Thicker Than Water

’

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.

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.

"Taking it very slowly, I made a tentative pass at the whole complicated business of sitting up and then standing. It hurt a lot, but in some ways it had the abstract fascination of a crossword puzzle: finding joints that still pivoted and muscles capable of doing some actual work, and putting them together so that I moved in the directions I wanted to go.

Moving forward was even more of a challenge, because my head was full of fizzing static and my eyes were still refusing to focus or even to combine their efforts and look in the same direction. A concussion? That would be bad.

Inching my way along the rail, I made it to a fence and - after a few false starts - scrambled-slid-slipped over it into a narrow alley that led out onto st l I the street.