Blood Victory
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.