“Something wrong?” I asked when the noise stopped.
If I thought I’d get a smile out of him, or that I’d shift his mood, I was mistaken.
“I didn’t mean to scare her,” Kit said, his voice catching. “I really like her, Frannie. She’s a great kid. It’s just that—we could all die.”
“I know. She knows, too. She’ll be okay.” Max had a hair-trigger flight response. I knew that people who’d been battered acted like that. What had been done to this little girl? Who had hurt her, and how? We needed to know more about the School. Where it was. How it had worked. What was going on there. Who the people were.
Kit walked to the bathroom door and knocked softly. “Max, I’m sorry if I sounded mad,” he said. His voice was gentle, concerned. “I was mad. I’m worried about your safety, and I don’t know what to do without your help.” I guess that was one way of saying, people are trying to kill us.
Max was quiet behind the bathroom door. Not a peep from her. Sometimes, she was a little girl.
Kit appealed to me in a whispered voice. “Please, get her out of there. Will you at least try? C’mon, Frannie, help me.”
Chapter 71
I SLOWLY WALKED to the bathroom. I didn’t know what I was going to say, didn’t have a clue. I knew I wouldn’t lie to her. I stood outside the locked door for a moment, composing my thoughts. When I opened my mouth to speak, the words came spontaneously and from the heart.
“Max, I promise that nobody is going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. I know that. You know that. We’ll figure out the best thing together. Don’t you think that’s the fair way? You have any other idea?”
There was a long pause. Total silence behind the bathroom door. Max could be incredibly willful and stubborn sometimes. She was almost a teenager. I was seeing that already. Then the knob of the door slowly turned.
Max didn’t look at either of us as she came out of the bathroom. “I’m sorry. I just got scared,” she whispered as she climbed back into bed. She was being a little sweetheart under this incredible pressure.
Pip jumped on the bed and she folded herself around him. I sat down behind her and lightly preened her feathers. A bird will do this smoothing feathers, realigning microscopic hooks along the edges so that they form a seamless unit. I was thinking about how to break this impasse without upsetting her again.
“It’s okay, Max,” I whispered.
“No it isn’t, Frannie. You don’t know.”
Tell us your secrets, Max. We trusted you. Now you trust us a little.
After a while I asked, “What are the people like at your school? Just tell a little bit. Are they scientists? Doctors? Are they teachers?”
“Sort of,” she said. “They taught me to read slides. Mostly science, but I could read what I liked on my own time. They put me to work. Most of them are scientists. They’re doctors.”
Kit was pacing back and forth in the room, staring at the floor. When he heard the word “slides,” he stopped moving. “What do you mean, ‘slides’? What kind of slides, Max?”
“That you look at with a microscope. In the labs. I was allowed to work there. I was supposed to match alleles.”
The incredible tension kept building inside me. Chaos and confusion reigned in my mind. Alleles were alternative forms of a gene. What Max had said about the School so far was unbelievably scary and wrong.
“The doctors are working with chromosomes?” I asked. “Why are they doing that? Do you know?”
“Of course I do. To improve the stock,” she said, and shrugged her shoulders.
“What kind of stock?” Kit asked. This had evolved into a kind of question and answer. I felt like a police officer.
Max’s face went pale white. “I could get people in trouble if I talk,” she said. “I’ve been warned. Talking is absolutely forbidden,” she murmured.
Max covered her eyes and sobbed hard. I gathered her into my arms. “Please trust us, Max. You have to trust somebody. You know that you do, honey.”
I rocked the child, the beautiful little bird-girl. I felt like I was back at the Inn-Patient, taking care of sick and injured animals. That’s where I wanted to be.
Max spoke softly into the side of my neck. I could barely hear the words, but I did.
“Take me home,” she whispered.
Book Four
THE FLIGHT SCHOOL
Chapter 72
TAKE ME HOME.
It had obviously been hard for Max to say the words. It sounded so innocent coming out of her mouth, but I knew it wasn’t. We couldn’t get out of the Motel Six fast enough.
We zoomed down the Interstate at eighty miles an hour and then some, hoping a highway patrolman wouldn’t stop us for speeding.
We were going to the School, weren’t we?
I was in the back with Max. She was clearly scared, so I held her tightly. I could feel her heart beating against my arm way too fast. Poor Max. Just a little girl. Caught up in something much larger than any of us could comprehend.
I stroked her as I talked, hoping it would soothe and calm the eleven-year-old. I told Max I’d grown up on a dairy farm in northern Wisconsin and asked her if she’d ever seen a real cow.
“We don’t have any cows at the School,” she said. “I’ve seen lots of them on TV, though.”
I told her about our small herd of Holsteins, with their gooey tongues and liquid eyes. I even remembered their names and personalities. Max couldn’t disguise her curiosity as I described Blossom Dearie and Nellie Foot-Foot and Please Louise and our spotted bull, Kool Kat.
I told her how my sister, Carole Anne and I got up at five in the morning to help my dad; and how we washed the cows in the summer and turned on the electric fan so they’d stay cool. But it was how we got milk from them that really fascinated her.
She hooted out loud as I described the joys of early-morning milkings. I loved to hear her laugh. It was infectious and always made me smile. Max took such delight in the world she hadn’t been able to experience until now. And besides, laughing kept our minds off everything else that was going on.
I made up a goofy story about chocolate cows giving chocolate milk. Kit tossed in a thought. “Tell her about the peppermint cows,” he said and winked.
“You two are crazy,” Max told us. “It’s nice, though. I like it. I love being here with you.”
“We love being with you, too,” I said.
“Me three,” Kit nodded agreement.
The Jeep sped through the early-morning dark. I was thinking, pretending, Hey, maybe it was justaroad trip, after all—when Max stiffened. She strained forward toward the front seat and the windshield.
Then she pointed to a narrow side road that slipped off behind a rocky outcropping. “Turn here, Kit.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. I didn’t doubt Max, but I was curious. I was pretty sure she’d never been on this road before. I lived near here, and I don’t think I was ever on it.
She shrugged, then peered deeply into my eyes. She could be smiling, then suddenly turn very intense and serious. “Can’t you feel the dairy farm where you used to live?”
“It’s far away,” I said. “I’d need a map to find it.”
“I feel the School,” Max said. “I know exactly where it is. I can see the way there in my mind.”
I understood what she was saying, and it hit me hard. I felt an uncomfortable lump in my throat. Like pigeons and house cats and migrating animals who can find their place of origin through either inertial navigation or God knows what, Max could home!
Chapter 73
PULL OVER,” she said before Kit made the actual turn.
Kit did as he had been asked. There was something in Max’s voice that couldn’t be ignored.
“Now, listen to me,” she said. “You can’t go any farther than this. If they catch you, I think they’ll kill you. I’m serious.”
“This is definitely serious stuff,” Kit said to her. “And that’s exactly wh
y we’re going with you, little one. This is a serious gun,” he said and showed Max a handgun. It was a semiautomatic and it looked deadly.
“I have to come, Max. It’s my job. It’s the reason I came here to Colorado.”
“I can’t leave either,” I told Max. “I won’t leave you and Kit. It’s not going to happen.”
Max finally nodded. She didn’t like it, but she could tell we weren’t going away. For better or worse, we were in this together.
Kit pulled on the steering wheel and we turned off the main road, which wasn’t exactly U.S. One. Now we were on something called Under Mountain Pass, a twisty service road that shot up into the foothills of the Rockies. The School was here someplace. Max seemed certain of it.
“Take a right,” Max said suddenly. “Then you can let me out.”
“It’s not going to happen, Max,” Kit insisted. “We already went over that.”
“You’re awfully stubborn, Kit.”
“Look who’s talking.”
The road deteriorated and became an unmarked stream of dirt track that gave no clue as to where we were headed—neither by signage nor by buildings. It was appropriately desolate and eerie, though.
Every turn in the road was a driving challenge for Kit. Eyes glowed out at us. Deer and other forest critters wisely waited before sprinting to the other side. As we drove higher and higher into the mountains, Max finally began talking about where she had come from.
“The School moved a few times while I was growing up. I know it was in the state of Massachusetts, then out in California before we moved here. I went to classes every day, and it was okay at first. My teacher was Mrs. Beattie. She was a doctor, too, but she said we didn’t have to say ‘Doctor’ before her name. She really loved Matthew and me, and we loved her. We’re geniuses on the Stanford-Binet tests. We were told to take no credit for being smart, though, or being able to fly. We were made that way. We were just lab specimens after all.”
I heard Max’s breathing intensify. She was clutching my hand so hard it nearly went numb. Even though she had told us to turn back, I knew she hadn’t totally meant it. She was too frightened to do this alone.
“Let me out,” she said, suddenly grabbing higher on my arm. “I have to get out. I have to! Please, Kit? Right now! I promise not to fly away. I swear I won’t.”
I reached over and pressed Kit’s arm. He braked the car on the narrow shoulder of the road.
We were in the middle of nowhere—surrounded by nothing but tall fir trees and sharp outcroppings of rock, and the loud buzzing of cicadas.
I opened the Jeep’s door, and Max scampered over me and out.
She was quick and athletic, and so strong for her age. Almost everything she did was amazing to observe. I prayed she wouldn’t fly and leave us.
Max climbed up to the roof of the Jeep. We heard her footsteps pounding above us. Then a furious whooshing sound as she beat her wings.
“What’s she doing?” we said, almost in unison.
Then she stepped off the Jeep and took to the air. Just like that.
“Oh, Jesus,” Kit whispered. He took the words right out of my mouth. “Just look at her. Look at that. I hope we can keep up with her.”
“We have to. Move this thing.”
He revved the engine. Stepped on the gas. The Jeep lurched off the shoulder of the road and then found its center, climbed steeply up the mountain. We followed Max’s flight, at least we tried.
I stuck my head out of the side window like a kid. So did Pip. I couldn’t take my eyes off her white and silver-blue wings as she flew before us. Cool air flowed past my face. I almost felt that I was flying, too. I was certainly having an out-of-body experience.
The Jeep bore into a long tunnel of darkness created by overhanging pines and towering fir trees. Max veered to the left, up another side road. This one was all dirt and deeply rutted.
We were following Max home. We were trusting her with our lives.
Chapter 74
THE SCHOOL WAS CLOSE. She could taste it on her tongue—bitter and nasty as could be. She could feel it, like a deadly poison pumping through her bloodstream.
Max suddenly came swooping down to the ground. The Jeep screeched to a stop close behind her. Frannie and Kit scampered out in a hurry. Pip was running around in circles. Normally, he would have made her smile, giggle happily. Not now, though.
“What is it, honey?” Frannie called. She was always so concerned, and never bossy.
Max felt as if a rope were tied around her waist and she was being firmly, inexorably, reeled in. She could feel extreme tension in her neck and shoulders, right down into her chest plate. She was going home. She was voluntarily returning to the School. Then maybe all the secrets would be out—and she could be free.
And maybe not!
She decided to stay on the ground for a while. Walking was probably safer. Frannie and Kit walked hurriedly right behind her.
She didn’t look back, didn’t have to. She could hear the struggling for breath in their lungs, the blood pumping through their hearts. She sensed their fear was growing. Finally, they would see the truth. See it for themselves. She prayed they were ready for this.
Suddenly, Max stopped!
She saw the physical boundary between her new freedom and her old life—the barbed-wire fence. The powerful sight chilled her, brought back a flood of terrifying memories. She could picture Uncle Thomas, the other creepy guards, and it made her retch. She almost lost it right then and there.
The School was close. She was almost there. It was as if the School were watching her approach, waiting for her, laughing because she’d come back.
The chain-link fence was ten feet high and topped with razor sharp concertina wire. Behind it was everything she knew, loved, and hated with all of her heart. She had seen men parking trucks at the School. Maybe they were all gone by now.
A white metal sign read: ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE. THIS IS A GOVERNMENT INSTALLATION. TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.
She turned to Frannie and Kit. “We’re here.”
Chapter 75
MAX WAS STARING back at us, her bright green eyes wide with fear.
“They’re not kidding,” she said. “Trespassers have been shot, believe me. You can still go back. I think you should.”
“We won’t leave you,” Kit said.
Pip was barking and twirling in tight circles outside the fence. Suddenly two Dobermans came loping forward on the far side. They bared their teeth, barked and growled.
Kit pulled me away from the fence as spit and fury flew from the mouths of the Dobermans.
I felt the hackles rise on the back of my neck. And it wasn’t just because of the dogs. Actually, the dogs didn’t bother me so much.
Chain link and concertina wire and guard dogs in the middle of the woods were scary enough, but to see the words “U.S. Government” attached to “Trespassers Will Be Shot” made me ill. Kit and I were close to being trespassers, and illegal trespassing was definitely on our minds.
“Is this the School?” I asked, but Max wasn’t listening. She was busy with the Dobermans.
“Bandit, Gomer, it’s me!” she called out crisply to the dogs. “Stop it. Stop it now! Heel, you two!”
Amazingly, the growling and barking trailed off and then stopped completely. Suspicious sniffs followed. Then happy woofing as the dogs seemed to recognize Max.
“Don’t worry,” she said to us. “They’re my friends. Their bark’s much worse than their bite,” she grinned.
“Can we get over this fence anywhere?” I asked Kit.
He started to answer when Max interrupted.
“Frannie!” she was pulling at my arm. “There’s something wrong with Bandit and Gomer. Something is really wrong with the dogs! Please, come look at them.”
I moved closer but I didn’t need to examine Bandit and Gomer to see what had happened to them. Their black coats were dull. Their rib cages were standing out sharply, the skin stretched taut
over the bones.
“They’re pretty hungry,” I said to Max.
It was an understatement. The dogs were suffering from malnutrition. Some cruel bastard was starving them.
Kit returned from a trip down the fence. “I couldn’t find a break or access point in the wire,” he said. “Maybe around the other way.”
“I think I can fly you both over,” Max said. It was such an unexpected statement, I nearly laughed.
“I know I can do it. I’m stronger than I look,” she insisted. She was dead serious.
“No way,” Kit told her. He was right. There was no way an eighty-pound little girl could lift an adult twice her weight against the pull of gravity.
“Yes, I can.” Max was firm. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I know what I’m capable of.”
I listened to Max and reconsidered. I wasn’t figuring in the stress factor. Stress produces adrenaline. And also, who knew what kind of strength Max actually did have?
“Let me try you first,” she said to me.
“I don’t think it’s a great idea, Max.”
She shrugged. “Fine. Then I’ll fly over by myself.”
I grabbed on to the chain link. I climbed a few feet and clung there. Then Max gripped me around my midsection with her strong legs. She was definitely powerful. God, this was the strangest thing.
Holding me from behind, Max’s wings almost could have been mine. She flapped hard, then we took off. Suddenly we were suspended in the air. Then we started upward.
I could feel a breeze rushing around me. It was cold up in these hills, and getting chillier by the minute. For a moment I forgot everything, so focused was I on the sensation of being airborne in this unusual manner. For just the briefest instant I could imagine that I had wings myself.
When the Wind Blows Page 17
