Maximum Ride Forever (16 page)

THE NEXT DAY started in the absolute worst way possible: I woke up in a cage.

The light in the room felt like an attack. My eyes stung from the gas, and the back of my throat was raw. Moving an inch made my stomach churn with nausea.

“Where…” I mumbled, disoriented, and then heard a low whimper.

Harry was crouched next to me on the metal floor, his wings folded in and his head tucked down. I touched his back. He was shaking all over.

I squinted through the bars of the cage, expecting a dungeon or a lab, maybe—but we were in the middle of a lecture hall. Kids sat in the rows of seats rising up all around us.

Some of them were burned like the girl had been, and some had those weird golden cataracts in their eyes. Others’ eyes just looked glazed.

The words came back to me then:
One Light
. That was what the little girl had said right before she’d knocked us out with the gas.

They were Doomsday followers.

Iggy had been brainwashed by the cult once, so I knew how hard it was to get through to them. Still, I had to try.

“Yo, Children of the Corn!” I reached an arm out of the cage and waved. “Snap out of it! Let us out of here and I promise to return your brains in one piece.”

“Shh!” A girl in the front row glared at me.

“The Remedy is speaking,” another chided.

The name was like a bucket of ice water to the face, and I jerked my head around toward the front of the hall.

As I gripped the bars of our cage and gaped at the small man pacing the platform, the pain and devastation I’d felt in Africa and then New York flooded my heart, and for a second, I couldn’t breathe. This was the man who’d destroyed the world, the man who’d killed billions of people.

This was the man I’d been hunting.

As the mastermind of world devastation, he wasn’t much to look at. He wore a wrinkled suit and had a scraggly brown beard. His voice in the microphone was shaky and high-pitched, his manner feverish. He was short, balding, and giving some sort of lecture on Napoleon. Images flashed on a huge screen behind him.

“So
you’re
the piece of scum known as the Remedy!” I shouted. “You look more like the Problem!”

The man on the stage stopped pacing, startled to hear sounds coming from his zombified audience.

“Napoleon fanatic—go figure. I gotta be honest, I thought you’d be taller.”

The Remedy reached up to smooth his thinning hair and walked down the stairs, stopping far short of our cage.

“It can talk,” he observed, more to his pupils than to me. “I thought they’d bred that out by now. This mutant is definitely out of date and toward the end of its life span.”

The kids in the bleachers chorused their approval, gawking at us like we were zoo animals, and I stood fuming in front of Harry, who probably didn’t even know he should be offended right now.

“
It
can even form full sentences,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “And
it
is Maximum Ride, in case you want to memorize the name of the mutant who’s going to destroy you.”

The Remedy crossed his arms over his chest. It was supposed to look threatening, no doubt, but the way his shoulders hunched forward and his head ducked down made him look uncomfortable. Scared, even.

“Considering where you’re standing and where I’m standing, I think you might not get that chance, Maxine.”

He had actually inched back another foot.

“It’s Max
imum
,” I sneered. “And keeping the dangerous animals locked up is kind of cheating, isn’t it?”

The coward turned away, climbing back onto the stage
to continue his lecture. He clicked open a slide titled “World Domination in a Historical Context.”

Context? Context? I have some context for him, all right.

“Did you tie up my family before you killed them?” I yelled after him, my voice shaking with fury. “When you silenced Nudge underwater, did you think she couldn’t talk, either? When you blew up Gazzy, did you have to look at his nine-year-old body parts? Or was that too much ‘context’ for you?”

“Napoleon’s downfall was ego,” he continued doggedly.

“What about
your
ego? Did you think you wouldn’t have to pay?” I shouted more loudly, rattling the cage. “Did you think I’d let you get away with it?”

“You might not get that chance.”
His words echoed in my head, snagging on the last one:
“Maxine.”
Was it just a taunt, meant to infuriate me?

Or did he really not know me?

SOMETHING WASN’T ADDING up.

The giant had known me, and he’d said the Remedy had sent him. And the girl in the chat room, ImMargaretA, had claimed the Remedy was specifically hunting the flock. But even if they were both liars, something seemed off about this guy.

I quieted down and watched him carefully—his expressive face and breathless cadence, the way his eyes bulged with urgency.

“It was Goebbels, with his understanding that nothing human could be sacred, and the Hulk, with his appetite for complete and total destruction, who laid the foundation for our current revolution…”

Even I, with my sketchy grasp of history, could tell he
was making no sense, but it didn’t matter. He rambled in circles until he had them eating up every word. He was a storyteller, for sure.

But a killer? A megalomaniac bent on world domination?

Uh-uh. This guy was a
joke
.

“It’s not him,” I whispered.

“Max Mum?” Harry said, looking at me.

“These kids all believe him, but I don’t. He’s not the Remedy.”

So why was he pretending to be?

Probably to save his own skin. If what I’d heard was true, the Remedy wanted to wipe the planet completely clean, sparing no survivors. No one was safe… except the Remedy himself.

So this guy had conned some cleanup crews, convinced them he was their revered leader. It probably hadn’t been too hard. Doomsday was a cult, after all, made up of vulnerable kids easily duped by smooth talkers.

And the man could
talk
, I’d give him that. He was so desperate to sell his story, it almost made me feel sorry for him.

Almost.

After all, he was still pretending to be the deadliest, most despicable man in the history of the world. And he’d put me in a freaking cage.

“He’s not the Remedy!” I yelled. “This man is lying!”

Finally some of the Doomsday kids heard me. I saw heads turning, heard whispers spreading.

“I’m sure some people in this room would beg to differ,” the impostor said, flashing a nervous smile at his dead-eyed groupies. “As well as some not-so-fortunate people outside of it.”

“Okay, Mr. Remedial, so how’d you do it, then?” I demanded. “Who developed the virus? Who are the Horsemen?”

“There are unsung heroes in every revolution,” he answered vaguely, his voice going up an octave. “Loyal soldiers who are tasked with doing the hard work.”

“Like the burned kids in this room, whose families you freaking
bombed
?”

“We all have to make sacrifices for the greater good…” His eyes flicked around the room at his disciples.

“One Light,” a few voices murmured, and I scoffed.

“Where’d you get the bombs?”

“I—” His face twitched.

“And how come you’re here babbling about history to a group of kids instead of, you know, ruling the world? Let me guess—you’re a failed actor, right? Or maybe one of those carnival guys—the grifters who are always trying to cheat people out of the big stuffed animals? Whatever you are, you’re just a Remedy
fanboy
,” I spat. “And that’s almost as disgusting as being the mass murderer himself.”

Fear flashed behind those eyes. Desperation. The man raced back down the steps and leaned close to my cage this time—almost within reach.

“Do you know why
you’re
here?” he hissed, just loud
enough for me to hear. “Because if I make sure my students have someone to sacrifice to their ‘One Light’ every so often, they think I’m legit.”

Pink splotches appeared near his temples, and he was trembling, but his eyes were victorious. “Let me condense it for you, bird girl: As long as
you
die,
I
get to live.”

“Faker!” I shouted, swiping at his smug face. “Liar!”

I grabbed a fistful of tweed fabric through the bars of the cage, but he shrugged off the jacket, pivoting out of my grasp. He stumbled away from me with wide, terrified eyes.

“Kill them!” he yelled into the microphone. “Kill the mutants!”

THEIR FEET SOUNDED like thunder. Hundreds of kids streamed down from the stands, tripping over one another in their eagerness. They were smiling giddily and chanting, “
One Light! One Light!
”

But dark intentions flashed behind those grins.

Professor Phony wasn’t a legitimate dictator, but his followers were the real thing. They were Doomsday kids who idolized the Remedy and had done his dirty work picking off survivors.

Kids who had probably already murdered dozens of people and were now coming at us from all sides.

The reality of the situation set in: We were totally screwed.

Harry was in the corner, with his neck tucked in and
his feathers all puffed out, rocking back and forth, banging his shoulders against the bars in desperation.

“Get in the middle!” I yelled, and yanked him close to me. “Crouch down. Quick!”

Harry and I huddled together as the lynch mob rocked the cage with frenzied bloodlust. For a brief moment, I was grateful for those thick metal bars holding us in—they were also keeping everyone else out. Then the kids started poking knives and sticks through the spaces.

So we’ll just die a little slower, then.

All the horrible deaths I’d read about on the blog had been true, and now there would be two more. Even if the Remedy wasn’t in this room, he’d gotten to me.

There had never been hope for any of us.

Harry leaned his head back and made a horrible, high-pitched sound, and though I’d only known him for a couple of days, his plaintive cry awoke a fierce maternal instinct in me.

I stood up, sheltering him from the blows like I would my own flock. In my mind I saw flashes of their faces twisted in pain—Fang’s anger, Iggy’s shock, and Nudge’s fear—and though I wanted to break down, I became a stone. I knew I was just delaying the inevitable, but if they wanted Harry, they’d have to go through me first.

The Doomsday kids pressed their hateful faces against the bars, leering as their arms swiped at me with knives and hangers, fingernails and pieces of glass.

At first I fought them. I broke fingers and tried to pry
weapons from fists. I used every self-defense move I’d learned over the years, every honed skill. But I was locked in a box that made me vulnerable on all sides. If I wielded a knife, it was knocked from my hands. If I leaned back from a swinging fist, another ripped out a handful of my hair. They gouged and slashed, tore and pummeled. There were just too many of them.

Like the fake Remedy had said, I’d been brought here to die. My life was going to end like it had started—caged like an animal, being poked and prodded, with absolutely nowhere to run.

I clenched my fists together and stood stronger, prouder, even as my arms ached and I lost all hope. I wasn’t going to cry.

“You’re all cowards!” I snarled. “At least I didn’t give up! At least I didn’t—”

Something struck the side of my head and I fell, crumpling to the floor.

When I blinked and looked up, Harry’s wings were open, cramming the small space full of feathers.

“Harry, what are you…?” I asked, dazed with pain.

When Harry thrust his wings out through the bars, leaving them completely exposed to the murderous masses, I thought he was giving up. Until he started to flap.

Amazingly, the cage floor shifted below my feet and I tumbled sideways. Some of the Doomsday kids took advantage and beat me harder or gouged at Harry’s fluttering
wings, but most were staring with open mouths and puzzled looks.

Incredibly, the cage was rising off the ground.

Harry’s face turned red, and veins popped out of his neck as he strained. Me, the metal cage, the kids gripping the bottom… Harry’s head was tilted forward and he was supporting the full weight of it on his shoulders as his wings flailed outside the bars.

He was that good of a flier.

I scrambled to my feet and joined him, shoving my wings out through the bars, pumping in rhythm with his so we wouldn’t collide. After just a few seconds, my strength was already starting to fail me.

But with the added power of my wings, the kids couldn’t hold us down anymore. The cage jerked us side to side, rebounding as, one by one, their hands fell away from the floor.

“We’re doing it!” I marveled as, untethered, we carried our small prison up and over the stadium seating. The cult members chased after us, shaking their fists and chanting their words of sacrifice, but we’d already flown high into the top of the dome.

We were actually getting away.

WE SMASHED THE cage against the ceiling, the impact jolting me down to my toes. Then Harry’s face grew even more determined and we rose again. And smashed again. My teeth snapped shut hard and I tasted blood.

“What are you doing?” I yelled. “Harry, stop!”

One last time, still trapped inside our metal box, we crashed smack into the ceiling. One last time the force ricocheted through my body, chattering my teeth and rattling my bones.

The heavy door of the cage sprang open just as the ceiling broke from the impact. Chunks of plaster rained down, we scrambled away as the cage dropped, and then we were bursting through the ceiling into the sky above. A huge clang and some screams of agony told me the cage had landed.

We didn’t have to talk—we just flew high, hard, and fast, until the building was out of sight. When I could finally speak without coughing, what came out was laughter. Rolling, uncontrollable giggles that almost sounded like sobs.

Somehow, once again, I’d made it out alive, and I felt so shaken, so insanely grateful, that I had to put the rest of my dark reality aside for the moment and just laugh it out.

Harry looked alarmed at the sounds I was making, so I tried to get my hiccupping snorts under control, and held up my hand for a high five.

“Good job, Harry!” I said. At the sound of his name, that dazzling smile was back, along with his dimples.

I choked out another laugh. “Well, that was a pretty epic escape, huh?” I said.

In response, Harry crowed and soared even higher. I knew exactly how he felt—man, it felt good to be
free
again.

Even this far from the city, you could see the explosion’s effects. Many trees were stripped of bark, others look singed, and many of them had simply been broken off right above the ground.

There was still some life, though, scampering through the underbrush, and Harry was already scanning the ground for prey. My stomach rumbled at the idea. We hadn’t eaten in almost two days—since the rattlesnake feast Harry had delivered.

Harry screeched like an owl as he swooped low to the
ground, and when I followed suit, my voice came out like a war cry. It felt good to be loud and primal, to hunt our own dinner in the woods, to stretch my wings and know my speed and feel my power.

By the time the sun had completely set, we’d strung more than a dozen rodents up over the fire. For dinner, we had a mix of radiation rat, charred chipmunk, and nuclear squirrel. It was absolutely disgusting.

And absolutely delicious.

“This is just like the old days,” I reminisced, tearing into the gamey flesh. “When we were running from the whitecoats, me and the flock—”

I stopped, worried about letting those dark emotions in, but Harry was looking at me with wide, curious eyes, and I
wanted
to talk about my family. I needed to feel like they were still right here.

Or needed to believe they were still
somewhere
.

“Here, look.”

I licked squirrel juice off my fingers and grabbed a nearby twig. “Here’s me, Maximum,” I said, tracing a simple shape in the dirt—a stick figure with two triangles for wings. I added another next to it. And then five more. I even drew Total, but he came out more like a fuzzy sausage with a weird growth on his back.

I told Harry about Nudge’s love of fashion, about how Total had adored Akila, and how Iggy was the only one of us who could cook. I described the tree house Dylan had built me and how Fang had pulled me out of the swirling tsunami.

I missed them all desperately, and even if Harry didn’t understand, it just felt good to say their names.

“We’re a flock of two now,” I finished, looking at him. “You and me.”

“Flaaaack,” Harry echoed wisely.

“Show me your flock, how you grew up.” I handed him the stick.

But Harry didn’t draw his friends or family. He drew a boy with huge wings and a square box with bars around him. Harry pointed to the boy’s frowning face, and then tapped his own chest.

The twinge of protectiveness I’d felt earlier in the Doomsday hall returned. Harry was strong and an exceptional flier, but he was still so vulnerable.

“That was scary today, huh? I’m sorry for not listening to your instincts before,” I said quietly. “Don’t worry, though. It’s all over now.”

Harry kept sketching with the stick. Outside the cage, he drew other figures—people with masks over their faces. Scientists, without a doubt.

I noticed that Harry had started shaking again, his down trembling.

“I understand,” I said, reaching for Harry’s hand. I squeezed it tight, trying to comfort him. “It happened to me, too.”

Then suddenly Harry leaned over and planted his lips on mine.

That kiss brought back every sweet memory of
Fang—shy moments from the beginning when a kiss meant the whole world, and then that last night we spent together…

It made me think of Dylan, too, though, and my cheeks burned with confusion.

I pulled back abruptly. My eyes swam with tears—but my chest hurt like I’d been stabbed. The grief threatened to overflow. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and pressed my lips together.

Get it together.

“Max Mum?” Harry asked.

Harry lacked even the most basic communication skills. How could I explain that I still loved a boy who was dead, and another who had left me?

“Harry…” I started.

“Harry!” he crowed in response. He jerked his head forward again, but I was quicker to move this time.

“No, Harry,” I said. Looking at him, I drew an X through the Max stick figure on the ground. I slowly shook my head for emphasis.

“You must never. Do that. Again.”