James Patterson: Maximum Ride Forever

When you’re a claustrophobic bird kid, an underground compound really is the definition of hell. No matter what blissed-out German word you choose to name it.

Our only window to the outside world was a tiny camera that poked aboveground. We watched the screen for months as rain started to fall, and then snow. Then the temperature dropped and the ice came, and all we saw out of the lens were thick, blue-white crystals.

“Trust me,” Angel said. “Not yet.”

Not yet.

So we lived like moles, navigating tunnels in near darkness, turning pale in artificially lit rooms. Once I ended up in Dylan’s former room by mistake. Several kids had moved in there; it was big enough, and none of its belongings reminded me of Dylan. But still, I saw his face silhouetted against the silk wallpaper, imagined him sleeping on the round waterbed that now held two smaller mutants. My heart ached for him, and all he had wanted, and all he had done for me. It probably always would, and that seems fitting, somehow.

We all dreamed of the sun and breathing fresh air.

It wasn’t all bad, though. In the room I shared with Fang, I swore through a much-too-long childbirth and may have punched Fang and ripped a pillow in half, but I ended up with a wrinkled, utterly perfect nugget of joy as a souvenir.

A baby girl. With wings.

I wish I could have taken a picture of Fang holding his daughter, just to capture that expression of wonder and terror on his face. And while she learned to wail and projectile vomit and say “No” to everything I asked ( karma ), we made some pretty amazing progress in other ways.

Star used her talent for making annoying high-pitched sounds to shock the rest of the Doomsday prisoners back to their senses.

Our little seedlings grew into a thriving plant nursery, which meant never having to eat a freezer-burned Salisbury steak again. And, okay, it also meant avoiding extinction as a species.

The Morrissey brothers, Matthew and Lucas, had worked on developing the original vaccine for the H8E virus, and were able to replicate it in the lab using splices of Fang’s DNA. Jeb was right — Fang really would have a huge impact on generations to come. Because though the virus was endemic in most of the world, now everyone, mutant or man, would be protected when we returned to the surface.

And one day, after almost four years, we did exactly that.

A sliver of sun peeked through the camera lens, and the ash was finally starting to clear. And when, after days of staring at a clear blue sky, Angel finally nodded yes , there was no better feeling than leaving behind our earthworm existence to emerge, blinking, into the light, and become birds again.

Even if the world wasn’t exactly as we’d left it.

Though the sun was shining again, the Russian wilderness was still completely encased in ice. The trees in the surrounding forest looked more like stooped snow people, and the cold was bone-breaking. We could not survive there.

For months more, we all made plans. Everyone who could fly had the best chance of getting far enough south. Others carefully gathered provisions so they could attempt overland journeys — we still had hopes that more people had survived.

Finally the day came when the original six of our flock, plus Fang’s and my daughter, and Total, of course, and fifteen other bird kids left the home that had kept us alive through the devastation that people came to call Earth 2.

As we flew south, we found that ash and ice had buried cities and hidden landmarks. It was hard to tell where we were, but we knew the blue-white shimmer stretched over a whole lot of the planet.

Until it gave way to just ash.

The sky was clear, but the earth’s surface was now gray. And when we flew near the impact site of the biggest crater, the drifting ash had formed dunelike waves that were a hundred, sometimes two hundred feet high.

I don’t know how to even explain how massive this meteor was.

It left a crater so wide that we could barely see across it. When we stood at its edge, we were looking into a hole that went down for almost a mile.

It was the literal expression of “awesome”—every one of us was struck speechless with shock, wonder, and reverence at the extreme power of nature.

Finally, Total managed to articulate what all of us were feeling.

“How is it remotely possible that we survived this?” he asked, and we all chuckled, breaking the tension.

“The human spirit,” Angel said with a good-natured shrug. “Turns out it’s actually pretty tough to kill.”

“And the canine spirit,” Total said quickly, and we all agreed.

“Mama, what are we going to do now?” my daughter asked, ever curious.

I squeezed her hand and smiled.

“We’re going to begin again.”

We’re living in the Southern Hemisphere now, somewhere in what used to be Peru. The rain forest shriveled up along with everything else, so I’ll have to wait awhile to build another tree house, but plants are starting to grow back, bit by bit. I come out to this hillside every afternoon and sit cross-legged among the Incan ruins, where the boulders are still standing, even after the end of the world. I take my feather pen — an old memento — and I write with ink made from ash and stone.

I try to record the past.

Right now, I exhale and lean back against a five-hundred-year-old stone wall, relishing the feel of the sun on my face again. I study this page, and the many pages before it, and wonder if someone will read these words in another five hundred years.

I trace the silky black feather pen across my skin, down my cheek, and close my eyes, remembering.

Fang follows my gaze across the rocky slope to watch our girl playing with her flock family, and his face softens. It seems crazy that she’s already almost five now — almost as old as Angel was when she was first kidnapped by Erasers, what seems like several lifetimes ago.

The whole flock is helping to raise her, with Total insisting on French lessons and Nudge making sure she doesn’t look like a cave girl (even though we pretty much live in caves). But it’s only Fang who spends as much time with her as I do, Fang who patiently teaches the fascinating facts his photographic brain remembers from all those fat books I shunned in school. Fang, because he’s her father.

“Watch!” she yells when she sees us looking her way. “Mama, watch me!” Her light brown eyes widen as she tears down the hill on long, gangly legs.

It’s always surprising to see those eyes looking back at me. They narrow at the first sign of danger, and confidently hold my gaze when she knows she’s right. When I tell her “No,” they are defiant, and when I cuddle her, they melt like honey. They take in everything, all the time.

They’re my eyes.

She looks like Fang in almost every other way. When she takes off after Star’s blur of speed, her wings trail behind her, the same color as her silky hair — a deep blue-black. Just before she crashes into Harry, he flings her a few dozen feet up in the air. Kate and Harry toss her between them, back and forth, and her wing muscles slide along her back and make her wings flutter. They’re still growing, but her primary feathers are all in now, and strong.

When she lands, her mouth twists into a familiar lopsided smirk, asking the same question it always does: Is it time yet, Mama?

I turn to the love of my life. My first love, and my last love. The love I accepted a dear friend’s sacrifice for. “Do you think...?”

Fang nods before I finish the question.

“You don’t think we’re rushing it?”

“It’s time.” He grins good-naturedly. “Like I’ve been saying for a week.”