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

  He raced at Aaron. Pushed off. The older man grunted as Ken’s foot fell into the stirrup Aaron had created of his hands. It had to have hurt the cowboy terribly, the fingers had been broken and the thumb dislocated only a few days before. Ken had no doubt he would have been screaming if the tables had turned.

  Aaron: just a grunt. So low it was almost inaudible. A reminder that this was a man you definitely did not want to meet in a dark alley. Or even a bright one. Anywhere at all, in fact, where the guy might want to pound you.

  And Ken was going to have to get the drop on him, sooner or later. Because the man who had been – and, he sensed, in many ways still was – his friend now wanted to kill his children.

  Then he was airborne as Aaron flung him up and forward. Ken lurched sideways as he made his short flight, and in the moment he took trying to right himself he almost forgot to grab the top of the boxcar.

  What if there’s nothing to grab?

  Maybe that’s why Aaron really sent you first.

  But there was something. A rail around the top of the boxcar that Ken’s hands slapped against and gripped reflexively.

  He pulled himself up. Looked down.

  Aaron was already halfway across the coupler between the trains. Standing on the knuckle that joined the two cars. Staring upward, good right hand reaching up.

  “Come on,” he said. His hand waved back and forth, motioning for Ken to hurry. “Let’s go.”

  And Ken just looked at him.

  33

  Ken didn’t turn away. Not because he didn’t want to – he did – but because he didn’t have the luxury of anger. Rage and revenge were things that stood in the way of life; of the struggle to survive.

  He made a choice. Not based on his gut, but his mind.

  Aaron wanted to hurt his kids. But he knew where they were. And Ken needed that knowledge. Besides, he hadn’t said he was going to kill them, had he? Only that he “might have to” kill them.

  What did that mean?

  Ken didn’t want to know. But he had to find out.

  Because his girls were changing. And what if –

  (what if they’re the enemy what if they’re the monsters what if they’re the disease we’re carrying with us now?)

  – Aaron knew something that would help him stop it? Help him turn back the clock on whatever was going on with Lizzy and Hope?

  The easy way would be to just let Aaron die. But it wouldn’t be the good way, or even the right way.

  He dropped to his stomach. Hung out over the edge of the boxcar. Put his good hand down. Grabbed Aaron’s. But before he pulled the cowboy up he said, “Remember this.”

  He didn’t know exactly what he meant by that. Remember that I had you in my power, perhaps. Remember that I was merciful when you were not.

  Remember that we, together, are human. Are all that remains of the Once that Once Was.

  Ken pulled, Aaron pulled, and then the cowboy was up on the roof with him in an instant.

  Ken looked ahead. They had run a surprising distance. Only maybe ten cars left to the rear locomotive.

  He looked behind.

  Fifty cars covered with writhing bodies. A seething mass of darkness, night falling one car at a time.

  More and more of the zombies dropped off the sides, more and more of them vomited acid on rails and then died of the wounds the secretions caused.

  In his headlong flight with Aaron, Ken hadn’t noticed the increased bouncing, but now he did. Standing still he felt the vibrations of the train as more and more of it passed over rails eaten away by acid, stripped of their strength by the destructive power of the things’ excretions.

  The wobbling seemed to ripple back, getting worse the farther back it went. The first cars the things were on had just a bit of bounce to them, then more and more. The last train cars seemed to be rocking to some unheard music. A terrible tune thought up by an insane composer who only wished his audience to feel the same madness he suffered.

  It couldn’t be much longer before those last cars fell. Derailed. And brought down the rest of the train with them.

  The boxcar Ken stood on jittered beneath him. A noise like gears grinding a mixture of glass and bent steel screeched out.

  Ken looked at Aaron. The cowboy’s face was impassive, but there was a hard edge to his jaw, a subtle clench visible under his gray-flecked beard.

  They gazed at one another for an instant. Not even a second, but it seemed long, Ken felt like he was looking at Aaron because he wanted to memorize the last face he would ever see. He wondered if Aaron was feeling the same thing. Brotherhood imposed by circumstance, if not by choice.

  Then they looked back. Both their heads moving as one, a coordinated movement that could have been rehearsed.

  The back of the train.

  It was far behind them, but still visible as a black line in the distance. A line that suddenly twitched. Whipped to one side, then the other.

  The last cars tipped.

  Fell off the rails.

  34

  “Down!” Ken screamed. He pushed Aaron to the roof, both of them going down in a tangle. He barely had time to grab the rail he had used to pull himself up before a vibration rolled through the boxcar. He felt it pummel his chest and legs. The hand gripping the bar felt hot. Fevered, if it was possible to have a single body part be fevered.

  Why not? All bets on the impossible are off, Kenny.

  Aaron started to slide away. Ken grabbed his arm. Aaron’s good hand gripped him at the same time, arresting his sideways fall. They hung to one another, Ken bearing the full weight of Aaron’s body for a moment. Then the cowboy wedged a boot against a rail and his slide stopped. Now he was supporting Ken as much as Ken was supporting him. Tangled in a strange embrace where Ken was unsure who was helping whom, just as he was unsure whether they were friends or enemies.

  Maybe something else. Something new in a new world.

  The train bucked again. Not the boxcar below them, but he felt the back cars flinging sideways like the tracks had been a prison and they were at last free to run wild.

  Ken heard three words in his mind. Over and over, and he clung to them tighter than he clung to Aaron and Aaron clung to him.

  Hatfield rail crash. Hatfield rail crash. Hatfield rail crash.

  Aaron grunted. Ken couldn’t tell if it was pain or effort. He felt like patting the older man on the shoulder. Letting him know they had a chance.

  No, no chance. The train’s derailing.

  You know there’s a chance.

  The vibrations worsened. Ken’s teeth rattled together. The back of his head – which had already been concussed, lacerated, burned – now bounced off the boxcar roof.

  He felt himself slip into semi-darkness. Pulled himself back to full consciousness, using those same three words as a rope.

  Hatfield rail crash.

  Hatfield rail crash.

  Hatfield rail –

  The sound of the train derailing in sections behind them got so loud that Ken could no longer hear himself think. There was only an aural cliff that he had been pitched over the side of. And now he was falling past a sheer wall of sound that just grew louder and louder. Metal designed to stand up to millions of pounds of pressure shrieking as it was torn like tissue. Wheels of heavy steel separating from axles and then shattering into shrapnel.

  Hatf –

  The sound grew. Grew. Closer.

  Ken held to the three words.

  Even though he couldn’t hear them, even in his mind, he held to them. They were hope.

  Hope was silent. But even silent, that did not always mean it was gone.

  He screamed as loud as he could, this time saying the words aloud.

  “HATFIELD RAIL –“

  Then their car tipped to the side as well.

  35

  Mormons were everywhere in Boise.

  It wasn’t an exaggeration or a condemnation, it was just a fact. Members of the Latter-day Saint church comprised abou
t one in three people in the area. And, truth be told, Ken rather liked it that way. The LDS kids were less likely to turn up at class stoned, hungover, or “accidentally pregnant” (no kids, he had learned early, ever showed up and said they were “purposely pregnant”). Not that all LDS kids were angels – they weren’t – but they did have a lower tendency to cause trouble on average.

  A result of this demographic makeup was that there was a lot of media coverage given to All Things Mormon. If an LDS church leader did something noteworthy, you could bet it would be covered at six p.m. on KBOI or KTVB – network affiliates who wouldn’t have given such items even a ten-second spot in areas like Los Angeles or New York.

  So when a pair of Mormon missionaries in England were on a train that derailed, it was big news. Bigger still because one of the missionaries was actually from Caldwell, only about half an hour from Boise.

  “The Hatfield rail crash” got coverage on TV, radio, newspapers. For weeks it was all anyone could talk about – either the “miracle” that the two young men hadn’t been killed, the fascinating details of the crash, or (in the case of a few very strange and bitter people Ken knew) whispered accusations that it was all part of a Mormon Conspiracy to bring down rail traffic in Europe.

  The train was going almost one hundred-twenty miles per hour when a section of the track gave way. The back cars derailed completely, breaking into three sections as they skidded away from the rails.

  But in the entire length, only four people were killed. Seventy injured, but only four died.

  That was one of the things Ken tried to fix in his mind as the boxcar tilted beneath him. He heard screaming, wondered for a moment if it was Aaron.

  No, Aaron doesn’t scream. Must be me.

  The boxcar tilted so far to one side that Ken was certain it was going to slide sideways – either roll completely to its side or at the very least jump the tracks and gash twin furrows in the ground as the wheels went from solid track to comparatively soft ground.

  Then the car slammed back the way it had come, bouncing Ken’s head against the metal again. Showers of sparks flew, and he couldn’t be sure if they were real or just something his brain was creating as a sort of mute protest to everything it had been forced to deal with of late.

  The sound – the grating, shearing sound of train cars separating and metal being torn asunder – rose. Shifted. Now the high-pitched whine of air –

  (Automatic air brakes?)

  – mingled with the even higher scream of steel dragging on steel. The thud-thump-thuds that had been bouncing Ken and Aaron only a fraction of an instant before smoothed out.

  Slowed.

  Ken held to the fact that only four people had been killed in the Hatfield rail crash.

  Held to that, and to one other thing.

  The train slowed. He could feel it hitching to a stop below him, gears grinding from somewhere ahead. Brakes engaged sporadically up and down what was left of the line.

  The train slowed.

  Stopped.

  Ken wanted to lay there. Just lay there and stare into the sky that was somehow untouched by what had happened.

  But he didn’t have the time. He had to see if this was another Hatfield.

  He sat up. Groaned. But didn’t let himself shut his eyes or even wince.

  He had to see.

  36

  If this had been anything other than a freight train, already weighed down by a half-mile of cars and who-knew how much cargo, Ken figured he would already have died. If they’d been going much faster than they had been, he and Aaron no doubt would have been flung off the top of the boxcar when the train derailed. And then they would have hit the graveled ground on either side of the tracks, suffered lacerations and abrasions and broken bones that would have killed them quickly if not instantly.

  So it was a blessing that he could sit up at all.

  That was he told himself.

  But it sounded false. Hard to believe when he managed to sit up and take stock of the destruction behind them.

  The train was a mile-long range of twisted metal and shattered cargo. Some of the closer cars had broken open and spilled contents all around the now-warped tracks. Ken saw what looked like grain spilling out of one boxcar, silver boxes that might have once been electronics scattered around another.

  One of the cars – a cylindrical length of steel – had split open and was very clearly leaking some kind of dark fluid. Ken couldn’t tell at this distance what it was – could have been molasses or corn oil or some kind of radioactive explosive waste for all he knew.

  Besides, the threat wasn’t explosion or irradiation. It was still what it had been from the beginning of this nightmare: the zombies.

  Like the boxcars, many had been thrown from their perches and now lay along the tracks in broken piles.

  Unlike the boxcars, many had managed to maintain their grips. Had held to cars that slid and slipped from tracks to terrain. And now they growled as one and leaped toward the front of the now-still train.

  Even the zombies who lay in shattered heaps were moving. Ken knew what he’d see if he was closer: creatures walking on arms and legs that ended in stumps, pushing themselves forward in spite of bodies whose every bone had been shattered.

  And in another moment, if they kept doing as they had –

  (no guarantee of that they keep changing so who knows what’s next)

  – a waxy yellow substance would start oozing out of their wounds, hardening around injured areas. It acted, so much as Ken could tell, as both cast and some kind of healing salve. Only one that put things to right in seconds instead of weeks or years. He hadn’t seen stumps grow new hands or feet, but he had seen shattered limbs straighten and regain strength in moments.

  Some of the things could be seen vomiting on themselves and others: more of that yellow crap coming out of their mouths as though they were medics moving around the wounded on a battle field.

  The zombies had mobilized.

  And the train – the one thing that had kept the survivors ahead of death, if only for a few extra minutes – was stopped.

  Ken turned around.

  Please let it be like Hatfield.

  37

  The Hatfield rail crash had been a surprise for Ken. Not because of the severity of the crash; not because of the news coverage a British passenger train got in Boise, Idaho; not even because it turned out a Mormon missionary from Caldwell had been sitting in the front passenger car.

  No, what surprised him most was watching the after-crash reports.

  He had always heard things like “the train derailed” on news reports and assumed that meant the entire vehicle length left the tracks. Certainly most news anchors stood in front of smoking hulks of wreckage splayed brokenly to the left and right of tracks that stood mute and unused.

  But with the Hatfield line, only about the last two-thirds of the train left the tracks. The front two passenger cars and the locomotive stayed on the rails.

  More importantly, as soon as preliminary investigations were finished those cars were simply detached from the wreckage behind… and drove away.

  Just from his quick view of the aft part of the train, Ken could tell that this was a much more severe crash. The Hatfield line had been a commuter rail, only a relatively few cars. Not a freight train with eighty or more cargo cars to weigh it down.

  But still… the last cars on the line seemed to have spun away and more or less disintegrated. Ten cars later they were at all angles across the ground, torn and mangled.

  Ten cars later, closer to the tracks.

  And where Ken sat? He couldn’t tell. Thought it possible that this car might still be on the rails.

  He jumped to his feet.

  The three engines sat only ten cars ahead. One of them hissed as though angry to have been sidelined in such an ignominious manner. Motionless, but with a pent-up power that was still awesome and a bit dangerous.

  And the front locomotive looked like it sat s
quare on the rails.

  Ken looked at Aaron. The old cowboy nodded at him, and he could tell that both were thinking the same thing.

  “Think it’ll still run?” asked Ken.

  Aaron glanced behind them. The zombies were still moving slowly. But their broken bodies straightened a bit more every second. Their motions smoothed out as they drew into tight knots, seeming as always to draw strength and agility from the simple fact of their siblings’ propinquity.

  The train wasn’t moving. The things would be on them that much faster.

  “It better,” said Aaron.

  Neither man looked at the other. There were no questions about loyalty or about what was to happen next.

  They simply ran.

  38

  When he jumped over the first space between boxcars, Ken saw that this boxcar, too, had derailed. Not as radically as the rear cars, obviously, but when he jumped he could easily see how the two boxcars were well off the centerline of the tracks. His heart sank.

  This far forward? What if the engines are off the tracks, too?

  What if we’re on foot from here?

  He landed on the roof of the next car and ran. Ran fast as he could, not just to outrun the swarming creatures that hunted them, but to outrun the bleak thoughts that threatened to overtake him.

  He ran so fast he forgot to notice the difficulty of jumping from car to car, the fear of leaping from boxcar to flat. It might have been simply that the train was stopped, but Ken suspected that he would have run this nimbly if he had been racing over a hypersonic bullet train. He was too afraid of too many things to worry about the vague threat of lost footing.

  Aaron was behind him now, and Ken didn’t think the cowboy was just letting him have the lead. Ken was in front because he had earned this position. He had somehow become different in the last few hours, the last few minutes.