I did the equation on my DT after checking the speed of the train with the built-in laser. Factoring in my weight, my surface area, and the length and diameter of the jelly rope, I should dig in for 5.19009 seconds before letting myself go. If I were off by. 6 seconds either way, it wouldn’t end well.
I readied my timer, gripped the rope under the hammer, and began to twirl it.
The ground rumbled harder, and I could hear the train now, a gathering storm of pounding engines and steel wheels.
Of the two ways to screw up, I disliked dragging more. Might be smart to keep the Nife in mind to cut the rope if my head started bouncing off of railroad ties.
But then, smacking hard into the train, bouncing off unconscious, and then being dragged to death was potentially worse than being dragged from the get-go.
Or hitting so hard it shattered my bones, then sticking there on the train for ninety minutes until it reached Chicago, every bump and vibration absolute agony.
I remember Teague playing a video in our office a few months ago called Extreme Hobo Deaths 7. This one guy somehow got his legs cut off, an inch at a time, as he slowly slipped under the wheels. Another one hit upside down and his face was erased, pressing against the rail. He lived, and now spends his days alternating between being fed mush through a tube and screaming for someone to kill him.
This was really a bad idea. WTF was I thinking?
Then the train was upon me, and I thought about Vicki, thought about never seeing her again because I was killed in prison, and I threw the hammer.
It clanged against one of the grain cars, the glue forming an instant mollybond. I braced myself, tensing my feet, leaning slightly back as the jelly rope played out – and that was when I realized I’d forgotten to hit my timer.
Panic spiked my adrenaline even higher. How much time had already passed? Half a second? A full second?
Assume a second and count, dammit!
“One one thousand…”
The jelly rope was uncoiling like a tornado, half of it gone.
“Two one thousand…”
Now the rope had all played out, tugging on my chest lightly as it began to go taut.
“Three one thousand…”
I leaned back as the rope stretched, going from a slight pull to a serious yank, almost pulling me off my feet.
“Four one thousand…”
I leaned back at a forty-degree angle, my heels digging into the dirt, gritting my teeth as I strained against the tremendous force.
“Five one thousand…”
I jumped, springing ten feet into the air, rocketing at the train extremely fast.
Too fast.t.
The potential energy in the elastic had become kinetic energy, hurtling me toward the train much faster than it could speed away. I was within fifty yards of it and accelerating, traveling in an imperceptible arc, pinwheeling my arms in an effort to slow down.
I wondered if the train had its rear cameras on, and if I’d make the cover of Extreme Hobo Deaths 8.
Twenty-five yards to impact and I was still going too fast. When I hit, I’d fragment like a snowball.
Ten yards away, and I began to rapidly slow down. As my speed came closer to matching the speed of the train, it seemed like everything was taking a lot longer to happen. The wind, screaming in my ears and drowning out the roar of the engine, was countering my momentum.
In a fraction of a second I went from worrying about splattering to worrying I wasn’t going to reach the train at all.
I tucked my knees up and my elbows in, streamlining my body, trying to cut down the wind resistance for the last few yards, getting slower and slower until it seemed like both the train and I had come to a complete stop. I reached out, floating gently though the air, and finally touched the side of the grain car, gently as kissing a lover.
I slapped my hands against it, the millions of setae on the gecko tape forming van der Waals adhesion and sticking me to the aluminum. Unlike a mollybond, which combined molecules into solid compounds, the gecko tape induced dipole forces. The result was very sticky and incredibly strong, but easy to remove by peeling the material away from the angle of incidence.
While the scientific principle was simple enough, trying to climb up the side of a train speeding at eighty miles per hour was anything but. The wind and the speed made me feel like I weighed three hundred pounds. Plus the dipole on the gecko tape shifted, making it tricky to break the adhesion. I placed a hand onto the roof of the train, trying to pull myself on top, and felt a sharp tug.
Immediately, I was a flag flapping in the breeze, only one hand still on the train. I turned around, trying to figure out what had a hold of me, and saw my jelly rope stretching off into the distance.
It had snagged a tree.
I breathed a sigh of relief for my misaligned dipole-had I put the tape on correctly, I’d be wrapped around the tree right now.
My relief was short-lived. Van der Waals’s forces would rip my arm from my body before the gecko tape detached from the train. Since it had already pulled taut enough to yank my other three limbs away, I figured I had less than two seconds before I lost the arm.
I frantically reached for my Nife with my bad right hand, missed the sheath, and my palm stuck to my side.
The jelly rope pulled so tight I no longer worried about losing my arm.
That was because I realized it would crush my chest first.
TWENTY-NINE
It was hard enough to breathe with the wind slapping me in the face and blowing my cheeks wide open, turning my tongue into a dried-out piece of beef jerky. But with the jelly rope constricting my chest like an anaconda, breathing was impossible. Not that I’d be short of breath for long. In just a few nanoseconds my rib cage would be only slightly wider than my spine.
Seeing red, I yanked my stuck hand, hard as I could. The gecko tape stayed attached to my shirt, but the shirt ripped away, allowing me to unsheathe the Nife.
I slashed blindly behind me, hoping I’d nick the rope. Then, suddenly, I was free, my lungs greedily sucking in air, the terrible stretching/crushing feeling replaced by wonderful freedom.
Elation became fear as the slingshot effect once again threw me into the air, my hand peeling off the roof of the train as I sailed several feet over the top.
I bent into a pike, trying to grab the speeding train below me, knowing the last car was coming up fast and soon there wouldn’t be anything to grab. My Nife trailed across the roof, digging a trench in the aluminum, and then I’d flown too far, staring down at the ground rushing past, realizing that would be the last thing I ever saw.
I jerked to a sudden stop, the gecko tape on my knee catching on the train, slapping me against the side, facing upside down. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or sob, so I laughed.
My laughter died abruptly when I saw the viaduct coming up. There was very little space between the concrete support pillars and the moving train. When we reached it, it would scrape me off like a bug on a windshield.
I had ten seconds, tops.
I put the Nife handle in my teeth and placed my palms on the side of the train, pushing myself sideways, heading for the car ahead of me a few feet away. If I could crawl in between the cars before hitting the viaduct, I’d be safe. But it was easier said than done. The wind was insane, whipping by so fast it caught my goggles and yanked them off. My muscles had nothing left to give. I inched forward, hand… knee… hand… knee… not daring to see how much time I had left.
Incredibly, I reached the link between the cars with a few seconds to spare. But, like the rest of this train ride, my happiness was short-lived. To cut down on wind resistance, the cars had a rubber screen between them, shielding the link.
I removed the Nife from my aching jaws and slashed the divider The viaduct almost on me Slipping through the slit in the rubber No time left The tip of my shoe whacked against the stone support column as we rocketed past.