School's Out- Forever (Maximum Ride 2)

“Here!” Fang said, stopping suddenly. I’d almost passed the door completely—it was practically invisible. Quickly we shot through it and found ourselves in a long, dimly lit corridor. Child’s play. In seconds we had raced to the end of it and out its exit. We found ourselves behind some large shrubs.

“Come on,” I said grimly. “Over to that fake mountain and then an up-and-away.”

Three minutes later we were airborne, fading into the setting sun, leaving Disney World far behind. Nudge had tears running down her cheeks, and Gazzy and Angel both looked bitterly disappointed.

“I—,” the Gasman began.

“What?” I angled one wing slightly and pulled closer to him.

“I wish we could have gone into the Haunted Mansion,” he said. “It’s supposed to be awesome.”

I sighed. “I know, guys.” Everyone was flying steadily, but each face was a mask of disappointment and frustration. “There were a bunch of things I’d been hoping to do too.” All involving seeing mouse ears in my rearview mirror. If I had one. “But you know we had to go.” Flock, one. Ari, zip.

“I hate stupid Ari!” Gazzy said. He punched and kicked the air in front of him. “He always ruins everything! Why does he hate us? It’s not our fault they turned him into an Eraser!”

“It’s not that simple, sweetie,” I said.

“His dad left him,” said Iggy bitterly. “Just like all of ours. Then they Eraserfied him. He’s a walking time bomb.”

“How does he track us so easily?” Angel asked. When she’d seen Cinderella’s Castle, her face had looked as though it were made of sunlight. She was still young enough to really get caught up in the magic of an enormous, all-powerful marketing juggernaut.

“I don’t know, Ange,” I said. That was the ten-thousand-dollar question, in fact.

Below, the landscape was a spongy green, with nothing but a carpet of treetops to look down on. The trees ended abruptly, and beyond them we could see huge refineries or some kind of water-treatment plants or something.

I heard a faint buzz only a split second before a buglike helicopter popped up from behind the trees. It was pointed a bit away from us but almost immediately turned and headed in our direction, like a curious insect.

“Okay, guys, scatter and zoom,” I instructed quickly. “Meet up in fifteen minutes, same heading.” I angled my wings sharply and peeled off to one side. From a corner of my eye I saw the rest of the flock split up, zipping off in all directions.

The chopper hesitated. It had News 14 Florida painted on the side. So maybe not an Eraser chopper, maybe just a news cam tracking traffic.

But they’d seen us. I arched my back, pointing downward, then dropped into a screamingly fast descent. I rocketed toward the ground at two hundred miles an hour, which meant in less than a minute I had to angle out of it and swoop up again so I didn’t squish like a mosquito on the windshield of the world.

Who said poetry was dead?

When I finally looked back, the chopper was nowhere in sight. A few minutes later, I saw various-sized dark specks coming at me. My flock.

Fang arrived first.

“We need to get out of the air,” I told him.

117

“Black Ranger to Feather One,” Total said softly. “Coast is clear. Come in, Feather One.”

“Total, I’m right here,” I whispered. “We don’t even have walkie-talkies.”

“No, but we should,” Total whispered back. “I should have one, and it could—”

I put my hand over his mouth, looking at the mountains of rusted metal, ancient appliances, and empty car husks that stretched for acres around us. I signaled over my shoulder, and Fang, Gazzy, and Nudge scampered past me and crouched next to a bunch of doorless refrigerators.

There had been only one guard, who looked as if he couldn’t guard his way out of a paper bag. We’d left him in front of his oil-drum fire clear on the other side of this enormous junkyard-chop shop. Or at least I assumed it was a chop shop, given the suspicious number of relatively late-model cars that were tucked away in an airport hangar-sized building.

Which was where we were heading.

“Okay, now, the last time we were in a car . . . ,” Fang whispered in my ear.

“That was different,” I said impatiently. “Anyway, we’re not going to steal a van.”