“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.
I took a deep breath and waited for the tornado to hit, pick up the train, and hurl it into the sun.
There was no tornado. For the moment, I was safe.
The space between the cars was dark and quiet compared to the outside. I stood on the coupling, sheathed the Nife, and then pressed my earlobe.
“Call Vicki. Adjust sound filter for clarity.”
When she picked up, we both said, “Are you okay?” at the same time.
“You first,” I told her.
“I’m at Sata’s. I just got here.”
“Problems with the cops?”
“They questioned me for a while. I told the truth.”
“Good. There’s nothing to lie about. Nothing to hide. Was Teague there?”
“For a little bit. He left when he caught your trail. But there’s something else. The cops… they found something.”
“What?”
“Bugs.”
“You mean listening devices? Could they track them?”
“I assume they’re trying to.”
I wondered who would bug my house, and why. It might not have been related to me at all. For all I knew, one of Vicki’s clients liked to eavesdrop on her.
“Where were they? Your bedroom?”
“There were four. One was in my bedroom. One was in our bedroom. One in the kitchen, and one on the
