The gull had good evasive maneuvers, but I was better, and it had been ages since the termite-fest in Tanzania. Afterward, my stomach seized in protest and I wondered if the bird had been ill or full of poisonous chemicals. I felt nauseous and dizzy for miles, concentrating on not puking up the only food I might see for days, and when I finally looked down, I realized I’d gotten completely off track.

I thought I’d been flying over the Midwest, but I didn’t recognize the landscape at all. The earth was as parched as a desert, with a deep, endless gash in the ground that I couldn’t identify. The snaking shape was like a mini Grand Canyon, so big that it was certainly a landmark I would’ve recognized.

Then it hit me: It was the Mississippi River. The gull had probably been trying to find water. The thing was, there wasn’t any. It was completely dried up.

As I continued westward, things got even weirder. The city of St. Louis seemed to have a big barricade around it, and between the windmills of the prairie states, the tall grasses fed whirling tornadoes of fire.

I didn’t buy everything Angel had said—I still thought it was better to gather information than follow a bossy kid wherever she commanded, for example. But after seeing the extent of the devastation, I knew she was right about one thing: Something bigger was building.

And if, as I’d overheard on the radio, there were people massacring whoever they found, then having the flock members separated and vulnerable was about the worst idea ever right now.

Which brought me to: I had to find Fang.

43

FANG HAD LOST a lot of blood in the bird attack, and by the time he’d reached the edge of the Rocky Mountains in what was probably Wyoming, he’d been so exhausted and light-headed that all he could do was flop down in a dry creek bed.

Now all his wounds were covered with pus-filled scabs, he was so dehydrated that his lips were cracked and bloody, and he was near starvation. He thought he’d read that you could eat anything that smelled like mint, but the spiny purple flowers he’d found had made him hallucinate for three days.

So when he first heard the voices, he wasn’t sure they were real.

“I mean, I signed up for the cleanup crew to kill some freaks, you know?” a young male voice complained from shockingly nearby. “But everybody’s already dead.”

Fang had been so weak he hadn’t sought out proper shelter. Cursing his carelessness, he flattened himself against the dusty red earth.