The Stolen Vault

by Landry Q. Walker

  Traci’s jaw dropped. “Is that . . . ?”

  “You better believe it is,” Red said. “Now we’ll get to see how good cars drive when they got no roads.”

  CHAPTER 8

  UNDERGROUND BART TUNNELS

  It was a lucky thing that Ms. Nowhere’s tech guys had already removed the limiters on Tony’s and Echo’s cars. Otherwise there would have been no chance to catch up with these thieves. Tony pushed the gas pedal down hard. Finally, he could cut loose.

  “I can see them!” Echo called out over her comm earpiece. “Man, that train is seriously hauling!”

  “Might as well be sitting still,” Tony replied as he swerved sharply to the right. The tunnel wasn’t designed for cars or for speed, and was split down the middle by an electrified rail. It wouldn’t hurt if a rubber wheel bumped the rail, but any metal touching that active current would risk frying the car . . . or the driver.

  “Take it easy on the wheels,” Layla chastised through gritted teeth as she rode along in his passenger seat. Her car wasn’t ready to drive yet thanks to Ms. Nowhere’s limiters, and her irritation at playing ride-along was clear. “This tunnel’s gonna eat up the rubber fast if you’re not careful!”

  Tony swerved again, this time with a little extra oomph for dramatic effect. “We’re racing against a train. I don’t think we need to stress too much!”

  And then a rocket exploded in front of his car, and everything turned to fire and smoke.

  CHAPTER 9

  EAST BAY CITY STREETS

  Meanwhile, the team’s hauler careened through the city streets above . . .

  “Left!” Frostee shouted from the back of the hauler. “Turn left now!”

  Up in the driver’s cab, Cisco obliged, quickly turning the large hauler to the left down a narrow street in the suburbs of Berkeley.

  “Hey, homie!” Cisco yelled back to Frostee through his comm. “You gotta give me more warning!”

  It had been a calculated risk on the part of Frostee to hold Cisco back from joining the others underground, but he had a plan to remotely stop the accelerator from overloading.

  From the back of the large hauler, Frostee yelled in response. “I’m rigging a remote pulse nullifier device to stop a miniature nuclear meltdown from happening on a speeding train in a reinforced tunnel thirty feet below us! And you want me to GPS you at the same time?”

  “Well, I don’t know this neighborhood!” Cisco countered. “And all these streets are, like, super narrow.”

  Frostee shook his head while trying to twist a red wire to a blue wire. Everything showered sparks, so he quickly switched to a yellow and green wire. This was a long shot, but since the accelerator was active now, it might be possible to send a wireless signal to the device’s CPU, forcing it to slow down.

  “Just keep going straight for the next mile down,” Frostee said. He glanced at the screen with the map, squinting to read the street name. “What’s this? Adeline Street? Go straight down Adeline! And keep the speed up. The train is just below us!”

  Frostee thumbed a button on the device he was building and a little blue light popped on. “Almost got it,” he whispered, hoping he was correct.

  CHAPTER 10

  BART TRAIN TOWING PLATFORM

  José fell backward onto the platform as Red fired a second rocket at the oncoming cars.

  “What the . . . ,” he stammered in shock. “You’re gonna get someone killed!”

  Red whirled on him. “You think this is a game? You think we’re just playing around? If we get caught, we lose everything!”

  José jumped back to his feet, poking Red in the chest. “You build cell-phone towers for a living! You’re not some kind of criminal mastermind!”

  “I can work on cell-phone towers and be a criminal mastermind!” Red said, getting angrier by the minute.

  An abrupt hiss interrupted the argument. Both men whirled around in time to see Jonathan pulling the vault open.

  “Guys!” Jonathan yelled over the roar of the train. “Guys, it’s done. Now we can grab the money and get off this stupid . . .” Jonathan trailed off, his voice cracking slightly as he backed away from the vault. “What? What is this?”

  José and Red pushed past him to look through the open vault door. As he caught sight of the cargo they’d stolen, José felt his stomach grow cold. Instead of money, the vault contained a strange machine that was emitting a high-pitched whining noise.

  José blinked, and finally spoke. “I think . . . I think it’s a bomb.”

  CHAPTER 11

  UNDERGROUND BART TUNNELS

  Trailing behind the speeding train, Tony, Layla, and Echo remained in pursuit. The rocket explosions had been a very near miss. “Gah!” Tony yelled in frustration. “Don’t those idiots know we’re trying to save them?”

  Layla shook her head. “Echo . . . smoke ’em out.”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” Echo answered as she fired off her smoke bombs. A split second later the flatbed attached to the train was enshrouded in smoke. Behind Echo, Tony saw his opening and flicked on the night-vision mode. His windshield display suddenly showcased everything he needed to see. The bad guy with the rocket launcher was dead ahead. So close he could hear the man shout.

  “You punk kids in your fancy cars think you’re gonna stop us?” Tony heard the crook yell. “I got this planned down to the wire! You wanna face me, get outta your car and face me!”

  Tony scowled as he let go of the steering wheel. “Get this, Layla. I’m gonna drop in on our friends.”

  “What?” Layla said, grabbing the wheel. “That’s a stupid idea. We’re going too fast! We just need to take out the power—”

  Tony cut her off as he climbed out of the window of his car. “I got this! Trust me!”

  Layla shook her head, but zoomed forward alongside the platform. “This is a really, really bad idea,” she muttered.

  * * *

  Back on the train, Jonathan and José watched Red grow increasingly erratic . . . and dangerous.

  “What are we gonna do?” Jonathan shouted.

  “Stop the train,” José said. “You go tell Traci. She’ll stop the train and I’ll deal with Red. This . . . this is all too much. The heist is over!”

  Jonathan turned to run the length of the train to the driver’s car. The headlights of the cars whirled and dazzled through the smoke, outlining the shape of Red as the criminal readied another rocket blast.

  Not waiting to try to reason any more, José slammed into Red, knocking him to the surface of the platform. Suddenly, everything went bright and he was blinded.

  Sunlight? It was sunlight. The train had come out from one of the underground tunnels and emerged into the bright, sunlit city of Oakland. Instead of being underground, they were now on a stretch of track positioned several stories above street level.

  Red regained his footing too quickly, and before José could try to stop him, he fired off another blast of his rocket launcher.

  Behind the speeding BART train, the missile struck, and the tracks splintered. The pursuing cars were headed right to the freshly-made gap in the rails leading to the streets below, and they were going way too fast to stop!

  CHAPTER 12

  ABOVEGROUND BART TRACKS

  Insistent on pulling off his big hero-style move, Tony was clinging to the hood of his speeding car, using his magnet hand gloves to stay locked in place until he was ready to make the jump over to the platform hauling the vault. Layla had almost caught up with the back of the speeding train when the tunnel gave way to the bright light of the city, blasting away the last bits of smoke.

  Which was immediately replaced with a fresh burst of fire and smoke as the bad guy on the train fired another bazooka shot, rupturing the track in front of Tony’s car.

  Echo was luckier. She was swerving to the side to s
wing past Tony and Layla as the track widened. But Layla, now firmly behind the wheel of the car that Tony favored, had no room to veer.

  “Hold on!” she yelled to Tony.

  Clinging to the hood of the car, Tony suddenly realized what Layla was going to do.

  “Oh,” he said, now thinking that climbing onto the hood of a moving car that was being fired at by a bazooka while chasing a train might not have been his wisest move. “Oh no. Layla . . . wait—”

  Layla didn’t wait. There wasn’t time to wait, really. Instead, she blasted the engine turbo, sending an explosion of supercharged speed through the pistons. The wheels responded as they were supposed to—fast. Instead of dropping through the gap in the rails, the car hit the twisted and ruined structure like a ramp, sending the car high up into the air with Tony desperately hanging on to the surface.

  And at just the worst possible moment, a piece of debris struck the hood, sending a shock wave through the metal and disrupting the magnetic grip of Tony’s gloves. He went flying into the air!

  CHAPTER 13

  ABOVEGROUND BART TRACKS

  Jonathan ran the length of the speeding train as fast as he possibly could. “Stop the train! The vault . . . the vault has a bomb in it.”

  Traci shook her head. “I’ve been trying to stop it for the last five minutes. I can keep the speed from getting any faster, but I can’t slow us down. We’re officially out of control.”

  At the other end of the train, Layla’s car finished its jump through the air and landed on the other side of the ruined gap with a screech. The car swerved as it fishtailed, but Layla managed to manipulate the brakes to avoid speeding right back off the tracks.

  “Ha!” she yelled, slapping the car horn for emphasis. “Check out those moves, Toretto!”

  That was when she noticed Tony wasn’t on the hood of the car anymore.

  Instead he was sailing overhead.

  “Whoops,” said Layla.

  CHAPTER 14

  BART TRAIN TOWING PLATFORM

  Tony was incredibly lucky.

  Yes, he’d been hurled off a car at a high velocity while it jumped over a ruptured train track toward a speeding cargo platform.

  But he still had time to stick the landing.

  Tony slapped his wrist communicator, silently grateful that the unit had been outfitted with an emergency grapnel wire.

  The wire launched, and the hook end lodged right into the side of the vault. The wire went taught and Tony used the extra momentum to pull himself into a shoulder roll across the platform. He tumbled over several times, crashing into the angry-looking red-faced man with the rocket launcher as he did so. The two of them tumbled together into the open vault.

  Tony pulled himself up with a groan. He was very, very lucky. But that didn’t stop every bone in his body from thinking otherwise.

  Before he could think any further, he looked up and saw the experimental reactor that was supposed to be totally chill by now . . . or at least that’s what he thought Frostee and Cisco had been doing while he was busy chasing bad guys through a tunnel.

  “That is not chill,” Tony said to himself out loud, considering the obvious fact that the reactor was glowing bright hot white and clearly getting ready to explode. “That is very much not chill.”

  And that’s when the man with the red face jumped up and punched him.

  CHAPTER 15

  CITY STREETS OF EAST BAY, CALIFORNIA

  Back on the hauler, Cisco raced to keep pace with the speeding train.

  “Tony,” Cisco yelled through his comm. “Bro! Talk to me!”

  “I’m good!” Tony yelled back. “Busy trying not to get punched. Gotta go!”

  Frostee’s voice shouted through the hauler’s comm system. “I’m losing the signal, Cisco! You gotta get closer or that thing’s gonna blow!”

  Cisco shook his head. “The tunnel’s gonna go underwater soon! We got a secret submarine mode on this that no one ever told me about? Because that would be really cool for many reasons!”

  “There’s no secret submarine mode!” Frostee shouted back.

  “That’s disappointing!” Cisco yelled as he drove. “It would have been very convenient to go underwater right now! Like ridiculously convenient! Like the kind of convenient where you just discover the mode at the very last minute and it saves everything!”

  “There’s no secret submarine mode!”

  “Dang,” said Cisco, as he steered the hauler toward the Bay Bridge. The train was rushing into the underwater Transbay Tube, which would be out of reach, even from the bridge over the water.

  In the back of the hauler, working furiously, Frostee began to worry. The reactor was going to fire off an energy build-up. Sort of a pulse. An electromagnetic pulse, to be specific. It was better than an outright explosion, and would help delay the inevitable kaboom, but it would disrupt any unshielded electrical devices in its range—which meant that most cars above the vault would careen out of control. Maybe right off the bridge . . .

  Frostee tapped a button on his spy watch and began shouting. “Ms. Nowhere, things are getting worse.”

  CHAPTER 16

  BERKELEY, SPY RACERS SECRET HEADQUARTERS

  Ms. Nowhere cringed and considered that she might have gone into any other line of work. Anything, and it would have been more relaxing. Like maybe a job as a brain surgeon who only performs delicate operations while on a Ferris wheel.

  “Electromagnetic pulse?” she yelled back at Frostee. “Can you stop it?”

  Frostee’s voice crackled back. “Sure, I mean, give me a fully-stocked lab, three days, unlimited funds and NO! I can’t stop it!”

  “Gary!” Ms. Nowhere snapped. “Get emergency vehicles to the bridge! Now!”

  “Already en route,” Gary responded. “But they’re not shielded the way our custom vehicles are, so there’s nothing to stop them from being affected by the pulse either. So . . .”

  Ms. Nowhere leaned back and rubbed her temples. Any. Other. Job.

  CHAPTER 17

  BART TRAIN TOWING PLATFORM

  On the platform trailing the BART train, Tony staggered. The red-faced criminal was on top of him before he could defend himself.

  “There was supposed to be money!” Red yelled. “Who puts bombs in bank vaults? Who chases subway trains with cars? What is wrong with you?”

  Tony shoved back. “What kind of incompetent thief steals a vault when they don’t know what’s in it? What is wrong with you?”

  “I’m a criminal mastermind!” Red shouted in response. “I planned the heist of a century!”

  “You’re an idiot that’s going to get everyone blown up!”

  “That thing is worth money, and I’m gonna get that money and—”

  Tony blinked as the criminal abruptly stopped shouting. Then the criminal fell over, unconscious. Standing behind him was a larger man, clearly the guy who had knocked the shouting guy unconscious.

  “I’m José,” the large man said, pulling Tony up by one hand. “Sorry about Red. He thinks he’s a super villain now or something. But man, this bomb, though. We didn’t know, okay? Can you help stop it?”

  Tony looked at the glowing reactor. “Seriously? You just accidently stole a multimillion-dollar piece of super-high-tech equipment like that?”

  José shrugged, a sheepish smile on his face. “This is our first heist. We’re still working the kinks out.”

  The BART train sped up as the tracks descended from aboveground back toward an underground tunnel. Suddenly, everything was shadows and darkness again.

  “Can you stop the thing from blowing up?” José asked.

  Tony looked at the glowing reactor. “Yeah, yeah, let me just—”

  The accelerator chose that exact moment to blast out an EMP pulse, which killed the electrical systems on the train’s computer, but
not the third rail that fed the train its power.

  And so, the train started speeding up. And that in turn made the accelerator become less stable.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE BAY BRIDGE

  The pulse wasn’t stopped by the tunnel wall, or the dozens of feet of earth and concrete, or even the bay water itself.

  Instead, the EMP blast killed the power of every car speeding down the narrow, four-lane Bay Bridge. While most cars lost power and slowed to a halt, some had their brakes lock up, and the vehicles slid into one another. There were several collisions, though at a quick glance Cisco could tell none of them were serious.

  Luckily, only one was headed toward the edge of the bridge.

  Unluckily, that one was a school bus.

  A school bus filled with kids.

  “Frostee!” Cisco yelled into his watch. “We got serious issues!”

  In the back of the hauler, Frostee got up to answer Cisco’s call, but his spy watch buzzed and Tony’s voice punched through. “Frostee!” Tony yelled. “I’m at the reactor and it’s pulsing like crazy! What do I do?”

  CHAPTER 19

  BART TRAIN TOWING PLATFORM

  “Tony!” Layla yelled, propelling herself onto the speeding platform. “You’re okay!”

  Tony glanced back, surprised. He was unhooking the small reactor from its framework with the help of a larger man—one of the criminals, Layla assumed.

  “How . . . ?” Tony asked her, confused. “Where’s my car?”

  Layla shook her head. “I used the grapple to attach it to the back of the train and now it’s being towed behind us. You could have done that, too, if you had just waited half a second and listened.”