Maximum Ride Forever (20 page)

I AWOKE FEELING cold again. But this time, the cold felt heavy in my gut, and it didn’t go away.

Angel led us. Harry and Dylan formed the V, and I hung back, riding the slipstream and letting them carry me for thousands of miles. We flew up along the west coast of Canada and over Alaska, and I didn’t look down once. Didn’t want to see the flattened cities and charred forests. Didn’t want to see the landscape as bleak as my mind.

I don’t deal with death well, you might have noticed. I don’t really deal at all—I go on autopilot. The flight to Russia felt like one long hallucination, and I didn’t eat, or talk, or cry.

It seemed like I barely breathed.

I do know that as we flew over Alaska, we were pelted with a blizzard so fierce it almost knocked Harry from the air. The cold made Dylan’s teeth chatter and Angel’s breath come in gasps, but I hardly felt any of it.

My thoughts were as blank as the snow.

Numb.

The Bering Strait was less than a hundred miles across, but the slate-colored water looked like an endless dark hole, trying to suck me down.

Once, I stopped flying completely, letting my body hang limp for a second too long. I folded my wings in and started to drop, imagining myself plunging into the freezing water, having it hit me like concrete at that speed. A fast death.

But then I saw angry clouds in the distance and jerked back up. I was sure I’d glimpsed Fang’s stormy eyes, and thought I saw his face just beyond the horizon. The wind whispered to me:
Not yet. Not yet.

“Cut it out, Angel,” I mumbled. “Get out of my head.”

She didn’t look back, though. It was Fang’s voice, gravelly and insistent, that urged me on, reminding me why I was still here, and what I needed to do.

So I kept moving forward, mile by mile, and the cold feeling inside me started to heat up into rage and harden into resolve: I would get to the Remedy, whatever it took.

And I’d kill him myself.

I’d expected the Remedy’s den of death to be as wrecked as the rest of the world, but when the water became land
again, the gray, barren coast of Russia turned to lush, green forests. Mountains were untouched by ash, and rivers still flowed blue. After all the devastation I’d seen, it should’ve given me hope.

But I was in no state to embrace such a positive emotion, so naturally, it just fueled my fury. He didn’t deserve this.
I
didn’t deserve it.

Not yet.

We were flying over a forest of tightly packed trees when I noticed Dylan scanning the ground. I broke formation and flew up next to him.

“Where is he?” I didn’t have to clarify who I meant.

“Underground. A place called
Himmel
.” Dylan pronounced the last word with an accent.

“Himmel?”

“Heaven,” Dylan explained. “It’s German.”

My mouth tightened into a hard line and I wondered what the German word for hell was. I was going to show Dr. Gunther-Hagen that everything has an opposite.

“Okay, let’s go,” I said grimly.

“Wait, Max.” Angel reached for my arm. “We have to join the others at the camp first.” She smiled faintly. “It’s just another few miles.”

Reluctantly I nodded, figuring “the others” were the rest of the flock, but when a clearing opened up in the woods, I saw rows and rows of makeshift tents made out of everything imaginable, from plastic tarps to blankets to flowered bedsheets. Between them,
thousands
of people
went about their business. After seeing hardly anyone for so long, it really was a sight to behold.

“Where did they all come from?” I asked in awe, and Angel shrugged.

“All over.”

I had seriously underestimated her. And for once, that was a good thing.

“Look.” She pointed. “There’s the rest of the flock.”

I hadn’t let myself believe I’d see them again. Not fully. I’d already lost something so huge, having hope seemed like being a sucker asking to get burned.

But the sight of their faces cut through my shield, and I was shaking so hard I could barely steer myself to a landing. I hadn’t lost it all. Nudge, Iggy, Gazzy. Even Total—they were all here, waiting for me.

Alive.

THE FIRST POOR soul in my path of suffocating love was Nudge, and I tackled her, knocking her to the grass.

“Agh!” she said as I almost crushed her with the force of my embrace. Strangers stared at the bird girl acting like a lunatic attacker, but I didn’t care as long as I never had to let my little sister go again. Finally, I pulled her to her feet.

“Oh, Nudgelet,” I said with a shaky breath, “I’m so glad you’re okay.” Nudge’s eyes glistened.

“I missed you, too, Max.” The bite on her cheek had healed into a gnarly scar, but her brilliant smile made you hardly notice it.

“Don’t I get a hello?” Iggy asked from behind me.

“C’mere.” I yanked him into a fierce bear hug, squeezing
tightly until he started coughing. Then I held him at arm’s length, looking him over.

“You scared the crap out of me!” I shouted, jabbing him in the chest.

“Whoa, take it easy!” Iggy put his hands up defensively.

“I thought you were dead!” I shoved him. “Do you have any idea what that does to a person? Do you?”

“It’s not my fault! Dylan spread the rumor!” Iggy protested, but now he was laughing as he blocked my jabs. “Besides,” he said, flashing a wry grin, “how much more do you love me now that I’m not dead?”

I rolled my eyes and mussed his shaggy blond hair in exasperation, but the truth?
A lot more.
Or at least I was a lot more appreciative of my weird, lovely little flock than I ever had been.

I hugged Gazzy and Total, too, my face muscles constantly quivering between sobs and smiles. It was definitely an emotional reunion, to say the least.

“How did they say
I
died?” Gazzy asked eagerly.

“You got blown up.”

“Cooool.” His eyes lit with morbid delight, and when I pursed my lips, unamused, he cackled like a maniac. “And also totally bogus you would believe that, Max. Do you have any idea how much I know about combustible materials and the rate of conflagration?”

“No, I don’t,” I said, trying not to imagine all the times Gazzy’s experiments had come close to blowing us all up in our sleep. “And for that I’m incredibly grateful.”

“Well, jokes aside, I’m incredibly grateful to be alive,” Iggy said. He clapped Dylan on the back and pulled him in for a hug. “Seriously, man, I don’t know how you pulled that off, but thank you.”

“It wasn’t a big deal.” Dylan blushed.

“Not a big deal?” Nudge echoed in disbelief. “I almost died of shock! I could’ve done without waking up to Total slobbering on my face, but you saved all of our lives, Dylan!”

Dylan smiled, but his eyes flicked to mine and Angel’s and his smile faded.

He didn’t save all our lives. He didn’t save Fang.

“An act of heroism to rival any of the classic demigods,” Total was gushing. “Achilles…”

Suddenly my chest hurt and my throat ached. “Okay,” I said, and coughed. “So what’s the deal with the kids at the camp? Why are we here?”

“I TOLD YOU. We’re here to fight a war,” Angel said. She looked out across the crowded field. “And that’s why we brought an army.”

I watched Angel’s face, trying to figure out what was different about her. She seemed removed from the group, somehow. Apart.

“Gasman and I just got here a couple of days ago,” Iggy said. “But Nudge has been chatting everyone up for the last week, pulling together their stories.”

“We’re pretty sure the Remedy detonated nuclear warheads on every continent,” Nudge reported. “Maybe close to a hundred.”

“That’s insane,” I said in horror.

“No, what’s insane is that there’re over four thousand
left, stockpiled here in Russia,” Gazzy said. “And this wackjob has full access.”

I thought of the flattened cities I’d seen. The caved-in homes, mangled bodies, burned flesh. Then I imagined one man, alone in a room, pushing a button to make that happen.

Then pushing it again. And again.

A hundred times.

“It’s time to end this,” I said through gritted teeth. “Now.”

“Supplies are low anyway,” Iggy agreed.

I glanced at the dense forest around us, at the still-green leaves and undeveloped land. There had to be a ton of wild game nearby.

“We know how to hunt,” I reminded him. “And Harry here is stellar. Harry—”

“Harry!” He’d been hanging off to the side, but now he crowed his name on cue, and Nudge’s face lit up.

Gotta be the dimples. Every time.

“We can definitely use him,” Iggy said. “But a lot of these other mutants are city kids, and they have no idea how to feed themselves.”

“They’re not all mutants, either,” Gazzy said. “Like the girls we brought from the silo—they’re human, but they’re super hard-core.” He beamed. I raised a suggestive eyebrow, and Gazzy snickered, always the lady-killer. “There’s also a lot of lab escapees, like the bug boys over there.”

I followed his gaze to where a bunch of small, athletic
kids were kicking around a ball of newspaper tied with rope in place of a soccer ball. They almost didn’t look like mutants at all, except for the hard brown shell that started on their upper arms and went down their backs. There was a paler kid with them who seemed familiar.

“Is that…”

“Holden from Fang’s gang?” Iggy said. “Yeah, that’s the Starfish. They actually have contests over who has the weirder epidermis.” He chuckled. “Kate and Ratchet are here, too, somewhere.”

“Kate?” I jerked my head around to stare at Angel. “The traitor?”

“I found her and Ratchet in San Francisco, in an abandoned mall,” Angel explained. “They were emaciated, living off whatever hadn’t rotted in the food court. Almost everyone else within a thousand miles had died of the H8E virus, but since they were immune, they’d set up a clinic and were transfusing their own blood to save other kids.”

Well, what little martyrs.

“But she still
betrayed
Fang,” I repeated, emphasizing each word with my open palm. “She and Star sold him out to Jeb.”

It had meant the death of my clone, Maya, and the dissolution of Fang’s gang.

“Trust me, Kate regrets that,” Angel said. “That’s why she’s here—to fix what she did. And we’re going to need her strength against the Remedy’s forces.”

Dylan nodded in agreement, and I remembered what
he’d told me about the Horsemen, how they were almost superhuman. Kate might have lightning reflexes and be able to punch with the force of a wrecking ball, but she could never “fix” what she’d done.

“Speaking of Fang’s gang,” Total said curiously, twitching his furry ears. “Where is our dark, brooding brother?”

“Yeah, I thought Fang was coming with you guys,” Iggy said. “Dylan told us—”

“Fang is dead,” Angel answered bluntly.

The words were still like knives, slicing up my heart.

“Yeah, right.” Gazzy started to laugh but then saw the looks on our faces, and his expression morphed into horror. “What do you mean, he’s
dead
?”

“He was killed by Horsemen,” Dylan said, clenching his fist. “I tried to stop it, but there were just too many of them.”

The words tore through the flock like a hurricane. It hurt to see them realize that nothing would ever be the same.

Nudge’s face crumpled and she buried her face in Dylan’s shoulder as her body shook with sobs. Total flopped on the ground, wailing. Tears ran down Gazzy’s cheeks and he sat abruptly, ripping at blades of grass. Angel rubbed his back, trying to comfort her big brother.

Iggy walked off to the side and blindly stared into the woods, his body incredibly still, his face a mask I couldn’t read. Just like after Ella.

Only I stood alone, my eyes dry. I wouldn’t revisit that grief—not yet. At that point I felt only pure, distilled anger, a seemingly bottomless well of fury.

At Angel, for saying it would happen. At Dylan, for making it true. At myself, for letting him go.

And at Fang, most of all, for leaving. For dying.

How could I ever, ever forgive him for that?

So when Total suggested we say some words for Fang, when Gazzy said we would fight the battle in his name, and when Nudge wanted to hold a candlelit vigil, I bit down hard on my tongue to keep from screaming.

I didn’t want to tell stories or share memories. I didn’t know if I could even say his name.

With the taste of blood in my mouth, I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned away.

“Max?” Nudge called after me, a quaver in her voice.

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” I said as I walked away from my family. I trudged deeper into the camp, ducking under clotheslines and trying to lose myself in the sea of strangers.

“I just can’t.”

THE NEXT DAY, the camp buzzed with nervous energy as everyone prepared for battle.

Iggy and Gazzy had rigged up a catapult out of fallen trees, and Holden was shouting directions about angle placement and velocity. All around me, kids were trying to psych each other up, banging their weapons together like they’d seen in movies, even though no one knew what we were up against.

Most of us didn’t, anyway.

Angel was the one who’d gathered us here, and of course she was nowhere in sight. And Dylan was the one person who’d actually seen the underground layout, and so far, he’d told us nothing.

We were here. It was time. What were we waiting for?

Restless, I wandered through the muddy rows of the camp, veering right to avoid a damp-eyed prayer circle Nudge was leading, complete with candles. I ground my teeth.

“Not into that praying crap, either, huh?”

Startled, I turned to see Ratchet lying on a tarp, doing sit-ups.

“We’re gonna win or we’re gonna lose. Personally, I think we’re gonna lose. But either way, praying to some yahoo isn’t going to change anything.”

“Where’s Kate?” I asked.

“Over with the baby general.” Ratchet nodded past me without breaking rhythm.

About a hundred yards away, near the edge of the woods, Angel was talking to Kate and Dylan.

“If they wanna whisper secrets,” Ratchet said, taking a breath, “maybe they shouldn’t be so loud about it.”

I could barely see their expressions from here, let alone hear their voices, but with his extraordinary senses, not much got past Ratchet.

“What secrets?”

Ratchet did several more sit-ups, his trademark aviator glasses reflecting back at me with each one. Finally, he stopped and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

“Maybe you should go find out for yourself.”

When I approached, Angel seemed completely different than I’d ever seen her. Her voice was still the same, soft and young, but her tone was one of unmistakable authority.
Sitting on a stump with her legs tucked under her, she looked like a child empress, consulting with her trusted advisors.

Which apparently didn’t include me.

As I approached, they stopped talking abruptly. Dylan coughed and shifted uneasily, and Kate flashed me a wide fake smile.

“Getting chummy in the cool kids’ club?” I asked.

“Hmm?” Angel said distractedly. “What is it, Max?”

“Sorry to break up this little party, but is someone going to explain what the heck is going on? Shouldn’t we be casing the entrances? Or at least organizing the giant mass of people you convinced to meet here?”

“Dylan and Kate have been working out a strategy of attack,” Angel said, standing. “And I was about to make an address on the field that should answer some of your questions.”

“All I need,” I said coldly, “is a face to smash my fist against.”