Unfed (18 page)

“Gumpf!” Pete cries, his eyes panicked, an arm outstretched to us on the bridge. At first I think he’s crying in desperation because he’s being carried away, but just as he regains his wind and gives the shout-out another try, I realize what he’s suggesting. “Jump!”

“Not on your nelly,” spits Alice.

“Yes.” Russ clambers over the rail. “He did it, we all can.”

“He didn’t jump, he fell,” Alice yells at him, but she’s already sizing up the jump. We all are.

“It’s nothing, Alice,” Russ calls. “Pete didn’t even hurt himself!”

Pete, currently bent over except for his pale and wretched face, might take issue with that. But he sure wants us to join him.

“Hurry! It’s speeding up.”

Oh, great
. Smitty put his foot down and Thomas the Tank Engine is about to become the Flying Scotsman. Truth is, regardless of that, we don’t have time to think this over. Zombies are making their entrance onto the bridge, stage right and stage left. Russ and Alice clamber over and join me on the other side of the railing, and we’re all going to make the leap.

Russ goes first, an athletic bound into the air, landing in an acrobatic squat. He runs lightly down the moving train, then walks on the spot directly under us, like this is just another workout.

“I’ll catch you.”

I turn to Alice. “Come on, we’ll go together.” I hold out a hand, nodding.

“Get your filthy paw away from me!” she screams. “Don’t trust you an inch.”

I glance up at the bridge; they’re nearly on us.

“Do you trust them more?” I shout back. “Because if you do, then totally, hang out here and have a party for all I care!”

The first zombie roars at us from above, the fish smell hitting me like the worst kind of putrid sock. Sod Alice, this train is leaving and I’m going to be on it. Who is she kidding? She’s going to either jump or fall off after me, and I want to be out of the way so she doesn’t break my skull when she does. I ready myself for the leap.

“Bobby!” Russ is pointing frantically at the end of the train. The end of the train, which is fast approaching the bridge. “You have to jump now.”

I lower myself slightly, take a breath, and —

“Help me,” Alice whimpers. “Please.”

“You got it.” I nod, and take her hand. “After three. One, two —”

“Aargh!” Alice falls before I finish, and takes me with her. As our feet hit the train’s roof, her hand is wrenched from mine and we both fall over backward, not able to stick the landing. I make the perfect backward roll and end up on my hands and knees. Alice is somewhere behind me. I turn to look — and she’s gone.

The end of the final carriage is all I see as we leave the bridge behind, the zombies waving us off from above.

“Aliiiiice!”

I scrabble toward the edge, hoping to see her pale pink fingernails clinging on. But they aren’t there. I hardly dare look down. But I make myself.

There she is, below, lying on her side on the little kind of mesh iron balcony that sticks out of the back of the train. She’s lying there, and she’s groaning, arms wrapped around herself in a hug, rocking as the train judders along, picking up speed.

The cold rush of air makes my head hurt. I have to move — it’s going to get drafty up here soon. “Hang in there, Alice!” I scream. I look for some way to get down to her, and I spot the ladder.

In a second I’m down there and she’s swearing at me for stepping on her; there’s not exactly much room to move. “You’re doing OK, then,” I growl as I pull her into a sitting position.

“Did I ever mention how much I hate school trips?” she splutters out at me. “I never thought I’d miss the nice, cozy bus.” She looks down behind us. “Ew, gross. Smitty is running them over.”

The train tracks run red. Every now and then we judder as we hit bodies. They must be pretty mushy, they’re not putting up much resistance.
There are bits of zom on the track; some still moving, some decapitated. He’s just mown them over. Pretty good, really. You can do that if you’re driving a train. I look around. We’ll be clearing the station in a minute. I remember the horde outside. We’d better get inside this train before it gets seriously busy around here.

“Bobby!” It’s Russ from above. “You both all right?”

I nod as Pete appears on the roof, too. “We’ll live. But let’s not do that again, huh?”

Russ is suddenly down the ladder with us, squashed together. He puts an arm around me and gives me a sudden squeeze, on the charm offensive. “I thought it was awesome.” His face is beaming.
Wow
. He really did love it. “How often do you get to jump onto a moving train?”

“Luckily not very often.” Alice uses me to lever herself upright. Once she’s up, she transfers her arms around Russ, effectively cutting him off from me. Which is totally fine by me. The train speeds up a gear, jostling us against one another. “Door.” She points behind us. “Now can we go inside, please?”

Russ and Alice go in. I wait for Pete to come down off the roof.

“You OK?” I look at him. His goggles are around his neck and he’s breathing kind of heavy. He nods at me.

“Guess we solved our transport problem.”

I pull a face. “Guess we did.” I gesture for him to lead the way into the train. “Smitty’s got skills.”

“And passengers.” Pete’s brow is crinkled. At first I think he means us, but then I look where he’s looking. There, through the glass door at the end of the compartment we’ve just entered, are the passengers in question.

Oh, fudmukker
. Zoms on a Train.

I walk slowly down the corridor to them, not getting too close, because we all know what happens if you get too close. The nearest zom is squashed against the glass door, one bloodied hand slapping, a hat on askew, a little machine slung casually around his shoulder.

“It’s the conductor,” calls Alice, behind me. “I hope we all remembered our tickets.”

Behind him, there are more — five or six? Hard to say how many, but enough to be a problem. I sigh inwardly.

Alice doesn’t do inward sighs. “God!” she harrumphs. “Didn’t he think to check the stupid train before he went full steam ahead? That is so typically Smitty.”

“OK, so this is fine,” Pete gabbles. “We simply walk on the roof past that carriage, then climb down and uncouple the final two carriages. The Undead will be left behind on the tracks, and we are safe.”

“And you’re down with ‘uncoupling,’ Pete?” I shoot him a look. “Do it all the time?”

He shrugs. “How hard can it be? Smitty has apparently learned to operate a train.”

We go out into the fresh air again, amid Alice’s protests. She’s all leaden legs and green around the gills, and I feel her pain. We’re leaving the station behind, and this is quite a way to see Edinburgh and its occupants. Suddenly there are so many of them — every street I look down, they’re there, and on the tracks, and looking out of doorways. It’s like Zombie Town proper. I’m über-grateful we’re on the train; we never would have made it out on foot.

“It’s getting slippery up here.” Russ is first to hit the roof, and yes, it’s raining again. Not a full-on torrent, but the kind of soaking, fine drizzle that the UK specializes in. Makes everything kind of slimy. I grab the
ladder and carefully pull myself up after Alice, who, despite her protests, has clearly decided she doesn’t want to get left behind.

The train isn’t exactly going flat out, but it jiggles from side to side as it goes, which means the safest way to traverse the roof is kind of like a zombie stagger: feet spaced wide, arms held up in front, hands outstretched and ready to grab. Except if we’re grabbing anything, it’s going to be a piece of roof as we fall. Or each other. Russ reaches the end of the first carriage, and then drops to his knees.

“It’s no good, the carriages aren’t separate,” he shouts back at us. “We can’t undo them.”

As I get closer I see what he means; the train is segmented so that it can go around bends in the track, and there are individual carriages separated by internal doors. There probably is some way of adding or subtracting carriages, but not one that four teenagers on a rainy roof can figure out or execute.

“What now?” Pete shouts.

“We have to go back inside, we can’t stay here,” Alice whines.

“We need to warn Smitty.” I start zombie-ing up the train again.

“And how do we do that?” Alice yells after me.

I have no idea, but we can’t all ride this train together. Smitty clearly doesn’t know about his stowaways, and they could be sneaking up on him. Then we’ll be missing a driver. That would be unthinkable — and I’m not just being sentimental. The only thing worse than being on a train with zombies is being on a runaway train with zombies.

By the time I get to the front of the train, I’m crawling. Smitty’s clearly loving the need for speed. We’re coming out of the city, and the view would be pretty damn impressive if I wasn’t so frightened of falling
to my death. Vivid green hills, and I can see the sea, the fog lingering over the water. It’s on my left; as we all know, my geography pretty much stinks, but I think that means we’re going south, so at least that’s something. I flatten myself against the roof of the train and edge forward.

“What are you going to do?” Russ has caught up.

I answer him by reaching down and slapping the windshield below with my hands. Russ joins me. Then Alice is at my other side, and we’re all slapping away, trying to alert Smitty to let him know we’re here.

The train speeds up. A bit. Then a lot.

“He thinks we’re the friggin’ monsters!” Alice screams.

Damn, she’s right. He’s speeding up to try and shake us off. I wiggle forward on my belly.

“Keep tight hold of my legs!” I shout at the others, trying to banish thoughts of the soldiers slipping off that glass roof to the horror below.

“Oh my god, don’t do it!” Alice flops down on my right leg anyway.
Ow
.

Russ grabs my left leg, and I feel the pressure of my ankles being held. I pull myself forward until I’m hanging upside down over the front of the train, looking through the windshield. It’s surprisingly secure, the force of the train moving forward pinning me there like a bug. And there’s Smitty, leaning forward and peering up at me, his hand resting on a lever, his expression barely concealed panic.

“It’s us! Slow down!” I slap the window some more, perhaps a little too much, because he jolts upright and the train suddenly lurches forward faster. “Stop the train!” I shout. “We can’t get in.”

He gets control over his face and the train, and we slow right down. But he clearly can’t hear exactly what I’m saying, because we’re not stopping.

“Stop the train!” I scream. “Stop it!” I slice a hand across my neck. He gets the message, I hear the brakes screech below us, and I’m pulled up roughly from behind.

“What are you doing?” Alice says as I clamber back onto the roof. “We can’t stop here. Look at them!”

I hadn’t exactly been scoping out our surroundings as I was doing my Spider-Man routine. But now I see where we’re at. Out of the city, yes, and surrounded by fields. But in those fields — well, I can only describe it as the Nightmare Highland Games. Zombies in kilts stumbling around a soggy field. And now I know what that screeching noise was — not the brakes on the train, but bagpipes. These zombies are playing for us, wheezing and squeezing what has to be the weirdest instrument in the world at the best of times. It sounds like someone is torturing donkeys.

“That’s quite impressive.” Pete squints into the distance. “And I do believe one of them is tossing a caber.”

“And I do believe the rest of them are coming this way,” Russ yells. “No time to lose!” As the train draws to a halt, he slithers down off the train, and lands on the gravel below with a
crunch
and a bit of a yelp, then holds his hands up to help us. There are rungs down one side, and we use ’em. The driver’s door opens, Smitty offers a hand up, and one by one we are safe in the cab.

“Why didn’t you go in the door at the back?” Smitty fiddles with the lever and tries to start us up again.

“We did,” I say, “but we had company. Didn’t you think to check you
didn’t have any zoms on board before you picked this train?” I ease the door to the carriage open a crack. “Looks like this carriage is clear, and the next, but it’s hard to tell.”

Russ pats me on the shoulder. “Leave it up to me, I’ll check.” Alice smiles at him as he strides off into the carriage.

“He’s handy to have around, isn’t he?” Smitty snarks. “So I had some easy riders? Oops.” He presses some buttons on the dashboard. “It’s not like I had hundreds of trains to choose from.”

“Yeah. How come you can drive a train, you loser?” Alice snarls at him.

“Oh how I’ve missed you, Malice, let me count the ways …” He goes to tally on his fingers, then makes an
O
with finger and thumb. “That’ll be none.” He busies himself with the train controls again; we’re not moving yet. “I turned a key, pushed a lever, pressed a pedal. Ran a few of them over while I was working it out, but that’s no bad thing.”

“Well, can you get a move on now?” Alice points out the window, and we see the line of kilts staggering out onto the track.

“Hopefully,” Smitty says. “Might have been a fluke, me starting this thing last time.” He cranks something, and the engine starts up, and the train moves forward slowly. We all breathe a sigh of relief. “Sorted.” He leans back and puts his feet up on the dashboard as we slowly squish a hairy man with a huge sporran.

Russ bursts through the door, making us all jump.

“They’re only in the one carriage, the second to last one, where we saw them. We’ve got two clear carriages between them and us here, and I’m pretty sure we can secure the door if someone gives me a hand. I can detach one of the seats and wedge it in front.”

“I’m in,” Pete says.

Alice watches them go, then looks at us, rolls her eyes, and schleps out of the door with a groan.

Smitty looks at me. I look back. His eyes are different: older, sadder, but they still have the twinkle. His face breaks into a weary smile and he winks at me.

“Alone again, Roberta.” He affects my accent. “Wanna make out?”