Hawk

by James Patterson

  CHAPTER 51

  Hawk

  “They’re deeper in,” Clete whispered. Sweat had broken out on his forehead, and I could smell the fear radiating off him. Behind him in this air duct, Nudge and Gazzy must have been thinking I was crazy. Or stupid.

  I could barely see around Clete’s bulk, but I caught Nudge’s eye and made motions to say I was going farther in. Her eyebrow raised, and I quickly turned and started crawling as fast as I could down the duct. Each room in this place had at least one air vent, and I looked through every single one as I went past. I heard Clete crawling after me—what choice did he have?

  Finally I stopped for a second. “There are no people anywhere,” I said softly. “Where are the doctors or the guards?”

  Clete said, “They must be at the prison. Helping or something.”

  “Then where are the rest of the gang?” It was the middle of the freaking night and I was almost weeping with exhaustion and frustration. Then I remembered that I was Hawk, goddamnit! I straightened my back and swallowed my tears. Setting my chin, I made a decision. “Let’s go to the end of this duct. If we don’t see them by then, we’ll turn around.”

  “Without them?”

  I didn’t meet his eyes. “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Max

  I’d let myself believe that I’d find a way out of the prison, maybe through a break in the metal bars or something. I’d pictured myself running, taking off, finally free after—who knew how many years?

  You’ve gotten stupid, Max, I told myself. You let yourself have hope. Hope… sometimes it was just as dangerous as dope.

  Already guards were running at me, tasers ready, guns raised.

  With nothing to lose I jumped high in the air, whipped my wings out, and pushed down hard. Beneath me, the rabble seemed suddenly quieter. The metal cage over the prison wasn’t too far up, maybe forty feet, and I reached it in about a second. I landed, grabbing the grid of thick metal bars, bracing my feet against them.

  I was trapped, stuck, going nowhere. And still, even knowing all that, it felt damn good to fly. I stretched my wings out, enjoying the freedom.

  McCallum appeared on the vidscreens in the courtyard. “Shoot her!” he screamed. “Don’t hit her wings!”

  Bullets began whizzing past me and I pulled my wings in. With a grim smile, I wrapped the end sections around me, a cool, feathery shield they didn’t dare damage. McCallum himself gave me the best safety net I could ask for—he wanted my wings unharmed? Great! That made these things better than a bulletproof vest.

  No more bullets came at me, though below I heard shouting and feet running. It sounded like the big prison riot was pretty much over; watching me get shot off the cage was better entertainment.

  One thing about feathers—you can’t see through ’em. Very slowly I edged them away from my face and immediately a bullet came so close to me that it singed some of my hair. Shit.

  “You’re trapped!” McCallum yelled from his vidscreen. “You might as well come down! We’d rather take your wings off you alive than dead—but either is fine with me!”

  That asshole.

  What to do… what to do… Peeping out again, I saw the skinny sad-sack doctor shouting orders to the guards, staring up at me with fury. I bet he wished he hadn’t helped me, before. He probably wished he’d just let me bleed out from the shiv in my side. He’d said he was just an old Ope, but I bet his version of flying wasn’t half as good as mine.

  Hey, here’s a thought…

  With no warning, I dropped off the ceiling cage, plummeting toward the ground. Prisoners started applauding—they probably thought I was going to kill myself. You are shit out of luck, guys, I thought, letting my wings stream out behind me. Right as I was about to splat against the stained concrete, I grabbed the doctor and whooshed upward! People gasped as I reached the ceiling bars almost instantly, holding the doctor with one arm around his skinny middle.

  “What are you doing?” His voice sounded tense and squeaky—guess he wasn’t used to looking down from forty feet up.

  “Max.” McCallum’s voice now sounded calm and patient. “Max, come back down with the good doctor. Even with him, you’re still trapped. Really, what can you do?” He was all reason and logic.

  Blinding strobe lights spattered against me, holding me in sharp focus against the bars. Guards were raising long ladders against the walls. What was their plan? Were they going to climb the cage to get me? Or maybe they were angling for a better shot?

  “You can’t win this, you know,” the doctor said. He was trembling and his voice was weak. His hands gripped the arm holding him, as if afraid I’d let him go. To be honest, I had totally considered it. I mean, I could hold him for hours. But not forever.

  “I don’t need to win, hack,” I said. “I only need to come out even.”

  With that I let go of the bars and swept downward, zigzagging to avoid the bullets ripping through the air around me. The doctor squealed and then suddenly screamed. I reached the bars way on the other end of the courtyard and held on.

  “I’m hit!” the doctor yelled, trying to hold his leg where he could see it, assess his own damage. “I got shot!”

  “Gosh, I bet that hurts, huh?” I asked. “Whoa, you’re dripping blood on everyone below you!”

  “Eff you, you goddamn freak!” the doctor shouted, squirming in my hold.

  “Hold still!” I said. “Unless you want me to drop you right now!”

  The doctor stopped, his body rigid with pain.

  “I’ve been shot before. It hurts like a mother,” I said sympathetically. “Almost as bad as getting a shiv in the side and having some hack staple it shut.”

  More bullets hissed through the air around us. The doctor looked down and screamed, “Quit shooting, you idiots! I’ve already caught one bullet!”

  A slight sound made me look to my right. Hm. I squinted against the bright lights to see that guards were climbing up the outside of the cage. It would be super hard for a person to climb up the inside of the cage, but much easier to climb up the outside. In a few minutes I’d have bullets coming at me from front and back.

  Looks like it was a bad plan, after all.

  CHAPTER 53

  Hawk

  Clete was horrified by me saying I’d leave without the gang. But—I knew the Flock was anxious to leave, to go get this Max. And I could hardly ask them to crawl around in air ducts when the kids could be anywhere. They wanted to save my mother… my supposed mother. What a laugh. Well, I didn’t need them anyway.

  I kept crawling down the duct, which was mostly pitch-black except for the air vents from each room, shining a bit of light. There weren’t too many left before I’d have to stop, tell Clete I was abandoning most of our family.

  “I need to get out of here,” Clete whispered from in back of me. “I can’t breathe.”

  There were three more striped rectangles of light ahead of me. We’d be turning around soon. Suddenly I felt a whoosh, and air started flowing strongly past us. The next few feet showed me why—there was a giant fan on my right, so powerful that I couldn’t help leaning toward it as I crawled past.

  “Careful,” I told Clete, who was gulping mouthfuls of fresh air.

  I crawled past a vent, scouring the room for any sign of the kids. Nothing. The closer I got to the end of this duct, the more a sense of dread wrapped its clammy cloak around me. We might not ever find them. I’d blown off any feelings I had about losing them, but now those feelings seemed bigger than me, bigger than Clete, bigger than this whole building.

  We might not ever find them. They might be gone forever.

  “No, no, no, no!” I froze as the piercing scream echoed through the duct, filling my ears.

  “That’s Calypso!” I told Clete and scrambled toward the sound.

  They were in the second-to-last room. I’d been moments away from leaving them behind.

  Peering through the vent, I saw that Calypso was strapped down to a
hospital bed, like a troublesome prisoner. Which I guess she was.

  “Argh!” The animal-like roar came from Moke. Looking through the vent at an angle, I saw that Moke had grabbed the thick bars on the one window and was shaking them, trying to break them or pull them out. When he couldn’t, he just kept yanking on them and shouting.

  And Rain? I had to lie flat on my stomach to see her. She was curled up in a ball beneath Calypso’s hospital bed, so still I couldn’t tell if she was alive. Calypso screamed again, Moke roared again, and I waited wide-eyed for guards or doctors to come running. But they didn’t.

  “They’ve gone crazy,” Clete said, not bothering to lower his voice. “And I think Rain’s dead.”

  Those were the exact same thoughts I was having, but I didn’t want to admit it, not even to Clete.

  “We have to try,” I said, and started kicking at the air vent. It was screwed in from the room side and there was no way for me to get it out neatly.

  “I’ll do that,” Clete said, and I gave way. It would take his mind off his fear.

  At the sound of the first kick, Calypso turned to look, her face red and wet with tears. The only thing she could move was her head, and no doubt she was seeing dust falling and plaster chipping.

  “Rats!” she said. “There’s rats in here!”

  “Rats?” said Moke and let go of the window bars. Coming closer to the wall, he peered upward.

  “Moke!” I called over the sound of Clete kicking. “It’s us, we’re here!”

  There was a noise of breaking plaster and creaking metal, and the vent fell out into the room, leaving a space about two-thirds of a meter wide and a third of a meter tall.

  I put my head out, checking what I was about to jump into. “Moke! We’ve been looking all over for you guys!”

  I couldn’t wait for them to meet the Flock, see the expressions on the gang’s faces when they saw adults like me, with wings.

  “Can you get Calypso free?” I asked, pulling my head in and sticking my feet out.

  I lowered myself carefully, glad the ceilings weren’t higher. With one last little jump, I was in the room and trying to hug Moke.

  He pulled back and looked at me blankly. “Who are you?” he said. “What’s wrong with your face?”

  I couldn’t believe he was joking around. I rushed to Calypso’s bed and started undoing the straps around her arms. “Hey, sweetie,” I said gently. The pupils in her blue eyes were so wide I could hardly see the color of her irises. I checked her neck, beneath her wild red hair. It was there, the tiny, blinking green sensor.

  Like Moke, she looked at me with zero recognition. “There, one hand free,” I said, and no sooner was it free than it shot out and grabbed my shirt.

  “Got any dope?” Calypso asked, her voice ragged and raw.

  CHAPTER 54

  I unhooked Calypso’s fingers from my shirt.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said miserably. “Up in that duct. You just need to climb up there to get it.” I managed to free her other hand and she clapped them together to get feeling back, then rubbed her wrists where the skin was broken.

  Clete was staring at her, and now we met eyes. I shrugged a tiny bit, like, what am I gonna do?

  He gave a small nod, then explained to Calypso that he would help lift her into the vent, where friends of ours were waiting.

  “Friends with dope,” Calypso said, smacking her lips hungrily.

  “Yeah, okay,” Clete said, sounding as miserable as I felt.

  Up in the duct, Nudge was looking down, her face both worried and I guess understanding? She knew my back was against the wall here, and she also knew that having our rescuees out of their minds was a… complication. So I didn’t even want to mention that they were all chipped. That would come later.

  “Moke?” I said, standing in front of him. “Time to go, bud.” I pointed to the vent that Calypso was being lifted into.

  Moke swallowed and looked around as if I hadn’t spoken. His large fists were clenching. “I need…” he began.

  He needed to get his ass up in that vent now, I thought.

  Again he looked right through me. “I need—”

  Clete touched his shoulder. “Come on, man. We gotta go. Soldiers comin’.”

  Moke said nothing, so Clete and I pushed and pulled him over to the wall, on totally high alert because a punch from Moke would really hurt.

  I left Clete to deal with Moke and went back to Calypso’s bed, where Rain was curled up. I watched for a second—she wasn’t breathing. Goddamnit. We were too late. I was torn. No way did I want to leave her body behind to be experimented on, but could we carry her as well as wrangle Moke and Calypso?

  Gently I touched her back. It stiffened. It stiffened? She was alive!

  “Rain?” I whispered. “Rain, sweetie? Time to go.”

  Slowly, stiffly Rain turned her face in my direction. “Need dope,” she mumbled.

  I started to offer her the imaginary dope in the air vent, but my breath was snatched from my lungs. Rain… I stared at her, wanting to throw up. They’d already started their experiments on her: her eyes were gone. They’d taken her beautiful hazel eyes. Her eyelids were shut, the lids collapsed into empty sockets. Holy mother.

  “Need dope,” Rain said again, reaching a hand out to me. I took it.

  “Okay,” I said, hearing my voice quaver. “I need you to come with me, okay?”

  Docilely Rain uncurled, her lithe body now weak from lack of food. She tried to stand up, banged her head on Calypso’s bed. She hadn’t known she was under it.

  “Come on,” I said again, guiding her out from beneath the bed. Suddenly my ears pricked—was I hearing boot steps? Feeling their vibrations? “Come on!”

  She let me take her hand, though she obviously had no idea who I was. I led her over to the wall and helped her climb up on the table. Nudge looked out and reached down, pausing when she saw Rain’s empty eye sockets. Between the two of us we got her up into the duct, then I jumped up.

  The boot steps were definitely louder now, and too late I realized that we had left a huge, broken hole where the vent had been—it would take even the dumbest guard about a second to see how their prisoners had escaped.

  “Go, go!” Nudge whispered, pushing me after Rain.

  I told Rain to crawl and she did, sometimes tentatively feeling the duct with her hands. Behind me I heard the door open, heard guards shout, then there was a small pop! and a fizzing sound.

  Nudge began crawling rapidly after me, saying, “Go! Hurry!”

  I barely heard the two guards drop to the floor as I raced with Rain and Nudge down the maze of air vents that would take us back to safety.

  Safety. My ass.

  CHAPTER 55

  Max

  Pretending to drop the doctor and hearing him squeal like a scared little pig had been fun, the first half dozen times. Now I was bored. What we had here was a classic standoff: They yelled, Come down and don’t drop the doctor! And I yelled, Screw you! We’d gone back and forth like this for a good half hour. Every once in a while they tried to shoot me, and I let the doctor scream at them for that; each bullet that came near me barely missed him as well.

  As to the busy beavers who’d climbed up the outside of the cage, well. I’m just faster than them. AND I CAN GODDAMN FLY, YOU MORONS!!!!! When one got too close, I let go of the bars (making the doctor scream) and shot over to one and kicked their ladder out. One by one they’d swung backward at the top of a very tall ladder, their faces outraged, surprised, and terrified, right before they hit the ground.

  Now, all was quiet. The prisoners below weren’t even interested anymore, since the violence was only sporadic and nobody had actually died yet. The doctor was starting to feel a bit heavy. He was a decent human shield as long as he didn’t wiggle, but something had to change, and it didn’t exactly help that I didn’t care a whole lot if he did get shot. There was a time in my life when I could have kept this up forever, but I’d been in prison a lon
g time, and I couldn’t stay up here all night. God, it felt like this had been going on forever. When had it all started? Had it been only… it must be way after midnight. So it was just yesterday that they had grabbed me, held that mock trial, tried to operate on me.

  What’s your next step, Max? I asked myself. Your next big plan?

  CHAPTER 56

  Hawk

  Okay, Hawk, what are you gonna do? I asked myself. We’d gotten the three lab rats out of the ducts and were now moving through the underground tunnels again.

  We had a few issues:

  1. All three lab rats were raving, out of their minds, and desperate for dope.

  2. Sure, we were in the tunnels, but where were we going? Not back to the Children’s Home, that was for sure, but where?

  3. Fang was desperate to leave us. Well, he was good at that, wasn’t he?

  4. I needed a place that would be safe for the kids, where they couldn’t get into trouble, where Moke, Rain, and Calypso could make noise while they were coming down off their dope. I didn’t know any place like that. The top of the unfinished building was safe in a way, but I knew one of my gang would end up walking off the roof by accident. And they couldn’t fly.

  5. The longer we stayed in these tunnels, the more likely it was we’d run into trouble.

  I counted these off on my fingers, my spirits sinking with every step. Finally, I edged past Iggy to talk to Nudge. Very quietly, I admitted that this was as far as my plan had gotten me. I didn’t know what to do now.

  I felt like a total failure, and I hated having to admit a weakness to anyone. I mean, really hated it.

  Nudge put her arm around my shoulder. I immediately hunched so it would fall off but caught myself and let it happen. I had to make some sacrifices here.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” she whispered. “You’ve done great so far. I’ve been thinking about your friends—they’re not great travelers right now, you know?”