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

“Angel?” Nudge finally spoke, fear trickling like ice water down her neck.

“Time to die,” Angel said in her sweet little-girl voice.

36

“This is too easy,” Fang muttered, frowning at the ground two thousand feet below us.

“I was thinking the same thing. They did everything except leave gigundo yellow arrows saying This way, folks!”

We’d flown in a mammoth circle and had picked up tire tracks within an hour. It looked like a big truck, lots of wheels, and it had left desert sand on the highway for almost half a mile. We couldn’t think of any other reason a truck would have been hidden off-road and then driven out. Unless it belonged to, like, cactus poachers. Sand collectors. A movie crew.

This being the middle of Freaking Nowhere, USA, there was only the one road for miles and miles. So, one road with clear tire marks headed in one direction. Gee, obvious much?

“And we’re falling for this because of our sudden, unexpected regression into unbelievable stupidity?” I said.

Fang nodded grimly. “We’re falling for it because we’ve got no other choice.”

“Oh, yeah. That.”

Three hours of fast flight later, we saw them: an eighteen-wheeled semi parked off the road in perhaps the most desolate, unpopulated spot in all of Arizona. You could not call 911 from here. You could not run for help. You could send off a flare every half hour for days and not be seen by anyone.

“Looks like the place,” I said, sighing. “And look at that crowd down there. I thought all the Erasers were exterminated.”

“So the Voice lied to you?”

“No,” I said slowly, as we coasted on a current. “It’s never actually lied to me. So if those things aren’t Erasers, then they’re the Erasers’ replacements. Oh, joy.”

“Yep.” Fang shook his head, so not into this. “Five bucks says they’re worse than the originals. And they probably have guns.”

“No doubt.”

“And of course they’re expecting us.”

“We did everything but RSVP.”

“I hate this.” Fang deliberately looked everywhere but at my useless left hand.

“That would be because you’ve still got a tenuous grasp of sanity.”

I circled wide, trying to gear myself up for an impossible fight: We would be outnumbered a couple hundred to two, by something worse than Erasers. I had no idea if the rest of the flock would be able to help.

It was pretty much a suicide mission.

Again.

“There is one bright side to this,” said Fang.

“Yeah? What’s that?” The new and improved Erasers would mutilate us before they killed us?

He grinned at me so unexpectedly I forgot to flap for a second and dropped several feet. “You looove me,” he crooned smugly. Holding his arms out wide, he added, “You love me this much.”

My shriek of appalled rage could probably be heard in California, or maybe Hawaii. Certainly by the unknown army down below. I didn’t care. I folded my wings against my sides and aimed downward to get away from Fang as fast as possible. Now that he had filled me with a blind, teeming bloodlust, I was ready to take out a couple thousand Eraser replacements, no matter what they were.

Which, I admitted to myself, may have been his point.

Amazingly, we were able to thump to quick-running landings on the roof of the semi without getting punched full of little unaerodynamic bullet holes.

Heads swiveled to look at us, Erasery heads, but there was something different about them. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.