Unfurling

A Fanfic by xMudd

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PROLOUGE

Hey there. Glad you decided to read. The message on the first page? Oh, just to keep out the riffraff. Anyway, now to business.

You've read the Maximum Ride series, right? If yes, read the next paragraph. If no, the next paragraph won't make any sense to you, but I guess you can read it anyway.

See, the Maximum Ride series is true. Every word of it. There's a girl named Max out there. She's 14. She's destined to save the world, and – of course – she has wings. The only thing that's not true is the percentage of avian DNA in us bird kids (yes, I said "us." More on that later.) is not 2, it's 20. But that's a small thing, a typo I'm sure. What I'm here to tell you about is my life, not Max's. Although they do intertwine a little.

My name is...well, I don't really have a name. But you, and others, know me as Mudd. The full name I gave to myself is Mudd Hawk, but you don't really need to know that. What you do need to know is that I'm 12, and a leader of my own little Flock. Again, if you haven't read the Max Ride series, I'll be making plenty of references.

A Flock is a group of avian-humans, recombinant lifeforms, mutant freaks, whatever you wanna call it. We're bird kids. Kids with wings. Yeah, pretty cool, right? Well, yeah, except for one thing... it hurt. It hurt to become a bird kid, and people are after us now.

They have claws and teeth and all sorts of nasty stuff, and they're after us. They're called Flyboys. They were called Erasers, but the Erasers died too quickly, so now there are Flyboys. Big, evil, robotic wolf people. The Erasers were alive, as I'm sure you can guess, but the Flyboys are just as evil as the real thing.

Bet you guys that have read Max Ride are pretty bored now, right? Then you'll be glad when I say that I'm gonna start from the beginning, right now. So hold on tight, this is gonna be a wild ride.

Chapter One:

Run!

"This specimen may be the future of Itex. Yes, this one right here." I woke to the sound of a scientist's voice. I groaned a little, sat up, and looked around. Of course I was still in the dog crate. (Yes, I did say dog crate. I lived in one for 8 long years.)

I gazed out at the whitecoat that was standing outside my cage, and he smirked. With him was a trainee evil mad scientist. (Yes, evil mad scientist. Do you need eyeglasses?) This young, bright eyed, girl was looking at me in interest, with no trace of pity. Of course. The tours came after the training of how we were just playthings, just test objects.

So she felt no guilt whatsoever when she reached out and pulled out one of my feathers. "Ouch!" I yelled, having learned how to talk via scientist chatter. That particular word was learned when, at age 6, I bit a whitecoat's finger.

The girl seemed taken aback that I could speak, and apologized. "Oh! I'm sorry," she said with a worried look at her elder whitecoat, who laughed.

"No need to apologize to the Experiment, Marcia," he said with a smile, and herded her along to the next area. I scowled, and looked through my bars at Maximum Ride, age 10. Whose innocent manner immediately made me smile again.

"Hi." I whispered through the bars of my cage, and she smiled. "When are we gonna escape?"

Max just shrugged. Surprisingly, considering her adept manner now, she was very shy, and quiet back in the bad old days. She knew how to talk, but just...didn't.

I looked around at the whole room. Hopefully this was how my day could go. Just sitting in my dog crate, not getting dissected or tested or hurt for one day. Just one day. I didn't want much, just no intense pain for a few days. Or weeks. Or out of here. I laughed a little at the thought. Out of this place? I didn't even know whether the whole world was like this or not.

Little did I know that I was going to escape soon.

Another thing I didn't know was that I was going to become very unconscious in the next 3 seconds. I woke up on the floor of my dog crate, not remembering falling asleep. Yeah, life was crazy like that.

Max looked up, and held up 3 fingers. Then pointed at a clock. "Max?" I said, and she cocked her head, like a curious puppy. "I know that you mean 3 o'clock, but could you talk?" I would have said "please" if I had known such a word existed. The whitecoats weren't too polite, so I'd never heard it before.

Max nodded. "But what if there're bugs in the room?" she whispered, and I saw the legitimacy of the question. I shrugged, and she continued. "Well, anyway, at 3 o'clock, Jeb's gonna come in here and unlock our cages, and then we gotta run. But we gotta be quick."

I thought about this for a moment, and then agreed. It sounded like a great plan at the time, and turned out to be a great plan later.