The Sound of Broken Ribs(71)
Something in the dead woman’s chest was moving, was poking up from her between her small breasts like jutting fingers, tenting the fabric of her shirt.
Belinda crawled up the back of the couch. “What the fuck?”
Clickety-clack, clickclickclick…
The sound was everywhere, a terrific cracking, like icebergs expanding and colliding. A great creaking cacophony of chaotic shifting. A noise so deep and dissonant that her bones thrummed and her skin rippled like pond water in its presence. This was the sound the earth made under the heels of gods.
The author’s ribs exploded from her chest. Jutted like claws. Among them, a black hand with long sickly yellow claws. The hand slapped down beside the body. Then another arm extended from the chest cavity. It too slammed down. The arms pressed and lifted.
From the corpse rose a monster whose existence Belinda’s mind refused to believe. A creature of impossible design. Emaciated torso. Arms longer than its legs. Small, flat yellow dots for eyes residing in a great oval of a head. Flesh as black and smooth as lava rock. No nose. A mouth of matte-yellow teeth the size of human fingernails. Its breath was carrion.
Your agony is music.
The voice was in her head. All around her. Her mind quaked with every word.
I have heard your song.
Belinda shrieked as she fell over the back of the couch. She rolled. Bounded to her hands and knees. Scrabbled for the nearest exit. The back door. Out. Up. Running.
It gave chase. She could hear it behind her. Its every step the boom of tribal drums.
As Belinda fled around the side of the cabin and bolted for the main house where she knew there to be another human capable of helping her, a single image flickered into her mind:
The tabloid Jack Kennedy had shown her that day in the grocery store. The one with Lei Duncan’s face plastered on the front. The title of Duncan’s newest book flashed like neon in the nightscape of her mind.
THE EBONY ONE
Madness. Nothing but madness. To think a fiction had come to life to chase her through this group of cabins was madness.
I have answered your call.
Belinda screamed at the intrusion—the violation of her mind.
I have accepted your sacrifice.
She pushed harder. Ran faster.
Suppertime.
In her mind, a low, rumbling chuckle rattled her teeth in their moorings.
*
Pam Baker twirled the spiral cord on the office phone while her boyfriend Derrick droned on into her ear. If she were smacking gum, this would be an ‘80’s movie. Well, her tits were too big for her to play, like, the lead role or something like that, but she could totally pull off the chubby friend.
“I met my favorite author today,” she said, cutting Derrick off in the middle of a diatribe about “retarded people”. His words, not hers. She considered herself a Social Justice Warrior of a kind. She didn’t rally around internet chat rooms or protest anything, but she thought that she thought like an SJW, and her mother had always said, “If you think you’re something, you’re gonna be that something.”
Totes.
“What? Is your favorite author retarded?”
“No. But I think she’s friends with that one midget writer. The guy you like. That genre guy?”
“Jeff Brackett?”
“No. Less furry.”
“Chatmon?”
“Yeah, but nah. That’s not his name. Like, he came out of the closet a few years back, or something.”
“Chatmon’s not gay.”
“Who said he was gay?”
“You said—fuck it. It doesn’t matter. Where was I?”
“Something was retarded.”
“Right.” Derrick cleared his throat. “So you got your three levels of Tard. You got your ReTards, which isn’t PC, but it’s accurate. ReTards are just slow. Hell, rising bread is retarded, you feel me? Then you got your FuckTards. These are the Tards that don’t want to educate themselves. They go through life, day by day, being dumber than shit on toast and twice as smelly, wondering why they aren’t going anywhere in life. Then you hand them a book and they look at you like you just tongued their anus. And, finally, you got your basic Tards. Your BasTards. These fuckers didn’t have both parents around, so they’re only half as tarded as—”
A distant but loud POP! cut off the rest of Derrick’s monologue. The first POP! was then followed by several more.
“Derrick?”
“Yeah?”
“I think someone’s outside letting off fireworks.”
“Are they retarded?”
“Huh? Wha—How would I know?”
“If you don’t know if they’re retarded or not, why the fuck are you interrupting me all the goddamn time?”
“Whatever. Shut up. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Don’t fucking—”
She hung up on him. He’d be mad at her until she sucked him off, but that would have to wait until she got home. She glanced at the clock—1:20 in the afternoon. He’d be waiting a whole eight more hours. Poor him.
The phone rang. She ignored it. Someone was banging on the office door. Figured. Two months with only two customers and then two customers in one day. Just her luck, the cabins would fill up tonight and she’d have to stay over. Policy was policy, though, and Pam Baker was all about policy.