Hero (Gone 9)

“We can’t ignore our own people, either,” Dekka said firmly.

Shade nodded and started to call 911. Then she thought better of it. “How about I get you an ambulance and a paramedic and we keep going?”

Dekka pursed her lips and started to say yes, but by then Shade was gone. Her maps app showed an emergency room just two miles away, a matter of seconds. She was in luck and found an ambulance that had just unloaded a patient. She came to a sudden, startling stop in front of a paramedic just climbing out of the back of the red-and-white ambulance.

“I need you,” Shade said, and without waiting pushed the woman back inside and slammed the door. She zoomed around to the driver, opened his door, yanked him out as gently as she could, which was not very gently. “You, I don’t need.”

Shade hopped up into the driver’s seat.

“Hey! You can’t—” the driver protested, but by that point Shade had thrown the vehicle into gear, executed a tire-squealing reverse out of the emergency room loading area, spun the wheel, and taken off.

“Hey! Hey!” the captive paramedic in the back yelled as she was tossed back and forth by maneuvers carried out at speeds no normal human driver could manage.

“Strap in!”

“You can’t—”

“And yet, I did.”

This was no sports car, and it was top-heavy and precarious on corners. Coming around one sharp turn the vehicle started to tip, but its driver had extraordinary speed and felt the roll coming and shifted the wheel just enough to bounce violently onto a median and then careen back onto the street. It took longer to get back to the crash scene—easy to locate from the pillar of smoke—than it had to run to the hospital, but soon Shade crashed the ambulance right through the wooden fence and brought the vehicle to a halt in the destroyed backyard. On the way she blew past police cars no doubt heading to the scene and knew she would have just seconds to get away without a possible gun battle.

Shade leaped from the ambulance and practically threw Sam in the back, earning a shriek from the paramedic. Then she scooped up Francis and laid her as gently as she could on the stretcher inside the ambulance. She grabbed the paramedic, a twentysomething Latina, by the collar of her uniform and slowed her speech just enough to say, “Your patients. More coming.”

The police cars were pulling up on the street, sirens dying, lights flashing, but by then Shade had everyone but Dekka loaded.

“Let’s go!” Shade said. “I’m driving.”

“I have shotgun,” Dekka said.

“Yes you do, my friend,” Shade said.

Shade drove back through the fence she’d flattened, between two police cars, past shouting police officers as Dekka stuck a hand out of the passenger-side window and carefully shredded the tires of the cop cars. Shade mashed the gas pedal and aimed south, toward the New Jersey Turnpike.

Dekka, beside her, was already on the phone with General Eliopoulos. “No, no, if you bomb it or derail it, Vector will escape into the countryside.” A long listen. Then, “Delay, yes. Mess with the switches if you can.” Another listen. “I understand, General. Okay. Yeah. Then, what we need is no cops on our tails and a faster ride. Okay. Okay.” She glanced at Shade. “Yeah, that should work.”

“So?” Shade demanded.

“So he’s seeing about having Amtrak mess with the switches, but he can only do so much without derailing the train. Vector can force his hostages to climb out and manually change the switches, but that will eat up some time.”

“He offered to bomb it?”

“He has F-16s in the air. But if he tries that, Vector will just buzz away.”

“This ambulance’s top speed seems to be a hundred twenty,” Shade said, disgusted. “I thought ambulances were fast.”

“Eliopoulos has another idea. Some new helicopter they have with a top speed of two fifty. Faster than the train.”

“That would do it.”

“He’s having it meet us.”

“Where?”

“In the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike just south of Philadelphia.”

A police barricade waited at the on-ramp of the turnpike, but as they neared, the police cars hastily reversed out of their way.

“Eliopoulos,” Dekka said.