Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports Read online

  I held her hand tightly. “They never do. But I will survive, and I will steal you one of those magic suits.”

  She smiled.

  “Here you see our patented process for growing replacement limbs,” said the Director. A man walked out, reached over, and detached his arm from the shoulder. He showed that it was made of flesh and bone, and was attached to him by an electronic interface that looked suspiciously like an iPod data port.

  “Way gross,” said Nudge, and we all nodded.

  “We made the replica arm out of biogenetic matrix,” the Director explained.

  “Is that from Duncan Hines?” I whispered.

  “It functions exactly like the limb he lost—and even better,” the Director went on. “We laced titanium cells into the bone material, strengthening its stress resistance by four hundred percent.”

  “And guaranteeing him hassles at airport security stations all over the world,” I murmured.

  “Next we have one of our most successful human hybrids,” said Dr. Janssen.

  A woman walked out, totally normal looking. Did she have wings? Was she an Eraser?

  “Mara here had Panthera pardus genetic material grafted into her human DNA. It’s given her some unique qualities.”

  “What’s that?” Angel whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Something feline,” said Ari.

  He was right. Up on the platform, the woman opened her mouth to reveal humongous razor-sharp fangs, which looked even more lethal than the typical Eraser’s. Then she crouched down, sprang up as if made of rubber, and landed fifteen feet above the platform, clinging to a tall light stand.

  Everyone who hadn’t gasped when they saw her fangs quit trying to be suave and went ahead and gasped.

  The Director smiled and motioned her down. “As usual, the leopard genes were expressed in some unexpected ways.”

  Meaning they still didn’t know what the heck they were doing.

  Mara turned around. The Director unzipped her jumpsuit at the back, and an excited murmur raced through the crowd. Ol’ Mara had leopard spots trailing down her spine.

  “Guess she can’t change that,” I said, and Total snickered.

  “And Mara is just the beginning,” said the Director.

  112

  Growing up in the lab at the School, where we were surrounded by dog crates filled with mix ’n’ match genetic experiments, we’d seen pretty much any combination of two living things that you could imagine, and probably a thousand that you couldn’t. Virtually all of them had been unsuccessful, or “nonviable,” as the whitecoats said. A tiny percentage made it past the embryo stage, and a few struggled along for a year or two before their horrific deficits caught up with them. As far as I knew, we, the flock, had been by far the most successful hybrid. Us and the Erasers. Even the Erasers only lived about six years or so. We were ancient compared with them.

  Today we were seeing some successful hybrids, like Mara. After SpotGirl, the Director trotted out two people who could control the color of their skin just by thinking about it.

  “Can they turn blue?” Nudge asked, fascinated. “Or purple?”

  “Who knows?” I said, and then my stomach twisted as the people onstage literally turned camouflage right in front of us. I thought about what the military people of various countries could do with that and felt ill.

  We saw people who could increase their height by about four inches, just by controlling their muscles and skeletal structures with their minds.

  “Combine that with the skin-changing types, and you’ve got a recipe for a bank robber deluxe,” I said. “They’d never be recognized.”

  We saw people with hard, scaly, bulletproof skin, or GatorGuys, as we called them. We saw a woman who could scream at pitches too high for any of us to hear but had Total writhing in pain on the ground, biting his lip to keep from shrieking swear words. Her voice could break glass, which isn’t totally unusual, but it could also shatter metal, which seemed new and different—and completely horrifying.

  “Think of what a successful nag she would be,” I said to Ari, and he tried to smile but couldn’t. His skin seemed to have a grayish cast, and he’d been unusually quiet for several hours. I wondered if he was near his end.

  “These things all look like soldiers,” said Nudge. “Like they’d be good in a war, you know?”

  “They look all warry because they were built to be an army,” I told her.

  “Well, that would do it,” she said.

  “Don’t these people ever think about anything else?” Total muttered in disgust. “There’s more to life than world domination, you know.”

  “Max? What’s that?” Angel asked, pointing.

  I looked. Up on the stage the Director seemed to have a remote control in her hand. Then I saw a small swarm of glittery copper-colored things circling around her. Were they bugs? Had they started engineering bugs? Oh, great. Just what the world needed.

  The Director motioned to someone. He opened a large plastic box, and hundreds of beautiful butterflies flew out. It was a weird jolt of color in this gray landscape. Well, besides the camo people, that is.

  The glittery things weren’t bugs.

  They were nano-bullets, with their own internal guidance systems.

  Within seconds they had locked on to the butterflies, and moments after that, all that was left were bits of shimmery wings, floating to the ground.

  Nudge, Angel, Ari, Total, and I stared at one another in horror.

  113

  “What do they have against butterflies?” Nudge demanded, outraged.

  “I think the butterflies were just an example,” I said. “I think the point is that those things are tiny and deadly and can find the proverbial needle in the biogenetically modified haystack.”

  Total shook his head, then lay down and covered his eyes with his paws. “It’s all too much,” he moaned. “I’m too sensitive for this.”

  “And now, we have saved the best for last,” the Director boomed over the loudspeakers. “I give you...Generation Omega!”

  A boy came out. He looked about my age but was maybe a couple inches shorter than I was, and heavier by about forty pounds. He had pale brown hair and silvery blue eyes, and was wearing one of the magic suits, which could change color and form at a verbal command.

  “Oh, they gave him the cute gene,” said Nudge, and Angel giggled.

  The Director beamed at the boy. He looked out at the crowd without expression.

  “Omega here is our pinnacle achievement,” said the Director, “the result of more than six decades of research. He is an unqualified success and far surpasses any hybrid made before.”

  “Ouch,” said Total.

  “In Omega lie our hopes and dreams for the utopia of the future,” the Director gushed. “He is the key to the hyperevolved human of tomorrow. He’s immune to virtually every disease known and has superacute reflexes and greatly increased strength. He tests off the charts of every intelligence scale devised. In addition, he has superior memory retention and reaction time. He’s truly a superman.”

  “Plus, he cooks like a dream and makes darling floral arrangements in his spare time,” I muttered.

  “And he’s here to demonstrate just how tough he is, how supremely suited he is to forge a new human existence in our brand-new world.”

  “Brand-new but full of dead people and empty buildings,” I said.

  “To begin, Omega will vanquish an obsolete but somewhat successful human-avian hybrid,” said the Director. “And that will be a symbol for how everything will go from here on.”

  I stiffened and stared at her.

  The Director looked back at me.

  “Right, Max?” she said.

  114

  Have I mentioned how much I can’t stand despotic psychopaths? Why, yes, Max, you have. Like, a couple hundred times.

  Well, it’s for reasons like this.

  “Maximum Ride and Omega will fight to the
death,” said the Director merrily, as if announcing the next croquet competition.

  “Max?” Nudge whispered, appalled.

  Ari grabbed my arm and stepped halfway in front of me, to protect me. I smiled at him and shook my head slightly, and he stepped back with an angry frown.

  “That guy wants to kill you, Max,” said Angel, sounding scared. “His whole life, he’s been trained to kill you.”

  Of course. Because God forbid he should have any kind of normal existence, watching TV, eating Twinkies, and so on.

  Like a school of washed-out-gray fish, the mutants all turned to stare at me. They parted, as if Moses were waving his staff over them, and then Omega did a high double somersault off the stage, landing perfectly on the gray grit with a barely heard crunch.

  “Angel, if you can, this would be a good time to mess with his mind,” I murmured.

  “On it,” she said, but she didn’t sound hopeful.

  My heart had kicked into high gear, my fists were clenched, and adrenaline was whipping like white lightning through my veins.

  From the end of the mutant corridor, Omega started coming at me, doing one handspring after another, leaping forward onto his hands, flipping over, then landing lightly, a human circle. He could move incredibly fast, and within seconds his booted feet landed crisply right in front of me.

  Omega snapped upright, and for a second, those silvery eyes looked coldly into mine.

  Before he knew what was happening, I had cocked my arm back and slammed my fist into his left eye as hard as I could.

  I can move pretty fast too, when I want.

  He staggered back but used the energy from my punch to fuel a spinning snap kick that would have caught me right in the neck if I weren’t a great fighter and the fastest bird kid around.

  Instead, I was ready, and I grabbed the heel of his boot and whipped it to the left, yanking him off balance so that he landed hard on his back in the dirt. Hoo-yah.

  In a split second he sprang up again. I blocked his hard elbow jab to my head, but his other hand knifed into my side, right over my kidney. The pain was immediate and stunning; it hurt so much that I wanted to sink to my knees and throw up.

  But I hadn’t been raised that way.

  It’s just pain, I told myself. Pain is merely a message, and you can ignore the message.

  So I stayed on my feet, sucked in a breath, and smacked my open palm against his ear with all my force. His face crumpled, and his mouth opened in a brief, silent scream. I hoped I’d ruptured his eardrum. But all too quickly, his face straightened out and he lunged at me again, elbowing me in the ribs and then chopping the back of my neck with the edge of his hand.

  Pain is merely a message. Right now I was holding all calls.

  I managed to spin and kick him hard in the side, then followed with a snap kick right into his spine. If he’d been an ordinary human, it would have broken his back. But Omega just staggered, instantly righted himself, and came roaring back full force.

  Usually I try not to kill people, ’cause I’m just a softie that way. Even Ari—I only killed him by accident. But I decided that since my ex-mom had said this was a fight to the death, in a way I kind of had permission to kill this weiner. And yes, I’m worried about the state of my soul and karma and blah blah blah, but right now I wanted to live, to come out of this battle alive. So I would deal with my karma later. And if I came back as a roach in the next life, well, at least I’d survive the nuclear holocaust.

  I did a spinning kick where I literally looked like a propeller, both feet off the ground, scissoring at Omega with my powerful legs. One kick caught him hard in his back, and he lurched forward. As he tried to block the next one and grab my boot, I slammed right into the back of his perfect little head and knocked him to the ground.

  In seconds I had sprung onto his back, grabbed one arm behind him, and yanked hard, up and to the left.

  His arm popped out of its socket with a stomach-churning

  thunk sound.

  “Maybe you should change your name to Theta,” I hissed into his ear as he gasped, facedown in the dirt. “Or Epsilon.”

  Okay, now, the shoulder dislocation, I have to tell you, stopped most people cold.

  “My...name...is...Omega,” he ground out.

  Then he jerked upward, throwing me off as his shoulder joint popped loudly back into place. He grimaced, then came after me again, murder in his bloodshot, silvery eyes.

  115

  You are reading Fang’s Blog. Welcome!

  Date: Already Too Late!

  You are visitor number: Thing is still broken.

  Watch Out, Guys, Here We Come

  It’s about five a.m. We should be sneaking on board the cargo plane soon. I’ve let the others sleep as much as they can—and of course now I’m so wiped I can’t think straight. I’ll try to grab some zzz’s on the plane. Once it’s up in the air, we’re golden. We’re probably the only people in the world who don’t worry about plane crashes. If something happens to this plane and we start going down, I’ll be like, later!

  I hope Max is okay. Any of you guys—if you’re around Lendeheim, Germany, go to the castle there and raise heck, okay?

  —Fang

  A slight sound made Fang quit typing. He listened. It wasn’t dawn yet—through the hangar windows he could see the glow of the amber safety lights outside. Maybe the loading guys had shown up early.

  And maybe Fang had been born yesterday and was a gullible numskull.

  Silently he closed his laptop and stashed it in his backpack. Then he slid over to the others and touched their legs. They woke instantly, with no sound, the way they’d been trained.

  The Gasman looked at Fang. Fang put a finger to his lips, and the Gasman nodded.

  Fang reached over and tapped the back of Iggy’s hand twice.

  Iggy sat up carefully and nodded also.

  Then their world imploded: The enormous metal doors at the hangar entrance opened with earsplitting creaks; the glass door by the hangar office shattered inward; and two high windows on the other side broke as Flyboys began crawling through like angry, angry wasps.

  “Get outside!” Fang ordered the boys. “Iggy, open doors right in front, twelve o’clock!”

  The trick to having obedient, unquestioning children was to have death be the other option, Fang thought as he raced toward the oncoming Flyboys.

  There were dozens of them, some running in, weapons ready; some airborne, swooping down like big butt-ugly insects. They opened fire: Bullets began ricocheting off the metal hangar walls, off the pallet movers and Bobcats.

  Fang flew straight through the crowd of Flyboys. Several of them landed blows on him, making him suck in his breath, but he stayed aloft and made it outside. Instantly a bullet grazed his shoulder. Hissing, he glanced down, saw it was just a surface wound, and raced upward. There! He saw the Gasman and Iggy also outside. Excellent. Now, if they could all meet up and somehow lose these suckers...somehow?

  Fang darted here and there, keeping his wings in close, the way the hawks had. He banked and maneuvered tightly, able to move much faster and more nimbly than the Flyboys.

  He could still hear shots from inside the hangar, and he had a moment to think, They might not want to be shooting so close to that plane’s gas tank, then boom! As in—BOOM! The metal roof of the hangar blew upward, and a massive fireball boiled out. Jagged chunks of metal flew everywhere, and Fang saw the Gasman take a hot shard across his face. The Gasman gasped and put one hand to his cheek but still managed to punch both of his feet into a Flyboy’s chest, knocking it sideways.

  The Flyboys weren’t great at flying sideways, and before that one could right itself, it crashed to the ground.

  Bits of other exploded Flyboys rained around them. Fang swooped down, grabbed a fallen weapon, then rocketed back into the air. He tried to fire the gun, took a second to find the safety, then let rip a hail of bullets at a line of maybe ten Flyboys. It effectively mowed them down, and Fang
seriously questioned Max’s “no guns” rule.

  “You will die today,” several Flyboys promised in their weird metallic voices. “We are here to kill you and the others. Max and the rest of your flock are already dead. Now it is your turn.”

  116

  Fang felt a cold jolt, then dismissed it. Max wasn’t dead. He would know, somehow. He would have felt it. The world still felt the same to him; therefore, Max was still in it.

  “We are here to kill you,” the Flyboys intoned all together.

  “Then you’re out of luck,” Fang snarled, and opened fire again. Another ten Flyboys dropped, hitting the ground with somewhat sickening crunching and splatting sounds.

  “You will not die easily,” yet another Flyboy droned.

  “You got that right.” Fang had never seen so many Flyboys before—there must have been three hundred? More? The Gasman and Iggy were still holding their own—the Flyboys seemed to be trying to capture them instead of kill them outright. Because what would be the fun of that? Fang thought.

  “First we will dismember you,” said a Flyboy. “We will post the pictures on your blog. To show what happens when you resist. Then we will make you recant everything you have said on your blog.”

  Fang grinned, continuing to bob and weave up and down by fifteen-foot drops. “After you dismember me? Did you fail basic human biology?”

  “We will torture you,” the Flyboys pressed on.

  “I don’t think so,” said Fang, and mowed them down. God! The whole firing-a-weapon thing was amazing! It just worked so incredibly well! It was so efficient! What did Max have against guns, anyway?

  “We will show the world how you take back everything you said.” A new, unmowed-down crop of Flyboys continued the same old song.

  “Here’s a tip,” Fang advised them. “If you show me being tortured and then taking everything back, people might catch on. They might actually guess that I didn’t do it voluntarily.”

  “We will torture you,” the Flyboys insisted.

  “Okay, bored now,” Fang said, and pulled the trigger. Only to have nothing happen. Maybe the gun was empty. In an instant he’d swooped and tried to pluck another gun from a crumpled Flyboy body. That gun was attached to its Flyboy, though, so Fang ended up being yanked to the ground. He dropped it, ran a bit to get away from ground-based Flyboys, then finally found an unattached gun.