Shade hopped onto the nearest car roof. Cars are generally under five feet tall, and the tunnel was just over thirteen feet. Plenty of clearance. She was going to dent some roofs, probably break a few windshields, and almost certainly scare the hell out of some motorists, but she’d just killed a man, and none of that minor mayhem was worth worrying about. She ran in great, bounding steps, roof to roof, bouncing across lanes to bypass trucks and buses.
All at once she was in the open air. She leaped down onto solid ground, moving like a compact hurricane beneath a dozen overpasses, then skidded to a stop, realizing she’d taken an off-ramp by mistake. She backtracked, slowing to allow the maps app to catch up. She crossed a river, crossed a marsh, crossed another river, and was suddenly in downtown Newark with nice, wide, uncluttered sidewalks.
Turn coming up.
Shade skidded into a sharp left turn, and there it was, an ugly concrete building that bridged over the road, marked with tall gold letters: Newark Penn Station.
It was smaller inside and nothing like as grand as its Manhattan counterpart. She stopped in the midst of a crowd on its way here or there, seeming to materialize out of nowhere, unless you’d noticed coats suddenly flapping, hats flying off, shopping bags almost torn from hands by the wind of her arrival.
Take the time to ask questions in slo-speech? Or check the signage? The signs were quicker. One pointed the way clearly to the Acela, the fast bullet train that ran up and down the East Coast. She shot down a ramp—amusingly marked with Do Not Run signs—and came to a stop again on the Acela platform.
There was a crowd of people, many with suitcases, all milling around and looking scared and angry.
But there was no train in sight.
“Train’s gone,” Dekka snapped, reading Shade’s text. “Dammit! If Vector’s on that train, he can be in DC in just over three hours!”
“Faster,” Simone said. “There are half a dozen Acela stops between Newark and DC, and I doubt the engineer is going to argue with my fa . . . with Vector. They’ll blow right through those stops and ignore speed limits.”
Edilio had been tapping his phone. “It’s about two hundred miles, and the Acela’s top speed is one fifty.” He looked up at them, at the entire Rockborn Gang, all in morph, all crowded into the living room. “It won’t be able to do one fifty the whole way without derailing, but we aren’t going to catch it.”
“Oh ye of little faith,” Dekka said. “I talked to my friend the general as soon as I realized we might be racing a train. A chopper will land in the park in five minutes. Let’s go. Armo?”
“Yeah?”
“Grab the . . . Um, your strength would be much appreciated. Would you be willing to grab our new toy?”
The artillery shell Edilio had obtained from the army currently occupied a couch. It was painted dark green, gray at the tip, with red warnings all scratched and rendered almost illegible by time. The shell, and the poison gas within it, were older than any two of them combined. The Marine captain had emphasized that it was dangerous even unexploded, capable of leaking and killing anyone nearby.
The shell had been modified. It now had a small digital timer literally duct-taped on, with wires running to the detonator.
They ran—or in Simone’s case, flew—the few blocks to the park just as an olive drab military helicopter with a strange triple tail swept over them, beating the air and flattening the grass. Armo, never fast in bear morph unless he dropped to all fours, struggled to keep up while running with a shell that could kill everyone within a several-block radius, very much including Armo himself.
Once again, a battle plan had come to nothing. Dekka had intended to set the nerve gas off in Grand Central, with Shade and Francis running as many nonmutant humans to safety as possible. But Grand Central was irrelevant now, and there was no way to plan for what was coming.
Dekka waved them all into the helicopter’s open door, assisted by a helmeted crewman. Armo barely avoided having the top of his bear head lopped off by the whirling blades as Cruz grabbed him and yelled, “Duck!” He shoved the shell into the helicopter and climbed in after it.
The loadmaster yelled, “What the hell is that?”
“Nerve gas,” Sam said, projecting a calm even he could not possibly feel.
“Jesus H.!” the crewman yelped.
“Yeah, welcome to our lives,” Cruz muttered.
In the helicopter there were eight seats, five facing each other with a row of three stacked behind the row of two. Nothing about this configuration was good for Armo or Dekka since they left little room for anyone else to sit beside them, so they de-morphed as Dekka yelled, “Go, go, go! Don’t wait!”
The helicopter lifted off and veered away, skimming over trees, rising to clear the apartment buildings that lined the park and racing above the Hudson River, heading west.
Dekka, human once more, squirmed forward to the cockpit and tapped on the pilot’s shoulders. She started to tell him something but the noise of the turbines and blades obliterated speech. The pilot tapped his headphones, and at that moment the loadmaster squeezed beside her and clapped a pair over Dekka’s ears.
“Do you know where you’re going?”
The pilot shrugged. “Newark train station.”
Dekka shook her head. “No, the train’s left already, heading south. You need to plot an intercept course. The train goes one-fifty, top speed.”
There was a low curse from the pilot, who keyed his microphone to ask his controller at the base to plot an intercept with a train moving south. He preemptively banked the helicopter from almost due west to south-west.
After a few minutes the pilot was in Dekka’s headphones again. “Intercept is a no-go unless someone slows that train down. We do a hundred forty-five knots, which is about a hundred seventy miles an hour. If the train’s going one fifty with a head start, it’ll take a hell of a long time to catch him.”
“I’m pretty sure someone’s trying to slow it down,” Dekka said. “Listen, I know this’ll sound crazy, but can you get me through to General Eliopoulos on the radio?”
The pilot turned all the way around and raised the visor on his helmet to favor her with a look that suggested she was crazy.
“Lieutenant, the worst person on earth is on that train heading to DC. If he gets there and escapes us, he’ll destroy the entire US government. So make the call!”
The door of the helicopter was open, and the wind whipped clothing and hair as Dekka made her way back to the canvas jump seat between Sam and Malik.
“He says—”
“We heard,” Sam interrupted, tapping his own headphones by way of explanation. “I guess we have to hope Shade can slow the train down.”
Dekka clenched her jaw. So close! If she’d been quicker. If she’d thought of it instead of needing Sam to spot Vector’s likely next move. If, if, if.
If when Tom Peaks first rolled up in the parking of the Safeway you’d just told him to go . . .
But that wasn’t true. Not really. This disaster was not her fault; she accepted that.
“General Eliopoulos,” the pilot announced in an awed tone. Lieutenant chopper pilots did not speak to chairmen of the Joint Chiefs unless they’d just earned the Medal of Honor or been the cause of some truly spectacular screwup.
“General, Dekka Talent,” the pilot said, and handed the microphone to her.
“I suspect this is not good news,” Eliopoulos said, voice stretched and grainy in the radio.
“We are pretty sure Vector is aboard an Acela train heading for DC. Could get there in as little as an hour. We’re chasing him, but it doesn’t look good.”
The general then showed why he’d risen to become the top soldier. He went right to the point. “What kills him?”
“Fire and nerve gas, we hope. Fire for sure.”
“Got it. I’ll get some planes armed with napalm in the air.”
No goodbye, just a dead line. Okay then. “Hey, Mr. Pilot: I like your general. The man
does not screw around.”
The pilot shot her a thumbs-up and the helicopter flew on, barely above the roofs and treetops.
Dekka, not wishing to broadcast her conversation with Sam, lifted one side of his headphones and spoke into his ear. “I know you had doubts about Grand Central. Do you think you can do your thing with a fast-moving train?”
Sam tilted his head back and forth, then said, “I’m not sure, Dekka. It will sure as hell wreck the train.”
Dekka nodded and replaced her headphones.
Kill a policeman, wreck a train. A day in the life . . .
CHAPTER 35
Stop That Train! I Want to Get On!
SHADE HAD NEVER run this long, this far. It was, she knew, impossible. Every part of it was impossible. Impossible that she could generate the energy required. Impossible that her brain could seamlessly adapt to a world that should be nothing but a blur.
At top speed she could run faster than a 787 jet; in fact, right now she was moving just below cruising speed for an airliner. Impossible that she could still hear in what amounted to a wind tunnel cranked up to maximum, not to mention the Doppler effect, which should have reduced anything she heard to a whine. Impossible that she could even keep her eyes open, let alone actually be able to see the railroad ties flying away beneath feet moving so fast they should have caught fire.
Malik is right. The laws of physics have been hacked.
Not time to think about that. Maybe I’m a real person; maybe I’m a sim. It doesn’t matter because life is what it is, no matter how strange or impossible it seems. Maybe it was all a game invented by some alien species, maybe, but Vector was still en route to Washington, DC, and people, whether biologically evolved or created on some futuristic keyboard, would suffer terribly.
Is that right, Watchers? Maybe give me a little wink if I’m right?
She remembered once diving into Wikipedia’s philosophy page and following links through all sorts of speculation about the nature of humanity. The problem of free will had been debated and written about endlessly, but in the end it came to a dead end because the fact was that humans were simply not capable of pretending as if free will did not exist. The human mind had limitations.
It was not easy running on a train track, not easy at all. The spacing of the ties was awkward, and if she missed a step and landed on gravel, it slowed her down so that she missed her next step. As a result Shade was moving at half speed, probably no more than four hundred miles an hour.
Which seemed poky.
She actually had time to notice how very slowly the planes landing at Newark airport were moving. It made her laugh; they looked as if they had to fall, but just kept gliding along at what to Shade looked no faster than a car pulling out of a suburban driveway.
Shade had no idea how far ahead the Acela was and berated herself for not asking one of the passengers who’d been forced off. In the back of her mind, she ran the algebraic equations, trying to calculate how long it would take a person moving at four hundred miles an hour to overtake a train moving at one fifty.
Another part of her mind wondered just what she thought she would do if she caught up to the train. Run ahead and drive a truck onto the tracks? That could work. Or she could race ahead and throw one of the switches that would shunt the train off onto a side track.
The problem with both of those solutions—aside from not having any idea how train switches worked—was that the train would likely go off the rails at a hundred fifty miles an hour and rip through some residential neighborhood like a meteorite—a meteorite filled with a swarm of disease-causing insects that would undoubtedly survive a wreck just fine.
The best way was to get aboard the train—a train moving at NASCAR speeds—with locked doors and shatterproof windows. That would not be easy.
Then, in the distance, intermittently visible between trees as it took a curve, she saw it, a silvery snake. It was just going into a turn, and Shade counted six passenger cars, wedged between two “energy cars,” which were the electric version of locomotives. Hopefully all empty.
She could catch up to the train in under a minute. Then what?
Excellent question, Shade. Got any answers?
She had the clean phone Edilio had provided, and slowed slightly to be able to focus on texting. Texting was odd in that her fingers moved faster than the software could generate a letter, so that there was a lag. She had finished her message before the third word appeared on her phone.
Caught train. Residential area. Somewhere safer ahead?
She knew what Edilio would do: open a maps app and search ahead on the track for a more open spot where whatever she did wouldn’t involve derailing a train right into a subdivision or an elementary school. It would take forever by her calculations, minutes at least.
So as she waited for Edilio’s reply, she kept racing ahead until she was in the train’s slipstream, trotting along just a few yards behind it, slowing to match its speed, a crawling hundred and fifty miles an hour.
The last car, the one she could almost reach out and touch, was an energy car, an engine, identical to the one at the front of the train, bullet-headed and streamlined. There were no evident handholds, so if she was to leap atop it, it’d be a mad scramble not to slide right back off.
They were coming up to the Metropark station where the train was to stop, though Shade really doubted it would.
She checked her phone. A text was just popping up.
Abt 7 miles south of Metropark sta see Costco/Target on rt. 2 m after. Trees sparse houses.
“All right, Edilio,” Shade said. Pretty quick for a mere human.
The train instead blew past crowded platforms. The draft from the swift train pulled a baby stroller toward the tracks, but Shade saw it, saw the mother in slow motion rushing to grab it, knew the woman was too slow, and skidded to a stop just as the stroller tipped over the edge of the platform. Shade pushed it back before taking off again.
My superhero good deed.
No, she corrected herself mentally, my second superhero good deed. Save a baby, kill a man.
Not now!
Now she had to accelerate to pass the train. She moved onto a parallel track and ran beside the train, hoping she wasn’t running into a train coming north—her armored body was strong, but she was pretty sure hitting a train at hundreds of miles an hour would crush her like a bug on a car windshield.
The last passenger car looked empty, a relief. The next car and the one after that were empty as well. Then she reached the first-class car, the one just behind the front energy car. There Shade got a shock: passengers! She’d assumed Vector had forced everyone off the train before seizing it, but of course he’d kept hostages. Of course! At least two dozen of them, it seemed, all sitting with frightened, desperate looks on their faces.
So much for derailing the train by any of the means she’d considered. It might come to that, but not yet, not with people aboard the train.
Now, unfortunately, she had another problem: keeping pace with the train, her speed zero relative to the train, she was perfectly visible to anyone on board, including Vector’s insect eyes.
Shade dropped back past the rows of windows, to the back of the train. She took a breath and leaped up to the sloped windshield, and had to motor her legs like Road Runner to keep from slipping off. She clawed and clambered up onto the roof to discover her way impeded by the raised framework called a pantograph that scraped along the bottom of a live electrical line running very high current. She gave as wide a berth as possible to the pantograph then trotted forward, easily leaping the gaps between cars, indifferent to the gale-force wind that would have knocked any normal person flat, and flashing on movie scenes she’d seen of people doing just this. Hadn’t Tom Cruise done this in at least one movie?
Ahead on the right was a big shopping center with, yes (thank you, Edilio!), a Target and a Costco. She ran to the front of the train, scooted past another pantograph, and threw herself flat. She edged
forward on her belly to peek down through the tinted front windows. She was quite suddenly face-to-face with a dark-skinned woman—a woman with a dusting of strange insects on her shoulders and head. The woman had not been infected, not yet, but the threat was unmistakable.
Shade sat up, swung her legs around, and with the power that allowed her to move at jet speed, she smashed the window with her heels, then slid down into the train’s cockpit to find that the engineer had been knocked back against the bulkhead by the sudden wind. And, as Shade had hoped, most if not all of Vector’s bugs had been knocked loose.
They were quick, the insects, but Shade was quicker, snatching them out of the air and crushing them in her fists or stomping them underfoot.
Slowing her voice, Shade said, “Stop the train.”
“He’ll kill me!”
“Don’t worry about Vector. The Rockborn Gang is here.”
It sounded ludicrous in Shade’s ears, like yelling “The cavalry is coming!” but the engineer, seeing dead bugs littering the floor, complied, and the train began to slow.
“Now hold on!” Shade yelled.
“What are y—”
Shade grabbed the engineer, dragged her to the side door, slid it open, and leaped. Shade and the engineer flew through the air at shocking speed. Shade’s legs were moving before she hit the ground and she matched speed before slowing enough to deposit the engineer well off the tracks in a soggy ditch. She muttered an apology the woman could not hear, and raced after the train again, catching it effortlessly as it slowed to freeway speeds.
Did Vector know what she’d done? If he did, he would threaten the passengers to stop her, and the extortion would work. So thing one: in and out before Vector could react. You can’t threaten if no one hears the threat.
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