James Patterson - Two Schools Out - Forever

Yo. I thought Gazzy and Iggy were repulsive eaters. I made a mental note to not ever let them get this close to starving. Those two kids fell on the hot dogs and virtually shoved them whole into their mouths. It made me think of a TV special I'd seen that showed hyenas ripping apart their prey.

I put two slices of bread in front of them, then two more, then two more, then two more hot dogs. They all disappeared in instants. After that I gave them candy bars, and their eyes widened as if I'd just handed them-uh... candy bars when they were starving. Finally their chewing slowed. Now they seemed to savor every bite. Fang passed them a canteen of water. They drained it.

They crawled closer to the fire and sat in front of it, looking sleepy and unafraid, as if it would be fine if we killed them now, because they weren't hungry anymore.

"So-what's your story?" I asked, wanting some answers before they nodded off.

"We got kidnapped," said the girl, her dark eyes reflecting the flames.

Well, okay, I hadn't seen that coming. "Kidnapped?"

The boy nodded tiredly. "In south Jersey. From two different places-we're not related."

"We just ended up in the same place," said the girl, yawning.

"And where was that?" I asked.

"Here," said the boy. "We escaped a couple times. Even made it to the police station."

"But both times our kidnappers were already there, like, filing missing-kid notices. They just found us again, real easy." The girl sighed heavily and lay down on the ground, curling into a bony clump. We weren't going to get any good answers out of them tonight.

"So, who were your kidnappers?" Fang tried.

"They were, like, doctors," the boy said sleepily, lying down too. "In white coats."

He closed his eyes, and within seconds both he and the girl were asleep.

Which left the rest of us wide-awake, frozen in terror, staring at them as if they carried the plague.

Fang took the first watch, so I hunkered down close to the fire and tried to relax. Which was about as likely as Florida freezing over. Angel snuggled up to me on one side, and Total curled up next to her.

"So, what are you picking up from them?" I whispered to her, rubbing her back.

"Weird images," she whispered back. "Not like regular kids, like the ones at school. Like, flashes of grown-ups and darkness and water."

"Which I guess makes sense if they were kidnapped and experimented on by whitecoats," I said softly. I raised myself up on one elbow and caught Fang's eye. Using sign language, I reminded him to keep an eye on the strange kids. He used sign language to say "No freaking duh." I shot him the bird. He grinned.

"Do you think they're mutants?" I asked Angel, lying down again. "They look pretty human."

She shrugged, frowning. "They're not Erasers. But they're not like regular kids either. I don't know, Max."

"Okay." Maybe we would figure it out tomorrow. "Try to get some sleep. Total's already snoring."

Angel smiled happily and pulled him closer to her. She just loved that dog so much.

I had third watch, from 4:00 to 7:00 a.m. or whenever everyone else woke up. I never minded night watches. All of our sleep patterns were permanently screwed, so it wasn't like I needed my forty minutes of REM all together. I woke instantly as soon as Iggy touched my arm. And why was the blind guy on watch, you might ask? Because a cockroach couldn't come within fifty feet of us without his knowing it. Iggy on watch meant I could relax, or at least relax as much as I ever did. Which, okay, is not that much.

At five I put more wood on our small fire. The slight smoke seemed to be keeping mosquitoes at bay-I had expected them in Florida, even in November. I left the firelight and walked the perimeter in the darkness of the woods. Everything was cool.

At daybreak I was sitting against a pine tree, which seemed even more popular here than in the mountains of Colorado. I was watching and being. The thing about watch is, it isn't the time to work through problems or write sappy poetry. As soon as you do, you're not paying attention to your surroundings. You basically have to sit and just be, be totally alert to everything around you. It's really kind of Zen, man.

Anyway. I was leaning back, being all Zen, when I saw one of the strange kids stir and sit up. Instantly I closed my eyes to the barest slits and let my breathing become deeper and more even, as if I were sleeping. Tricky Max, that's me.

The girl sat up and looked around at all of us: the Gasman sprawled out, one arm thrown across his backpack, Fang lying neatly on his side, Nudge and Angel curled up around Total, so that they made a heart shape around him.

Ever so quietly, the girl shook the boy's shoulder, and he woke up, startling out of sleep, already tense and on guard, the way kids are when waking up often = bad news. He glanced around also. I looked so asleep I almost was asleep. But I saw the two of them slip off into the woods so silently that not even Iggy twitched.

I waited several moments, as they made sure they weren't being followed, and then, just as soundlessly as they, I got up and began tracking them.

I moved stealthily from tree to tree, and though they glanced back a couple times, they didn't see me. About three hundred yards from camp, they crouched down. The girl took something from the dirty pocket of her ragged jeans. It looked like a pen-except she started speaking into it. A transmitter.

It took only a second for me to reach them with huge, bounding leaps. They stared up at me, stunned and afraid. I crashed down and knocked the pen from the girl's hand. Then I grabbed her shirt and hauled her to her feet.

"Ordering a pizza?" I snarled.

It's funny how different people are. If I'd been this kid and someone was snarling "Ordering a pizza?" at me, without even thinking, I would have snarled back, "Yeah. You want pepperoni?"

But not her. She stared up at me in horror and then immediately burst into great heaving sobs, her hands over her face. Next to her, the boy dropped to his knees and also started crying, without even trying to hide it.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" the girl gasped out, and I lowered her to the ground by her shirt.

Crossing my arms over my chest, I scowled down at her. "Sorry for what? Be specific."

The girl pointed to the transmitter blinking on the ground. "I didn't want to!" she sobbed. "They made us! They made us do it!"

I picked up the transmitter and threw it out into the swampy area. It landed with a small splash and sank out of sight. "Who made you?" I demanded, knowing that the clock was now ticking.

For several moments the kids only sobbed. I nudged the girl with the toe of one sneaker. "Out with it!" I said. Yeah, I know: bully Max. It wasn't that I didn't feel sorry for these kids. I did. It was just that I valued our lives more than theirs. I know some people would be all, Oh, every life is precious, everyone is equally valuable. And maybe that's true, in Pixieland. But this was the real world, my flock and I were prey, and these kids had ratted us out. That was the bottom line, and in my life, you'd be surprised how often the bottom line is the only one that matters.

"They did," the girl said, still crying. By this time the noise had woken the others, and they were making their way through the trees to us.

I knelt down to the girl's level and took hold of one wrist. "Tell. Me. Who." I squeezed her wrist slightly, and her eyes widened.

"They did," she repeated, starting to hiccup. "The guys who-the people who kidnapped us. They've had us for months. They took me in August."

"Me too," said the boy, raising his face. Tears had made streaks through the dirt on his cheeks, and he looked stripy, like a zebra. "Those guys-sent us to find you. They didn't feed us for two days, so we'd try hard. And we did. And you gave us food." He started crying again.