Maximum Ride Forever (3 page)

SYDNEY WAS NOT the booming metropolis we had heard of. In fact, it was pretty much uninhabitable.

Huge waves crashed through the city, flowing through angular valleys created by the buildings. Abandoned cars bobbed like bath toys in the current before they were tossed against the salt-crusted, crumbling skyscrapers. The foam sprayed three flights up.

There were no people anywhere. Dead or alive.

“Where do you think everyone went?” Nudge asked.

“Maybe they’re all at the opera,” I said dryly.

Nudge grinned. “I
told
you I knew what I was talking about.”

“Seriously, though, Max. Shelter…”

I looked at Iggy’s pale, drawn face, and the circles
underneath Angel’s eyes. I saw the salt caked on Nudge’s parched lips. I heard the sharpness in Gazzy’s cough and realized Akila had barely made a sound since we’d left. Despite their jokes, my flock was just about at its breaking point.

I felt the exhaustion settle into my own body. “What are you proposing?”

Fang nodded upward. “I say we break into a penthouse suite.”

Nudge squealed, clapping her hands, and it was settled.

If you want to know how seriously bad weather can get, try to fly through it, like, without a plane. The falling volcanic ash mixed with the ocean spray, forming a gritty mud that pelted us. All visible surfaces were coated in a concrete-like sludge, and the buildings looked like enormous crumbling gravestones.

And my little flock? We looked like gargoyles, dragging ourselves up the side of a tall skyscraper. Our wings grew heavier and heavier, coated with what soon felt like stucco, but we moved them up and down, up and down, and clung to the ledges for dear life. At the very top, Nudge’s deft fingers brushed against the metal lock and, easy-peasy, we were in.

It was an office, not the luxury apartment I’d been hoping for, but it was dry and surprisingly well preserved. The halls were still lined with glass-framed posters that said things like
LET IT FLOW
and
ATTITUDE MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE.

I rolled my eyes and knocked that last one off the wall.

Angel curled up under a desk, folding her crusty wings beneath her. Forget mind-reading, that was her true talent: That kid could sleep anywhere.

Me? I was more interested in tracking down some chow. That lava-cooked, acidic fish was the last thing I’d eaten, and my stomach wrenched at the memory. Fang and Gazzy followed me on the search for a kitchenette, ever the eager consumers.

Just as I was shaking the box of aged, crumbled crackers into my mouth and thinking we’d made out pretty well considering, you know, the
apocalypse
, I heard a low, lingering growl.

“Jeez, Gasman.” I scrunched up my nose, bracing for the stench to hit, but Gazzy held up his hands: Not me.

Max, get out of there!
Angel’s voice.

None of us ever question a warning. In a split second I had dropped the cracker box, signaled Gazzy and Fang, and rushed to the door. It was already too late; the doorway was full of snarling creatures trying to get through at the same time—to us.

“What the heck are they?” Gazzy breathed, jumping onto the kitchenette table and assuming a fighting stance. Fang and I both leaped onto the counter, muscles tensed, adrenaline pumping.

“No idea,” I murmured. “Not Erasers. Not Flyboys. Not anything I’ve ever seen.”

They were—doglike, but huge, easily three times the
size of a Great Dane, but with a bulldog’s heavily muscled build and a mastiff’s powerful, snapping jaws. Their long-fanged mouths were already slavering in anticipation of a bird-kid breakfast.

And we were trapped.

“YOU’VE GOT TO be freaking kidding me,” I snarled.

“Are those hyenas?” Gazzy asked.

“Or just ugly mutant steroid dogs?” Fang said.

The things
were
hideous, their furless pink skin wrinkled and speckled with flaky black spots. Their flat, massive heads were too big for their bodies—which, of course, meant bigger teeth, stronger jaws.

“Are they sort of hyena-ish?” I asked. “Either way, they look rabid, and they’re bad news.”

With our luck, it made perfect sense that these hellbeasts were the only other creatures that seemed to have survived the apocalypse, and that they somehow were thirty stories up a skyscraper, running loose in the hallways, ready to corner us.

Quickly I took stock. Small, windowless room? Check. Useless weapons, such as plastic cutlery? Check. Villains engineered specifically to destroy us… to be determined.

The first hellhound flattened its ears and bared its teeth, a low growl building in its throat. Even with me standing on the countertop, their heads came up nearly to my waist. And they were vicious. This was Cujo meets Marmaduke meets the Hound of the Baskervilles.

“How many?” Fang asked quickly. I barely heard him over the high-pitched whining, low growling, and eager, hungry barking.

“Um, somewhere between five and… like, twenty,” I said as more flat, slick heads pushed in through the doorway.

“What are they waiting for?” Gazzy asked. “Maybe we can intimidate them.” With a roar of his own, he snapped open his ten-foot wings, sending bits of crud flying. And this seemed to be what the animals were waiting for. Their attack instinct kicked in and they sprang to life, crashing through the doorway at us, teeth bared. Their growls became a frenzied, barking hysteria that was deafening in the tiny room.

I fended them off okay at first, with roundhouse kicks and evasive pivots. But then a particularly ugly beast with pink eyes reared up on its hind legs and dug its front claws into my chest, and the full weight of a two-hundred-pound animal made me stagger sideways.

I barely heard a sharp hiss from Fang as one of them
sank its incisors deep into his shoulder, but I couldn’t spare a glance—I had a huge snapping muzzle inches from my face. Its tongue slobbered over its teeth in desperation, and its pink eyes bulged, crazed with hunger.
They were starving.

For a second, I felt a wave of pity for them. But just for a second. In a choice between me and something else, I always choose me. So I gripped Pinky’s lower jaw with my hands and head-butted the mutt right between the eyes.

It skidded like an ungainly bowling pin into the giants behind it, but they weren’t down for long and when they sprang to their feet, there was a new hatred in their eyes.

“Hang on, Max! We’re coming!”

I snapped my head around to see Nudge and Akila pushing their way through the entrance. Nudge was wielding a desk chair in one hand and a marble statuette in the other. I’d never seen Akila look so fierce—she was snarling, her teeth bared, and seemed so much more doglike than she had, say, at her wedding. But even though Akila was fairly big, she was dwarfed by these monsters.

“Nudge! No!” I yelled. “Find a safe place!”

I gave one vicious kick to my closest attacker and then grabbed for the sink hose behind me. Slamming the water on full blast, I sprayed all around, aiming for eyes, ears, and open mouths. The barking and howling hit a higher pitch.

On the other side of the kitchen, Gazzy fended the animals off as best he could, which was pretty dang good,
but he was covered with bites and scratches and looked like he was starting to tire. One vicious hellhound dove for him, huge jaws open like a vise. I quickly sprayed icy water into its ear, and Akila snarled and dove at the creature, tearing into its throat. Her fur was stained with blood, and more blood dripped from her mouth. She looked pure wolf in that instant, and as they leaped, her cry pierced the air.

I lashed out however I could—the sprayer, karate chops to noses, hard kicks to their ribs, and, yes, plastic forks to the ears—anything to hold them back, but they just kept coming.

“Max!” Nudge cried, and I watched, horrified, as one leaped at the side of her face and clamped on with those long yellow teeth, tearing flesh from bone. Fang stabbed at it with a knife and it yelped and jumped back.

Nudge stumbled into the fridge, her eyes wide and dazed. She held her hand over the left side of her face, but blood ran through her fingers and spilled down her shirt.

Fang gave one animal a brutal punch in the face that made it yelp and fall back. My own arms and legs were pretty torn up, and I started to wonder… if there were actually just too many of them.

So I did what you’re never supposed to do in a dogfight: I charged.

And then the room exploded.

Well, part of it. Before I got to Nudge’s attacker, chunks of plaster shot toward me as one of the walls blew inward.
For just an instant, there was silence as we all stared at the destroyed wall in surprise.

On the other side of the gaping hole, Iggy stood in the hallway, waving dust away from his face. “Go!” he yelled, choking on smoke.

While the beasts were still stunned, Fang grabbed Akila, and I reached for Gazzy’s and Nudge’s hands. We. Freaking.
Ran.

Another floor-shaking blast made a few more of the creatures fall back, but there were plenty of them still on our heels as we ran through the mazelike hallways, searching for a way—any way—out of this. Then straight ahead of us we saw a conference room lined with big glass windows, and there was no time to hesitate.

“Abandon ship!” I shouted.

Just as the monsters rounded the corner behind us, I closed my eyes, tucked my head down, and crashed through a window, feeling the shards explode around me.

I CAREENED LIKE a broken helicopter down half of those thirty flights, but finally I snapped my wings open and righted myself. My wings were still heavy and full of crud—cleaning them off would be job one. After quickly counting heads—all accounted for—I looked back to see the bloodthirsty animals snapping their jaws at us. Several unfortunates got pushed out the window by their eager packmates, and we swerved out of the way as they twisted through the air, baying as they plunged downward.

“They’re more like
cry
-enas now!” Gazzy joked wearily as we headed toward the outer edges of Sydney.

I was so dizzy with relief, I didn’t even feel the bite marks on my hands, or the feathers missing from my
wings, but all of us looked like we’d been put in a blender on “chop.”

I was especially worried about Akila. I eyed the bundled form that Iggy carried in the harness, and saw red splotches growing on the cloth. Nudge, too, was a bloody mess, and she flew with one hand holding the deeply torn flap of skin in place against her cheek.

When we stopped on a hill overlooking the city, we took stock of our injuries. Nudge seemed to be injured the worst, and I ripped off the sleeve of my ratty shirt. “Does it hurt bad?” I asked, tying the flannel under her chin.

“It’s f-fine,” she lied, her voice quivering as she bit back the pain.

I thought of all the times she’d spent scrapbooking fashion models and tried to make a joke of it. “What girl doesn’t want more defined cheekbones, am I right?” She nodded and forced a weak smile. “Zombie chic,” I pressed, and she actually giggled.

“Lame, very lame, Max.” Nudge shook her head and adjusted the bandage, but her eyes were smiling.

“Does that count as zombie chic?” Angel pointed.

A silence fell over the flock as we took in the grim scene below us.

So that’s where all the people are.

Our hill overlooked a subdivision, and while we couldn’t see inside any of the houses from our perch, we definitely saw the circular cul-de-sac drives—or the vague
shape of them. I only caught a glimpse of cracked asphalt here and there, because the cul-de-sacs were
littered
with… skeletons.

Humans, animals, young, old. The ash was doing its best to bury them—it had already piled in drifts several feet deep in some places—but you could still see thousands of corpses in the mass grave.

“Jeezum,” I whispered.

It was a modern Pompeii: Some of the skeletons were curled in fetal balls, with arm bones circling skulls. Others lay side by side holding hands, or clasping their own hands together. Many looked like they’d been crawling away, their jawbones hinged open in a permanent, silent scream.

I felt the vomit rise in my throat.

“What
happened
to them?” I asked helplessly, looking for something, any type of answer that might make this somehow easier to understand. “The volcanoes couldn’t have erupted until pretty recently, or this whole place would be one big ash pit. But something killed these people long enough ago so that only bones are left.”

Gazzy started hacking again, and Nudge lifted a worried eyebrow. “Ash inhalation from some other volcano?” she suggested. When we’d flown over the open ocean, we’d seen any number of “new” islands being formed. It was like the earth itself was splitting in two, and volcanoes were erupting everywhere.

Gasman shook his head. “What about aftershocks
from wherever that sky fire thing crashed? We got a lot of quakes on our island, and that’s hours from here.”

“Or starvation?” Iggy countered. “Maybe they didn’t have any rats.…”

“Everywhere has rats,” Angel scoffed. “Besides, they’ve got loads of snakes, rabbits, dogs, cats, deer, even kangaroos. Tons of protein for the taking.”

“Maybe the climate change drove all the animals nuts and they went on a murderous rampage,” Gazzy said.

“Or someone—or something—more powerful did.…” That was probably Nudge’s conspiracy-theorist mind going into overdrive, but I wasn’t ruling anything out.

“Could’ve been mass suicide,” I said seriously.

“Stop it. Just stop it, will you?” Total snarled suddenly, and I looked at him in surprise. “These aren’t statistics. They were families. Look at them holding each other, protecting each other. They died with dignity. Just like… Akila.”

Shocked, I looked at the bundled cloth that Iggy had set down carefully when we’d landed. I hadn’t even thought to check on her, though I’d noticed Total licking her face and talking quietly to her.
Oh, Akila. Not you, too.

“Total, no—”

Gently Total nudged her nose with his, and I hurried over to kneel by the still, beautiful dog. Her eyes were closed and I put my hand on her side, praying that I would feel her ribs rising and falling with breath. I didn’t.

“Total, no,” I whispered again, unable to think of anything
else to say. The rest of the flock crowded around. Nudge and Angel had tears rolling down their cheeks, leaving odd, pale lines where they washed away dirt.

“A couple of the Cryenas got her good,” Total said, his words muffled. “And the ash—she breathed too much of it. She sacrificed herself. Miserable excuses for canines…” He coughed a bark. “Pure courage. Pure grace. That was my Akila.”

Weeping, Angel wrapped her arms around Total’s scruffy neck, and then he couldn’t keep his composure any longer.

If you’ve ever heard a dog cry, you know it’s absolutely heartbreaking, a wail that cuts to the rawest emotion and shakes it in its teeth. Total howled for Akila, but also for Dylan, for the thousands of people below, for the whole world. And by the time he was finished, every one of us was all cried out.