Max- Evading Rifle Fire

  Just then Angel said, “uh-oh,” which is always enough to make my blood run cold. In the next second, I focused sharply on a few dark specks at the front of the dust clouds. One of the dark specks raised a tiny dark toothpick.

  This time I knew for sure that I wasn’t overreacting.

  “Guns!” I shouted. “They’ve got guns!”
...

  “QUICK! UP!” FANG SHOUTED, just as the first bullets strafed the air around me with ominous hisses.

  I angled myself upward, only to see the shiny silver underbelly of one of the CSM planes, now flying right above us. It was pressing downward — the rough landing strip was maybe a quarter mile away.

  “Drop back!” I yelled. We all went vertical as the planes continued to come down practically on our heads. To escape from the bullets, we’d had to fly up right under them. The engines were way too close — the noise was deafening.

  “Watch it!” I yelled, as one plane’s landing gear almost hit Iggy. “Drop down! Drop down!” Bullets are bad, but getting smushed by landing gear, toasted by jet engine exhaust, or sucked into the front of an engine were all much less fixable.

  I could now make out the sun-browned faces of the men on … oh, geez, were those camels? The men continued to aim their rifles at us, and I felt a bullet actually whiz by my hair. In about half a second, my brain processed the following thoughts lightning fast:

- Fang: A Maximum Ride Novel, chapters 2 and 3