Maximum Ride Forever (Maximum Ride 9)

“Oh, God!” Iggy scooted away, holding his nose.

Gazzy was giggling like a maniac.

Iggy shook his head in disgust, but he was grinning. “Gasman, I knew I could count on you to keep it real.”

“Freeze, scumbags!” a gravelly female voice shouted from the woods.

Iggy and Gazzy leaped to their feet, sending burning pine needles flying.

But they were already surrounded.

49

AT LEAST A dozen heavily armed teenage girls circled Iggy and Gazzy just beyond the trees, holding crossbows.

“What didn’t you understand about the word ‘freeze’?” asked the leader, a girl with dreadlocks and sharp eyes, stepping closer. When she saw the burn marks on the ground, color rushed to her cheeks. “Did you actually try to blow up our silo?” she barked.

Silo?

“Are you kidding me?” Iggy said as Gazzy gaped at the cement circle they’d assumed was a camping platform.

The boys had been working their way north toward Pennsylvania to try to find the blog commenter and his silo. They never imagined they’d been sitting right on top of it.

“You Doomsday guys think you can come here with your cleanup crews, take whatever you want, kill whoever you want?” another girl with dark hair asked shrilly.

“No! We’re not—”

Dreadlocks narrowed her eyes. “We play by different rules.” She cocked her weapon, and the sound echoed around the circle as all the other girls followed suit, stepping out from behind the branches.

With the flock backing them up, the boys might’ve had a fighting chance, but with just the two of them, they were seriously outnumbered.

“We’re not armed!” Gazzy shrieked, putting his hands up.

“And we’re not with Doomsday,” Iggy, who had once been hypnotized by the cult, said more calmly. “We’re mutants, see?”

He unfurled his pale fifteen-foot wings over his head, and Gazzy did the same. As if that weren’t proof enough, they fluttered their feathers.

The leader stared at them, unimpressed. “The Remedy’s got plenty of mutants working for him,” she noted, and the crossbows stayed trained on Iggy and Gazzy.

“Not us. We came because we have a friend here,” Gazzy explained hurriedly. “From the Internet. We had this flock, and not bragging or anything, but we were kind of famous…” He knew he was babbling, but he was desperate to buy some time. “So he went on our website and said we were welcome to visit. He called himself PAtunnelratt? It was an avatar?”

He looked around with raised eyebrows, waiting for recognition, but Dreadlocks’ answer was flat and final: “Don’t know him.”

Iggy pressed. “Are you sure? He said his dad—”

“Must’ve been somewhere else,” she snapped. “The government built fallout shelters all through these mountains in the 1950s. Could be anywhere.”

“But—”

Another girl’s impatient voice cut in. “There aren’t any guys living here, period.”

Iggy’s eyebrow jumped with interest. “Just girls?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Just us.”

“Sweeeet.” Gazzy exhaled in wonder. From his dopey expression, he seemed to have forgotten about the threat and was convinced they’d landed in heaven. Iggy elbowed him.

The girls sighed in annoyance but seemed to understand that the bird kids didn’t pose much of a threat, and they relaxed their grip on their weapons.