He hit the roof of the boxcar and fell forward as his left leg collapsed under him. The pins and needles of pain that were ever-present in that limb exploded into spikes of agony.
Ken tried to control the fall, to roll forward like he had been taught in countless hapkido classes. He tucked his head under and hit his right shoulder on the metal roof. Another bruise to go with the grape tones of the rest of his body.
He rolled. Went over his back. Feet somersaulting forward. Saw the edge of the boxcar rushing at him.
He couldn’t stop. He managed to flip over, going to belly and chest, arms and hands spread wide to gain as much traction as possible. The curve of the roof resisted purchase and he kept sliding. There were small grooves in the roof, but nothing deep enough for his scrabbling fingers to grip, no depression that would allow him to wedge a hand or a toe in and arrest his fall.
His feet, kicking for purchase, abruptly kicked into void as his legs went over the side.
27
Ken was sure that gravity would pitch him over. But fate – so often a vengeful scourge of late – seemed at last to come to his aid. The train was rocked as another group of zombies no doubt boarded it en masse, and the sudden bounce pounded Ken upward a fraction of an inch, giving him just enough time to slow his fall.
He was still hanging partially over the edge of the boxcar, his lower legs dangling into nothing. But he was alive.
He wiggled forward like a worm. Sliding forward until he was on the top of the boxcar, only his feet hanging out. Then on hands and knees again.
The metal was solid under him. The boxcar felt sturdy. Heavy. Immovable. It wouldn’t have minded if he fell, wouldn’t have noticed when he was plowed to tiny pieces beneath him.
Ken’s brow furrowed.
The train had bucked. Not once, but repeatedly. And that made no sense. The great length of rail cars, the three locomotives at the lead, had to weigh many thousands of tons. And there hadn’t been nearly enough zombies to cause something that size to shift. He had seen creatures in the hundreds, perhaps as many as one or two thousand.
But not enough to bounce the train. Not enough to cause it to shimmy the way it was doing now.
Ken stood and looked back.
The things were gaining. Maybe twenty cars looked like they had black bugs crawling over them. That put forty or so between them and Ken. He had to hurry. But first… he had to figure out what was happening with the train.
He looked a moment longer, but could see nothing.
Nothing on the top of the train.
He dropped back down to hands and knees, then to his stomach, and wiggled to the same edge he had just tried so hard to avoid. Poked his head over the side and looked down the length of the train.
It turned out that only about nine out of ten of the creatures were actually moving forward.
The rest were doing something else. Possibly something worse.
28
As Ken watched, a trio of the zombies clinging to the closest boxcar crawled down the side of the car. They didn’t bother holding onto any of the small handholds that Ken had had to navigate, and this no longer surprised him. The things had been changing constantly since they first –
(took over)
– appeared, and one of the changes had been an apparent ability to hold to surfaces without benefit of hand-or footholds. Ken didn’t know if all of them had this strange ability, but the three he saw now were clinging like flies to the side of the boxcar, skittering down headfirst so fast they looked like they were sliding as much as crawling.
When they got to the end of the car, they leaned under it. Coughed.
Ken had seen the things vomit like this before. Had seen the black that splashed out of their mouths and knew what to expect. He could imagine the hiss as it spewed from their mouths, the angry whisper of acid as it splashed on the tracks.
They were trying to derail the train. That was what Ken had been feeling: not the impact of the zombies leaping aboard, but the train jittering as wheels tore over tracks that were melting and losing their strength.
Then, as Ken watched, the trio that had vomited the dark dissolvent started to jerk. Vibrations turned to thrashing. They slammed their trunks against the side of the boxcar. Against each other.
One fell. The train pulled it under.
Another reared up, and Ken saw that it had been driven mad. The zombies lost whatever drive impelled them to attack only humans whenever they suffered serious head injury, and this one now had only half its head. The other half was a smoking ruin, a crater that Ken could see even at this distance.
It had melted itself.
Ken realized he had never seen the aftermath of a zombie’s secretion of this acid. Too busy running, fleeing, trying to stay alive.
Another one of the zombies fell.
The third didn’t fall. But nor did it remain on the train. A group of five or six other zombies swarmed over the side of the train and, lightning fast, threw their once-brother over the side.