James Patterson - When the Wind Blows

by When the Wind Blows (lit)

  Frannie seemed real nice and easy to be around. And so did Kit, actually.

  The outside door at the School was always locked, Max remembered.

  She felt a shiver knife through her body. Bad memories flooded her brain.

  She and Matthew had called it the Flight School. Two pretty good reasons. Number one, because the two of them desperately wanted to fly the hell out of there. Number two, because they were forbidden to fly at the School. So - the Flight School. A protest!

  She'd been absolutely forbidden to go outside at the School. Under pain of being put to sleep.

  But here she was. Awake. Alive. Listening to "Bitch."

  the one time the guards had left a door open - the only time she remembered them ever being sloppy - she and Matthew had bolted. Flew the coop, as Matthew said, hollered and whooped, actually.

  Max tucked her knees up under her chin. She admired how her legs looked in the black stretch pants Frannie had given her. She also liked the big blue shirt Kit was letting her wear. "FBI", was printed on it.

  She had a suspicious thought. The blue shirt covered her wings so that she couldn't fly.

  But it was clean and smelled nice and she didn't want to fly, anyway.

  Not right now. She wanted to sit in the creaky old rocking chair and listen to rock and roll and eat chocolate-chip cookies until they came out of her nose. God - unlimited cookies. What an idea.

  The rock music played and she liked the rhythm. It kind of matched up with her heartbeat. That was the trick of it, wasn't it?

  She was thinking that if Frannie's "surprise" was good, maybe she'd tell her one of the secrets about the School.

  Just one secret, though.

  Maybe about Matthew.

  Or maybe she'd tell about Adam? Or start with poor Eve? The terrible, terrible night the two of them were put to sleep.

  Maybe Kit and Frannie could help her find Matthew.

  Her hands clenched automatically. This was very scary territory. One thing had been drilled into her time and time again. She could get into terrible trouble if she ever talked.

  People could die, starting with her, and then anyone she talked to.

  Chapter 60

  PIP WAS PULLING ME through the woods as if he were the engine of a miniature runaway train. Cicadas shrilled, close up and far away. Everything felt like a dream, but it definitely wasn't one, was it.

  "Hold on, fool," I yelled ahead, but Pip completely ignored me.

  I was carrying all kinds of junk on my back: clothes for Max, a little black bag, a 35men camera - and Pip was intent on being at the cabin now.

  The lead finally jerked out of my hands and he was gone, scampering on ahead, dragging rope and chain behind him, yapping his fool head off.

  "Pip! You little snip!"

  The girl never had a chance to hear him with those damned earphones on her head. I dropped my pack and ran, but it was too late. He was all over her. Dear God. Would she know Pip was just a small, overeager dog? That he was nothing to be afraid of?

  Then I could hear her laughing and the small, playful dog's yipping, and it was just about the neatest sound in the world. It certainly would do for right now.

  Kit came flying out through the front door just as I got to the bottom steps of the cabin. He looked concerned - until he correctly sized up the situation.

  "Is this my surprise?" the girl asked. Meanwhile, the squirming hunk of dog was slobbering all over her.

  "Pip, manners," I said. "Yep, he's the surprise." The girl said, "We have dogs at the School. Bandit and Gomer."

  I glanced at Kit. We filed the tidbit away for later.

  "This is Pip," I said. "He's a good little pup." The girl smiled. "Hello, Pip," she said.

  She picked up a stick and Pip went nuts; backing up, wagging his snippet of a tail, and yapping like the little whirligig and madman that he is.

  The girl looked thoughtful for a moment, then she spoke.

  "I'm Max," she said, telling us her name for the first time. Then she threw the stick. "Go fetch, Pip."

  Chapter 61

  I NEEDED TO EXAMINE Max for injuries and possible malnutrition. I couldn't wait to start. The suspense, the drama, was overwhelming. Most doctors would kill for this opportunity, and perhaps someone had.

  I stood outside the familiar and usually nonthreatening door to the spare room of my house and I took one of the deepest breaths of my entire breathing career. Kit and I had just been talking about bringing Max to the "authorities," the local police, or maybe even to the University of Colorado at Boulder.

  "I am the police," Kit had argued. He was definitely against the move, "And for the moment, I'm not certain who else we can trust. I'm working on that, Frannie. Please give me another day or so to check out some things."

  His reaction wasn't very reassuring, but I had my own misgivings about the local authorities in Nederland, or even Boulder. I didn't feel they were quite up to this. I hadn't from the beginning.

  So Max was behind Door Number One, waiting for me to give her a full physical exam. She had already told me it was no big deal to her she was used to them.

  Well, it was a big deal for me.

  I left Kit on the front deck, making calls around the country. He had a couple of notebooks filled with information about the outlaw group of scientists who might have settled somewhere in the area. He'd already interviewed dozens of doctors who knew someone in the group. He told me the investigation was like trying to cross the country by way of a network of blind alleys. He sure wasn't wearing his million-dollar smile today. He admitted that he was frustrated and nervous about what would happen now. Neither of us really knew what it was that we were getting into.

  How could we?

  I knocked gently on the door. I heard Max say, "Come in."

  I opened the door and walked in, carrying my black medical bag, trying not to appear as nervous as I was.

  Max put down People magazine, which she said she read every week, and since we'd discussed the physical exam beforehand, she started to take off her clothes without my having to ask. I kept wondering who had examined her before this?

  What I saw now squeezed the breath of my body. I felt exhilarated, but also more nervous than ever, and afraid. I felt as if I had suddenly been recruited onto the National Bioethics Committee. This was definitely medical history. This was a miracle.

  The young girl standing before me had no nipples, no vestige of breasts. The massive depth of her chest was incredible. The drape of her smock when I first saw her and the bulk of Kit's shirt had disguised a rib cage fully two times as deep as mine.

  That was understandable, I was thinking, as I prepared to examine her.

  Max had to pack an awful lot of musculature into that chest in order to fly. Also, her flight muscles had to be anchored into something very solid. Perhaps a superheavy breastbone, or a Y-shaped collarbone. How had this happened? Who had created her - and why? It made me dizzy and weak-kneed.

  I moved closer. "Stethoscope," I said, and she nodded that it was okay with her.

  Her shoulders were broad, and her pectoral muscles were anchored to an oversized breastbone called the pectoral crest. Absolutely extraordinary. As I pressed my stethoscope to her back, or "sternal keel," she took a deep breath and then released it.

  She knew exactly what she was supposed to do. She was accustomed to physical exams. By whom? For what reason? What was the School all about? I "Is the stethoscope too cold?" I asked Max.

  "No," she said. "Toasty warm.

  She spoke very well for a young girl. Her language could be colorful and descriptive. I'd heard her use both humor and irony. She was bright.

  Why? How? Who had taught her to speak? How to act? To be polite and considerate, as she certainly was.

  "Would you take another deep breath," I said. Max nodded. She did as she was asked. She was being very cooperative, and she was almost always polite. Max was a very sweet young girl.

  I couldn't believe what I he
ard inside her chest. She didn't have the billow-type action of mammal lungs. Hers were relatively small, and from what I could hear, attached to air sacs, both anterior and posterior.

  What lungs! I could write a book on her lungs alone. Man, oh man! I was having a little trouble breathing now myself.

  I couldn't be sure, but it followed logically that her bones were hollow, that some air sacs intruded into her bones.

  "Thanks, Max. That's great."

  "It's okay. I understand. I'm a freak." She shrugged her shoulders.

  "No, you're just special."

  I turned her to face me and placed my stethoscope over her heart.

  Jesus. It was at a resting rate of sixty-four beats a minute, but it was booming.

  Max had the heart of an athlete, a great athlete. The organ was huge. I figured it weighed a couple of pounds. She had the heart of a good-sized horse.

  A large, powerful heart could pump a lot of blood. The connecting chain of air sacs indicated a one-way flow of air. A big pump and a lot of air surface made for a very efficient means of exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen. This was understandable to me. It made good sense. It would give her the endurance she needed to fly long distances and would also keep her cells saturated with oxygen at high altitudes, where the atmosphere was thin.

  As if she'd read my mind, Max began to beat her wings.

  Chapter 62

  "YOU HAVE DONE THIS BEFORE," I said and smiled. I couldn't help myself. She was such a cool little girl. Relaxed, well mannered, and funny.

  "Millions of times," Max said.

  She lifted a foot off the ground and hovered there.

  I stood on a footstool and pressed the stethoscope to her chest again and listened to her heart as On her hips. "Okay," I whispered. "That's enough of this for right now. Thank you."

  "You're very welcome."

  Max stopped beating her wings and dropped to the floor. I measured her from head to toe. I was trying to regain my composure.

  "Fifty-seven inches," she piped up.

  Right. She was exactly four foot nine. Her arms and legs were slightly disproportionate; the legs were longer. The ring and pinkie.

  fingers of both hands were partially fused, but it wasn't noticeable unless you looked closely. There was tiny webbing between her toes.

  These adaptations allowed her to use her hands and feet as a kind of rudder mechanism in lieu of a tail. There was also some feathering down the back of her legs. That would help in flight, too. Provide more rudder.

  Her neck was very flexible. Her reflexes were much, much better than mine - or anybody else's. Her distance and peripheral vision were acute. No, they were extraordinary. She was superior in almost every way - the best of humans, the best of birds.

  As I'd already suspected, her feathered wings were perfectly jointed.

  Blindfolded, I'd have thought they belonged to a large bird that did some serious long-distance soaring; hawks, for instance, or birds that fish the ocean. Was Max part human, part hawk? How, how, how had this happened?

  I put my tape measure to a wing tip and, without my asking, Max spanned her wings.

  "One hundred and ten inches," she said with pride. Her soft voice had a rustling sound, like wind blowing over dried corn- stalks.

  "Thanks," I said. "A little over nine feet of wingspan." Biggest wings I'd ever seen on an eleven-year-old girl.

  I asked Max to please lie down on the bed. I palpated her abdominal cavity, got a fix on her organs, which were in the expected places, but small.

  Again, this was logical and understandable. Flight was only possible if the wings could lift the body. So, strong chest muscles, small organs, and, unless I was way off the mark, her bones would not only be lightweight and hollow but also very strong in order to cope with the considerable stress of flight.

  A perfect design, I thought.

  She had been designed, hadn't she?

  "Are you going to give me a pelvic?" Max asked.

  She'd been given pelvic exams? I was shocked, but I didn't allow my discomfort to show.

  "No," I said. "I'm not."

  "Oh. Well, I can tell you, anyway," she said, putting on her pants. She grinned. "I'm oviparous."

  Oviparous, indeed. That explained why Max had no breasts. If reproduction were possible, she wouldn't be delivering live offspring. And she wouldn't be nursing them.

  Her babies would hatch from eggs.

  Chapter 63

  MY THOUGHTS at this point in the physical exam were flying fast and furious. I felt as if my head had actually taken off and gone into permanent orbit. I had been aching for the chance to find out who or what this magical creature was. Now that I had examined her, I could hardly absorb what I had learned. She was supergirl, wasn't she?

  A perfect design.

  But who was the designer? Or designers?

  I needed an X-ray machine. I needed blood analysis equipment. I needed medical and zoological experts to help me interpret the data. I had more questions now than ever before.

  "So tell me, where do you come from, Max?" I said, as I put my stethoscope back in my medical bag.

  She gave me one of her mischievous smiles. "A cabbage patch," she said. I was left there by a stork."

  Then her green eyes narrowed. "How come I have wings and you don't?" she asked.

  I don't know. That is the big question, though."

  Max looked hurt. Did she think I was lying to her? Withholding? From the sudden pained look on her face, I could see that she'd really wanted me to give her a good answer. "They" had kept her in the dark about herself, hadn't they.

  "I'm going to try to find out," I said. "Give me some time. This is all new and overwhelming to me. "Please, trust me a little, Max."

  "I trust no one," she snapped. I saw a spark of anger, bitterness, and a lot of hurt in her eyes.

  Had she been living with medical researchers? Young people? Lab techies? I'd noticed that her language could be very colloquial, and young. I kept testing her with figures of speech.

  "You think grown-ups are full of it, don't you?" I said.

  Max shrugged. "Whatever. I'm going to play with Pip, okay? May I?

  Is that allowed? Or do I have to stay inside - now that you have what you want from me."

  "No, Max. Go play."

  She bolted from the room. She was angry. Was it with me, or something I'd said. Whatever it was, she was starting to cry. Max was able to cry, and that was stunning to me. I imagined an eagle soaring over the land that man was so obviously wasting, and being able to cry about it. Or a mother robin crying over an injured chick she couldn't help.

  I found Kit out on the deck where I'd left him earlier. When he saw me, he hung up his cell phone.

  "What happened in there? She looked like she was crying."

  "Well, she didn't tell me where she lives," I said softly. "But what I learned from examining her completely knocks me out. Kit, she's medical history. However it happened."

  "Tell me," he said. His eyes became intense, probing. I am the police.

  "I don't know where to start exactly. I think she's a human being who was born to fly. Max is definitely human. She's got a human brain, emotions, but the rest of her is an amalgam of human and avian pieces and parts. The human parts seem to dominate. And this "school" she's talked about, whatever it is, has scientists attached to it."

  Kit looked grim. "How do you know for sure?"

  "She's accustomed to being examined. Max knows a lot of medical terms. I don't know how or why. She told me that she's oviparous. She's an egg layer."

  There was a silence between us, broken only by the sounds of Max and Pip playing across the yard.

  "Are you saying she's actually some kind of cross between a human and a bird? Is that possible?" Kit muttered.

  "No. I don't think it is. Except for one small and very convincing detail..."

  Kit finished my sentence. "We're looking at it," he said. "My God."

  We watched as Max scoo
ped Pip up into her arms.

  There was the sound of beating wings, and then she was airborne. She was flying above the treetops with Pip, who didn't seem to mind in the least.