Sam leaned out the side door, face stretched back into a grimace by the wind, droplets of blood torn from his oozing wound.
“Ready?” Dekka’s voice was flat.
00:55 . . . 00:54 . . .
Francis nodded.
“Do it.”
“Wait!” Shade screamed, but it was a buzz that no one heard.
CHAPTER 38
Momentum
DEKKA HAD NEVER traveled through n-dimensional space, and despite Malik’s warnings, the effect was absolutely disorienting and shocking. She had never seen Malik in his charred and livid natural state. She had never seen her own veins and arteries seeming to float outside of a hand that was hers, not the morph’s.
And she had never seen inside Shade Darby’s head, seen her actual brain, like a cauliflower Mandelbrot video.
“Shade?” Dekka said, blinking in confusion. And had just enough time to wonder why Shade was with them.
Shade had leaped at the last moment and grabbed hold of Francis because Shade had remembered what everyone had forgotten: momentum.
The train was moving now at just over a hundred miles an hour. When Dekka, Armo, Francis, and Shade popped back into three-dimensional space from the stationary helicopter, they were not moving, but they were inside a train that was moving very fast.
They emerged back into 3-D space toward the front of the second car. Shade appeared at the exact same moment, but a “moment” to Shade was not a “moment” to the others.
The rearmost wall of the train car was moving at a hundred miles an hour, or a hundred forty-seven feet per second. The distance between the nearest of the Rockborn Gang, Armo, and that door was seventy-five feet.
Shade had less than half a second. And that was not enough, not even for Shade. She might save one, but not the others. Unless . . .
The car ended in a door. The next car would also have a door. Eventually, they would slow down.
Eventually.
Shade leaped, spun in the air, so that she flew backward, facing Armo’s back as the steel door rushed at her. She stuck out her hands and grabbed seat backs that tore away, row after row of blue upholstered seats, bam, bam, bam bambambambam!
Grabbing at seat backs had bled off only a little of their relative speed, and Shade hit the door at seventy miles an hour. She took the impact in her back and felt her chitin armor snap, crushed like a cockroach under a boot. Her head smashed into steel and the thick glass window, cracking her skull like a dropped cantaloupe.
The impact smashed the door open, and Shade plowed into the next door at a mere fifty miles an hour. Her hands were torn, some fingers ripped off and spraying blood, her back broken, her head caved in. She was reduced to a bloody mess of bone and chitin armor and blood.
The impact went: Shade, Armo, Francis, Dekka, and the shell.
Armo, Dekka, Francis, and the shell survived.
Shade looked like a lobster that had been cracked open and torn apart with a fork.
Armo knew only that he had flown through the air at fantastic speed, whooshing past blue seats before coming to a brutally sudden stop. The back of his head hit something hard and unyielding. His left arm had been snapped like a twig by impact with the bulge of the restroom bulkhead. He slammed into something crunchy behind him and took the momentum of Francis then Dekka in his gut, blowing the air from him.
And then he was out.
Dekka hit Armo, the best cushion possible, and her morphed body took a blow like being hit by a truck. Brutal, staggering, and fatal . . . had she been in human form.
Dekka saw stars, swirling lights, a blankness that came, then receded, came back again as she tried to move, then receded again, leaving her conscious and all too aware of pain throughout her body. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t make her lungs work, like they were empty balloons, flat and hard to inflate. Then a gasp. Another gasp. A sudden, deep breath that was like needles inside her. But pain was pain, while suffocation was death.
Her hands and feet would not work at first, hands seeming disconnected, reaching out toward targets like seat backs and missing. Legs all wobbly. She was like a drunk, a brain confused and lost and unable to . . . But at last with great focus she managed to get her fingers around a seat back and pulled herself up. She stood, swaying, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. There were no passengers here, just the clickety-clack of the track and a pile of bodies.
She stumbled back and stepped on something soft.
“Armo!” she cried. “Armo!” The aisle was too narrow to let her get beside him, so she clambered over the seats till she could kneel down on an aisle seat and look at his face. There was blood coming from his nose and ears. Blood coming from his eyes as well. But he was moving, random, unfocused, groggy but alive, though maybe not for long. A puddle of blood too large to have come from Armo’s ears, nose, or eyes saturated the carpet.
“Armo! You have to de-morph! Now!”
“Urrhh?” He was groggy, barely conscious, and yet heard an order and instinctively thought, No.
“De-morph, now!”
He blinked bloody eyes and half raised a bloody paw. Dekka realized she was crying only when his face was blurred by her tears.
“Armo! Armo, you . . . I . . . Armo, maybe you should consider de-morphing!”
“Urr.”
Slowly at first, then faster, Dekka saw the white fur receding and the bear man being replaced by the man.
And then she saw what lay beneath Armo.
“Oh, God! Shade! Shade!”
Shade Darby looked far too much like a huge grasshopper that had been stepped on. It was impossible even to make sense of the lower half of her body. Bones, strips of chitin cracked like lobster shell, pink flesh protruding, and ripped arteries that pumped blood far too fast.
Dekka shot a look forward. The shell lay in the aisle, rolling sluggishly back and forth. Red numbers read 00:24 . . . 00:23 . . .
Dekka had to climb over the last row of seats to get to Shade, and she knelt over her and yelled, as she had with Armo, “De-morph, Shade, de-morph!” Again and again.
She glanced back, looking for the shell and its timer. Red numbers swam in her tears. Fourteen seconds!
“Francis!” Dekka cried. She found the girl curled up under a seat, her broken leg bleeding freely, blood coming from her nose and trickling from one ear.
“Francis! Francis!”
00:09 . . . 00:08 . . .
“Unh?” Francis moaned.
“I need you. Right the hell now!” Dekka shouted. “Get Shade out of here!”
00:07 . . .
Seven seconds.
In the helicopter Sam turned his wind-whipped face to Malik, Simone, and Cruz. “Something’s wrong. They should be back by now.”
“Where’s Shade?” Simone demanded suddenly.
“Dammit,” Sam snapped. The plan was already falling apart. The train was still racing at speed, not its full one fifty, but very fast. The Anacostia River sparkled just ahead, their target area, the very last relatively unpopulated space before the city proper.
Looking ahead, Sam saw the dome of the Capitol building, and the white needle of the Washington Monument. He’d never been to Washington. This was a hell of a first visit.
“We have to stop that train!” Simone said.
Malik erupted. “Oh, God, Shade must have grabbed Francis as she was . . . No, no, no!”
“Why would she do that?” Simone cried.
“Momentum,” Malik said grimly.
“If the train hits the inside of the dome, everyone aboard, including our friends, will die!” Cruz cried.
“If my father isn’t stopped . . .”
And just like that, Sam was back in the business of making life-and-death decisions.
Francis’s brain was a swirl of images and shouts and pain.
Get her out of here!
She fumbled for something to hold on to, felt her hand sink into flesh like hamburger studded with shards of glass.
&nb
sp; “Now, now, now!” Dekka’s voice cried from far, far away, and Francis knew Dekka meant her, meant that she . . .
In an instant Francis and the wreckage of Shade were back in the helicopter, which had blessedly turned to match speed with the train.
“Shade!” Malik cried. He and Cruz knelt beside the gruesome horror of Shade’s barely alive body, yelling, “De-morph, de-morph, Shade!”
Sam was yelling something different. “Four seconds! Francis!”
“You have to do it, Sam!” Simone cried.
Sam staggered to the door and gripped a handhold, leaned out, and extended his free hand.
“Look!” Armo yelled, and tried to point with a hand that was not exactly obeying his brain’s instructions but wavered like a drunk pointing the way to his car.
Dekka looked. And saw.
00:04 . . . 00:03 . . .
A dark swarm was rushing toward Dekka, and she thought, If I have to die, I’m taking some of you bastards with me, and fired her shredding beams into the mass.
She was still firing when she suddenly found herself back in the helicopter, narrowly missing Sam’s head while shredding the sill of the helicopter’s door.
The train was well past the open space of the wetlands by the river. They were not a mile from the station, and now the train’s brakes were squealing.
A big freeway interchange to the right.
A college campus to the left.
Sam whispered, “Forgive me.”
CHAPTER 39
Gas Will Expand to Fill Available Space
VECTOR LOOKED THROUGH many eyes at once and saw the Capitol dome rising in his field of view. He had ordered his hostage train driver to begin slowing, not that the fool knew what to do, but she had hands, and hands, it seemed, were useful.
Seeing the Capitol and the Washington Monument ahead filled Vector with grim excitement.
I’m taking over the United States government!
He felt the brakes beginning to bite. He would survive a headlong crash into the train station, but it would disrupt his swarm, and who knew, he might want to use the train again someday. It changed your perspective, Vector realized, when you started to understand that everything belonged to you now. Everything! New York was his. Washington would soon be his. And then what of the Rockborn Gang’s resistance? Where would they go? Where would they hide when the US military and the National Guard and the Secret Service and FBI were all working for him?
President Vector? Or President Markovic?
Not that he would reside in the White House, that rundown dump. No, he could have any place he wanted, and the beauty of it was he didn’t really need a place at all. He could be anywhere or everywhere. The thought made him laugh from sheer glee.
He had seen the desperate efforts of the Rockborn Gang. It had been clever of Shade to remove the train’s engineer, but not, in the end, effective. He’d watched as a pillar of smoke had receded behind him, the burning of the Rockborn Gang’s last, faint hope.
Then to his shock he’d seen a newer, sleeker, and obviously faster helicopter come zooming overhead. It now hovered menacingly above the tracks. No question that it could fire missiles and derail the train, but he was so close to the city now that it would barely amount to a delay.
Blow up the train, fools, if you must: it will only kill the hostages.
Then a series of rapid-fire sounds, fast as a machine gun’s fire, followed by an impact that sent a shudder through the train. He had turned part of his swarm to investigate and had come upon the startling spectacle of three bloodied, stunned members of the Rockborn Gang . . . and one who was well beyond stunned or bloodied.
Shade Darby is dead!
One down! Now for the black bitch.
His swarm raced back as an enraged Dekka ran forward. So much the better. Let her come all the way to the passenger car, and there he would present her with a stark choice: surrender or watch helpless people writhe in undying agony.
Hah! That was the problem with virtuous, heroic types: they lacked ruthlessness. Rather than allow the passengers to come to harm, they would leave him to annihilate all opposition and rule the country. The world!
Wait . . . where was Shade Darby’s body?
Dekka fired, and Vector registered dozens, hundreds of his eyes going dark, but no matter: he had hundreds of thousands of eyes to spare.
Then, still searching for the crumpled remains that had made him too happy, he spotted the curious object on the floor. Green. With scratched letters.
And a timer.
And the glowing, red number . . . 00:02 . . .
No!
Dekka and Armo disappeared. The shell . . . did not.
But no explosion would kill him. His swarm would be diminished, scattered, but not annihilated.
Unless . . .
NO!
Markovic ordered his swarm out, out through the shattered windshield of the energy car, out through the broken side window of the first-class car.
Then Vector’s world came apart, as the hurtling train came to a sudden and total stop. His parts swirled in a tornado of crashing steel and flying hostages.
Sam Temple focused his mind, the same mind that had learned to manipulate light itself during the FAYZ. It felt like old times, but not in a good way.
The timer on his phone counted down. 00:03 . . . 00:02 . . .
Armo, Dekka, and Francis appeared, their weight causing the helicopter to yaw, nearly throwing Sam out through the door.
“Now!” Dekka yelled.
Sam focused, and a split second later, the Acela train, now moving at a relatively sedate fifty-five miles an hour, smashed into the interior wall of a transparent dome. This was not a derailment. This was not a sideswiping of another train. This was a collision like nothing any train had ever endured. This was train vs. brick wall. Irresistible force meeting unmovable object.
The deceleration was shocking to see. The energy car accordioned, swung left, breaking away from the first car, smashed sideways into the barrier, and bounced back. The second car, the one containing the hostages, plowed into the engine, T-boning it, and split open. Bodies flew from the jagged tear, one flying so fast it smashed into the dome’s interior, splitting the body open like it had just been autopsied.
The remaining cars cascaded in a jumbled pile, like some terrifying game of pickup sticks.
Malik was yelling something that Sam barely understood at first.
“Shade! De-morph!”
Sam heard but could not take his eyes off the destruction he had just caused. He could imagine all too easily the carnage inside, the bodies suddenly hurled around a steel tube, smashed, broken, split open, spilling their intestines . . . He could not stop looking because to stop looking was to avoid taking on all the pain he knew he deserved. He owed it to the people—the people he had just killed—to look, to acknowledge.
And he thought, as the helicopter swerved away to avoid hitting the exterior of the dome, that it would be a sort of justice if he simply let go and fell to his death. The alternative was living this moment over and over again in his mind. And he already had so many terrible moments that his nights would never be safe from nightmares.
It was Dekka who pulled him back inside and pushed him gently into a seat. Sam now saw the nearer horror, right at his feet: Shade, a gory mess, and Malik and Cruz shouting and Simone crying and he was back in it all, back in all that he had escaped.
The helicopter made a wide turn, having run past the dome, which was little more than an eighth of a mile in diameter. The dome that had appeared at Sam’s command and had cut through buildings and cars and people.
How many dead? Oh, God, how many had he killed?
Vector had no warning. The dome was perfectly transparent. No warning. Just a catastrophically violent impact that sent bags, seats, glass, and bodies flying through the air. An impact that twirled the cars like cheerleaders’ batons. Through tens of thousands of eyes Vector witnessed the wild madness of annihil
ation.
Vector was not immune to the effects of the laws of physics, at least not the laws having to do with momentum, and thousands of his bugs were killed by smashing into walls at high speed or being struck by flying bodies and debris.
Bad. Infuriating! But not the end, not by a long shot. Only a few percent of his eyes went dark; the rest, including those outside the train, were intact.
Then, almost simultaneously, came the explosion.
The shell blew up, but it did not spray napalm or even shrapnel aside from the shell’s casing.
Vector had just enough time to think, Hah, you can’t kill me with . . . Then Vector’s eyes started to go dark in waves. Not hundreds, but thousands. Not an easily replaced few percent, but masses, multitudes, a rapidly closing circle of darkness.
Gas, he thought. What he had feared.
Gas!
But the crash had created escape holes, too. Vector sent his surviving parts racing toward fresh air, escaping through broken windows and twisted doors and great gashes in the aluminum body of the cars.
He rose in a wave of millions, still alive, still able to spread disease and terror.
Still Vector!
A part of his mind looked for but did not find the solid object the train had clearly hit. No one had driven a tank onto the tracks. No one had built a wall. The train had simply hit . . . nothing . . . and stopped instantly with devastating results.
Then the first of his insects banged into what felt like glass.
Impossible!
He sent his swarm higher, up and up, but the invisible barrier persisted. It seemed to be curved. Like a bowl. Like an invisible bowl. Like . . .
Like a dome.
The lower edge of his swarm began to go dark now, and his bugs fell in their hundreds and their thousands as the gas slowly dispersed and filled the interior of the dome.
Vector flew his swarm as high as it would go. To the top of the dome, the inescapable dome. From there he looked up, up through his dwindling number of eyes and saw a face looking down at him from the door of the helicopter.
It was a black feline face surrounded by writhing serpents.
The gas rose, and Vector’s bits died.
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