Shift by Michaelbrent Collings
1
“I bet you’d like to know what’s going on.”
The words hung in the air, and somehow they didn’t seem to make it to Ken Strickland. He heard them, but understanding eluded him. Just like the reason he was here escaped his understanding.
The world had ended.
He had lost his son.
His daughters were… changing. Into what, he had no idea. He only knew that they vacillated between the two-and seven-year-old he knew, and a pair of strangers who seemed to want the destruction of the few people who had managed to survive the first days of the end of the world.
Maggie… at least she was still his. Still his wife, still his love.
But where was she?
The words the cowboy had spoken remained in midair between them. Caught in a stasis of unreality far greater than that of men and women who turned on one another, than that of insects swarming and attacking and dying in the millions, even greater than the dead rising up to attack the living.
“I bet you’d like to know what’s going on.”
Ken didn’t understand the words, so he ignored them. Turned away from them, mentally and literally. He craned his neck around.
He was inside a steel box. Corrugated sides, top. It was gunmetal gray, nearly featureless. It smelled like feed, a gamey smell that was nearly pleasant and brought to mind horses and cattle and farms – things that spoke of life and a world that had been, a world that should still be. He was in an empty shipping container.
A boxcar.
The box that should have contained life but had somehow become a tomb swayed slightly. It jounced minutely. Tok-tok. Tok-tok. Tok-tok. The sound of steel wheels passing over rolled steel. The sound of rails that had born this burden millions of times without complaint, unaware that this would perhaps be the final passage that they would see.
Tok-tok. Tok-tok. Tok-tok.
Ken wondered briefly how the train was even moving. When the world end, shouldn’t that mean trains stopped? What good would schedules be when there was no one waiting at the terminal? When cargo would only be met by bloodthirsty killers?
How had he gotten here?
He tried to stand, lurched a few inches upward and then fell to his side as something blocked his feet. He looked down and saw his hands and feet were bound with zip tie cuffs, the kind favored by cops as convenient ways to deal with drunks and common criminals.
“I bet you’d like to know what’s going on.”
Tok-tok. Tok-tok. Tok-tok.
And now he remembered. Remembered being saved by newcomers Theresa and Elijah, who had appeared out of nowhere to whisk them away from attacking hordes. Theresa had run dozens of them over in a school bus, plowing through the monsters just in time to save Ken and his friends; then Elijah had shown up and mangled many more with a John Deere thresher.
They abandoned the farm equipment near a train, of all things. Elijah had mentioned something about Theresa’s brother, how he had stayed behind to cover their escape – a death sentence – because he “hadn’t known how to drive” something. Elijah must have meant this vehicle, this cruising iron beast that Ken had at first been surprised to see, then willing to use.
And then their rescuers had turned on them. Theresa, a chubby redhead who had gone to so much trouble and seen the sacrifice of her family to rescue Ken and his friends and family. Elijah, a huge black man with a smile so bright it dazzled. They had turned guns on Ken.
No. Not me. They aimed them at the girls. At Hope and Lizzy.
And before Ken could move… before he could even think about stopping them.
Aaron. The cowboy who had saved them all time after time. He had attacked Ken from behind. Had choked him unconscious.
And now he was looking at Ken. Sitting across from him, holding a flashlight that was the only illumination in this mobile jail cell.
Ken maneuvered himself into a sitting position. He pushed himself up to the wall of the boxcar. Stared at a man he would have given his life to. A man who had betrayed him.
“I bet you’d like to know what’s going on.”
The words finally made it across the wide gap between them. Penetrated a pain-fogged body and an exhausted mind.
“Yeah,” he said. Bitterness writhed through the word. “I guess you could say that.”
2
Aaron had a strange look on his face as he started speaking. The shadows the flashlight cast on his face might have had something to do with it, but Ken thought it was more than that. The cowboy looked like he was about to have the birds and the bees talk with a two-year-old, or something else equally disconcerting.
He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. He had to use the same hand that held the flashlight: the other had had its fingers dislocated and thumb badly broken during one of the times he had defended Ken and the other survivors from an onslaught of zombies.