Vicky Peterwald: Survivor (Vicky Peterwald Series Book 2)

by Mike Shepherd

  It did, but not all that much closer.

  She softened her bite on the hairpin and slowly worked it out farther, praying her hold on the damn thing, either with her teeth or her lips, wouldn’t fail her now. She stretched for her wrist.

  She could just barely get the edge of the pin into the lock. She got it in. She got it moving a little.

  And she lost the pin.

  It took her a couple of minutes wiggling around in the bed to find the pin, but no matter how she tried to twist her neck, she couldn’t pick it up again.

  Near cross-eyed, she frowned at the hairpin, then decided desperate times called for desperate measures. Again, she began throwing herself from side to side. The bed bounced once, twice, then, with a mighty heave, it flipped over.

  Vicky found herself facedown on the floor with the bed on top of her.

  “Never tried it this way,” she told no one in particular.

  The pin had followed its own path to the floor. She had to do a bit of wiggling, nothing new for her naked, but under the bed kind of added a new twist to matters. Finally, she had the hairpin back in her mouth.

  She also had a sliver of wood in her right boob and another in her tongue.

  Vicky lost it all, big-time.

  “Damn it,” she shouted, “I’m a Peterwald. No one does this to a Peterwald. Certainly not someone who just slept her way into the family. Stepmom, you and me, we are going to finish this.”

  Vicky got the hairpin back between her teeth and took another try at the lock.

  Close, but no damn cigar.

  She tried again.

  No way.

  “Okay, we got the bed to give up some space before. Bed, you and me are going to twist as much as we have to.”

  Vicky worked the bed back up on its side. It was no easy thing with just one foot on the floor and the rest of her in the bed’s clutches, but she managed to get it where she wanted it.

  Then she shoved it up against the door.

  Nothing happened.

  About the tenth or twentieth time she hit the door with the bed, the lock popped open, and she found the bed headed into a hall.

  That didn’t do much for her, so she wedged the foot of the bed against the end of the door and started seeing what kind of leverage she could get on the bed between them.

  The bed creaked and bent, but it did not snap.

  Vicky alternated between shoving against the top of the headboard and pushing hard against its bottom. The wood did a lot of moaning and groaning as it strained against her efforts. Better yet, Vicky could feel the wood start working.

  “Are you a loose bed?” Vicky asked. She knew she’d been a plenty loose woman. What she was now was a very hurting woman. She was feeling pain in places she didn’t know a woman could or should.

  She was leaning into the headboard, putting all the torque on it that she could manage, thinking she might take another try at seeing if she could reach the cuff lock . . . when the bed emitted a snap, and something came very loose.

  The post had parted from the upper sapling. The slat holding her right hand came loose and the handcuff slid up and off.

  Vicky had a hand free!

  She only needed a moment to work the lock and free her other hand.

  Now she lay with the bed on its side, her falling out of it, but her right leg still held up high in the air.

  “I’ve had a few boys who would have loved to see me in this predicament,” she muttered, and struggled to pull herself up on her one free leg. She was hurting. Hurting bad as she bounced on one leg to get herself in reach to work the damn cuff’s lock.

  When the last lock snapped open, she made a grab for the bed, then, putting it to the best use yet, settled slowly to the floor.

  For a long moment, she sat there, cross-legged on the floor, her body shaking uncontrollably.

  Her body was shaken, but she wasn’t.

  “I did it. I did it. I did it all by myself!” she shouted, over and over again.

  When the trembling finally stopped, she used the bed again, this time to pull herself up. One of the slats would make a very nice spike in case she ran into any vampire that needed staking.

  “It won’t be much good against a machine pistol,” she admitted, but considering her luck of late, she wouldn’t bet against her running into anything.

  The hall that had been so close but so far away for so long turned out to be only the walking space between the cabin’s two bedrooms. The other room was as primitive as the one she’d been in. More so. The two pallets that lay on the floor didn’t even sport a bedstead.

  Down the hall was a common room that included a fieldstone fireplace and a kitchen with a cast-iron woodstove and a metal sink.

  There, glory be to one and all, was a water pump.

  Vicky made a beeline to it. She worked the wooden handle on the pump, but only ugly noises came out, no water.

  “Damn them,” she said, then her eyes lighted on a battered tin can. She lifted it to her lips. The water within was scummy and hot, but it was water.

  Vicky barely stopped herself before she gulped it down.

  “You’ve got to prime the pump,” Vicky said, remembering the words before she remembered where she’d heard them.

  It was Doc Maggie who told her that. They’d been discussing economics and the need to put money in if you wanted to take money out. Something Maggie didn’t think her father did often enough.

  A young Vicky had asked what she meant. “Prime a pump?”

  “You’ve never seen a pump, have you?” Maggie had said. “I doubt if any of you kids in the palace have ever seen one or likely ever will.”

  But Maggie had done an internship in one of the more primitive areas of St. Petersburg, and she had actually worked an old-fashioned hand pump.

  Now, Vicky suspected that she was also in one of those primitive areas, and the metal piping with a long wooden handle very likely was what Maggie had been talking about that day.

  Vicky lifted a metal flap at the top of the pump. Yep, it was damp in there. With a prayer to a God she knew nothing about, Vicky poured the water down the hole.

  Then she again applied herself to working the wooden pump handle. For an agonizing moment, nothing happened. Then all Vicky got was a racket that left her even more thirsty. Finally, with a gurgle and a gush, water poured forth from the rusty mouth of the pump.

  Vicky kept pumping with one hand. The other she used to catch and lift to her mouth cool, deliciously wet, water. She lowered her head and dunked it in the spurting stream of water. Only after she had refilled the metal cup did she use a cork stopper to plug up the sink. She filled it before beginning to wash herself all over.

  There was a lot of scum she needed to be rid of. Some was on her skin. A lot more of it was out there, waiting for her.

  “Speaking of waiting for me,” Vicky muttered, and took a look out the window above the sink. She spotted a corral of rough-hewn logs, but it held no animals. There was a rusting old truck, but it was up on blocks, and its wheels lacked tires. Vicky was not likely to get a ride there.

  She edged herself up to the other windows and peered out. There were wooded hills not too far away, snow-clad mountains in the distance. The meadow around the house was green and empty.

  “Stepmom, you bastard, you really did intend for me to die of thirst,” she concluded. She measured the thirst she’d felt before she quenched it at the pump, then multiplied it by several days.

  “You bitch. I was toying with the idea of raising that banner of rebellion against you. Now you’ve bought it full price and full measure. Stepmom, only one of us is coming out of this alive, and it’s not going to be you.”

  It was one thing to say that. At the moment, Vicky not only questioned her ability to kill her stepmother but kind of wondered at her chances of survi
ving the next couple of days. Hours even.

  Being a hardheaded Peterwald, she set out to take stock of her empire. Hers was a bit smaller than her father’s, and it looked to have even less to offer.

  A visit to the rusting truck showed that it not only lacked tires, but the engine was long gone. Vicky could find nothing worth stripping from the wreck. Most everything that could be taken had been.

  The corral was empty. Its split rails were lashed together with some sort of plastic binding, not even a nail for Vicky to arm herself with.

  From the lack of any droppings, it had been empty for a very long time. The only things in it were some huge flying things that buzzed Vicky. She could swat them away. It was the tiny things that swarmed around her that annoyed her. They didn’t bite but did seem attracted to the water on her skin.

  She gave up slapping herself silly and did her best to ignore them.

  The barn was no more generous than the rest of the ranchstead. There wasn’t as much as a rusting pitchfork or a piece of broken leather harness. Even the few bales of hay were broken and molding.

  In its shade, Vicky did discover gnats or mosquitoes that bit. She swatted them and was rewarded with bloody splotches on her skin.

  The walk around the barnyard reminded Vicky that she never even went to the pool without sandals. She was very tender of foot.

  A return to the house and a thorough search turned up nothing of her uniform. No panties or bra. Most especially, no shoes.

  Sitting on the edge of the porch, she examined her options. Somewhere in her survival training she remembered something about staying put. Wait in one place for rescue. Now she recalled sorry tales of lost people and rescuers wandering around in circles and missing each other.

  Missing each other until someone stupid was dead.

  While the prospects of sitting still might be nice on her tender feet, this place had nothing to offer her but water. She could probably last without food for a week or two, but what were the chances that her assassins would come back sooner for her desiccated body?

  Sooner than any rescuers?

  That raised the issue, was the house transmitting her tribulations for someone to enjoy or only recording them for retrieval and later enjoyment?

  “No way would Stepmommy dearest allow her Vicky darling to die in private.”

  If a shack like this one was transmitting live, it would have to attract attention. The Navy would not miss that. No, this place had to be off the grid.

  She stood and walked into the middle of the yard. As she’d observed on her approach to the landing at Kiev, there were mountains to her east. Thus, there was likely a very wide river somewhere around here.

  She shook her head. It could be to her east or west. They could have crossed it in the night. She could have been driven two, three, even four hundred miles inland during her drugged sleep. All she knew was that somewhere to the south was the Midland Sea, and the mountains were to her east. Her route lay south. How east or west she was stood as a question mark.

  It would be nice to send out an “I’m here, come get me” signal before she started her walk. The question was, how subtle did she need to be.

  “No, the question is: How do I do it?”

  She returned to the corral. She thought she’d noticed some familiar rocks there. She found two that looked like flint. Try as she might, she could not get them to spark when she struck them together. Then she remembered. Sparks came not from flint on flint but from flint on steel.

  She headed back to the truck. It had little to offer her, but she managed to work a few pieces of the rusted steel frame off the wreck.

  With flint and steel, she headed for the barn. The place had seen better days. There was plenty of rotten punk, fortunately dry. There was also some straw that was less moldy than the rest.

  It took her an hour, but she finally got a fire going. In a whole lot less time, the barn was fully involved, sending fire and gray smoke up to the heavens.

  Vicky had heard somewhere about fire being used to make offerings to the gods. She hoped the Navy god was paying attention.

  Of course, the stepmommy-bitch god might also be attentive to her prayers.

  Vicky headed for the hills. Not the mountains east but the wooded hills to the west.

  She was in the trees before the barn collapsed in upon itself. It was still smoking, though, and her hope for rescue rose with it up to the heavens.

  CHAPTER 61

  BEING tender of foot, Vicky tried to stay to the softer ground. Sadly, even she could see that she was leaving a trail. That would be good if Mannie was racing to her rescue.

  If the Empress’s murderers were ahead of Mannie, not so good.

  Before too long, she came to a well-shaded stream; she waded into it and turned south. She stepped carefully to keep her balance, to avoid flipping rocks, and, very much to avoid doing a full flop in midstream. That would be a definite “hello” for those following her.

  While she tried to stay invisible to overhead observation, she kept her ears peeled for the sound of helicopters. Her efforts to keep quiet didn’t seem to matter much. She appeared to have the place all to herself. Just herself and the four-legged types that lived here.

  In the undergrowth, Vicky found a reddish green leaf and gobbled it up with gusto, if not the proper spices, praising the Pathfinder girls with enthusiasm and precision. In the last few hours, she’d gained a whole new understanding of hunger. She’d have to see that another fleet of emergency food relief got headed for Poznan. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to start a survey of the local planets, either. If she sent out scouts, they might find places that were even hungrier.

  Being a Grand Duchess was fun . . . when she wasn’t dodging her family’s traditional values and assassins. The Navy had been an education. What she was getting now was something more than an education.

  This was experience.

  And this experience would be with her the rest of her life.

  “And I’m going to have a long life,” she told the sky, “unlike you, Annah. Unlike you, my grasping corpse.”

  The water was cold, leaving Vicky’s teeth with a tendency to chatter. She balanced her passage south between time in the water leaving no trail and time walking carefully along the bank that very likely did leave a trail despite her best efforts. There were game trails through the woods. Paths the animals followed. They weren’t wide, and she was getting all kind of cuts from the brush and thorns along the trails, but she used the trails to let her move quickly.

  Evening came, and she dined on more salad greens before pulling up several handfuls of grass from a meadow and spreading it under a bush to make an if not cozy, then at least warm enough, bower.

  In the night, she heard a helicopter pass overhead. With no way to tell if it was friend or death, she chose to lie low and wait for the morning. She suspected tomorrow would be very challenging, if not interesting.

  She was up at first light; her hunger woke her as much as the dawn.

  As she headed south, she kept an eye out for more of that salad she’d had for supper, but she spotted none. She picked up a rounded pebble from the stream. If she spotted one of those floppy-eared things the boys had killed, she was game for giving it a try even if the thought of cutting into one still made her squeamish.

  She saw nothing worth making a throw at.

  Before too long, though, she started hearing the sounds of unmuffled vehicle engines rumbling through the woods to the north. She quickened her pace downstream, trying to move silently, tracklessly, away from the sound.

  “If I were Mannie, I’d be in a helicopter using a loudspeaker to tell me I was safe,” Vicky muttered.

  For now, she did not feel very safe.

  The problem was that, other than fleeing, she couldn’t think of any way to make herself safe.

  While she puzzl
ed over that problem, she fled like a frightened deer, of which there were several keeping her company. Being a battleship Sailor, she’d gotten few courses on dirtside survival and paid even less attention to the ones she was obliged to sit through.

  “Dumb little shit,” she chided herself. “In the future, I will not assume I know everything about my future.”

  She considered some of the things she’d learned from the Pathfinder boy. She’d spotted the tough grass that he’d used to make twine, but she doubted that a bit of twine would trap the booted feet following her. With only her two hands, there was no way to dig some of the traps she’d seen in vids.

  “There’s not much I know how to do with my own two hands and bare-ass naked,” she finally concluded.

  What she did know was that she’d become predictable—again.

  She’d been moving south along this same creek, now widened into a stream, for most of yesterday afternoon and all of this morning.

  “It’s time to do something off my beaten path.”

  The stream passed through a rocky section. There was a touch of white water and some solid rock on her right. When she found the chance, she climbed up onto the rock and headed uphill, into more rocks. Even taking as much care as she could to avoid breaking a twig or twisting a bush, she knew she was leaving wet tracks. Fortunately, the day was warming up. Given an hour or so, the tracks would be obliterated by the sun.

  She climbed, moving from rock to rock. She did not climb very expertly. She dislodged a rock here and there. One landed on her toe as it bounced off down behind her. She muttered a curse and kept heading for higher ground.

  She froze when she heard the motors get suddenly louder. Through the trees on the other side of the stream, she could just make out three rigs. All were four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicles. Each carried two men in tandem.

  The one in back of all three had a scoped rifle at the ready.

  Vicky melted into the shadows of some trees beside a rocky outcrop and kept climbing. The top of the ridge wasn’t much farther. If she could make it over that, she’d have some pretty rough ground between them and her.