“I know we’re looking for your flock, but I’m looking for someone, too, okay?”
Harry’s brow was wrinkled with anxiety.
“What is it?”
“Pfft!” Harry’s eyes widened, and the way he flung his fingers open reminded me of one of Gazzy’s IEDs.
“A bomb?” I asked, grabbing his wrist. “A bomb went off, to the north?”
My breath caught in my chest as I thought of the charred remains of Tanzania and the watery grave of New York. The giant I’d fought had said the Remedy would punish the whole world, and the voices on the radio had been carrying out that mission.
They wanted no survivors.
“We have to check it out,” I decided, and as I started to turn, Harry shook his head in alarm. Of course the other bird kids would’ve avoided the place—birds and animals tended to be the first ones to flee during disasters.
I was already headed up the coast, though, scanning the northern landscape for smoke and steeling myself for whatever we might find.
Call me stubborn, but I always listened to my gut.
55
EVERYTHING WAS SO still. So quiet.
As we landed, the wind from our wings moved dust that seemed like it had blanketed the ruins for years, and when I coughed, the sound echoed even in the open, leveled space.
I’d say Seattle was a ghost town, except without the town part. There were just piles and piles of rubble as far as we could see. Exactly like the bombed city in Africa.
All desolation starts to look alike, I guess.
Or maybe I’m just jaded.
“Looks pretty bad, huh?” I said.
“Max Mum…” Harry pleaded.
“Yeah, yeah. We won’t stay too long,” I said. To be honest, I was ready to split the moment we landed, too. The place was giving me a major case of the heebie-jeebies, but since I’d dragged us here, we had to at least check it out.
We shuffled through the colorless haze, gaping around us like archaeologists digging up a lost city. We walked under archways that stood alone where buildings had fallen, and passed skeletons of cars that still smelled of gas. I saw a hard hat lying in the dirt and reached for it, but it crumbled on contact.
“There’s no one,” I whispered. No survivors, no bodies. Just ash.
Turns out, almost everything burns, and history is quick to turn to dust. Except for that smooth glint of metal over there…
What is that?
I cocked my head to stare at the large, disklike object. For a second, I thought that, on top of everything else, the world was being invaded by aliens.
Then I understood.
So that was what had happened to the famous Space Needle. The long white base was nowhere in sight, but somehow the UFO-shaped top had ended up over a mile from the coast. It was half submerged in a pile of debris, like it had skidded onto a dull gray planet.
“Come on!” I said, dragging a less-than-enthusiastic Harry behind me.
The windows that circled the perimeter had been blown out, and we had to climb over the twisted metal dividers to get in. The initial blast must’ve blown the aerodynamic disc inland before the mushroom cloud incinerated everything else, though. Because inside, apart from the white chairs that were overturned and piled everywhere, the objects in the restaurant were surprisingly intact.
There were even a couple of cracked dishes sitting on a table. And a small, black, rectangular object, just lying there, like it had been forgotten…
I snatched up the phone. No. It couldn’t be.… Impossible.