Yet another potential hazard addressed in training, the Dark Mode screens are so detailed and realistic that after an extended period of time, the driver can lose touch with their immediate physical surroundings and start to feel like they’re floating through the dark untethered. Every few minutes or so, Luke’s supposed to touch his own nose, then grip the gear shift for thirty seconds to fight this sensory-deprivation effect.
When the techs first explained the whole system to him, chests bursting with pride, Luke was pretty sure he’d identified its Achilles’ heel before they finished their pitch. “What about oncoming headlights?” he’d asked. “If the thing’s that sensitive, they’ll blind me and wash everything out, right?” Apparently not. The program’s designed to recognize the fierce intensity of approaching headlights and dim them until they look like candle flames behind a pane of smudged glass. And that was when Luke had yet another moment of shaking his head and wondering just how much goddamn money these people had.
Mattingly’s truck is a bright-green rectangle speeding down the highway ahead of him, the occasional rattles of its carriage visible in the windshield’s new hyperbrilliance. Charley insisted Cole not tell her what was waiting for her inside, but Luke, they all made clear, wouldn’t have been given the info even if they had shared it with Charley. No gory details for him. Not yet. It’ll be a while before they’re confident he can handle whatever Charley endures at the hands of these monsters before she kicks the shit out of them.
But with this particular psycho, the goal’s the destination.
Surrounded by all this technology, the item hanging around his neck feels ironic. It’s a stopwatch, the kind gym coaches wear, and he’ll set it for three hours the minute he gets word Charley’s been triggered.
“Hey,” his brother’s voice says quietly in his ear.
Maybe Bailey’s on edge, but there’s a hint of hesitation there. Luke immediately assumes something awful’s happened to Charley and Bailey’s trying to figure out how to break the news. Why anyone who’s spent longer than five minutes with his little brother would pick him to break bad news of any kind is beyond Luke’s ability to comprehend.
“How’s it looking out there?” Bailey asks.
“You tell me,” Luke says before he can stop himself.
“Uh, that’s a no-go, guys,” Shannon cuts in, a reminder that he and his brother don’t have a private line of communication.
“I’m not allowed to ask my brother how he’s doing?” Bailey asks, sounding genuinely pissed. Not just pissed, Luke notes, stressed.
“Actually, you asked him how things were looking. Which is a different question.”
“Let me guess, Shannon. When the teacher at school forgot it was Friday and said I’ll see you kids tomorrow, you were the first to raise your hand and say, ‘Nah-uh, Ms. Parker. You’re not going to see us tomorrow because tomorrow’s Saaaaaaturday.’”
“I’m just saying maybe being more direct with your brother might improve your relationship,” she answers. “I’ve heard it’s had its moments.”
“You could also try leaving us alone,” Bailey says.
Shannon says, “The question Bailey meant to ask, Luke, is how are you feeling?”
“Well, annoyed, to be frank, now that this comedy routine’s lighting up my right ear.”
“I figured it was time for some jokes,” Bailey says. “I mean, how else are we going to pass the time?”
There it is, Luke thinks. The hesitancy in his brother’s tone. Bailey’s about to start speaking in code.
“Sure thing, brother. It’s not like I’m jamming out to satellite radio out here.”
Luke never calls Bailey “brother” or even “bro,” so he hopes this deviation from their usual pattern will tell Bailey he got the message and he’s listening closely.
“How many Texans does it take to eat an armadillo?” he asks.
“No idea.”
“Three. One to eat it, and two to watch for headlights.”
“Ha.”
“Seen any out there?”
“Nope.”
“Well, watch out. Armadillo shells are hard as hell. Might take out one or two tires on that thing and leave your grille looking a little different. Probably two, I’m guessing.”
“I doubt that. This thing’s pretty souped up.”
“Still, an armadillo should stop you in your tracks. Not sure you’d have to stop for one blowout. But for two, definitely. Even in that thing.”
Armadillo, armadillo. In the past minute, Bailey’s said the strange word more than he probably ever has in his life. Impossible not to think that’s the basis of whatever code he’s trying to project. What else has he said? The number two.
Not sure you’d have to stop for one . . . but for two, definitely.
Armadillo.
Stop.
Two.
Leave your grille looking different.
He’s not telling Luke to stop right now. He’s telling him he might have to stop in the future if he encounters whatever an armadillo is code for in this instance.
He’s telling us where we’re headed.
Headed, direction. Maps. Naturally, since they’re being listened to, Bailey wouldn’t be able to give place-names or points on a compass with his coded directions.
There’s something in the number two . . .
Luke can’t use the GPS screen in Cloak Mode, but Lord knows he’s studied enough detailed maps of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and even New Mexico as prep for this operation. He visualizes them in his mind. If they stay on their current course, the next big town they’ll hit will be Wichita Falls and then . . .
Boom.
He has to stop himself from crying out.
Amarillo, Texas.
He can see it on the map in his head, all by itself at the top of the Texas Panhandle, just about due north of Lubbock.
It’s armadillo with two letters knocked out, not two tires. And the different-looking grille must be the r you have to add to get it.
Now, how does he signal he read the code?
“Appreciate the warning, brother. I’ll be sure to brake for the ugly little sons of bitches if I see one.”
“Sure thing.”
“Got any better jokes? That one wasn’t actually very funny?”
“Yeah, I think that well’s gone dry for the time being.”
No more code. Is that really all Bailey knows about their destination? Just a city?
“I don’t know. Shannon? You got any gut busters about famous math problems you want to chime in with?”
“Shannon’s gonna bust your gut with her foot if you don’t knock it off,” she answers casually, as if the threat took no effort at all.
“You see how they treat me around here?” Bailey asks.
Better than the feds would have treated you if they’d ever caught you, Luke thinks. But he keeps that joke to himself.
Silence falls, leaving Luke to consider the information just shared.
Charley never asked for their destination to be withheld from her. Just the method of Mattingly’s madness, specifically the contents of his truck. If Bailey’s telling him now, does that mean Bailey knows and Cole doesn’t? Or does it mean Cole’s been keeping it a secret from Bailey and Bailey just now managed to find out?
If so, why keep the information from Charley?
Trying to get the answers to these questions through coded conversation would either result in preposterous confusion or detection by their multiple monitors, so Luke decides to take the only option available, even though it’s far from being the easiest one.
Shut up and drive.
12
Joyce Pierce.
Sixteen years old, safe in her new bedroom at her grandmother’s house with no one peering over her shoulder, typing her mother’s full name into her new computer feels like the most rebellious act Charlotte’s ever committed.
As Charlotte, still Trina then, pages through the search results yie
lded by her mother’s name, her heart starts to race, fingers of tension pressing against the back of her neck.
There is information she’s never heard before; details that have been hidden from her. Somehow the therapists, the tutors, the press agents, the network of staff her father constantly encircled her with all kept these pieces of the story from her. Maybe for a very simple reason. Their job wasn’t to sell Joyce Pierce’s narrative; it was to sell Trina’s. That was the sales pitch. That by having spent seven years as the child of serial killers, Trina Pierce possessed intimate knowledge of how such predators concealed themselves.
It was a lie.
She’d had no idea that Abigail and Daniel Banning weren’t her real parents, not until a SWAT team exploded from the woods one day, the result of a deliveryman recognizing Trina from an age-progression photo he’d seen on a true crime show.
Her father had built a story for her that didn’t exist.
Worse, that narrative didn’t even fit with his own suspicions about his daughter.
He sometimes worried aloud about the effect Trina’s experience might have had on her young mind. Once, as a teenager, when she’d complained about yet another series of speaking events, he’d snapped and said, “We keep doing this so you’ll never forget who they really were.”
And what would have been so bad about forgetting the Bannings and what they had done?
In that moment, she didn’t have the courage to ask. Later, she’d come to suspect that her father believed if he didn’t drag his daughter constantly through the mud of her past, she might turn into a literal heir to the Bannings’ evil ways. Did he actually think he was competing with those monsters for the care and feeding of his daughter’s soul?
The search results reveal details about her mother’s final hours she’s never heard before—first reported by the Washington Post right after her rescue and the arrest of the Bannings, then repeated in countless other articles. She realizes that her mother’s death is something she’s never truly experienced or grieved.
Now she experiences it as a body blow.
Her ears are ringing; her cheeks hot.
The exhumation of her mother’s body from where the Bannings had crudely buried her revealed that she’d broken four fingers on her right hand during her captivity. The manner of the breaks suggested she’d done it trying to claw open the doors to the root cellar in which Abigail and Daniel Banning confined her. Abigail confirmed it in interviews. Four fingers, all but her pinky on her right hand. Worse, the pathologist believed she broke one after the other, which meant she kept up her efforts even after the first bone snapped. Maybe it was pure panic. Or maybe it was something else.
The root cellar was dug out of the side of a gently sloping hill. Charley can remember the mound it made between the trees. Many of the victims scratched messages into the stones in the walls with their fingernails or tiny rocks. They weren’t messages for other victims; they were messages for the Bannings, and the most famous one read U CAN’T RAPE MY HATE AWAY.
Several families of the victims believed their loved one had written it, but there was no telling, really. There was another message, though, that had most certainly been left by her mother; Abigail confirmed it.
LET ME HOLD HER PLEASE.
Impossible not to believe that Joyce Pierce had broken her fingers not just to escape the root cellar but to get to her baby girl, who she wanted to believe was somewhere alive on that farm. Did she find out she was right before she died? Abigail says no. It was not Abigail’s job to visit the victims during her confinement; that was the time her husband spent alone with them. On the third day, Abigail would cut their throats, but not before whispering in their ears, “You are now nothing.”
No interviewer had ever mentioned this message to Charley. When she was first rescued, she was a little girl, appearing only briefly on camera, seated mostly on her father’s lap and answering basic, insipid questions about whether she was OK. Those interviews were like proof of life for television watchers everywhere.
Then, once her father was able to put the money-making machine in place, he did the interviews, and she appeared onstage to read the agreed-upon script. Maybe she should be grateful now that the horror movie fans who flooded their events had enough restraint not to ask about her mother’s last, anguished request.
But now, sitting in her brand-new bedroom, free to Google and free to roam the countryside surrounding her new hometown, she is also free to experience the leveling pain of her mother’s loss for the first time. It’s their first goodbye, really, and it’s composed of broken bones and a desperate plea scratched in stone.
LET ME HOLD HER PLEASE.
She can’t remember falling off the bed. She must have, though, because the next thing she remembers is being on all fours, staring at the laptop, which landed on the back of its screen and then snapped closed. Then she’s listening to the loud footsteps of her grandmother and her boyfriend as they run toward the sound of her hysterical sobs years in the making.
A familiar tingling spreads through her body.
She knows this sensation.
She’s even named it.
Bone music . . .
Charlotte’s tempted to think memory’s the cause. The cloying scent of her grandmother’s carpet powder rising up to meet her as she sobbed on all fours; the feel of Uncle Marty’s powerful arm as he looped it under her stomach so he could lift her up and onto the bed; the sight of her grandmother going still and silent when she saw what Charlotte was studying on her new computer’s screen. LET ME HOLD HER PLEASE. If these things were powerful enough to unleash Zypraxon’s power within her veins, that would be a breakthrough, for sure. Memories, mental images, have never been enough to trigger her before. Lord knows they’ve tried in the lab. But she’d be fooling herself if she said that was the cause now.
The truth is, Mattingly has worn her down. The hours in the storm cellar, the thick leather straps pinning her body to the gurney, the interminable invasion of the Lucite tube wedged inside her mouth. It’s an endurance test, and she’s about to fail it. By her standards, not his. Would this be the moment a normal victim lost her mind, tried to claw her way free of the trap, and ended up opening the tube’s entrance to the confined, restless swarm of rats overhead?
The truck bounces over a bump in the road, carriage shuddering. For the past few hours, her arms have sung with pain from the rigid pose she’s held them in to keep from parting the container’s divider.
Too late, she notices the pain is gone.
That means she’s fully triggered.
And that means she didn’t exert enough effort to keep her arms still.
A fat-bottomed rat is already wiggling upward through the newly opened space in the divider.
Once it enters the tube, she loses a clear view of it, can see only the press of its fur-covered back. But it’s headed straight for her open mouth, convinced it’s the escape it’s craved now for hours.
This doesn’t have to be the end of it, she tells herself. Now that she’s triggered there’s little the rats can do to her other than gross her out. Their bites will instantly heal; whatever diseases they might communicate will have trouble taking root in her system because her cells will rebound from any alteration. If she can just endure the pure horror of this, she can keep going, get closer to Mattingly’s endgame.
But when she feels the rat’s nose brushing against the tip of the tongue she’s pressed to the bottom of her mouth, those thoughts feel like theory.
Her stomach lurches. She coughs with enough Zypraxon-infused force to frighten the rat out of her mouth. From what she can see of its fur pressing against the tube, the little creature looks like it’s trying to turn around.
Another rat squeezes through the new opening above. Followed by another. It won’t matter, she realizes now, if the first rat senses there’s something large and potentially dangerous blocking its escape. The pressure of its comrades streaming down after it might trap it and push
it forward.
And here they come. A tide of gray filling the tube, so thick it’s impossible to tell where one rodent ends and the other begins.
Fur clogs her mouth suddenly. The first rat’s pinned, unable to escape.
It’s the taste that does it—a taste that reminds her of turned mushrooms and the smell of sour milk.
When she feels the head strap slide away, she realizes she jerked her head before she could stop herself. Did Mattingly see it on that little black camera of his? He’ll spot the broken strap eventually, but he doesn’t have to know how she broke it. Not yet.
With the smallest motion she can muster, she jerks her hand free of the cable attached to the divider, but she still pulls one half of the divider free from the cube and sends it slamming to the floor. She reaches up, pulls the tube from her mouth, and rolls her head to one side. When she spits the rat out of her mouth, the force of her supercharged breath sends the thing hurtling into the stack of crates nearby with a loud crack before it slaps to the floor with deadweight.
Oops.
But by then she’s feeling the brush, brush, brush of the other rats landing on her shoulder and streaming down her body, hears them hitting the container’s metal floor with similar thuds, heading out in a dozen different directions. If she yanks her other hand free of the cable with a single tug, that will reveal her powers for sure, so instead, she rolls to the side facing away from the camera until the strap across her stomach gives way with a soft pop of leather.
The gurney slams to the floor with a thundering crash, kicking one leg out from the Lucite contraption and toppling it. The impact would have knocked the wind out of a normal victim, but she’s fine, more concerned with keeping her fetal position so she can make it look like the straps around each ankle snapped when the gurney turned over and not because she’s gently pressing upward on each one.
She’s free. Slowly, she rises to all fours, coughing with great drama, pretending to be stunned.
“Showtime,” Shannon’s voice says in Luke’s ear.
“Already?”
Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl) Page 11
