I looked at him, appalled. “So what happens on that date?”
He shrugged and stood to start wheeling me forward again. “I’ll die. They would have exterminated me with the others, but my time is really close anyway. So they cut me a break. Because, you know, I’m Jeb’s son.”
His voice cracked as he said that, and I stared straight ahead down the hall.
This was a new low, even for mad scientists.
45
I don’t know if you guys ever tour top-secret evil science labs, like for school field trips or something. But I got a tour that day, and if I had had to write a school paper about it, my title would have been, “Scarier and Far Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine (even if you have a totally twisted imagination).”
I mean, we’d grown up here. (I thought.) Plus, we’d seen some horrific stuff at the Institute in New York. (I thought.) So it’s not like devastating freaks of nature were new to me. But Ari brought me down halls and up and down in elevators, and we explored parts of the School I’d never seen, never knew existed. And let me tell you, the flock and I looked like Disneyland cast members compared with some of the things I saw.
They weren’t all recombinant life-forms. Some were “enhanced” but not combined with another species.
I saw a human baby who wasn’t even walking yet, sitting on the floor, chewing on a plastic frog while a whitecoat wrote a long, complicated, unintelligible mathematical problem on a wall-sized whiteboard.
Another whitecoat asked, “How long did this take Feynman to solve?”
The first whitecoat said, “Four months.”
The baby put down the frog and crawled over to the whiteboard. A whitecoat handed her a marker. The baby wrote a complicated, unintelligible answer on the whiteboard, something with a lot of Greek squiggles in it.
Then the baby sat back, looked at the whiteboard, and started to gum the end of the marker. The other whitecoat checked the answer. He looked up and nodded.
The first whitecoat said, “Good girl,” and gave the baby a cookie.
In another room I saw, like, Plexiglas boxes with some sort of grotesque tissue growing in them. Brainlike tissue floating in different-colored liquids. Wires were coming out of the boxes, connected to a computer. A whitecoat was typing commands into the computer, and the brain things were apparently carrying them out.
I looked at Ari. “Have brain, will travel.”
“I think they were seeing if people would still need bodies or something,” he said.
I saw a room full of the Eraser replacements, those Flyboy things. They were hung in rows on metal hooks, like raggedy coats in a closet.
Their glowy red eyes were closed, and I saw that each one had a wire plugged into its leg. Thin, hairy Eraser skin was stretched taut over their metal frames, and in some places it had torn, allowing a joint to poke through or a couple of gears and pulleys to show. The whole effect was pretty repulsive.
“They’re charging,” said Ari tonelessly.
I was starting to feel overwhelmed, even more overwhelmed than usual.
“They call this one Brain on a Stick,” Ari said, gesturing.
I saw a metallic spinal cord, connected to two metal legs, walking around. It walked smoothly, fluidly, like a person. At the top of the spinal cord was a Plexiglas box holding—no, not a hamster—a brainlike clump of tissue.
It walked past us, and I heard sounds coming from it, as if it were talking to itself.
In the next room we saw a little all-human kid, about two years old, who had weirdly bulked-up, developed muscles, like a tiny bodybuilder. He was bench-pressing more than two hundred pounds—weights much bigger than he was, probably eight times his body weight or more.
I couldn’t take any more of this. “So what happens now, Ari?”
“I’ll take you back,” said Ari.
We didn’t speak as he navigated the halls and levels of this village of nightmares. I wondered, if his expiration date was real, how it must feel for him to know that the end of his life was coming soon, minute by minute, second by second. The flock and I had faced death a thousand times, but it had always had an element of “maybe we can slide out of this.”
To have a date tattooed on your neck—it was like looking up and seeing a train’s headlights coming right at you, and your feet just can’t move off the track. I was going to check the backs of our necks as soon as I could.
“Max, I—” Ari stopped, pausing outside the door to the flock’s ward.
I waited.
“I wish—,” he said, his voice breaking.
I didn’t know what he’d been about to say, but I didn’t need to know. I patted his hand, perpetually morphed out into a heavy, hairy, Eraser-clawed mitt.
“We all wish, Ari.”
46
The next day they let us loose.
“Is it time for us to die?” Nudge asked. She sidled closer to me, and I put my arm around her.
“I don’t know, sweetie,” I told her. “But if it is, I’m taking a bunch of ’em with me.”
“Me too,” said Gazzy bravely. I gathered the Gasman to my other side.
Fang leaned against a wall, his eyes on me. We hadn’t had any time to talk privately since we’d gotten here, but I caught his gaze and tried to send him a look that had everything I was thinking in it. He was a big boy. He could handle the swear words.
The room’s door swung open, with its peculiar air rush. A tall, sandy-haired man strode in as if he were the king of the world. He was followed by Anne Walker and another whitecoat I hadn’t seen before.
“Dese are dey?” he asked, sounding like Ahnold in The Terminator.
Already he had me angry. “We be them,” I said snarkily, and his pale, watery blue eyes focused on me like lasers.
“Dis vould be de vun called Max?” he asked his assistant, as if I couldn’t hear.
“I not only would be Max, I am Max,” I said, interrupting the assistant’s answer. “In fact, I’ve always been Max and always will be.”
His eyes narrowed. Mine narrowed back at him.
“Yes, I can see vhy dey’ve been slated for extermination,” he said casually, as his assistant made notes on a clipboard.
“And I can see why you were voted ‘least popular’ in your class,” I said. “So I guess we’re even.”
He ignored me, but I saw a tiny muscle in his jaw twitch.
Next, his eyes lit on Nudge. “Dis vun can’t control her mouth or, obviously, her brain,” he said. “Something vent wrong vis her thought processes, clearly.”
I felt Nudge stiffen at my side. “Bite me,” she said.
That’s my girl.
“Und dis vun,” he went on, pointing at Gazzy. “His digestive system has disastrous flaws.” He shook his head. “Perhaps an enzyme imbalance.”
Anne Walker listened expressionlessly.
“Dis vun—vell, you can see it for yourself,” the man said, with a casual flick of his hand at Iggy. “Multiple defects. A complete failure.”
“Yes, Dr. ter Borcht,” murmured his assistant, writing furiously.
Fang and I instantly looked at each other. Ter Borcht had been mentioned in the files we’d stolen from the Institute.
Iggy, sensing ter Borcht was talking about him, scowled. “Takes one to know one,” he said.
“De tall, dark vun—dere’s nothing special about him at all,” ter Borcht said dismissively of Fang, who hadn’t moved since the doctor had come in.
“Well, he’s a snappy dresser,” I offered. One side of Fang’s mouth quirked.
“Und you,” ter Borcht said, turning back to me. “You haf a malfunctioning chip, you get debilitating headaches, and your leadership skills are sadly much less than ve had hoped for.”
“And yet I could still kick your doughy Eurotrash butt from here to next Tuesday. So that’s something.”
His eyelids flickered, and it seemed to me that he was controlling himself with difficulty.
Well, I get u
nder people’s skins. It’s a gift I have, what can I say?
47
Ter Borcht looked at his assistant. “Let’s get on vis de questioning,” he said abruptly. Turning to me, he said, “Ve need to gather some final data. Den you vill be exterminated.”
“Ooh,” I said. “If I had boots on, I’d be quaking in them.” I tapped my bare toes against the floor.
I saw a quick flare of anger in his eyes.
“No, really,” I said, mucho sincerely. “Totally quaking, I promise. You’re really a very scary man.”
“First you,” he barked suddenly at Gazzy, and Gazzy couldn’t help jumping a tiny bit. I looked at him reassuringly and winked, and his narrow shoulders straightened.
“Vhat ozzer abilities do you haf?” ter Borcht snapped, while his assistant waited, pen in hand.
Gazzy thought. “I have X-ray vision,” he said. He peered at ter Borcht’s chest, then blinked and looked alarmed.
Ter Borcht was startled for a second, but then he frowned. “Don’t write dat down,” he told his assistant in irritation. The assistant froze in midsentence.
Glaring at the Gasman, ter Borcht said, “Your time is coming to an end, you pathetic failure of an experiment. Vhat you say now is how you vill be remembered.”
Gazzy’s blue eyes flashed. “Then you can remember me telling you to kiss my—”
“Enough!” ter Borcht said. He turned suddenly to Nudge. “You. Do you haf any qualities dat distinguish you in any way?”
Nudge chewed on a fingernail. “You mean, like, besides the wings?” She shook her shoulders gently, and her beautiful fawn-colored wings unfolded a bit.
His face flushed, and I felt like cheering. “Yes,” he said stiffly. “Besides de vings.”
“Hmm. Besides de vings.” Nudge tapped one finger against her chin. “Um...” Her face brightened. “I once ate nine Snickers bars in one sitting. Without barfing. That was a record!”
“Hardly a special talent,” ter Borcht said witheringly.
Nudge was offended. “Yeah? Let’s see you do it.”
“I vill now eat nine Snickers bars,” Gazzy said in a perfect, creepy imitation of ter Borcht’s voice, “visout bahfing.”
Ter Borcht wheeled on him as I smothered a giggle. It wasn’t funny when Gazzy did a pitch-perfect imitation of me, but it was hilarious when he did it to other people.
“Mimicry,” ter Borcht said to his assistant. “Write dat down.”
Walking over to Iggy, he poked him with his shoe. “Does anysing on you vork properly?”
Iggy rubbed his forehead with one hand. “Well, I have a highly developed sense of irony.”
Ter Borcht tsked. “You are a liability to your group. I assume you alvays hold on to someone’s shirt, yes? Following dem closely?”
“Only when I’m trying to steal their dessert,” Iggy said truthfully.
“Write that down,” I told the assistant. “He’s a notorious dessert stealer.”
Ter Borcht moved over to Fang and stood examining him as if he were a zoo exhibit. Fang looked back at him, and probably only I could see his tension, the fury roiling inside him.
“You don’t speak much, do you?” ter Borcht said, circling him slowly.
Fittingly, Fang said nothing.
“Vhy do you let a girl be de leader?” ter Borcht asked, a calculating look in his eye.
“She’s the tough one,” Fang said.
Dang right, I thought proudly.
“Is dere anysing special about you?” asked ter Borcht. “Anysing vorth saving?”
Fang pretended to think, gazing up at the ceiling. “Besides my fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica.”
Ter Borcht locked his gaze on me. “Vhy haf you trained dem to act stupid dis vay?”
They weren’t stupid. They were survivors.
“Why do you still let your mother dress you?” I countered snidely.
The assistant busily started writing that down but froze at a look from ter Borcht.
The scientist stepped closer to me, looking down menacingly. “I created you,” he said softly. “As de saying goes, I brought you into dis world, and I vill take you out of it.”
“I vill now destroy de Snickuhs bahrs!” Gazzy barked. Then the five of us were laughing—literally in the face of death.
48
“Oops,” I said once we were alone again. “Guess they forgot to program us with any respect for authority.”
“Those idiots,” Gazzy said, scuffing his foot against the floor.
We were feeling victorious, but it was still clear: We were captive, and right now they held all the tarot cards.
“I miss Total,” said Nudge.
I sighed. “If he ever existed.”
“We didn’t imagine the hawks...or the bats,” Nudge said.
“Yeah,” said Iggy. “We didn’t imagine those creepy subway tunnels in New York.”
“Or the headhunter, at that school,” said Gazzy.
“I know. I’m sure we didn’t,” I said, though actually I wasn’t, not a hundred percent, anyway.
Ari came and got me again that afternoon. This time I was actually allowed to walk. Wee-hah!
“I don’t trust him. Keep your eyes open,” Fang murmured as I was leaving.
“Ya think?” I whispered back.
“So what’s this all about, Ari?” I asked, as we passed some whitecoats who looked at us strangely. “How come we’re taking these little tours?”
Now that I wasn’t strapped to a lead wheelchair, I was memorizing every hall, every doorway, every window.
He looked uncomfortable and still subdued. For a wolverine, anyway. “I’m not sure,” he muttered. “They just said walk her around.”
“Ah,” I said. “So we can assume there’s something they want me to see. Besides the brain on a stick and the superbabies.”
Ari shrugged. “I don’t know. They don’t tell me anything.”
Just then we passed wide double doors, and one of them swung open as we went by. A whitecoat hurried from the room beyond, but not before I’d caught a glimpse inside.
On a large video screen that took up a whole wall, I saw a map of the world. My raptor vision took in a thousand details in a second, which I digested as Ari and I walked. Each country was outlined, and one city in each country was highlighted.
Above the map was a title card, THE BY-HALF PLAN. I’d heard of that somewhere before.
On an off chance that it would actually get me somewhere, I asked Ari, “So, what’s the By-Half Plan?”
Ari shrugged. “They’re planning to reduce the world’s population by half,” he explained morosely.
I almost stopped in my tracks but remembered to keep walking and to look disinterested. “Geez, by half? That’s what, three billion people? They’re ambitious little buggers.”
My mind was reeling at the idea of genocide on that level. It made Stalin and Hitler look like kindergarten teachers. Okay, really evil kindergarten teachers, but still.
Ari shrugged again, and I realized it was hard for him to get worked up about things when he was going to die any day now.
I thought about what else I had seen, and it suddenly hit me: I’d seen some of this stuff before, like in a movie, or a dream, or in...one of those skull-splitting infodumps I used to get. For a while I’d had intensely horrible headaches, where it felt like my brain was imploding inside my skull. Then tons of images, words, sounds, stuff would scroll through my consciousness. I realized that some of what I was seeing, saying, doing right now—I’d already seen it.
Think, think.
I was still concentrating when we turned a corner and I literally ran into someone. Two someones.
Jeb and Angel.
49
“Max! Sweetheart,” said Jeb. “I’m glad they’re letting you get some exercise.”
I stared at him. “So I’ll be in really good shape when they kill me?”
He winced and sort of cleared his throat.
&nb
sp; “Hi, Max,” said Angel.
I just looked at her.
“You should really try one of these cookies,” she said, holding out a chocolate-chip chunk of treason.
“Thanks. I’ll make a note of it. You lying traitor.”
“Max—you know I had to do what was right,” she said. “You weren’t making the best decisions anymore.”
“Yeah, like the one when I decided to come rescue your skinny, ungrateful butt,” I said.
Her small shoulders sagged, and her face looked sad.
Be strong, Maximum, I told myself. You know what you gotta do.
“I have lots of special powers,” she said. “I deserve to be the leader. I deserve to be saved. I’m much, much more special than you or Fang.”
“You just keep telling yourself that,” I said coldly. “But don’t expect me to get on board.”
Her heart-shaped face turned mutinous. “I don’t need you to get on board, Max.” Her voice had an edge of steel in it. She’d learned that from me. What else had she learned? “This is all happening whether you’re on board or not. You’re going to be retired soon, anyway.” She took an angry bite of cookie.
“Maybe. But if I am, I’m going to come back and haunt you, every day for the rest of your hard, traitorous little life.”
Her eyes widened, and she actually took a step back.
“Okay, that’s enough, you two,” said Jeb, just the way he used to when some of us would mix it up back in the day.
“Whatever,” I said in my trademark bored tone. I stepped around them, avoiding any touch as if they were poison, and headed down the hall. My heart was pounding, and I felt an unwelcome flush heat my cheeks.
Ari caught up to me. We walked in silence for a while, then he said, as if offering a consolation prize, “They’re building an army, you know.”
Of course they are, I thought, feeling depressed. “How do you know?”
“I’ve seen them. There’s a whole hangar full of Flyboys, hanging up, charging. They have thousands, and they’re making more all the time. They’re growing Eraser skins in the lab.”
Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports Page 8
