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

by Christopher Rice

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute . . .” He assumed he was just thinking these words; then he realizes he’s saying them aloud, and he sounds both dazed and pathetic. But the woman doesn’t stop; she’s carrying him sideways, away from the cargo door as a shadow, possibly belonging to her partner, lowers the door. With the truck’s engine cut and the taillights dark, the field will descend into almost total darkness as soon as that door’s closed. Somehow that thought frightens him more than being trapped in the truck with these two fuckers.

  The gurney’s lowered, then tilts so suddenly his stomach knots. His eyes haven’t adjusted yet, but he’s gone vertical now and the woman’s as close as a lover. Her breath grazes his neck. But that’s the only part of her touching him. He hears a low crackle at his feet. It sounds almost like flame, but it’s too quiet and there’s no light. It’s the sound of earth splitting from constant, steady pressure. That’s when he realizes she’s driving the foot of the gurney’s plank down into the earth itself.

  Impossible . . .

  He’s thought the word countless times and spoken it aloud even more than that. But never with this much fear, never with his heart roaring like this.

  Then she steps away, leaving him standing upright like a stake, and there’s another sound. Footsteps. But they’re loud. Too loud, it seems, to be human, crunching dirt like it’s broken glass.

  It’s stress, he tells himself. His mind’s playing tricks. Hell, maybe he’s had a psychotic break.

  But the fierce beam of light that suddenly pierces the dark before him doesn’t have the quality of a hallucination. The bright halo of a flashlight hits the dirt a few feet from him, and that’s when he sees little craters in the dirt. Not craters. Footprints. Footsteps made by something impossibly heavy but the size of a human.

  The connections his mind is making are worse than the pain of his broken arm. Because the footsteps make him think of the way she lifted him in a two-handed grip, of the power with which she wedged the gurney plank into the dirt, of the sudden, impossible speed with which she yanked him through the divider and strapped him to the gurney.

  Whoever’s holding the flashlight, probably the woman’s partner, wants Cyrus to see what he’s been denying now for too long. The woman who left those footprints isn’t impossibly heavy; she’s impossibly strong, and she ground those footsteps into the earth on purpose.

  When the flashlight beam finds her, she’s standing at the back of the truck. The sound that happens next doesn’t belong in nature, and it turns most of his skin to gooseflesh. He’s heard giant pieces of metal shredded by fast and furious winds or split-second collisions, but he’s never heard them emit this kind of low protest as they’re torn from something by a powerful force that’s just taking its sweet damn time. In the flashlight beam, he sees Hailey Brinkmann rip the entire length of the drop step bumper from the back of the truck. The metal doesn’t screech; it whines, the tops of the four vertical support beams popping free like fence stakes as she tears the bumper off like a Band-Aid.

  Then she drops it to the dirt with a sound like a giant tuning fork.

  “I need you to answer my questions, Cyrus.”

  Before he can say anything, she places a hand at the bottom of one of the vertical support beams and pulls it free as if it’s made of taffy.

  “Are you ready?” she asks.

  Some stubborn instinct tries to make him protest, but the sound that comes out of him is so phlegmy and incoherent he thinks he might be having a stroke.

  The evil bitch shakes her head as if she’s disappointed.

  Then the broken crossbar is suddenly flying through the air toward him, so fast the flashlight beam can’t keep up. When it vanishes into darkness midflight, Cyrus emits a yowl that sounds animallike, braces to be pierced through his center like the lizards he used to torture as a kid. Then there’s a crackling impact. Cyrus winces. The flashlight beam finds the crossbar, speared in the dirt a short distance away. Another few feet and it would have pierced him straight through.

  “Are you ready, Cyrus?” the woman who shouldn’t exist asks.

  But Cyrus doesn’t answer because he’s realizing the wet heat down his leg means one thing: he’s pissed himself for the first time in his life. And that’s when the pain from his broken arm finally makes him cry.

  When another spear hits the dirt a few feet away, he loses control of all the sounds coming from him just like he lost control of his bladder. He hears his wrenching sobs as if from a distance and knows he’s crying out for help from gods he’s never believed in and a host of others. Even thinks, for a moment, that he’s looking down on himself from above and wonders if he’s died from the shock of it all.

  But then he feels hot breath on his face, blinks, and sees the impossibly strong woman is standing inches away, her nose practically touching his. That’s when he realizes he’s still very much alive, and his hysterical words revealed something that has brought her close.

  “Who’s Mother?” she asks.

  III

  19

  Lubbock, Texas

  1969

  Marjorie Payne wishes her father was the one driving the Plymouth GTX and the two of them were on another one of their excursions into the vast, empty fields that surround their town. The kind of night when they’d sit together on the hood of the car, drinking Dr Peppers and eating moon pies and trying to spot the satellite that’d been put into space that year, all while her daddy spoke of the stars overhead as if they were a vast, unknowable ocean and the plains of West Texas its only coast.

  But it’s her mother behind the wheel, and the woman’s pelting Daddy with a dozen frantic questions about the accident that’s rendered him unable to drive. The same one that had him limping to the nearest service station to call for their help. He’s in too much pain to answer them, but of course, that doesn’t stop her shrill, insistent mother, and once again, Marjorie finds herself stuck in a back seat, gazing out a window and remembering that the curse of being a teenager is knowing how your momma can be a better wife and not being able to tell her because she just won’t listen.

  Daddy had been crisscrossing Texas for days on another work trip, and they’d expected him later that evening, so when the call came, Momma had been in the middle of preparing his usual welcome home dinner—chicken-fried steak with bacon gravy and Frito casserole, his favorites. Of course, once they all sat down to eat, her mother would give them her usual lecture on how Frito casserole was technically an entrée, not a side dish, but just this once she’d yield to her husband’s expansive appetite. The same lecture, every damn time. It was a wonder her father still came home.

  She listened to KLLL whenever she cooked, so she was singing along with Loretta Lynn when the DJ cut in with a newsbreak about how the Plains Rapist had got another woman up in Plainview. She’d cried out and killed the radio as if the damn thing had bit her. Ironing her hair in her room, Marjorie was so startled by her mother’s outburst she almost knocked the iron from the board. The damn newspaper article the other day certainly hadn’t helped. They’d run a drawing of a victim’s description of the stocking cap, which apparently had star designs around its eyeholes and silver thread around the mouth like fading lipstick, and now her mother’s anxiety was even worse.

  When the phone rang just a few minutes later, her mother cried out again. Further proof, Marjorie had thought, that Momma was a silly woman who brought needless fear everywhere she went. Like a rapist would telephone first.

  Marjorie could tell from her mother’s tone that it was her father on the other end of the line, and he was in some kind of trouble.

  She followed Momma next door to Uncle Clem’s even though her mother had told her to stay put in case Daddy called again. The Plymouth was apparently all right—banged up but drivable, her mother said with an authority that made it sound like she was directly quoting her husband—but her daddy was not. The story came out of her mother in a frantic rush as she stood on Clem’s back porch and he listen
ed through the screen door he was holding open with one hand, one arm already punched through the jacket of his janitor’s uniform. He was on his way to the overnight shift at the municipal auditorium and in no mood for this nonsense and wanted to know how his sister’s husband could have been stupid enough to get out of his car and check on an injured animal like that, even if he was the one who hit it. Her mother had fired back that pronghorn antelopes weren’t known to play dead like opossums, and it wasn’t her husband’s fault the damn thing had kicked him in the gut, and the point was she needed a ride, not a discussion of roadkill ethics.

  The three of them squeezed onto the bench seat of Clem’s Studebaker pickup while Marjorie tried to draw comfort from the stars. But all the sniping going on right next to her—Clem didn’t have time to follow them back into town because it wasn’t on his way, so Beatty had better be damn sure the car’s actually drivable—was coming close to draining the magic from the big starry skies she loved so much. In the end, that wasn’t possible; she was sure of it. She’d always be just like her daddy, comforted by open spaces and strengthened by silence.

  They found her father a few minutes past the service station’s lone island of light, standing beside the Plymouth, its angled headlights shooting across the empty field. When he started toward them at the sign of their approach, Marjorie saw how badly injured he was. She’d figured the term “kicked in the gut” had just been an expression, but her daddy held his stomach in both arms, as if he was afraid it might burst. The closer he got to the Studebaker, the more visible the blood under his arms became. Despite her mother’s protests, Marjorie hopped from the truck before it had come to a full stop. When she ran to him, the instinct to hug her made him flinch. Either he didn’t want to get blood on her or just didn’t want to reveal how badly he was injured.

  “You need to get to the hospital, Beatty,” Clem shouted without anything that sounded like compassion.

  “Go on now,” her daddy said. “Danielle will bring me home.”

  “You’re banged up worse than the car. You need to—”

  “Go on now, Clem.”

  “It’s fine, Clem. I got ’im.” But Momma didn’t sound like she thought Clem was wrong; more like she just wanted to prevent a fight between her husband and her brother. She even sounded a little frightened of being alone in the vast dark with only an injured husband and a teenage daughter.

  When her uncle Clem’s eyes landed on her, Marjorie realized she’d been glaring at him too confidently because she thought she stood in darkness. But some of the headlights’ reflected glow must have been falling on her face, and that’s why Clem’s attention caught on her look like a hooked trout. She couldn’t help it.

  Why did he always talk to Daddy like he was the big screwup in the family?

  Daddy drove all over the great state of Texas selling insurance while Clem pushed a mop bucket at the coliseum, cleaning up other people’s spilled beer after basketball games. While Clem got drunk and picked fights with Hispanics because he blamed them for his problems, her daddy spent evenings with his happy family, watching the brand-new television he bought them in a house he’s already paid for. Clem’s also one of the many men who’s started looking at her differently since she became a teenager, his wariness implying the changes in her body make him think thoughts he doesn’t like and he believes she’s to blame for them.

  She didn’t care how badly Daddy was hurt; she was glad Clem left.

  If Daddy needed a hospital, he’d tell her mother to drive him there. What he needed was rest, a good meal, and for the people in his life to stop treating him like a child just because he had compassion for some poor, dumb antelope.

  As Clem’s truck pulled a U-turn, Marjorie watched with relief as the taillights vanished into the endless dark. Behind her there were whispers.

  Her mother tended to drop her voice whenever she needed to tell her daddy something he might not like, probably to shield herself from Marjorie’s opinions.

  When she started whispering, Marjorie moved closer, trying to eavesdrop, while pretending to watch Clem’s vanishing truck. Her mother was asking for a boatload of details, and her father sounded tired, so very tired.

  Why’d her Daddy walk all the way to the service station to make the call and then back to the Plymouth again? He didn’t, of course. He got an employee from the service station to drive him back to the car as soon as he knew she was on her way.

  Then how come he didn’t ask her to meet him at the service station? It was foolish of him to wait for them alone out here in the dark when he was this badly injured. He responded by saying he wasn’t that badly injured. But Marjorie could hear something in her mother’s voice, something beyond irritation and fear. Her mother just couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that her father had been so determined not to leave the Plymouth alone for any length of time.

  Marjorie had to admit, if only to herself, it was a pretty good question.

  Was Daddy afraid the Plymouth would get stolen out here in the middle of nowhere? Maybe plowed off the side of the road by a truck that didn’t see it in time? She could see how her father might have been able to prevent the former—he never went anywhere without his gun—but in his current state, there would have been precious little he could have done about the latter.

  Even though she was afraid it might silence them, Marjorie looked in the direction of her parents, saw her mother try to grip her father’s shoulders. He tried to step back, and the attempt caused wince-inducing pain.

  “Gosh dang it, Beatty, your rib’s broke!”

  “Nothing’s broke. I’m just scratched up is all. Now get in the car and let’s go.”

  Her mother gave her a look, and Marjorie saw disappointment in it. Like she wished she had an ally in this moment, someone else who recognized the strangeness of her husband’s behavior, but she knew she’d never find one in her daughter.

  “We should get him home so he can rest,” Marjorie said.

  “Should we?” Like so many of the questions her mother asked her of late, it was both rhetorical and sarcastic.

  When Marjorie reached the passenger-side door, her father managed to pop the passenger seat forward with twice the usual effort so she could squeeze into the back seat.

  “Hey, baby girl.”

  “Pronghorn get you, Daddy?”

  “Sure did. No sense in trying to do right by a wild creature.”

  “Guess a hug’ll hurt, then?”

  “It will, baby girl. But maybe later after I’ve had a beer.”

  “Deal.”

  He made a kissing sound, gently pinched her cheek.

  It was so dark out and the leather in the back seat so black, it felt like she was settling into a void until she heard the familiar creaking underneath her as she readjusted.

  Now they’re charging through the dark toward Lubbock’s halo on the horizon. The Plymouth’s powerful V-8 engine feels familiar, comfortable. And finally, her mother’s stopped with all the damn questions.

  But she’s driving like a bat out of hell, which isn’t like her. Does she think the Plains Rapist has wings?

  “Oh, no.” It sounds like a groan her mother hastily attached two words to at the last possible second.

  Maybe they have a flat, or the car’s banged up worse than her daddy thought and some warning light’s gone on in the dash.

  “What, Danielle?” her father asks.

  Her mother points to a dark smear on the windshield close to the passenger side. It’s backlit by the glow of the four headlights, and it’s dark. If it’s making her mother queasy, it can only be one thing. Her father already told them he struck the pronghorn so hard, it flipped up onto the windshield and then over the roof of the car. It must have left some blood smears along the way. And if there’s one thing her mother hates more than the dark, it’s blood.

  “Can you reach it?” she asks.

  “No, I can’t reach it. You crazy?”

  “You can’t just wipe it off
?”

  “Woman, just drive the damn car and don’t look at it.”

  “I can’t, Beatty. I can’t with it like that. You know how I am.”

  Amazing, Marjorie thinks, that one fear can overpower another so quickly. Her mother’s so determined to get rid of that bloodstain, she’s pulling over in the middle of nowhere despite her fear of the endless night. Her father’s letting out a stream of curses, but in no time, she’s rounding the hood, standing next to the passenger side, leaning in to see how big the bloodstain is, when her father says, “Well, don’t ruin your dress over it, Danielle!”

  “I’m not.”

  Marjorie studies her father, the way he’s rocking back and forth, still gripping his stomach. He’s hurt bad. There’s no denying it. He’s not a man to avoid doctors when he’s got the flu or even a sore arm that won’t go away. And right now, he’s badly injured—bleeding, even—and all he wants to do is go straight home. There’s got to be some good explanation. He’ll share it in time.

  With her, at least. And that’s just the way she likes it.

  She’s been watching him so closely she’s got no idea what prompted his suddenly wild jostling in his seat. She’s worried he’s having some sort of seizure; then she realizes that in his weakened state his wrestling efforts to get the seat belt off are so ungainly they look like an epileptic fit. He’s also trying to kick the door open with one foot, but it’s too heavy and he’s in too much pain to accomplish both things at once. When Marjorie hears the familiar creak of the trunk opening, she realizes it’s her mother’s actions that have freaked him out. She’s rooting around inside the trunk, and that’s caused her father to convulse with sudden panic.

  The seat belt off, the door half-open, her father’s managed to turn in his seat. He’s looking past Marjorie to where the rear window’s blocked by the open trunk. His eyes meet hers. There’s a blend of pain—physical and emotional—and resignation in them that she knows she will remember for the rest of her life. A sense that something he’s slowly built with his only daughter over time is about to be either irreparably damaged or forever lost.