The Final Warning

by James Patterson

  “I was thinking we’d get something to eat, then call Dr. Martinez,” he suggested.

  I smiled at him, my first real smile in . . . I didn’t know how long. “An excellent notion.”

  72

  Washington DC

  “I’m gonna barf,” I whispered to Fang, wiping my sweaty hands on my jeans.

  “You’ll be fine,” he whispered back. “You always are.”

  “I’m gonna die,” I moaned.

  “You can’t die,” he said, a hint of a smile in his voice. “You’re the indestructible Max.”

  “I’ve never faced anything this hard before.” Yes, I sounded like a pathetic weenie. I prefer to think of it as showing my softer side.

  “Max?” My mom stood at the door, smiling at me. She was all dressed up and looked fabulous. I would be lucky if I grew up to look like her. Which I guess would be hindered by my refusal to girlify myself. I looked down at my clean T-shirt and jeans. Mom had thoughtfully supplied me with a nice actual dress, but when I’d tried it on, I felt — I don’t know. Vulnerable? Like I couldn’t move, couldn’t fight.

  Well, we all have issues.

  At least my clothes were totally clean, though my T-shirt advertised Güero’s Taco Bar in Austin, Texas. On top of that I wore my traditional oversize, loose Windbreaker, because why would I want Congress staring at my wings?

  Yes. Congress. There, in a nutshell, was my whoopsy-daisy life: Many evil people wanted to kill me, or sell me, or use me for evil purposes, and on the other hand, there I was, testifying about global warming to the Congress of the United States. Sometimes the lines got a little blurry.

  “Okay, do you have your notes?” Brigid Dwyer came up and brushed some lint off my jacket, as if that would help.

  “Yep.” I held up my sheaf of paper. Brigid, Michael, and the other scientists from the Wendy K. had helped me come up with what to say. All except Brian. He’d turned out to be another mole for the UD. He was in jail. There’s always one — or in this case two — in every crowd.

  “I think they’re ready for you,” my mom said, gesturing at the open door. I could hear the buzzing of voices inside and wished fervently that the Capitol Building had an open ceiling that I could escape through if necessary.

  “This is your mission,” said Jeb, smiling at me. “You’re fulfilling your mission right now, right here.”

  I nodded, took a deep breath, and gave one last look at my flock. They were lined up, scrubbed clean, looking awed and a little freaked. Angel waved at me, and I waved back.

  Showtime, folks.

  73

  MY HANDS SHOOK. The microphone in front of me seemed too big, and I’d made it squeak by getting too close. I wished I could just beat someone up and get the heck out of here.

  I cleared my throat and looked down at my speech.

  “Thank you for inviting me here today,” I said, my voice sounding nothing like me. “I’m here to testify about things I’ve seen and experienced myself. I’m here because the human race has become more powerful than ever. We’ve gone to the moon. Our crops resist diseases and pests. We can stop and restart a human heart. And we’ve harvested vast amounts of energy for everything from night-lights to enormous superjets. We’ve even created new kinds of people, like me.

  “But everything mankind” — I frowned — “personkind has accomplished has had a price. One that we’re all gonna have to pay.”

  I heard coughing and shifting in the audience. I looked down at my notes, and all the little black words blurred together on the page. I just could not get through this.

  I put the speech down, picked up the microphone, and came out from behind the podium.

  “Look,” I said. “There’s a lot of official stuff I could quote and put up on the screen with PowerPoint. But what you need to know, what the world needs to know, is that we’re really destroying the earth in a bigger and more catastrophic way than anyone has ever imagined.

  “I mean, I’ve seen a lot of the world, the only world we have. There are so many awesome, beautiful things in it. Waterfalls and mountains, thermal pools surrounded by ice and snow as far as you can see. Beautiful beaches with sand like white sugar. Fields and fields of wildflowers. Places where the ocean crashes up against a mountainside, like it’s done for hundreds of thousands of years.

  “I’ve also seen concrete cities with hardly any green. And rivers whose pretty rainbow surfaces came from an oil leak upstream. Animals are becoming extinct right now, in my lifetime. Just recently, I went through one of the worst hurricanes ever recorded. It was a whole lot worse because of huge, worldwide climatic changes caused by . . . us. We, the people.”

  I suddenly remembered a catchy (if annoying) song I’d heard over and over in a Saturday morning cartoon — the one that was supposed to teach kids about the Constitution. The words of the preamble, which were quoted in the song, came flooding back to me. “ ‘We the People of the United States,’ ” I began, “ ‘in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.’ ”

  The room was silent. I looked around at all the faces. “A more perfect union? While huge corporations do whatever they want to whoever they want, and other people live in subway tunnels? Where’s the justice of that? Kids right here in America go to bed hungry every night, while other people get four-hundred-dollar haircuts. Promote the general welfare? Where’s the general welfare of strip-mining, toxic pesticides, industrial solvents being dumped into rivers, killing everything? Domestic tranquility? Ever sleep in a forest that’s being clear-cut? You’d be hearing chain saws in your head for weeks. The blessings of liberty? Yes. I’m using one of the blessings of liberty right now, my freedom of speech, to tell you guys, who make the laws, that the very ground you stand on, the house you live in, the children you tuck in at night, are all in immediate, catastrophic danger.”

  I took a deep breath, really getting warmed up. The flock was standing all around me, and Mom and Jeb were off to one side. I glanced at Mom, and she looked so proud. I hoped that Angel wasn’t turning into a bird of paradise, and that Nudge wasn’t making pens fly toward her. And if there was a God, Gazzy would not demonstrate his new skill right here in Congress.

  “Every minute of every day, cars belch exhaust. Factories spew toxins into the air, land, and water. We’ve cleared millions of square miles of forests, rain forests, and plains, which means tons of topsoil is just washing away. Which means loss of animals and plants, and increased fires, floods, and coastal disintegration. Just by stuff people have made, created, we’re raising the overall temperature of the entire atmosphere. Well, we only have the one atmosphere! What do you plan to do when it’s destroyed? Can we all hold our breath until we get a new one?”

  No one shouted out an answer.

  “The problem is here, now,” I went on. “Nine of the ten hottest years ever recorded have happened in my lifetime. I’m fourteen. More or less. There have been record-setting weather extremes across the globe — tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, wildfires, tsunamis. We’re warming up the planet, and the planet’s ice is melting. If only fifty percent of the world’s ice melts, countless rivers and streams will overflow and then dry up, killing hundreds of thousands of people from disease and starvation. The ocean water level will rise anywhere from four feet to maybe twenty feet. How many of your favorite vacation spots would be under water? Want to see the Eiffel Tower by canoe? Do any of you own beach houses? Kiss ’em good-bye. And not two hundred years from now. Soon. Maybe within this lifetime.”

  I swallowed and wished I had like an Icee or something. “We can’t reverse this disaster, even if we all pitched in now and did everything we could, which, face it, we’re not going to do. A small percentage of us will do stuff, and other people will ignore the problem and hope they’
ll be dead before it gets really bad. But there are things we can do that would at least help. It would make a difference.

  “The US could ratify the Kyoto treaty. Pretty much every country in the world, except us and Australia, has ratified it. How can we be so pigheaded? Wait — don’t answer that. I know our time here is limited.

  “In general, we need to pay more attention to what we do, what we buy, who we buy it from. Use compact fluorescent bulbs. If every house in America replaced just one of its regular lightbulbs with a compact fluorescent, it would be like taking a million cars off the road. I mean, how hard is that? I can do the math, and I’ve never even gone to school!

  “Look into other kinds of power. Windmills, water mills, solar power — every year corporations pay a jillion dollars in legal fees to avoid getting fined for pollution violations. What if they took a tiny percentage of that money and put it toward coming up with better energy sources?

  “Right now America looks like a fatheaded, shortsighted, gas-guzzling, arrogant blowhard to the rest of the world. And Sweden looks all clean and tidy and progressive. I mean, where’s our sense of pride?

  “Why can’t we be the progressive leaders, showing the rest of the world how to clean up its act? Why can’t we, the people, get more involved and push through legislation that will help clean up our air, land, and water? Why can’t we take government funds from stupid things like war and use them for programs that will develop better fuel sources?

  “I’m just one kid, and not even a regular kid. But if I can come up with all this, why can’t you? Will you wait until the water is lapping at your feet?”

  I stopped abruptly. To tell you the truth, I could have gone on and on. I could have kept them pinned in their chairs all day while I recited facts and figures. But I hoped that at least a little of what I had said would stick, and make them think.

  That was all I could do to save the world.

  Epilogue

  HOW BAD CAN IT BE?

  74

  “GEE, A FANCY SCHOOL in northern Virginia,” Iggy muttered. “How bad can it be?”

  “I’m sure nothing disastrous or life threatening will happen to us while we’re here,” I said, sounding much more gullible than I am.

  Here we were at Ye Olde Academy for Mutants and Other Kids. Shortly after my Oscar-worthy speech to Congress, my mom had explained that some important people had gone ahead and created a school for us. Frankly, we’d all been ready to kick back and relax on a non-hurricaned beach for a while, but Mom and Jeb had asked us to give the school a try. So here we were.

  It was the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and when I’d taken a gander at the government limos, bigwigs, news teams, and stuff, I’d cottoned on to the fact that this was a big deal.

  Plus, my mom; my half sister, Ella; Jeb; and some of the scientists from the Wendy K. were all there, beaming at us. I don’t know who had created this school (actually called the Lerner School for Gifted Children — I thought they’d misspelled Learner, but then found out Lerner was some guy who donated a bunch of money), and I had no idea why anyone who knew us would think that we’d be here for any length of time, but hey! I was willing to try anything once!

  So here we were, my flock. Angel’s arm was all better, Akila had fully recovered (but still weighed eighty pounds, which still posed a humongo problem carting her furry butt around when we flew), Total’s wings had continued to grow, and yesterday he’d gotten his two front paws about an inch off the ground. I almost missed Antarctica — not the coldness part but the empty cleanness of it, and the fact that we’d been relatively safe there (until we were captured, anyway), and the meaning of the work we’d done there. I missed the penguins. The leopard seals? Not so much.

  We were all clean, and I only mention this because it was something new and different. Cameras were flashing all around us. Our former “lie low and be anonymous” rule was pretty much shot all to heck. I’d had a great visit with my mom and Ella, and do not tell anyone I said this, but I was relieved that Brigid was staying in Antarctica and Fang was staying here.

  I wondered if they had rounded up some of the other mutant kids I’d crossed paths with at the Institute and at Itex. I had always felt kinda sorry for them. They seemed lonely, like they didn’t have a flock, or a family, or a purpose in life.

  “And now, without further ado, I give you the Lerner School for Gifted Children!” The mayor of this small town stepped forward and cut the ribbon across the front entrance with a big pair of scissors that wouldn’t be good for anything except stuff like this. The wide ribbon fell neatly apart, and everyone clapped and took pictures.

  Max?

  I didn’t pay any attention for a moment, and then I realized that it was actually my Voice, the one inside my head. (I wonder if that phrase will ever sound less weird.)

  What? I thought.

  I know you’re in the middle of something here, and I hate to interrupt, but there’s another mission for you.

  Huuuh? What are you talking about? I just did my mission! And almost died! A bunch of times!

  Max, Max, Max, said the Voice in that irritating way it had. The world isn’t saved yet, is it? You’ve got work to do. Now, get out of there, and I’ll give you the coordinates of where you need to go.

  Well. I weighed some unknown, probably difficult, possibly deadly mission, with us not knowing where we were going or what we’d be doing, against this bright, shiny new school building, no doubt full of gleaming desks and Macs everywhere.

  Never let it be said that I, Maximum Ride, would ever shirk my duty.

  “Come on, guys,” I said to the flock. “Gotta go. More world to save. All this book learning’s going to have to wait.”

  Nudge looked relieved, and Gazzy said, “Oh, thank God.”

  “Max?” said my mom.

  I gave her a quick hug and a kiss, and Ella too.

  “Duty calls,” I said. “I’ll let you know where I am. Thanks for everything.”

  “I love you,” she said, because she’s the coolest mom in the entire messed-up world.

  Many cameras went off when the six of us, holding Total and Akila, whom I now thought of as the world’s heaviest Malamute, took running starts, unfurled our wings, and soared into the sky, just like that.

  My heart was so full of freedom that I felt like it might burst.

  About the Author

  JAMES PATTERSON is the author of the highly praised Maximum Ride novels and of bestselling detective series featuring Alex Cross and the Women’s Murder Club. His novels have sold more than 140 million copies worldwide. He lives in Florida.