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 annihilation.
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.
He switched frantically between views, like a desperate TV watcher whose cable has gone out, looking for active eyes, and finding fewer and fewer and fewer.
No! No! It doesn’t end like this!
In the end he had only a handful left, just four. Four out of his millions. Four insects whose eyes were on leaves and homes . . . outside the dome.
He was not dead but . . . but his mind was . . . he could not quite . . .
Shrinking, that’s what it was like. Like shrinking, smaller and smaller. Like he was a house and someone was walking through that house systematically turning off lights, so that room by room he went dark.
His focus wavered and fragmented, thoughts becoming random, irrational. He should . . . he could . . . He was . . . Lights going out . . . Confusion . . .
I am Vector . . . I am Markovic!
I know who I . . .
Somewhere a voice was shouting.
De-morph, de-morph, over and over again.
It was irritating. And Shade had other worries. Pain. Confusion. Blindness.
De-morph, de-morph. Shade, de-morph now!
Okay, if it will shut you up.
Watchers in her head. Was it them yelling?
Her mind was on the very edge of a cliff, a cliff a thousand feet high over jagged rocks, and if she slipped . . .
De-morph, goddammit, Shade!
Malik?
Shade formed a thought, a tenuous, slick, impossible-to-hold-on-to thought . . . and slipped over the edge of the cliff and fell and fell and fell.