Hero (Gone 9)

Kill a policeman, wreck a train. A day in the life . . .

CHAPTER 35

Stop That Train! I Want to Get On!

SHADE HAD NEVER run this long, this far. It was, she knew, impossible. Every part of it was impossible. Impossible that she could generate the energy required. Impossible that her brain could seamlessly adapt to a world that should be nothing but a blur.

At top speed she could run faster than a 787 jet; in fact, right now she was moving just below cruising speed for an airliner. Impossible that she could still hear in what amounted to a wind tunnel cranked up to maximum, not to mention the Doppler effect, which should have reduced anything she heard to a whine. Impossible that she could even keep her eyes open, let alone actually be able to see the railroad ties flying away beneath feet moving so fast they should have caught fire.

Malik is right. The laws of physics have been hacked.

Not time to think about that. Maybe I’m a real person; maybe I’m a sim. It doesn’t matter because life is what it is, no matter how strange or impossible it seems. Maybe it was all a game invented by some alien species, maybe, but Vector was still en route to Washington, DC, and people, whether biologically evolved or created on some futuristic keyboard, would suffer terribly.

Is that right, Watchers? Maybe give me a little wink if I’m right?

She remembered once diving into Wikipedia’s philosophy page and following links through all sorts of speculation about the nature of humanity. The problem of free will had been debated and written about endlessly, but in the end it came to a dead end because the fact was that humans were simply not capable of pretending as if free will did not exist. The human mind had limitations.

It was not easy running on a train track, not easy at all. The spacing of the ties was awkward, and if she missed a step and landed on gravel, it slowed her down so that she missed her next step. As a result Shade was moving at half speed, probably no more than four hundred miles an hour.

Which seemed poky.

She actually had time to notice how very slowly the planes landing at Newark airport were moving. It made her laugh; they looked as if they had to fall, but just kept gliding along at what to Shade looked no faster than a car pulling out of a suburban driveway.

Shade had no idea how far ahead the Acela was and berated herself for not asking one of the passengers who’d been forced off. In the back of her mind, she ran the algebraic equations, trying to calculate how long it would take a person moving at four hundred miles an hour to overtake a train moving at one fifty.

Another part of her mind wondered just what she thought she would do if she caught up to the train. Run ahead and drive a truck onto the tracks? That could work. Or she could race ahead and throw one of the switches that would shunt the train off onto a side track.

The problem with both of those solutions—aside from not having any idea how train switches worked—was that the train would likely go off the rails at a hundred fifty miles an hour and rip through some residential neighborhood like a meteorite—a meteorite filled with a swarm of disease-causing insects that would undoubtedly survive a wreck just fine.

The best way was to get aboard the train—a train moving at NASCAR speeds—with locked doors and shatterproof windows. That would not be easy.

Then, in the distance, intermittently visible between trees as it took a curve, she saw it, a silvery snake. It was just going into a turn, and Shade counted six passenger cars, wedged between two “energy cars,” which were the electric version of locomotives. Hopefully all empty.

She could catch up to the train in under a minute. Then what?

Excellent question, Shade. Got any answers?

She had the clean phone Edilio had provided, and slowed slightly to be able to focus on texting. Texting was odd in that her fingers moved faster than the software could generate a letter, so that there was a lag. She had finished her message before the third word appeared on her phone.

Caught train. Residential area. Somewhere safer ahead?

She knew what Edilio would do: open a maps app and search ahead on the track for a more open spot where whatever she did wouldn’t involve derailing a train right into a subdivision or an elementary school. It would take forever by her calculations, minutes at least.

So as she waited for Edilio’s reply, she kept racing ahead until she was in the train’s slipstream, trotting along just a few yards behind it, slowing to match its speed, a crawling hundred and fifty miles an hour.

The last car, the one she could almost reach out and touch, was an energy car, an engine, identical to the one at the front of the train, bullet-headed and streamlined. There were no evident handholds, so if she was to leap atop it, it’d be a mad scramble not to slide right back off.

They were coming up to the Metropark station where the train was to stop, though Shade really doubted it would.

She checked her phone. A text was just popping up.

Abt 7 miles south of Metropark sta see Costco/Target on rt. 2 m after. Trees sparse houses.

“All right, Edilio,” Shade said. Pretty quick for a mere human.

The train instead blew past crowded platforms. The draft from the swift train pulled a baby stroller toward the tracks, but Shade saw it, saw the mother in slow motion rushing to grab it, knew the woman was too slow, and skidded to a stop just as the stroller tipped over the edge of the platform. Shade pushed it back before taking off again.

My superhero good deed.