Maximum Ride Forever (Maximum Ride 9)

The sorry piece of crap known as the Remedy seemed to be taking credit for at least some of the destruction that was happening in the world, and the giant had said there would be more Horsemen serving him—H-men, as they were known on Fang’s blog.

Okay, I had to think. Nudge was safe back at the caves. Angel was apparently in Russia, and God knew she could take care of herself. The boys were going to Pennsylvania, but at least they were together.

That left just me. And Fang. He’d headed to California, because someone had mentioned looters there—at least, other people. I was here, not really enjoying Africa as much as I would have liked to.

Among the cities the giant had mentioned, Paris was out—I was never going there again. Hong Kong was, I was pretty sure, a lump of rubble on the coast of China. That left New York. The fact that New York and California were on the same continent had nothing to do with my decision.

It was about seventy-five hundred miles to New York, as the bird kid flies, ha-ha. I have a top speed of over three hundred miles an hour, but I’d need a lot more calories to keep it up. So I gave myself two whole days to get there.

Oh, New York…

I almost fell out of the sky when I saw the city, or what was left of it. My mind couldn’t make sense of the images it was processing: The eastern coastline was completely flooded.

I don’t mean flooded like Sydney, with the waves lapping against the bottom of buildings.

I mean: New York City was completely underwater.

The island of Manhattan looked like hundreds of teensy different islands, with only the very tops of skyscrapers rising out of the sea. The water reached dozens of stories up, and still the tide bit at the windows, insisting on destruction.

The Brooklyn Bridge was now an underwater attraction, and as for the Statue of Liberty, only the tip of her torch broke the surface of the water.

There weren’t any real torches burning, either. The City That Never Sleeps had gone completely dark.

I didn’t know if it had been a tsunami or an earthquake or a sudden melting of all of the polar ice caps—I just knew what I saw, plain and simple: the end of the world.

But in a city this huge, there had to be some survivors, right? I searched the tops of high-rises for huddled groups of people but saw no one.

Where would all the people have gone? Or had whatever happened, happened too fast? I remembered the wall of water Fang and I had seen on the day the sky caught fire—hundreds of feet high, bulldozing everything.

I’d almost drowned that day. Without wings, most people couldn’t even try to fly away like we could. Unless…

The airport.

Given the state of Manhattan, I knew the New York airports would be gone. But inland—how far had the water gone? I flew to New Jersey—or the flooded space where I thought Jersey should be. The Hudson River no longer separated the two states. The river no longer existed at all.

I found my way to Newark Airport, though to this day I wish I hadn’t.

The floodwaters reached about twenty-five feet up, lapping at the cabins of the bigger aircraft. Some of the planes were partially burned or otherwise wrecked; others seemed perfectly preserved, waiting in line for the runway. I saw one jet whose entryway was open, and I dipped down to check it out. Maybe there were cookies or crackers or sodas.

The smell alerted me within twenty feet, as it had in Africa. But these weren’t animals. These were people. This jet was jam-packed with… corpses. Beating my wings hard, I swerved away, then did a slow cruise around the other planes. No matter the size of the aircraft, I could see that every seat was full, every aisle crammed with people. They’d been desperate, trying to escape any way they could.

Maybe a few had made it into the air—though from what I’d seen of the rest of the world, I couldn’t imagine where they’d be headed. But what was left here was grim.

I spotted the control tower globe sitting high above everything like a giant eye. If anything was still moving, I’d see it from up there, so I made straight for a hole in the windows. I thought I could hear voices as I approached, so I burst into the tower room, hardly taking notice of the shattering glass around me.

Could it be… survivors?

The circular room was empty, but the voices continued, cutting in and out with static. Someone was alive—I could hear them on the radio.

My heart pounding with hope, I fiddled with the knobs until I got a clear channel, but what I heard was more gruesome than anything I’d witnessed that day.

“The Remedy said to shoot anything that moves,” a young voice was saying.

“A clean slate means no survivors,” another answered.

I covered my mouth, inhaling sharply. The giant had said the Remedy was striking around the world indiscriminately, but I still didn’t know what the scope might be.

What do these kids mean, “No survivors?”