When the Wind Blows (37 page)

The children were allowed to go to the affair in casual clothes, which they loved. I wore a beige cowl-neck sweater and blue
jeans, while Kit had on khaki pants and a blue blazer. We were incredibly nervous and jumpy as the momentous hour approached,
and so were the kids. This would be the biggest day in their lives.

At 1400, we pulled up in front of a large, plantation-style house on a tree-lined road. Up and down the neat, pretty street
were magnolias and pines, as well as several large brick houses. The general’s house was the most impressive, the handsomest,
the obvious choice for the upcoming event.

“We’re in the army now,” Matthew sing-sung a little ditty as we climbed out of the military base’s khaki-green van.

General Hefferon and his wife came out to meet us in the driveway. The Hefferons had warm, friendly smiles, but several of
the MPs were holding M-16 rifles and that brought back bad memories.

“Flying is probably forbidden here,” Max turned and said to me. “I don’t feel so good about this place anymore. It’s creeping
me out.”

“Give it a chance,” I whispered to her. “This is a good idea, Max.”

“People are already gawking,” she said.

“That’s because you’re so beautiful.”

Just then, the front door of the house opened wide. Several men and women walked out onto the porch single-file. They stood
there looking stiff and uncomfortable, nervous and afraid. I couldn’t help thinking that they mirrored our own body language.

“Let’s go up to the house, children,” the general’s wife suggested.

Each of the children was given a name tag and pinned it on. I helped Peter, who was being a little pill, and Kit assisted
Icarus, who seemed the most nervous of all the kids.

“Let’s go up to the porch,” I said. “Be good now.”

The children started to walk across the manicured front lawn. They were quiet and subdued. They had never met their birth
parents before.

As we got closer, I could see that the men and women assembled on the porch wore name tags, too. They stood in distinct pairs
inside the larger group. They fidgeted and didn’t know what to do with their hands. They were trying not to stare at the children.

“Here’s your mom and dad,” I whispered to Peter and Wendy, who were trailing close behind me. I almost started to cry, but
I held the tears back somehow. I felt as if something were about to break inside of me.

“This is Peter, and this is Wendy,” I said.

“We’re Joe and Anne,” the parents introduced themselves. The woman’s lips were quivering. Then they broke down. Joe was a
large, generous-looking man and he bent low and put out his arms, and choked on his own tears.

Wendy surprised me, and ran right to her dad. Then Peter did the same, flinging himself into his mother’s arms. “Mommy,” he
cried.

Just about the same thing was happening with the other children and their birth mothers and fathers. The kids had been wary
and even cynical as we traveled to the army base, but all that was behind them. The army, the people in Washington, had done
a good job arranging the reunion.

Most everybody on the porch had tears spilling from their eyes, including General Hefferon and his wife, and even a few MPs.

Max and Matthew were wrapped in the arms of a handsome-looking couple in their late thirties. I knew their names, Art and
Teresa Marshall, and that they were good people from Revere, Massachusetts.

Icarus was being hugged by a slight-looking woman who was down on her knees and had one of the brightest, biggest smiles I’ve
ever seen.

Oz was in the arms of his birth mom. She was cooing softly in his ear. Oz was cooing back to her.

Something had finally gone right for the children. I stood there holding Kit, and tears streamed down both our cheeks. I was
almost blind with tears, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of the children and their mothers and fathers.

“Let’s fly for them,” Peter started to chirp in his unmistakable, high-pitched voice. “C’mon, let’s show everybody. Come with
me, Wendy. Let’s go, slowpoke. Let’s fly as high as we can.”

“Peter! Don’t you dare!”
It was Max calling from across the porch. The crackling sound of her voice stopped Peter in his tracks. He rolled his eyes
and then he grinned.

“We’ll all fly. We’ll do it together,” Max said then.

And that’s what they did.

The children ran across the front lawn together and they took to the air like an amazing flock. They whistled so that Icarus
could keep up. They rose up over the rooftops of the houses, the surrounding magnolias and towering southern pines.

They floated effortlessly in the cloudless baby-blue skies.

It was so unbelievable to be there, like nothing anyone had ever seen in the history of our world, certainly like nothing
the mothers and fathers had experienced before.

Just to watch the beautiful children fly like birds.

Special eBook Feature:

Excerpt from

James Patterson’s

The Lake House

IT SURPRISES SOME READERS that
When the Wind Blows
(featuring Max and the gang) is my most successful novel around the world. Who knows why for sure, but I suspect it’s because
an awful lot of people, myself included, have a recurring fantasy in which they fly. They treasure it. On the other hand,
there are plenty of folks who won’t fantasize or play make-believe. They wouldn’t have gotten to the Neverland with Peter
Pan. There is one other thing that might be interesting to those who read this book. When I researched it I interviewed dozens
of scientists. All of them said that things
like
what happens in
The Lake House
will happen
in our lifetime.
In fact, a scientist in New England claims that he can put wings on humans right now. I’ll bet he can.

So settle in, you believers, and even you Muggles.

Let yourself fly.

IT SURPRISES SOME READERS that
When the Wind Blows
(featuring Max and the gang) is my most successful novel around the world. Who knows why for sure, but I suspect it’s because
an awful lot of people, myself included, have a recurring fantasy in which they fly. They treasure it. On the other hand,
there are plenty of folks who won’t fantasize or play make-believe. They wouldn’t have gotten to the Neverland with Peter
Pan. There is one other thing that might be interesting to those who read this book. When I researched it I interviewed dozens
of scientists. All of them said that things
like
what happens in
The Lake House
will happen
in our lifetime.
In fact, a scientist in New England claims that he can put wings on humans right now. I’ll bet he can.

So settle in, you believers, and even you Muggles.

Let yourself fly.

Resurrection

The Hospital, somewhere in Maryland

At about eleven in the evening, Dr. Ethan Kane trudged down the gray-and-blue-painted corridor toward a private elevator.
His mind was filled with images of death and suffering, but also progress, great progress that would change the world.

A young and quite homely scrub nurse rounded the corner of the passageway and nodded her head deferentially as she approached
him. She had a crush on Dr. Kane, and she wasn’t the only one.

“Doctor,” she said, “you’re still working.”

“Esther,
you
go home, now. Please,” Ethan Kane said, pretending to be solicitous and caring, which couldn’t have been further from the
truth. He considered the nurse inferior in every way, including the fact that she was female.

He was also exhausted from a surgical marathon: five major operations in a day. The elevator car finally arrived, the doors
slid open, and he stepped inside.

“Good night, Esther,” he said, and showed the nurse a lot of very white teeth, but no genuine warmth, because there was none
to show.

He straightened his tall body and wearily passed his hand over his longish blond hair, cleaned his wire-rimmed glasses on
the tail of his lab coat, then rubbed his eyes before putting his glasses back on as he descended to the subbasement level.

One more thing to check on… always one more thing to do.

He walked half a dozen quick steps to a thick steel door and pushed it open with the palm of his hand.

He entered the dark and chilly atmosphere of a basement storage room. A pungent odor struck him.

There, lying on a double row of gurneys, were six naked bodies. Four men, two women, all in their late teens and early twenties.
Each was brain-dead, each as good as gone, but each had served a worthy cause, a higher purpose. The plastic bracelets on
their wrists said DONOR.

“You’re making the world a better place,” Kane whispered as he passed the bodies. “Take comfort in that.”

Dr. Kane strode to the far end of the room and pushed open another steel door, an exact duplicate of the first. This time
rather than a chilly blast, he was met by a searing wave of hot air, the deafening roar of fire, and the unmistakable smell
of death.

All three incinerators were going tonight. Two of his nighttime porters, their powerful workingman bodies glistening with
grime and sweat, looked up as Dr. Kane entered the cinder-block chamber. The men nodded respectfully, but their eyes showed
fear.

“Let’s pick up the pace, gentlemen. This is taking too long,” Kane called out. “Let’s go, let’s go! You’re being paid well
for this scut work. Too well.”

He glanced at a naked young woman’s corpse laid out on the cement floor. She was white-blond, pretty in a music-video sort
of way. The porters had probably been diddling with her. That’s why they were behind schedule, wasn’t it?

Gurneys were shoved haphazardly into one corner, like discarded shopping carts in a supermarket parking lot. Quite a spectacle.
Hellish,
to be sure.

As he watched, one of the sweat-glazed minions worked a wooden paddle under a young male’s body while the other swung open
the heavy glass door of an oven. Together they pushed, shoved, slid the body into the fire as if it were a pizza.

The flames dampened for a moment, then as the porters locked down the door, the inferno flared again. The cremation chamber
was called a “retort.” Each retort burned at 3,600 degrees, and it took just over fifteen minutes to reduce a human body to
nothing but ashes.

To Dr. Ethan Kane, that meant one thing: no evidence of what was happening at the Hospital. Absolutely no evidence of Resurrection.

“Pick up the pace!” he yelled again. “Burn these bodies!”

The donors.

Child Custody

IT WAS BEING CALLED
“the mother of all custody trials,” which might have explained why an extra fifty thousand people had
poured into Denver on that warm day in early spring.

The case was also being billed as potentially more wrenching and explosive than Baby M, or Elian Gonzales, or O. J. Simpson’s
battle against truth and decency. I happened to think that this time
maybe
the media hype was fitting and appropriate, even a tiny bit underplayed.

The fate of six extraordinary children was at stake.

Six children who had been created in a laboratory and made history, both scientific and philosophical.

Six adorable, good-hearted kids whom I loved as if they were my own.

Max, Matthew, Icarus, Ozymandias, Peter, and Wendy.

The actual trial was scheduled to begin in an hour in the City and County Building, a gleaming white neoclassical courthouse.
Designed to appear unmistakably judicial-looking, it was crowned with a pointy pediment just like the one atop the U.S. Supreme
Court Building. I could see it now.

Kit and I slumped down on the front seat of my dusty, trusty beat-up blue Suburban. It was parked down the block from the
courthouse, where we could see and not be seen, at least so far.

I had chewed my nails down to the quick, and there was a pesky muscle twitching in Kit’s cheek.

“I know, Frannie,” he’d said just a moment before. “I’m twitching again.”

We were suing for custody of the children, and we knew that the full weight of the law was against us. We
weren’t
married, we
weren’t
related to the kids, and their biological parents
were
basically good people. Not too terrific for us.

What we did have going for us was our unshakable love for these children, with whom we’d gone through several degrees of hell,
and their love for us.

Now all we had to do was prove that living with us was in the best interest of the children, and that meant I was going to
have to tell a story that sounded crazy, even to my closest friends, sometimes even to myself.

But every word is true, so help me God.

Copyright © 2003 by James Patterson

When the Wind Blows,
the most brilliant and original “what if” suspense novel to come along in a decade has somehow surpassed the page turning
chills of
Cat and Mouse
and
Kiss the Girls.
Frannie O’Neill, a young and talented veterinarian whose husband was recently murdered, comes across an amazing discovery
near her animal hospital in the woods. Kit Harrison, a troubled and unconventional FBI agent soon arrives on her doorstep.
And then, there is eleven-year old Max—Frannie’s amazing discovery—and one of the most unforgettable creations in thriller
fiction.

When the Wind Blows
will not just thrill readers, it will make their imaginations and hearts soar.