Page 5 of January Bell

CHAPTER

FOUR

LILY

“No freaking way,” I say out loud, then immediately clamp my mouth shut, because the last thing I want to do is draw attention to where I’m dangling overhead like a piece of meat on a spit.

Thankfully, there’s no fire. I screw my mouth up to one side. On the other hand, maybe the smoke from the fire would get this over faster.

It’s taken some time for my brain to catch up to what it is I’m actually looking at.

My first thought was a dinosaur.

My second was that was impossible.

My third was that chickens are in fact dinosaurs, and this is without a doubt the largest chicken I have ever seen.

Not that I’ve seen many. I didn’t grow up on a farm, and being a personal assistant to the city’s most notorious personal injury lawyer didn’t exactly put me in a position to handle a lot of chickens. But I am in fact a human, which means that I spent a lot of time identifying barnyard animals as a toddler. And this is, without a doubt, a chicken. Thank you very much to Old MacDonald and his farm.

A chicken roughly the size of a tank.

Its beady little dinosaur eyes look at me, and I swallow, all too aware of the fact that I’m still dangling overhead like some sort of yummy treat.

Or worse, a piñata ready to be burst open. I wince. That mental image did not help my mental state.

Fuck.

Chickens are omnivores, and judging from the way this chicken’s looking at me I’m definitely on the menu.

“BAAAWK,” the chicken thunders loud enough to make the tree tremble, which in turn sends me shivering as the rope jostles on the branch above. Blood floods loudly back into my ears, and I wince, slightly horrified by the indignity of my inevitable demise by chicken beak.

Didn’t have that as a possible death scenario I played on repeat before bed after the Roth invaded.

“Bawk?” the chicken asks, tilting its head, one foot in the air, huge talons lifting.

I never stopped to think about how sharp a chicken’s talons might actually be, probably because I’ve never been around a live one, but also because typically chicken talons aren’t the size of my torso. I never really thought a lot about dinosaurs and the evolution of chickens, but I sure as hell am now.

“You have nice feathers,” I tell it weakly, the sound of my voice strange in my ears after being upside down for so long.

The chicken lifts a wing and preens underneath it, eyes closing, before its attention is diverted to another sound behind it.

“Oh balls,” I mutter, doing my best to stay utterly still as a second chicken comes into view.

It’s even more enormous than the first, with the large red appendage bobbling on top of its head, and I swallow hard, a difficult thing to do when you’re upside down, I might add.

The goddamned rooster looks pissed off. And hungry. It stretches its throat out, looking straight up into the sky, and screams, “COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!” so ferociously that it hits me all at once: forget the chicken, the thing I need to be afraid of is this beast.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling I’m going to be dinner for the monster rooster.

“Shit shit shit,” I mutter frantically.

How the hell am I going to get out of this?

Maybe if I can finally get the comms tablet out of where it’s tucked into my pants, something I haven’t been able to do yet…

Oh shit. I shouldn’t have moved.

The rooster’s head tilts, and I don’t even have time to close my eyes before its beak lashes out, cutting me down from the snare that’s held me up in the air for who knows how long. Well, Ken No Privates probably knows, but fuck that guy.