The Colony: Shift (The Colony, Vol. 5) Read online

  The fingers of his right hand raced around the plastic. He could picture the cuffs in his mind: white. Tiny ridges along their exterior. Both loops meeting in the middle. Threaded through a pair of holes in the head. The holes would have a locking mechanism inside that allowed for the captors – Aaron, Elijah, and Theresa – to close the cuffs. The locking mechanism only worked one way, a stiff piece of plastic inside it catching on the ridges that ran along the cuffs and allowing them to tighten but not loosen. That meant that ordinarily the cuffs would have to be cut off, unless –

  The phantom cries of his daughters had made it hard for Ken to concentrate. Now they disappeared. Everything disappeared. There was only the darkness, thick and nearly impenetrable.

  The darkness was the thing that was keeping him captive. The only thing.

  He turned to his stomach again, and began to crawl.

  10

  Crawling with bound feet in the dark.

  Not the way Ken wanted to be spending his minutes. But he had no choice. He had to be on his stomach, hands outstretched, waving back and forth as he moved forward.

  His Doc Martens had thick rubber soles – the only reason Coach Picarelli hadn’t made a meal of his feet back at the high school – but they couldn’t get purchase. Not with him pushing inch by inch with his toes. The leather tops of his shoes just slid across the steel floor of the boxcar, and he ended up inchworming his way across the space.

  His hands moved like wiper blades, back and forth, back and forth. After a moment he squeezed his eyes shut as well. It was already pitch black, but he felt oppressed by the darkness. It weighed on him. He had heard that losing your sight resulted in increased acuity to your other senses, but this prison-darkness just numbed him. Depressed him. Closed eyes had to be better. Self-imposed blindness better than the black of imprisonment by a friend.

  Eyes closed, feet bound, he scrunched and then lengthened, folded then telescoped.

  Maggie would laugh if she could see me.

  He thought of his wife’s ridiculous laugh, that high, breathy gasp of a laugh that had always enchanted him. It almost brightened the darkness behind his eyes.

  Only she wouldn’t laugh. Because she has to know the kids are in danger. And she’s terrified.

  If she’s not already dead.

  Fold, then extend. Fold, then extend.

  His fingers crashed into something. The end of the boxcar. And all he had felt was bare floor.

  Panic started to rise in the back of his throat, his heart pounding with more than the exertion of this perhaps pointless exercise.

  You don’t even know if this will work.

  It has to work.

  Despair was so easy.

  And the easy way is so rarely the right way.

  Wasn’t that what he had always told his students? A million years ago, an age ago, when the world had made sense and kids had come to him with their decisions to give in to boyfriends who wanted to have sex with them or peers who wanted them to do drugs or any of a thousand other problems that teachers were not paid to deal with but so often did.

  Had he meant it? Not just for them, but for himself?

  He rolled over, and kicked himself around a hundred and eighty degrees. Hard to tell in the darkness, but he thought he was facing the opposite direction, angled slightly so he wouldn’t just retrace his path.

  He inched forward. Hands wiping back and forth. Back and forth.

  The right way is rarely the easy way. The easy way is rarely the right way. Right rarely easy, easy rarely right.

  His left hand touched something.

  Three fingers curled around it. Pain as they did, but Ken smiled. Tears fell from his eyes. He wiped them away.

  No time to cry. Crying was easy.

  And easy was rarely right.

  11

  For a second Ken worried that what he felt wasn’t what he wanted. Worried that it was something else entirely. Or worse, that it was a piece of what he wanted, but the wrong piece.

  He gagged down panic. Reminded himself that his left hand had questionable sensory abilities. Traced it with his good hand. Two bent curls of plastic. A shattered nub in the middle of one of them.

  The remains of the cuffs that had bound his wrists.

  He tried not to get excited. Too many things had gone wrong, too many moments had seemed promising only to turn into situations even worse than the ones that had gone before.

  The screams came back.

  The train twitched again. What was happening out there?

  He tried to put both the distractions – both imaginary and real – out of mind. He traced the loop of plastic to its end. Felt a smoothed triangle. The spot that was inserted into the bottom of the locking mechanism to guide the cuffs so they could be tightened.

  Ken drew his knees up to his chest. His eyes still closed, he felt the cuffs around his ankles. They were snug enough that there was no way he could slip them off. But not so tight that he was in danger of losing blood flow to his feet. Whoever had put them on – Aaron, Elijah, or Theresa – had done so expertly. The cuffs were comfortable, but utterly secure.

  They were just right for what Ken had in mind.

  He grabbed the broken cuffs in his right hand, holding them near the triangular end of the plastic. With his left he felt for the locking mechanism of the cuffs that rested between his ankles. He found it, then pulled it up as far as he could. Not much, but it gave him a tiny bit of space.

  He pushed his right hand behind his ankles, then poked the end of the broken cuff up, following the plastic spans around his ankles into their locking mechanism. He pushed the makeshift loid as far as he could, hoping he had guessed correctly. There should be a plastic lever that clicked against the ridges of each cuff, and he was hoping to wedge it open with the end of the broken cuff.

  He pushed as far as he could. Then moved his hand to the ends of the cuffs that bound his ankles. He pushed on one.

  Nothing. It was still locked firm.

  He pushed the other.

  And it moved.

  He wiggled his jury-rigged lock pick back and forth, pushing firmly as he did. At first there was almost no give. He kept pressing. Sweat dripped from his forehead, concentration wringing perspiration from him faster than a full-out sprint could have.

  The plastic pushed through. An inch. Two. Three.

  He pulled his foot right free.

  He left his other foot bound in the matching circle. He could walk, and he didn’t think he had the time to work it free. The phantom cries were slamming into him.

  He was free. Free enough.

  Now he just had to get out of this boxcar.

  And find his family.

  12

  Ken tried to orient himself for a few long moments before admitting it was useless. He had no idea where he was in relation to the walls of the car, no idea whether he was close to one of the sides of the car, one of the ends, or standing dead center.

  He walked straight ahead. Sliding one foot after another. His rubber soles caught a bit, giving him a jerking gait that the cracking roll of the train exacerbated. The trailing edge of the cuff on his left ankle rasped on the floor.

  His hands waved in front of him in the darkness. His toes tried to curl back with every step, as though possessed of their own intelligence and certain that they would hit something.

  For all he knew, they might be right. There was no way of knowing if this car was empty or full, if he was alone in here or accompanied by some unseen cargo.

  He kept walking. Sliding and rasping.

  His left hand – always his left hand, dammit! – hit something. Hard and cold and unyielding.

  A moment later his right hand hit the same thing.

  And the boxcar moved again. This time there was no way to pawn it off as a normal event or even some small issue with the train. A vibration traveled through the entirety of the car, rattling Ken’s bones.

  He felt something faraway.

  give up
….

  give in….

  “Dear God, please, no,” he whispered.

  13

  The cry had come to his mind, no sound to his ears. He might have imagined it, the same way he had been imagining the cries of his children.

  But Ken didn’t think so.

  He felt the cold metal under his palms. It vibrated in time with the tok-tok of the train’s wheels, the clacking of steel on steel. He thought it was one of the inside walls of the boxcar. He hoped so. He didn’t want to have to feel around some kind of shipping containers to find the sides of his cell.

  He moved to the side. Feeling the metal inch by inch. He went as fast as he could without missing anything. Sooner than he expected he hit a corner. He wondered if that meant he had been on the end of the car and was now rounding to one of the sides. No way to tell. If he was rounding to a side it was a good thing. If he had been on a side and was now moving to the end, he was wasting time.

  He decided to keep on his course. There was no way of knowing what to do. When in doubt move forward.

  He kept feeling along, feeling along. His mind began playing tricks on him, making it seem like the metal stretched forward an impossible distance under his hands. Like he was walking not feet or yards, but miles in the darkness.

  Must have missed it.

  Keep going.

  Should have felt it by now.

  Maybe it’s on the other side. Maybe I should walk to –

  Just keep going!

  Panic curled its way up his spine, threaded vines through his gut. The phantom screams of his children grew louder, and so did the others.

  Give up….

  Give in….

  Louder now. Harder to pawn off as imagination.

  He kept moving. His jaw quivered, though whether with terror or concentration he could not say. The two had merged into one animal.

  He felt something under the fingers of his leading hand. Brought both hands together.

  It was a long line in the steel wall. Still unseen, a seam that could have been a trick played by a mind that needed it to be there.

  But he had heard Aaron leave. Had seen the light come in.

  And he hadn’t heard a lock, had he? Had just heard the cowboy slide something open, then slide it shut.

  The car thrummed under his feet.

  Give up. Give in.

  Ken pulled. There was nothing to hold onto, at least nothing that he could feel, and he was loath to leave the spot he had found. All he had was the friction of his palms.

  He pulled again. The flesh felt like it was tearing off his hands.

  The wall slid to the side.

  A bright crack of light speared into the darkness. He was blind again, though for a different reason.

  Then sight returned, and he almost wished it hadn’t. Sometimes it was better to be blind. Sometimes sight was a curse.

  14

  On their honeymoon in Kauai, Ken and Maggie had spent a lot of time on the ocean, and significantly more time in their hotel room.

  They had also hiked a good deal of the island. One of the hikes had led them to Waimea Canyon.

  Waimea Canyon stood out in Ken’s mind ever after as being exactly like the Grand Canyon in terms of size and magnificence. The only difference was that where the Grand Canyon was painted in sunset tones of oranges and yellows and pinks, Waimea was done primarily in tropical greens, with hints of red island soil peeking through. It was an awesome sight, full of life and seeming to stretch away forever, a crack in the land that extended until the low-hanging mists of the island swallowed it into a dream.

  At one point, Ken became curious about how far down it actually was to the bottom of the canyon. He hopped a guardrail and, immune to Maggie’s concerns about becoming a widow on her honeymoon, leaned over a cliff and looked straight down.

  Then, satisfied that it was every bit as high as he had thought it would be, he hopped back over the guardrail, into Maggie’s arms, and then they returned to the hotel room and did not come out for a good number of hours.

  The heights hadn’t bothered him. Hundreds of feet, and he hadn’t blinked an eye.

  Now he leaned out the side of the freight car and saw the ground only a few feet below him. It fell quickly away to a slope that dropped an additional five or six feet into a dry wash that could have been a riverbed at one time, and perhaps still was during the wettest parts of the year.

  Only a few feet. And he felt like falling back into the womblike darkness from which he had just gone to so much trouble to escape.

  To stare down an unmoving cliff, a piece of land that had been there tens of thousands of years and had trees that had taken root in its face: no problem. To look down and see the scrub sweep past, the dirt a blur below the train as it screamed over the tracks, to realize all at once the awesome weight of the train he stood on, and that if he fell beneath it the thing wouldn’t so much as lurch in recognition of his passing: a very big problem.

  He felt like throwing up. Probably would if he didn’t wrench his gaze away from the land being chewed up beneath the passing cars.

  Give up.

  Give in.

  The wordless shout was still there. Still getting stronger, bit by bit.

  Ken looked straight ahead. He didn’t know where he was, didn’t recognize the land he was passing through. Not sure whether that meant they had been going for a long time, or if this was just a vantage point he had never had before: not often that he got to look at Idaho from the side of a speeding train.

  The train wasn’t actually going that fast. Barely pulling ahead of the slow-moving thunderheads that dotted an otherwise bright sky. That made sense. The train he had seen for a few seconds before being ambushed by Aaron had been a freight train: a locomotive at the front that somehow managed to look both sleek and boxy, with a cab to the rear for the engineer and conductor, followed by two more locomotives with different body types. The center one was flatter; it looked like a squat box with another cab, this one toward the front, almost the whole thing surrounded by a walkway that extended a bit farther over past the rails than the other two engines did. The last one in line, the shortest engine, was a rounded thing that looked almost like what Ken pictured an old-fashioned caboose would have looked like. And the whole trio was trailed by a string of flatcars and boxcars that extended into the distance.

  It was the kind of train that kept people cursing at crossings as it lumbered past for an eternity, so long it seemed to have been constructed less for hauling than simply to irritate commuters in a hurry to get to destinations in a busy world.

  Ken wondered for a second if they would have been so upset when the trains passed if they had known how very quickly that world would end.

  Probably. Because the world had moved fast, and the trains never did.

  Still, “not very fast” when waiting for a train to pass at a railroad crossing meant a very different thing than “not very fast” when suspended from the side of that train. He wished it was going a bit slower. Zero mph would be good.

  Give up.

  Give in.

  He jerked his head to the right. There was no sense of sound, but somehow he knew there was a direction to the noiseless imperative that was chipping away at the edges of his mind and will. It was coming from the rear of the train.

  The train was going around a curve. He could only see the three boxcars behind him, then the train arced away into invisibility. If he had been on the other side of the boxcar he could have seen the entire length of the train. But here, almost nothing.

  He looked to his left, toward the front of the train. Same problem. The curvature of the track seemed to pull the leading cars away from his view. He saw only two boxcars, then empty air in front of him. And no telling how long the track would curve like this, how long it would take for him to get an accurate idea what was going on behind him or even how close he was to the front of the train – where he assumed his family was.

  And where he also assume
d Aaron, Elijah, and Theresa waited. Deciding whether to kill his children or not.

  He still didn’t understand that, and knew that now wasn’t the time to figure it out. Not with –

  (Give up.

  Give in.)

  – danger coming closer. Not with his family threatened by both the zombies and the people they had viewed as friends.

  What about Christopher? Buck?

  Easy to answer: there was no way the young man would go along with any plan to kill the girls. And Buck would permit nothing to happen to Hope, especially. He had formed a bond with her, had become something akin to a favored uncle.

  So that meant they were in trouble, too. Because Aaron wasn’t the type who would leave possible threats free to roam.

  Ken looked for a way out of the boxcar. There were a few rungs on the side, a ladder leading to the top of the car. But they were well out of reach. A good ten or fifteen feet away from his perch.

  He looked to the right, toward the back of the train. Nothing there. Not even the rungs that were to the front. Just the bare sides of the boxcar, painted a rust-red that brought to mind coagulating blood.

  Ken looked back at the rungs. Too far to jump to.

  Which meant only one way to get to them.

  15

  The boxcar door slid to the side on tracks anchored at the bottom and top of the car. The door itself was heavy-duty, metal like the rest of the car. It had slid only with effort – Ken’s palms still stung from the strain of getting the thing to move. Now it was open only about the width of Ken’s body.

  He leaned into it. The door slid open toward the front of the train, and Ken forced it the rest of the way open. He shoved with his shoulder until he felt it hit the end of the track. Something clicked as a mechanism engaged that – he hoped – would keep the door locked at least semi-securely in place.