“Okay, so first Max and I scout the place,” said Fang. “Look for possible cracks in the armor, etc. If we don’t come back within a half hour—”
“We fly to Badwater Basin,” Iggy interrupted. “Then we wait for three days. Then, if you’re still not back—”
“We absolutely do not barge in there and attempt to rescue you,” Nudge deadpanned, repeating the words I’d drilled into all of them over and over again. “We act like sensible, self-preserving mutants and head back to Oregon.”
“Good,” I said. “Anybody have a problem with the plan?”
They all shook their heads no. Except Dylan. I knew he wanted to go with me, knew he was miffed, or peeved, or maybe even furious that I’d asked him to stay with the others. He’d bought my explanation—that they would need another good fighter with them, and that Dylan, out of all of us, was the least well known to the inner circle of crazed maniacs who seemed to chase us everywhere we went. He’d bought it. But he wasn’t happy about it.
I looked at Fang. “You ready?”
He nodded, his eyes burning into mine, reading me, knowing my needs and my history and, it seemed, even my thoughts.
We’d just bent our knees and were about to take off together when Iggy yelled, “Wait!”
We all turned to him, instantly on the alert. “Fire,” he warned. “I smell smoke.”
“Smoke?” I glanced around, not seeing or smelling anything other than the undisturbed buildings and the clear, sunny day. “From where?”
Wordlessly, he pointed in the direction of the facility we were about to break into, and then the breeze changed and I smelled it, too: smoke. Lots of it.
Little did we know then that the 99% Plan was in effect… just a little bit ahead of schedule.
53
THE SMOKE LED us right to the burning building, which was eerily hushed, with only the crackling sound of dying flames, and no signs of life anywhere at first glance. No panicked refugees, no firefighters—just a red-hot shell.
When the fire had finally died down enough for us to safely explore the inside of the smoking facility, we stepped gingerly through the wreckage. Everything was horribly, deathly silent.
My intestines sank down to my shoes.
Marks from the fire had streaked the walls—or what remained of them—with gray and black. The stench of smoke permeated the dry air completely, scorched metal lay heaped where foundations used to be, and machinery that I recognized as mutant-testing equipment lay blackened and twisted in the rubble.
I swallowed. Time to be a leader, Max.
“Okay, everybody,” I said, coughing against the thick air. “Search everything.”
There was a huge crash then, as part of the floor above us gave way and a large piece of lab equipment fell through near to where we stood. Gazzy giggled nervously, at home in the destruction despite the underlying worry on his face.
“But be careful,” I continued. “The roof could collapse at any second. Pay special attention to the part that wasn’t destroyed—the eastern side. Angel could be in there.”
Maybe. Hopefully. God, if she was in the section of buildings we were standing in… Well, I would still want to find her, I thought grimly. Still want to take her body home.
Carefully we picked our way toward the far side—the eastern side—through a doorway that had been stripped of its actual door.
I nearly threw up when I stepped over a partially melted plastic Kanine Kamper. Were we too late? Had we come this close only to miss saving Angel from a horrible death by—what, minutes?
My heart was shriveling, but I kept picking my way through the demolished building, opening every door, trudging down passages that led to the smell of fire and combustibles and sickening chemicals.
And fear. It hung in the air, thicker than smoke.
I don’t want to describe the sick things we saw, experiments on… some kind of life-form… that had clearly failed. Everything that might have been alive was now dead from smoke inhalation, including a couple of whitecoats.
“How did the whole thing go up so quickly?” Dylan asked me. We were in the process of searching a lab that was filled with large machinery and operating tables. The sights made me physically ill. “I’ve been trying to work it out. It ate through the brick in, what? Ten minutes? And it was a scientific laboratory. Didn’t they have some kind of fire-safety procedure?”
“Maybe they didn’t want to stop it,” Fang answered from across the room. He gestured at a utility closet, at a pile of overturned metal jugs inside. They reeked of gas fumes.
I heard Nudge gasp from another doorway and ran to her side, my adrenaline rushing.
“Max, why are they in a circle like that?” she whispered, her bottom lip quivering.
A strangled moan escaped my lips when I saw what she had found: the still smoking bodies in the lab, dozens of them, slumped against one another, arranged in a circle, just like Nudge had said. Like they’d been sitting down to tea, or a game of telephone. Like they’d died en masse.
My throat was dry and my mind was whirring.
We’d tried to get inside when we’d first seen the smoke, but the doors had all been bolted.
What had seemed like an abandoned building had been packed with people.
What had seemed like an accident reeked of purposeful destruction.
We’d been there for the fire. We’d watched the whole thing happen. No one had run outside.
I shivered, understanding the horrific implications. They’d wanted to die like this. This place was making my soul hurt.
“Max.”
It was Dylan who’d spoken. He was down the hall.
“Yeah?” I forced the word out of my mouth, peeled my gaze away from the awful sight of the bodies before me. “Did you find something?”
“I… I think so.” His tone was hollow.
I swallowed. I couldn’t bear to find definitive evidence that we’d lost Angel. Not again. Not after we’d had so much hope.
Reluctantly, I came up beside Dylan. My eyes followed his gaze to the slick metal operating table in front of him. There were four clamps on it, in the corners, for restraining limbs.
Caught in one of the clamps were two soft, downy, white feathers.
“No,” I choked out, my knees buckling.
Faintly, I heard the flock gathering behind me: Nudge’s intake of breath, Gazzy’s moan of pain, Iggy’s hiss, and Fang’s teeth gnashing together. But I couldn’t stop staring, horrified, at the feathers in the clamp.
You’d think it couldn’t get any worse, after that.
But it did, of course. Because right then, we heard the sweet, sociopathic voice that would give us all nightmares for the rest of our lives.
“May I help you?”
54
IT TOOK ME about zero point three seconds to recognize the man standing before us: Mark. The once manic leader of the Doomsday Group. Someone I hadn’t seen since Paris, since Angel disappeared. I was pretty sure he was responsible for that whole bloody nightmare.
“Hello, children,” Mark said languidly. His entire body was covered with horrible burns, and his clothes were scorched and torn to the point of falling apart.
“You,” Gazzy spat. His voice was shaking. “You’re the one from the tunnels! You hurt me and my sister!”
We were all glaring daggers at Mark, but despite his burns and the excruciating pain he must’ve been in, his expression was one of dreamy bliss, and that was what truly scared me, what made the hair on my arms stand up and my blood run cold. Angry people I can deal with; I can handle rage with a quick fight. Insane people are much more terrifying. They’re totally unpredictable.