The Viperob Files Read online

  In her peripheral vision, she noted Jaego had slowed in front of her. She came to a stop to ensure she didn’t bump into him.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. After the hideous wind earlier, her voice sounded unnaturally loud in the calmer conditions.

  “Something’s different,” muttered Jaego.

  Ethan spoke behind her. “Shit. I feel it, too.”

  A slight buzzing sensation drew Gwen’s attention to her feet. The metal track felt different, like it was somehow coming alive under foot. During their entire crossing, the steel had remained oily black and cool to touch, but before her eyes it was beginning to change. The metal was becoming brighter, as if an inner core was sparking so brightly the exterior steel was unable to contain the glow. Gwen felt her heart drop as realisation hit. The track’s magnetic field is activating. “There must be a train coming!”

  Gwen could now feel the holstered gun trying to escape her body as the track began to repel any other metal in the vicinity with huge force. Force that would continue to grow to the point that it could levitate an entire train carriage as it hurtled scant inches above.

  She looked ahead to the mainland and sure enough, there it was. Less than a kilometre distant Gwen could now see the headlight of the Maglev lancing through the night, speeding their way at an incredible rate.

  “What the hell do we do?” Jaego’s voice had a tremor to it, the last word rising in panic.

  Gwen felt her heart race, each limb felt tingly with surging adrenaline and fear, the hair standing on end upon her neck. The night seemed to grow brighter as her pupils dilated, absorbing every possible bit of light available. The train would be on them in seconds. There was no other choice. They would have to place their faith in a simple harness and pray that it held for a second time in one night.

  Unconsciously, the trio had found each other’s hands in the darkness, all eyes staring down the track at the hurtling promise of death. The track now seemed to pulse with energy, leaking a white light that lit up their legs. Ethan’s backpack pulled away from his body as if an invisible hand tugged at the steel bang stick within.

  Gwen swallowed, her throat dry.

  “We have to jump.”

  She closed her eyes and with the hand of her mates clutched in each grip, they leapt.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Harris leant hungrily forward, both hands planted on the desk with fingers spread in a sweaty arc on the wood surface. Manic energy lit his face as he watched the video feed from the front of the train as it ate up the track with astonishing speed.

  The train had just hit the bridge and he could see the three teens ahead, rapidly increasing in size and clarity as the carriage shot closer. Harris stared unblinking, tongue darting out to lick his bottom lip. He wanted to see the teenagers die. Needed to see their faces as they realised they were beaten. That he’d won.

  Harris saw the kids join hands, turn to the side and leap. But it was too late, the train was already on them. He snorted a laugh as they were smashed aside, finding their feeble attempt at escape mildly amusing. If only there’d been sound with the footage. A nice wet crunch and scream on impact would have been the finishing touch. He sighed as he stood, pushing both hands into his lower back to stretch the aching muscles that gnawed.

  Sue started weeping behind him. She was sitting in a chair, slumped forward with face in her hands, ugly crying.

  Harris rolled his eyes. “Make yourself useful for a change, Sue. Grab a tissue, blow that disgusting nose, and then find me the camera view from the middle of the bridge.” I want to see their corpses swing under the bridge like sacks of meat. “I need visual confirmation of success.”

  He turned back to the screen, waited for the footage to change and tried to block out the noise of the manager as she sobbed at the controls.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Ethan stared at the oncoming train, mouth hanging slightly open, breath caught in his chest. He watched it speed closer with the stunned disbelief of an observer, because surely this couldn’t be happening to them. There was supposed to be at least a four-hour gap between trains, enough time for them to easily cross the expanse. And yet, his every sense screamed that fifty-odd tons of unforgiving machinery was about to turn his flesh to pulp.

  This can’t be happening.

  His body felt heavy, muscles sluggish, mind paralysed. Ethan felt a tug on his shoulders that nearly pulled him off the track and realised with some confusion that his backpack was standing proud from his back, held in place only by the straps at his shoulders and waist.

  He vaguely heard Jaego ask a question, but the words were lost in the rushing of wind. A warm grip took his hand, finally broke his trance and he looked to see Gwen beside him. Her eyes were wide, face deathly pale as she stared past him at the oncoming train. It would be on them in seconds, growing larger in his vision with every heartbeat.

  “We have to jump,” she shouted.

  Without waiting for an answer, she dived off the track. With the train growing in his peripheral vision, Ethan followed, allowing himself to be tugged with her.

  And only just in time, the edge of the train missing his heels by centimetres as he dived off the glowing track. The harness about his hips jerked his fall to a vicious stop, causing his back and legs to arch into a painful bow. Above him, the train carriages hurtled past, an iron-grey smear of colour, wind, and electric hum. With the rushing wind from the Maglev, he should have been whipping about in the air or sucked into the slipstream against a carriage, but his backpack had other ideas. It continued to wrench at his shoulders, pulling his safety rope taut as a fishing line, as if it too was trying to stay as far away from the track.

  Beside him, Jaego and Gwen were suspended by their own safety lines, pulled at separate angles away from the track, tugged by an invisible force—Jaego straight down, Gwen out at a forty-five-degree angle. Her face wore a rictus of terror, her scream torn from her throat and consumed by the wind before it could reach his ear. Ethan was no different, his own vocal cords shredded by the force of his cry.

  And then as quick as it had come, the four carriages of the train were past.

  The light began to fade from the track, bleeding back to iron grey, and with it, so too did the force pulling at his bag. Gwen swung down from her angle out at the side to hang directly below the track as gravity overtook as the dominant force.

  Ethan breathed hard as he watched the train disappear off the end of the bridge, not quite believing that they’d survived. He touched a hand to his head feeling for blood, then flexed his arms and legs and felt a flush of relief that everything seemed to be working.

  “Ethan! Jaego’s not moving!”

  Shit. He felt his heart drop at Gwen’s voice. Here he was worrying about himself, when one of his friends had been injured. Ethan spun himself around on the line to see Gwen holding onto Jaego’s shoulder with an outstretched arm from her harness set.

  “I think my foot clipped him on the side of his head after we jumped.” Her voice was tight, worry seeping through every word. She gave him another rough shake. “Jaego, you have to wake up! We need to get off the bridge before they send the train back at us.”

  Ethan’s mind was finally starting to catch up to the situation. He mentally kicked himself, it now made total sense why the train was so early. Harris must have found out about their route of escape and pulled the train off its usual route. If they stayed here, they’d be sitting ducks when Harris sought to finish the job with the same tactic.

  Jaego groaned, his eyelids cracking open to display a blunted consciousness returning. He squinted at Gwen groggily as a trickle of dark blood ran from his hairline down past his left eye.

  “Jesus, Russo, the goddamn train was bad enough. You didn’t have to kick me as well,” he mumbled between thick lips.

  “Give me a break. If I’d meant to kick you, you wouldn’t have woken up so fast,” she said through a relieved smile. “My foot got you when the magnetic repulsion
of the track flicked us apart. I was pulled out to the side by my holstered gun.” She looked up at Ethan. “And I saw you almost pulled off the track before we jumped by the bang stick in your backpack.”

  Ethan touched a hand behind his back to the bag and where the bang stick lay at the bottom. If he’d slotted into the side pocket to carry as he’d almost done, the data chip would have been lost into the sea below. The deaths and danger faced, the lives lost—all would have been for nothing. He couldn’t afford to let Harris have a second go at them.

  “We’re going to have to risk it and run the rest of the…”

  “Ethan,” Gwen had put her hand up to stop him speaking. “Maybe we won’t have to run.”

  He scowled. “I’m not waiting for Harris to send the Maglev again. We have to run for shore, and bloody quick.”

  “But we’re already on our way,” she said, pointing a finger up with the beginnings of smile on her face. “Take a look above.”

  Ethan glanced upward at the track, and it was a split second before he realised what she was pointing at, then he felt his own smile crack at the corner of his dry lips.

  We’re moving!

  The track had been angling downwards since passing the centre of the bridge, making footing harder the further they went. And now that the magnetic repulsion of the track had dissipated, gravity was able to do its job. As he watched, Jaego’s safety harness began to slide smoothly away from them. Before he went outside arm’s reach, Gwen grabbed hold of a fistful of shirt, then threw out her other hand, locking grips with Ethan. All together now, the nylon ropes of their safety loops were beginning to slide to the mainland over the greasy surface of the track.

  “We should have done this earlier,” muttered Jaego.

  “Understatement of the year,” said Ethan, his eyes still fixed on the sliding ropes above. He looked landward and saw that the incline of the track continued to escalate. “If only we’d start moving a little more quick—”

  “Shut up!” shouted both his mates in unison. Ethan clamped his mouth. “I was just going to say—”

  “Nothing. Don’t go jinxing us,” said Gwen, her eyes fixed above as well. “Just let it do its thing.”

  Ethan clenched his jaw, biting off the reply on the tip of his tongue and settled in to join his mates watch the rope slings. His heart was thumping a race-away beat against his ribs, breath short and shallow. If the lines started to pick up speed, they could find themselves running a zipline to shore. Slowly but surely, the nylon ropes were accelerating. White teeth cut holes in the darkness as grins spread on each kid’s face. Ethan felt a kernel of hope starting to blossom, then mentally shut it down. Too early for that, you idiot. Need to get your feet on shore first. But despite that, he couldn’t erase a dawning look of hope on his face as he stared over the shoulders of his mates, forward to the approaching mainland.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “Stop mucking around and get that bloody camera up on the screen!”

  Harris stooped over the manager where she worked, his mouth so close that goblets of saliva spattered her cheek as he yelled. He felt agitation rapidly mount, heart rate growing from a canter to a sprint as his chest tightened like a strap. Did the train hit the kids, or did they jump in time? He was starting to second-guess himself and needed to know the answer.

  Sue paused to wipe her face with back of her hand, eyes narrowing, and jaw clenched in anger as she flicked his saliva off her fingers. “I’m working as quick as I can,” she muttered. “You spitting in my face won’t make it happen any faster.”

  Harris kept his face next to hers, his eyes bulging as he stared. “Bull. Shit. I’ve seen snails move bloody faster than this.”

  She began to type even slower. God damn it! Harris’s fist tightened about his knife handle as his fingers itched to be around her throat. A strangled snarl of rage exited his mouth. The last scraps of his self-control were running threadbare, liable to snap at any second.

  Boots hammering on floor tiles drew Harris’s attention away from the manager and the screen for a moment. The two officers he’d recalled from the foreshore had arrived, crowding the doorway as they regained their breath, rifles in hand. Behind them, the Maglev drew up to the platform, a low hiss of escaping air sounding as it lowered onto the track and parked.

  “We got here as fast as we could,” said one officer with a voice rough as sandpaper. The man was huge, the top of his head scant centimetres below the lintel while his shoulders nearly filled the width of the doorway. “Have you located the kids, sir?”

  “Yeah, I found them,” muttered Harris as he armed himself with one of their pistols. “Now I just need to know if they’re dead or not.” He turned back to the screen as Sue gave a little whoop of joy.

  The feed from the camera was of poor quality with the targets at the limit of its reach. But despite this, the footage was unmistakable.

  The kids were alive.

  Harris felt anger flare anew. There was movement on the screen as the trio began to slide under the track towards the far side of the bridge.

  “Arrgh!” Harris kicked the nearest table in rage, snapping the wooden leg and sending a computer terminal crashing to the ground. He clenched his eyes shut, fists balled tight as he forced a slow, shuddering breath and some semblance of control back on his features. He hadn’t lost yet. There was still time.

  He clamped a hand on Sue’s shoulder. “We’re getting on that train. I want you to send it back across the bridge, then stop it and open the doors.”

  “No.”

  Harris gave his head a slight shake, not quite believing his own ears. “Did you just refuse my order?”

  Sue met his gaze, unshed tears glistening on her lower lids. “You nearly made me a killer before and I’ll be damned if I let you do it again. I’m not sending that train anywhere.” Her fingers shook as she lifted them away from the keyboard.

  Harris’s lips tightened. “Have it your way, then.” He lifted the pistol, watched her pupils balloon with terror as he casually lined up her head.

  “Wait—”

  He fired.

  The far side of Sue’s skull erupted in a gout of bone, blood and brains, painting the floor and workspace in slaughterhouse red. Her body slowly slumped to the side before falling into her own mess with a heavy thud.

  Harris eyed her body for a moment, his gaze as dead as the corpse he’d created, before turning to line up the last transit employee in the room. The man’s mouth was open in a silent scream as he pushed himself flat up against the rear wall in an unconscious attempt to escape notice. His eyes flicked down to the man’s name badge.

  “Tony. You’ve just won a promotion.”

  Tony’s gaze slowly lifted from his Sue’s lifeless corpse to Harris, eyes uncomprehending.

  “I’m boarding this train with my officers. I want you to get us to the other side of the bridge, then bring it to a stop and open the doors. Can you do that?”

  No response. Harris took two swift steps forward and shoved the barrel of his pistol up under Tony’s chin.

  “I haven’t got time for this shit. Can you do it or not?” he roared.

  Tony nodded finally. “Sure,” he said in a small voice. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Harris lowered the gun from beneath Tony’s chin and stepped back again. “Good. Once you get us over there and open the doors, I’ll do the rest,” he said, walking towards the station platform. Harris paused at the doorway, turning to fix Tony with a hard look. “Don’t even think about screwing me over. You do anything to piss me off, and I guarantee you’ll be Tri-Claw food within the day. Got it?”

  Tony’s throat bobbed as he nervously swallowed and nodded acceptance. Harris waited until he’d taken a seat at Sue’s now-vacant desk and started the cascade of commands required to send the train back down the line, then stepped out of the control room back onto the platform. Ahead of him, the track began to glow white as the carriages lifted thirty centimetres into the air. H
arris sprinted along the platform, then ducked through the doorway into the foremost carriage, closely followed by his two officers.

  Inside, the carriage roof curved in an arc no more than a foot above their heads. Harris grit his teeth as the door slid shut with an electronic hum, a faint nag of claustrophobia that he felt whenever taking a ride on the bullet-shaped Maglev clawing at the base of his spine. The walls and roof were a stark white, so bright that he found himself squinting and averted his gaze to a row of charcoal-coloured seats.

  A chime of a bell sounded in his right ear as his earpiece notified him of an incoming call. Harris swallowed. That particular bell told him the call was from the Viperob Board. Not the people he wanted to be speaking to just yet. He touched a finger to the earpiece to accept the call.

  A disembodied voice spoke without hint of emotion. “Do you have the files, Lieutenant?”

  Harris forced some air into his chest. “I’ll have them within the hour.” The words tumbled out of his mouth in a spurt, and he grimaced at the sound of his own voice. Hardly inspiring confidence.

  “You assured us this operation would be resolved quickly. And yet here we are, two days down the track, and our files are still in the possession of our enemies. On behalf of the board, I must express utmost displeasure at the current state of affairs.”

  Harris bit his tongue as the train began to accelerate towards the exit, platform slipping by at an ever-increasing speed. He’d never been addressed by the board in such a fashion during a tasked investigation. It was unprecedented and didn’t bode well for him. All he could do was give the impression that he still had the operation under control. And at that thought, he had to choke down a manic snort of laughter—he’d never had a mission turn into such a mess. Outside the carriage windows, bright white turned to pitch black in an instant as the train passed through the rear wall of the station and into the night. They’d be on the bridge within moments.

  “I have the group pinned down on the bridge, sir. The data files will be in my hands or destroyed within the hour. You have my word.”