James Patterson - Maximum Ride - The Angel Experiment

Ordinarily, I would have been on my feet by now, pushing Angel and the others in back of me, an angry snarl on my face.

However, tonight I was crumpled in a humiliated, whimpering ball, holding my head, eyes squeezed shut, trying not to sob like a complete weenie.

“What are you talking about?” Fang asked, an edge of steel in his voice.

“My system crashed. I’ve tracked the interference, and it’s comin‘ from you. So I’m tellin’ you to knock it off-or else!”

I drew in a deep, shuddering breath, totally mortified that a stranger was seeing me like this.

“And what’s wrong with her ? She trippin‘?”

“She’s fine,” Fang snapped. “We don’t know anything about your computer. If you’re not brain-dead, you’ll get out of here.” No one sounds colder or meaner than Fang when he wants to.

The other guy said flatly, “I’m not going nowhere till you quit messing with my Mac. Why don’t you get your girlfriend to a hospital?”

Girlfriend? Oh, God, was I going to catch it later about that. It was enough to make me lever up on one arm, then pull myself to a sitting position.

“Who the hell are you?” I snarled, the effect totally ruined by the weak, weepy sound of my voice. Blinking rapidly, finding even the dim tunnel light painful, I struggled to focus on the intruder.

I got a hazy impression of someone about my age; a ragged-looking kid wearing old army fatigues. He had a dingy PowerBook attached to straps around his shoulders like a xylophone or something.

“None of your beeswax!” he shot back. “Just quit screwing up my motherboard.”

I was still clammy and nauseated, still had a shocking headache and felt trembly, but I thought I could string a complete sentence together. “What are you talking about?”

“This!” The kid turned his Mac toward us, and when I saw the screen I actually gasped.

It was a mishmash of flashing images, drawings, maps, streams of code, silent film clips of people talking.

It was exactly the stuff that had flooded my brain during my attack.

My eyes flicked to the kid’s grimy face. “Who are you?” I demanded again, still sounding shaky.

“I’m the guy who’s gonna kick your butt if you don’t quit messing with my system,” the kid said angrily.

In the next moment, his computer screen cleared totally, turning the same dull green as his fatigues. Then large red words scrolled down: Hello, Max.

Fang’s head whipped around to stare at me, and I focused helplessly on his wide, dark eyes. Then, as if connected, our heads turned to stare again at the computer. Onscreen, it said, Welcome to New York.

Inside my head, a voice said, I knew you’d come. I’ve got big plans for you.

“Can you hear that?” I whispered. “Did you hear it?”

“Hear what?” Fang asked.

“That voice?” I said. My head ached, but the pain was better, and it looked as if I might avoid barfing. I rubbed my temples again, my gaze fixed on the kid’s Mac.

“What’s the deal?” the kid asked, sounding a lot less belligerent and much more weirded out. “Who’s Max? How are you doing this?”

“We’re not doing anything,” Fang said.

A new pain crashed into my brain, and once again the computer screen started flashing disconnected images, gibberish, plans, drawings, all chaotic and garbled.

Peering at the screen, wincing and still rubbing my temples, I spotted four words: Institute for Higher Living.

I looked at Fang, and he gave the slightest nod: He’d seen them too.

Then the screen went blank once more.

The kid quickly started typing in commands, muttering, “I’m gonna track this down…”

Fang and I watched, but a couple minutes later the geek stopped, flicking his computer in frustration. He looked at us with narrowed eyes, taking in everything: the drying blood on my chin, the other kids sleeping near us.

“I don’t know how you’re doing it,” he said, sounding resigned and irritated. “Where’s your gear?”

“We don’t have any gear,” Fang said. “Spooky, isn’t it?”

“You guys on the run? You in trouble?”

Jeb had drilled it into us that we shouldn’t ever trust anyone. (We now knew that included him.) The geek was starting to make me extremely nervous.

“Why would you think that?” Fang asked calmly.

The kid rolled his eyes. “Let me see. Maybe because you’re a bunch of kids sleepin‘ in a subway tunnel. Kind of clues me in, you know?”

Okay, he had a point.

“What about you?” I asked. “You’re a kid sleeping in a subway tunnel. Don’t you have school?”

The kid coughed out a laugh. “MIT kicked me out.”

MIT was a university for brainiacs-I’d heard of it. This kid wasn’t old enough.

“Uh-huh.” I made myself sound incredibly bored.

“No, really,” he said, sounding almost sheepish. “I got early admission. Was gonna major in computer technology. But I spun out, and they told me to take a hike.”

“What do you mean, spun out?” asked Fang.

He shrugged. “Wouldn’t take my Thorazine. They said, no Thorazine, no school.”

Okay, I’d been around wack-job scientists enough to pick up on some stuff. Like the fact that Thorazine is what they give schizophrenics.

“So you didn’t like Thorazine,” I said.

“No.” His face turned hard. “Or Haldol, or Melleril, or Zyprexa. They all suck. People just want me to be quiet, do what I’m told, don’t make trouble.”

It was weird-he reminded me a little bit of us: He’d chosen to live a hard, dirty life, being free, instead of a taken-care-of life where he was like a prisoner.

Course, we weren’t schizo. On second thought, I had a voice talking inside my head. Better not make any snap judgments.

“So what’s up with your computer, man?” Fang asked.

The kid shrugged again. “It’s my bread and butter. I can hack into anything. Sometimes people pay me. I do jobs when I need money.” All of a sudden his mouth snapped shut. “Why? Who wants to know?”

“Chill out, dude,” Fang said, frowning. “We’re just having a chat.”

But the kid had started to back away, looking angry. “Who sent you?” he asked, his voice rising. “Who are you? You just leave me alone! You just stay away!”

Fang raised his hands in a “calm down” gesture, but the kid had turned and run. In about fifteen seconds we could no longer hear his sneakers on the ground.

“It’s always refreshing to meet someone crazier than us,” I said. “We seem so normal afterward.”

“ We ?” Fang said.

“Wha’s up?” Iggy asked sleepily, pulling himself upright.

I sighed but forced myself to tell Iggy about the kid’s computer, the Voice in my head, the images that flashed through me during one of my attacks. I tried to sound nonchalant, so he wouldn’t know I was quaking in my boots.

“Maybe I’m going crazy,” I said lightly. “But it will lead me to greatness. Like Joan of Arc.”

“But controlling other people’s computers?” Iggy said skeptically.

“I don’t see how,” I said. “But since I have no clue about who or what could possibly be causing it, I guess I can’t rule anything out.”

“Hmm. Do we think it’s connected to the School or the Institute?” Fang asked.

“Well, either that or I was born this way,” I said sarcastically. “On the off chance I wasn’t, let’s really, really try to find the Institute tomorrow. At least now we know what name to look for.”