Horseman nodded with a humble half-smile.
“I must admit I was beginning to worry. I nearly sent a rescue mission to root you out.” The doctor grinned wolfishly, and Horseman was grateful for the poor pixelation. “Tell me, how are your… travels?”
Keep it brief, just stick to the basics, Horseman reminded himself.
“I had a most satisfying morning, Doctor.”
“Oh, yes? Report: You haven’t killed the whole flock, have you?” The man’s bushy eyebrows jumped in feigned delight, but Horseman knew the doctor must have the same information that he did.
“No, sir. My coordinates indicate that the group has split up, so I am tracking them individually. But you’ll be pleased to know that Nudge… official name Monique,” he corrected himself, “is dead.”
“Well done!” the doctor praised Horseman, but blinked back at him expectantly, waiting for more information.
“Monique did not detect my approach, and my skills far outmatched hers. It was over in seconds.” Horseman knew his maker would want to know how strong he was, how impenetrable.
“I see,” the doctor said, sounding disappointed that there were no gruesome, salacious details.
“She… wept in fear,” Horseman offered.
“This is why we must press on in our cause.” The doctor’s voice rose emphatically. “The newer generations are stronger, more perfect. When it comes down to it, these so-called heroes are just accidents, like all of the older generations.”
“Yes. Accidents,” Horseman agreed. “Which reminds me…”
He looked across the pool of water at the ledge where Nudge’s limp body lay. He watched the small dog licking her face and smiled, then positioned his arm so that his master could see the image.
“Should I also destroy the remaining canine?” Horseman asked. “It would be my pleasure.”
Book Two
EVOLUTION GONE WRONG
40
RUSSIA WAS OUT—for now, anyway.
The sorry piece of crap known as the Remedy seemed to be taking credit for at least some of the destruction that was happening in the world, and the giant had said there would be more Horsemen serving him—H-men, as they were known on Fang’s blog.
Okay, I had to think. Nudge was safe back at the caves. Angel was apparently in Russia, and God knew she could take care of herself. The boys were going to Pennsylvania, but at least they were together.
That left just me. And Fang. He’d headed to California, because someone had mentioned looters there—at least, other people. I was here, not really enjoying Africa as much as I would have liked to.
Among the cities the giant had mentioned, Paris was out—I was never going there again. Hong Kong was, I was pretty sure, a lump of rubble on the coast of China. That left New York. The fact that New York and California were on the same continent had nothing to do with my decision.
It was about seventy-five hundred miles to New York, as the bird kid flies, ha-ha. I have a top speed of over three hundred miles an hour, but I’d need a lot more calories to keep it up. So I gave myself two whole days to get there.
Oh, New York…
I almost fell out of the sky when I saw the city, or what was left of it. My mind couldn’t make sense of the images it was processing: The eastern coastline was completely flooded.
I don’t mean flooded like Sydney, with the waves lapping against the bottom of buildings.
I mean: New York City was completely underwater.
The island of Manhattan looked like hundreds of teensy different islands, with only the very tops of skyscrapers rising out of the sea. The water reached dozens of stories up, and still the tide bit at the windows, insisting on destruction.
The Brooklyn Bridge was now an underwater attraction, and as for the Statue of Liberty, only the tip of her torch broke the surface of the water.
There weren’t any real torches burning, either. The City That Never Sleeps had gone completely dark.
I didn’t know if it had been a tsunami or an earthquake or a sudden melting of all of the polar ice caps—I just knew what I saw, plain and simple: the end of the world.
But in a city this huge, there had to be some survivors, right? I searched the tops of high-rises for huddled groups of people but saw no one.
Where would all the people have gone? Or had whatever happened, happened too fast? I remembered the wall of water Fang and I had seen on the day the sky caught fire—hundreds of feet high, bulldozing everything.
I’d almost drowned that day. Without wings, most people couldn’t even try to fly away like we could. Unless…
The airport.
Given the state of Manhattan, I knew the New York airports would be gone. But inland—how far had the water gone? I flew to New Jersey—or the flooded space where I thought Jersey should be. The Hudson River no longer separated the two states. The river no longer existed at all.
I found my way to Newark Airport, though to this day I wish I hadn’t.
The floodwaters reached about twenty-five feet up, lapping at the cabins of the bigger aircraft. Some of the planes were partially burned or otherwise wrecked; others seemed perfectly preserved, waiting in line for the runway. I saw one jet whose entryway was open, and I dipped down to check it out. Maybe there were cookies or crackers or sodas.
The smell alerted me within twenty feet, as it had in Africa. But these weren’t animals. These were people. This jet was jam-packed with… corpses. Beating my wings hard, I swerved away, then did a slow cruise around the other planes. No matter the size of the aircraft, I could see that every seat was full, every aisle crammed with people. They’d been desperate, trying to escape any way they could.
Maybe a few had made it into the air—though from what I’d seen of the rest of the world, I couldn’t imagine where they’d be headed. But what was left here was grim.
I spotted the control tower globe sitting high above everything like a giant eye. If anything was still moving, I’d see it from up there, so I made straight for a hole in the windows. I thought I could hear voices as I approached, so I burst into the tower room, hardly taking notice of the shattering glass around me.
Could it be… survivors?
The circular room was empty, but the voices continued, cutting in and out with static. Someone was alive—I could hear them on the radio.
My heart pounding with hope, I fiddled with the knobs until I got a clear channel, but what I heard was more gruesome than anything I’d witnessed that day.
“The Remedy said to shoot anything that moves,” a young voice was saying.
“A clean slate means no survivors,” another answered.
I covered my mouth, inhaling sharply. The giant had said the Remedy was striking around the world indiscriminately, but I still didn’t know what the scope might be.
What do these kids mean, “No survivors?”
How many other places in the world resemble the destruction of New York?
What could this man’s motive possibly be, and why does he call himself the Remedy if all he wants is death?
I surfed through the stations for hours, desperate to find some information I could use, but I didn’t find any other signs of life. Finally I flicked off the switch. I couldn’t go back out into this awful world, though. Not yet. Not today.
Instead, I curled up on the thin carpet, and I let myself cry.
I wept for the billions of dead, and the thousands more still dying.
I wept for New York. I wept for Sydney. I wept for Dar es Salaam and for Jonny and Rizal on the island. I wept for Ella, and my mom, and Dylan, and Akila.
I wept for my lost flock, for Fang. I wept for myself.
I wept for the whole human race, because for the first time in my life, I really felt like a part of it, and I understood, finally, how much we had lost.
I cried until my throat was raw and my eyes were swollen shut, but even then, I couldn’t sleep.
41
FANG HAD NO idea where to start.
&
nbsp; He’d made it to the western United States, but that didn’t mean he had any idea how to find these so-called H-men. It wasn’t like he could just ask, either. LA was underwater, Vegas was a blackened ghost town, and anyone he did happen to see was so panicked and terrified that a productive conversation was impossible.
He’d taken to flying low along the coast, scanning for pockets of people among the destruction. But without friends to talk to, without Max, the days felt empty. And long.
Now that Fang had a death sentence, he felt like he had all the time in the world, and it was excruciating. The last thing he needed right now was an existential crisis, but it turned out that the more time you had, the more questions you started to ask. Like Why me? Why now? Until you couldn’t think around all the whys.
Until your whole existence was one big question mark.
When the heat from one of the prevalent forest fires got too hot for him, Fang rose high above the clouds. He saw a flock of seagulls in the distance ahead, and though such a routine sight should have comforted him, like everything else, it left him questioning.
He hadn’t seen a single other bird in weeks, so why were these gulls here? Why, instead of in a typical V, were they flying in a chaotic, swirling flurry? And why were there so many of them?
More and more birds joined the mass, rolling toward him like a snowball, gaining speed and power.
Fang had a brief flash of watching seagulls squabbling viciously over a potato chip at the beach. As hundreds of slate-gray eyes with their pinprick pupils honed in on him, he had a sudden realization: He was the potato chip.
Fang jerked back, but the gulls were already all over him. Dirty gray wings beat in his face, and they screeched and jabbed one another in their frenzy to get at his skin.
They went for the exposed parts of him first—his face, his neck, his hands—but soon dove at anything not covered by fabric. Sharp beaks tore out clumps of hair and gouged his cheeks.
Fang held one arm across his eyes and tried to gain altitude, but the gulls didn’t let up. On every inch of skin, exposed nerves sang in protest as the wind found the fresh wounds.
I’m one of you! Fang wanted to scream, but they were pecking at his lips, and he couldn’t open his mouth.
The squawking in his ears and the full-body attack made coherent thought impossible, and Fang kept trying to fly upward, unsure of what the gulls’ top altitude could be. This meant his wings were fully exposed, and with raucous cries the birds tore into his glossy black feathers. Fang felt the rawness in the spaces between them as whole rows were plucked away.
Looking over his shoulder, he found that his wings didn’t look like his own. They looked alive, and he couldn’t see a single glimpse of black through all the gray and white.
The weight of the seagulls’ bodies pulled down on him, and flying was getting tougher and tougher. The gulls pulled his right wing down, and he spun. He tried to force both wings up together, and he veered.
Fang felt the déjà vu sensation he’d had in Angel’s vision—his guts rock-heavy, panic mounting, wings useless. He didn’t feel invincible like he had with the Cryenas; he felt wracked with panic.
This is it. This is it. This is it, the seagulls seemed to shriek.
But Fang balked. This couldn’t be it—not out here, not like this.
He wasn’t ready yet.
He coaxed every bit of power he had into his torn-up body and slingshotted himself high into the sky at close to two hundred miles an hour.
The last-ditch effort worked and the birds were sucked off him, but it almost didn’t matter at that point.
Fang wasn’t sure how much of him was left.
42
I WAS FLYING west over what I thought was Kentucky when I spotted my lunch.
With its long, W-shaped wings, it had looked like a vulture, and my chest tightened at the thought of all the corpses that were piling up everywhere. The world was a scavenger’s feast.
But as I got closer and saw the white torpedo-shaped body, I realized it was a seagull. It was weird to see one this far from water, but it was probably starving, like everything else that was still alive.
My stomach grumbled pointedly.
I guess it’s a bird-kid-eat-bird world we’re living in.
The gull had good evasive maneuvers, but I was better, and it had been ages since the termite-fest in Tanzania. Afterward, my stomach seized in protest and I wondered if the bird had been ill or full of poisonous chemicals. I felt nauseous and dizzy for miles, concentrating on not puking up the only food I might see for days, and when I finally looked down, I realized I’d gotten completely off track.
I thought I’d been flying over the Midwest, but I didn’t recognize the landscape at all. The earth was as parched as a desert, with a deep, endless gash in the ground that I couldn’t identify. The snaking shape was like a mini Grand Canyon, so big that it was certainly a landmark I would’ve recognized.
Then it hit me: It was the Mississippi River. The gull had probably been trying to find water. The thing was, there wasn’t any. It was completely dried up.
As I continued westward, things got even weirder. The city of St. Louis seemed to have a big barricade around it, and between the windmills of the prairie states, the tall grasses fed whirling tornadoes of fire.
I didn’t buy everything Angel had said—I still thought it was better to gather information than follow a bossy kid wherever she commanded, for example. But after seeing the extent of the devastation, I knew she was right about one thing: Something bigger was building.
And if, as I’d overheard on the radio, there were people massacring whoever they found, then having the flock members separated and vulnerable was about the worst idea ever right now.
Which brought me to: I had to find Fang.
43
FANG HAD LOST a lot of blood in the bird attack, and by the time he’d reached the edge of the Rocky Mountains in what was probably Wyoming, he’d been so exhausted and light-headed that all he could do was flop down in a dry creek bed.
Now all his wounds were covered with pus-filled scabs, he was so dehydrated that his lips were cracked and bloody, and he was near starvation. He thought he’d read that you could eat anything that smelled like mint, but the spiny purple flowers he’d found had made him hallucinate for three days.
So when he first heard the voices, he wasn’t sure they were real.
“I mean, I signed up for the cleanup crew to kill some freaks, you know?” a young male voice complained from shockingly nearby. “But everybody’s already dead.”
Fang had been so weak he hadn’t sought out proper shelter. Cursing his carelessness, he flattened himself against the dusty red earth.
He’d spent days trying to track down the H-men and hadn’t been able to catch even a whiff of their scent in the crackling desert air. Now that he was in such bad shape, the Remedy’s goons were the very last people he wanted to encounter.
That was the way the world worked, though: Life always managed to surprise you with child assassins at just the right moment. And find him they did.
“Well, look what we have here,” a stocky boy said with obvious delight when he almost stepped on Fang.
So much for hiding.
“Nice score, Chuck.” Another kid with bright yellow hair and a face erupting with acne stumbled into view.
The boys couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen, but they already had the swagger of abusive power. Fang eyed the shotguns slung over their shoulders. They held the guns with casual affection, obviously used to handling them.
“You said the scavengers had picked these trails clean,” chubby Chuck said to his companion. He nodded at Fang’s wounds. “Looks like they got a taste and decided the meat was too tough.”
That’s not too far off base, Fang thought.
“Lucky for me, my Benelli doesn’t discriminate,” the blond one said, his hand caressing the gun.
Fang stared back at them from sunken eye sockets
. Were these posturing preteens, who days earlier he could’ve knocked out cold with a flick of the wrist, really going to be his executioners? Fang actually started laughing at his sorry situation.
“Is something funny?” Chuck demanded, trying to sound tough but verging on a whine. “Keep laughing. We’ll shut you up by cutting out your tongue before we kill you.”
“Or we could just string you up in a dead tree,” the nameless pimpled punk offered. “Leave you for the vultures to polish off.”
“Go ahead, please prove your manhood by one-upping each other in acts of cruelty,” Fang said dryly. If they didn’t use the guns, he might stand a chance. Maybe.
Trying not to wince, Fang struggled to his feet. The boys immediately cocked their weapons, their faces twitching nervously, but neither shot.
“Who do you think you are?” the blond kid demanded, and Fang didn’t miss the slight quiver in his voice. He would take full advantage of it.
Fang unfurled his huge wings. With his black feathers framing his scabbed face and haunted eyes, he looked like the Angel of Death, and he knew it. He smiled, and the blond kid stumbled backward, suddenly pale.
“Renny, look at him,” Chuck chided, awestruck. “He’s obviously a Horseman. Idiot.”
Fang kept his poker face. He still had no idea what the H-men looked like, but if he could convince these twerps he was one of them, he’d take it.
“A Horseman?” Renny asked excitedly. “Maaan. Who did you fight?” He glanced at Fang’s scars and bruises.
“A whole bunch of… survivors,” Fang said, mildly amused. If he played along, maybe he could actually get some information out of these morons.
“Did you cut their heads off?” Chuck asked, his cruel eyes sparkling. “I heard they’re like zombies—if you don’t cut off the head, they’re not dead.”
Fang’s jaw twitched with fury as he imagined his flock’s necks stretched over chopping blocks.
“The weak must be rooted out,” Chuck recited. “The earth shall be cleansed so we may evolve.”