Illusions of Evil Read Online Free

her reverie. She heard screams. People were rushing past her.
    â€œWhat’s happening?” she asked the man beside her.
    She didn’t wait for an answer. Looking up, she saw that one car in a train had derailed on a banked curve of the coaster. The cars behind it were still on the track. The two passengers in the lead car were in trouble, though. Their car had jumped the track and was dangling at least thirty feet above the ground.
    There was a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach as Nancy pushed her way through the crowd at the foot of the ride. When she was close enough to get a good look at the couple still seated in the front car, she gasped.
    It was Ned and George!

Chapter

Three
    N ED !” N ANCY SCREAMED . “George!”
    They were suspended in the car nearly upside down. Only their safety straps and a bar kept them from plummeting to the ground.
    People around Nancy were pointing and murmuring, their faces full of fear. She noticed that the second train of cars had avoided disaster and was stopped at a low place on the coaster. Its passengers were already scrambling down to safety. Then she saw a man halfway up the rise, where the first train had hit trouble. He was climbing the tracks. In minutes he reached the jeopardized train and bent over to the passengers in the last car.
    Nancy heard sirens wail in the distance, but she wasn’t about to sit still while her friends’ liveswere at stake. She pushed her way through the crowd. In seconds she reached the steel latticework side of the coaster under the spot where the lead car had gone over the edge. As she grabbed onto a crossbeam and started to climb up, she heard someone call her name.
    â€œNancy! Wait!”
    It was Adriana. The park owner was running toward her, her black hair flying out of its barrettes. When she arrived, Adriana was breathless. “You had just left when my stage manager told me there had been an accident. I raced over here.” She looked up at the roller coaster and said, “I’m going with you.”
    Before Nancy could say a word, Adriana was climbing up beside her. The latticework beams provided footing and handholds. They were both out of breath when they reached the top and scrambled over the guardrail onto the tracks.
    The wind whipped Nancy’s hair into her eyes. She pushed it away, crossed the tracks to the side where George and Ned had gone over, then leaned over the rail so that she could see the car in peril. In it, George and Ned were like a pair of wide-eyed puppets, frozen in place, clutching the steel bar in front of them. Nancy tried to swallow her fear and get their attention. “Hey, Ned, George, don’t worry—we’ll get you down!”
    Ned turned toward her. He was bleeding from a nasty gash in his forehead.
    Just then Adriana nudged Nancy. She turned and saw that the man who’d climbed up the tracks was helping the passengers in the last three cars out of their safety harnesses. The burly man wore a gray worksuit with a Riverfront Park insignia above the breast pocket and a red bandanna around his neck.
    â€œThat’s Rand Hagan, my chief engineer and ride supervisor,” Adriana explained, breathless.
    On the tracks behind Hagan, Nancy could see that other gray-suited park workers had followed Hagan up the tracks. Like a human chain, they were now guiding the frightened riders who’d been released down the steep slope.
    Nancy and Adriana turned back to the first car, which was connected to the rest of the train by a solid metal hitch. Nancy noticed the heavy-duty hosing that lined the tracks firmly gripping the front wheels of the cars; she was relieved to see that the coaster’s brake system had apparently worked. The roller coaster wasn’t going anywhere. What about George and Ned, dangling precariously in the car that had gone over the edge?
    Nancy thought fast, then lowered herself to the foot-wide metal easement bordering the