She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,198

steps!”

The shouting took the wind from his lungs, and Stack had to take a break a half dozen steps from the top. He didn’t sit, although he would have liked to. Instead he stood still, gripped the handrailing—the only thing keeping him from tumbling back down the steps like the man earlier, and drew in a series of breaths.

He never had a heart problem.

All the things wrong with his body read like a laundry list, but his ticker had never been part of the problem. Things changed, though, and if the pain in the left side of his chest was any indication, his heart was about to become another line item on his health insurance.

The pain in his chest was dull, a deep-rooted thump reminding him of his days playing football back in high school. A lifetime ago, the memories creeping back from someplace in his head as if only yesterday. Stack’s brain was funny like that. He couldn’t remember what he ate for dinner two days ago or even what he watched on television last, but at this particular moment he smelled the wet grass of the field behind the Macintosh farm, the scent of the dirt. He remembered the sun beating down from the east for the first time since the previous fall, and he remembered the pain of Henry Otter when he broke the line, got past Daryl Luthing, and barreled into him shoulder first, into his left flank. When the hit came, Stack remembered his mind telling him to hold the ball, and he fully intended to do that, but with Daryl’s shoulder smacking into him like a runaway bull came the sharp crack of a couple ribs, the complete evacuation of all air from his lungs, and the most godawful pain Stack had ever experienced. The football shot out of his hands straight up into the air and landed directly into the arms of Ernie Neidert, who ran it back for a touchdown. All of this played out in the second or two it took for Stack’s beaten body to crumble to the ground.

The pain Stack felt in his chest now felt no better than that day nearly seventy years earlier, and when the deep, burning ache had a good foothold in his chest, it began exploring, edging down his left arm all the way down to his fingers, still wrapped around the railing.

Stack didn’t want to die. He was too fucking stubborn to die, and he sure as shit wasn’t about to fall down his own stairs and end up spooning the shitknocker occupying that space now.

Pain or no pain, Stack tightened his grip on the railing and gave a good, solid tug. His legs kicked like pistons, and he shot up two steps, just like that. The pain in his chest fired back a ball of heat in protest, but before that could sink in and really deliver the hurt, Stack yanked at the railing again and made the last two steps. He collapsed on the floor of the narrow hallway at the top, his breathing ragged and drool leaving the corner of his mouth.

Someone walked up to him, came out into the hallway from the middle bedroom, the one with the expanded Wall of Weird. That someone stopped a few feet from his head. Stack tried to look up and get a better look at the person—all he could see were white shoes, white pants, and the bottom of a white coat much like the one worn by the man at the bottom of the stairs. Stack’s head wouldn’t move, though. His eyes barely wanted to move. He tried to swing his right arm around, the one holding the magnum, but as he did, he realized he was no longer holding the magnum. The gun might be on the floor beside him, or more likely he dropped it somewhere on the stairs. Either way, it wasn’t in his hand, and it did little good somewhere else.

The person standing beside him knelt down, got a little too close, and whispered in his ear. “That’s an interesting room you got there. My boss is gonna want to talk to you about that.”

Stack tried to tell the guy that he wasn’t about to talk to him, his boss, or the President of the United States, and if he did, he’d tell all of them fuckwad-nothing, but when he opened his mouth to speak, nothing came out but more drool, the pain in his chest and