Two Schools Out - Forever

11

Walking quickly, the doctor looked at me in that zoo-exhibit way I've become familiar with. My heart sank.

All of my worst fears were coming true. I could already see the mesh of a big dog crate closing in around me. Those freaking Erasers! I hated them! They always showed up, and when they did, they destroyed everything.

You have to respect your enemy, Max, said the Voice. Never, ever underestimate them. The second you do, they'll squash you. Be smart about them. Respect their abilities, even if they don't respect yours.

I swallowed hard. Whatever.

We pushed through heavy double doors and were in a small, tiled, very scary room. Fang was on a gurney.

He had a tube going down his throat and more tubes attached to his arms. I pressed my hand to my mouth. I'm not squeamish, but cracked, painful memories of the experiments done on us at the School were seeping into my brain, and I wished that my Voice would keep talking, say something really annoying to distract me.

Another doctor and a nurse were standing by Fang. They had cut his shirt and jacket off. The horrible jagged claw wounds in his side were still bleeding.

Now that he had me here, the doctor didn't seem to know what to say.

"Will-will he be okay?" I asked, feeling as if I were choking. Life without Fang was unimaginable.

"We don't know," said one of the doctors, looking very concerned.

The woman doctor gestured to Fang. "How well do you know him?"

"He's my brother."

"Are you-like him?" she asked.

"Yes." I set my jaw and kept my eyes on Fang. I felt my muscles tighten, a new, unwelcome flood of adrenaline icing its way through my veins. Okay, first I would slam this little trolley against the nurse's legs...

"So you can help us," the first doctor said, sounding relieved. "'Cause we're not recognizing this stuff. What about his heartbeat?"

I looked at the EKG. The blips were fast and erratic.

"It should be smoother," I said. "And faster." I snapped my fingers a bunch of times to demonstrate.

"Can I...?" the doctor asked, motioning his stethoscope toward me. I nodded warily.

He listened to my heart, a look of total amazement on his face.

Then he moved his stethoscope over my stomach, in several places. "Why can I hear air moving down here?" he asked.

"We have air sacs," I explained quietly, feeling as if my throat were closing. My hands tightened into fists by my sides. "We have lungs, but we also have smaller air sacs. And-our stomachs are different. Our bones. Our blood." Gee, pretty much everything.

"And you have... wings?" the second doctor asked in a low voice. I nodded.

"You're a human-avian hybrid," the first doctor said.

"That's one name for it," I said tightly. As opposed to, say, mutant freak. "I prefer Avian American."

I glanced at the nurse, who looked scared and like she'd rather be anywhere but here. I so related.

The female doctor became all business. "We're giving him saline, to counter the shock, but he needs blood."

"You can't give him hu-regular blood," I said. All the scientific knowledge I'd gleaned over the years from reports and experiments started coming to the surface. "Our red blood cells have nuclei." Like birds'.

The doctor nodded. "Get ready to give him a donation," she instructed me briskly.