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

by Christopher Rice

  Or disengaging?

  They’re trying to uncouple from the cargo area, she thinks. They’re trying to cut us loose.

  On a major highway, being in a loose trailer would be dangerous because of other traffic, but there’d be enough roadway to recover if they didn’t get struck. Out here on this narrow, winding road, they’ll go plummeting into a ravine, and the only way to protect the woman she came here to save would be to throw her arms around her. Which could also crush her.

  Charlotte throws herself against the wall between the cargo area and the passenger cab and drives one arm through it. If she can manage to grab the back of the cab and hold it for a few minutes, she can release it at a time of her choosing, maybe keep the cargo area steady. At the very least, whoever’s driving will realize he can’t cut the cargo area loose so easily. Maybe then they’ll resort to pumping the damn brakes and trying to bail on foot. That’ll give the woman behind her time to recover and the truck time to slow to a stop.

  But when she punches her arm through the metal wall, she doesn’t feel open air on the other side like she expected. Instead she feels something slick and warm. She was wrong about how the truck’s built, wrong about her belief that the cargo area was about to be released. There’s no gap between the cargo area’s back wall and the passenger cab at all. She didn’t see the truck from the front as she approached it, and the violent sounds of rocks impacting the underside of the cargo area tricked her into believing it was a different style of truck from the one Cyrus put her in. Thanks to this misunderstanding, she’s just driven her arm straight through someone sitting inside the passenger cab.

  She withdraws her arm. It’s covered in thick black blood turning deep red as oxygen hits it. What at first looks like tufts of fabric are actually splinters of human bone pulverized by the quick passage of her fist.

  Agonized howls pour through the bloody hole she just left in the metal wall. A man and a woman’s screams combining in a terrible harmony. Both are so piercing it’s impossible to tell which one of them she just injured. One thing’s for sure. If they’re both screaming this badly, the one who’s driving won’t have control of the wheel for much longer.

  “Get down on the floor in a ball,” Charlotte shouts.

  “What?” the woman she just freed screams.

  “Do it! I’m trying to save your life. We’re about to—”

  Before the rest of the sentence can leave her mouth, the cargo area’s floor starts wobbling like a ship at sea. Either one of the tires has blown out or the driver’s losing control.

  Wide-eyed, the woman hits the floor and curls into a ball, right in the corner the divider makes with the cargo area’s side wall. Knowing she’ll crush the poor girl if she throws herself on top of her, Charlotte drops to her knees next to her instead. There’s nothing to grab on to so Charlotte punches one fist through the cargo area’s sidewall, then another through the divider, and does her best to hang on to the resulting holes as if they’re grips without pulling on them. But it’s a useless effort. When their world turns upside down, the woman’s thrown into Charlotte’s chest, and Charlotte has no choice but to close her arms around her as they both go flying, praying she doesn’t break the woman in half while trying to save her life.

  40

  In the darkness, it’s possible to believe it was all a nightmare.

  In the dark, she can convince herself she didn’t really see an arm come bursting through Jonah’s chest as he drove. Didn’t hear his keening, throaty screams as he spit blood and tried to stare down at the impossible eruption of gore his own torso had become.

  In the dark, she’s her daddy’s girl again, poised on the edge of her bed after dusk, waiting for him to bring her a moon pie, a sign they’re about to go stargazing.

  In the dark, Marjorie Payne realizes she’s chewing dirt.

  Blindly, desperately, she unbuckles the seat belt that’s twisted up around her like a tentacle. A mistake; she drops sideways against Jonah, whose body’s been half consumed by the twisted remains of the cab’s driver side, which, she now realizes, struck earth first after they went off the road. The only mercy in his awful posture is that his horribly bent limbs conceal the wound in his chest.

  But she can’t get out unless she pushes herself away from his corpse, then steps on his soft limbs. That’s the only way she can reach the upturned passenger-side window so she can pull herself free of the cab. Ignoring the shards of glass slicing into her hands, she gets her chest free, flops up and onto the door like a fish leaving water, then manages to swing one leg free, then the other. When she lets herself drop to the wet dirt, it’s as if all her energy has been exhausted and suddenly her age makes itself known in every bone in her body.

  She crawls. It’s the only thing she can do that will take her farther from the truck and the terrible noises coming from inside it. There are no screams now, just a deep, persistent scratching that reminds her of the time a rat got stuck in the wall behind her oven. Only bigger.

  If she hasn’t knocked out several teeth, she’s jostled a bunch of them loose, and she’s afraid to lift her face from the mud and find out just how many. But she does, and that’s when she sees her blood running through the stubborn rivulets of creek that haven’t gone dry yet.

  She can’t go any farther, and so she rolls over onto her back because she’d rather see what’s coming for her than sob facedown on the ground.

  She refuses to believe what she sees next: two hands, a woman’s hands, it looks like, pressing against the narrow lip of what remains of the windshield, pushing outward from within a space too small and mangled for a human to fit. A living one, at least. But what else besides life could be animating the arms that just shoved the large spiderwebbed piece of glass from where it’s been clinging perilously to its bent frame?

  The hands look spotted, but they’re moving without any hesitation or fatigue that would indicate injury. The spots, she realizes, aren’t exactly round. They’re misshapen. They’re bloody openings in the woman’s skin. Marjorie blinks what must be a hundred times before she can accept what her eyes are telling her—they’re all changing size; they’re each getting smaller. Healing.

  The hands reach out, grab the edges of the windshield’s bent frame, and pull.

  One eye stares wildly, and Marjorie realizes it looks that way because the skin’s separated above and below it, revealing glimpses of white skull underneath. The woman’s hair looks like it’s been pulled back because her entire scalp has been pulled back, revealing a blood-spotted patch of skull where her forehead should be. But that terrible wound is healing, too. And as she pulls herself out from the truck’s demolished front cab, yanking one leg free of the wreckage at an angle perfectly parallel with the rest of her body, so parallel it should break her hip, Marjorie sees the eye looks normal now.

  And then the woman is standing beside the truck that should have crushed her to death. She looks healthy and vital in the fractured halo of the one headlight that’s still illuminated. That’s when Marjorie wonders if she’s dead and if this is how death plays out for everyone—you pick up from where you left but in a realm where all things are suddenly possible.

  The woman’s footsteps splash through the water as she approaches. Her expression is rageful. If this is death, if angels are real, then the young woman standing over her might be an angel of judgment.

  “Who are you?”

  It’s a stupid, useless question. Marjorie knows it’s the woman on the phone, the woman who broke Cyrus.

  She crouches down, gazing into Marjorie’s eyes.

  “I am your mother, returned from the storm,” she answers.

  And that’s when Marjorie breaks the promise she just made to herself.

  She screams.

  “How many?” Charlotte asks.

  The woman’s old age, her pathetic sobs, her mangled broken state; none of these things inspire pity or sympathy, and Charlotte wonders if she’s gradually losing those emotions altogether or i
f she’s heard and seen enough on this long, terrible night to keep her focused on what this woman truly is.

  “How many bodies are on your ranch?” Charlotte asks.

  When the woman doesn’t answer, Charlotte gently rests one hand atop her throat. The woman’s eyes go wide, but her sobs don’t stop.

  “I will make you hurt a lot worse than you do now unless you tell me where to find every body of every woman you killed.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone—”

  “You did. You’re a murderer just like your boys.”

  “I made them . . .”

  “What? You made them what?”

  “Better. Once a year. They . . . they only had to do it once a year because of me. That was the rule . . . I gave them rules.”

  “You found them when they were teenagers. Cyrus had only killed animals. You made it easy for him. You taught him how to kill people.”

  Women like your mother, she wants to add, but it’s possible this vile woman really does believe Charlotte is her mother reborn and that’s why she’s so talkative. Charlotte’s not going to steal the illusion from her. Yet. And it looks like the old woman isn’t hearing what Charlotte does: the low approach of a large helicopter, massive rotary blades chopping air.

  “The barn,” the woman whispers. “They’re in the barn. Under it. Planted. Silenced. Where they belong.”

  “How many?”

  The old woman stares into her eyes with a coldness and a focus that seem to laser through whatever physical pain she’s in.

  “Not enough,” she says.

  Before Charlotte realizes what she’s done, the woman’s head is twisted to one side; her right ear where her face just was, her glassy eyes staring at the slope the truck went over. It was a slap, that’s all. Just a reflexive, sudden slap, the kind someone might unleash in the heat of the moment and either atone for or regret for the rest of their lives. But this one snapped the old woman’s neck like a doll’s, the force of it leaving her right cheek misshapen.

  The helicopter’s closer now; it’s probably the Black Hawk. But there’s another sound, softer. Footsteps. Halting, slow.

  After the truck had landed and once it was clear the woman she’d tried to protect hadn’t broken any bones, Charlotte told her to flee out the back of the cargo area. She didn’t want her to see what Charlotte might have to do to the people in the cab. But the woman obviously wasn’t content to wait. Maybe she sensed a life being snuffed out in the blink of an eye.

  It’s too dark for Charlotte to make out her expression, so there’s no telling if the woman saw her kill Marjorie Payne.

  “Are you for real?” the woman finally asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Well . . . shit.”

  She’s in shock, Charlotte can tell.

  Slowly, Charlotte moves to her, fully expecting her to scream and run. How else would anyone respond after everything she’s been through, after everything she’s seen Charlotte do? But instead the woman stays put, swaying slightly, backlit by the truck’s headlight.

  “What’s your name?” Charlotte asks.

  They’re a few feet apart now.

  The woman doesn’t look like she’s about to bolt, but now that they’re close, Charlotte can see her trembling lips and her flaring nostrils, her failing attempt to fight tears. Despite the terrible jostling she endured when the truck went off the road, her long mane of raven hair is still matted in the shape left by the gag’s hood and the gurney. And once Charlotte’s close enough to see her big, tear-filled brown eyes, she’s overwhelmed by the pain in them. Hours and hours of degradation bubbling up inside of her. And Charlotte knows it’s shortsighted, but it suddenly feels as if the goal of saving this woman was a selfish thing, because now the woman will have to endure the pain of being a survivor.

  “Thank you,” she whispers.

  All the usual responses seem unbearably inappropriate. You’re welcome. Don’t mention it. None of those will suffice, not in this moment.

  Before she can pause to consider all she’s revealed to this woman and the potential consequences, she offers her something else. “My name’s Charlotte. Charlotte Rowe.”

  “Zoey,” she answers through the first sob, as if saying her name out loud again after all she’s been through is a brave and defiant act, her first move to begin collecting all her abductors tried to take from her.

  When Zoey starts to sob, Charlotte offers comfort with the same hands she just used for murder.

  41

  In the first light of dawn, the Black Hawk looks wildly out of place where it landed not far from the barn in the middle of the isolated and desolate property that from the air looks like a patchwork of desert. If you were flying overhead and didn’t have any idea of the events that had led up to this moment, you would think the chopper had made an emergency landing here while on its way to take part in some elaborate military exercise.

  But as his own helicopter—an Airbus H155 with a leather-padded passenger compartment housing him, Noah, and Scott Durham—swoops low over the property, Cole spots the other evidence of the small battle that took place here.

  The pilot lands them close to the barn’s entrance.

  They’ve already given him a rough list of the dead—the owner of the property, Marjorie Payne, dead. Jonah Polk, one of the other drivers, dead, remains collected from inside the cab of his truck. Wally Shore, killed by a botched attempt to escape from the getaway truck.

  But still, the response team’s refusing to provide a total body count. “Not until you see the barn, sir,” was their response when Cole asked why. As for his super-secret ground team, he ordered them to fall back as soon as the Black Hawk caught up with the getaway truck. So for now, Charley and Luke have no idea armed mercenaries were waiting to assist once they pinpointed Cyrus Mattingly’s intended destination. When the stand-down order came, the ground team had been closing in on Marjorie Payne’s ranch as Luke cased the place by himself. As soon as Cole can clear Charley and Luke out of here, he’ll have the ground team enter the scene to help with the cleanup. Which sounds like it’s going to be a nightmare.

  Dreading the surprise in store, Cole steps from the helicopter. There’s a hand on his shoulder before his second foot hits the ground. He brought Noah because he thought they could use his combat skills. But the fight’s over, and now his presence might cause more problems than it solves.

  “Just wait here,” Cole says.

  Clearly stung, Noah averts his eyes and sinks back against the leather bench seat.

  Two response team members advance as soon as they see Cole approaching the barn. One’s strapped with an assault rifle he never got the chance to use, the other a Glock in a hip holster clearly visible under his windbreaker.

  They start to explain what’s waiting for him inside, but he holds up a single hand and they go silent. He’s too busy observing what he can already see. It’s a large concrete mixer, or what’s left of it. The damn thing’s the size of a small car, and there’s a large plastic tube wrapped in its wreckage. Grooves in the earth between the barn’s half-open double doors suggest the machine was dragged to its current position by a giant. That makes sense. Charlotte’s actions often look like a Titan’s handiwork.

  “Watch your step inside,” the guy with the assault rifle says.

  Cole walks through the double doors and into the barn.

  There are no horse stalls or interior structures of any kind, and Cole wonders if there were previously and Charley tore them all to pieces. He doesn’t see any piles of splintered wood, however. No, what she’s torn to pieces is the ground itself, and that ground, it turns out, is mostly concrete. Evenly spaced squares of concrete that travel the entire length of the barn; multiple rows of them, about three rows in all, but it’s hard to tell because what mostly fills the barn are piles of large concrete chunks. With the strength of a god, Charlotte has managed to dig down into most of them.

  As he walks carefully between the concrete piles, he sees
that each hole reveals something stomach churning. In some, there are mummified arms. In others, desiccated heads. It’s a gallery of bodies entombed beneath the barn’s floor. The awful scene reminds him of those death casts from Pompeii, but those were created by pouring plaster into the cavities once occupied by bodies long since decomposed. What he sees here are actual corpses unearthed for the first time by the impossible strength of Charlotte Rowe’s hands.

  Then he sees Charlotte. She’s rocking back and forth, her arms looped around her bent knees, powdered head to toe with concrete dust. Her second trigger window closed a few minutes ago, and he wonders if that’s the only reason she stopped.

  “Charley?”

  She doesn’t even look at him. It’s quiet enough for her to hear him, he’s sure. His helicopter’s blades have powered down, and the only sound is a gentle huff of wind that blows through the half-open barn doors, lifting little twisters of concrete dust into the threads of early-morning sunlight pouring through the slats in the barn’s roof.

  “Charley?”

  I have broken her, Cole thinks before he can stop himself. Broken her as surely as she tried to break these long-buried bodies free.

  He approaches her until only a few feet separate them. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t recognize his presence, and—worst of all—doesn’t stop rocking gently back and forth.

  “Charley?”

  No response. He scans their surroundings again, sees a few untouched squares of concrete in the barn’s floor she hasn’t gotten to yet. Will she ever?

  Will they?

  He says her name a few more times. The results are the same. She’s never gone into shock before. But during their last operation an unexpected explosion caused her to lose consciousness while her entire body regenerated from burns that would have instantly killed a normal person. Maybe this silence, this retreat inside of herself, is a part of her process now.