It is very easy to forget to write these after that month-and-a-half break. Apologies. This’ll also be the last spork of the year, and somehow I still won’t be done with this book! It keeps multiplying on me or something aaaa help me I am going to headdesk myself to death
Chapter 78
Max gets Angel’s telepathic message and heads to the house.
Within fifteen seconds, I was streaking through the sky at upward of 250 miles an hour. (pg 272)
Noooot physically pooooossibllllllle!
Chapter 79
Dr. Gunther-Hagen injects a hypodermic needle into Fan’gs IV line, but it does nothing. Angel is there too, evidently having given up on trying to find a phone. Suuure.
“Blast!” Dr. Hans shouted. (pg 273)
LOL, “blast.” Am I really supposed to take this guy seriously?
Meanwhile, Angel is “in a deep state of shock.”
When her Voice had given her the premonition about Fang, she had just reported it. … Somehow, she’d thought that telling Max and the others would help it not come true. (pg 273)
Right, I already pulled Angel’s quotes about Fang in the last spork, so just look to those again to see how incongruous they are with this. I guess JPatterson couldn’t be bothered to go back and change that earlier scene what with writing this book in two days.
So apparently after Dylan showed up Angel’s voice then told her that the flock needed to split up, with Angel in charge of one with Fang as her second in command and Max in another with Dylan. So, uh, what was with voting Max out of the flock? Last I checked, the best way to get someone (Max) to want to work with another person (Dylan) isn’t to force them away from said person.
Dr. Hans had promised that if Fang came here, everything would be perfect. (pg 274)
We aren’t told what constitutes “everything,” how it would be “perfect,” or what Dr. Gunther-Hagen would do to make “everything perfect,” but, you know, there’s no time for pesky things like “a plot that makes sense” when you have… uh… Well, I’d say “excitement” and “cool stuff” and “fight scenes” like JPatterson usually seems to focus on, but those have been pretty absent from this book. It’s mostly just been pointless angst and characters repeating vague things at each other without doing anything.
Oh, and apparently now Angel has decided that Dr. Gunther-Hagen was lying to her about “making everything perfect” and “making Fang more evolved” or whatever. Too bad she couldn’t have figured that out earlier with her MIND READING.
Chapter 80
I dropped down onto the terrace like a bird of prey. (pg 275)
You know, when I think of “animals that drop to the ground in a smooth manner,” my first thought really isn’t “birds.” They’d probably be closer to the end of that list, really, given that they’re creatures made for flight and all. I could maybe see them swooping in for a landing, but “dropping”? That just seems silly.
Max head for Angel and Dr. Gunther-Hagen.
Somehow, I had seen these steps in the message Angel had sent me–I knew just where to go. (pg 275)
You know… we probably should have been told this when Angel sent the message… or when you got the message… so that this doesn’t come across as a lazy plot contrivance thought up in two seconds…
Max finds Fang. He’s still dead and Dr. Gunther-Hagen isn’t trying to save him anymore.
“Why are you so surprised, Max? Your insistence upon being with Fang above all else–well, I warned you quite clearly that no good would come of it. You had the chance to protect all of the ones you love.” (pg 276)
Uh. What? It was Fang separating from Max that put him in this situation.
Chapter 81
The rest of the flock arrive, and I want to take a moment to do a little math.
Going at 250 miles per hour, Max was traveling at at least twice the speed of the rest of the flock. She said it took her “a few minutes” to reach the house, so let’s be conservative and say that means four minutes. This means that since Angel sent the message (probably about a minute after Fang died), it’s been eight minutes, for a total of nine minutes that Fang has been dead. A quick skim/read of Wikipedia’s clinical death page would point towards roughly 10-15 minutes being about as long as you’re going to be able to be dead before resuscitation without really serious brain damage. (I, of course, am not a doctor, and so my estimate is likely off, not to mention an oversimplification of the process. Still, let’s run with it.) So after the following scene (which is the last I’m getting to in this spork), Fang has been dead for about 15 minutes, meaning it’s probably not possible to bring him back. I can’t wait to see how JPatterson gets out of this one.
Just as the flock arrives, the “lab security team” enters (took them long enough). Oh, and Mr. Chu is there, because…?
Even though they knew I couldn’t leave Fang’s side, I’d never seen the flock look so confident and determined. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we were in a lab, and we knew our way around labs. (pg 278)
Bzzzzt. Labs should be bringing back traumatic and/or repressed memories for the flock, as indicated by their uneasiness around antiseptic smells. (Heck, didn’t Max get freaked out by the vet back in book one? Oh, haha, silly me, expecting JPatterson to follow his own continuity.)
The flock take out a few of the guards, masterfully using their environment because lulz what is logic, then stick those guards in crates. There are still guards left, though, that apparently just waited around while their allies were subdued. Riveting stuff.
It could have easily been a lost battle without the secret weapon. Dylan. (pg 280)
Hmm? What about Dylan? Or were you just too lazy to press the shift key for that handy colon?
So, yeah, Dylan fights and is really good and Max is apparently watching this all with the presence of mind to be able to write it down like this, but is too upset to fight? Because the love of her life’s death has for some reason overridden her most defining character trait of “gets angry and fights stuff.” Oh, JPatterson.
Angel brings some containers from another room and gets Gazzy to analyze them despite there being a big fight going on that should be preventing them from doing this. Or there are so few guards left that they can easily stop fighting, at which point why would they need extra weapons? But no matter because
The impeccably dressed Mr. Chu–who’d been cowering under a lab table to avoid the fight, or to avoid ruining his suit–now appeared at their side. (pg 281)
1) Go with security guards to fight intruders.
2) Hide for half the fight.
MAKE PERFECT SENSE.
Iggy slams into Mr. Chu and “twists his neck” (???) and then Mr. Chu’s face comes off to reveal a green-scaled face of someone else, who Max calls “a freak” because that’s nice. Dr. Gunther-Hagen refers to him as Robert.
“Robert?” Iggy almost shrieked. “He’s green!” (pg 281)
I know it’s not what was intended, but the presentation here kind of makes it looks like the second piece of dialogue is objecting to the scaly guy’s name on grounds of him being green and that is very funny to me.
Dylan tells the flock to be careful because some of the guards they’d taken out are getting back up. So these ones weren’t put in crates? And apparently all the guards have been taken out? But it was still necessary for Angel to get containers full of chemicals? THIS WHOLE SCENE MAKES NO SENSE.