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

by Christopher Rice

  “Julia?”

  “Yes.”

  “This problem we have. It’s very big.”

  “I know.”

  “Can we fix it together? When it’s time?”

  He wasn’t expecting anything like an unqualified yes. She’s too savvy an operator to grant anyone unconditional compliance. Still, she’s staring at the camera for what feels like an eternity. She moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue, looks to the ceiling, and clears her throat. It was her efforts that helped put The Consortium back together, but she did it at Cole’s insistence. Now he’s asking her to turn against business partners who may or may not have turned against them. But she’s also had a front row seat to how Stephen and Philip have acted since Project Bluebird 2.0 commenced, so it’s not like the request’s coming out of nowhere. Still, maybe it’s the kind of ask you make over a quiet, private dinner and not at the end of a frantic phone call. But right now, he’s not very hungry and they’re in different parts of the country.

  “When this is over, we can certainly discuss the road ahead. Just the two of us. In confidence.”

  With that she ends the call, and Cole takes what feels like his first deep breath in days.

  “I’m open to thoughts,” Cole finally says.

  Noah and Scott exchange a befuddled look. It’s like Cole just spoke four words of a foreign language.

  Christ almighty, Cole thinks, am I that bad at taking advice?

  “Thoughts?” Scott asks.

  “What’s your opinion of Julia’s behavior? Do we think she’s behind the hack?”

  “No,” Noah answers. “But you know her better than I do.”

  “I’m with Dr. Turlington,” Scott says.

  “Well, my father knew her better than I did, that’s for sure.”

  “Indeed,” Noah says. “It sounds like he told her a great deal about your past.”

  Cole’s silent.

  “It sounds like your father didn’t actually forgive those boys, did he?” Noah asks.

  “He did not.”

  “And Charley knows the real story?” Noah asks.

  “She does.”

  Noah nods, getting it. Scott, however, is still staring at his feet as if he’s trying to decipher fading text written on the floor.

  “So since the last thing you said to Charley was a lie, and she knew it was a lie,” Scott says, “you were basically ordering her to defy you.”

  “Correct.”

  “It was more than that,” Noah says. “You ordered her to kill whoever Cyrus Mattingly’s working with.”

  “I’m not sure it was an order. More like a . . . vague allusion.”

  He can’t tell if Scott’s judging him. He can never tell if Scott’s judging him.

  Noah, on the other hand, is smiling and nodding. “Works for me,” he finally says.

  “How much time do we have?” Cole asks Scott.

  Scott checks his phone. “Five minutes.”

  Another silence.

  “They’re not going to overdose her,” Noah says. “They just want to stop her. They don’t want to kill her.”

  “Killing her would stop her,” Cole says. “It would also stop Luke, who’s heavily armed with some of our technology.” Just the thought of being confined in a moving vehicle right next to someone undergoing the cascade of grotesqueries that visits animal subjects when overdosed makes Cole nauseated.

  “You want me to get an update from Bailey?” Scott asks.

  “No. Let him work.”

  “Is this really all we can do?” Noah asks. “Wait for Bailey?”

  “Well, if you believe in God, you could always pray,” Cole says.

  “I am,” Scott answers, “silently.”

  Noah seems to consider this for a moment.

  “I’m on the fence,” Noah answers. “I think I’ll just try positive thinking.”

  30

  Highway 287

  “Three minutes,” Luke says.

  Charlotte nods, stares out the passenger-side window, acting like she’s searching for a CLEAN RESTROOMS sign and not trying to silence a storm of thoughts in her head.

  Thoughts is a generous word for what’s plaguing her.

  It’s more like a quick, angry inventory of what she’ll be and what she won’t be if she doesn’t get dosed again.

  Basic firearms training, check.

  Hand-to-hand combat training, nope. Cole’s been understandably reticent about letting her take martial arts classes when a single strike from her right hand during a trigger window is capable of almost taking someone’s head off.

  Ability to fight her way free of a reasonably strong captor. Half check. Maybe.

  Experience fighting for her life in real-world situations without paradrenaline flowing through her veins. Giant red X mark indicating a value lower than zero.

  If they don’t dose her, she’ll be in a position she’s never been in before.

  Relying on Luke for her personal safety.

  Luke’s special, but relying on a man isn’t her favorite thing.

  Her father forever warped the concept of what protection means. He exposed her to constant risk from dangerous stalkers rather than endanger the cash flow generated by their public appearances, all while claiming he was shielding her from a world that would never truly understand what happened to her. Her grandmother’s boyfriend, Uncle Marty, is probably the closest she’s ever had to a male protector, before and after her grandmother’s sudden death. When she was a teenager, he and some of his friends escorted a particularly frightening stalker to the edge of town when the guy showed up on her grandmother’s doorstep. But that was a group effort, and there’d been some women in the crew.

  It’s not about relying on a man, she realizes. It’s about relying on the man I love.

  She saved Luke’s life, and under the right circumstances, she could do it again with ease. It’s a unique foundation their relationship’s rested on comfortably for a year. But it’s the reverse of most of the relationships she’s seen, the straight ones anyway. When she and Luke both hear a strange noise in the middle of the night, their feet hit the floor at the same time. Then Charley remembers she doesn’t take Zypraxon every day, and although there’s an emergency reserve of pills close to her hometown, it’s not exactly in her bedside drawer, and the conditions under which she’s allowed to access it are strict. But still, she’s not the girl who grabs her man’s arm when she’s startled or afraid. Maybe because her experience of bringing down hideous predators with her bare hands has rewired her brain to the point that she’s less skittish and afraid even when she’s not triggered.

  For a while now, she’s felt like an asset instead of a need. After being treated like a burden and a head case by her father, a possible infant serial killer by vast swaths of the internet, and a freak show oddity by large auditoriums full of horror movie fans pretending to care about her case, Charlotte stopped being a burden shrouded in darkness several years ago.

  But now, in just a few short minutes, she might become that burden again; a woman who doesn’t know when to quit, being patiently indulged by her gun-toting boyfriend.

  In the eyes of who, though? Who would judge her like this?

  Someone who doesn’t care enough about the women who might die tonight, she thinks, and who gives a damn what they think?

  “One minute,” Luke says.

  She tells herself not to get nervous if she doesn’t feel the symptoms of a remote dose right away. Re-dosing her during a trigger window apparently entails some risks, even though Cole’s never told her what they are. He’ll probably wait a beat. She’s tempted to share this with Luke. But that might reveal Cole’s actions to his business partners, and she’s guessing he’d like to keep them covert.

  “Thirty seconds,” he says.

  “Babe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m good without the countdowns. We can just wait for the beep.”

  “Sure.”

  As soon as t
hey fall silent, she feels a sudden lurch in her stomach she assumes is fear.

  31

  Kansas Command

  “Thirty seconds,” Scott says.

  Cole can’t bring himself to watch the feed from the truck. Scott’s assumed that duty. He’s standing a few paces away from where Cole and Noah are practically resting their bowed heads against the door to Bailey’s lair, like parents eavesdropping on their child.

  They’d look ridiculous if anyone was looking at them, but the ground team’s long gone, leaving their break room empty, and none of the monitoring techs have dared to leave their stations since Noah threw a chair. The last time Cole checked, they were hunched over their desks like kids in detention.

  When Bailey yelps, Cole jumps.

  Noah looks into his eyes. They’re both trying to decipher the sound, both realizing the other’s expression isn’t going to help with that endeavor. The sound from the man who holds Charley’s fate in his typing fingers could have been joy or terror, no telling unless they throw open the door and ask him. And Cole’s not about to do that. Not in this moment, when Bailey’s the equivalent of a surgeon with his scalpel pressed to his patient’s brain matter.

  He can’t even bring himself to look at Scott for some indication of whether something went wrong on the feed.

  “Cole?” Noah whispers.

  “Yes.”

  “If they kill her . . .”

  “We’ll deal with them,” Cole answers.

  Noah looks into his eyes again, and Cole realizes he’s satisfied by the answer in part but searching for more.

  “Together,” Cole whispers.

  “You mean you’ll deal with Stephen and Philip together or . . .”

  “You and I will deal with Stephen and Philip together,” Cole whispers.

  Noah’s smile looks so sincere, Cole’s distracted from the other thing he’s doing with his body. He’s raised one fist in front of him. It’s an invitation. It feels childish and silly, but he’d rather feel both of those things in this moment than the stark terror that’s defined the last twenty minutes.

  He makes a fist of his right hand, bumps it lightly against Noah’s. As soon as he does, Noah takes his hand in his and grips it, interlacing their fingers and holding on tight.

  A second later, Cole realizes they’re both resting their heads against the door and breathing like tired dogs.

  32

  Highway 287

  It’s a quieter sound than she expected. Three quick little beeps. Easy to miss over the rush of the truck’s tires if she hadn’t been waiting for them. Three quick beeps that could mean the end of so many different things at once.

  She reaches out, presses one hand gently against the glove compartment, feels its normal give. Presses harder, igniting the sort of achy pain in her wrist any human could expect to feel during such an effort. The glove compartment doesn’t warp or crack or give any sounds of audible protest over the truck’s engine.

  She keeps pressing.

  Her persistence must look a little manic to Luke, but he doesn’t say anything, knows better than to try to police her reactions in this moment. A minute goes by, then another. And when she feels none of the telltale unpleasant symptoms of a remote dose, she’s surprised by what comes next.

  Tears, a sudden, hot sheen of them, but enough for her to blink away before they spill. Tears of anger and frustration. Because she wasn’t prepared for how this was actually going to feel—a reminder that this power isn’t really hers, that it can be taken away at a moment’s notice by forces she doesn’t always understand and often fears. Worse, a trigger window’s never closed on her in the heat of battle like this, with the job left undone. All her discussions of what they might do after this moment seem theoretical now. Empty. Boastful, even.

  Now she’s just another woman who can easily be killed no matter how much she wants to help other women. She can’t save Luke. She can’t save anyone.

  “Hey,” Luke says quietly.

  He reaches out. When she takes his hand and squeezes it back, he’s got his confirmation that the window’s closed, and for the time being it’s not reopening.

  “It’s taking too long,” she says.

  “What?”

  “They should’ve . . .” Done it by now, she wants to say, done it by now. She tries to cough the sound of tears from her throat, but it makes her hack, and that makes Luke squeeze her hand even tighter.

  Their names. We don’t even know their names. How are we going to stop them if Mattingly never gives us their names?

  “I’m sorry. I really thought they’d dose me again.”

  “Well, maybe they will.”

  “It’s taking too long.”

  He doesn’t argue with her.

  “I feel like a fraud.”

  “What?” Luke sounds genuinely astonished. “Why would you say that about yourself?”

  “I just didn’t expect . . . When the window closed, I didn’t expect to freak out like this. I’m sorry. It’s just . . . It’s not done, Luke. We’re not done.”

  “I know, I know, and we don’t have to quit, Charley. We don’t. I’m sorry if I said it the wrong way earlier. I just didn’t want you to feel like you didn’t have a choice.”

  “I don’t.” It feels like a painful admission, and maybe that’s why she says it with a sob. “I don’t have a choice.”

  “Then we keep going, baby.” He brings her hand to his mouth, kisses her fingers. “And we do whatever we can with what we have.”

  She gives in to every repressed urge she’s had since she first laid eyes on him again, squeezes up against him, embraces him as tightly as she can without pulling his arms from the steering wheel. A few minutes before the effort would have crushed him. But now she’s doing what she can with what she’s got, just like he said.

  Just then she feels a sudden piercing headache that turns into blurred vision and a dizzy feeling. Then it gives way to a flush of heat down the back of her neck and along both arms.

  33

  Kansas Command

  “I am the Prince of Awesome!” Bailey Prescott cries.

  “There’s no such thing,” Cole responds. “Get off that chair.”

  Bailey ceases his strange jig, which has made him look like a leprechaun crashing a hip-hop music video, and steps to the floor.

  “Oh, by the way,” Bailey says, “we no longer have a remote dosing system. It was a ‘destroy the village in order to save it’ kinda thing.”

  “Nothing like a Vietnam reference to inspire confidence during a combat situation,” Noah says. “So we can’t dose her again?”

  “Moot point,” Cole answers. “Remote dosing’s a one-shot deal. There’s only so many nanobots I’m willing to inject into her blood at one time. Bailey, next order of business. Boot Stephen and Philip from the system. Pull their feeds, block their access. I don’t care what it takes. Throw them out and keep them out.”

  Scott says, “And if they ask why?”

  “Tell them we’ve had a massive security breach and it’s for the protection of everyone.”

  “And if they say it wasn’t them?” Scott asks.

  “I’m not saying it’s them. Yet. Right now we’re doing this to keep their hands clean. That’s the official story.”

  Scott nods.

  Bailey says, “Can I at least have a Nutella break?”

  “Charley and Luke are forty-five minutes from Amarillo. Pull Stephen and Philip out of our network right now. When this is over, I’ll provide you with a bathtub full of Nutella at the posh resort of your choice. Got it?”

  “The bathtub part sounds a little dangerous, but the resort part I’m—”

  “Bailey, now!”

  “You know, you really yell a lot for a guy who always wears shiny shoes.”

  Noah clears his throat and steps toward Bailey. “Bailey, good job. You are a bright light in the darkest corners of cyberspace.” He pats Bailey on the crown of his head. “You are to be commended for
your good work, young sir.”

  Grinning, Bailey sinks into his chair.

  Noah turns to Cole with a cocked eyebrow, as if to suggest people skills aren’t that hard if Cole would just try. If that’s what Noah thinks, he should try working with Bailey year-round.

  “Thank you, Dr. Turlington,” Bailey says. “It’s nice to be appreciated.”

  “Yeah, I know, Dad’s so mean and never understands.” Cole gestures for Noah and Scott to follow him into the hallway.

  Once they’re out of Bailey’s lair, Cole says, “We’re not staying here.”

  “You want to evacuate Kansas Command?” Scott asks.

  “No. The three of us are not staying here. We’re going to Amarillo. In my helicopter. But first . . .”

  Cole looks to Noah, who’s trying to hide his excitement and failing, then to his security director. “Arm him,” Cole tells Scott.

  Both men stare at him silently, expressionlessly. They all know a line is being crossed here, and no one’s quite sure what comes after, but neither of them seems eager to hold that line in place. Not even his security director.

  A few minutes later, Noah’s emerging from the guest bedroom having donned his windbreaker. It hides the gun holster at the small of his back. The guards flanking him aren’t sure of whether to treat him as a prisoner or an asset, and their confusion is evident in their jittery poses.

  Cole can’t blame them. It’s all happening pretty fast.

  By the time Cole, Noah, and Scott step out onto the front porch, he can hear the familiar chop of his helicopter’s rotary blades starting up inside the pen behind the hangar.

  What he’s not prepared for are the three people waiting for them on the front porch. Shannon Tran, Tim Zadan, and Paul Hynman have all left their stations. They’re standing off to the side of the front door. Because they’re not exactly blocking Cole’s path, their poses don’t seem hostile. But still, after recent events, it’s impossible not to assume this is part of some conspiracy or plot to thwart what remains of this operation.

  Shannon steps forward, and he notices she seems on the verge of tears. “Please,” she says, “please just make sure she gets through this OK.”