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

by Christopher Rice

  She knows what he wants now. He wants an enhanced interrogation, the kind only she can administer.

  But will he really be able to stomach it? The last time he saw her unleash relentless violence against other humans, his life was at stake.

  This time’s different.

  Lives are at stake here, too. Two of them, apparently. Just not his.

  Luke nods. It’s almost imperceptible. Maybe he was fighting the urge and then gave in. But he made the gesture nonetheless, and that’s all she needed to see.

  With a simple twist of one hand, she breaks Mattingly’s right shin.

  By the time she breaks his left foot, Cyrus Mattingly is adding information to his screams.

  Marjorie races for the barn, seeing fleeting shadows out of the corner of her eye. Shadows of ghosts. One ghost, in particular. Her wicked mother, brought forth from the beyond by the hateful words of that woman on the phone. Killing on the side . . .

  Her boy. Her boy Cyrus betrayed her, betrayed all of them. She sees him luring back-alley whores into some dirty pickup truck, fondling their breasts after they’re dead like a bargain-basement serial killer. After all she’d built for him, all she’d given him over the years, rescuing him from orphanhood at Caden Ranch, teaching him to focus and channel his dark impulses, he’d been killing on the side all this time and somehow it had landed him in the clutches of whoever that evil woman was.

  It’s like her mother’s racing alongside her as she runs for the barn, hissing that strange woman’s words. Your little game ain’t workin’, Momma.

  When she explodes into the barn, the boys are still filling the cement mixer and they whirl at the sound of her entry.

  “Get her out of the pit and into the truck now,” she says.

  “What?” Jonah says.

  “Someone’s got Cyrus and it’s bad, real bad.”

  “They’re coming?” Wally asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we can’t just up and leave and—”

  “We have to. Now! Get her in your truck and put the Head Slayer on her and quit arguing with me. Jonah drives. You stay in back with her.”

  They’re standing atop dozens of concrete-encased graves, and they all know it. Jonah looks to the ground briefly as he approaches, arm out. “Momma, you gotta calm—”

  “Don’t you fucking get it?” The hysteria in her voice has amped her words to a pitch that’s terrifyingly near to one of her mother’s fatal screams. “He broke the rules! He was killing on the side and someone got to him ’cause of it.”

  The shock of this seems to wash over them in a second wave. Or maybe they’re noticing the way she’s flinched at what looks like a flash of motion past the barn’s half-open back door; a flash of motion she’s sure is wearing one of her mother’s old floral-print housedresses.

  “We put everything that’s for killing in one of the trucks and we go. Now. Get her out of the pit!”

  Without another word of protest, her boys get to work. The boys she has left anyway.

  Zoey can barely make out the words. But the terror in the crazy old woman’s voice has stirred something in her she was on the verge of losing.

  Hope.

  Then the ladder drops down into the pit once more and down it come two men, her abductor and one she doesn’t recognize. Both descend with a determination that brings the chill of dread back to every bone in her body. And the one she doesn’t recognize is holding something strange. At first, she thinks it might be another hideous contraption like what they gagged her with. But it’s more ordinary than that.

  It’s the harness they used to lower her into this pit. No sooner has she noticed it than the man she’s never seen before is putting her blindfold back in place.

  A few yards from the entrance to the ranch Cyrus Mattingly directed them to, Charlotte sees something in the truck’s headlights: deep, fresh tire tracks cutting through the last section of the ranch’s dirt road before vanishing into the blacktop of the road they’re traveling. She thinks she can see which direction they headed, but she’s not sure.

  She cries out for Luke to stop and he does, but she’s jumped from the passenger-side door before the truck stops moving, and the run of skipping steps she takes as soon as her feet hit the road would probably have broken the ankles of a normal person.

  Behind her, the truck groans to a halt, brakes squealing, as she bends down and studies the tire tracks in the headlights.

  Luke starts toward her, Glock out, shooting glances up the dark road. There’s a gentle swell in the earth that keeps the ranch house hidden from here, and if Mattingly told the truth about everything, it’s a good ways up the dirt road.

  “They ran,” Charlotte says.

  “Canadian River’s that way,” Luke says.

  By the time she’d made her way up to his wrists, Mattingly told them that if Mother and his brothers made a run for it, they’d probably use back roads heading north of the property, through the isolated landscape where a few creeks intersect with the Canadian River’s east–west passage above town. The reform school where she’d first recruited all three boys had been close to this area before it burned down, and all the boys have experience hiking and horseback riding through its small, dusty canyons. None of the canyons are very deep, but they were the few hiding places amid a landscape that was mostly flat.

  “Is it one truck or two?” Luke asks.

  “Looks like one.”

  “Go.”

  “What?”

  “Take the truck and go. See if you can catch up with them. I’ll check out the ranch.”

  “Isn’t this the part in the horror movie where everyone splits up and the audience screams?”

  “In the horror movie, the hero can’t break the killer’s neck with one hand. Go, Charley. If they ran, they ran with those women. No chance they’ll leave them behind so they can tell everything they know.”

  “And if they did?”

  “That’s why I’m going to secure the ranch.”

  “Luke . . .”

  “Charley, take the truck and go. Give it thirty minutes. If you don’t catch up with them, come back and we’ll search everything together.”

  He’s got a point, but leaving Luke to search the ranch alone turns her stomach. But it won’t be much longer before the team following them descends out of the sky in a blaze of military-issue lights. If that wasn’t the case, she’d never leave him alone here in a million years. She doesn’t care how good his training is.

  “Charley, go. You’re their only hope.”

  You, not us.

  If she lingers on this moment, regret will slow her down even further. So she just nods and walks past Luke and carefully steps up into the driver’s seat of the truck. Only once she’s pulled the door shut does she remember she’s still got Cyrus Mattingly in the back. She’s not going to dump him now. That would give Luke a distraction as he searches the ranch alone. And besides, the guy’s got two broken feet and he’s strapped down like a shrink-wrapped chicken breast.

  The first time she drove while triggered, she almost broke the gas pedal.

  This time, she’s had practice.

  And that’s good.

  Because she plans to go fast.

  39

  “Turn the headlights off,” Marjorie says.

  “I can’t, Momma. It’s too twisty.”

  “Do what I’m—”

  “Momma, there’s no moon; we’ll go off the road!” Jonah’s voice sounds as frightened as hers did back in the barn. Maybe it was a mistake to have him drive given his recent failure. Wally’s always been a cooler operator. But Wally’s seedling is Wally’s responsibility; he’s been with her for hours, knows all the tricks she might try if she sees their flight as an opportunity. As for Jonah’s panic, it can only mean her mother’s ghost is doing far more than just dancing at the edges of Marjorie’s vision. She’s infecting their minds, their souls. And it’s all Cyrus’s fault. His betrayal has weakened them, cast
cracks through all the majesty and meaning of what she built for her boys over the years.

  She’s once more riding beneath the Texas skies her father taught her to love, but she’s never felt more distant from him. Because her mother’s back, and she’s not just screaming. She’s filling Marjorie’s mind with hateful curses she’s fine-tuned during the years she’s spent in hell. Your game ain’t workin’, Momma.

  On the camera linked to the truck’s cargo area, he can see Wally holding on to the wall next to him to stay balanced, loaded shotgun in one hand. A few feet away, his seedling’s strapped to the gurney and gagged once more, staring at the ceiling overhead. Something’s wrong with the look in her eyes, and Marjorie realizes there’s not enough fear there. There’s hardly any at all.

  “She knows something. She’s in on it.”

  “Who?” Jonah asks.

  “Wally’s seedling. Look at her. She knows something. This whole thing, it’s some kind of trap. We’ve got to question her. Find out what she knows.”

  “We will. Let’s just get some distance between us and the ranch; then we can find a highway and keep going. I can take us all the way back to my place in Albuquerque—”

  “No, no. They might know about all of us. None of us can go home.”

  “Where do we go, then?”

  “We just drive.”

  Jonah shoots her a look. She doesn’t look back because she doesn’t want to see whatever’s in his eyes—the fear, the confusion, the disappointment. It’s sinking in. They’re homeless now. Who knows how much Cyrus told? Cyrus failed them, but that means she failed them, because Cyrus was her boy.

  “Forget it,” Marjorie says.

  “Forget what?”

  “I don’t give a damn what the little bitch knows. We kill her and dump her and the other one in Chicken Creek. Then we keep going. If we don’t know where we’re stopping, I’m not towing all that evidence along with us.”

  “That’s just fi—”

  But Jonah never gets a chance to finish the sentence because just then headlights flash in the side-view mirrors, briefly blinding them both. It’s a box truck about the size of theirs, and it’s gaining on them fast.

  Cyrus’s truck, she realizes, but is Cyrus driving it?

  Marjorie’s first cry drowns out the sound of the first few strikes Jonah levels against the metal wall behind him. That’s Wally’s cue to get ready to fire back at their pursuer.

  Charlotte almost missed them. She was heading due north on the paved county road when she saw what looked like tiny lights moving through the dark off to her right, like tea candles floating atop a vast lake. At first she thought they were security lights atop the gate of a distant property. But then they winked out briefly, and when they came back they were farther to her right than they should have been if they weren’t on the move themselves.

  She hit the brakes, turned the truck around as fast as she could without tipping the thing over. She and Luke had both trained on vehicles of this size as prep for this operation, but she’d never once thought things would escalate to the point where she’d actually have to drive one.

  Now, she kills the headlights, but it’s way too dark to drive without them. Maybe if the dirt road wasn’t so narrow and serpentine. The landscape’s not mountainous, but it’s not perfectly flat, either, the kind of arid stretch that was carved by eons-old bodies of water that have long since dried up.

  Maybe she’s got the wrong truck, but she doubts it. There’s nothing out here except the prospect of concealment and escape. And while she hasn’t been able to get a good look at the truck’s length, the cargo door looks about the same size as the one on the truck she’s driving now, and the metal’s also dilapidated and rust splattered. Maybe it’s a bigger truck overall. From this angle, she’s not sure. But like Cyrus’s, it looks anonymous, easily disposed of once it’s served its purpose. Both of them bought for cash so the purchase wasn’t traceable.

  Any doubt she’s honing in on the right target vanishes when the cargo area door in front of her suddenly rises, followed by a shotgun’s blast. She braces for impact or for the windshield to explode. Instead, the truck’s hood dents upward from shrapnel flying inside the truck’s nose. The guy shot straight through the grille, and the impact just sent a shudder through the vehicle’s carriage that she feels in the steering wheel, even though she’s gripping it lightly to keep from accidentally tearing the thing in half.

  Another blast. Sustained, grinding noises follow, telling her this shot did real damage to the engine’s moving parts. It’s a smart strategy. The front of the truck is a big, reliable target, unlike her shadow behind the windshield.

  She releases the steering wheel, turns to face the passenger side, then straightens her left arm like a baseball bat before striking it against the windshield. The glass shatters.

  By the time she crawls headfirst through the broken windshield, black smoke is streaming from underneath the edges of the truck’s hood. But the man standing in the half-open cargo area door can still see her through the twin clouds. His shock is evident in his paralysis. He’s holding the door up with one hand, but it seems he’s forgotten he’s holding his shotgun in the other.

  The vehicle under her is losing power and speed, but she’s on all fours on the hood now. When the distance between them starts to widen, she leaps.

  In the shooter’s scramble to pull the cargo door shut in her face, he drops the shotgun. It spins away from his feet, then out into the night.

  By then, she’s airborne.

  The pure sensations of what comes next are what she imagines it feels like to dip your upper body in wet concrete. Her vision blacks out as she hits the door; then in widening tendrils, she can see what must be the inside of the truck’s cargo area: a divider door just like the one that walled her in, a metal floor. Someone’s howling like an injured wolf, and she’s sure it’s the shooter. If she hasn’t injured him, he’s losing his mind. The metal that’s molded around her head and neck starts to yield in various spots like some quick-drying substance that’s now cracking and flaking. There’s cool air on her right arm, making it feel exposed. It must have punched straight through the cargo door on impact, while her left arm feels like it’s coated in something vaguely molten but also very cold. Because it seems like the quickest and most efficient thing to do, she shakes her upper body like a dog trying to dry itself and hears what must be a dozen pieces of metal clunk to the floor around her. The man’s screams intensify to the level of madness.

  Standing now and freed from her metallic shroud, Charlotte sees the shooter. He’s curled up against one wall as if he thinks he might be able to crawl through it and away from her. Jaw trembling and nostrils flaring, he’s watching what must be dozens of cuts instantly healing along her face and arms.

  What she does next seems to be too much for him to bear.

  She looks him in the eye.

  Without a second thought, he crawls to the hole in the cargo door and jumps out into the night. She spins just in time to see him hit the road legs first. In his delirium, he must have thought the truck’s speed would give him a running start. Instead the momentum breaks both his legs and sends his body into a grotesque series of somersaults before the shadows swallow him. For the first time, she sees the truck—her truck, Mattingly’s truck—is long gone, careened off the side of the road and into the dark night somewhere.

  Behind the divider, she finds a terrified, wild-eyed woman strapped to a gurney just like the one she was tethered to for hours on end. The woman hasn’t seen any of what she just did to the cargo door or the final choice her captor just made, but no doubt, she’s heard all of it. Charlotte expects a frightened struggle when she starts tearing the leather straps free, releasing the woman’s forehead and then her ankles. But the woman goes limp and numb, as if she realizes instantly that no one who wanted to hurt her would try to free her. Not right now. Once she can, the woman sits up, starts pulling on the gag. Charlotte’s afraid this process
will require more precision than can be managed in the bouncing cargo area of a speeding truck, but if it’s what the woman wants, who is she to stop her? After what she’s been through, she deserves any release she can get.

  Hacking and coughing and clawing at it with her now free hands, the woman spits the gag out; then Charlotte pulls it from her lap and casts it aside so she won’t have to look at the hideous thing anymore. That’s when she sees the body. The other woman is lying in a fetal position on the floor against the metal wall; the gag’s slid across the floor and is now resting against her back. Her lifeless arm is milk pale, and she jostles from the cargo area’s movements with unmistakable deadweight.

  Charlotte wants to scream, but instead she runs Luke’s words back and forth through her head until she can breathe again. We’ll do what we can with what we’ve got.

  “Are you hurt?” she asks the woman before her, the one she can still save.

  “Hurt . . .”

  “Injured. Are you physically injured? Can you move?”

  The woman shakes her head and swings one leg to the floor as if to prove it.

  “What did you do to him?” the woman asks. “He was screaming so loud.”

  “He’s gone. He jumped.”

  “Are they gonna stop?” Hours of agony are preparing to split the woman’s sanity in two. “Are they ever going to stop?” she wails.

  A clanging sound, like a giant rock has hit the underside of the truck. Then another—the clanging of something very large underneath the cargo area. Metal engaging with metal?