“I don’t think you want to do that, Hoss,” Dylan growled, sounding like he might go grizzly on the kid. Josh’s smile never faltered, but he let go of me, and I spun around toward the mob, trying to see where Ella had gone. I was taller than many of these kids, but when I got up on tiptoe and peered around, I still couldn’t see my sister’s dark head anywhere. She’d been swallowed up.

I spotted Iggy just a few yards away, though, so I nodded at Dylan, and we made our way toward him.

“The Doomsday Group is the hope of tomorrow,” someone said, and there were shouts of agreement. Another kid said, “Save the planet!” Then somebody added, “Kill the humans.”

Something in my brain finally clicked, and then it seemed so freaking obvious. The ’noids back at the school. The delirious kid in the desert. “The Earth or Us.” And now these kids. Desert Boy was right: the end was near.

“Kill the humans,” Iggy shrieked, unfolding his giant wings.

“Oh, Ig,” I whispered. “No.”

37

“WE NEED TO get out of here, now,” Dylan said under his breath.

But the cult was already swarming around Iggy.

“He’s the new generation,” I heard someone say. “He’s the future.” It was like they wanted him to be their leader.

“Iggy! Iggy!” kids were chanting, closing in on us. They were touching his face, stroking his wings. “He’s the future.”

Some girls sobbed as if he were Robert Pattinson or something. “I want to be you,” they said, weeping, their painted-on smiles making the whole scene even weirder. “Can you sign my flyer?”

“I’ll take out my eyes,” one psycho volunteered happily. “I want to be blind like Iggy.”

“This is bad,” Angel said next to me. “Max, this is really, really bad.” I gave her a look that said, “Like, you think?!”

Normally, I follow the “no birdkid or flock relative left behind” rule. For all I knew, Ella was about to gouge out her eyes too. But I was being swept up in a crowd of insane, horrifying zombies, all chanting about saving the planet and murdering about seven billion people to do it.

So I made a fast, horrible decision.

“On the count of three, we grab Iggy and blow this popsicle stand,” I yelled. “One, two, three!”

Dylan, Angel, and I broke away from the group and pounded across the school parking lot until we had room to jump in the air to get aloft. This, obviously, prompted a new round of murmurs about us being the future, which we’d heard before, but it felt a bit less… flattering than it usually did.

Dylan and I swooped over Iggy, grabbed him under the arms, and lifted him up, just like the flying monkeys did to Dorothy in Oz.