“So, Angel talks to fish, is that right?” Iggy said carefully. “And this is useful how?”
106
We had to keep on the move. It was going to be dark soon, and we needed shelter. Most kids my age would be bummed about their next math test or that their parents cut their phone calls short. I was more concerned with shelter, food, water. The little luxuries of life.
We were over northern Florida now. All along the coast we saw a million twinkling lights of homes and stores and cars moving in threads like blood cells in a vein. If blood cells had, you know, weensy little headlights.
But there was a huge unlit area below us. In general, dark = no people. I looked over at Fang, and he nodded. We started to descend.
A few minutes’ reconnaissance informed us that this was the Ocala National Forest. It looked like a good place, and we dropped down out of the twilight and aimed ourselves carefully through small gaps in the umbrella of treetops. And landed in water.
“Yuck!” I was calf-deep in muddy water, surrounded by cypress knees and towering pines. Looking around, I saw land a couple yards away and slogged over to it. “To the left!” I called, as Nudge and Iggy swooped in.
“This is good,” I said, looking around in what was rapidly becoming the pitch-darkness. “Easy to get out of, straight up through the trees, but almost impossible for anyone to track us overland.”
“Home, sweet swamp,” said the Gasman, and I smiled.
An hour later we had a small fire going and were roasting things on sticks. I was so used to eating this way that even if I were, like, a grown-up making breakfast for my 2.4 children, I would probably be impaling Pop-Tarts on the ends of sticks and holding them over a fire.
Now Fang pulled a smoking, meaty chunk off a stick and dropped it onto an empty Baggie, which was Nudge’s plate.
“Want some more raccoon?” he asked.
Nudge paused in midbite. “It is not! You went to the store. Didn’t you? There’s no way this is raccoon.” She examined the meat critically.
Fang shrugged. I rolled my eyes at him.
“Oh, maybe you’re right,” he said seriously. “Maybe this is the raccoon, and I gave you the possum.”
Nudge choked and started coughing.
“Stop it,” I told Fang, reaching over to pat Nudge’s back. He looked at me innocently.
“He’s just kidding, Nudge,” said the Gasman. “Last time I checked, Oscar Mayer wasn’t making squirrel dogs.” He held up an empty package, and Nudge wheezed a bit and swallowed.
I was trying not to laugh, and then I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I glanced around—we were all here. But I felt like someone was watching us. I see incredibly well in the dark, but the fire was too bright to see much beyond it. Maybe I was imagining it.
Next to me, Angel straightened up. “Someone’s here,” she whispered.
Or maybe not.
107
Well, it had been a whole day without an Eraser crashing—literally—our party.
I snapped my fingers softly twice, and five heads turned toward me, alert and tense.
“Someone’s here,” Angel repeated softly.
Fang kept turning things in the fire, but his back was taut and straight, and I knew he was reviewing escape plans.
“What are you getting?” I asked Angel out of the side of my mouth.
She frowned, her blond curls glinting in the firelight. “Not Erasers.” She cocked her head to one side, concentrating. “Kids?” She looked puzzled.
I got slowly to my feet, scanning the darkness around the fire. Moving to the edge of our little circle, I peered intently into the woods. Then I saw them. Two small, skinny forms, inching toward our fire. Much too small to be Erasers. And human, not animal.
“Who’s there?” I said strongly. I stood tall and put my shoulders back, making myself look bigger. Fang got up and came to stand next to me.
The two little forms slunk nearer, more quickly.
“Who are you?” I asked, sounding mean. “Come closer, where I can see you.”
They crawled into our small area, two dirty, skinny, big-eyed children. I mean, all of us bird kids looked really long and slender compared to other kids our ages, but our bones didn’t really stick out. Theirs did.
They gave us all wary glances but seemed riveted by the fire and the smell of food cooking. One of them actually licked her lips—they were a boy and a girl.
Hmm. They didn’t seem like the biggest threat I’d ever seen. I leaned over, put some hot dogs onto a paper bag, and placed it in front of them.
Yo. I thought Gazzy and Iggy were repulsive eaters. I made a mental note to not ever let them get this close to starving. Those two kids fell on the hot dogs and virtually shoved them whole into their mouths. It made me think of a TV special I’d seen that showed hyenas ripping apart their prey.
I put two slices of bread in front of them, then two more, then two more, then two more hot dogs. They all disappeared in instants. After that I gave them candy bars, and their eyes widened as if I’d just handed them—uh . . . candy bars when they were starving. Finally their chewing slowed. Now they seemed to savor every bite. Fang passed them a canteen of water. They drained it.
They crawled closer to the fire and sat in front of it, looking sleepy and unafraid, as if it would be fine if we killed them now, because they weren’t hungry anymore.
“So—what’s your story?” I asked, wanting some answers before they nodded off.
“We got kidnapped,” said the girl, her dark eyes reflecting the flames.
Well, okay, I hadn’t seen that coming. “Kidnapped?”
The boy nodded tiredly. “In south Jersey. From two different places—we’re not related.”
“We just ended up in the same place,” said the girl, yawning.
“And where was that?” I asked.
“Here,” said the boy. “We escaped a couple times. Even made it to the police station.”
“But both times our kidnappers were already there, like, filing missing-kid notices. They just found us again, real easy.” The girl sighed heavily and lay down on the ground, curling into a bony clump. We weren’t going to get any good answers out of them tonight.
“So, who were your kidnappers?” Fang tried.
“They were, like, doctors,” the boy said sleepily, lying down too. “In white coats.”
He closed his eyes, and within seconds both he and the girl were asleep.
Which left the rest of us wide-awake, frozen in terror, staring at them as if they carried the plague.
108
Fang took the first watch, so I hunkered down close to the fire and tried to relax. Which was about as likely as Florida freezing over. Angel snuggled up to me on one side, and Total curled up next to her.
“So, what are you picking up from them?” I whispered to her, rubbing her back.
“Weird images,” she whispered back. “Not like regular kids, like the ones at school. Like, flashes of grown-ups and darkness and water.”
“Which I guess makes sense if they were kidnapped and experimented on by whitecoats,” I said softly. I raised myself up on one elbow and caught Fang’s eye. Using sign language, I reminded him to keep an eye on the strange kids. He used sign language to say “No freaking duh.” I shot him the bird. He grinned.
“Do you think they’re mutants?” I asked Angel, lying down again. “They look pretty human.”
She shrugged, frowning. “They’re not Erasers. But they’re not like regular kids either. I don’t know, Max.”
“Okay.” Maybe we would figure it out tomorrow. “Try to get some sleep. Total’s already snoring.”
Angel smiled happily and pulled him closer to her. She just loved that dog so much.
I had third watch, from 4:00 to 7:00 a.m. or whenever everyone else woke up. I never minded night watches. All of our sleep patterns were permanently screwed, so it wasn’t like I needed my forty minutes of REM all together. I woke instantly as soon as Iggy touched my
arm. And why was the blind guy on watch, you might ask? Because a cockroach couldn’t come within fifty feet of us without his knowing it. Iggy on watch meant I could relax, or at least relax as much as I ever did. Which, okay, is not that much.
At five I put more wood on our small fire. The slight smoke seemed to be keeping mosquitoes at bay—I had expected them in Florida, even in November. I left the firelight and walked the perimeter in the darkness of the woods. Everything was cool.
At daybreak I was sitting against a pine tree, which seemed even more popular here than in the mountains of Colorado. I was watching and being. The thing about watch is, it isn’t the time to work through problems or write sappy poetry. As soon as you do, you’re not paying attention to your surroundings. You basically have to sit and just be, be totally alert to everything around you. It’s really kind of Zen, man.
Anyway. I was leaning back, being all Zen, when I saw one of the strange kids stir and sit up. Instantly I closed my eyes to the barest slits and let my breathing become deeper and more even, as if I were sleeping. Tricky Max, that’s me.
The girl sat up and looked around at all of us: the Gasman sprawled out, one arm thrown across his backpack, Fang lying neatly on his side, Nudge and Angel curled up around Total, so that they made a heart shape around him.
Ever so quietly, the girl shook the boy’s shoulder, and he woke up, startling out of sleep, already tense and on guard, the way kids are when waking up often = bad news. He glanced around also. I looked so asleep I almost was asleep. But I saw the two of them slip off into the woods so silently that not even Iggy twitched.
I waited several moments, as they made sure they weren’t being followed, and then, just as soundlessly as they, I got up and began tracking them.
I moved stealthily from tree to tree, and though they glanced back a couple times, they didn’t see me. About three hundred yards from camp, they crouched down. The girl took something from the dirty pocket of her ragged jeans. It looked like a pen—except she started speaking into it. A transmitter.
It took only a second for me to reach them with huge, bounding leaps. They stared up at me, stunned and afraid. I crashed down and knocked the pen from the girl’s hand. Then I grabbed her shirt and hauled her to her feet.
“Ordering a pizza?” I snarled.
109
It’s funny how different people are. If I’d been this kid and someone was snarling “Ordering a pizza?” at me, without even thinking, I would have snarled back, “Yeah. You want pepperoni?”
But not her. She stared up at me in horror and then immediately burst into great heaving sobs, her hands over her face. Next to her, the boy dropped to his knees and also started crying, without even trying to hide it.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” the girl gasped out, and I lowered her to the ground by her shirt.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I scowled down at her. “Sorry for what? Be specific.”
The girl pointed to the transmitter blinking on the ground. “I didn’t want to!” she sobbed. “They made us! They made us do it!”
I picked up the transmitter and threw it out into the swampy area. It landed with a small splash and sank out of sight. “Who made you?” I demanded, knowing that the clock was now ticking.
For several moments the kids only sobbed. I nudged the girl with the toe of one sneaker. “Out with it!” I said. Yeah, I know: bully Max. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel sorry for these kids. I did. It was just that I valued our lives more than theirs. I know some people would be all, Oh, every life is precious, everyone is equally valuable. And maybe that’s true, in Pixieland. But this was the real world, my flock and I were prey, and these kids had ratted us out. That was the bottom line, and in my life, you’d be surprised how often the bottom line is the only one that matters.
“They did,” the girl said, still crying. By this time the noise had woken the others, and they were making their way through the trees to us.
I knelt down to the girl’s level and took hold of one wrist. “Tell. Me. Who.” I squeezed her wrist slightly, and her eyes widened.
“They did,” she repeated, starting to hiccup. “The guys who—the people who kidnapped us. They’ve had us for months. They took me in August.”
“Me too,” said the boy, raising his face. Tears had made streaks through the dirt on his cheeks, and he looked stripy, like a zebra. “Those guys—sent us to find you. They didn’t feed us for two days, so we’d try hard. And we did. And you gave us food.” He started crying again.
“They said if we didn’t find you, they would never come get us. We’d be lost in the swamp until something killed us.” The girl was shuddering now, calmer, though tears still dripped off her chin. “I’m sorry. I had to.” Her face crumpled again.
I understood. They were trying to survive, just like us. They’d chosen themselves over us, which was exactly what I would have done.
I turned to Fang. “Get our stuff. We’re gone.”
The flock hurried off to dismantle our rough camp. I put my fingers under the girl’s chin and raised it so she’d have to look at me. “I understand,” I said levelly. “The transmitter will bring them here to find you. But we’ll be gone, and you won’t be able to tell them much. Now I’m going to ask you one more time: I need a name, a place, a logo, something. It’s the difference between them picking you up alive and them finding your bodies. Get it?”
Her eyes widened again. After a moment, she barely nodded. She shot a glance at the boy, and he gave her a nod. “Itex,” she whispered, then sank down on the damp ground. “The company was a really big one called Itex. I don’t know anything else.”
I stood quickly. No doubt people were on their way to the transmitter’s coordinates. We had to get the heck out of here. The two kids, filthy and exhausted, lay on the ground like bodies at Pompeii. I reached into my pocket and dropped some protein bars and hard candy on the ground by their heads. They stared up at me, but I was already gone, flashing through the woods. I met up with the flock and then we were airborne, on the run.
Again.
110
An hour later we were almost a hundred miles away. I had no idea what would happen to those kids.
“So, Itex,” I said to Fang.
“I told you it was like a deer,” Angel said.
“That’s ibex,” said Nudge. “And they’re more goatlike than deerlike.”
“Whatever,” said Angel.
“It’s not ringing a bell,” said Fang.
“They have long horns and live mostly in mountains,” Nudge explained.
“No, I mean Itex,” Fang said. “They said it was a big company, but I’ve never heard of it. Which doesn’t mean anything.”
“Yeah, I guess your education has a few gaps in it,” I said. Except for the past two months, none of us had been to regular school, ever. Thank God for television.
“Can we look it up somewhere?” Iggy asked. “Like at a library? Are we close to a town?”
I looked down at the incredibly flat land below us. I saw the tiny buildings of a small town, about fifteen minutes away. “Yeah. Good plan. Twelve points west, everybody.”
So it turned out that Itex owned, like, half the world. It wasn’t just a company. It was a huge multinational, multifaceted conglomerate that had its fingers in virtually every type of business there was, including food, medicine, real estate, computer technology, manufacturing, and even book publishing—so heads up, whoever’s reading this.
The more info we found on the Web, the more I started remembering the Itex logo. Now that I recognized it, I realized I’d seen it on a million things in my life, going all the way back to the School where we were created. It had been on test tubes, pill vials, lab equipment—you name it.
I logged off the computer and stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”
I’d seen enough.
111
“No.”
“Please, Max,” Nudge begged.
We were airborne, head
ing south. On the Web we’d found an address for Itex headquarters. It was roughly between Miami and Everglades National Park.
“No way. It’s too risky. The whole place is fenced in. There’s a million people there. We’ll be in crowds.”
“Fang?” Nudge wheedled.
Fang shrugged, as much as he could shrug while flying. He held up his hands as if to say, Talk to the boss. I’m just the hired help.
That wiener.
“Pleeease, Max?” The Gasman added his voice.
I stared ahead stoically, refusing to look down at the tall water tower wearing mouse ears. Of course, we had to pass right over Orlando.
“Max?” Nudge said.
I didn’t respond. I knew what she was trying to do.
“Oh, come on!” said Total, from Iggy’s arms. “We’re not going to the Magic Kingdom? How lame is that?”
I glared at him. It didn’t faze him.
“A couple rides?” Angel asked wistfully. “Splash Mountain?”
“Maaax?” Nudge said again.
I made the supreme mistake of looking at Nudge. Shoot! I winced and looked away but not quickly enough. She got me. She had given me Bambi eyes. Now I had no choice.
I gritted my teeth. “Fine. A couple rides, some cotton candy, and we’re out of there.”
Everyone cheered. Fang gave me a look that said, You sap.
“Who let whom have a freaking dog?” I responded.
He chuckled.
And we were on our way to the land of the Mouse.
112
“Disney World?” Ari felt like his head was about to explode. “Disney World?” His gravelly voice rose into a harsh shriek. “They’re not on vacation! They’re on the run! They’re running for their lives! Death is following them like a bullet, and they’re on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad?”
He snapped his teeth shut so hard the impact jarred his skull.
This was the end.
He would show them what a freaking Small World it was. There was about to be a rain of destruction on Main Street, U.S.A.