Hero (Gone 9)

No, she corrected herself mentally, my second superhero good deed. Save a baby, kill a man.

Not now!

Now she had to accelerate to pass the train. She moved onto a parallel track and ran beside the train, hoping she wasn’t running into a train coming north—her armored body was strong, but she was pretty sure hitting a train at hundreds of miles an hour would crush her like a bug on a car windshield.

The last passenger car looked empty, a relief. The next car and the one after that were empty as well. Then she reached the first-class car, the one just behind the front energy car. There Shade got a shock: passengers! She’d assumed Vector had forced everyone off the train before seizing it, but of course he’d kept hostages. Of course! At least two dozen of them, it seemed, all sitting with frightened, desperate looks on their faces.

So much for derailing the train by any of the means she’d considered. It might come to that, but not yet, not with people aboard the train.

Now, unfortunately, she had another problem: keeping pace with the train, her speed zero relative to the train, she was perfectly visible to anyone on board, including Vector’s insect eyes.

Shade dropped back past the rows of windows, to the back of the train. She took a breath and leaped up to the sloped windshield, and had to motor her legs like Road Runner to keep from slipping off. She clawed and clambered up onto the roof to discover her way impeded by the raised framework called a pantograph that scraped along the bottom of a live electrical line running very high current. She gave as wide a berth as possible to the pantograph then trotted forward, easily leaping the gaps between cars, indifferent to the gale-force wind that would have knocked any normal person flat, and flashing on movie scenes she’d seen of people doing just this. Hadn’t Tom Cruise done this in at least one movie?

Ahead on the right was a big shopping center with, yes (thank you, Edilio!), a Target and a Costco. She ran to the front of the train, scooted past another pantograph, and threw herself flat. She edged

forward on her belly to peek down through the tinted front windows. She was quite suddenly face-to-face with a dark-skinned woman—a woman with a dusting of strange insects on her shoulders and head. The woman had not been infected, not yet, but the threat was unmistakable.

Shade sat up, swung her legs around, and with the power that allowed her to move at jet speed, she smashed the window with her heels, then slid down into the train’s cockpit to find that the engineer had been knocked back against the bulkhead by the sudden wind. And, as Shade had hoped, most if not all of Vector’s bugs had been knocked loose.

They were quick, the insects, but Shade was quicker, snatching them out of the air and crushing them in her fists or stomping them underfoot.

Slowing her voice, Shade said, “Stop the train.”

“He’ll kill me!”

“Don’t worry about Vector. The Rockborn Gang is here.”

It sounded ludicrous in Shade’s ears, like yelling “The cavalry is coming!” but the engineer, seeing dead bugs littering the floor, complied, and the train began to slow.

“Now hold on!” Shade yelled.

“What are y—”

Shade grabbed the engineer, dragged her to the side door, slid it open, and leaped. Shade and the engineer flew through the air at shocking speed. Shade’s legs were moving before she hit the ground and she matched speed before slowing enough to deposit the engineer well off the tracks in a soggy ditch. She muttered an apology the woman could not hear, and raced after the train again, catching it effortlessly as it slowed to freeway speeds.

Did Vector know what she’d done? If he did, he would threaten the passengers to stop her, and the extortion would work. So thing one: in and out before Vector could react. You can’t threaten if no one hears the threat.

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.