“ ‘Maximum Ride and Flock Take On Congress.’ ” I read the headline aloud, choking up at the memory.
“Maaaaaaax,” said the bird kid, my name sounding odd and guttural.
I looked up at him.
“Maximum,” I said, pointing a thumb at my chest. “Maximum Ride. But you can just call me Max.”
“Maaaax Mum. Maaaaax Mum. Maaaaax Mum,” he repeated, and I sighed.
“Okay. Maximum it is.”
He touched his own chest. “Huryu.”
“Uh… that’s not actually a name,” I muttered, thinking quickly. “Harry,” I said firmly, and touched his chest. “Harry.”
He reached out and touched my chest and I tried not to scream. His gentle fingers stroked the cloth of my ratty sweatshirt carefully. “Maaaax,” he said softly.
I nodded again. “Max.” And for some reason I teared up.
48
“GET READY…” Gazzy said, lighting the waxed rope.
Iggy stuck his fingers in his ears.
There was a low, nervous clucking sound, and then a big bang. Feathers rained down, snagging on the pine trees, and when the smoke cleared, three wild turkeys were no longer very wild.
“Most excellent,” Gazzy said, beaming, his face covered in black film.
“Well, that’s one way to cook a turkey,” Iggy laughed.
It was hard not to be giddy. After the miles and miles of mass destruction they’d flown over these past couple of weeks, they’d found the forests of Appalachia somehow untouched. Now they were sitting on the cement platform of an old campsite, chowing down on the first hot meal they’d had in what felt like years.
“Ig, no kidding, this is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.” Juice ran down Gazzy’s chin as he devoured the meat. “You should have your own postapocalyptic cooking show or something.”
“Oh, totally. ‘Tune in next week for Seasoning the Squirrel, Blowing Up the Bird,’ ” Iggy said in an announcer voice. Then he pursed his lips. “I was actually thinking it tastes a little funky.”
Gazzy tore off another big hunk, considering. “Maybe you went a little overboard with the rosemary?” he suggested.
Iggy paused with a turkey leg halfway to his mouth. “Rosemary?” he repeated skeptically. “You don’t think it might have something to do with the fertilizer you used?”
“Hey, I got a fire going, didn’t I?” Gazzy pointed out. “I didn’t see any gunpowder or ice packs in that farmer’s shed, did you?”
Iggy shrugged. “Well, it’s definitely a step up from bugs and rats.”
“Are you kidding?” Gazzy said, poking the charred birds with a stick. “This is a regular Thanksgiving feast. Hey, maybe we should say what we’re thankful for!”
“I’m thankful I’m not currently eating bugs and rats,” Iggy said immediately.
Gazzy nodded. “I’m thankful for the stupidity of wild turkeys.”
“Since this is supposed to be Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for the memory of garlic mashed potatoes drenched in butter. Or yams with marshmallows.” Iggy sighed.
Gazzy’s eyes twinkled. “Oh, man. Remember when Nudge wanted us to celebrate Thanksgiving like normal people, and we went all out trying to cook, but the marshmallows caught on fire?”
Iggy chuckled, remembering. “We almost burned down Dr. Martinez’s kitchen!”
“And then Ella ate all the burned yams to make Nudge feel better, insisting that she just really liked the smoky flavor?”
At the mention of Ella, Iggy went silent and stopped eating. The lines around his mouth deepened in pain.
“Ig?” Gazzy whispered after a few minutes.
“Hmm?”
“I miss the flock,” Gazzy said even more quietly.
Iggy nodded, but his milky, blind eyes were like a concrete wall.
“But Ig?”
“Hmm?”
Gazzy reached a tentative hand out and squeezed Iggy’s shoulder. “I’m thankful I’ve still got you, though. And that we’re still alive.”
Iggy turned his head in Gazzy’s direction, his face softening. “Me too, little bro. Me too.”
And just as the moment started to feel a little too heavy, a low, hornlike sound rippled through the air. The fire flared up in response.
“Oh, God!” Iggy scooted away, holding his nose.
Gazzy was giggling like a maniac.
Iggy shook his head in disgust, but he was grinning. “Gasman, I knew I could count on you to keep it real.”
“Freeze, scumbags!” a gravelly female voice shouted from the woods.
Iggy and Gazzy leaped to their feet, sending burning pine needles flying.
But they were already surrounded.
49
AT LEAST A dozen heavily armed teenage girls circled Iggy and Gazzy just beyond the trees, holding crossbows.
“What didn’t you understand about the word ‘freeze’?” asked the leader, a girl with dreadlocks and sharp eyes, stepping closer. When she saw the burn marks on the ground, color rushed to her cheeks. “Did you actually try to blow up our silo?” she barked.
Silo?
“Are you kidding me?” Iggy said as Gazzy gaped at the cement circle they’d assumed was a camping platform.
The boys had been working their way north toward Pennsylvania to try to find the blog commenter and his silo. They never imagined they’d been sitting right on top of it.
“You Doomsday guys think you can come here with your cleanup crews, take whatever you want, kill whoever you want?” another girl with dark hair asked shrilly.
“No! We’re not—”
Dreadlocks narrowed her eyes. “We play by different rules.” She cocked her weapon, and the sound echoed around the circle as all the other girls followed suit, stepping out from behind the branches.
With the flock backing them up, the boys might’ve had a fighting chance, but with just the two of them, they were seriously outnumbered.
“We’re not armed!” Gazzy shrieked, putting his hands up.
“And we’re not with Doomsday,” Iggy, who had once been hypnotized by the cult, said more calmly. “We’re mutants, see?”
He unfurled his pale fifteen-foot wings over his head, and Gazzy did the same. As if that weren’t proof enough, they fluttered their feathers.
The leader stared at them, unimpressed. “The Remedy’s got plenty of mutants working for him,” she noted, and the crossbows stayed trained on Iggy and Gazzy.
“Not us. We came because we have a friend here,” Gazzy explained hurriedly. “From the Internet. We had this flock, and not bragging or anything, but we were kind of famous…” He knew he was babbling, but he was desperate to buy some time. “So he went on our website and said we were welcome to visit. He called himself PAtunnelratt? It was an avatar?”
He looked around with raised eyebrows, waiting for recognition, but Dreadlocks’ answer was flat and final: “Don’t know him.”
Iggy pressed. “Are you sure? He said his dad—”
“Must’ve been somewhere else,” she snapped. “The government built fallout shelters all through these mountains in the 1950s. Could be anywhere.”
“But—”
Another girl’s impatient voice cut in. “There aren’t any guys living here, period.”
Iggy’s eyebrow jumped with interest. “Just girls?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Just us.”
“Sweeeet.” Gazzy exhaled in wonder. From his dopey expression, he seemed to have forgotten about the threat and was convinced they’d landed in heaven. Iggy elbowed him.
The girls sighed in annoyance but seemed to understand that the bird kids didn’t pose much of a threat, and they relaxed their grip on their weapons.
“You still owe us for those turkeys,” Dreadlocks said, gesturing at the pile of feathers and charred meat. “The forests are almost picked clean of game, and we can’t afford to lose them.”
Iggy crouched down and ran his hands over their meager supplies. “We don’t reall
y have anything to barter. Maybe we can pitch in?”
The leader regarded them coolly. “And what makes you think we need any help?”
“You know, with guy stuff.” Gazzy broadened his nine-year-old chest. “I know it can be hard without a man around. Any basic repairs you need done? Heavy lifting?”
Dreadlocks scowled, and her finger hovered over the trigger again, threatening to release the arrow.
“Jackie, don’t we have that thing we need done at the bottom level?” the dark-haired girl interrupted. “You know.” She wiggled her eyebrows at Gazzy and flashed a white, sharklike smile. “Men’s work.”
The leader frowned in confusion at first, but the other girls around the circle started to laugh. Iggy and the Gasman were definitely not in on it, but Gazzy grinned anyway, happy to have the attention of so many giggling girls at once.
Iggy’s expression was more uncertain. Without the benefit of sight, he was more attuned to the subtleties of sound, and he was pretty sure the laughter was at their expense.
Dreadlocked Jackie relaxed as she, too, understood what the dark-haired girl was implying. “Actually, come to think of it,” she answered, “there are some things we could use some muscle on. Thank God you showed up!”
50
“NICE GOING, DOOFUS,” Iggy grumbled.
“I was just trying to be neighborly,” Gazzy said, his voice echoing around the small room. “What if they had really needed our help?”
The boys were on their hands and knees, scrubbing crusty cement walls with hard-bristled brushes and heavy-duty chemicals. Iggy sat back on his heels and nodded at the armed guard he heard pacing the scaffolding above them.
“Pro tip, macho man: When someone has a crossbow pointed at your head, they’re probably not all that vulnerable.”
“I said I was sorry!”
The room was at least a hundred feet underground, at the very bottom of the silo. The dim light made it hard to see—and though that didn’t make much difference to Iggy, Gazzy was grateful. He didn’t want to know what the walls looked like, or what they were scrubbing.
They could both smell it well enough.
“ ‘Men’s work,’ ” Iggy scoffed, shaking his head. “Oh, would Max get a kick out of this. I can almost hear her laughing from across the ocean.”
“At least Max never made us clean toilets,” Gazzy said, dunking his brush into a rusty metal pail of cleaner.
“We call it the dump tank,” the guard called from above them. “We figured since most guys are crap, you two would feel right at home.”
“I’m pretty sure that girl with the black hair has a thing for me,” Gazzy said wistfully as they worked.
Iggy shook his head. “That’s what you’re thinking about right now? Man, you sure have a one-track mind.”
“Hey, she totally wiggled her eyebrows in my direction. I think she was checking out my wings.” Gazzy spread his wings proudly in the darkness, as if the girl were watching right now.
But Iggy was skeptical. “She was, like, probably almost twice your age.”
“Women dig a younger man. When we get out of here, I’m gonna make some fireworks—you know, romance her the old-fashioned way.”
“I’m glad someone has motivation.”
Iggy’s mind was on something else, though. He was remembering what the leader, Jackie, had said—that the woods were almost picked clean of food. The guys had thought they’d finally found an untouched paradise among all the wreckage, but it sounded like they wouldn’t be able to survive here for long. And neither would these girls.
“Gasman? I’ve been thinking,” Iggy said in a more serious tone. He heard Gazzy stop scrubbing for a second, waiting for him to continue. “Maybe we should join up with the flock again. Somebody needs to stand up to this Remedy dude, and there are obviously some tough survivors left in the world.”
As nervous as Iggy had been when they were first surrounded, when he’d learned that this troupe of street-smart survivors was against the Remedy, his spirit had been buoyed with hope.
“If we met up with Angel, and convinced some of these girls to join us…” Iggy trailed off.
“Then we might just stand a chance,” Gazzy finished. Iggy couldn’t see, but Gazzy’s eyes were glistening.
“Let’s do it,” he said enthusiastically, and nudged Iggy’s shoulder. “Let me just go grab my girlfriend, and we can leave for Russia right now!”
They heard a gurgling sound, and then a pipe protruding from the wall started to spit. Fresh sludge surged onto the floor.
“Gross!”
The guard laughed as they scrambled away from the slime. “You missed a spot,” she taunted.
“It’s a regular comedy hour down here,” Iggy muttered, lifting his wet feet in disgust.
Gazzy watched the waste circling down the drain. “What’s the point of cleaning this place if it just keeps pumping down?”
Iggy pulled his shirt up over his nose to filter the fresh stink. “There is no point,” he said, his voice muffled. “That’s the point—we’re unnecessary.”
“Ugh, I just can’t take the smell,” Gazzy said, gagging.
Iggy chuckled to himself. “Oh, Gasman, I think that aroma’s called karma.”
Gazzy socked Iggy in the arm.
“Wait, I smell something else,” Iggy whispered suddenly. “There’s someone in here with us.”
51
HORSEMAN STEPPED FROM the shadows and clamped a hand over the Gasman’s mouth before he could turn around.
“Don’t move,” Horseman whispered, keenly aware of the guard standing overhead. “Stay calm.”
But when you’ve spent your entire life running, someone telling you not to move seems pretty suspicious.
The Gasman bit down on Horseman’s fingers so hard that, even through the gloves, he almost cut through bone. Horseman cursed, hunching over his wounded hand, and everything dissolved into quick chaos.
“Get out of here, Iggy!” Gazzy screamed.
Iggy shook his head. “I won’t leave—”
“Go!” Gazzy insisted, pulling something from his pocket. “I’m right behind you!”
“What’s going on?” the guard demanded, waving her crossbow. “Who’s that down there?”
Iggy heard the snag of the match and dove for the ladder just as Gazzy tossed the small flame into the bucket of chemicals they’d been using for cleaning.
And then the blast drowned out everything.
It made the walls shudder and the floor disappear. It blew Gazzy, Iggy, and Horseman upward. Horseman shot his arm out to catch the ladder, dangling to the side. As smoke billowed up through the shaft, the dangerous mix of chemicals burned his eyes. He squeezed them shut, but the insides of his eyelids felt like they were lined with thorns.
He didn’t have time to worry about it, though—just kept his eyes shut and scrambled up the ladder as fast as he could, three rungs at a time. The fire alarm was wailing, and the army of girls was spilling out of the floors he’d been blown past.
“Breach!” they shouted when they saw Horseman on the ladder. “Stop him!”
Two arrows whizzed past his ears, and he heard the warriors climbing after him in fierce pursuit. He hadn’t heard the Gasman or Iggy since the explosion.
Horseman’s left hand felt nearly crippled, but the chute was too narrow to fly through, so he did the only thing he could do: He climbed as fast as possible.
His eyes still burned, and he tried opening them. Tears poured down his cheeks—everything was blurry and he couldn’t see through the smoke. The ladder seemed endless, but finally, after at least a hundred rungs of agony, Horseman burst out of the silo and blinked painfully in the light. His eyes were still tearing, but a quick glance showed him that the bird kids were nowhere to be seen. He turned quickly to screw down the heavy cement lid over the manhole, ignoring the loud bangs coming from beneath his feet—he’d deal with the group later.
He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and turne
d over his wrist, where he saw a number of impatient queries on the screen. The letters blurred—had the chemicals permanently damaged his vision?—but Horseman knew the gist of his master’s concerns. He tapped out a quick message to the Remedy: “The Gasman is dead. The kid blew himself up.”
Standing on top of the silo, Horseman turned in a slow circle.
Now, where is Iggy?
52
HORSEMAN SAW THE flash out of the corner of his eye—a figure disappearing into the trees like a pale ghost.
“Iggy!” Horseman called, blazing after him on the trail through the pines. “Let’s not make this harder than it has to be.”
Horseman didn’t exactly enjoy this part of the job—the kids’ fear reminded him too much of how he felt around the doctor—but he knew his body was made for the hunt. His wings were longer, his body stronger, and he had the eyesight of a hawk.
Well, usually. Right now, he felt like he was looking through a milky lens.
But however clouded his vision, Horseman still had Iggy in his sights, and he could cruise as long as he needed to; his lungs were built to outlast Iggy’s twofold. It was only a matter of time.
“Iggy!” Horseman shouted again as he wove after him through the underbrush.
“Don’t call me that,” Iggy yelled over his shoulder. “Only my friends get to call me that.”
Iggy was distracted now, and Horseman was gaining on him with each breath. Closing in.
“You don’t want to be my friend?” Horseman asked with a smile as he darted forward.
Iggy laughed and veered up sharply, winding toward the clouds.
Horseman grasped at the air in frustration. He’d thought he had him.
He strained his neck to keep track of Iggy’s movements above, desperate not to lose him now. Though Iggy was blind, he was a magician in the air and seemed to possess a sixth sense that made him even better at navigation… and almost impossible to track.