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

by Christopher Rice

  There’s blood all over the blue tarps covering part of the barn’s floor, and the plain fact of the matter is she’s too damn old to drag the bodies of these kids anywhere. Shotgunning them would have been a mistake if her boys hadn’t been on their way. But they are, and so they’ll clean up this mess when they get here. Dispose of the bodies the way they dispose of broken seedlings.

  It’s not like she didn’t try. Even managed to drag the boy’s body some distance from the edge of the covered pits, just because it felt like too much of an indignity to leave him lying right in the middle of where they’ll begin the planting in a few hours. But the effort drained her, reminded her she’s aged into being a woman whose real power comes from her shotgun and her willingness to use it. And her boys.

  She shot the girl first because she thought maybe, just maybe, some protective instinct in the boy might keep him from running. No such luck; no such loyalty. Hysterical in the wake of the thundering blast, he’d run for the door as soon as he’d found himself splashed in his girlfriend’s blood. The blast that brought him down filled Marjorie’s already ringing ears with a veritable scream that reminded her of her mother’s dying one.

  She set the shotgun down a few moments ago, but her hands are still shaking.

  She tells herself it’s just the aftermath of the recoil, not nerves. No one’s going to come looking for this human trash anytime soon. She’s thirty minutes from the nearest neighbor and anyone else who might have heard the shot. But maybe that’s not her worry. She’s an old woman now, and the older she gets, the more room there is for error. These past few years she’s wanted the boys to stay longer. Wanted them to visit during other parts of the year, too, not just their annual reunion. But that would be a betrayal of them, she knows. A betrayal on par with her mother’s betrayal of her father. None of them will be served by her clinging to them like some little simp.

  She’s built many things of which she can be proud. This family most of all. A family based on understanding and truth.

  But right now, she needs a bit of rest.

  Whenever she feels fatigue or some form of doubt, she calls to mind the sight that greeted her when she emerged from the storm cellar after one of the worst tornadoes in West Texas history tore through downtown Lubbock and reduced her neighborhood to splinters. At first, she thought her mother was floating high above the earth, suspended by an invisible force, her body eerily lit by the explosions of blue sparks from the battered power pole nearby.

  Another few flashes from the transformer and Marjorie saw that her mother had been speared by a dozen leaf-stripped branches of the cedar elm tree. Like Saint Sebastian and his arrows. And one of those branches had been run straight through her mother’s throat, a sight that almost sent Marjorie to her knees. But prayer, she realized, was not the language of the god who had sent her this vision. This god taught you how to channel the darkness of men and storms for your own benefit, and he had used both of those things to set Marjorie free. This god spoke in thunder alone.

  He’d silenced her mother, and in this was the key to Marjorie Payne’s liberation.

  The phone is ringing. Tinny and distant, coming from the house.

  The lure of talking to another one of her boys is so strong she’s halfway back to the house before she becomes aware of the pain in her hip. But even as she hurries through the dark house, it feels like the exhaustion of killing the two tweakers has been pumped from her system. Then she gets to the phone and finds herself breathless again.

  “Good evening, ma’am. Is Sheryl there?”

  It’s Jonah, the handsomest of her boys. If Cyrus is the smarty-pants and Wally the sweetheart, Jonah’s the soulful one, the one prone to fits of darkness and too much self-reflection and, in her opinion, too much book reading. Jonah, out of all of them, is the one who struggles mightily with the gifts of focus and direction she’s provided them for most of their adult lives. It’s because he’s the handsomest and therefore perpetually distracted and deceived by the women who desire him sexually. For him, the added benefit of a planting is that it will purge him of natural urges he might accidentally unleash on the women he insists on sleeping with. She’s explained this to him many times, and each time he seems to get it. Then, a year later, he’s mired in the same self-doubt. Given the demons that haunt his mind, she’s always most relieved by his call.

  “I’m sorry, did you say Sheryl?”

  “That’s correct, ma’am. Sheryl Peterson. She gave me this number.”

  Peterson. Good. Everything’s going well on his end.

  “Well, that’s odd. Could you read me the number, because there’s no Sheryl here?”

  “Sure.”

  She grabs a pen that’s sitting by the phone and writes it down. As with Wally a little while earlier, the first three and last two numbers are the same as hers—the middle five are the seedling’s height and weight. This one’s 5ʹ9ʺ and 180 pounds.

  “Sorry, son, but sounds like Sheryl gave you the wrong number.”

  “Ah, well. Thanks for your patience, ma’am.”

  “Sure thing. ’Night, now.”

  She hangs up. The call with Jonah has restored her some, even if the boy did sound as exhausted as she currently feels.

  26

  Highway 287, near Harrold, Texas

  Charlotte should be long past the point of being amazed by the technology available to Cole Graydon and his business partners, but by the time she discovers the third camera hidden inside the cargo area of Mattingly’s truck, she can’t help but shake her head and exhale in a long, slow hiss.

  It’s not a camera so much as a patch of translucent gel-like material. The tiny swirl of milk-colored wiring inside only became visible when she pressed the lens of Luke’s halogen flashlight almost flush with the metal wall and began moving the beam in slow sweeps over it. There’s no lens she can see, so it’s probably less of a camera and more of a motion detector that uses vibrations to send some sort of digital image back to Kansas Command.

  However it works, it doesn’t belong here and sure as hell isn’t Cyrus Mattingly’s.

  Instead of trying to peel it from the wall, she punches it, leaving a fist-size crater in the wall.

  Bound to the gurney, Mattingly yelps and sucks snot through his nose.

  If she’s already enraged Cole’s business partners by defying their order to stand down, no doubt they’re currently screaming bloody murder over her casual destruction of another several million dollars’ worth of their secret technology.

  As if he’s an obstacle on par with an ottoman in a crowded living room, she pushes Mattingly’s gurney to one wall, then starts raking the ceiling of the cargo compartment with the flashlight’s beam. She spots another faint glimmer of tiny, nearly invisible wires that could easily be mistaken for a patch of lint and drags one of the crates over—the one he didn’t use on her; the one filled with spiders—so she can stand on it gently before punching through one, two, then three cameras adhered to the ceiling.

  “You have to let me call,” he says meekly. “If I don’t call, she’ll . . .”

  “She’ll what?”

  “It’s a code. I’ll just give her a code and then—”

  “Yeah, see, that’s just it, Cyrus. How do I know you’re going to give her the right code? You might warn her I’m coming, and that wouldn’t be good for anyone. Especially you.”

  “Please . . .”

  “Please what, Cyrus?”

  “She’s my mother,” he wails with more despair than anger.

  “But she’s not, though. Your real mother died when you were a baby, and you didn’t meet this lovely lady until you got sent to some reform school. Isn’t that what you just told us?”

  Along with a lot of other seriously crazy shit, she thinks. Seriously crazy shit that was also devoid of full names, addresses, and locations.

  She’s staring at him now, but after pouring his guts out in the form of the strangest, most laudatory tale of twisted familial b
onding she’s ever heard, Cyrus Mattingly can’t bring himself to look directly at her. She doesn’t mind. What she minds is that he hasn’t been able to bring himself to provide the name and location of the woman he calls Mother, and her kill site.

  Mattingly falls silent.

  They need to get going. They were only supposed to pull over long enough to buy some burner phones, then get a little ways down the highway from anything that looked like civilization so Luke could make the phone call they’d discussed and she could interrogate Mattingly. Maybe Luke’s making the call now, but she can’t hear him outside. That’s a good thing, though. She doesn’t want Mattingly to hear Luke, either.

  “Tell me more about your mother, Cyrus.”

  “Let me call her and I will.”

  A phone number, she thinks. Without internet access, they can’t use just a phone number to pinpoint Mother’s location. The road between here and Amarillo isn’t exactly lined with cybercafés, and their own devices are all being monitored by the same business partners who somehow frightened Cole into sending coded messages.

  “When I can see your mother, literally, like with my own two eyes, then you can talk to her. How’s that?”

  “If I tell you where she is, you’ll kill me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Liar.”

  “I’m not like you, Cyrus.”

  “That’s for fucking sure,” he barks, then cackles like a mad dog. “If I could do what you could do, I’d . . .” He seems to remember himself suddenly, but it’s too late to stop her from bending down over him and resting a hand atop a chest she could crush with a gentle press.

  “You’d do what?” She didn’t mean to growl, but that’s how it came out. “Rescue kids from a burning building? Or break some poor woman’s legs so she couldn’t get away from you?”

  What’s worse, she wonders, the malevolent sanctimony of the speeches he gave her when he first tied her up or his pathetic tears of defeat now? Maybe he’s nothing without his mother’s love. Which gives her an idea.

  “What do you want?” he wails.

  “I want the other two women your mother’s holding captive in that factory.”

  “It’s not a factory. It’s a ra . . .”

  Too late, Mattingly realizes he fell victim to a classic trick, instinctively correcting wrong information and revealing something in the process.

  A ranch, she thinks. It’s not a factory, it’s a ranch. Charlotte makes a point to list all the additional easy-to-overlook facts this information reveals. Ranches are isolated. Ranches often have several structures on the property, barns or otherwise. Earlier, Mattingly bawled up a storm at the mention of Amarillo, which as good as confirmed that Luke interpreted Bailey’s coded message correctly. So they’re looking for an isolated property on the outskirts of Amarillo where no one would bat an eye at the late-night arrival of three large box trucks, and there’s no one close by to hear the screams that would result from the gruesome rituals Mattingly described to them as if he were recounting the baptisms of the saints.

  It doesn’t narrow things down as much as she’d like. Amarillo’s surrounded by a lot of vast, open country.

  Still, her idea might just work. And more importantly, it might get them back on the road again.

  Mattingly sucks snot back from his nostrils, clears his throat with a few coughs, and says, “If I don’t call her, that’s as good as warning her.”

  “Not really. Just means you ran into trouble somewhere on the road. But if I run the risk of letting you tip her off, then she knows she’s in trouble, not just you, and she might kill those women and run.”

  “She’s not going to fucking run,” he says with trembling defiance.

  And why not? she thinks. Is it because this place, this ranch, is her actual home?

  She keeps this to herself.

  “What’s she going to do, load her guns and prepare for battle? Well, I’m just fine with that. I mean, look at me, Cyrus. Do I seem like the type of woman who needs a gun to solve problems?”

  I won’t be for another hour or two, at least, she thinks, hoping Mattingly can’t detect this nagging worry in her expression. But he’s wide-eyed and gasping, as if every few minutes he needs to remind himself of the fact that she really does exist and can really do impossible things.

  She could waste all night trying to get Mother’s name and address out of this psycho, but they’re not just racing against whatever Mother’s clock is.

  They’re racing against the response team Cole’s business partners have probably insisted Cole send after them, most likely with orders to put an immediate stop to her defiance. And since Cole’s playing both sides of the field, no doubt he had no choice but to send one. She’d love to know who the teams answer to, but up until now, that question seemed above her pay grade. In the past, before he involved new business partners, Cole’s commanded all the small armies of fence-hopping, shadow-crawling mercenaries she’s worked with. If that’s still the case, then it doesn’t seem foolish to hope he hasn’t ordered them to stop her in her tracks. Just to make sure she doesn’t vanish into thin air once the operation is through.

  In essence, she’s trying to avoid two potential nightmares.

  One, allowing Mattingly to give his beloved Mother a warning that would allow her to slip off into the vast Texas night with two innocent women in trucks just like this. And two, sharing Mother’s name and location with Cole’s business partners, who’ve made it clear they’re far more invested in stopping Charlotte from reaching her destination than saving the women being held captive there. If Bailey, and possibly Cole, had really managed to keep Amarillo a secret from the partners, she and Luke would lose their only real advantage over the response team if they gave away that information now.

  She’s got a compromise that will allow her and Luke to get back on the road and figure out Mother’s location when the time’s right.

  “Tell you what,” she says. “You can call your momma when we get to Amarillo.”

  “Liar,” he says, but there’s childlike hope in his desperate tone.

  “I guess we’ll have to see when we get there.”

  She bangs lightly on the cargo area door so Luke can push it open for her.

  This time she doesn’t jump from the truck. She sinks to a seated position, drops one leg to the dirt and then the other. There are no searchlights filling the night sky. If Cole’s been pressured into sending an airborne battalion in pursuit, it’s not on their tail yet. They left the SUV, along with the vials of her blood, in the field where Mattingly first pulled off the highway. It broke Luke’s heart to say goodbye to his favorite car, but between all of its top-secret technology, as well as the paradrenaline-filled vials resting on the front seat, they figured the response team would either stop to collect it first or divert some of its members for the effort. In either scenario, maybe it would buy them a little more time. The skies are empty save for stars and wisps of high-altitude clouds. And she figures the cars whizzing by on the highway are bound for ordinary homes where ordinary people live, most of whom go to bed each night believing monsters like her captive don’t exist outside fiction.

  Her eyes focus on the stopwatch dangling around Luke’s neck, counting down what remains of her trigger window. He probably forgot he’s wearing it outside of his shirt, a sign that he’s been nervously checking it every few minutes.

  “How’d it go?” she asks Luke.

  “Not good. They said they’d get back to me. I tried to make it sound like I had more facts than I did, but if I just started spewing the crazy shit he told us, I’d tip them off that I was fishing.”

  Up until a year ago, Luke had worked as a deputy for the sheriff’s department in Altamira, California, so they’d decided to let him pretend like he was back in his old job so he could call the Amarillo Police Department.

  “They had no idea who you were talking about?” she asks.

  “I said we were trying to close a cold case in the are
a that might be connected to the Plains Rapist who’d worked in the Texas Panhandle in the late sixties. I said we had someone in custody who was bragging about all the bad shit he’d done with the guy back in the day, but we thought it might be lies and so we wanted to see if the daughter could confirm some of her dad’s movements during that period so we could see if our guy was bullshitting. I even tried to throw in the fact that the daughter might want to talk to us because maybe our guy was responsible for some of what her father went down for.”

  “It didn’t work?”

  “He had no idea what I was talking about, wanted to know why I was calling so late, and was starting to get curious about why I didn’t have more names. I even threw in the part about the woman’s mother getting killed in a tornado, and that’s when Deputy Dawg started acting like I was on meth. I tried, Charley. I’m sorry.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Let’s get going.”

  They’re wasting time, but she’s not surprised Luke isn’t rushing to get behind the wheel of the truck again. Given the type of cameras Cole’s men planted on the truck, any audio-only recording devices are probably damn near invisible to the naked eye. Trying to debug the truck’s cab could take all night. Once they’re inside again, it’ll have to be radio silence between them or any information they discuss might get transmitted back to Kansas Command.

  “Charley, we don’t know where we’re going,” Luke says.

  “We’re going to Amarillo. It’s where your brother told us to go.”

  “Yeah, but after that. I mean . . .”

  “What?” she asks.

  “We could always just start breaking his bones.”

  “You drive, I torture?”

  Luke nods, then goes silent as he considers the idea. Terrifying Mattingly into revealing his twisted origin story was one thing. Extracting information from him through pure pain is another.

  “If it comes to that . . .” But even she sounds unsure.

  “If it comes to that,” Luke says, as if trying to encourage her.

  But he sounds pretty damn unsure, too.

  As Luke starts the truck’s engine, she watches Mattingly on the same little flat-screen monitor he used to watch her. It should be gratifying, but it isn’t. Not with two other women hell bound somewhere on these vast plains, not with the filthy residue of Mattingly’s twisted tale still clinging to her skin.