But now he looked-well, not anything close to normal, but at least all the frothing at the mouth had stopped.
I waited for the first volley of venom.
But Ari had no snide remarks, no taunts, no threats. Instead he undid one of my arms, then pulled it down and strapped it to the arm of a wheelchair.
Hmm. Could I still fly if I was strapped into a wheelchair? I thought maybe I could. I guessed we would find out. In fact, if I could get some serious speed going on this thing, it might lend a significant boost to an exciting takeoff.
I sat down in the chair, and Ari strapped my ankle to the post by the front wheel. Just as I was tensing to make a break, he whispered, "They made this chair with lead bars. It weighs about a hundred an' seventy-five pounds."
Crap. Even though I was really tall for my age, I weighed barely a hundred pounds because of all the avian modifications to my bones and stuff. And the fact that I could almost never get enough food. So even though I was really, really strong, there was no way I could get a wheelchair that heavy off the ground.
I looked at Ari with loathing. "What now, big guy? You taking me to your leader?"
He didn't rise to the bait. "Just thought I'd show you around a bit, that's all, Max."
44
"Gosh, a guided tour, from you? Now I know I'm dreaming," I quipped. But then a thought occurred to me. "They told me all the Erasers had been retired. And if I wasn't strapped down, I'd make air quotes around retired."
Ari looked sad. "Yeah. I'm the last one. They...killed all the others."
For some reason his quiet, sad confirmation of that terrible fact made my blood run cold. Despite what a walking chigger bite he was, there were still times when I could almost see the little kid he'd once been. They'd altered him when he was already three years old, and his results had been less than stellar, poor guy.
Oh, yeah, poor guy who tried to kill me a bunch of times. My eyes narrowed.
"The flock is supposed to be wiped out too," I said. "Am I the first to go? Is that why you came to get me?"
He shook his head. "I just have permission to take you around. I know you guys are supposed to be retired, but I don't know when."
I got an idea. "Listen, Ari," I said, trying for a cajoling tone. Since snarling or threatening comes much more naturally to me, I wasn't sure how successful I was. "Maybe all of us should bust out of here together. I don't know what Jeb's told you, but you might be on the endangered list too."
I was about to go on, but he interrupted me.
"I know I am," he said, still very quietly. He pushed the wheelchair through the doorway, and we were in a long hall lit by fluorescent lights and tiled with the ever-popular linoleum squares. Suddenly he knelt down and pulled his shirt collar away from his neck.
I recoiled, but he said, "Look-I have an expiration date. We all do."
Totally grossed out but morbidly curious, I leaned forward. On the back of Ari's neck was a tattoolike line of numbers. It was a date. The year was this year, and I thought the month was this month, but I wasn't sure. Funny how time drags when you're being held captive.
I thought, Eew. Then, Poor Ari. Then, This might be another trick, another way for them to yank my chain.
"What do you mean, we all do?" I asked suspiciously.
His eyes, looking like the familiar kid-Ari eyes, met mine. "All of us experiments have built-in expiration dates. When someone's time is pretty close, it shows up on the back of their neck. Mine showed up a couple days ago. So my time is soon."
I looked at him, appalled. "So what happens on that date?"
He shrugged and stood to start wheeling me forward again. "I'll die. They would have exterminated me with the others, but my time is really close anyway. So they cut me a break. Because, you know, I'm Jeb's son."
His voice cracked as he said that, and I stared straight ahead down the hall.
This was a new low, even for mad scientists.
45
I don't know if you guys ever tour top-secret evil science labs, like for school field trips or something. But I got a tour that day, and if I had had to write a school paper about it, my title would have been, "Scarier and Far Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine (even if you have a totally twisted imagination)."
I mean, we'd grown up here. (I thought.) Plus, we'd seen some horrific stuff at the Institute in New York. (I thought.) So it's not like devastating freaks of nature were new to me. But Ari brought me down halls and up and down in elevators, and we explored parts of the School I'd never seen, never knew existed. And let me tell you, the flock and I looked like Disneyland cast members compared with some of the things I saw.
They weren't all recombinant life-forms. Some were "enhanced" but not combined with another species.
I saw a human baby who wasn't even walking yet, sitting on the floor, chewing on a plastic frog while a whitecoat wrote a long, complicated, unintelligible mathematical problem on a wall-sized whiteboard.
Another whitecoat asked, "How long did this take Feynman to solve?"
The first whitecoat said, "Four months."
The baby put down the frog and crawled over to the whiteboard. A whitecoat handed her a marker. The baby wrote a complicated, unintelligible answer on the whiteboard, something with a lot of Greek squiggles in it.
Then the baby sat back, looked at the whiteboard, and started to gum the end of the marker. The other whitecoat checked the answer. He looked up and nodded.
The first whitecoat said, "Good girl," and gave the baby a cookie.
In another room I saw, like, Plexiglas boxes with some sort of grotesque tissue growing in them. Brainlike tissue floating in different-colored liquids. Wires were coming out of the boxes, connected to a computer. A whitecoat was typing commands into the computer, and the brain things were apparently carrying them out.
I looked at Ari. "Have brain, will travel."
"I think they were seeing if people would still need bodies or something," he said.
I saw a room full of the Eraser replacements, those Flyboy things. They were hung in rows on metal hooks, like raggedy coats in a closet.
Their glowy red eyes were closed, and I saw that each one had a wire plugged into its leg. Thin, hairy Eraser skin was stretched taut over their metal frames, and in some places it had torn, allowing a joint to poke through or a couple of gears and pulleys to show. The whole effect was pretty repulsive.
"They're charging," said Ari tonelessly.
I was starting to feel overwhelmed, even more overwhelmed than usual.
"They call this one Brain on a Stick," Ari said, gesturing.
I saw a metallic spinal cord, connected to two metal legs, walking around. It walked smoothly, fluidly, like a person. At the top of the spinal cord was a Plexiglas box holding-no, not a hamster-a brainlike clump of tissue.
It walked past us, and I heard sounds coming from it, as if it were talking to itself.
In the next room we saw a little all-human kid, about two years old, who had weirdly bulked-up, developed muscles, like a tiny bodybuilder. He was bench-pressing more than two hundred pounds-weights much bigger than he was, probably eight times his body weight or more.
I couldn't take any more of this. "So what happens now, Ari?"
"I'll take you back," said Ari.
We didn't speak as he navigated the halls and levels of this village of nightmares. I wondered, if his expiration date was real, how it must feel for him to know that the end of his life was coming soon, minute by minute, second by second. The flock and I had faced death a thousand times, but it had always had an element of "maybe we can slide out of this."
To have a date tattooed on your neck-it was like looking up and seeing a train's headlights coming right at you, and your feet just can't move off the track. I was going to check the backs of our necks as soon as I could.