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The brain explosion came again while I was sleeping.
One moment I was lost in a dream in which I was strolling lazily through a field of yellow flowers, like a dopey shampoo commercial, and the next I had jack-knifed into a sitting position, holding my head and feeling like this was it: Death had finally come for me, and it wasn’t taking no for an answer.
My breaths were tight hisses. Jagged shards of pain ripped through my skull, and I heard myself whimper. Please let it be fast, I begged God. Please just end it, end it, end it now. Please, please, please.
“Max?” Fang’s low voice, right by my ear, seeped through the waves of agony. I couldn’t respond. My face was awash with tears. If I had been standing on a cliff, nothing could have kept me from throwing myself off. With my wings tucked in.
Inside my brain, images flashed incomprehensibly, making me sick, assaulting my senses with pictures, words, sounds. A voice speaking gibberish. Maybe it was mine.
As if from a great distance, I felt Fang’s hand on my shoulder, but it was like watching a movie-it seemed totally unrelated to what I was going through. My teeth were clenched so hard my jaw ached, and then I tasted blood-I had bitten into my lip.
When was I going to see the proverbial tu
Then an angry voice filtered through the pain: “Who’s screwing with my Mac?”
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Just as before, the pain slowly ebbed, and I almost cried with frustration: If it was ending, I wasn’t dead. If I wasn’t dead, I could go through this again.
Images flashed across the backs of my eyes, but they were unfocused and undecipherable. If I had been alone, I would have started bawling. Instead I had to desperately try to keep it together, try not to wake the younger ones (if I hadn’t already), try not to give our position away.
“Who are you?” The angry voice came again. “What are you doing? You’ve crashed my whole system, worthless dipstick!”
Ordinarily, I would have been on my feet by now, pushing Angel and the others in back of me, an angry snarl on my face.
However, tonight I was crumpled in a humiliated, whimpering ball, holding my head, eyes squeezed shut, trying not to sob like a complete weenie.
“What are you talking about?” Fang asked, an edge of steel in his voice.
“My system crashed. I’ve tracked the interference, and it’s comin‘ from you. So I’m tellin’ you to knock it off-or else!”
I drew in a deep, shuddering breath, totally mortified that a stranger was seeing me like this.
“And what’s wrong with her? She trippin‘?”
“She’s fine,” Fang snapped. “We don’t know anything about your computer. If you’re not brain-dead, you’ll get out of here.” No one sounds colder or meaner than Fang when he wants to.
The other guy said flatly, “I’m not going nowhere till you quit messing with my Mac. Why don’t you get your girlfriend to a hospital?”
Girlfriend? Oh, God, was I going to catch it later about that. It was enough to make me lever up on one arm, then pull myself to a sitting position.
“Who the hell are you?” I snarled, the effect totally ruined by the weak, weepy sound of my voice. Blinking rapidly, finding even the dim tu
I got a hazy impression of someone about my age; a ragged-looking kid wearing old army fatigues. He had a dingy PowerBook attached to straps around his shoulders like a xylophone or something.
“None of your beeswax!” he shot back. “Just quit screwing up my motherboard.”
I was still clammy and nauseated, still had a shocking headache and felt trembly, but I thought I could string a complete sentence together. “What are you talking about?”
“This!” The kid turned his Mac toward us, and when I saw the screen I actually gasped.
It was a mishmash of flashing images, drawings, maps, streams of code, silent film clips of people talking.
It was exactly the stuff that had flooded my brain during my attack.
PART 5. THE VOICE- MAKE THAT MY VOICE
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My eyes flicked to the kid’s grimy face. “Who are you?” I demanded again, still sounding shaky.
“I’m the guy who’s go
In the next moment, his computer screen cleared totally, turning the same dull green as his fatigues. Then large red words scrolled down: Hello, Max.
Fang’s head whipped around to stare at me, and I focused helplessly on his wide, dark eyes. Then, as if co
Inside my head, a voice said, I knew you’d come. I’ve got big plans for you.
“Can you hear that?” I whispered. “Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?” Fang asked.
“That voice?” I said. My head ached, but the pain was better, and it looked as if I might avoid barfing. I rubbed my temples again, my gaze fixed on the kid’s Mac.
“What’s the deal?” the kid asked, sounding a lot less belligerent and much more weirded out. “Who’s Max? How are you doing this?”
“We’re not doing anything,” Fang said.
A new pain crashed into my brain, and once again the computer screen started flashing disco
Peering at the screen, wincing and still rubbing my temples, I spotted four words: Institute for Higher Living.
I looked at Fang, and he gave the slightest nod: He’d seen them too.
Then the screen went blank once more.
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The kid quickly started typing in commands, muttering, “I’m go
Fang and I watched, but a couple minutes later the geek stopped, flicking his computer in frustration. He looked at us with narrowed eyes, taking in everything: the drying blood on my chin, the other kids sleeping near us.
“I don’t know how you’re doing it,” he said, sounding resigned and irritated. “Where’s your gear?”
“We don’t have any gear,” Fang said. “Spooky, isn’t it?”
“You guys on the run? You in trouble?”
Jeb had drilled it into us that we shouldn’t ever trust anyone. (We now knew that included him.) The geek was starting to make me extremely nervous.
“Why would you think that?” Fang asked calmly.
The kid rolled his eyes. “Let me see. Maybe because you’re a bunch of kids sleepin‘ in a subway tu
Okay, he had a point.
“What about you?” I asked. “You’re a kid sleeping in a subway tu
The kid coughed out a laugh. “MIT kicked me out.”
MIT was a university for brainiacs-I’d heard of it. This kid wasn’t old enough.
“Uh-huh.” I made myself sound incredibly bored.
“No, really,” he said, sounding almost sheepish. “I got early admission. Was go
“What do you mean, spun out?” asked Fang.
He shrugged. “Wouldn’t take my Thorazine. They said, no Thorazine, no school.”
Okay, I’d been around wack-job scientists enough to pick up on some stuff. Like the fact that Thorazine is what they give schizophrenics.
“So you didn’t like Thorazine,” I said.
“No.” His face turned hard. “Or Haldol, or Melleril, or Zyprexa. They all suck. People just want me to be quiet, do what I’m told, don’t make trouble.”