IT WAS LUCK. Luck and Sam’s instincts.
“I don’t like that he hasn’t come after us,” Sam said, speaking privately to Dekka. They were in the backyard of their temporary headquarters. Sam had not wanted to say anything challenging in front of the others, anything that might shift focus to himself. This was Dekka’s command, not his, and he was happy to have it stay that way.
But there was a nagging voice in the back of his head, and even though he was in morph, it was not the Watchers this time.
“What are you thinking?” Dekka asked.
Sam shrugged. “From all you say, this Markovic character is smart and experienced. So he’s not like Knightmare or even the Charmer. He’s not just some thug; he’s a smart thug.”
Dekka nodded. “You think he’s up to something?”
Sam nodded. “Smart guys think. He’s got to know that the government will be sending in tanks at the least, and possibly something much worse for him. He won’t just wait around. So, I ask myself: WWCD?”
“WWCD?”
“What would Caine do? He was a smart thug, too. He wouldn’t have waited for me to come after him again. He’d attack in some new direction, somewhere I wasn’t looking.”
“It’s been bugging me too,” Dekka admitted. “No pun intended. He laid a trap for us, but it ended in a draw. So what’s he doing? Trying to rerun the earlier game, hoping to win this time? Shade says he hasn’t added recruits. It’s him and that fish girl and Mirror and a few hangers-on.”
“Maybe have Shade take another look? Once more before we go in and set off explosions?”
Dekka led the way back inside the house. Shade was talking to Cruz about something in clipped, high-speed, barely comprehensible speech.
“Shade. How would you feel about taking another run through Grand Central?”
“Bzzt,” Shade replied, and was gone. A door slammed.
“Good timing,” Cruz snarked. “We were talking about emotional things earlier, and you know Shade.”
Shade, for her part, was not happy hearing about Cruz’s encounter with Armo. Not because she wasn’t happy for Cruz, but because she still did not think it would work out in the end, and she couldn’t bear to see Cruz have her heart broken on top of everything else.
She’d suggested to Cruz that maybe this was not the time to consider romantic entanglements.
To which Cruz had replied, “Like you and Malik?”
That had just forced Shade to start really thinking about what exactly she was doing with Malik. Was it pity, was that why she had gone to him? That didn’t feel quite right. No, if she was honest with herself—and she tried to be—she had needed him. She had felt afraid and isolated, and maybe that’s what it took to get her to admit she needed someone.
Now she was relieved to be out the door and racing down the avenues toward Grand Central. The last time she’d passed through she’d seen a pair of Vector’s human minions, looking haunted and terrified, perhaps afraid of Vector, or just as likely, nowhere near getting over the shattering experience of Malik’s blast. The two of them were trying to string wire across the doorways, driving nails into marble with difficulty. And all of it pointless—with her momentum and chitin covering, she could blow right through wires.
It was a run of only a few seconds, so Shade took a few extra seconds to play a game of Mach-1 parkour, leaping from car roof to car roof, bouncing off walls, swinging around light poles, and her favorite new pastime: going around and around in revolving doorways until the bearings smoked and the glass started to crack.
I’m entitled to have a little fun, aren’t I?
At the station, she found the wires had not been successfully strung, and she had no difficulty blowing in past . . . past no one. Vector had posted no guards.
She ran at half speed, which was still twice as fast as a race car, around the main concourse, running up walls and over ticket booths. Grand Central was empty. No Vector. No flying-fish girl. No Mirror in or out of morph.
Suspecting a trick, she blew down through the dining level, raced through kitchens, ran through the subway station; in all, she spent an interminable five minutes carefully searching the place at hyperspeed.
Of course, it’s easy to hide bugs. Just because you don’t see them . . .
She ran back to the main concourse and saw that there was only one living thing left behind. She dashed back to the dining level, retrieved a twelve-inch chef’s knife to cut through duct tape, returned, and leaped the dozen feet to land atop the information booth.
The stink that came from the tortured man was stomach-churning. He was like a corpse exhumed from a grave, his body a breeding ground of diseases known and unknown. One bicep showed bare bone poking through rotting hamburger. His abdomen had been hollowed out, his stomach and intestines gone, and in their place a black pit oozing pus and blood.
He did not know Shade was there. His face was still covered by the cushion that muffled his screams. Shade dreaded removing the cushion and seeing his face, but this was not about her delicate sensibilities. The man was writhing in hell.
She sliced through the duct tape and tossed the cushion away.
“Please God, please God, please God!” the man cried, his voice faint and ragged from too many such screams and cries.
“Listen to me,” Shade said. She squatted on the slanted top of the booth, and looked at the place where his eyes should be, but his eyes were gone, consumed by voracious bacteria and viruses that had eaten so far through his left eye that Shade saw pink brain tissue.
He should be dead. If there was any pity left in this new world, he would be dead.
Shade leaped clear of the booth and made it to a place out of sight behind a pillar and vomited. She was back before the tortured man could have noticed her absence. Then again, he hadn’t noticed her presence.
Shade slowed her voice till to her own ears it sounded like molasses. “I’m here to help you. Where is Vector?”
“Kill me, please, please, please have mercy!”
“I need you to answer me! Where is Vector?”
Shade felt exposed and vulnerable standing still for so long, but the man was in no state to be answering questions, and she had to take her time with him.
“Vector. Where is he?”
“He’s everywhere! He’s inside me! Oh, God, help me!”
Nothing was going to penetrate this brutalized mind. Nothing. With one possible exception.
Dekka did it when she had to.
Still, Shade hesitated. It was one thing to be in a fight, and to try to not take a life, but do so nevertheless. This wasn’t a fight.
No, but it is a war.
“Answer my questions and I’ll help you.”
“Kill me, please, please, God, oh please.” The words came so very slowly to Shade, and she could hear desperation in every single syllable. Utter despair.
“All right,” Shade said. “I’ll end it for you. But you have to tell me: Where is Vector?”
“I-I-I—don’t lie to me. You have to swear!”
“I swear.”
“Washington. I heard him say Washington. Now do it! Please, I’m begging . . .”
“How would Vector get to Washington?” Shade wondered, picturing a massive insect cloud flying south.
“Train. Train in Jersey. Now! Do it now!”
“Do you want to pray or anything?” Those words coming out my mouth! “Before I . . . do it . . . would you like to say a prayer or something?”
“Prayer?” He lolled his horrifying face toward her. “Do you think I haven’t prayed? Do you think I haven’t begged God to let me die?” His voice was raw, savage, a voice rising up from the pit.
Shade tightened her grip on the knife, and with one swift sideways swipe, she cut through his throat till the blade scraped spine. Then she reversed direction, severing the spinal cord completely.
The man’s head fell, bounced down the slanted roof, hit the marble floor, and rolled once, heavily. It came to rest with its face blessedly pointed away.
I’ve just killed a man.
She felt the enormity of her deed gathering force like a tidal wave far out at sea, knowing it was rushing toward her, building size and speed. Sooner or later it would sweep over and through her. Sooner or later there would be a reckoning. But now was not the time.
Shade raced out of the station, thumbing her phone so fast that the software could not keep up. First to Google Maps to find out where the Newark train station was. Then a text to Dekka.
D. Vector poss en route DC train out of Newark. OMW.
With that out of the way, it was time for sheer, unrestricted, all-out speed.
Forty-Second Street was a half-second’s blur. Left on Park Avenue, a left so sharp that she ran up the side of a building, feet smashing third-floor windows as she executed her turn. Right onto Thirty-Ninth Street, and the world was a blur of banks and sandwich shops and phone stores. Almost instantly she ran into the mass of cars still trying to escape the city. But the sidewalks were clear, and she tore along, leaping piles of bagged trash, running through mostly empty intersections. She was going so much faster than her Google Maps app that she missed a turn and had to skid to a stop and back up.
Down a winding ramp with concrete walls high on both sides, beneath an overpass, and she took a sudden plunge into the nicotine-tiled Lincoln Tunnel, which was wall-to-wall cars moving at three miles an hour. The walkways that ran along the sides of the claustrophobic tunnel were too narrow for her to stay on them and keep up her speed. She had to slow so much that a man squeezing around cars on a motorcycle actually passed her.
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 . . .