Kansas City Death Train: 13

Part 12 is HERE.

Joe poked his mug up over the side of the boxcar and feigned fear in order to draw the first mantisoid towards him in blind, stupid hunger. An excited light flashed over the thing’s pseudopupils as its spiny raptoriales clattered faster and louder over the car’s metal roof.

Joe waited until the split-second before the alien’s mouth crunched over his head to drop down and let the thing’s momentum take it sailing in a frantic arc over him as he hung from the boxcar’s side by his fingertips. The fallen creature hit the ground at high speed and bounced up and down several times as parts of its exoskeleton broke open with spurts of green goo. The thing finally rolled to a stop of broken alien-freak, very still and very dead.

Joe wasted a precious second admiring his handiwork before scampering down the boxcar’s side and swinging himself below the undercarriage. He climbed deftly across the metal rails with the ground speeding beneath him.

Looking out from the boxcar’s underside, Joe saw that Big Eater’s massive tentacle still twisting blindly in the air as the rest of the creature, still within the boxcar, repeatedly smashed itself against the side to gain freedom. Joe couldn’t see this, but he could hear and feel it, several times seeing the wheels on one side of the train jump off the rails from the impact…