Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl)

by Christopher Rice

  “I’m sorry,” Stephen says. “I need to clarify something, Julia. Are you saying we should be impressed that our test subject didn’t simply take it upon herself to tear open the man’s jugular vein with her bare hands without asking first?”

  “I am. Because unlike you, apparently, I’ve actually paid attention to what that monster’s done to her, and unlike you, I’m having trouble referring to him as a man.”

  “And here we are again!” Stephen barks, holding up his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. “Swimming in this . . . sentiment, and every time we do we lose sight of the most important question. Are we field-testing Zypraxon so we can harvest paradrenaline from her blood, or are we funding reckless vigilante missions? But any such discussion becomes impossible as soon as you all start speaking of our test subject as if she’s a superhero and a martyr in one.”

  “It’s also difficult when you mischaracterize the nature of her request.”

  Noah’s voice is greeted by silence.

  Reacting to his contribution would only make it more disruptive, so Cole stares at the conference table before him, trying not to clench his fists. Noah steps forward until the faces on-screen stop looking for him, appearing to lock on his position. In the end, there’s no reason for Cole’s business partners to be all that surprised their head scientist is at Kansas Command, only that Cole didn’t make clear he was on the call.

  It’s not the first time The Consortium’s laid eyes on the mad genius who’s caused them all so much wonder and grief. But the blend of wariness and reverence with which they seem to view him has never changed. Even Stephen looks like he’s afraid Noah might get the jump on him if he looks away.

  “Charlotte hasn’t asked for permission to tear open Cyrus Mattingly’s jugular vein. She’s asked for permission to show him the extent of her abilities as a means of frightening him into sharing what he knows of these ‘others.’”

  “And then what?” Stephen asks. “We fan out all over the country looking for them?”

  “Cole brought me in on this operation so I could assess Charlotte’s actions and mind-set. It would be inappropriate for me to speak to the logistics of the operation at this time. But if we are going to parse the specifics of her behavior, I feel it’s my duty to respond.”

  “I apologize for mischaracterizing Bluebird’s request,” Stephen says. “Allow me to clarify.”

  Julia cuts in. “Before Stephen launches into another lecture, I’d just like to say I’m in favor of granting her request as she actually made it. So I vote aye. Or whatever it is we’re going to do in this instance.”

  “Noted,” Cole says.

  As if neither of them has spoken, Stephen continues. “She’s asking to escalate the interrogation to a level where she might lose control of it. That can’t be tolerated.”

  “She can control iron with her bare hands,” Cole says.

  “I’m not speaking of physical objects. I’m referring to her instincts, Cole. That’s why I vote for denying her request. I propose we order her to stand down on the assurance we’ll interrogate Cyrus Mattingly at Kansas Command. A plan, I should point out, that gives us sterling cover as we add Mattingly to the test subjects in Dr. Turlington’s laboratory. We simply tell Bluebird and her boyfriend that Mattingly died in custody, or we talk sense to them for once and explain that dropping him back into the general population after he bore witness to all of our capabilities would have been insane. Maybe then, once we stop mollycoddling her, she’ll actually take some time to reflect on the insanity of her request.”

  “What about the others?” Cole asks.

  “The other test subjects?” Stephen asks.

  “The other victims. Mattingly made it sound as if there’s a window of time for them and it’s closing. If it didn’t close already during this . . . discussion.”

  For the first time since the call began, Philip Strahan speaks up, head bowed, voice a low grumble suggesting he’s uncomfortable with what he’s about to say. “We don’t know if there are other victims. It could just be a boast. Or a tactic.”

  “How would it be a tactic?” Cole asks.

  “If Charley gave me that speech, I’d be pretty sure she was good and ready to off me as soon as I answered her question. I’d be trying to buy time.”

  Former senator Philip Strahan, serial killer whisperer, Cole thinks. Sure, whatever, dude.

  “Stephen, do you agree?” Cole asks.

  “I’ve cast my vote,” Stephen says. “What’s being asked of me here?”

  “Are you also willing to run the risk of other women dying tonight at the hands of men like Cyrus Mattingly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s just . . .” Cole stops himself, but it feels like his entire face is flushed and beating.

  “What?” Stephen says, leaning toward his camera. “It’s what, Cole? Focused? Professional? Necessary? More clear-eyed than you have ever been on these matters? I’ll take any of the above. There are madmen all over the world, and in this very moment some of them are plotting acts of violence and terror that will kill more people in an instant than these serial killers with which you’re so obsessed will claim in their lifetimes. The right use of Zypraxon and paradrenaline could give the world the armor and weaponry needed to wipe those men off the planet or stop them in the very moment they try to act. Charlotte Rowe can’t do that.”

  Noah says, “With all due respect, until we find another human in which Zypraxon actually works, she’s the only one who can.”

  “Well, sounds like that’s an agenda item for future discussion, then. My vote stands.”

  “Philip?” Cole asks.

  Without any of Stephen’s pomposity, Philip answers, “The risk of her losing control of the interrogation is too great. I vote no.”

  “You realize she didn’t actually kill Richard Davies? We just let her think she did.”

  “I do,” Philip says calmly. “And that’s just it. If that sick fuck does manage to get the upper hand, I’m afraid she’ll blink before she breaks his neck. And Prescott’s too new in the field to be trusted to bring him down. Then the fuckhead’s out in the world talking about everything she can do. My vote’s no. Sorry, Cole.”

  “Very well, then,” Cole says. “It’s decided.”

  With a swipe of one finger, Cole ends the call.

  Noah’s advancing on him before the screen’s even dark. “What? Decided? What about your vote?”

  “I don’t have a vote,” Cole responds.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means our fifth member wasn’t interested in a second run. Since it’s just the four of us, Stephen and Philip thought Julia and I would vote against them every time and there’d be nobody to break the tie. So, for the time being, I have no vote.”

  Cole’s never seen anyone literally try to tear their hair out. Zypraxon’s first test subjects came close. But when they raised their hands to their heads, it was usually to rip open their own skulls. Right now, Noah looks ready to pull out two clumps of his jet-black cap by the roots. When he realizes this, he brings his fists to his mouth, shakes his head, then turns back to the screen as if The Consortium’s still on it and he might be able to plead with them.

  Painful as it is, Cole reminds himself this is a good thing. He’s getting the reaction he sought in flying Noah halfway across the world.

  “This can’t . . .” It’s the first time Cole can remember Noah being rendered speechless.

  “This is exactly what you asked for when you showed up on my doorstep out of nowhere after years and said ‘activate The Consortium’ like you were suggesting I turn on the burglar alarm at my house.”

  “You cannot agree to this, Cole.”

  “You’re not listening. I didn’t agree, because I don’t have the option to disagree. And that’s how I got your labs back. I can’t fund this on my own, Noah. I’ve already hidden all I can from my board.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got something they don’t and
never will.”

  “What?”

  “Charlotte!”

  “Don’t overstate my hold on her. We’ve got a mutually beneficial relationship. That’s all.”

  “I didn’t say you were best friends. I’m saying you’ve built something with her and if you order her to stand down now, you’ll destroy it in an instant.”

  “Got it, thanks.”

  Cole goes for the door, a deliberate tactic that he’s pretty sure will garner some sort of revealing response from Noah. But he’s not prepared for how swift and severe that response is.

  Noah grabs his shoulder so hard Cole’s jerked backward. No one’s touched Cole with this kind of anger for years, not since he was a child and several young men dragged him into a woodshed, violating him with a viciousness and hate that had nothing to do with actual sexual desire. There have been times when Cole invited Noah to treat his body with force, but those moments were negotiated, almost scripted, two consenting adults choreographing a dance that drew a strange heat from Cole’s old wounds without pulling the scabs away. The word that comes from Cole’s mouth now sounds like a yelp. “Don’t!” Pathetic, childlike. Not a counterattack, but a plea.

  Noah’s so shocked by Cole’s reaction, a new set of emotions muddy the anger in his expression. He doesn’t know what Cole suffered that long-ago summer afternoon. True, he’s always suspected, sometimes with brazen, insensitive language, that some past trauma has shaped the outer contours of Cole’s sexual desires in ways that occasionally spike his desire with bits of shame. But very few people know about the abuse he suffered, or how his father responded to it.

  Charlotte knows.

  Charlotte knows things about Cole the man across from him doesn’t.

  And that only serves to prove Noah’s point. Cole shares a connection with her that might be holding this project together.

  But in this moment, despite all that’s taking place around them, his focus isn’t Charley.

  It’s Noah.

  He realizes he’s done it; part of it anyway. Coaxed a version of Noah out of hiding. A version that cares about Charlotte in a way that transcends the end goals of this operation. Noah, always so damn composed, always so vain, looks downright desperate. And if this Noah is truly authentic, he will be more loyal to Cole than to The Consortium, no matter what lies ahead.

  “I’m trying to do what you asked me to do,” Noah says.

  “How?”

  “This is what I learned about her in Arizona. Every moment of her life—every waking moment, Cole—her mind goes back to that root cellar on the Bannings’ farm, to what she imagines it was like for her mom. Do you know she carved a message on the wall?”

  “Her mother?”

  “Let me hold her please. That’s what it said. When Charlotte got away from her father and went to live with her grandmother, they gave her a computer for the first time and she Googled her mom’s name. And she found that story. From that moment on, she’s never been the same. The trauma of discovering that was worse than anything else she went through before then. Her every thought, Cole. Whenever her mind’s at rest. No matter what happiness she’s experiencing, her mind goes back to that cellar. It goes back to her mother’s final hours. When I learned that about her, I knew, I knew, that eventually she would open up to what my drug could do for her, for the world.”

  And yet you tricked her into taking it.

  But there’s a sheen in Noah’s eyes that might be tears, so Cole measures his next words carefully. What Noah just said might not be accurate, but he’s pretty sure Noah believes it. He’s also pretty damn sure Noah’s so disconnected from his grief for his own mother that he can only access it by using Charlotte as a kind of proxy. Also good to know.

  Cole says, “You can’t stand here and tell me you picked Charlotte for this back in Arizona. Not for what this has turned into, at least.”

  “Of course not. She’s the one who chose to go after men like Cyrus Mattingly. For this very reason. Because she wants to save women like her mother, and if you deny her the chance to do that now . . .”

  “What? What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m afraid she’ll run.”

  “We’ll find her.”

  “I’m sure, and I’m afraid of what will happen when you do, and I’m afraid that whatever comes after will be nothing like what this is now.”

  Cole agrees but isn’t about to say so.

  He can see Stephen’s plan already—Charlotte tied down in a lab, horrifying simulations forcing her to trigger while her paradrenaline-filled bloodstream is milked like a cow’s udder.

  He hates his urge to linger here, to study the specifics of the pain on Noah’s handsome face, the foreignness and all the dangerous invitations it offers. This feels like the first moment in years when Noah’s been something more than an oppositional force in his life or a reminder of awful memories.

  “I will take your opinion under advisement,” Cole says, trying to sound more resolute than he feels.

  When Noah flinches as if he’s been slapped, Cole steps from the room, leaving the door open behind him. It takes effort not to look back.

  15

  Off Highway 287

  The Thunder Derm, as Luke calls it, makes a sound that reminds Charlotte of a tennis ball cannon, and when Luke fired the device into her arm, it startled Cyrus Mattingly so badly she could hear him let out a yelp on the other side of the divider. The device looks like a bulky, handheld ray gun out of a fifties sci-fi movie, only the central chamber is composed of a fat, transparent vial designed to quickly extract her paradrenaline-charged blood.

  Luke’s already withdrawn five vials of her blood. Just one more to go.

  He’s practiced with the thing a bunch in the lab, using Graydon-generated materials that somehow mimic the approximate tensile strength of her flesh during a trigger event. To hear him tell it, the real danger’s to himself, apparently. The gun’s pretty unwieldy, thanks to the amount of force that needs to be packed behind its artery-piercing needle, and a misfire into his own leg could kill him.

  On the night they first met, Cole ordered a terrified lab tech to draw Charley’s paradrenaline-filled blood with a large but fairly standard hypodermic needle. The tech later confessed that due to her capacity for rapid healing while triggered, he strained his wrist driving the needle in, and worse, when they got to the lab, they discovered he’d barely managed to fill the vials. The fact that she and Cole can now laugh about this story is a testament to how far they’ve come and how much they’ve learned about each other in just a year.

  But she’s not laughing now.

  The wait’s taking too long, and the word others is pulsing through her mind.

  Charlotte watches the device fill, sucking blood directly from an artery with a speed and force that would kill a normal person within minutes. That’s why the Thunder Derm is housed inside a titanium case and locked by a code only Luke knows. Only now does she realize she’s not sure if that’s actually the thing’s technical name or just a nickname Luke thought up for it while playing around in Graydon’s labs.

  Luke would be the first one to admit that much of his training feels like play. He comes home from most of his stints at Graydon bright-eyed and talking a mile a minute about all the cool things he did there. Even now, he’s got an energy she rarely saw in him before Cole officially brought him into the fold.

  “You good?” she asks him.

  He nods, but he’s still focused on the task at hand. The blood-filled chamber is now sealed and ready for removal. Luke pops it out and tucks it into the foam-lined case.

  “You sure?” she asks.

  “Of course. I mean, what did I have to do other than drive?” He gives her a sincere-looking smile.

  “At least you had people to talk to,” she says.

  He looks her dead in the eye, smile fading. “That I did.”

  She knows that look; it’s the one Luke makes when he’s biting his tongue, but it’s not always acco
mpanied by this kind of steady eye contact, and that’s what really gets her attention. He wants to tell her something, but he can’t, and whatever it is has to do with whoever he talked to during their drive. That’s a very short list of people, and Bailey’s probably close to the top. If both of them removed their earpieces and TruGlass lenses, they could discuss it. But that would incur Cole’s anger, for sure. Another reminder that everything they’re doing, everything they’re saying, even everything they’re looking at is being constantly monitored, in some cases by people they’ve never met and probably never will.

  “Could you do me a favor?” he asks. “When you have a moment, of course.”

  “What is it?”

  “Could you get those snakes out of here? I know they’re not venomous, but I have a feeling they won’t fuck with you after what you did to their friend.”

  “As soon as I have a moment, sure.”

  She changes out of Hailey Brinkmann’s pajamas and into the black T-shirt Luke brought her along with a pair of Charlotte Rowe’s favorite jeans.

  “Charley . . .”

  Luke reacts to the voice, too. Cole’s addressing them both.

  “I’m here,” she says, rising to her feet.

  “I apologize for the delay.”

  “OK.”

  “Charley, we’ve discussed your request in detail and given it the utmost consideration, I can assure you. After weighing all of the implications, we have two possibilities we can pursue in this moment. One, you continue the interrogation verbally, with his blindfold on. Or you let us take him into custody so we can ascertain what the meaning of his last statement was.”

  “We don’t have time,” she says.

  “We don’t know that, Charley.”

  “Others. He said others. Other drivers like him, other victims like me. What else could it mean?”

  “I’m not disputing that, but we don’t have proof they’re all heading to the same place.”

  “It doesn’t matter where they’re headed. What matters is that it’s happening right now.”