Maximum Ride Forever (Maximum Ride 9)

Then, as the bombs started to release their gases, Angel heard a barrage of new thoughts, all at once.

Not the thoughts of her own army, but of the army below—the one she hadn’t been sure was there.

They were there, all right, and Angel realized with alarm that there were more than she’d ever anticipated. There were many thousands of fighters in the Remedy’s army. More than they could ever take on.

“HOLD!” Angel shouted a little hysterically at her ranks. But the events had already been set in motion, and thick clouds of smoke began billowing out of the hole. The angry, panicked thoughts of the Remedy’s army buzzed louder, louder. “Hold…”

The survivors and the mutants on the field twitched uncomfortably in response to Angel’s reaction. They didn’t hear the deafening thoughts, couldn’t fathom how many soldiers there were; they saw only an empty field.

Her friends had no clue what was about to happen.

They waited, watching the smoke-filled hole.

They tensed, readying themselves for what was to come.

“CHARGE!” Angel screamed the moment she saw the outline of bodies through the smoke.

As her fighters surged forward, the Remedy’s troops started to emerge, but the entrance to Himmel was so narrow it formed a bottleneck. Only a few of the Remedy’s soldiers could get out at a time, she realized.

There was still a chance they could hold them off!

The billowing smoke blocked her view, but right before the armies clashed into each other, Angel saw her troops hesitate, just for a moment.

What are you doing? She sent the question telepathically to Kate, their strongest fighter, who was on the front lines. What’s wrong?

“They’re kids, Angel,” Kate answered her. “Just little kids.”

Angel’s heart broke, but the rest of her shook with fury. They’d been mentally, if not physically, prepared for the Remedy’s superhuman Horsemen or his armed Russian guards. Using children to fight his war was way more despicable.

They were fighting, though. They were Doomsday soldiers, brainwashed to hate humans and mutants alike. Angel watched more and more of them pushing past her soldiers, weapons held in fierce grips, eyes lusting for blood. If her survivors didn’t push back, they’d all be killed.

Luckily, the flock, at least, had dealt with these kids before. Nudge let out a terrifying battle cry and launched herself forward in a roundoff backflip, her feet catching two machete-wielding warriors midair. The rest of the troops followed, battling the Remedy’s child army in hand-to-hand combat.

Angel worked on breaking into the minds of the Doomsday fighters, but she knew from past experience that the cult mind was extremely difficult to crack into—the One Light had an incredibly powerful hold on them.

Still, she burrowed into their minds, hammering at the boundaries of their psyches, her head throbbing as she worked to free them before too many had to die. In a trancelike state herself, Angel was concentrating so hard on battling back the warped thoughts that she almost didn’t hear Dylan’s desperate cry.

“THE VENTS!” he was screaming at full volume now. “ANGEL, THE VENTS!”

As dozens of Horsemen burst up through unseen vents in the field, Angel shook in despair. These Horsemen were elite models, robots whose actions were completely controlled by the Remedy, so she couldn’t read their thoughts.

But she knew their power.

“Ratchet! Kate! Dylan!” she summoned them telepathically, her voice tinged with real fear for the first time. “Get to Max!”

Even if they didn’t win this battle, even if she couldn’t save these kids, Angel knew, as she’d always known, that Max was their only chance at saving the world.

81

THE GROUND UNDER me shook violently. Like everyone else on the front lines, I couldn’t see anything through the smoke, but it sounded like the world was breaking open.

Our whole army was bunched in a tight cluster in the center of the field. It was obvious we were in an extremely vulnerable position, but we had to hold back the ranks upon ranks of Doomsday psychos who kept pushing out of the entryway.

Right now, I was in a hair-pulling battle with a surprisingly vicious pigtailed eight-year-old and standing on an older boy’s windpipe as I tried to pry his fingers off his homemade scythe. I thought that was more important than worrying about an earthquake… until I realized it wasn’t an earthquake.

It was another army, shooting up out of holes in the ground all around us.

An army of M-Geeks.