The two back doors of the truck were thrown open with heavy, brain-rattling bangs. Sunlight flooding in made them blink and turn their heads away. The Flyboys in the truck with them strode to the opening.
There was more shouting, raised voices from the front of the truck. Nudge saw nothing outside except a long, empty dirt road with low brush lining it. No buildings, no electricity wires. No one around to help them. Nowhere to run to. Their wings had been bound flat against their backs.
"What's happening?" Iggy's whisper was barely audible, but a Flyboy kicked him.
"Shut up!" it growled, sounding like a recorded phone message.
Nudge heard many feet walking quickly toward the back of the truck. She braced for whatever was going to happen next.
Which no one ever could have predicted in a million years.
An overwhelming clump of Flyboys surrounded the back of the truck, furry faces frozen into identical sneers. Nudge swallowed, pretending to be braver than she was.
The crowd shifted restlessly, and Nudge saw that it was parting to let someone through. Max? Her heart jumped at the possibility. Even Max trussed up, in bad shape, thrown into the truck with them, would be fabulous, such a welcome-
It was Jeb!
Nudge felt a twinge around her heart as she looked at the face that had formed so much of her childhood. Jeb had rescued them. Then he'd died-or they'd thought he was dead. Then he had shown up again, clearly one of Them. Nudge knew that Max hated him now. So Nudge hated him too.
Her eyes narrowed.
From behind Jeb an Eraser, a real Eraser, stepped out to stand next to him. It was Ari! Ari, who had also been dead and then not really. Ari was the only real Eraser they'd seen in days and days.
Nudge put a bored expression on her face like she'd seen Max and Fang do a thousand times. Yeah, yeah, Jeb and Ari, she thought. Show me something new.
Someone else stepped out from behind Ari.
Nudge's eyes widened, and her breath seized in her throat. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Instead her lips silently formed one word: Angel.
Nudge searched Angel's blue eyes, but they seemed like a total stranger's. Nudge had never seen her like this.
"Angel!" Gazzy's face looked happy but at the same time concerned.
"Angel?" Nudge finally spoke, fear trickling like ice water down her neck.
"Time to die," Angel said in her sweet little-girl voice.
36
"This is too easy," Fang muttered, frowning at the ground two thousand feet below us.
"I was thinking the same thing. They did everything except leave gigundo yellow arrows saying This way, folks!"
We'd flown in a mammoth circle and had picked up tire tracks within an hour. It looked like a big truck, lots of wheels, and it had left desert sand on the highway for almost half a mile. We couldn't think of any other reason a truck would have been hidden off-road and then driven out. Unless it belonged to, like, cactus poachers. Sand collectors. A movie crew.
This being the middle of Freaking Nowhere, USA, there was only the one road for miles and miles. So, one road with clear tire marks headed in one direction. Gee, obvious much?
"And we're falling for this because of our sudden, unexpected regression into unbelievable stupidity?" I said.
Fang nodded grimly. "We're falling for it because we've got no other choice."
"Oh, yeah. That."
Three hours of fast flight later, we saw them: an eighteen-wheeled semi parked off the road in perhaps the most desolate, unpopulated spot in all of Arizona. You could not call 911 from here. You could not run for help. You could send off a flare every half hour for days and not be seen by anyone.
"Looks like the place," I said, sighing. "And look at that crowd down there. I thought all the Erasers were exterminated."
"So the Voice lied to you?"
"No," I said slowly, as we coasted on a current. "It's never actually lied to me. So if those things aren't Erasers, then they're the Erasers' replacements. Oh, joy."
"Yep." Fang shook his head, so not into this. "Five bucks says they're worse than the originals. And they probably have guns."
"No doubt."
"And of course they're expecting us."
"We did everything but RSVP."
"I hate this." Fang deliberately looked everywhere but at my useless left hand.
"That would be because you've still got a tenuous grasp of sanity."
I circled wide, trying to gear myself up for an impossible fight: We would be outnumbered a couple hundred to two, by something worse than Erasers. I had no idea if the rest of the flock would be able to help.
It was pretty much a suicide mission.
Again.
"There is one bright side to this," said Fang.
"Yeah? What's that?" The new and improved Erasers would mutilate us before they killed us?
He grinned at me so unexpectedly I forgot to flap for a second and dropped several feet. "You looove me," he crooned smugly. Holding his arms out wide, he added, "You love me this much."
My shriek of appalled rage could probably be heard in California, or maybe Hawaii. Certainly by the unknown army down below. I didn't care. I folded my wings against my sides and aimed downward to get away from Fang as fast as possible. Now that he had filled me with a blind, teeming bloodlust, I was ready to take out a couple thousand Eraser replacements, no matter what they were.
Which, I admitted to myself, may have been his point.
Amazingly, we were able to thump to quick-running landings on the roof of the semi without getting punched full of little unaerodynamic bullet holes.
Heads swiveled to look at us, Erasery heads, but there was something different about them. I couldn't quite put my finger on what.
"Iggy?" I yelled.
"Max!" I heard his strangled cry from the rear of the truck and trotted over.
"You guys ok-," I began, then I saw Jeb, Ari, and Angel standing on the ground. "Angel!" I cried. "Are you okay? I'm gonna take these guys apa-"
The look in Angel's polar-ice eyes stopped me.
"I told you I should be the leader, Max," she said with a chilling flatness. "Now it's your time to die. The last life-forms from the labs are being exterminated, and you will be too." She turned to Jeb. "Right?"
Jeb nodded solemnly, and then my world went blank in the wink of an eye.
Part 2
My head was feeling as if had been used as a bowling ball, against solid marble pins.
My heart pounded, my breaths were ragged and shallow, and every muscle I had ached. I didn't know what was going on, but it was bad.
I opened my eyes.
The word bad was so grossly inadequate to describe the situation that it was like it was from another language-a language of naive idiots.
I was strapped to a metal hospital bed, wrists and ankles bound with thick Velcro.
And I wasn't alone.
With effort, I raised my head, fighting off the swift wave of nausea that made me gag and swallow convulsively.
To my left, also strapped to a metal bed, the Gasman breathed unevenly, twitching in his sleep.
Next to him, Nudge was starting to move, moaning slightly.
Turning to the right, I saw Iggy. He was lying very still, eyes open, staring up at a ceiling he couldn't see.
On his other side, Fang was straining silently against his Velcro restraints, his face pale and grimly determined. When he felt me looking at him, I saw relief soften his gaze for a split second.
"You okay?" I mouthed.
He gave a short, quick nod, then inclined his head to gesture to the others. I nodded wearily, summing up our situation with a universal "this is crap" expression. He tilted his head at a bed across from us. There was Total, looking dead except for the occasional muscle jerk, his small limbs bound like ours. He looked mangy, missing patches of fur around his mouth.