Hero (Gone 9)

I’ve just killed a man.

She felt the enormity of her deed gathering force like a tidal wave far out at sea, knowing it was rushing toward her, building size and speed. Sooner or later it would sweep over and through her. Sooner or later there would be a reckoning. But now was not the time.

Shade raced out of the station, thumbing her phone so fast that the software could not keep up. First to Google Maps to find out where the Newark train station was. Then a text to Dekka.

D. Vector poss en route DC train out of Newark. OMW.

With that out of the way, it was time for sheer, unrestricted, all-out speed.

Forty-Second Street was a half-second’s blur. Left on Park Avenue, a left so sharp that she ran up the side of a building, feet smashing third-floor windows as she executed her turn. Right onto Thirty-Ninth Street, and the world was a blur of banks and sandwich shops and phone stores. Almost instantly she ran into the mass of cars still trying to escape the city. But the sidewalks were clear, and she tore along, leaping piles of bagged trash, running through mostly empty intersections. She was going so much faster than her Google Maps app that she missed a turn and had to skid to a stop and back up.

Down a winding ramp with concrete walls high on both sides, beneath an overpass, and she took a sudden plunge into the nicotine-tiled Lincoln Tunnel, which was wall-to-wall cars moving at three miles an hour. The walkways that ran along the sides of the claustrophobic tunnel were too narrow for her to stay on them and keep up her speed. She had to slow so much that a man squeezing around cars on a motorcycle actually passed her.

Shade hopped onto the nearest car roof. Cars are generally under five feet tall, and the tunnel was just over thirteen feet. Plenty of clearance. She was going to dent some roofs, probably break a few windshields, and almost certainly scare the hell out of some motorists, but she’d just killed a man, and none of that minor mayhem was worth worrying about. She ran in great, bounding steps, roof to roof, bouncing across lanes to bypass trucks and buses.

All at once she was in the open air. She leaped down onto solid ground, moving like a compact hurricane beneath a dozen overpasses, then skidded to a stop, realizing she’d taken an off-ramp by mistake. She backtracked, slowing to allow the maps app to catch up. She crossed a river, crossed a marsh, crossed another river, and was suddenly in downtown Newark with nice, wide, uncluttered sidewalks.

Turn coming up.

Shade skidded into a sharp left turn, and there it was, an ugly concrete building that bridged over the road, marked with tall gold letters: Newark Penn Station.

It was smaller inside and nothing like as grand as its Manhattan counterpart. She stopped in the midst of a crowd on its way here or there, seeming to materialize out of nowhere, unless you’d noticed coats suddenly flapping, hats flying off, shopping bags almost torn from hands by the wind of her arrival.

Take the time to ask questions in slo-speech? Or check the signage? The signs were quicker. One pointed the way clearly to the Acela, the fast bullet train that ran up and down the East Coast. She shot down a ramp—amusingly marked with Do Not Run signs—and came to a stop again on the Acela platform.

There was a crowd of people, many with suitcases, all milling around and looking scared and angry.

But there was no train in sight.

“Train’s gone,” Dekka snapped, reading Shade’s text. “Dammit! If Vector’s on that train, he can be in DC in just over three hours!”

“Faster,” Simone said. “There are half a dozen Acela stops between Newark and DC, and I doubt the engineer is going to argue with my fa . . . with Vector. They’ll blow right through those stops and ignore speed limits.”

Edilio had been tapping his phone. “It’s about two hundred miles, and the Acela’s top speed is one fifty.” He looked up at them, at the entire Rockborn Gang, all in morph, all crowded into the living room. “It won’t be able to do one fifty the whole way without derailing, but we aren’t going to catch it.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” Dekka said. “I talked to my friend the general as soon as I realized we might be racing a train. A chopper will land in the park in five minutes. Let’s go. Armo?”

“Yeah?”

“Grab the . . . Um, your strength would be much appreciated. Would you be willing to grab our new toy?”

The artillery shell Edilio had obtained from the army currently occupied a couch. It was painted dark green, gray at the tip, with red warnings all scratched and rendered almost illegible by time. The shell, and the poison gas within it, were older than any two of them combined. The Marine captain had emphasized that it was dangerous even unexploded, capable of leaking and killing anyone nearby.

The shell had been modified. It now had a small digital timer literally duct-taped on, with wires running to the detonator.

They ran—or in Simone’s case, flew—the few blocks to the park just as an olive drab military helicopter with a strange triple tail swept over them, beating the air and flattening the grass. Armo, never fast in bear morph unless he dropped to all fours, struggled to keep up while running with a shell that could kill everyone within a several-block radius, very much including Armo himself.

Once again, a battle plan had come to nothing. Dekka had intended to set the nerve gas off in Grand Central, with Shade and Francis running as many nonmutant humans to safety as possible. But Grand Central was irrelevant now, and there was no way to plan for what was coming.

Dekka waved them all into the helicopter’s open door, assisted by a helmeted crewman. Armo barely avoided having the top of his bear head lopped off by the whirling blades as Cruz grabbed him and yelled, “Duck!” He shoved the shell into the helicopter and climbed in after it.

The loadmaster yelled, “What the hell is that?”

“Nerve gas,” Sam said, projecting a calm even he could not possibly feel.

“Jesus H.!” the crewman yelped.

“Yeah, welcome to our lives,” Cruz muttered.