Eleven seconds remained before the audit minute expired.
Behind Julian Vance’s heels, the air in the rear stair-well went dead.
The four ghost commuters from Row 12 erupted across the aisle in a synchronized rush of waterlogged wool, snapping joints, and reeking marsh mud. Their skinless, gray fingers clawed through the cold river draft, skimming less than two inches above the ribbed rubber floor, aiming straight for Julian’s combat boots.
At the exact same instant, the bus’s electrical system screamed in agony.
A massive surge of negative twenty-four volt back-current ripped through the central grounding rail beneath the floorboards. Purple sparks geysered from the heating ducts like magnesium flares. The electrical surge traveled along the main copper bus-bar, racing straight toward the front wheelchair bay where Clara Vance lay in her mobile ICU isolette.
“Battery breaker tripped!” Elena Rostova shouted from the front.
Julian saw it all in the curved acrylic of the sixteen-inch convex mirror thirty feet ahead.
The main charger line on Clara’s mobile incubator had begun to smoke, throwing a dense cloud of white ozone into the air. The green traces on the cardiac monitor jittered violently, the digital readout spiking with high-frequency noise. If that negative twenty-four volt back-surge reached the incubator’s delicate solid-state inverter, Clara’s ventilator would shut down. Her oxygen delivery would flatline in less than eight seconds.
