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.
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.