I eyed the train, bracing my feet against the stakes, trying to envision success and push away the catastrophic failure that kept running though my head. I’d talked with hobos before, and they’d said the key was the release. If you went too soon, the jelly rope didn’t maximize its potential energy, and you’d be dragged to a horrible death. If you went too late, you’d hit the train traveling too fast, and splat against it like a bug on a windshield.
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.
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.