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.