Cherry Creek forked off from the Platte River. The Elitch Gardens amusement park was off in the distance.
I hoped that no one saw her, and if they did, that they couldn't believe their eyes. That's what happened to me the first time.
She did a couple of acrobatic loops. Then Max flew back down toward Kit and me. She dived, pulled out of it beautifully, and landed right next to the Jeep.
"This is so great!" she said, and she was smiling, laughing out loud.
"Thank you, thank you both. I've dreamed about doing that since I was a little girl."
We climbed back in the Jeep.
Max wrapped her soft, feathery arms around me and she hugged me all the way home.
Chapter 69
IN HER WARM, snuggly bed at the cabin, Max was replaying the glorious night in Denver. She was having good thoughts for a change, especially about Frannie and Kit. They were so nice to her. They were like the mother and father she'd never had.
Suddenly, Max stiffened. She tilted her head to one side. They were coming. She heard them, felt them in every part of her body.
All of her senses told her it was so. They were sneaking up on the cabin right now. She wasn't paranoid, wasn't making this up. She wanted to scream a warning for Frannie and Kit, but she held it inside.
Don't let the attackers know that you know.
She angled herself out of the bed and went to the closest window. She peeked outside. It was a moonlit night. She heard the crackling of the underbrush. One of the men appeared, came sneaking out of the woods.
She knew who he was - one of the meanest guards. The Security people from the School were here. They had found her. And they were here for Frannie and Kit, too.
Suddenly, Max was eighty pounds of flapping wings, fueled with fear and fury. She flew out of the small bedroom! She flew inside the house she whipped back toward the rear bedrooms. Frannie and Kit were asleep in two of the rooms. Their senses weren't nearly as sharp as hers.
But then again, neither were the Security creeps' senses.
Forbidden! Forbidden! She wasn't supposed to fly! But who gives a damn what the guards say! They don't run things out here in the real world. She ran her own life now.
Pip came out of nowhere, starting up a high-pitched barking frenzy.
Pip knew, too. He sensed the danger, the men close by in the woods.
What a good dog!
The barking woke Kit. He blew out of the back room with his gun in hand. He saw Max flying down the hall, coming straight at him. "Jesus, Max!"
"They're coming, Kit! They're real close. Lots of them. They're here for us!"
"Who's coming, Max?"
"Not now! Please. Let's go. Let's go. They'll kill us. They'll kill all of us!"
Frannie had come out of the other bedroom. She was in the hallway with a look of pure astonishment on her face.
"Please! Trust me!" Max pleaded with both of them, and it was at that moment she realized how much they already meant to her.
"Get dressed, Frannie," Kit nodded his head. "Back door. The Jeep.
I'll drive. Don't look back. Just run like hell." He was shouting as he put on his clothes.
Kit grabbed Max's hand. They were running full blast. Frannie went ahead of them and threw open the back door! Man, woman, child, and dog spilled out of the house into the pitch blackness of the night. None of them looked back.
The Jeep started like a lucky charm. As it screeched out of the rear parking area, shots slammed into metal. Glass exploded. The rear window had been shot out. The Jeep bounced high over the deeply rutted dirt road. Kit drove through the gunfire as if he'd done it before.
They fled.
Frannie and Kit had trusted her, Max kept thinking, and that changed everything.
Chapter 70
THERE IS NOTHING more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
I don't remember who said that first, but whoever it was, they were definitely right.
The insane tornado of the night's events had whipped us into persons we hardly knew, or even recognized. Coming off near death at my house, we looked like hell and felt worse. The idea of someone trying to kill us was so monstrous that it was difficult for me to make it concrete and real in my mind. What had just happened couldn't have happened - and yet it did. Someone had shot at Kit's Jeep, at us. Someone had tried to kill Max, Kit, and myself I'd never had a terrifying thought like that before.
We were huddled in a cruddy, awful Motel Six somewhere off Interstate 70. I think we were in the town of Idaho Springs, which has its fair share of crummy motels. The door was locked and chained, but how safe were we? Not very. Cheap, lime-green curtains covered the plate-glass window. The room lights were out, but I could see Max and Kit by the flickering light of the television set.
Max was eerily detached from what had happened, or so it seemed.
She was up to her chin in bedcovers and Kit had pulled a chair right up to the bed.
I knew that he liked Max a lot, but they were locked in a struggle now.
Kit believed we'd die if Max didn't talk to us about where she came from, and Max thought she'd die if she did.
His voice was cold. I had never heard him speak in that tone before. I guess he was being an FBI agent now. Professional, intense, very focused on what he felt had to be done.
"I really need some answers, Max. I'm telling you, you have to start trusting somebody soon. I mean, like right now. I'm talking to you, Max."
"I know who you're talking to. I just don't like your tone," she answered back.
Max's fragile composure broke suddenly. She leaped off the bed, ran to the bathroom, and locked herself in.
"Leave me alone! You sound just like them. Trust me." She mimicked Kit. "Why should I trust anybody? I'm not like you, Kit! Haven't you noticed?"
"Please, she's just a little girl, Kit," I said, my own voice pinched thin by stress, fear, and the unhinged craziness of the past hour.
He shook his head - once. "No. She's not just a little girl. Unfortunately, she's more than that. People are apparently dying because of her.
We almost died back there, Frannie. We have to find the School where she was being kept, at least I do."
That made me angry. "Don't be like that, Kit. I have to find the so called School, too. In case you haven't noticed, I'm involved up to my eyeballs."
Every time I looked at Max I wanted to hug her, but Kit was right. She was no more just a little girl than this was just a road trip. The truth is, we had no idea exactly what Max was, or what her being here meant. Only Max knew, and she wasn't talking.
Kit turned and tripped over a tin trash-can full of junk-food wrappers from Mcdonald's. He picked up the can and fired it hard against the wall.
He kicked it a few times for good measure.
Reflexively, I threw my arm over my eyes as the noise reverberated.
My dad used to lose his temper sometimes, back at our farm in Wisconsin. He'd throw things around, but never anything valuable; and he never hit anyone in our family, not even a spanking. Maybe that's why I wasn't really afraid of Kit's mild, almost humorous tantrum.
"Something wrong?" I asked when the noise stopped.
If I thought I'd get a smile out of him, or that I'd shift his mood, I was mistaken.
"I didn't mean to scare her," Kit said, his voice catching. "I really like her, Frannie. She's a great kid. It's just that - we could all die."
"I know. She knows, too. She'll be okay." Max had a hair-trigger flight response. I knew that people who'd been battered acted like that.
What had been done to this little girl? Who had hurt her, and how? We needed to know more about the School. Where it was. How it had worked. What was going on there. Who the people were, Kit walked to the bathroom door and knocked softly. "Max, I'm sorry if I sounded mad," he said. His voice was gentle, concerned. "I was mad.
I'm worried about your safety, and I don't know what to do without your help." I guess that was one way of s
aying, people are trying to kill us.
Max was quiet behind the bathroom door. Not a peep from her. Sometimes, she was a little girl.
Kit appealed to me in a whispered voice. "Please, get her out of there.
Will you at least try? C'mon, Frannie, help me."
Chapter 71
I SLOWLY WALKED to the bathroom. I didn't know what I was going to say, didn't have a clue. I knew I wouldn't lie to her. I stood outside the locked door for a moment, composing my thoughts. When I opened my mouth to speak, the words came spontaneously and from the heart.
"Max, I promise that nobody is going to make you do anything you don't want to do. I know that. You know that. We'll figure out the best thing together. Don't you think that's the fair way? You have any other idea?"
There was a long pause. Total silence behind the bathroom door. Max could be incredibly willful and stubborn sometimes. She was almost a teenager. I was seeing that already. Then the knob of the door slowly turned.
Max didn't look at either of us as she came out of the bathroom. "I'm sorry. I just got scared," she whispered as she climbed back into bed. She was being a little sweetheart under this incredible pressure.
Pip jumped on the bed and she folded herself around him. I sat down behind her and lightly preened her feathers. A bird will do this smoothing feathers, realigning microscopic hooks along the edges so that they form a seamless unit. I was thinking about how to break this impasse without upsetting her again.
"It's okay, Max," I whispered.
"No it isn't, Frannie. You don't know."
Tell us your secrets, Max. We trusted you. Now you trust us a little.
After a while I asked, "What are the people like at your school? Just tell a little bit. Are they scientists? Doctors? Are they teachers?"
"Sort of," she said. "They taught me to read slides. Mostly science, but I could read what I liked on my own time. They put me to work. Most of them are scientists. They're doctors."
Kit was pacing back and forth in the room, staring at the floor. When he heard the word "slides," he stopped moving. "What do you mean, slides?
What kind of slides, Max?"
"That you look at with a microscope. In the labs. I was allowed to work there. I was supposed to match alleles."
The incredible tension kept building inside me. Chaos and confusion reigned in my mind. Alleles were alternative forms of a gene. What Max had said about the School so far was unbelievably scary and wrong.
"The doctors are working with chromosomes?" I asked. "Why are they doing that? Do you know?"
"Of course I do. To improve the stock," she said, and shrugged her shoulders.
"What kind of stock?" Kit asked. This had evolved into a kind of question and answer. I felt like a police officer.
Max's face went pale white. "I could get people in trouble if I talk," she said. "I've been warned. Talking is absolutely forbidden," she murmured.
Max covered her eyes and sobbed hard. I gathered her into my arms.
"Please trust us, Max. You have to trust somebody. You know that you do, honey."
I rocked the child, the beautiful little bird-girl. I felt like I was back at the Inn-Patient, taking care of sick and injured animals. That's where I wanted to be.
Max spoke softly into the side of my neck. I could barely hear the words, but I did "Take me home," she whispered.
Book Four
THE FLIGHT SCHOOL
Chapter 72
TAKE me HOME.
It had obviously been hard for Max to say the words. It sounded so innocent coming out of her mouth, but I knew it wasn't. We couldn't get out of the Motel Six fast enough.
We zoomed down the Interstate at eighty miles an hour and then some, hoping a highway patrolman wouldn't stop us for speeding.
We were going to the School, weren't we?
I was in the back with Max. She was clearly scared, so I held her tightly. I could feel her heart beating against my arm way too fast. Poor Max. Just a little girl. Caught up in something much larger than any of us could comprehend.
I stroked her as I talked, hoping it would soothe and calm the elevenyear-old. I told Max I'd grown up on a dairy farm in northern Wisconsin and asked her if she'd ever seen a real cow.
"We don't have any cows at the School," she said. "I've seen lots of them on TV, though."
I told her about our small herd of Holsteins, with their gooey tongues and liquid eyes. I even remembered their names and personalities. Max couldn't disguise her curiosity as I described Blossom Dearie and Nellie Foot-Foot and Please Louise and our spotted bull, Kool Kat.
I told her how my sister, Carole Anne, and I got up at five in the morning to help my dad; and how we washed the cows in the summer and turned on the electric fan so they'd stay cool. But it was how we got milk from them that really fascinated her.
She hooted out loud as I described the joys of early-morning milkings.
I loved to hear her laugh. It was infectious and always made me smile.
Max took such delight in the world she hadn't been able to experience until now. And besides, laughing kept our minds off everything else that was going on.
I made up a goofy story about chocolate cows giving chocolate milk.
Kit tossed in a thought. "Tell her about the peppermint cows," he said and winked.
"You two are crazy," Max told us. "It's nice, though. I like it. I love being here with you."
"We love being with you, too," I said.
"Me three," Kit nodded agreement.
The Jeep sped through the early-morning dark. I was thinking, pretending, Hey, maybe it was just a road trip, after all - when Max stiffened. She strained forward toward the front seat and the windshield.
Then she pointed to a narrow side road that slipped off behind a rocky outcropping. "Turn here, Kit."
"How do you know that?" I asked. I didn't doubt Max, but I was curious. I was pretty sure she'd never been on this road before. I lived near here, and I don't think I was ever on it.
She shrugged, then peered deeply into my eyes. She could be smiling, then suddenly turn very intense and serious. "Can't you feel the dairy farm where you used to live?"
"It's far away," I said. "I'd need a map to find it."
"I feel the School," Max said. "I know exactly where it is. I can see the way there in my mind."
I understood what she was saying, and it hit me hard. I felt an uncomfortable lump in my throat. Like pigeons and house cats and migrating animals who can find their place of origin through either inertial navigation or God knows what, Max could home!
Chapter 73
"PULL OVER," she said before Kit made the actual turn.
Kit did as he had been asked. There was something in Max's voice that couldn't be ignored.
"Now, listen to me," she said. "You can't go any farther than this. If they catch you, I think they'll kill you. I'm serious."
"This is definitely serious stuff," Kit said to her. "And that's exactly why we're going with you, little one. This is a serious gun," he said and showed Max a handgun. It was a semiautomatic and it looked deadly.
"I have to come, Max. It's my job. It's the reason I came here to Colorado."
"I can't leave either," I told Max. "I won't leave you and Kit. It's not going to happen."
Max finally nodded. She didn't like it, but she could tell we weren't going away. For better or worse, we were in this together.
Kit pulled on the steering wheel and we turned off the main road, Which wasn't exactly U.S. One. Now we were on something called Under Mountain Pass, a twisty service road that shot up into the foothills of the Rockies. The School was here someplace. Max seemed certain of it.
"Take a right," Max said suddenly. "Then you can let me out."
"It's not going to happen, Max," Kit insisted. "We already went over that."
"You're awfully stubborn, Kit."
"Look who's talking."
The road deteriorated and became an unmarked stream of di
rt track that gave no clue as to where we were headed - neither by signage nor by buildings. It was appropriately desolate and eerie, though.
Every turn in the road was a driving challenge for Kit. Eyes glowed out at us. Deer and other forest critters wisely waited before sprinting to the other side. As we drove higher and higher into the mountains, Max finally began talking about where she had come from.
James Patterson - When the Wind Blows Page 17