Blood Victory

“That’s just fi—”

But Jonah never gets a chance to finish the sentence because just then headlights flash in the side-view mirrors, briefly blinding them both. It’s a box truck about the size of theirs, and it’s gaining on them fast.

Cyrus’s truck, she realizes, but is Cyrus driving it?

Marjorie’s first cry drowns out the sound of the first few strikes Jonah levels against the metal wall behind him. That’s Wally’s cue to get ready to fire back at their pursuer.

 

Charlotte almost missed them. She was heading due north on the paved county road when she saw what looked like tiny lights moving through the dark off to her right, like tea candles floating atop a vast lake. At first she thought they were security lights atop the gate of a distant property. But then they winked out briefly, and when they came back they were farther to her right than they should have been if they weren’t on the move themselves.

She hit the brakes, turned the truck around as fast as she could without tipping the thing over. She and Luke had both trained on vehicles of this size as prep for this operation, but she’d never once thought things would escalate to the point where she’d actually have to drive one.

Now, she kills the headlights, but it’s way too dark to drive without them. Maybe if the dirt road wasn’t so narrow and serpentine. The landscape’s not mountainous, but it’s not perfectly flat, either, the kind of arid stretch that was carved by eons-old bodies of water that have long since dried up.

Maybe she’s got the wrong truck, but she doubts it. There’s nothing out here except the prospect of concealment and escape. And while she hasn’t been able to get a good look at the truck’s length, the cargo door looks about the same size as the one on the truck she’s driving now, and the metal’s also dilapidated and rust splattered. Maybe it’s a bigger truck overall. From this angle, she’s not sure. But like Cyrus’s, it looks anonymous, easily disposed of once it’s served its purpose. Both of them bought for cash so the purchase wasn’t traceable.

Any doubt she’s honing in on the right target vanishes when the cargo area door in front of her suddenly rises, followed by a shotgun’s blast. She braces for impact or for the windshield to explode. Instead, the truck’s hood dents upward from shrapnel flying inside the truck’s nose. The guy shot straight through the grille, and the impact just sent a shudder through the vehicle’s carriage that she feels in the steering wheel, even though she’s gripping it lightly to keep from accidentally tearing the thing in half.

Another blast. Sustained, grinding noises follow, telling her this shot did real damage to the engine’s moving parts. It’s a smart strategy. The front of the truck is a big, reliable target, unlike her shadow behind the windshield.

She releases the steering wheel, turns to face the passenger side, then straightens her left arm like a baseball bat before striking it against the windshield. The glass shatters.

By the time she crawls headfirst through the broken windshield, black smoke is streaming from underneath the edges of the truck’s hood. But the man standing in the half-open cargo area door can still see her through the twin clouds. His shock is evident in his paralysis. He’s holding the door up with one hand, but it seems he’s forgotten he’s holding his shotgun in the other.

The vehicle under her is losing power and speed, but she’s on all fours on the hood now. When the distance between them starts to widen, she leaps.

In the shooter’s scramble to pull the cargo door shut in her face, he drops the shotgun. It spins away from his feet, then out into the night.

By then, she’s airborne.

The pure sensations of what comes next are what she imagines it feels like to dip your upper body in wet concrete. Her vision blacks out as she hits the door; then in widening tendrils, she can see what must be the inside of the truck’s cargo area: a divider door just like the one that walled her in, a metal floor. Someone’s howling like an injured wolf, and she’s sure it’s the shooter. If she hasn’t injured him, he’s losing his mind. The metal that’s molded around her head and neck starts to yield in various spots like some quick-drying substance that’s now cracking and flaking. There’s cool air on her right arm, making it feel exposed. It must have punched straight through the cargo door on impact, while her left arm feels like it’s coated in something vaguely molten but also very cold. Because it seems like the quickest and most efficient thing to do, she shakes her upper body like a dog trying to dry itself and hears what must be a dozen pieces of metal clunk to the floor around her. The man’s screams intensify to the level of madness.

Standing now and freed from her metallic shroud, Charlotte sees the shooter. He’s curled up against one wall as if he thinks he might be able to crawl through it and away from her. Jaw trembling and nostrils flaring, he’s watching what must be dozens of cuts instantly healing along her face and arms.

What she does next seems to be too much for him to bear.

She looks him in the eye.

Without a second thought, he crawls to the hole in the cargo door and jumps out into the night. She spins just in time to see him hit the road legs first. In his delirium, he must have thought the truck’s speed would give him a running start. Instead the momentum breaks both his legs and sends his body into a grotesque series of somersaults before the shadows swallow him. For the first time, she sees the truck—her truck, Mattingly’s truck—is long gone, careened off the side of the road and into the dark night somewhere.

Behind the divider, she finds a terrified, wild-eyed woman strapped to a gurney just like the one she was tethered to for hours on end. The woman hasn’t seen any of what she just did to the cargo door or the final choice her captor just made, but no doubt, she’s heard all of it. Charlotte expects a frightened struggle when she starts tearing the leather straps free, releasing the woman’s forehead and then her ankles. But the woman goes limp and numb, as if she realizes instantly that no one who wanted to hurt her would try to free her. Not right now. Once she can, the woman sits up, starts pulling on the gag. Charlotte’s afraid this process will require more precision than can be managed in the bouncing cargo area of a speeding truck, but if it’s what the woman wants, who is she to stop her? After what she’s been through, she deserves any release she can get.

Hacking and coughing and clawing at it with her now free hands, the woman spits the gag out; then Charlotte pulls it from her lap and casts it aside so she won’t have to look at the hideous thing anymore. That’s when she sees the body. The other woman is lying in a fetal position on the floor against the metal wall; the gag’s slid across the floor and is now resting against her back. Her lifeless arm is milk pale, and she jostles from the cargo area’s movements with unmistakable deadweight.

Charlotte wants to scream, but instead she runs Luke’s words back and forth through her head until she can breathe again. We’ll do what we can with what we’ve got.

“Are you hurt?” she asks the woman before her, the one she can still save.

“Hurt . . .”

“Injured. Are you physically injured? Can you move?”

The woman shakes her head and swings one leg to the floor as if to prove it.