James Patterson - Maximum Ride Forever

The name was like a bucket of ice water to the face, and I jerked my head around toward the front of the hall.

As I gripped the bars of our cage and gaped at the small man pacing the platform, the pain and devastation I’d felt in Africa and then New York flooded my heart, and for a second, I couldn’t breathe. This was the man who’d destroyed the world, the man who’d killed billions of people.

This was the man I’d been hunting.

As the mastermind of world devastation, he wasn’t much to look at. He wore a wrinkled suit and had a scraggly brown beard. His voice in the microphone was shaky and high-pitched, his manner feverish. He was short, balding, and giving some sort of lecture on Napoleon. Images flashed on a huge screen behind him.

“So you’re the piece of scum known as the Remedy!” I shouted. “You look more like the Problem!”

The man on the stage stopped pacing, startled to hear sounds coming from his zombified audience.

“Napoleon fanatic — go figure. I gotta be honest, I thought you’d be taller.”

The Remedy reached up to smooth his thinning hair and walked down the stairs, stopping far short of our cage.

“It can talk,” he observed, more to his pupils than to me. “I thought they’d bred that out by now. This mutant is definitely out of date and toward the end of its life span.”

The kids in the bleachers chorused their approval, gawking at us like we were zoo animals, and I stood fuming in front of Harry, who probably didn’t even know he should be offended right now.

“ It can even form full sentences,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “And it is Maximum Ride, in case you want to memorize the name of the mutant who’s going to destroy you.”

The Remedy crossed his arms over his chest. It was supposed to look threatening, no doubt, but the way his shoulders hunched forward and his head ducked down made him look uncomfortable. Scared, even.

“Considering where you’re standing and where I’m standing, I think you might not get that chance, Maxine.”

He had actually inched back another foot.

“It’s Max imum ,” I sneered. “And keeping the dangerous animals locked up is kind of cheating, isn’t it?”

The coward turned away, climbing back onto the stage to continue his lecture. He clicked open a slide titled “World Domination in a Historical Context.”

Context? Context? I have some context for him, all right.

“Did you tie up my family before you killed them?” I yelled after him, my voice shaking with fury. “When you silenced Nudge underwater, did you think she couldn’t talk, either? When you blew up Gazzy, did you have to look at his nine-year-old body parts? Or was that too much ‘context’ for you?”

“Napoleon’s downfall was ego,” he continued doggedly.

“What about your ego? Did you think you wouldn’t have to pay?” I shouted more loudly, rattling the cage. “Did you think I’d let you get away with it?”

“You might not get that chance.” His words echoed in my head, snagging on the last one: “Maxine.” Was it just a taunt, meant to infuriate me?

Or did he really not know me?

Something wasn’t adding up.

The giant had known me, and he’d said the Remedy had sent him. And the girl in the chat room, ImMargaretA, had claimed the Remedy was specifically hunting the flock. But even if they were both liars, something seemed off about this guy.

I quieted down and watched him carefully — his expressive face and breathless cadence, the way his eyes bulged with urgency.

“It was Goebbels, with his understanding that nothing human could be sacred, and the Hulk, with his appetite for complete and total destruction, who laid the foundation for our current revolution...”

Even I, with my sketchy grasp of history, could tell he was making no sense, but it didn’t matter. He rambled in circles until he had them eating up every word. He was a storyteller, for sure.

But a killer? A megalomaniac bent on world domination?

Uh-uh. This guy was a joke .

“It’s not him,” I whispered.

“Max Mum?” Harry said, looking at me.

“These kids all believe him, but I don’t. He’s not the Remedy.”

So why was he pretending to be?

Probably to save his own skin. If what I’d heard was true, the Remedy wanted to wipe the planet completely clean, sparing no survivors. No one was safe... except the Remedy himself.

So this guy had conned some cleanup crews, convinced them he was their revered leader. It probably hadn’t been too hard. Doomsday was a cult, after all, made up of vulnerable kids easily duped by smooth talkers.

And the man could talk , I’d give him that. He was so desperate to sell his story, it almost made me feel sorry for him.

Almost.

After all, he was still pretending to be the deadliest, most despicable man in the history of the world. And he’d put me in a freaking cage.

“He’s not the Remedy!” I yelled. “This man is lying!”

Finally some of the Doomsday kids heard me. I saw heads turning, heard whispers spreading.

“I’m sure some people in this room would beg to differ,” the impostor said, flashing a nervous smile at his dead-eyed groupies. “As well as some not-so-fortunate people outside of it.”

“Okay, Mr. Remedial, so how’d you do it, then?” I demanded. “Who developed the virus? Who are the Horsemen?”

“There are unsung heroes in every revolution,” he answered vaguely, his voice going up an octave. “Loyal soldiers who are tasked with doing the hard work.”

“Like the burned kids in this room, whose families you freaking bombed ?”

“We all have to make sacrifices for the greater good...” His eyes flicked around the room at his disciples.

“One Light,” a few voices murmured, and I scoffed.

“Where’d you get the bombs?”

“I—” His face twitched.

“And how come you’re here babbling about history to a group of kids instead of, you know, ruling the world? Let me guess — you’re a failed actor, right? Or maybe one of those carnival guys — the grifters who are always trying to cheat people out of the big stuffed animals? Whatever you are, you’re just a Remedy fanboy ,” I spat. “And that’s almost as disgusting as being the mass murderer himself.”

Fear flashed behind those eyes. Desperation. The man raced back down the steps and leaned close to my cage this time — almost within reach.

“Do you know why you’re here?” he hissed, just loud enough for me to hear. “Because if I make sure my students have someone to sacrifice to their ‘One Light’ every so often, they think I’m legit.”

Pink splotches appeared near his temples, and he was trembling, but his eyes were victorious. “Let me condense it for you, bird girl: As long as you die, I get to live.”

“Faker!” I shouted, swiping at his smug face. “Liar!”

I grabbed a fistful of tweed fabric through the bars of the cage, but he shrugged off the jacket, pivoting out of my grasp. He stumbled away from me with wide, terrified eyes.

“Kill them!” he yelled into the microphone. “Kill the mutants!”

Their feet sounded like thunder. Hundreds of kids streamed down from the stands, tripping over one another in their eagerness. They were smiling giddily and chanting, “ One Light! One Light! ”

But dark intentions flashed behind those grins.

Professor Phony wasn’t a legitimate dictator, but his followers were the real thing. They were Doomsday kids who idolized the Remedy and had done his dirty work picking off survivors.