James Patterson - Maximum Ride Forever

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.

Fang had no idea where to start.

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 why s.

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.

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.

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.”