Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports (Maximum Ride 3)

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Date: Already Too Late!

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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.”

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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.