Max- Split Bomb

  The light was nearly blinding as the yellow and orange flames licked overhead, burning through the atmosphere. I heard Fang inhale sharply next to me, and we both stared in awe and wonder. Seconds felt like hours as we watched the whole horizon transform into a raging inferno.

  I could not move.

  It was… dazzling. More than that. It was awesomely, terrifyingly beautiful. Like, it hurt to look at. The most spectacular sunset the world would ever see—this was the world’s final good night.

  Moments later, a gash ripped across the sky, splitting it into two flaming halves, with an aching hole of nothingness between them. Then the split opened wider, like a horrible, garish sneer, and I felt all the dread I’d been bottling up sigh right out of it. I held my breath as I waited for the hand of God, or aliens, or even vindictive Ari, back from the dead one last time, to reach out and pluck me from where I stood.

  Instead, from that gaping mouth came a wave of excruciating heat that swept through the jungle and right over us.

  I snapped out of my trance and collapsed to the floor in agony, tearing at my feathers, my clothes; I was sure my skin was boiling off. I couldn’t even scream—my lungs were like shriveled little steaks baking inside my chest.

  I was hyperventilating, trying desperately to breathe. Everything was getting fuzzy, except the pain. I was passing out.

  But after what felt like a century of torture, the gap zipped closed as quickly as it had opened.

  I gagged, sucking in the cooling air. I was alive. With intact skin and feathers. How was that even possible? I squinted upward, disbelieving. Except for some dying red streaks, the fire was no longer scorching the sky.

  My adrenaline finally caught up to the insanity and the world rushed back into place. I scrambled to my feet, looking around wildly. I didn’t know what I was looking for—just an answer, a direction I could follow.
...

  Like I should’ve been from the start.

  Together, in silent agreement, Fang and I shot into the sky. A few hundred meters away, all the trees were scorched—a few more seconds of that heat and we would’ve been human fireworks. As we raced over the smoking jungle toward the coastline, we saw trees crashed down on one another like dominoes. Their trunks were stripped of bark and branches from where the fire had come.

- Nevermore: The Final Maximum Ride Adventure, chapter 84