38.
Jamie
“Snake One, this is Torch. Olympic One must be down! Sienna Nealon just came out of the bank!”
“Roger. Switch to alternate frequency three.”
“Roger that.”
Jamie opened her eyes as the words filtered through her consciousness, the pain in her head like she’d stuffed it into a metal vise and gone wild spinning it tight. She couldn’t even see straight. As she lifted her head, she noticed an indentation in the counter where the wood had chipped from her striking it when she’d been knocked down by the blast.
She pushed up on her hands, palms covered in dust and dirt from her fall. Her thigh still felt like it was on fire from where that robber had slashed her with the knife.
Something snapped into place in her mind, and she remembered the words she’d heard as she was waking up, like a conversation that had woven its way into her dreams. “Sienna …?” she said, getting to her feet on unsteady legs. “Sienna?”
Hadn’t the voice said something about her walking out of the bank? Jamie looked to the door, which was missing, along with all the glass from the front window she could see. The little pylons with their interlaced nylon straps that formed the snaking line to the tellers had all been knocked over, though whether it happened when the robbers had secured the scene or sometime during the brawl or even perhaps during the explosion, she couldn’t recall. They were all tipped over now, though, like a massive latticework of black straps and poles, the world’s largest rope line. “And I’m not even at a club,” she muttered. Not that she’d ever been into the club scene.
Jamie made her way to the front door and out into the street. The cop cars that had been parked out front looked like they’d been smashed, one with a destroyed rear and the other spun about so that she could see the damage on the front right side. They’d been parked so that they could provide cover to the cops, but now they were positioned like a great big battering ram had run through and—
“Oh,” Jamie said and looked to her right.
Off in the distance she could see something—a garbage truck, it looked like, making a hard turn to the left. She stared at it for a second as it threatened to disappear from sight, and then she remembered that—
These are the bad guys.
Gotta stop them.
She made the channel direct to the ground beneath her feet and shot into the air, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet in a second. She launched off of one she set up on the building behind her, setting it to repulse and shooting her up like she’d been blown out of a gun barrel. She used a steady sequence of pulsing channels to keep her aloft as she flung herself after the truck, but when she turned the corner it was making another wide swing, this time onto—she glanced at the street sign—Albany Street.
The truck sped up again, slamming into a taxi with a sickening crunch and knocking it cleanly out of the way. Jamie bounced around the corner as she started to lose altitude, ping-ponging off of quick channels she set up off the ground on either side like tilted light posts.
She flew over the top of a short parking garage and latched herself onto the roof of the garbage truck, trying to drag herself along. If she could get close enough, she might be able to set up enough channels directly to the roadway beneath to slow it down, probably even stop it.
But where was Sienna? That was the question that didn’t seem to have an answer at the moment.
The garbage truck blew an intersection, smashing through an old Jeep and mangling its hood, sending pieces flying in every direction. Jamie latched hard onto the corrugated metal rear of the truck and held on. She threw up a quick channel and anchored it to the street, reversing the pull, and the truck slowed for a moment—
Then a chunk of pavement a few inches deep ripped free and started to drag behind the vehicle.
“Uh oh,” Jamie muttered. This was getting complicated.
She considered latching it to the buildings on either side, but it had to be going forty, fifty miles an hour now, ramming everything in its way. The roar of the engine was like nothing she’d heard from one of these trucks before, like it had been supercharged. It smashed the heck out of a Volvo, and came barreling up on a circular cul-de-sac that marked the end of the road.
Jamie stared, drifting above the truck, hanging on by a gravity channel as it sped up and headed toward the Battery Park City Esplanade, a stone walkway that meandered along the Hudson River. She stared at it, uncomprehending, then glanced down to see if the driver was bailing out of the truck.
He wasn’t.
Ahead was a series of stone pillars built up in a little monument that looked vaguely like the ruins of a Greek temple. The truck jumped the curb from the cul-de-sac and plunged right into the columns, making the ruined temple even more ruined as the truck raced madly toward the Hudson River.
Jamie unlatched herself just as the grill smashed into the rails, concrete and metal grinding as the garbage truck launched into the water. It hit with a splash and started to sink as she stared, hanging in the air twenty feet over the edge of the water, disbelieving.
Why would someone do … that? she wondered.
Jamie looked around to either side, waiting for the driver to come up. A quick examination of the towers on either side gave her pause; maybe she could latch the garbage truck to them and dredge it up, but more likely she’d peel the facade off the buildings—or worse—in a futile effort to drag it to the surface.
She waited only another moment before she made her choice, and dove into the river. Maybe the driver had panicked, maybe he’d just been in over his head—in more ways than one, now—but he didn’t need to die for it. She hit the water and it rushed around her, cool and smelly.
She swam down, thrashing her arms through the Hudson, eyes open and peering into the murky darkness. Her costume was going to need a hell of a laundering after this, she reflected as she tried to follow the natural trajectory of the garbage truck to the bottom. It didn’t take long.
She found it on the riverbed, among a whole mess of other discarded garbage. The truck was easy to see, daylight filtering down well enough that she could see its outline. The front door was open, and driver was gone, she realized as soon as she reached it. She looked around the truck, but there was no hint of him in the water, no sign that he’d swum off …
Jamie could feel the pressure on her lungs as she started back to the surface, hurrying up as quickly as she could for a breath of air when she glimpsed it. It made her stop, holding off the panic that came from not being able to draw breath as she stared down at the rear of the truck.
It was open, wide, as though something had come out.
As she broke the surface, Jamie’s head was spinning, and not just from the lack of oxygen. She blinked, gasping, in the overhead sun, the smell of the river rancid in her nostrils.
What had been in the back of that garbage truck? Some kind of submarine?
Who was doing this?
And where was Sienna?