The Colony: Shift (The Colony, Vol. 5)

by Michaelbrent Collings

  He leaned out and looked at the door.

  The rest of the boxcar was smooth steel on the outside. Flat panels of metal broken only by vertical lines of rivets that extended from bottom to top of the car. The door was different. Corrugated, the waves of the metal extending horizontally. There was a single handle in the middle of the door – Ken presumed it was meant for loaders to open and close it when the cargo car pulled into the station. At the bottom of the door was the wheel mechanism, tucked into the track that extended about four inches off the side of the boxcar.

  The entire thing – door, track, everything – extended to within maybe five feet of the ladder that crawled up the side of the boxcar. Maybe more. It was hard to tell from this angle.

  Ken looked around again. Hoping he might have missed something. Knowing he hadn’t.

  He grabbed the side of the door with his right hand. Then his left, ignoring the ache that always brought as best he could.

  He slid his right foot out of the boxcar. Onto the track that the door used to slide back and forth.

  Four inches wide.

  16

  Ken tried to convince himself that it was plenty of room. That four inches was the width of a parking curb. And hadn’t he walked on parking curbs as a kid all the time?

  But you aren’t a kid anymore.

  Also, you fell a lot.

  He felt a grimace pucker his face as he slid his right foot farther out on the track, and then moved his left foot over to join it. Unsure if the grimace was one of disgust at the inner voice that sometimes seemed as determined an enemy as the zombies that had taken over the world, or one of terror at the fact that his heels were now suspended over nothing but air.

  He reached with his right hand, feeling for the handle in the middle of the door. Couldn’t reach it. Not without letting go of the outer lip of the door with his left. And that meant he’d be clinging to the metal like a fly, no handholds whatever. Not long, probably, but when you were hanging to the side of a moving train with nothing to anchor you but hope and whatever prayers you could toss up to Heaven, any time was too long.

  The train bucked again. Harder this time, and his right foot slid off the track, kicking back like he was executing a particularly strange dance move. He felt himself slide backward for a terrible moment, his left arm trying desperately to yank his center of gravity back over the track.

  He grunted. Threw his right hand forward. It slapped the metal door so hard there was a clang and his wrist – already punished and bruised from his escape from the cuffs – shouted a rebuke.

  But he swung back over the track. Pushed himself so hard against the metal that he felt like he might have the waves and troughs of the steel etched permanently in his face.

  He had to move. Didn’t know when the next hit – whatever it was – would come. When the next bounce might just toss him off the side of the boxcar.

  He looked at the handle. Still out of reach.

  He let go of the door with his left hand. Holding onto nothing now. Just balanced on the track, both hands stretched wide along the outside of the door like he was trying to give the boxcar some strange bear hug.

  He inched over. His lead foot kicked something. He faltered. Almost lost balance. Glanced down.

  One of the wheel mechanisms.

  He had to step over and around it. Lifting his foot and swinging it around the rods and pins that went into the steel wheel that sat in the track. They weren’t something he could grab onto, either: the entire apparatus was anchored about a foot above the track, so all it provided was a stumbling block.

  He lifted his right foot. Now balanced on a single foot – his left foot, his left leg, the one that had hurt the most since he twisted his back – and kicked over the wheel mechanism. Slammed his foot back down on the track.

  The return to the track almost did him in. He was too hurried, too scared. The motion was harder than it should have been, and he almost kicked right past the track, almost kicked himself right down the side of the train.

  He caught himself with his lead foot a full six inches below the track. Frozen for a long moment. Then he raised it – more slowly, more controlled this time – and put it back on the track.

  Another two slides.

  And he reached the handle.

  He lifted his left leg over the wheel mechanism. This time it was easier, since he had both hands wrapped in death-grips around the horizontal steel loop riveted to the side of the door.

  He was at the center.

  Halfway left to go.

  Only there was no handle to reach for at the end of the second half. Just empty space.

  17

  Ken’s hands were bunched together on the handle of the sliding door. The handle – a steel loop about six or seven inches long – was not really designed for hanging off of. But to Ken it felt more comfortable than an easy chair. Convincing himself to let go was tougher than he would have thought it could be. Sweat slicked his fingers, but peeling them off the metal seemed to cause friction burns.

  Just let go, Ken. Just –

  GIVE UP.

  GIVE IN.

  He jerked. The sound wasn’t just in his mind this time. It was in the air around him, in his ears. The growl.

  They were here.

  The sound hadn’t been overwhelming. But the urge to let go, to drop below the train and let the wheels chew him up, was suddenly nearly overwhelming. Ken shut his eyes and leaned into the door of the train, whispering to himself. He didn’t even know what he was whispering until the moment passed, until the growl receded and with it the strength of the mandate to subsume himself in the will of the horde. Then he heard himself.

  “Hope. Maggie. Liz. Hope. Maggie. Liz.”

  The names of his children. His wife. The family that remained. They were the prayer he uttered, the only prayer that mattered. And Ken hoped that any God still looking down from the Heavens would hear those names and understand the world of hope and fear and pleading that each one implied.

  The growl faded to nothing. Replaced by the ongoing tok-tok of the train’s passage over the rails. By Ken’s panting. The thunder of his pulse in his ears.

  “Hope. Maggie. Liz.”

  He didn’t know why Hope came first in the litany. Other than, perhaps, because her name was synonymous with the only weapon that truly remained to humanity in this time when the world had crumbled. All that was known had passed to nothing. There was nothing certain. Only hope remained.

  Ken would find them.

  He let go of the handle.

  His right hand stretched along the side of the door. The ripples in the steel were deep – maybe two full inches. But the curvature of the metal was so smooth that there was nothing to grab in the winding troughs, no edge to hang onto on the sleek waves. They just created an irregular surface even more difficult to navigate than a flat siding would have been.

  Ken slid his way out. Extending his right arm ahead and barely able to see it because his face was pressed so hard against the door.

  His foot bumped the second wheel assembly. Ready for it this time but it still startled him. He lifted his foot off the track, over the mechanism. This time he managed to set it down more carefully and didn’t quite kick himself off the side of the train.

  Now he was straddling the wheel apparatus. Right hand extended but not quite touching the end of the door, left hand still holding firm to the handle that felt like his only life-line in a very hostile world.

  The life-line he now had to abandon.

  He had gone as far as he could. He had to let go to get to the end of the door. To get to –

  (Hope)

  – where he needed to be.

  His fingers uncurled. If the train rattled or lurched, he would fall. Nothing to hold onto. No anchor. Just him and the air.

  He slid forward. His left foot hit the wheel mechanism. He slid it carefully – carefully – up and over the apparatus. Put it down on the track. Heels hanging over nothing. Ankles burn
ing, calves on fire as lactic acid built up in them.

  His legs started to shake. The urge to just move, just leap, was nearly overwhelming. His body wasn’t used to this kind of exercise, his muscles not prepared for this particular exertion.

  He forced himself to continue slowly. Haste would mean a mistake. A mistake would mean death.

  Inch by inch. Centimeter by centimeter.

  The tip of his right forefinger touched the leading edge of the door.

  His hand curled around it.

  Safe.

  And Ken finally allowed himself to look ahead. Anchored, comparatively secure, he permitted a glance at the next step.

  The hardest was yet to come.

  18

  The rungs were right there. A track of steel leading from the bottom of the boxcar’s frame to the top, curving up over the roof. It looked solid enough to bear the weight of an elephant, let alone a medium-sized history teacher.

  The only problem was distance.

  Ken had guessed it was maybe five feet between the end of the track and the ladder. Not an impossible distance if you were talking about a standing long jump on a grassy field. Considerably more forbidding when the jump was over gravel and dirt and – oh, yes – several thousand tons of metal ready to grind you to pulp.

  And he had to add to the difficulty the undeniable fact that it was well over five feet between his perch on the edge of the door track and those rungs that led to – whatever they led to. Maybe eight feet. No way he could jump that at the best times, in the best circumstances.

  He looked around, seeking for a handhold, some spot he had missed. Anything that he could use to climb over or around this blank spot that represented the difference between going on and –

  Give up.

  He clutched the edge of the door and concentrated on not swaying as the growl floated over the top of the train like a noxious cloud. Still getting louder. He couldn’t tell how many of the zombies were making the noise. It was the living ones – the undead ones were silent, terribly silent – but he couldn’t discern if it was ten or fifty or five thousand. All he knew was that here, standing over a precipice as dangerous in its own way as any he had yet experienced, the call to lay down and surrender was much harder to resist.

  Action was key, he realized. He abruptly remembered the people he had seen on their phones, falling prey to some insidious sound that had beckoned them to a despair so deep that they had no choice but to lay down and just… die. Hearts stopping in chests, minds blanking as they succumbed to the call to oblivion.

  Ken himself had come within seconds of that fate. Maybe less.

  Just like now. Only seconds before he became too paralyzed with fear to move. Seconds before the growl and its psychic attack added to the terror he was already feeling and his immobility and locked him forever in place. He would become a statue. Like Lot’s wife, who had become a pillar of salt when she looked upon the wicked city of Sodom. Only Ken was staring at his own fear, his own inability.

  He couldn’t remain here. He had to move. Action was key. To live was to move, and motion was hope.

  He turned to the rungs. Still too far to reach by jumping.

  So he didn’t jump.

  He just let himself fall.

  19

  Ken knew that anyone looking would have seen someone determined to die. A suicidal man bent on leaving a world that had become too hostile, too alien, to bear living in any longer.

  But in the same moment that he pitched forward, in the same moment when he stared death in the face, Ken felt very much alive.

  A strange clarity gripped him. His mind seemed to turn to glass, images appearing that he had long forgotten.

  His grandfather, taking him up on the roof, showing him that if he stood with one foot on either side he could see the whole world….

  His grandmother, baking sugar cookies with him and pretending not to notice when he stole more dough than she cooked….

  A moment behind a friend’s house, his first kiss with a little girl when he was barely four and they promised to never tell and never did and then forgot about it because it was far too grown up and there were things to watch on television….

  A million remembrances that passed through his mind, that passed in front of his eyes. The world had become clear. For one instant he lived only for the moment, and because he could define it he understood the sum of his existence and could fulfill its measure.

  He was jumping. But not being pressed by anyone, not being hounded or led. This, he realized, was his first jump as his own man. He was making the decision. There was no Aaron, no Christopher, no Dorcas, no Buck, no anyone. Just him and his family. Him and his children. Him and an impossible leap to make.

  He fell forward along the side of the train. Stretched out to his full length. A few inches shy of six feet tall, with hands that reached another foot beyond his head. Almost seven feet. Maybe all the way to seven.

  Eight feet was too far to jump. But one? He could do that.

  But that meant he had to wait. He fell in an arc, his fingers coming closer to the ladder with every inch his body fell forward. But his body – his head and trunk especially – also plummeted closer and closer to the ground, the rails, the wheels.

  Tok-tok. Tok-tok. Tok-tok.

  Give up. Give in.

  Falling.

  Inch by inch.

  Wait. Wait. Don’t jump yet, Ken.

  The memory of his first solo ride on a bike, the delirious exhilaration followed by the terrible terror as the short ride came to a crash and he was swept into his father’s arms….

  The night he was so sick and his mother stayed up all night, rocking him and singing songs until she was hoarse….

  Still falling.

  Tok-tok. Tok-tok. Tok-tok.

  Give up. Give in.

  Falling.

  Wait. Just wait. Just… wait….

  NOW!

  Ken pushed off. He was nearly horizontal, his body stretched out so close to a straight line that if he waited one more millisecond he would lose the ability to kick off the edge of the door track.

  He shoved with everything he had. His right foot felt powerful, but his left leg shrieked and he buckled in mid-air.

  His fingers stretched. Knocked into metal. Fell past the rung.

  Past another.

  Past them all.

  20

  The clarity was still with him.

  Ken saw the last rung pass by his hand, his fingers just missing it. Saw his life ending, his children dying at Aaron’s hand. Maggie and Buck shot by Theresa. Christopher throttled into lifelessness by the huge and grinning Elijah.

  He willed it not to be so. Refused it. Rejected it.

  And a last chance appeared. As though the universe had heard his resolve and bent itself to his will.

  The rungs ended. But there was a loop underneath them. Ken hadn’t noticed it: it was set back slightly, a few inches back from the edge of the boxcar. Indeed, there was no way he could have seen it from his vantage point clinging to the side of the boxcar.

  Only by falling had he spotted it.

  Not a rung on the ladder that ran up the side of the car. No, this was a larger loop. A stirrup-like piece of metal that was clearly meant as a step to help people get up the distance between the ground and the bottom of the car.

  Ken’s arms flapped manically, moving so fast he could barely see them. He found time to wonder as he fell, to marvel at how fast a body could move when pressed by desperation. Not fear for self, but terror for the consequences of failure.

  He couldn’t fail. Too much depended on him. He was a father, and fathers had to succeed for their families. It was the main job description.

  His left hand clanged against the step and bounced off. The stumps of his fingers cried out. Ken ignored them.

  His right hand swung out.

  And caught.

  The steel stirrup was hot under his skin. Sticky and slick at the same time, old grease an
d grime and his own sweat mixing to create a unique sensation. Ken thought it would resist his grip, but then he slapped his left hand against it and felt both hands lock around the metal.

  But he was still falling.

  His feet and knees hit the ground. Bouncing hard, his frame rattling and pulling inward. Toward the track.

  Toward the wheels.

  21

  Ken had a friend once. A long time ago – before the world ended, before the universe stopped making sense. He had been a rock climber, and he took Ken with him to a climbing club. Ken didn’t know what to expect – a bunch of super-fit, good-looking people in vaguely hippie-looking clothes sitting around talking about Kilimanjaro and Everest and that time they punched a Sherpa, perhaps.

  Instead, he entered a room that was full of a stunningly normal array of old and young, male and female. Most were fairly trim, but there were a few people who were on the stocky side, and none of them looked like either hippies or cover models.

  Ken had been stunned at that for a few moments, until his friend leaped to the climbing wall that dominated the three-story warehouse. Then the focus of his shock shifted to the fact that his friend had apparently hidden from Ken his close family ties to Spider-Man. He flew up the side of the wall, hands and feet moving quick and sure.

  At one point he was hanging from one small nub of rubber sticking out of the wall. Just two fingers and a thumb clamped around it and he looked down at Ken and laughed like it was no big deal.

  Now, in the moment when Ken was hanging on to the stirrup below the boxcar, his feet and legs dragging closer to the train wheels like there was some invisible gravity well at the center of the tracks, he would have sold his soul to have that ability for a mere five seconds. To have that kind of finger strength, that kind of stickability.