Max

by James Patterson

  Fang frowned and tilted his head. "Uh—what kind of seabird wears preppy Top-Siders?"

  My eyes went wide as I stared first at Fang, then at the dark thing. "Oh, my God! It is wearing Top-Siders! It's Nudge!" 'Cause, I mean, how many preppy mutant bird kids are there? Not a lot.

  Fang and I poured on the speed, scanning the whole sky as we streaked toward Nudge, my Nudge! Nothing seemed to be pursuing her; she was flying fast but not panicky. Now we were close enough to see her long ringlets streaming out in back of her, her bright white smile shining in the deep night sky.

  My heart swelled, and I admitted to myself just how much I'd missed her, how worried I'd been, how hurt I'd felt that she'd chosen safety, calm, and education over us.

  "Nudge!" I shrieked, and she beamed and waved.

  Just then, something huge shot out of the water and slammed into her. It shoved her off balance, knocking the wind out of her. Fang and I surged forward, going into battle mode, and then two more things shot out of the water as if launched from a huge slingshot.

  Two large, wet, familiar things.

  "Max!"

  "Angel?!"

  "Get Gazzy! He's hurt! Oh—Nudge?!"

  "Angel—hi!"

  Fang swooped down and scooped up Gazzy, who had some weird contraption hanging off his head. His eyes were closed, and his face looked like a bulldozer had run over it.

  "He's hurt!" Angel said again. "Nudge! I can't believe you're back!"

  Here's what I was feeling: elation about seeing Nudge again, alive and unhurt; worry over Gazzy, who was now unconscious as we raced back to the naval base; a guilty thrill over what was happening between me and Fang (when will it happen again?); lingering anxiety about my mom; and a deep, abiding contentment that we were all together again, the six of us, my flock, my family.

  Not bad, for someone who hates emotions.

  46

  IT TURNED OUT that Gazzy had been stung by a Portuguese man-of-war, an incredibly dangerous and even deadly jellyfish.

  "Actually, it's not a real jellyfish," the navy doctor explained. "So its toxins are different, and we treat it differently."

  "I offered to pee on him, but they said no," Iggy said, sounding disappointed.

  The navy doctor smiled. "That was once thought to be acceptable treatment. Vinegar too. But actually, it's most important to remove any tentacles to prevent further discharge of venom. Rinsing the sting thoroughly with salt water can help."

  All of us bird kids have had days when we looked like we'd been put in a blender set to "whip." As many fights as we've been in, as many hard places we've been—odds are that someone has at least a black eye, if not broken bones, on any given day.

  But Gazzy really looked bad. They'd removed the man-of-war with gloved hands, dunked Gazzy in salt water, slathered him with goo, and given him a bunch of shots, and he still looked like he'd been dragged behind a chariot for a couple miles.

  Of course, seeing the wings had freaked everyone out, but this was the U.S. military, and they got over it real fast. I mean, if they can deal with Area 51, they can handle anything, right? Including Total, who had left Akila back at the hut and come at Angel's request.

  "He's going to sleep for about a day," the navy doctor said with a smile. "These stings really take it out of you."

  I glanced at the wall clock. "We're getting on a sub in six hours."

  "Oh, no," said the doctor. "He can't go anywhere. Trust me, he's going to feel terrible when he wakes up. There's no way he's getting on a submarine."

  It's taken me a while, but I've learned not to pointlessly butt heads about dumb decisions that I don't have to follow anyway. It's been a real step of personal growth for me. So now, for instance, I didn't even argue with the doctor.

  Instead, I got organized: I sent Fang and Iggy off to find food, got a debriefing from Angel about the adventures they'd had under water while they were supposed to be tucked into bed, and finally, finally, curled up in the hospital armchair with Nudge, while she told us all about being a real kid at school.

  "It was awesome," Nudge admitted. "I loved it. In just a few days, I learned more than I'd learned from weeks of watching TV."

  "That's good," I forced myself to say, and given my highly developed skills of deception, I even sounded very sincere. "And I'm glad to see you're still among the winged."

  Nudge looked embarrassed. "Yeah. But anyway. I realized I just missed you guys so much. And I was too worried about your mom," she told me. "I had to be here to help, if I could."

  I hugged her. "I'm so glad to have you back! Although you missed all the BS."

  "Whaaat?"

  The others filled her in while I checked on Gazzy and watched the clock. The doctor said the Gasman would sleep for a day, which I took to be about four hours in bird-kid time. Sure enough, along about four-thirty in the morning, he woke up.

  It was time to head down to the dock—I wasn't going to risk missing the sub. It felt like a month ago that my mom had been kidnapped. Who knew what had happened by now?

  "You good to go?" I asked Gazzy, fluffing his saltwater-sticky hair with my fingers.

  He did a systems check, then nodded. "Yep. Feel like crap, but I'm okay."

  "You look pretty tough with that face," I said admiringly, and he gave a pleased smile.

  "Okay, troops, let's mobilize," I said. We were all a little punchy from lack of sleep, but I knew a couple cups of coffee would perk us right up.

  "Whoa, hold it!" said a voice. It was the nice doctor, standing in the doorway, holding Gazzy's chart.

  "Sorry," I said briskly. "We've got a sub to catch."

  "He can't go anywhere!" The doctor looked appalled. "People stay in bed for days from a man-of-war sting!"

  "We heal fast," Gazzy said modestly.

  "We were hoping for a chance to study you some more," the doc admitted.

  I sighed. "If I got a nickel every time I heard that… Okay, guys, let's go."

  The doctor planted his feet, crossed his arms, and blocked the door to the hallway.

  "I'm sorry. I can't let you leave."

  "Uh-huh." I looked at Fang. In seconds he'd crossed the room, opened the casement window, and jumped out. Total jumped out after him. A nurse, passing by in the hallway, screamed and dropped an armful of files.

  Gazzy was next. "Thanks for everything, doc," he said, then leaped lightly out. He dropped out of sight, but soon rose, working his wings powerfully, looking good.

  Someone yelled, "There goes another one!" as I was busy hustling Iggy and Nudge out the window. Finally, it was my turn, and I hopped up to the window ledge.

  "Thanks again," I said politely. "But like I said, we've got a sub to catch." Then I let myself fall out the window, watching the ground rush up from six stories below.

  I spread my wings and felt the air press against them as I soared with the flock. I loved that feeling, relished that freedom. The sky was still predawn dark, the wind fresh but not cool.

  Finally, it was time.

  I'm coming, Mom. I'm coming to rescue you.

  47

  HERE ARE TWO things I hadn't thought about when I'd insisted that the navy lend us a sub for the rescue:

  1) The flock and I are just about the most claustrophobic life-forms you'll ever meet; and

  2) We would be trapped in a relatively small, airtight space with the Gasman.

  Now I was on the dock, staring at the open hatch, with its narrow ladder leading straight down.

  We'd spent a lot of time on the Wendy K., the research boat in Antarctica. So we knew that boat interiors were small and compact. But I hadn't really thought about how much more compact a submarine would be.

  The U.S.S. Minnesota was a really big submarine, by sub standards, but it was still smaller than, say, Disney World. Or a wide-open beach. Or a desert. Or, hey, the entire freaking sky.

  "Um, Max, you gonna go?" Nudge asked. There were two officers waiting for us. The seconds were ticking by.

  I
t looked like I'd be climbing into a huge coffin.

  It felt like that too.

  I could not be a total wuss in front of all these people. Especially the flock.

  I flicked a glance at Fang, and his face showed me that he understood what I was feeling, but he knew that I knew that I just had to suck it up and get on the dang sub.

  I felt a cold sweat break out on the back of my neck. My throat was closing. My chest felt tight. I had an image of me trapped on the sub, under water, crying and clawing at the metal walls to get out. Oh, geez. I was wishing I hadn't had that third espresso.

  I swallowed hard and tried to draw in a breath. I remembered that we were doing this to rescue my mom, who had saved my own life more than once. I remembered that she was being held captive in a sub probably not half as nice as this one.

  "It's a sub, Max," urged Total, who was suffering from a bad case of missing-Akila blues, "not a vat of boiling oil. Get on already, and let's see if they have any croissants. I'm starving."

  I took a big step forward, off the dock and onto the metal walkway that led to the top of the sub, not the sticking-up part of the sub, but the topside of its nose. I don't know the technical term.

  There was an open hatch there, and I strode toward it, trying to keep abject terror from showing on my face. I began to climb down the ladder, managing a smile and a wave that I hoped was at least in the neighborhood of jaunty. Then Gazzy stepped on the walkway, followed by Total, and I knew the others weren't far behind.

  There was no going back now.

  Get this: if there was nothing inside the submarine, it might not be so bad. It really was a great big one. On the outside. On the inside, it was crammed chock-full of people, walls of instruments, panels of lights and switches, huge pipes and bundles of thick cables—basically, there was hardly any room to walk. And we're skinny.

  There were not enough relaxation tapes in the world to get me through this.

  Then Fang came up behind me and put his hand on my waist, just for a second. And I felt a little better.

  The two officers zipped down the ladder, and one of them shouted the order to seal the hatch. Then he looked at us, these six weird, mostly tall, somewhat ungroomed children who had permission to be on a naval submarine. Plus their dog, who almost seemed like he could talk.

  "Come with me," he said. "The birds are working again."

  48

  WALKING THROUGH the narrow corridors of the sub was like being inside someone's intestines, like we were making our way through the digestive tract. I kept expecting the Magic School Bus to show up and dump bile on us.

  I absolutely refused to think about the fact that we were sealed inside this thing, sinking below the surface of the water. I kept repeating, We're saving my mom, over and over inside my head.

  The officer stopped outside a door. All the doorways on a sub are shaped like Vienna Fingers cookies, kind of oblong. Each door has a sill about six inches high so that if the sub springs a leak and water gets in, each room can be sealed off. Oh, God, I was gonna die.

  We stepped over the threshold and found ourselves in a small conference room. A tall man with short silver hair and dark brown eyes stood up and smiled. "I'm Captain Joshua Perry," he said, coming to shake hands with all of us. "I understand we have a mission to accomplish."

  This wasn't what I was expecting.

  Your mind creates your reality. If you expect nothing, you open up the universe to give you options. If you expect the worst, you usually get it.

  The Voice. That really was the Voice, not my own thoughts and not something Angel was beaming into my brain. It was the Voice, loud and clear. And it had apparently been watching Oprah again.

  Uh, Voice? Not that I'm not glad to hear you again, but this sub is already awfully crowded, and so is the inside of my head, so this might not be the best time…

  "Max?" Captain Perry was looking at me.

  "Sorry. What?"

  "We haven't had any direct word about your mother. However, late last night, the following surveillance film was taken in the same general area as the first one that you saw. It looks strange because it was taken with a night-vision camera."

  Someone dimmed the lights, and an image flickered on a white screen at one end of the room. It looked like daytime, except darker and kind of greenish. It was, like before, a huge expanse of featureless ocean. Covered with the shiny sides of dead, floating fish, as far as the eye could see. And attacking the seafood buffet were thousands of seabirds, who had clearly heard about the hundred-for-the-price-of-one special.

  "We don't know what killed these fish," said the captain. "Several were recovered and tested. They were negative for traumatic injury, bacteria, parasites, starvation, fungal illnesses, cancers, enzyme imbalances, and gas bubble disease. They're simply dead, and we don't know why."

  "Mass suicide?" Total muttered, clearly wishing he was back at the base with Akila.

  "Then, look at this," said Captain Perry, pointing with a laser pen. The image pulled back; the camera was clearly attached to a rising helicopter. When the copter was quite high, it changed direction, as if heading back to land.

  All of a sudden, in one tiny corner of the image, an enormous dark thing burst out of the water, sending dead fish flying everywhere and making the birds scatter. The camera quickly swung back to focus on it, and the helicopter started dropping altitude, but within moments the dark thing was gone without a trace.

  "We've watched this film a hundred times now," said Captain Perry, "and we still can't tell what that was. It was almost like a mountain suddenly emerged from the ocean, then disappeared just as quickly. But sonar images show no large masses in that area whatsoever."

  The lights flickered back on.

  "What does this have to do with my mom?" I asked.

  Captain Perry looked frustrated. "We don't know. In the earlier video, we saw part of the wrecked fishing boat in the background of the picture of Dr. Martinez being held hostage. This happened in the same area. The two instances of the dead fish, the enormous flock of birds, the huge thing rising out of the ocean—they're connected somehow. We just don't know how."

  Everything is connected, Max, said the Voice. Everything affects everything else, especially in the ocean.

  I gritted my teeth in frustration. I'd forgotten how incredibly annoying the Voice could be, with its fortune-cookie pronouncements.

  "It's all got to be connected somehow," I said. "Are we headed there now?"

  Captain Perry nodded. "We're keeping on code-red alert status, with full radar and sonar surveillance. We don't want that mountain to surge up and break us in half."

  My eyes went wide. Was that even a possibility? Why hadn't someone told me this? Why was I even on this sub? If there's anything guaranteed to make me hyperventilate, it's being stuck in a place I can't punch my way out of.

  It's okay, Max. I had to stop for a second and distinguish that this voice inside my head was Angel, not the Voice voice. It's okay, Max, Angel thought again. If anything happens, we can all breathe under water, remember? It's like when we're on an airplane—if anything happens to it, we know six kids who will be fine. Same thing here. If anything happens to this sub, the six of us will be able to breathe through our gills. Trust me.

  Oh, right. Our gills would appear. Excellent. Now I felt better. Not.

  49

  THE MAN LOOKED at his second-in-command, who was looking at the third-in-command, who was staring accusingly at the fourth-in-command.

  "They… escaped?" The man's voice was brusque.

  The third-in-command kicked the fourth-in-command, who was kneeling on the floor, his forehead actually touching the cold metal.

  "Yes, sir!" Everyone in the room knew the high cost of admitting such a thing. They also knew how much worse it would have been if he had lied about it. "I beg your forgiveness, sir! But they threw themselves over the edge of a cliff. Our trackers were programmed to follow them—no matter what. They kept attacking, sir. A
nd they went over the cliff as well."

  "But they couldn't fly, could they, Zhou Tso?"

  "N-no, sir." He cringed.

  "Unlike our quarry, who can."

  "Yes, sir!"

  Mr. Chu thought for a moment, though he already knew what he was going to do. The weakest link in the chain always had to be eliminated. The men and women he answered to would expect no less.

  He again met the eyes of his second-in-command. The fourth had failed, which was a failure of the third, who had picked and trained him. So it was also the second's failure, since she had picked and trained the third. Ultimately, this was Chu's own failure, for he had picked and trained his second. That was how it would be viewed by the board. They all knew it.

  Mr. Chu sighed, then motioned to his second-in-command. She gave a quick nod, then barked instructions at the two armed guards by the doorway. The fourth-in-command cringed and started to beg for mercy but was immediately silenced. The guards dragged him from the room.

  Mr. Chu again sighed heavily. If only the girl had joined his force! It would have been glorious. Instead, she had turned into an increasingly intolerable problem. Fortunately, he was holding the final ace: her mother, Dr. Valencia Martinez.

  Clasping his hands behind his back, Mr. Chu turned to look out the small, thick portholes in his office wall. He knew the fourth-in-command's solution would take several minutes. "Now the… mutants are on a U.S. Navy submarine?" Mr. Chu verified, gazing out at the blackness.

  "Yes." There was a world of frustration in that one word.

  Mr. Chu turned and met the eyes of his second-in-command. "Attacking a U.S. submarine, armed with nuclear warheads, would be suicide. Not only for us, but for those we represent. Even on a global level."

  The second-in-command was torn but was forced to admit that Mr. Chu was right. "Yes." She let out the word.

  "But, of course, if something were to happen to the bird people while they were not on the submarine…" Mr. Chu let his words trail off, and turned to stare out the portholes. At this depth, no light filtered down from the surface.