Maximum Ride Forever Read online

  “I’m going,” I announced, and walked back to the elevator. Right now, certain death seemed preferable. I jabbed the elevator button.

  “Listen, I know this is hard to understand right now,” Dylan told Stepford Girl quickly. “You think we’re supposed to be together, because that’s what you’ve been told. But we’re not.”

  This poor girl had been created with one purpose, and Dylan had to tell her it wasn’t going to work out. He was being so gentle with her, though, so kind. The way I’d never been with him.

  Don’t turn around, I thought guiltily. Just keep staring at this elevator door.

  “But we were made to be together,” she insisted sweetly. “I’ve done everything you wanted, tried to become everything you wanted. I know you like to read, so I’ve been reading. Since you wanted me to have a name, I took it from this book.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the cover. It was The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

  Margaret A. ImMargaretA. The commenter with “inside info” on Fang’s blog.

  “You’re ImMargaretA?” I asked, turning to gape at her.

  Her eyes widened and darted to Dylan nervously, and then she smiled at both of us, blinking like she had no freaking idea what I was talking about.

  “You posted on the blog,” I said testily. “You described the deaths of my flock. Remember?”

  Margaret’s face flushed. “The doctor let me follow all Horseman’s adventures,” she chirped happily, but I saw the anger behind her eyes when she looked at me—like I was spilling a secret we shared. “So I would know when he would come back to me.”

  When she looked back at Dylan, she turned on the charm, but now I saw something else beneath her adoration: fear.

  She still thought he was a real Horseman, I realized. And she was terrified.

  On the blog, she wasn’t trying to spread false information; she’d only repeated what she had been told was true. She’d really been trying to warn us about the Remedy. About Dylan.

  And I’d just sold her out.

  “It’s okay,” I assured her. “Just take us to the doctor.”

  But she wasn’t having it.

  “The doctor is busy,” Margaret A. answered, glaring at me, and then turned back to Dylan with a coy smile. “You must be tired, baby,” she cooed. “Come sit down.”

  “I can’t be with you,” Dylan blurted, seeming oblivious to her act. “I love… someone else.”

  My chest tightened, but Margaret had finally had enough.

  “You can’t be with me?” she snapped, her sugary voice hardening into something more real—something strong. “Well, guess what? Maybe I never wanted to end up with a contract killer, pieced together part by part, my identity wiped clean. But if I have to be a living doll to avoid getting gassed with H8E or blown to pieces in a nuclear blast, I can play along. Okay?”

  She fixed Dylan with in icy stare, but her eyes were filling with tears.

  “Margaret, listen to me,” I said in a low whisper. “You don’t have to pretend anymore. We’re going to get you out of here.”

  “There’s no way out,” she said miserably. “He just keeps moving farther down.”

  “Down where?” I pressed.

  Margaret A. glanced at the mirror, and I met her eyes. Crocodile tears started to roll down her sculpted cheeks, and she broke my gaze. But then, in the mirror, I saw what she’d really been looking at—an imperfection, some kind of seam.

  A door.

  86

  DYLAN PUSHED THROUGH the mirrored door to find a winding metal staircase that reached down what looked like several hundred feet into darkness. It was so narrow, there was no question that only one of us could fit at a time.

  Max protested, of course, but Dylan insisted on going first. Even aside from Angel’s warnings about protecting Max, Gunther-Hagen was Dylan’s maker, and he needed to face him alone.

  “Don’t fall off,” Margaret warned him.

  That warning seemed obvious, but the staircase was so narrow it hugged Dylan’s hips, and as he descended into what felt like the center of the earth, it shuddered and creaked under his weight, threatening to pitch him into the abyss beneath him. He thought he could hear creatures in water splashing somewhere far below, hissing and snapping their jaws.

  But when he finally reached the bottom, the staircase ended on solid ground—a street. Dylan blinked up at a door, confused. It looked exactly like the door to the mansion where he’d first found the doctor. The streets were holographic projections, Dylan knew, but the reproduction was incredible.

  The odd sense of déjà vu continued as his boots echoed across the marbled tile and he approached the grand ballroom and saw Dr. Gunther-Hagen sitting in his office chair, just as he’d left him. Alone.

  However, this time, hundreds of screens lined the walls—world maps, weather reports, graphs of ash trajectory, and recordings from his Horsemen.

  “A10103,” the doctor said, swiveling to greet him.

  “Actually, it’s just Dylan.” He removed his worn leather gloves and tossed them to the floor between them.

  “How disappointing,” the doctor said, but he was grinning with satisfaction, and it made Dylan’s skin crawl.

  “I am not the monster you think I am, Dylan. I only wanted to make you stronger,” he said earnestly. “Look around. You can have the life you want. You don’t even realize you’re fighting against your own kind.”

  Dylan laughed aloud, and the harsh sound echoed up into the frescoes. He saw nothing of himself reflected in this egomaniacal man who had created him. Once, this had been the person Dylan knew best. But he’d become more and more unrecognizable, and now Dylan felt that he had nothing in common with him.

  Absolutely nothing.

  “You failed,” Dylan announced, leaning menacingly over the doctor. “Jeb is dead, and so are the other Horsemen.” Dylan tapped the screen on his wrist, and the bloody battle replayed on-screen. “You did make me stronger. Stronger than all of them—I’m the only one left.”

  “Not only you.” Dr. Gunther-Hagen lifted the sleeve of his white coat, revealing a screen on his wrist that matched Dylan’s. “I injected myself with the serum, of course.” The doctor’s eyes glittered. “My creations shouldn’t be the only ones with a chance at eternal life. You and I are left together, son. Something tells me you didn’t completely overcome your programming, hmm?” He pursed his lips.

  Had he? Dylan dropped his eyes. This was what the doctor had done to him—made him question, made him doubt. Dylan had struggled with his origin from the beginning, trying to determine how much was really him and how much was… everything else. He hadn’t become a mindless killer, but apart from that, did he really have any control at all?

  Dylan heard footsteps echoing through the entryway and looked at his maker.

  “No.” Dylan shook his head sadly. “I just did what you first programmed me to do: I couldn’t stop loving Maximum Ride.”

  “You thought you’d won, didn’t you?” Max looked at the doctor from the doorway, her eyes like skewers.

  “Oh, I have won, child.” Gunther-Hagen sank back in his office chair, unperturbed. “I was just telling Dylan about our coming eternal life.”

  “He injected himself with Fang’s DNA,” Dylan explained.

  “Is that so?” Max shook her head sadly at the doctor, but she was smiling. “Jeb told me the serum wasn’t quite there yet. You might’ve been trying to live forever, but I’m afraid forever’s going to stop a little shorter than you’d planned.

  “And, bummer for you, there’s been a change in power, so things are probably going to get a little rough from here on out. There’s no way you’re getting out of here, Häagen-Dazs. We have you completely surrounded.”

  “The last of the world’s righteous survivors, all in one place?” For the first time, Dylan noticed that the doctor was tapping his fingertips carefully against the screen at his wrist. “How convenient.”

  Dylan! Max! There�
�s a bomb! Angel’s voice rang through his head.

  “Where is it?” Max growled, her body rigid with caution, her face muscles twitching in fury.

  Dr. Gunther-Hagen opened his pristine white lab coat and started to unbutton his expensive collared shirt, fixing them with his icy, amused gaze.

  But when the shirt fell open, there was a mass of wires and steel canisters where his chest should have been. The doctor wasn’t rigged to the bomb.

  He was the bomb.

  “Jeb was kind enough to hook me up to the last reactor…” The doctor swirled slowly around in his office chair, his voice trailing off. “It’s a pity you’ve killed him—how will you disable it now?”

  “I guess we’ll just have to kill you,” Max snapped.

  “Oh, I hope so,” Gunther-Hagen said, still smiling. “If I die, the bomb engages, and your little army goes down with me.”

  87

  I THOUGHT OF what Angel had said before the battle. The Remedy thinks he’s won. But he can’t see the future. I can.

  We will see him fall.

  There was nowhere for him to fall, though. We were already at the bottom of the earth.

  “We have to get him out of here,” I told Dylan as quietly as I could. “I’ll fly him as high as I can, and you start getting people underground.”

  “Max, no, let me do it. He wouldn’t blow me up.”

  But I was the one who was supposed to save the world. Angel had said that all along. Everything I’d survived so far had been building to this moment. It was the last chance I was going to get.

  “He’s mine,” I said, and my tone left no room for argument. “Let’s go, Hansy.”

  Dr. G-H gave a philosophical shrug and got up, as if he was indulging my silly whim. Pushing him toward the door, I grabbed the collar of his white coat, balling the fabric in my fist. As I started to drag him up the eleventy million steps of the medieval staircase, Gunther-Hagen kept that supercilious grin plastered to his face.

  “I guess there’s a way out after all,” he said smugly.

  He didn’t set off the bomb while we climbed, nor when we went out Margaret’s door and through the dark passageways. Out on the bloodstained battlefield, the Remedy stood still when I hooked my arms around him and took off, my wings carrying us high over where Gazzy and Iggy were leading the other kids in rounding up the prisoners.

  “I’ve so missed the great outdoors,” the doctor said. He closed his eyes, seeming to blissfully savor the wind on his face, despite the air, which was becoming more and more ash laden.

  Now that I had him in my hands, I didn’t want him to enjoy a single second of his life. He was brilliant and could have helped humanity so much. But he’d thought the only solution was to wipe people off the earth.

  “No,” I said, shaking him. “You don’t get to close your eyes, Häagen-Dazs. Look at all those people down there.” I pointed to the kids below, the ones who were helping the wounded, the ones who were carrying their dead comrades off the field. “You killed their families, their friends. You destroyed their homes, but they’re survivors. They’re free, because you failed. Look!”

  Gunther-Hagen craned his neck to look at me. “You want me to stay and watch their expressions as the reactor detonates, is that it? I agree, it would be most entertaining to watch.”

  I ground my teeth together and shot upward, flying high into the atmosphere and east over the ocean, until I was sure the kids would be safe.

  “Now I’m the one who’ll be making threats.” I hooked one arm beneath his neck and gave a little yank. He coughed, his hands reaching for my arm. “So you’d better start talking.”

  “Ask me anything you’d like, Maximum,” Gunther-Hagen said, evidently enjoying this. “I know once you hear my reasoning…”

  “Don’t count on it. Now, how did you plan it?” I demanded. “And who helped you?”

  If any of those scumbags were still alive, we’d deal with them as well.

  Dr. Gunther-Hagen pressed his lips together into an ironic smile. “The fates aligned, you might say. I barely had to plan at all… Dr. Martinez did most of the work for me.”

  I blinked hard at that. “I was with my mom the day of the explosion,” I snapped. “She was trying to protect everyone she could.”

  “Oh, her work with me started much earlier than that. You’ll remember her involvement in Angel’s modification, I’m sure.”

  My gaze faltered.

  “Jeb knew about Angel’s gift, but it was Dr. Martinez who founded the Psychic Initiative,” Dr. G-H continued. “She said Angel was just a child—a powerful child who didn’t know how to manage her power. That capable, responsible adults needed to take over, so we could learn about the risks of the future.” His voice had a dark edge to it. Though I was the one gripping his throat, it felt like he was moving toward checkmate. “All I had to do was fund it.”

  “My mom was just trying to save the planet!” I said defensively.

  “Oh, I assure you, Maximum, so am I. We just had different ideas about how to go about it. Dr. Martinez wanted to alert the world powers about the asteroid and blow it out of the sky with nuclear missiles. But I persuaded her that we should handle things more privately.” The corners of his eyes wrinkled with amusement. “So as to prevent panic.”

  “So instead you unleashed a deadly plague to kill ninety-nine percent of the world, let the asteroid destroy even more people, then nuked all the cities for good measure,” I said.

  I remembered the pictures we’d scrolled through on the computer. The images of people sobbing, people praying, people running even when they had nowhere to go.

  I didn’t know how he could live with himself. But then, he wouldn’t have to much longer.

  88

  THE ICY WIND whipped through my tangled hair and tugged at my aching arms, and I almost dropped the psychopath to his death right then. But I wasn’t done yet.

  Find. Truth.

  Dr. Gunther-Hagen was shaking his head. “The virus wasn’t my work, I’m afraid. The Apocalypticas left us that little gift, and they leaked it all on their own.”

  So my mom was right about that.

  “I don’t think they imagined such initial success. A hundred dead in a couple of days, millions within a week, and by the end of the month, a quarter of the world.” The doctor spoke breathlessly, his eyes lighting up. “It was extraordinarily impressive.”

  “Impressive?” My mouth gaped. “Is that what you call murdering billions of people?”

  I loosened my grip on his neck, and the doctor slipped down a few inches. His face blanched a light shade of green, but when he answered me, his tone was still measured.

  “Let me remind you, child, I did the honorable thing: I developed a vaccine.”

  “You can buy a lot with a vaccine when the population is in the grips of a global pandemic.” I narrowed my eyes. “Like… a bunch of nuclear bombs, for example.”

  “Actually, those were a gift. My staff had the technology to accurately target the asteroid, after all. With your mother’s political connections, the Russians were easily persuaded to hand over the stockpile if it finally meant some good PR for them.”

  He betrayed her—along with the rest of the world.

  “Why develop the vaccine, then?” I pressed. “What was it worth?”

  “I do love an eager pupil.” The doctor smirked. “It bought me a name.”

  “A name?” I repeated.

  “When the virus was released and so much of the population was infected, you can imagine how much media attention the discovery of a vaccine received.”

  Yeah, I could. I pictured his face covering the newspapers, his smile flashing out of televisions. They probably called him a freaking hero. The thought made me so furious I couldn’t speak. I glared at him, daring him to continue.

  “After the asteroid hit, suddenly everyone wanted another quick remedy. They looked to me again, of course. Who else could they trust more?”

  “So you’r
e saying you were able to push the world into a dictatorial state through branding?” I said in disbelief.

  “A remedy gave them permission to look away,” he explained. “It assured them that someone was capable of eliminating their problems. And I have.”

  “How can you call yourself a doctor?” I asked in disgust. “Didn’t you, like, take some kind of oath saying, ‘I will not unleash death and destruction on my patients and all of modern society’?”

  “The earth is my primary patient,” the doctor reasoned calmly. “And the ecosystem will recover much better with fewer people to compromise it.”

  “Right, because radioactive debris is super healthy for the planet!” I sneered. “Wait, you didn’t really think this little confession was gonna save you, did you?” I loosened my grip a bit more.

  He flinched, instinctively grasping at air, and I smiled faintly as I pulled him back. Gunther-Hagen’s eyes hardened, and his fingers locked around my wrists. “You still don’t understand. I don’t need to be saved. Humans aren’t supposed to be saved. My work will live on. My legacy—”

  I cut him off. “Your legacy is dead. Jeb is dead. He’ll never make another Horseman.”

  “Dylan is my legacy,” the doctor countered. “A truly evolved specimen, despite some remaining glitches. He and the female mate I created for him will help repopulate the earth with a genetically ideal species. You were never worthy of him.”

  The thing was… that last part was completely true.

  My expression must have faltered, because the doctor smiled. “You’re really very ordinary, you know, Maximum Ride,” he said sympathetically. “Weak. And soon, you and your kind will die out, just like your boyfriend did.”

  He tapped the screen on his wrist. I couldn’t see the image, but I could hear that it was the video Dylan had shown me. Even above the howling wind, I heard Fang’s screams.

  Too. Far.

  “Nothing’s dying out, you disgusting supremacist,” I snapped. My arms quivered with rage as I held him in front of me. I felt the heat rushing to my cheeks as I said the words: