when the wind blows by james patterson

Author:james patterson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: medical experiment, sci-fi
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 1998-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 62

YOU HAVE DONE THIS BEFORE,” I said and smiled. I couldn’t help myself. She was such a cool little girl. Relaxed, well mannered, and funny.

“Millions of times,” Max said.

She lifted a foot off the ground and hovered there.

I stood on a footstool and pressed the stethoscope to her chest again and listened to her heart as it pounded far too fast for me to count. I stopped listening and looked at her. I marveled at Max. My mind was in the process of being completely blown away.

“I can get it up to two hundred beats a minute without straining,” she said. Then she winked. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Very cool,” I said. I placed my hands on her hips. “Okay,” I whispered. “That’s enough of this for right now. Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.”

Max stopped beating her wings and dropped to the floor. I measured her from head to toe. I was trying to regain my composure.

“Fifty-seven inches,” she piped up.

Right. She was exactly four foot nine. Her arms and legs were slightly disproportionate; the legs were longer. The ring and pinkie fingers of both hands were partially fused, but it wasn’t noticeable unless you looked closely. There was tiny webbing between her toes.

These adaptations allowed her to use her hands and feet as a kind of rudder mechanism in lieu of a tail. There was also some feathering down the back of her legs. That would help in flight, too. Provide more rudder.

Her neck was very flexible. Her reflexes were much, much better than mine—or anybody else’s. Her distance and peripheral vision were acute. No, they were extraordinary. She was superior in almost every way—the best of humans, the best of birds.

As I’d already suspected, her feathered wings were perfectly jointed. Blindfolded, I’d have thought they belonged to a large bird that did some serious long-distance soaring; hawks, for instance, or birds that fish the ocean. Was Max part human, part hawk? How, how, how had this happened?

I put my tape measure to a wing tip and, without my asking, Max spanned her wings.

“One hundred and ten inches,” she said with pride. Her soft voice had a rustling sound, like wind blowing over dried cornstalks.

“Thanks,” I said. “A little over nine feet of wingspan.” Biggest wings I’d ever seen on an eleven-year-old girl.

I asked Max to please lie down on the bed. I palpated her abdominal cavity, got a fix on her organs, which were in the expected places, but small.

Again, this was logical and understandable. Flight was only possible if the wings could lift the body. So, strong chest muscles, small organs, and, unless I was way off the mark, her bones would not only be lightweight and hollow but also very strong in order to cope with the considerable stress of flight.

A perfect design, I thought.

She had been designed, hadn’t she?

“Are you going to give me a pelvic?” Max asked.

She’d been given pelvic exams? I was shocked, but I didn’t allow my discomfort to show.

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

“Oh. Well, I can tell you, anyway,” she said, putting on her pants.

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