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 assumed 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.
He leaned out and looked at the door.
The rest of the boxcar was smooth steel on the outside. Flat panels of metal broken only by vertical lines of rivets that extended from bottom to top of the car. The door was different. Corrugated, the waves of the metal extending horizontally. There was a single handle in the middle of the door – Ken presumed it was meant for loaders to open and close it when the cargo car pulled into the station. At the bottom of the door was the wheel mechanism, tucked into the track that extended about four inches off the side of the boxcar.
The entire thing – door, track, everything – extended to within maybe five feet of the ladder that crawled up the side of the boxcar. Maybe more. It was hard to tell from this angle.
Ken looked around again. Hoping he might have missed something. Knowing he hadn’t.
He grabbed the side of the door with his right hand. Then his left, ignoring the ache that always brought as best he could.
He slid his right foot out of the boxcar. Onto the track that the door used to slide back and forth.
Four inches wide.
16
Ken tried to convince himself that it was plenty of room. That four inches was the width of a parking curb. And hadn’t he walked on parking curbs as a kid all the time?
But you aren’t a kid anymore.
Also, you fell a lot.