“Sofia,” Jack said. “Where do they keep the Countermeasure?”
She fixed her eyes on him, anger sweeping away infirmity. “Floor 49. There’s a security door in Paul’s office. I’ll draw you a map.”
The Riverport swimming hall sheltered beneath the overpass. Rain slashed crazy, blasting down out of a night sky that couldn’t make up its mind. The world outside was a chopped-up madness of lenses: myriad stutters popping up, lingering and vanishing at points across the city.
The elevated line above began to sing. A train was incoming, not far away now.
Monarch Tower was his destination, that train his ride.
Nick had gotten him a backpack from the cab. Riverport Raptors. Jack slung it, tightened it.
The stairs to the elevated platform were a block away. Jack warped.
The platform was dark, every lighting tube blown out. Jack was the only living thing stupid enough to be there. The freezing, wind-lashed platform offered a 180-degree panorama of a world tearing itself to pieces.
The bridge across the Mystic River was a smashed wreck, having risen too slowly to avoid a cargo ship stuttering right through it. The boat itself was a smoking, flaming ruin, sitting idle in a river thrashing upon itself as multiple stutters threw its motions out of synch with itself. Alien-colored lightning leaped from earth to sky, clouds roiling like an off-black special effect. Entire sections of the city had blacked out. The soundtrack to all of this was alarms, sirens, horns. The platform’s loudspeaker system was still running, piping Riverport Radio, the nighttime DJ rattling off disaster updates and urging people to stay in their homes.
That’s not going to help anyone, Jack thought. Nowhere is safe once the rules go out the window.
The only solution now was Will’s: Jack had to find the Countermeasure and, somehow, use it to fix all of this. To make things right.
The train was barreling its way toward the platform. Maybe it was automated, or maybe the driver couldn’t see the blacked-out platform, or maybe they were just flooring it in the hope of getting clear and getting out. Whatever the reason, the train wasn’t slowing.
He ran down the platform, climbed to the top of the rigid iron safety fence that protected commuters from a straight drop to the overpass below, grabbed the gutter of the shelter, and bounced himself onto the pebbled roof.
Jack took three steps back from the edge, angled himself to match the train’s approach as best he could, waited…
The train was three blocks away.
Waited…
Two blocks, moving fast.
Waited…
One block.
And warped.
In less than a second he sprinted forward, covered the gap between the roof of the platform and the top of the train, and kept running forward, covering enough space within that folded second to match the train’s speed. As quickly as he could he decelerated, before that second expanded, got low, dug in, and held on tight to the lip of the carriage he was atop.
The second unfolded and tossed Jack face-first into a hurricane, his fingers almost snapping off at the joints as the train’s speed outmatched his by orders of magnitude.
He had to get the fuck off that train car.
He pulled himself forward, slid down into the gap between cars, and shouldered through the door, gasping.
His arrival was met with wide eyes and a few alarmed screams.
Passengers. Of course there were passengers. A handful in this car, and he could see others in the car down the line.
He felt that now-familiar pulse in his blood that said a stutter was coming.
This was the third-to-last car. Glancing behind him it looked like the others had been blacked out for the night. No other passengers. Small mercies.
An old man sat with a young woman. His eyes were fixed with sad concern on the world outside, while his pale paw of a hand patted hers.
A young guy in a suit was stabbing furiously at his phone while a middle-aged woman glanced at him with contempt.
A broad-shouldered father in a flannel overshirt held his small son tightly to his chest, glancing frantically from one window to another.
Another pulse kicked through Jack, harder this time. Stutter incoming harder and faster than any he had felt before.
Jack held on to a chrome support as the train’s frame jostled and kicked. “What’s the deal with the driver? Where’s this train headed?”
The woman with the old man said, “Whoever’s driving isn’t answering the emergency intercom.”
“Worcester,” shouted the man with the child. “All stops Riverport, then express to Worcester. You from the company?”
“No,” Jack said. “No. I’m not from the company.” He let go of the support, leaned across a seat, and opened the window. Sticking his head out into the wind and rain he saw Monarch Tower slide around the bend, just a few miles away. He’d planned on getting off at the nearest platform, but if the train wasn’t stopping then the train wasn’t stopping.
The elevated line curved away to the east, shooting above what should have been busy nighttime streets. Jack saw very few people out there, a lot of trashed vehicles, and windows lit from deep within by flame. He could see the domed distortions of stutters dotting the landscape like pimples. As one popped another emerged. Conflict emerged wherever these new borders sprang up.
One mile from Monarch Tower the elevated line curved to the east. A big rig was making good time, horn blasting, looking to get out of town as fast as possible. Its trajectory would take it directly beneath the elevated line. As it got close a stutter snapped down, trapping the front of the cab, bringing it to a halt in a microsecond. The articulated trailer attached to it did not.
The trailer rear-ended the back of the cab, flipped forward like a giant blade, and became trapped in the stutter. When it broke the entire vehicle would smash into the elevated line… and that stutter didn’t look like it’d be around for long, flickering as it was.
Jack pulled in his head and shouted: “Last car! Everyone into the last car!”
Nobody moved. Half a mile.
Jack pulled his pistol, fired a shot into the ceiling. People screamed and ran. Jack moved forward, fast. “Move! Everyone! Last car!”
The crowd surged into the back, the old man struggling to get out of his seat.
“I’m sorry about this,” Jack said. “But we have to move.”
The woman didn’t question. Together they got the old man upright, looping one arm each around his shoulders, moving as fast as they could.
The few people in the second car were with the program, and almost nobody was in the third.
“Bunch up tight against the back wall! Tight as you can!” The old guy was doing okay. “Can you get him down there?”
The woman nodded. Jack removed the man’s arm from around his shoulder to catch a glimpse out the window.
The stutter holding the truck in place broke, the trailer descending on the elevated line like a knife. Whatever it contained was big, heavy, and there was a lot of it. The rig went up in a fireball.
Jack whipped his head away, turned, and warped toward the terrified huddle of twenty-odd people at the back of the last car. Squeezing in close and tight he said, “I’m real sorry about this,” and threw down a stutter shield.
The stutter shield anchored their tiny island of car and track in a bubble of frozen time, locked the rear of the car they were squeezed into solidly in place. The rest of the train was not so constrained.
They watched as the rest of the car deformed at seventy miles per hour, metal screaming, glass shattering, lights sparking and going dark as electrics were severed. The engine and every other car pulled away from that one violently, the line of cars straining and snapping their connections, fishtailing wildly. Then half their car tore off completely. Jack watched as the passenger train whip around horizontally, bolo-like, once. The engine seemed to remain stationary in space as the car-tail whipped around it, and then the centrifugal forces swung the engine around to smash like a mace through the front face of Monarch Tower.