Thicker Than Water

With a frown of effort, the dead man leaned hard into the business of throttling me. His grip tightened, and all strength went out of me in a black, liquid tide. I shouldn’t have bothered with the knee to the groin, I should have been trying to break his grip. I scrambled for his hands now, but I couldn’t make my own hands move in synch or take a tight hold of anything. I was sinking into a swamp sown with broken glass. I was broken myself, and every ragged edge of me was shrilling in atonal discord like the factory sirens of Hell. My eyes were still open, but the seat of my consciousness seemed to drop from its usual position right behind them, plummeting into stippled darkness.

Time to fight dirty - assuming you count a knee to the balls as fighting clean. I went for the dead man’s eyes, hooking my thumbs into the sockets and squeezing with as much force as I could bring to bear.

The zombie rolled off me with a spluttered curse, one hand raised to his face, the other groping blindly at the planking. I rolled away in the opposite direction, struggling to get my knees back under me. That was the wrong move, because the dead man wasn’t groping blindly at all, he was reaching for the hammer. It swung around in a tight arc and staved in my third rib.

I screamed in agony, further tearing my already badly mangled throat. The dead man went two for one, smashing me in the chin with the blunt end of the hammer as he brought it up for another blow. I jackknifed, kicking out with both feet because it was the only thing I could do. Luck was with me, and my right foot met the guy’s arm as he brought the hammer down again. It went spinning out of his hand end over end, ricocheting off the suicide nets and fetching up ten yards from us.

But that was all I had in me. I slumped back onto the boards, my vision filling with black, granular static.

I think I actually blacked out for a moment or two. The next thing I was aware of was movement: the movement of my own body. Someone was lifting me, strong arms hooked around my lower chest. The pain was indescribable, because the pressure was right against the rib that had been damaged by the hammer.

‘It’s all right,’ said a voice. It was a woman’s voice, soft and low and very gentle - a stark contrast to the strong grip around my middle. ‘It’s all right, Fix.’

It wasn’t all right. My head was still swimming and the gorge was rising in my stomach. I was terrified of what would happen if I threw up: involuntary muscular spasms would tear through my tortured throat and bounce me off the diving board of agony in a spastic triple salto. I tried to pull away from my rescuer’s grip, but she wasn’t having any. As I sank she raised me up again, whether I liked it or not.

I was too close to the rail and my balance was off. I was still rising, and my Good Samaritan was leaning against me from behind now, pressing me hard against the rail.

‘Hey—’ I choked out.

She shifted her grip, clamping one hand on the back of my neck to push me forwards through a gap in the suicide nets. Then she got hold of my leg with the other hand and lifted my feet off the ground.

‘I can’t let you do it,’ she said, her voice strained and breaking. ‘God forgive me, but I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

There was the distant honk of a train’s klaxon, and the rails below me gave a tinny death rattle.

My eyesight cleared for a moment, at the worst possible point in the proceedings. I was staring down at the tracks far below, and even though there was a slight red shift to the scene I knew exactly what it meant.

I was about to impact on those rails at a modest but effective nine point eight metres per second - head first. And then the train was going to roll over me.

I got a good grip on one of the steel uprights and squirmed in the woman’s arms, leaning my weight backwards to mess up her leverage. That brought my head around to the point where I was staring straight into her face.

His face. Paler than pale, and with a steel ring punctuating his right eyebrow.

Despite the unmistakably feminine voice, this was the dead man. My two attackers were one and the same.

Shock took the strength out of my arms. He gave one last heaving push and I fell towards the tracks below.

The freight train shot past at the same second, more or less. I caromed off the roof of the first carriage, bounced through the air like a matador who’d picked on the wrong bull, and went arse over tip into the neck-high gorse and brambles beside the track. The impact knocked the breath out of me, and the last vestiges of consciousness.

I came back to the world again slowly, and piecemeal. From where I was lying, the walkway above cut across my field of vision like a bend sinister. There was no sign of anyone up there, which was kind of a relief.