Maximum Ride Forever

by James Patterson

  The smaller pieces breaking off as it entered the earth’s atmosphere, scattering throughout the Pacific.

  The many shooting stars that got brighter and brighter until it felt like your eyelids were peeled back, unable to shut out their light.

  The moment the biggest chunk hit on the western coast of Morocco, there was too much to see at once, too much to know. The images flashed faster and faster, like a flipbook of drawings:

  The main meteor, almost a mile wide, smashing against the earth, creating a new, gigantic crater where Morocco had once been.

  The ring of fire that circled the massive crater, burning for months.

  The jolt after the impact that rippled though the water within moments, churning into tsunamis.

  Angel showed them the blinding flash that North Africans saw just before their bones vaporized in the heat. The mile-high tidal wave of water arcing over New York and most of the East Coast of the United States, Venezuela, and Spain just before it sucked everything back to sea. She showed them forests from Eastern Europe to the western US that burst into flame all at once as hot ash pelted down. And the shudder of shock waves racing underfoot around the globe, toppling cities, causing a domino effect of volcanoes to erupt with devastating results.

  Angel showed them everything she could, and when she was done, she opened her eyes with a gasp, severing the connection.

  Angel saw Nudge right below her, tears spilling down her cheeks. Many others were weeping, too. Just as Angel had.

  Angel didn’t show them what had happened days and weeks after—the death and famine, the raids. They already knew all about that. There was just one more thing they didn’t know.

  The Remedy did this, she told them. This, and much more. He dropped bombs, unleashed a virus. He tried to wipe all traces of humans off the earth.

  The field of people was silent. They looked up at her with damp, desperate eyes, asking her what to do.

  We have to fight, she answered.

  Angel winced as a bolt of pain shot through her temples and a vision flashed behind her eyes—a split-second glimpse of this same field, littered with the wounded and the dead. She knew she was leading many of these kids to their deaths, but she had no choice.

  The world doesn’t have very many people left, but it has us. You’ve survived. But is just surviving enough?

  “No!” a few eager kids shouted, but others still looked uncertain.

  The Remedy drops bombs and builds superhuman androids to do his dirty work, but he’s never gone to battle, Angel said, her words gaining force. The Remedy stole our planet, murdered our families, and destroyed our homes, but he’s never seen our faces. Are you going to let him walk away?

  “NO!” the crowd roared in unison.

  Angel fluttered down until she was just a few feet off the ground. She wanted to see the dirt on their faces. She wanted to be able to meet their eyes. All she had was these kids, and all they had was her, and whatever they’d grabbed from the rubble. Her fighters were armed with barbecue forks, baseball bats, broken crutches, lengths of rusted rebar, pitchforks, tree limbs, junior archery sets… their bravery humbled her.

  “The Remedy thinks he has won,” she said aloud, her voice strident and clear. “But he can’t see the future. I can. And I swear, if you follow me, we will see him fall.”

  Right there, Kate fell to her knees in the dirt, her dark hair hanging as she bowed her head. Beside her, Ratchet knelt as well. One by one the others followed, until over a thousand kids were kneeling before Angel, ready to serve.

  79

  ALL I’D WANTED was to fight the Remedy. But as the troops were finally moving out, I was pushing backward against the tide of bodies, searching for blonde hair and white feathers.

  I needed to talk to her first.

  “Angel!” I yelled, elbowing my way through. “Ange!” I grabbed her hand and turned her around to face me. “What was that?” I demanded. I could still see the imprint of the explosion behind my eyelids, a sudden camera flash. I felt the heat, as real as if it were flaying my own skin. “Tell me what that was.”

  In the middle of all this chaos, with people bumping past us and shouting directions, Angel had the stillness of a monk.

  “You know what it was, Max. The day the sky caught fire—it was Armageddon.”

  “But that doesn’t tell me anything!” I said, more frustrated than ever. Everyone was acting like Angel had given all the answers, but all I had were more questions. “How do you know it was the Remedy? And what about the bombs, and the Horsemen?” I was shaking her now. “How do you know what you saw is even real?”

  “Because I know!” Angel shouted, wrenching free of my grasp. “Because I saw it, just like I saw Fang’s death—before it happened!” She looked up at me with watery blue eyes, and in that moment, I finally saw Angel for what she really was.

  Not just a psychic or a mind reader. A prophet.

  She was also a seven-year-old who’d been carrying around the most terrible secret in the world, all by herself. I noticed the ragged cuts around her fingernails where she’d torn the skin away, the dark circles around her eyes, and realized how much I had failed her.

  “Oh, honey,” I said. When I put my hands lightly on the outsides of her arms, she tensed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because,” she said, her small bow lips quivering, “you never wanted to listen.”

  “Of course I—” An image of Fang’s face flashed in my mind, and I winced.

  Fair enough.

  “I’m listening now,” I said gently.

  We walked to the edge of the clearing, away from the rest of the kids, and Angel sat back down on the stump and pulled her knees up to her chest.

  “The visions started after they altered my eyes at the school.”

  My chest tightened, remembering that awful time after Paris. We’d all believed Angel was dead for weeks before finding her in one of Jeb’s corrupt labs.

  “At first I thought I was blind, like Iggy. But then I realized I could actually see more—stuff that hadn’t happened yet. I kept seeing these flashes, and it was so scary, Max,” she said, resting her chin on her knees to look up at me. “I could never see the whole picture, and I didn’t know if it would be this year or in five years or a hundred years.”

  “Did anyone else know about all this? The meteor and bombs and apocalypse?” I asked, still trying to figure out where the Remedy fit into all this.

  “The scientists did, and the world leaders,” Angel said. “I didn’t find that out until the day it hit, when I heard Dr. Martinez’s thoughts.”

  “But my mom was worried about the H8E virus,” I said. I remembered her telling Fang and me about the plague the Apocalypticas had developed, how we should all be safe from it, on the island. “She didn’t mention the meteor.”

  “That’s because the Russians had planned to blast it apart with nuclear weapons. ‘They were going to nuke it’—that’s what Dr. Martinez kept thinking the day the sky caught fire. ‘I thought Russia was going to nuke it.’ ”

  “But somehow Dr. G-H got control of the nukes first?”

  Angel nodded.

  “He just… let it… hit us,” she said, looking up at me in bewilderment, and I’m sure my face was a mirror of shocked, sickened horror. Angel started to weep, and I hugged her close to me. “I swear I didn’t know about the Remedy, Max.” She cried harder, her tears soaking my neck. “I just knew we had to get to Russia.”

  “I know, sweetie,” I whispered, smoothing her hair. “I’m so sorry I didn’t listen.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” she hiccupped. “And I wasn’t trying to hurt Fang by showing him his fall. I just didn’t know what else to do.”

  I couldn’t think of Fang without feeling the cold grip of nausea in my gut, and I stiffened. Angel felt the shift and pulled away from me, wiping her face.

  “We should go. I said I would lead those kids.”

  My little prophet.

  “You real
ly were great up there earlier, Angel. A true leader.”

  “I know,” Angel said matter-of-factly, and I laughed. “What?” She smiled. “I told you I know stuff. You taught me a lot, though, Max.”

  “Oh yeah?” I cocked an eyebrow. “Like what?”

  “Like how you never stop fighting for the right ending. Even after the apocalypse.”

  That’s my girl. I snapped open my wings, and Angel did the same.

  “Let’s show Dr. God what hell feels like.”

  80

  ONCE AGAIN, ANGEL hovered above her army. The icy wind cut through her thin clothes and whipped against her cheeks, but Angel faced it unblinkingly. This time, she was officially their leader, the general leading them to war.

  And, for some of them, to death.

  We will win, though, Angel told herself, though her visions had never shown her the final outcome. We have to.

  As they shivered in haphazard lines awaiting Angel’s command, she studied the layout of the battlefield below. Years of living with Max on the run had taught her to look for vulnerabilities, and she saw that geography was in their favor, at least. The main entrance to the underground city known as Himmel was in a clearing, so they had unobstructed access, and though Dylan had warned her about vents in the surrounding ground, the surrounding woods provided a natural barrier against escape. From her vantage point in the sky, Angel saw beyond the trees as well—to endless miles of flat Siberian wilderness.

  The Remedy might have an advanced security system, but he was still underground. There was nowhere for him to run.

  “Prepare the catapult!” she yelled down to Gazzy and Iggy. She watched as they started to load the homemade smoke bombs.

  Himmel’s entrance didn’t look like much from above. From the ground it appeared like the mouth of a cave, but the outcropping was hidden by the wiry grasses that covered the rest of the countryside. From up here, apart from a small mound in the earth, you’d barely know it was there.

  “FIRE!” Angel commanded.

  Gazzy launched the grenades one after the other, but apart from the sound of the egg-like objects singing toward Himmel’s narrow mouth, the field was silent. The air felt full of static, it was so pregnant with anticipation.

  Then, as the bombs started to release their gases, Angel heard a barrage of new thoughts, all at once.

  Not the thoughts of her own army, but of the army below—the one she hadn’t been sure was there.

  They were there, all right, and Angel realized with alarm that there were more than she’d ever anticipated. There were many thousands of fighters in the Remedy’s army. More than they could ever take on.

  “HOLD!” Angel shouted a little hysterically at her ranks. But the events had already been set in motion, and thick clouds of smoke began billowing out of the hole. The angry, panicked thoughts of the Remedy’s army buzzed louder, louder. “Hold…”

  The survivors and the mutants on the field twitched uncomfortably in response to Angel’s reaction. They didn’t hear the deafening thoughts, couldn’t fathom how many soldiers there were; they saw only an empty field.

  Her friends had no clue what was about to happen.

  They waited, watching the smoke-filled hole.

  They tensed, readying themselves for what was to come.

  “CHARGE!” Angel screamed the moment she saw the outline of bodies through the smoke.

  As her fighters surged forward, the Remedy’s troops started to emerge, but the entrance to Himmel was so narrow it formed a bottleneck. Only a few of the Remedy’s soldiers could get out at a time, she realized.

  There was still a chance they could hold them off!

  The billowing smoke blocked her view, but right before the armies clashed into each other, Angel saw her troops hesitate, just for a moment.

  What are you doing? She sent the question telepathically to Kate, their strongest fighter, who was on the front lines. What’s wrong?

  “They’re kids, Angel,” Kate answered her. “Just little kids.”

  Angel’s heart broke, but the rest of her shook with fury. They’d been mentally, if not physically, prepared for the Remedy’s superhuman Horsemen or his armed Russian guards. Using children to fight his war was way more despicable.

  They were fighting, though. They were Doomsday soldiers, brainwashed to hate humans and mutants alike. Angel watched more and more of them pushing past her soldiers, weapons held in fierce grips, eyes lusting for blood. If her survivors didn’t push back, they’d all be killed.

  Luckily, the flock, at least, had dealt with these kids before. Nudge let out a terrifying battle cry and launched herself forward in a roundoff backflip, her feet catching two machete-wielding warriors midair. The rest of the troops followed, battling the Remedy’s child army in hand-to-hand combat.

  Angel worked on breaking into the minds of the Doomsday fighters, but she knew from past experience that the cult mind was extremely difficult to crack into—the One Light had an incredibly powerful hold on them.

  Still, she burrowed into their minds, hammering at the boundaries of their psyches, her head throbbing as she worked to free them before too many had to die. In a trancelike state herself, Angel was concentrating so hard on battling back the warped thoughts that she almost didn’t hear Dylan’s desperate cry.

  “THE VENTS!” he was screaming at full volume now. “ANGEL, THE VENTS!”

  As dozens of Horsemen burst up through unseen vents in the field, Angel shook in despair. These Horsemen were elite models, robots whose actions were completely controlled by the Remedy, so she couldn’t read their thoughts.

  But she knew their power.

  “Ratchet! Kate! Dylan!” she summoned them telepathically, her voice tinged with real fear for the first time. “Get to Max!”

  Even if they didn’t win this battle, even if she couldn’t save these kids, Angel knew, as she’d always known, that Max was their only chance at saving the world.

  81

  THE GROUND UNDER me shook violently. Like everyone else on the front lines, I couldn’t see anything through the smoke, but it sounded like the world was breaking open.

  Our whole army was bunched in a tight cluster in the center of the field. It was obvious we were in an extremely vulnerable position, but we had to hold back the ranks upon ranks of Doomsday psychos who kept pushing out of the entryway.

  Right now, I was in a hair-pulling battle with a surprisingly vicious pigtailed eight-year-old and standing on an older boy’s windpipe as I tried to pry his fingers off his homemade scythe. I thought that was more important than worrying about an earthquake… until I realized it wasn’t an earthquake.

  It was another army, shooting up out of holes in the ground all around us.

  An army of M-Geeks.

  At least that’s what I thought they were. They sure looked like the flying robots that had annoyed us since the days of Mr. Chu—right down to the weapons grafted onto their arms in place of hands.

  RAT-A-TAT-TAT! came the sound of machine-gun fire.

  The field became a tangle of chaos and panic. I knew how to fight these villains, though. I’d done it before.

  Leaving behind the Doomsday kids I’d pinned, I shot into the air. I flew erratically, hearing the pop of bullets and trying to find a clear view of one of the robots.

  “Watch it!” Ratchet smashed into my side, knocking me off balance.

  “Hey!” I scowled. “You watch it!”

  “You were about to fly into the path of a bullet,” Ratchet explained testily. Only someone with crazy heightened senses like his could’ve seen that. “You’re welcome.”

  Looking down, I saw that most of our army was scattering for cover, but Holden and the bug boys were running full speed toward the M-Geeks. Bullets ricocheted off the armored mutants, and though Holden should’ve been full of holes, his elastic cells regenerated at such a high frequency that they barely slowed him down.

  Closer to me, Gazzy teetered on the shoulders of another M-G
eek, determinedly slamming a big rock on its head. But the head didn’t split like an orange as before—they’d evolved. Instead, the gloved hand reached for Gazzy, grabbed him by his messy blond hair, and slammed him forward onto the ground, where Harry was already mewling in pain. The robot pointed his gun arm, execution style, at my wounded friends.

  I got ready to dive.

  Time for a reunion, Geeky.

  But before I could drop, Dylan shot past me. He reached the M-Geek first, tearing him off Gazzy and smashing the armored face until the metal actually dented.

  I started to look for another M-Geek, but I saw we had bigger problems to worry about.

  Beyond the bodies fighting on the field around me, I saw something else charging out of the forest. My mouth hung slack.

  It was a parade of enemies past come back to haunt me. Some had the snarling, wolfish snouts of Erasers. Some were cyborg Flyboys. Others looked like something entirely new: droids made of metal or giants whose hands could easily snap bodies in half.

  I spotted a huge man with a slick bald head and cruel eyes—a carbon copy of the giant I’d met in Africa, who’d told me his buddies would be back to rip me apart. I narrowed my eyes.

  This one’s mine.

  Dropping fast, I snap-kicked the backs of his knees, and when the big oaf buckled, I jumped up and jammed my fingers into his eyes, following with a quick uppercut to the chin.

  Now I’d made him mad.

  Roaring with pain and anger, he lunged toward me. Suddenly a powerful kick exploded against his left side—right to the kidney—and the giant collapsed in agony.

  Kate.

  “What are you doing?” I groaned, clenching my fists.

  “Helping,” Kate grunted as she heaved the whimpering giant up onto her shoulders. The giant had to outweigh Kate by about three hundred pounds, but she lifted him over her head as if he were a toy. She spun around and hurled him across the field, where he crashed against a tree and slid to the ground.

  “I don’t need help,” I insisted.

  This was a battle. A battle in which, with the Horsemen and the Doomsday kids together, we were vastly outnumbered. Kids were injured all around us, putting their lives on the line, and I should be pulling my weight, fighting alongside them. I wanted to fight, more than anything.