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

by Christopher Rice

  “Yeah,” she answers curtly.

  Shannon’s job isn’t to assess the situation, but she sounds disappointed, and he wonders if it’s a feeling shared inside Kansas Command. More importantly, he wonders what horrors inside that damn truck triggered Charlotte this soon in the process.

  These are wonders for a later hour.

  His only order of business now is to pull the stopwatch hanging around his neck from inside of his shirt and hit one of the two tiny buttons on top.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cyrus whispers.

  Sure, he’s got backup straps, a whole box of them, but in all his years of doing this a seedling’s never gotten free during a ride. It’s always been a possibility, of course, and he’s rehearsed responses countless times on his own.

  The ride is not without some risk. It’s not supposed to be. It requires practice and calculation. That’s the point. Mother invented this challenge to keep their minds sharp, their appetites focused, so their impulses would be effectively purged by the end of it.

  Eyes flitting back and forth between the monitor mounted on his dash and the empty roadway in front of him, Cyrus eases his foot off the gas. He’s driven this route enough to know where all the exits are. If the shit has to hit the fan, this isn’t the worst spot to pull over and clean the blades. Mostly vast farmland with isolated back roads and some hard-packed earth. Not a lot of brush or cover, so he might stick out like a sore thumb during the day. But that’s just one more reason they all ride at night.

  Cyrus finds the exit. Once his speed drops to thirty on the off-ramp, he gives another look at the monitor. In compliance with Mother’s rules—nothing that uses Wi-Fi—the camera’s hardwired to the monitor. If he ever gets pulled over for any reason, he can just unplug the thing and drop it into the space behind the passenger seat. But he’s never been pulled over. And technically, he isn’t being pulled over now. There’s just been a little accident. That’s all.

  As for the Head Slayer, their collective nickname for the Lucite device designed to slowly erode a seedling’s hard outer shell, well, they’re easy enough to reassemble. That’s part of their beauty. And he’s got plenty of sedatives to knock the ungrateful little bitch out with again.

  This is an annoyance, that’s all.

  An accident and annoyance.

  He should relax. Which means he should stop whispering both words under his breath in a singsongy mantra.

  And look at her, he thinks, down on all fours, coughing like the tube was down her throat when it wasn’t really because it doesn’t go that far. She’s a mess. Looks like the Head Slayer’s done at least part of the work. She may not be all the way there yet, not quite as broken as Mother would like, but she’s pretty damn close. Hopefully this strange turn of events hasn’t emboldened her. Hopefully for her sake. The fate of those who reach Mother’s threshold with their egos intact is far worse than what awaits the already broken ones.

  The truck starts to rattle as he enters a rough, isolated road heading into empty fields.

  Quickly, he turns off the road, wheels bouncing over the rutted dirt. He’d rather keep driving, but he could have trouble getting the truck free if the ground under the tires turns hostile.

  He stops.

  Relieved to be able to keep his eyes on the monitor now, he reaches into the glove compartment and removes his Taser, the strongest weapon he’s allowed to use on a noncompliant seedling. Another one of Mother’s rules. Fear is, of course, the strongest weapon of all, she reminds them, but if a seedling arrives with grievous physical injuries, then there are consequences for them all.

  That won’t be necessary, he assures himself now.

  The stupid bitch still can’t manage to stand up. If she had any real brains left, she’d be frantically searching for an exit. Then he sees she’s gripping the sides of the crates intended for phases two and three of their little road trip. Is she peering inside? Can’t tell. She’s still heaving with desperate breaths, another sign she’s barely sane.

  The divider’s locked from the other side, but she hasn’t even tried it, and that’s what tells him he’s already managed to do a lot of damage to her, the kind Mother wants.

  But when he steps from the parked truck, he wishes Mother would revisit, or maybe relax a little, her rules about internet usage. It annoys him to lose sight of his seedling for even the few seconds it takes him to reach the container’s cargo door. If he had one of those wireless security cameras, he could keep an eye on her through his phone. But then he imagines the sight of her—down on all fours, surrounded by scattering rats—streaming through the servers of some massive company and suddenly Mother’s rule seems very wise.

  Taser in one hand, he unlatches and opens the cargo door, then pulls it shut behind him quickly so that the dim security lights inside don’t spill out into the dark field for more than a few seconds.

  Ridiculous that the hairs are standing up on the back of his neck, but it’s reflex, he guesses. Just the result of not being able to see what’s on the other side of the divider. But he knows what’s there. One stunned and traumatized woman who still has an opportunity to be freed of her delusions.

  He unlocks the divider. He’s barely opened it a few inches when suddenly a snake comes nosing through the opening.

  When did the snakes get free? The serpent—charcoal colored and about three feet long—doubles back, recoiling from the heat of Cyrus’s legs. He saw her peering in the crate, but she didn’t open any of them, and they were both standing and still in good shape even after the gurney went over. The retreating snake slides past the body of one of its brothers. Cyrus expects the second snake to start moving away, too. But it doesn’t.

  Because it’s been torn in half.

  And that’s the only word to describe it. Torn. Like all the others in the crate, it’s a rat snake, about four feet long, dark. Cyrus’s first thought is maybe some of the rats ganged up and tore it to shreds, but that’s absurd. Even if all the rats somehow worked in concert, they’d have trouble doing damage like this in the minute or two it took him to round the back of the truck. And rat snakes eat rats. Not the other way around.

  Torn. The word keeps pulsing in his brain, bringing with it a cold wash of fear in the pit of his stomach and tension all along his shoulders.

  There is something in here that can tear a snake in half.

  Suddenly afraid to push the divider back any farther, Cyrus raises the Taser at the narrow sliver of pale-blue light before him.

  What happens next happens so quickly he can barely give it a chronology. His instincts assume some vehicle has struck the truck from behind and the entire thing is now sliding through the field. But when he slams face-first into one of the container’s hard metal walls, he realizes the truck’s not moving at all. But he sure as hell is. Then, as if on a delay, he hears the divider being violently pushed all the way open. That happened first, he realizes, but he was too shocked to process it at the time.

  Now he’s on all fours, his head throbbing with pain so total it feels like a helmet. Then he’s yanked backward and up at the same time. Now he’s sure something really did happen to the truck because there’s no other explanation for the impossibly powerful force that’s taken control of his body.

  His back slams down onto something hard. The metallic rattles are familiar sounding but louder than they’ve ever been before. The gurney. Something’s slamming him down onto the gurney. It’s been righted and he’s somehow landed on it and now he’s feeling something that seems startlingly normal and almost soothing given the jarring movements that brought him to this position. She’s binding his hands with the leather straps he left dangling from the sides of the gurney after he attached the cables to her wrists.

  There she is, standing over him; his little seedling, Hailey Brinkmann. Not coughing. Seemingly unafraid, working with a focus and precision that says he hasn’t managed to send even the slightest of cracks through her mind.

  A wail escapes him before he can
stop it. She looks into his eyes with a coldness and determination he’s never seen in one of his seedlings, a look that suggests divine judgment and many other things he’s never believed in. But all she says as she holds his jaw in a firm grip is, “Shut the fuck up, Cyrus.”

  13

  After releasing his jaw, Charlotte checks Mattingly’s restraints. The light testing tugs she’d like to give each strap might snap them in two, so she settles for running her fingers over each one. He had a box of extra straps nearby, which tells her she’s not the first victim to get free. Or at least temporarily free. But now he’s bound just like she was when he first loaded her into the truck; there are thick leather straps around his wrists, ankles, and head and a big, fat one just above the waistline of his jeans. She returns her attention to his contorted, gasping grimace, his wide-eyed terror. But she’s not just enjoying his fear. She’s looking for evidence of something specific in his crazed eyes.

  Has he sensed the unnatural extent of her strength? Or is he convincing himself she just caught him off guard and somehow gained the upper hand?

  The dumb shock in his expression suggests it could be the former, but it’s anyone’s guess until he finds his voice.

  It’s a gratifying sight, of course, seeing him strapped down like this, but the last time she paused to inflame a target’s terror, the bastard didn’t survive. Memories of Richard Davies, broken and bleeding to death on the snowy hunting range where he tried to confine her, have proved both stubborn and vivid in the six months since. They don’t inspire guilt. After all, the man fashioned wallets and belts from the skin of his victims. But if he were alive and in prison, she doubts she’d think about him so clearly every night before bed.

  But Cole’s order that she blindfold her targets as soon as possible has nothing to do with her memories, good, bad, or otherwise, and everything to do with keeping her incredible strength secret. They’ve added business partners since last time, people who’ve helped finance everything from Luke’s magical SUV to every last physical and digital detail of Hailey Brinkmann’s fake life. She’s pretty sure this new rule comes from them. She’s also pretty sure they’re watching everything she does now, so she’s got no plans to defy them.

  The headpiece with its grotesque throat attachment—she’s not sure what else to call the thing—rests on a pull-down utility shelf attached to the container’s wall, looking like a hellish beached jellyfish that floated up from the depths. Gently, she tears the fabric hood from the leather mask that covered most of her face while she was confined in the storm cellar, letting the mask fall to the floor. It’s taken her hours of practice in the lab to execute small, everyday moments while triggered without using mantras or deep breathing techniques to keep her from pulling doorknobs out of doors and cracking cell phone screens when she doesn’t mean to. She’s not perfect, but she’s getting better.

  The leather tongue hits the metal with a loud, satisfying thwack; then she tugs the fabric down over Mattingly’s head, covering his eyes just as he did her own hours before.

  “Sending Luke in.” Cole’s voice through the earpiece startles her so badly she almost jumps. His is the first voice other than Mattingly’s she’s heard in over a day.

  “Afraid a woman can’t handle it on her own?”

  “Can we minimize chitchat in front of our new captive?”

  In a near whisper, she says, “Yeah, I forget. You’re a big fan of one-way conversations.”

  “Letting off steam, I get it. It’s been a night. You’re allowed. I hate snakes, too.”

  Charlotte turns her back on the now blindfolded Cyrus Mattingly, moves to the open divider. “I actually don’t mind them, but that one struck at me when I opened the crate, and I wasn’t in the mood.” She glances back, sees Mattingly jerking against his restraints to see who she’s talking to. Voice low, she says, “Just want to point out there’s not enough here.”

  “You think if we notify the authorities there won’t be enough to implicate him?”

  She almost laughs at the ease with which Cole used the term authorities, as if the man answers to any higher power at all.

  “Not without me, no,” she answers.

  “Well, you’re absolutely not talking to the cops.”

  “Also, I shredded the headpiece to make the blindfold so that’s one piece of evidence that’s been tampered with.”

  “Yeah, it was covered in your DNA, so that would have been out, too.”

  “You reposition surveillance satellites at your will. I bet you can tamper with a little DNA evidence.”

  “Perhaps. But I prefer to tamper with it before it’s discovered, not after. What are you really proposing here, Charlotte?”

  He doesn’t sound annoyed, or even put off. More like he’s leading her to say something he’s afraid to say himself. She’s never been quite sure what value Cole Graydon places on the lives of these killers. He didn’t shed a tear when he broke the news to her that the target of their last operation didn’t survive it. But she knows this: after inserting himself in her very first hunt, he managed to talk her out of her rage before she broke her target’s neck. And by doing so, he gave the families of the man’s victims a level of closure she hadn’t thought to consider when she’d been poised to snap the fucker like kindling. Zypraxon doesn’t steal her common sense; the opportunity to exact revenge with her bare hands does.

  Sometimes.

  And Cole, shadowy as he is, can be a pretty good voice of reason.

  Sometimes.

  In this moment, she doubts he’s worried she might flip her lid and kill the guy. His concerns, as always, are driven by a multitude of agendas, often of unknown origin.

  “We need a kill site and it’s not this truck,” she whispers. “This is just . . . prologue. Nothing here’s designed to actually kill, and I don’t see anything that connects to other possible victims.”

  In the silence that follows, she wonders if Cole’s fighting a desire to agree with her. “We identified the snakes as nonvenomous, but if one of them went down the tube—”

  “No snake’s going to crawl into a person’s open mouth. I doubt they’d even leave the container unless you coaxed them with food. The purpose of the device is fear. But that can’t be his only game.”

  “So, what are you suggesting? An interrogation?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “OK. Let’s see how it goes. But his blindfold stays on. And keep it verbal.”

  Don’t hurt him, she thinks, got it. I’m sure the new ethically fluid billionaires we’re working with really hate strategic bone breaking.

  But the blindfold part makes sense on several levels.

  If Mattingly is going to seem sufficiently bonkers when the authorities find him, they shouldn’t give him a prolonged look at how she functions when she’s triggered. They’ll have no trouble altering her physical appearance and breaking apart all evidence of Hailey Brinkmann’s life. For all she knows, Cole’s teams are already clearing out the rental house in Richardson and altering the security footage of their mutual exit from the NorthPark Mall. Various apprehended serial killers giving consistent accounts of her impossible actions might spell trouble for Project Bluebird 2.0.

  The fewer details Mattingly can share, the better.

  There’s a knock against the back of the truck.

  “Boyfriend alert,” Cole says.

  Even though it requires her to lose sight of her captive, Charlotte heads for the cargo door, takes a deep breath, and uses two fingers only to pop the latch. Luke jumps back, raising his gun at two rats that shoot out of the cargo door the minute it’s open. He didn’t know to expect them, a reminder that he hasn’t had access to any of the camera feeds from inside the truck.

  She’s known this moment was coming for a year; the man she loves standing before her and ready to help amid the kind of horrors she used to face alone. But she’s not prepared for how much she wants to throw her arms around him, even at the risk of snapping ever
y bone in his body. Just some comfort from his heat, his familiar smell. Although, after the hours he’s spent in that Cadillac, his familiar smell has probably turned a little sour. But still, she craves it badly. It must be the terrible duration of this operation, the prolonged isolation, that’s made her this unexpectedly needy.

  Then she sees his expression: bright-eyed, breathless. Excited. He’s a part of this now, something he’s wanted for a year. Can she be excited about this, too, or will his nearness now trick her into believing they’re at home together and not inside a serial killer’s truck?

  “You OK?” Luke hoists himself inside by his free hand, Glock raised in the other.

  “We’ve been ordered to keep chatter to a minimum.”

  “Question stands,” he whispers.

  “I wish I could say I’ve been through worse, but this one’s . . . special.”

  “What are the rats about?”

  “Like I said, he’s special. Also . . . snakes.”

  Luke pales. She’s always thought snakes were languid, elegant things that just wanted to be left alone, the perpetual sunbathers of the natural world. But as a boy Luke used to run sprints along the wooded trails above their town and lived in so much fear of stepping on a rattler that he’s come to view them as animate bear traps with an appetite for ankle flesh.

  “Where are they?” he asks.

  “Hiding, and they’re not venomous.”

  She starts for the gurney compartment, gesturing for him to follow.

  He doesn’t even pause when he sees Mattingly strapped down. He’s witnessed Charlotte do much worse while triggered. Instead, he zeroes in on Mattingly’s Lucite contraption, sinks down next to it, studying the tube’s length with what looks like barely concealed disgust. All told, the thing survived its fall pretty well. There are some cracks on one side of the container, and the leg that hit the floor first is badly warped. Funny how innocuous it looks now without its former inhabitants, like a cat tree missing its padding.

  Luke looks up at her for an explanation.