Maximum Ride Forever (4 page)

TOTAL CHOSE AKILA’S burial site at an abandoned cottage way out in the middle of nowhere. We had no clue if the soil was full of nuclear radiation or if the air was breeding deadly viruses by the second, but there was no ash cloud in sight right now, and that was good enough for us.

The cottage was run-down and looked like it hadn’t been lived in in years, but we found a shovel and a hoe in a lean-to, and Fang kicked in the front door in the hopes there would be stuff inside we could use.

We started digging in the hard, parched earth. From the corner of my eye I saw Akila’s swaddled form, and something in me felt like it had split open.

“You okay?” Fang asked. He lifted my hand and ran his thumb over my dirt-caked fingertips. “I can take over.”

His touch felt solid. Reassuring. But I just couldn’t handle it right now. I just wanted to feel my body working. I wanted to dig. Or scream.

“I’m good.” I stepped back stiffly, and Fang let his hand fall.

When the hole was ready, Fang gently placed Akila in it. Total’s soft sobs made my heart feel like it was wrapped in barbed wire, but as leader, I knew I had to step up and say a few words.

I cleared my throat. “Here lies our brave friend Akila,” I said. “She deserves better than this unmarked grave, and to tell you the truth, she deserved better than us. I wish we’d taken better care of her. But even so, she was a true and loyal friend to us, a loving wife to Total, and a fierce fighter under the worst circumstances.”

I had to clear my throat again. My eyes were burning from the hot, dry dust, and I brushed my sleeve over them. Nudge had started crying and was trying to keep the stinging tears out of her injury, which had barely started to scab over.

“I don’t know about heaven or anything,” I said gruffly. “Though God knows we’ve seen a thousand kinds of hell. But I know that somewhere, Akila is running free, the sun on her face and the wind in her fur, and she’s got plenty to eat and isn’t in pain.”

That was when I started crying. I barely got out my last words: “Good-bye, Akila.” Then I took a handful of gritty dirt and sprinkled it on her cloth. One by one, we each
threw a handful of dirt on her, and then Total backed up to the pile of dirt and kicked furiously, filling in the hole faster than we could have with the shovel.

“Good-bye, my love, my princess, my beautiful bride,” he sobbed. “Our love will never die.”

We were all quiet for a couple of minutes.

“I wish we had flowers to put here,” said Angel, wiping her face and leaving a smeared streak.

“Maybe there’s something inside we could use as a marker,” Fang said, turning to the house. “Like a statue or vase or something. Be right back.” He headed inside.

We stood in awkward silence until a distant, bone-chilling howl made us all jump… and set the Gasman off.

“What else is alive out there? Max?”

“I don’t know, okay?” I said, suddenly exhausted and frustrated and so, so sad about Akila. “I don’t have all the answers. The world looks like it’s been completely obliterated. So whatever possibly survived is going to be… pretty… yucky.”

“I’m sure rats and cockroaches made it,” Iggy muttered.

“And us,” said Angel.

Dropping the shovel, I covered my face with my hands.

Breathe. Just breathe.

This was it: I had finally hit my breaking point.

“Guys?” Fang called from inside the house, oblivious. “Nudge, c’mere, I need you.”

“Akila won’t mind about the stupid fake headstone!” Nudge answered miserably.

“I think you’ll all want to see this.” Fang stuck his arm out the window, and I stared dumbly at the object he was holding.

Somehow, in the middle of this torched wasteland, Fang had found a laptop.

WE GAWKED AT Fang like he was holding an extra-large double-cheese stuffed-crust pizza.

“It’s a laptop,” I said, frowning in disappointment. “So what? With no Internet, all we could do is play solitaire. We need either actual food or a marker for Akila’s grave.”

“It’s a tablet, actually,” Fang corrected as we came nearer. “It’s smaller, see? And it has a touch screen!”

I rolled my eyes at his mocking tone. “Can we eat it?” I flicked the hard casing. “Can we use it to fend off the psycho hounds?” I gestured toward Nudge’s bandaged cheek.

“Let me see that.” Nudge took the tablet, turning it over in her hands. “I can sense the owner’s fingerprints. He was anxious, searching for something.”

“I knew it!” Gazzy punched the air victoriously. “I
knew there were still other people alive out there. It’s not just us and the Cryenas!”

Fang’s eyes flicked to mine, challenging. Nudge did have the power to feel leftover energy, but since we didn’t know how old the energy was, it didn’t necessarily mean anything. And when you’ve had the kind of epically bad luck I’ve had, you learn not to get your hopes up.

Still, it
could
mean something—a record of what happened, or a connection to the rest of the world…?

“It means answers.” Angel sat on the cracked kitchen counter, swinging her legs. The way she said it—with that weird authority she had—made it seem real, and there was a collective inhale, a quickening pulse, a feeling that maybe, possibly, we might just have a shot.

I bit my lip and then asked the only question that really mattered: “Does it even
work
?”

Nudge held down the power button for a few moments and then looked up with a frown, like she’d been betrayed. Nothing.

“There’s no electricity to charge it, either,” Fang said, flicking a dead light switch.

I sighed. “Like I said, just another useless piece of junk some poor sap left behind.” Seeing some plastic flowers on the table, I grabbed them and turned to head out to Akila’s grave.

“Max, be careful out there,” Gazzy said. “We definitely heard some kind of wild animal.”

“What if we could charge it another way?” Iggy called
after me. A high-pitched squeal made me cover my ears, and I turned to see him standing in the doorway to the next room, holding up a dusty radio.

“Where did you get that?”

Ig grinned. “Oh, just another useless piece of junk I found lying around.” He fidgeted with the dial, but all we heard was the crackle of static. “Looks like the antenna’s shot, but it has a charging panel—solar powered.”

“Doesn’t that mean you need sun?” I squinted out the window doubtfully. The sky was dark with ash.

“She still might have some juice in her.” Iggy shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

Somehow, of course, Iggy found some doohickey thingamabob, fiddled with it, and managed to plug the tablet into the radio. We crowded around, seeing our anxious expressions reflected on the touch screen. The tiny red light on the power cord blinked on, and we waited.

And waited.

“It’s not working,” I huffed, tapping the screen.

“Patience, Max.” Total licked away the smudge from my grimy finger. “Just give it a minute.”

But after five minutes, the radio started to hum with the effort, and the light was still red.

“It’s not going to be enough.” I started to pace.

Then, just as the radio took its last, groaning breath, a welcoming note chirped from the speakers, and our reflections faded as the screen glowed to life.

NUDGE’S HANDS HOVERED over the keyboard, and the rest of the flock huddled around her. “What should I look up?”

“Whoa, you actually have Internet?” Iggy asked. “I’m guessing this guy probably hasn’t paid his wireless bill in a while.”

“Five G.” Nudge wiggled her magnetic fingers. “I know it makes no sense, but don’t question it.”

We tried all the major news sites. Over and over, we saw the same thing: a white screen with stark black type that read
CONNECTION TO SERVER FAILED
. Then Nudge started trying anything she could think of. We squealed when an actual site popped up, but saw that it was a shopping list for a homemade disaster kit. Gazzy found “antidiarrheal
medication” particularly hilarious, while my stomach growled loudly over such delicacies listed as “canned fruit and meats.”

But no contact with an actual human. No clues.

Nudge was trying yet another website.

“Hey, this one works!” She grinned as the log-in field popped up.

“Seriously?” I smirked at her. “The world ends and you want to check your Fotogram? Here, I’ll give you another ‘like.’ ”

“Shh,” Nudge said, swatting at my hand. “I just want to see something.”

She typed
#apocalypse
into the search field, and the screen lit up with images—pages and pages of disaster pics taken with cell-phone cameras. Most of the scenes were beyond anything we could’ve imagined, and believe me, we have dark, twisted imaginations.

“Whoa,” I managed to croak.

Because what else could you say about a selfie of a woman clutching a Bible as, behind her, a two-hundred-foot tsunami obliterated Los Angeles?

Or a shot of silver fish flopping on marble staircases while the train tunnels in New York’s Grand Central Station flooded with water?

We saw the city of Tokyo decimated by earthquakes. The president of France speaking to the press, wearing a hazmat suit. A row of houses in Spain buried by a freak blizzard.

It was as if the world had been tossed in the air and all the puzzle pieces were jumbled.

A sea of blue-masked faces showed us Hong Kong under quarantine. We saw forests burning, buildings burning, and people burning. Dead birds rained from the sky in so many of the pictures, they had their own hashtag: #crispycritters.

This was the end of the planet, chronicled before us.

There were hundreds of thousands of images, but the events were so varied, the effects so utterly weird, that everything started to blur together.

What happened?
didn’t begin to cover it. It seemed like
everything
had happened, and more.

“Hey, we should check the blog,” Fang said suddenly. “I haven’t updated it since we took off in Pierpont’s jet, but it had a ton of followers…”

Nudge’s fingers were already flying across the touch screen as she nodded. “And maybe some of them are still checking in.”

AFTER FANG’S LAST post, there were a bunch of comments congratulating us on stopping the Doomsday cult, entries worrying about Angel because she had been missing, and a few standard Max-is-my-idol rants (no biggie).
Then
we got to the good stuff—the Fang-girls.

I started reading those comments aloud, of course.
“ ‘Come to Cali, the water’s warm! Love,
TeeniBikeeni
.’ ”
I wiggled my eyebrows at Fang. “
Babette99
says she’ll give you a tour of Rome if you want to experience love, Italian style.
Ciao
, Babette!”

Fang blushed a deep red. “Okay, we get it, Max. Ha-ha.”

“And look!
Brklynb8b
likes vampires—guess your name gave it away, Snaggletooth. Are those the kind of comments you always got? No wonder you used to spend so much time on this thing,” I cackled.

“All of these are from January eighth,” Gazzy said. “That would’ve been it—wouldn’t it?—the day before…”

The laugh died in my throat as we all stared at the glass screen, realizing these might be some of the last words written in the history of the world.

Total had been flopped morosely on the floor, but now he said, “They don’t really seem to do our culture justice, do they?”

But then again, what words could?

“Those aren’t all of them.” Fang pointed. “Some of the postings are more recent if you keep scrolling. Check out the time stamps here.
JumpinJoanie
wrote ‘
stay strong, bird kids. 6 jugs of water with the flock’s name on em in traverse city michigan.
’ That one’s from March.”

As Nudge scrolled down, it was clear that Fang’s blog had turned into some sort of rogue news site since the Event—whatever it was—had happened. The reports were either posted as Anonymous or under Friends of Fang, and they came from kids across the globe, sharing what had happened to them and trying to make some sense of things.

And
boy
, did things not make much sense.

Are Europeans checking this board? Since it went Dark, can someone verify if all of England incinerated, or just London? Thx for any info.

Just
London? I stared in stunned silence at those words and let out a choked breath. I don’t know what I’d expected, but I wasn’t sure I could handle this.

Anybody heard news W of Denver? Updates apprec.

Fires coming from the west as far as Mississippi R. and flooding still seeping from the east. We’re heading north to Ohio.

“From what we got on the island, I expected the flooding.” Fang looked up at me, his thick brows knitting together. “But what do you think is causing the fires? Was it from another natural disaster—more meteors or volcanoes—or something man-made? Something planned?”

I shook my head uncertainly. “Look at this one.
‘Whole fam got sick. I’m the only 1 left.’
Do you think that’s the virus my mom told us about—the bioweapon?”

Nudge clicked the link to see the responses.

Make sure you protect yourself. H-men sweeping populated areas now. Especially west coast usa.

Are H-men Erasers? My mom said they’re same as Doomsday cult, but I thought the flock got rid of those guys.

“What!”
I jumped up and jabbed my finger at the screen, disbelieving. “If I have to deal with feral robotic man-wolves along with the dissolution of civilization, I am seriously going to lose it.”

We had almost scrolled all the way down to the bottom, and we weren’t any closer to the answers. The last comment was by
PAtunnelratt
, and all it said was
We miss you guys
.

It was from four minutes ago.

“Do you see that?” I jerked forward.

“I told you!” Gazzy’s eyes lit up. “Quick, Nudge, write them back!”

FangMod:
@PAtunnelratt, it’s the flock. Are you still there?

“Ugh, this connection is so slow!” Nudge groaned as she hit Refresh over and over again.

Fang shrugged. “Well, the world
has
ended.”

Finally, it showed one reply, and we all crowded in closer to read it over Nudge’s shoulder.

PAtunnelratt:
Awww yeahhh. FLOCK 4EVER!! I knew if anybody could survive it was U guys.

FangMod:
Where are you?

PAtunnelratt:
West Penn. In the mountains. Ppl thought Dad was nutz to buy underground silo. Sometimes impulse buys work out I guess. Ha-ha.

“Ask him about Erasers,” I said.

“And Cryenas!” Gazzy added.

“Oh my God, now it’s frozen,” Nudge groaned. “This
always
happens.”

“Sorry!” Fang said dryly. “Next time I miraculously find a working computer in the middle of freaking nowhere, I’ll try to make it speedier.”

FangMod:
Tunnelratt, are there any other people in your area?

It finally went through, but Tunnelratt wasn’t responding.

“We have less than three percent battery left,” Nudge said nervously. She fired off another message.

FangMod:
Have you heard anything about Erasers?

PAtunnelratt:
No. but I heard of the Remedy.

“What is the Remedy?” Nudge typed lightning fast into the white box.

But the screen was already fading to gray as the tablet powered down.