and lidded sky, he added rubber boots and a tarp hat. Philip and Tanner followed in gray pants, hiking boots, and hooded white sweatshirts.

They crossed the creek, single-file, over a downed utility pole, scrambled into grass and brush still dripping from the night rain. Downstream, atop the security wall of the next building, an armed soldier saw them. He turned his back. They continued up a footpath beaten through the foliage. It led into a canyon that widened before rising to steep rock cliffs on either side. From the heights, a mist swirled and dispersed, part liquid, part slum breath.

Otavio’s route forked at irregular intervals, branched up weedy paths between rotted brick walls or wood or cardboard. Like a child’s enormous Lego fantasy, two thousand rectangular boxes clung to the canyon walls. Painted brightly or not at all, the shacks seemed truncated, as if a mad barber had scissored their flat tops. Rivulets that gathered beneath the shanties became ropy veins that carved islands out of dense mud and rocks, before tumbling into the creek. Philip leaped from stone to plank to brick, until there were no more.

They turned a corner and arrived at an open plaza on which three lanes converged, muddy spokes that dumped congestion from the slum onto this hub of raw concrete. Tiny businesses, obscured by flapping canvas, rimmed two sides of the plaza. One establishment had customers. The square also bridged the creek, thus joining favela Xavier to an asphalt road on the opposite side. This highway, as Otavio called it, looped past the plaza before bending south into the non-muddy city. At pavement’s edge squatted a two-story colonial-era hotel, the Baluarte, long abandoned, its ponderous walls blistered with handbills and tattooed with graffiti.

On the nearest corner of the square stood a plywood stage complete with microphone, amplifier, and speakers. A small Maker and a quad motorcycle were parked beside it. The quad was hitched to a trailer containing a Powerpod and a rack of cone segments—a portable Maker kit. Opposite the stage, in the far corner, three women in Health Department caps and smocks were administering free vaccinations from a folding table. One of them was Dr. Jacqueline de Bier.

Odd that the Belgian doctor would wear a Brazilian nurse’s uniform, but two men in Powerpods Company blazers rushed to Otavio. They reported in anxious tones, gestured to the road, to the stage, and to the muddy favela. Apparently, the large cones they needed to copy the quad and its Maker Kit had been impounded at an Army roadblock. Food and other gifts were stuck in traffic. Also missing were the DJ and his music, which they needed to draw a crowd, plus the camera crew to broadcast everything to the rest of Brazil.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.