She ran ahead of the train, spun, leaped, and flew backward through the air, as the train caught her at a relative speed of just a few miles an hour. Back through the windshield she’d broken, a stagger-step that smacked her into the bulkhead with just enough force to make her yell, “Ow!”
The speedometer showed seventy-four and dropping.
How long until Dekka and the others in the helicopter caught up?
Shade made sure the door to the cockpit was locked, then climbed back out of the window and onto the roof to scan the sky for approaching helicopters.
Markovic had indeed seen the shattering of the windshield, followed by the blur that had resolved briefly into Shade Darby, speaking in a weird, clipped, distorted speech.
He had felt the braking, the loss of speed, the sudden disappearance from sight of both Shade and the engineer.
“Oh, clever, clever girl,” Markovic said. “If only she would join me!”
He regretted now not bringing Mirror, but that mutant, though possessed of a useful power, was a difficult man, an unpredictable man, and Vector had left him behind, left all his hangers-on behind. Why should he need followers? He was Vector; his own power was all that was necessary.
Still, Mirror would have been useful now that the speed demon had shown up unexpectedly. A mistake. Bob Markovic did not like making mistakes, Vector still less.
But it was a minor matter. The Rockborn Gang might be on his tail, but he’d seen their pathetic efforts to take him down and was not overly impressed.
The mass of Vector’s tens of thousands of parts was in the first passenger car, first class, buzzing around terrified passengers. On the floor lay Vector’s “demonstration,” a woman writhing and crying out as disease organisms ate into her flesh.
Vector had no idea what Shade had planned, but one thing was certain: he had to get the train moving again and quickly. The damnable thing was that the door from the passenger car into the energy car was a secure door, and no amount of battering was likely to bring it down. Which meant he would have to send his swarm outside and enter the cockpit through the shattered windshield.
Two problems: One, his swarm moved at no more than about thirty-five miles an hour, and the train, while slowing, was still going faster than that. If he swarmed outside, the wind would blow him clear away from the train.
The other problem was that he had no hands, which meant he could not manipulate the instruments, could neither step on a pedal nor throw a switch.
Definite downsides.
He looked through his many eyes, searching for a hostage young enough and fit enough for what he had in mind. He settled on a young Hispanic man wearing sneakers.
“You!” Vector said. “Break that window.”
“Break it?”
“Use that fire extinguisher. Bash it out!”
The young man complied. It was neither quick nor easy; the glass had to be hit again and again until enough glass was pushed out to allow the man to writhe through the open window. At that point the train was moving at perhaps twenty-five miles an hour. So the man hit the ground, rolled like a stunt man, jumped up, and ran away across backyards, scrambling over fences.
Dammit!
Another mistake! Vector swarmed around a fit-looking woman with a toddler in tow. “You: climb out, make your way to the front of the train. If you disobey me, I will give your brat my own special treatment.”
The woman did as ordered. She climbed out as her daughter cried and called to her, and she shouted back, “Don’t be afraid!” in a voice guaranteed to have the opposite effect, and, “Carlita, you have to be quiet!”
The train was slow enough now that Vector could follow the woman out, watch her struggle to stand up on the windowsill and try to claw her way clumsily up onto the roof of the car. But she was too short to manage it, and Vector had to waste still more time getting two other hostages to grab her legs and boost her higher up.
By the time Vector’s unwilling, impromptu engineer had made it to the roof, the train was nearly at a standstill.
And there stood Shade Darby atop the roof, in morph, looking quizzically at them. In slo-speech she said, “Well, hello there, Markovic. Bummer not having hands, huh?”
“If you try to stop us, I will take her child and its screams will fill your nightmares!”
“I see you’ve mastered the art of supervillain monologuing,” Shade said.
“If you don’t—” But Shade was gone. He cursed silently and raged at his hostage, “Get down there! Slide! Now!”
The hostage did, and Vector flowed after her. He was a quick study, and the train’s controls were not difficult to grasp. He gave the hostage his orders, ignored her weak requests for reassurance about her child, and the train began moving once again.
It accelerated smoothly away, and Vector breathed a sigh—a figurative sigh, since he had no lungs—but realized he had a different problem now: neither he nor his captive knew what speed they should set. Vector knew vaguely that different sections of track were capable of sustaining different speeds, but decided to take the risk of going full speed. So what if the train derailed? It would slow him down, but only the humans aboard would die.
Shade had not tried to derail the train, though she probably could. She had only tried to delay it. Which meant the train was being pursued, probably by the rest of the Rockborn Gang. Could he destroy them without killing Simone? Did he care? You couldn’t make a revolution without breaking some eggs, and this was a revolution, wasn’t it? No more democracy with idiot voters making idiot decisions; he would rule directly. He was a businessman, not some bumbling politician. He knew how to get things done.
Yes: a revolution. The rise of the Vectorian Age. Hah!
That thought made him happy, an emotion that lasted for a full five seconds before he realized he had wasted too much time: a helicopter was passing overhead, and it was not a news chopper.
Vector flashed suddenly on The Wizard of Oz. On the Wicked Witch of the West dispatching her flying monkeys.
“Fly!” Vector wheezed. “Fly, my pretties, fly!”
CHAPTER 36
Too Late for Flying Lessons
“WE HAVE VISUAL on the train,” the helicopter pilot said in the headphones. Dekka crouch-walked to the cockpit and leaned over the pilot’s shoulder. And there it was, visible through the bubble canopy, just a mile ahead and, astonishingly, stopped.
“Someone’s standing on the roof,” the pilot said.
“That would be my girl Shade,” Dekka said. “Land just ahead of it.”
“No can do, miss: wires.”
“Damn!”
“And now it’s moving!” the pilot shouted.
“Keep pace with it and get as low as you can!” Dekka ordered. “We’re about to get another passenger.”
The helicopter swept in a tight circle and came back to hover just above the electrical wires, keeping pace with the train, which accelerated slowly, five miles an hour, ten, twenty . . .
Suddenly the helicopter lurched as it took on the weight of a new arrival. Shade Darby had jumped from the roof of the train straight into the helicopter’s passenger compartment.
“Talk to me, Shade,” Dekka demanded.
Shade had far too much to say to be able to do it in buzz-speak and de-morphed quickly. “He’s got people on that train. He’s already ‘Vectored’ one person and the rest aren’t going to argue with him.”
“How many passengers?”
Shade shrugged. “Looks like a few dozen, maybe fifty people.”
“We need to stop that train, no matter what,” Simone said, surprising Dekka with her intensity. “If Vector reaches Washington, the US government will be over. Then there’ll be no one but us. Just us.”
No more “father,” no more “Markovic.” Simone had seen what her once-father had become and had begun to accept that Bob Markovic no longer existed. Dekka felt a wave of pity for the girl: she’d been through a hell of a lot in a very short period of time
. It said something about her that she was still standing at all, let alone that she had adapted so quickly and . . . Dekka had been about to add “easily,” but of course that was almost certainly not true. Dekka had known many kids in the FAYZ who seemed to be coping easily and ended up as psychiatric in-patients or suicides. Simone might be suppressing the pain for now, but it would come. Impulsively she reached and squeezed Simone’s shoulder.
Malik said, “She’s right, Dekka. This isn’t a maybe-we-should-maybe-we-shouldn’t thing. If Vector takes Washington, the eight of us will be dead within a month. He’ll be able to turn military, FBI, everything against us.”
“You think that many people in Washington will just go along with some unhinged lunatic?” Cruz wondered aloud.
“Obviously you don’t pay much attention to politics,” Malik snarked. “People are weak. They take the easy path. Wait until Vector has the president on a live feed, screaming in pain and begging for death. Not one person in ten thousand will stand up.”
“He’s right,” Sam said. “And once people roll over for Vector they’ll resent anyone who doesn’t. It’s human nature. They’ll serve Vector and they’ll easily be turned against us.”
Dekka looked out through the open door, down at the train, wind blowing her snake-dreads straight back. The Acela was moving at maybe twenty miles an hour already. “Fifty or sixty people . . .”
“I can try to get some of them off the train,” Shade said, “and maybe Francis can, too, but anyone we save may have Vector’s bugs on them. We could save them and Vector simultaneously unless I take the extra time to de-bug each hostage.”
No one was telling Dekka what to do. They all knew the decision she had to make, and Shade, while knowing what she would do herself, was glad not to have to make the call. The passenger compartment of the helicopter was a howling wind tunnel, and yet it seemed quiet as they waited for Dekka to decide their fate, and quite possibly the fate of the human race.
“Lieutenant,” Dekka yelled to the pilot. “You’re going to have a sudden loss of weight.” Then, with her heart in her throat, Dekka turned to Sam and Francis and Armo and said, “Let’s do it.”
The helicopter flew low, keeping pace with the accelerating train. Armo stood and hefted the heavy artillery shell. Francis gripped his furry arm tightly. Dekka took Francis’s free hand.
“Wish us luck,” Dekka said just as a swarm of copper and silver and red insects flew in through the open door. The bugs swirled around Dekka, invulnerable in morph, and went straight for their vulnerable targets.
“No!” Cruz cried. Cruz was not in morph.
In the cockpit the pilot and copilot slapped frantically at bugs aiming for their eyes, mouths, and ears.
Shade was already morphing fast, fast enough that Vector’s beasts did not find her before chitin armor covered her.
“Cruz! Morph!” Malik cried in slo-mo speech.
But that would take too long. One of the bugs was inches from Cruz’s face. Shade could see the beats of its penny-bright wings. She snatched it out of the air and crushed it. Then looked down at it in her hand, a broken toy, yellow insides oozing, antennae broken like twigs. She threw it out the door.
Then, the Whac-a-Mole game got serious. Hundreds of insects had found the pilots, but dozens had recognized Cruz and Sam as targets as well, neither being in morph. Shade’s hands and arms were a blur, snatching and crushing, snatching and crushing. The bugs were not quick by Shade’s standards, but there were a lot.
And Shade found she had help from an unexpected source. The living dreads on Dekka’s head were almost as fast as Shade, snatching bugs out of the air and biting them in half.
But neither Shade nor Dekka could wedge into the cockpit and save the pilots flying the helicopter, which now veered wildly away.
Cruz had begun to morph, an amazing thing to watch with Shade’s accelerated senses. And as Cruz’s morph appeared, the bugs attacking her seemed to lose focus, as if they’d forgotten what they were doing. They turned in midair, and redoubled the assault on the cockpit.
“The pilots!” Dekka cried.
But Shade could see that it was too late. Far too late. The lieutenant pilot’s face was already erupting in pus-filled boils, slow-motion corruption of the flesh.
No time to consult Dekka. No time to parse the moral pluses and minuses. Time only to see the solution, the bright, clear, ruthlessly drawn line from where Shade was to a solution. The faint, probably futile, but only solution.
Shade pushed Dekka aside, reached into the cockpit, grabbed the pilot by the shoulder of his uniform, reached around to smack the buckle of his safety harness, yanked him out of his seat, and hurled him out of the door.
She was back to repeat the same sequence with the copilot. Finally she grabbed Malik bodily and pushed him toward the cockpit. All of this within three seconds.
She had time to watch in horror as the two men fell so very slowly, arms windmilling, mouths open to scream. The pilot hit the ground. The copilot smashed into a tree. Two rag dolls.
Three. I’ve killed three men today.
It took seconds for the others to realize what she’d done. It took Malik seconds to realize he was in the pilot’s seat. It took Dekka seconds to cry, “What have you done?”
“The only thing I could do,” Shade said at a speed Dekka would never be able to interpret.
Sam was on his feet now, putting an arm around a furious Dekka. He said, “Not now!”
The helicopter banked sharply, so hard that Shade was certain it would roll completely over and hit the ground in a fiery explosion. But then the roll slowed and reversed. Cruz and Armo crashed together into a bulkhead, knocking Sam and Dekka to their knees on the steel floor.
Shade knew one of them, just one, had the power to escape unharmed.
“Francis!” she cried.
But it was a tenth-of-a-second chirp in a howling tornado of wind as the ground rushed at them.
Malik quickly saw what Shade had done, quickly saw that she was hoping he would somehow figure out how to fly a helicopter, and stared in blank panic at an array of unfamiliar instruments.
Through the windshield Malik saw tall, straight pine trees rising suddenly like arrows, then tilting away. He felt the helicopter accede to gravity and slide sideways toward the ground. House roofs. Telephone poles. Grass. An aboveground backyard swimming pool. It was as if some giant had scooped the ground up and flung it at them, so that it felt less like they were falling and more like the ground was attacking them.
And yet, they were falling.
Malik understood Shade’s thinking: Malik was a techie, a gamer, a guy who’d spent thousands of hours driving virtual tanks and flying virtual jets. He was the best choice to play emergency pilot.
Just one thing: he’d never even flown a virtual helicopter.
To his side, right where the parking brake might be on a sports car, was an ornate sort of yoke, but it was no simple stick; it had various holds, things that needed to be pushed, things that needed to be rotated, things that needed to be pulled, and he had no idea, none, none, none what to do. But in flying planes, pulling back on the yoke had always sent the plane upward.
So Malik pulled up on the yoke. He heard the rising scream of the turbines, felt a sudden surge of speed, saw a whirlwind outside the bubble canopy . . .
The tip of a rotor caught a power line. There was a shower of sparks; the helicopter shuddered and jerked wildly, rose a few feet like a breaching whale, and spun madly. Malik was pushed back in his seat by the centrifugal force, suddenly several times his own weight. Behind him the bodies of his friends—those not buckled in—were hurled around, smashed into bulkheads, and suddenly Dekka fell, back first, feline hands clawing at the sky, out of the helicopter.
Shade moved, snatched Dekka’s desperate hand, and held on, but she wasn’t strong enough to pull Dekka in against the force of gravity and the delirious spinning, spinning . . .
The rotors hit again, and this ti
me they bit into something solid, and tree branches and pine needles lashed the windshield. Trees. A fence. The helicopter’s tail rose sharply, and the machine flipped over and smashed into the ground.
Even after impact the rotors churned on, tearing up grass and lawn toys and throwing steel chunks into the house whose backyard they had invaded.
Then . . . quiet, as the turbines whined and stopped. Malik was on his side. A tree branch had shattered the cockpit and now stuck there like a gnarled spear, having barely missed Malik’s head.
Then . . . Malik smelled smoke!
To Shade the destruction of the helicopter was like watching a car crash on a slowed-down video. The rotors moved very fast, but she could see the individual blades making their individual contacts with trees and dirt. The helicopter had flipped onto its side so that Dekka was now above her and falling in toward the door.
Dekka, though, did not need Shade’s help: with feline speed she landed with feet and hands on the open hatch.
Cruz had buckled up, but blood was pouring from a gash in her leg—or at least the leg of whatever morph she was in. Francis lay in a heap, her neck at a precarious angle.
If Francis dies, we’re done.
Simone had been lucky enough to be thrown into Armo, who lay now on his back on the grass with Simone cradled in his arms.
Priorities: Francis.
Shade went to her, holding on with one hand and a leg pressed against the door to the cockpit. She knelt and saw a slow pulse throbbing in her throat. Her neck . . . her neck . . . it had to be broken!
But then Francis stirred and moved her hands in a wild, belated effort to protect herself. Shade caught her hands in midair, pushed them down, and looked up at Dekka, still stretched across the doorway. Dekka spit blood and yelled, “Smoke!”
Dekka jumped out of the way, and Shade blew past her, up and out through the sky-pointing door. She saw it: fire, spread out in a fan shape behind the helicopter, burning the wooden fence, burning random yard toys, burning the crumpled tail section and beginning to eat its way forward.
Shade dropped back inside and had to crawl to reach Malik, separated from him by a substantial tree branch. She pulled at the branch, but not even her morphed strength was enough.
Hero Page 27
