But all he had was himself. A fairly fit history teacher. A man whose only hope for survival lay in the fact that he wasn’t surviving for himself, but for his family and the friends who had become like family.
He tried to kick his feet away from the bottom of the train, but it didn’t work. He moved them away for a second, but they just flew back, sucked in by whatever dark force was trying so desperately to kill him. He repeated the maneuver, but the same thing just happened again; and this time he almost kicked his grip loose of the stirrup.
He could only pull himself up. A pull-up from the worst possible starting point, and here there was no jeering jock to make fun of him if he didn’t manage to complete the exercise. No, just a quick fall – nothing more to hang onto this time – and then darkness.
He yanked upward. His body quivered, vibrating so rapidly he felt like he must be making musical tones. He was a single taut harp wire, every inch of him focused on the two hands that held the stirrup, on the wrists and arms that held him safe, on the biceps and back that pulled him up a fraction of an inch at a time.
His feet and knees kept dragging, bouncing, jouncing. A distracted part of his mind wondered how long his jeans and Doc Martens would hold out; how long before the gravel bit through the leather and denim and started to chew him to pieces.
No worries there, Ken. You’ll fall long before that happens. Small blessings.
He grunted and pulled himself up another centimeter. His knees stopped bouncing.
He reached up. Let go of the stirrup with his bad hand and made a lurching grab for the lowest rung on the side of the boxcar.
Made it.
No time to breathe. He kept pulling, ignoring the pain of ghost-fingers and severely over-taxed muscles. Let go with his right hand, his body almost dropping away for a gut-lurching instant before he managed to grab the lowest rung with his right hand as well.
His feet left the ground.
He hung for a long second. It felt like a vacation. A pause that was as welcome as any holiday he had ever experienced. No one trying to kill him, no imminent death to worry about.
Then the train lurched, the growl of hunters once-human oozed over the side. As though the cosmos had observed his complacence and was unwilling to let it pass unpunished.
Ken tried to pull his feet up to the stirrup but found he couldn’t. His stomach hurt too badly from being pummeled when he had bounced his wrist cuffs against it. When he pulled his legs up crooked rivers of pain cut deep beds through his core. He screamed and his legs fell slack of their own accord.
He had to do another pull-up. And another. Then he was high enough to put feet on the stirrup. To stand and be steady. To climb.
To see what lay ahead. And perhaps what hunted behind.
22
Ken pulled himself up to the top of the boxcar. The rungs of the ladder extended all the way to the top of the container and there was even an extra one jutting out at a forty-five degree angle a few inches into the top of the car.
Ken crawled up. His body still hurt, his muscles still quivered. But he felt strangely light. No one single subset of muscles being forced to bear his weight, they all seemed to be rejoicing and drawing on hidden reserves to push him up and over.
The train lurched once as he climbed. The growl came. Closer. Closer. But the call to surrender was, as he had suspected, slightly less powerful when he was moving.
Motion was action.
Action was the concrete manifestation of will.
And will was the defining characteristic of humanity; of the discipline and focus that both permitted simple survival and fomented the greatest leaps of knowledge and power.
Ken pulled himself up the last rung. He belly-crawled over the metal, his stomach twinging as the steel bit into it. But he didn’t pay it any mind, just kept wiggling forward.
The metal roof was hot under his belly. Not as hot as it could have been – he probably had those gray clouds that hung in the sky like badly-sewn patches on a sheet of blue cloth to thank for that – but still warmer than was comfortable.
There was a long strip of metal laying across the center of the boxcar’s roof. What was clearly meant as a walkway of sorts, though why anyone would want to be walking around up here under normal circumstances Ken couldn’t even begin to guess. That it was a design feature placed there in case of zombie apocalypse and the need to escape from homicidal ex-friends seemed unlikely.
At the center of the walkway was an outcropping, a bit of metal that served some arcane purpose for which Ken had no words. Tied to it was a coiled rope. No doubt the way Aaron had left. No suicidal jumps for him, just a simple climb. Or perhaps – given his bad hand – a more dangerous swing to the rungs. Still eminently doable for a man who seemed able to do anything life threw at him.
Ken wriggled to the walkway, then got his hands and knees solidly on it. Pointed toward the front of the train.
In movies people – heroes and villains alike – just stood and ran across train tops like it was nothing more than a jogging trail in the park. Ken didn’t see how that was possible – the boxcar seemed to sway enormously under him. He had no desire to stand. No desire to let go of the metal, or even to move.
But he couldn’t see the front of the train. Just the car ahead of him, which looked more or less the same as the one on which he now hunched. He had to see where he was going; how far until he could reach his friends and family.
Before, when dropping for the rungs, he had existed only for that moment. Now he had to look to the future. And just hope it wasn’t too daunting.
He stood. Slowly, carefully. The train rocked under him, but he found he could stand – though his legs remained in a half-crouch and wouldn’t straighten any further no matter how much he screamed at them to do so in his mind.
The train stretched away in front of him. A gentle curve swept it to the left. A half-dozen boxcars, then a few flatcars. Another dozen boxcars with a few dead spots interspersed that he assumed were more flatcars.
Then the locomotives. The three engines that provided the pushing power for a massive string of freight cars that might weigh ten thousand tons.
Ken had seen a configuration like that before; had even taken the kids to the Boise Train Station when one was on display there.
There were places the kids and Maggie could be, places friends and enemies could hide, in all three units.
For that matter, the kids could be in any of the boxcars. Could be impossible to find.
He threw that thought away. It wasn’t helpful, and it made what he had to do next impossible. Sometimes faith wasn’t a hope for something true, but rather a hope that what you feared wasn’t true.
Ken figured that Elijah had to be in the front engine. He had said – or implied – that he was the only one who could drive the train, so the front was the logical place for him.
Theresa, whose red hair and chubby face seemed deliberately at odds with the full-body riot gear she wore and the twin machetes she had once strapped across her back, could be anywhere. Ditto Aaron, who Ken suspected was more dangerous than either of them, even unarmed and hobbled by the injury to his left hand.
Ken wondered suddenly where Sally was. The snow leopard – a male, inexplicably named by his older daughter – had appeared out of nowhere with two others to save the group at a moment when every path appeared to end in doom. The other two predators had been lost, but Sally had stayed with them and more or less adopted Ken’s girls, especially little Lizzy. And not only did the big cat show no inclination to harm any of the group, but the girls seemed more –
(human)
– normal when Sally was close. More able to resist whatever invisible influence was working on them. Changing them to something different and frightening that seemed to align with the zombies at times more than with the surviving humans.
Where’s Sally?
Ken doubted that the big cat would have let anything happen to the girls – or by extension to Maggie
. So Sally was probably dead.
Another loss.
He gauged how long it would take him to get to the locomotive unit.
No idea.
The same held true of how he was going to sneak up on a trio of armed and dangerous people, rescue his family, and get off the train.
The train shifted below his feet.
Ken had been unconsciously avoiding what was behind. He had to focus on what lay ahead; that almost seemed like enough and more than enough. As though if the universe were at all fair he should only have to focus on the objectives and obstacles he had already identified.
But the universe wasn’t fair.
He turned around.
Myriad words flew into his mind. None of them good. He almost said several, but heard Maggie scolding him. Not in front of the children, Ken.
He shifted the word to a more innocuous one. And it didn’t matter: there was no word strong enough to express what he was seeing.
“Crap.”
23
The train bounced underneath him again, as though to confirm what Ken was seeing. He wondered how many jounces like this it would take to derail the thing. Hopefully a lot.
Because a lot of jounces were coming.
The train stretched off into the distance behind him. When he had first seen the train he had been focused on what was right in front of him, not really looking on anything to the right or the left. He hadn’t had much time, either, before Aaron put a sleeper hold from Hell on him and the lights went out.
Now he gaped. Like everyone he knew he had been stuck at intersections while freight trains passed by. Every time he had gone to St. Luke’s in particular, there had seemed to be a train crossing at Eagle Blvd. that made him and his then-new bride perennially late to the Childbirth and Pregnancy Class they were taking.
The trains seemed to go on forever, minutes and minutes and sometimes hours and hours. But he had always assumed the perceived length was more a function of wanting to get to the class (and get his pregnant and constantly-needing-to-pee wife to a bathroom) than a reality of the train’s length.
He was wrong, though. Dreadfully wrong.
The train had perhaps two dozen cars ahead of him. And well over sixty behind him. Easily a half-mile of cars.
Like those he had already seen, the cars to the rear of the train were a mix of boxcars and flatcars. Some steel, some wood, some holding visible cargo, others seeming to be empty. All worn with use, all clearly workhorses of the line.
They were different colors: green, blue, yellow, red. A lot of primaries, but mostly browns and grays.
The last cars were black. And the black seemed to be dripping off the sides of those cars. Like they had been freshly painted before leaving the last station and were now raining wet paint in a steady stream behind them.
Only this river of black, this thick trail of darkness that fell from the last half dozen cars and ran unbroken into a thick wooded area, was moving. Not like water, in confined rivulets held together by gravity and surface tension and the vagaries of the land over which it ran.
This river ran in a flowing mass composed of thousands of droplets that were each unique, each unbound to the other by physical ties, but somehow aware. Somehow shifting around one another without ever getting in the way, without ever interfering with one another.
The zombies had found them.
And they were on the train.
24
Ken’s first thought – not one he liked, but one that came nevertheless – was that they were doomed. The things were fast. Faster than people, faster than any human could run.
And if they were faster than the train, then there was no possible way to escape. Their only hope of freedom lay in flight and evasion. But they had been found, and the zombies were faster than the vehicle that Ken and his family rode.
He watched for a moment. Not gripped by panic, but by a cold certainty. He had to find a way out of this, and if there was no way for him, then he had to find a way for his family.
The zombies came out of the woods in a dark, tightly-packed group that reminded Ken of a trail of ants moving toward a piece of discarded food at a picnic. When he had seen them last in any great numbers there had been so many they had coated entire buildings, jammed together so tightly they resembled less a group of manic creatures than the oversized cells of a single malevolent monster.
Here, they were a bit looser. Still running closer and more fluidly than any fully human group could possibly do. But there was space between them, gaps as they ran and as they leaped to the back boxcars.
There was something important here. Perhaps something he could use. If he stayed alive long enough to ponder it. To figure it out.
He watched a bit longer. The back six cars had disappeared, and the growl –
(Give UP.
Give IN.)
– was constant. Especially now that he was standing. And the longer he stood still the stronger it became. The more insistent the hammer and chisel that chipped away at the self-centers of him mind.
Ken moved.
His body and a large part of his mind were screaming to run. To dash toward the front of the train, to find Maggie, his children. To die with the ones he loved.
And if that were truly the choice, perhaps he could have done it.
But death waited for none of them. Only the Change. The Change and, for his children, perhaps something far more alien and terrifying.
So he walked toward the zombies.
Seven – no, eight – cars covered in darkness now. The train was being swallowed by a creature that reached a tentacle from the woods and gulped it down whole.
Nine cars.
Ken kept walking. He shifted his focus away from the disappearing cars. Tried to ignore the rocking that was steadily worsening under his feet. His knees bent to adjust to the motion, and the less he thought of it the better he walked.
Ten cars.
He looked at the trail of creatures.
They were running faster than the train. Leaping up to hold not to the sides of the boxcars, but to their brothers and sisters, who clung to the train like spiders. Then they clambered over and forward and more came to take their place.
More of the ones who were running. Running faster than the train.
But only just.
A plan started to play in Ken’s brain.
He at last allowed himself to turn and run.
25
After only a few steps, Ken realized that “run” was a term that could only be applied to what he was doing in the very loosest sense.
The boxcar – the entire train – was rippling like a snapped bullwhip under his feet as more and more of the creatures climbed aboard behind him. He could only take a few steps at a time, then he had to stop and regain his balance.
Still, he got to the forward end of the boxcar without falling off. Strangely proud, then strangely ashamed at being proud at this point. His family and world were still in grave danger, so wasting a single neuron on excitement over making it across the top of the car seemed wrong somehow.
The next boxcar was the same as this one. And both had ladders, not only on their sides but on their ends. The only problem was that the ladders didn’t mirror each other. The ladder on the front of Ken’s boxcar was down and to his left, the other had a ladder off to the right. He would have to go down, cross the linkage between the two cars, reaching across empty space since he could see he wouldn’t be able to hold onto both ladders at once, and hope not to fall.
He might have taken the safe route if the ladders had been closer.
As it was….
What the hell.
Ken, language!
The second voice in his mind belonged to Maggie, and even now, in this moment it made him smile. The grin had to force its way out through an expression tight and grim. But it glimmered through, and brought strength to Ken’s legs as he backed up ten feet. Far enough to get up speed, not so far that the train could buck him
of.
He hoped.
He turned back to the front. Ran. One step. Two. Three.
Then a jump.
The gap between cars looked like it was about four feet. And Ken reminded himself in the middle of the jump that he’d already thrown himself across an eight-foot gap with only a four-inch launching pad. This should be no problem.
He hit squarely in the center of the steel walkway atop the next boxcar. Feet under him, hands in front in a perfect four-point landing. The impact made his teeth clack together. His front tooth – the one he’d already lost once and shoved back in, more out of a dazed sense of possession than anything – bounced out. It clicked across the top of the boxcar and off to the side. Ken had a wild instant in which he almost lunged after it.
Let it go, man. Maggie will just have to learn to love Hillbilly Ken.
He stood again. Ran forward. It went even better this time. Maybe he was getting his sea-legs.
Train-legs, Ken. Get the terminology right. Don’t use the end of the world as an excuse for lazy language.
Then the train rocked violently. He almost went over. Grabbed the lip of the walkway. Teetered. Righted himself. Continued forward. Didn’t look back.
Nothing back there to see. You already know what’s there. Focus forward. Focus on the job.
He reached the end of this boxcar and readied himself to jump again. Backed up the few steps. Took a quick breath. Ran.
And stopped the instant before he jumped.
26
The next boxcar was different.
It had no center strip of steel, no visible stretch that, if not designed for it, would at least be serviceable as a path for Ken to walk across. That meant there was nothing for him to hang onto, either: the walkway he was on now had a lip he had used to grip when he had almost fallen off before. The boxcar ahead of him had no such minute safety features. Indeed, the top of the car was a gentle curve. Nothing too steep, nothing too serious on a train that was at a dead standstill. But when jumping across a moving behemoth being shaken by the crowding throngs of a zombie horde… everything – everything – got much trickier.
The Colony: Shift (The Colony, Vol. 5) Page 5