Torched: A Thriller (8 page)

Vivian studied
her surroundings. The sun was a blinding torch, the landscape on the far side
of the canal a scorched desert. It broke her down. “Fuck you, Terri!” she
hissed into the screen. “Fuck you and your family, for all that you’ve done to
me!”

“Good luck,
Vivian. God speed.”

The feed
terminated, replaced with a blinking avatar indicating her location.

Vivian sat down.
She put her face in her hands and began to cry.

SIXTEEN

She wept until
she had exhausted her tears and the feeling of helplessness lifted, replaced
with a raw, purple anger. Vivian stood, cupping a hand to her forehead to shade
the light.

The terrain was
arid and there were very few trees or shrubs. What did grow there appeared too
small to support even her petite figure, so she nixed the prospects of going
over the canal almost immediately.

Besides, what
would she use for rope?

She pawed
through the dilapidated shelving and paint cans, searching for useful items. By
the time she was done she had two: a metal irrigation key and a stubby, rusted
landscaping knife—the same sort she’d used to cut sod when they put the yard in
all those years ago in Cape Coral.

The irrigation
key was long, made to turn sprinkler valves sunk deep in the ground, and she
liked the weight of it in her hand.

While she knelt
there, executing her search, she heard movement on the other side of the wall.
She climbed up onto a chunk of concrete and peered over the ledge.

It was an
iguana.
Two
, in fact.

She was so
relieved that they weren’t gators that her epiphany was slow in coming. But
when it dawned on her, she couldn’t hide her smile.

It was a shot. A
long shot, maybe, but it might give her a chance.

“You can do
this,” she whispered. She crept around the side of the structure, where the
iguanas watched her with flat, bemused eyes. She took a careful step toward
them and they skittered away, tales swishing pebbles behind them.

“Shit,” she
said.

Still, it was
the best idea she had come up with. She would just have to be patient.

She hid behind
the wall, huddling in the scant shade it provided, and hunted through the
broken concrete until she had seven baseball-sized chunks. She waited, the
minutes sliding away, listening for more of the creatures on the other side.

When another one
finally approached, she crept to the corner of the wall. Steeling her nerves,
she darted out into the light and fired the missile at the iguana.

Missing high,
the concrete exploded against the wall and the iguana vanished in the bush.
Forty-five minutes and three tries later, she still had nothing to offer the
patient gators.

“Lord, let this
work,” she prayed. She was down to her last few throws, and her shoulder and
elbow ached.

The tell-tale
skittering echoed again from the other side. She took a deep breath, released
it, stepped into the sunlight and fired a shot. It clipped the iguana—a fatty,
maybe seven or eight pounds!—on the haunches and the creature fell over on its
side.

She’d broken its
leg, but the animal was far from dead. It pawed at the dirt, struggling
mightily to escape.

Vivian charged
it with the irrigation key. It stopped moving after three good whacks. Vivian
looked at it, horrified by the quantity of bright red blood it shed, and
vomited.

How long had it
been since she’d eaten anything? There wasn’t anything there but bile and
water, and her abdominal muscles cramped.

She kicked sand
over the vomit, collected the iguana corpse by the tail and disappeared behind
the wall.

It wasn’t
enough. She had to have more.

She hunkered
down to wait, but it didn’t take long. Maybe attracted by the blood, maybe by
her vomit—a bevy of lizards ventured out of the brush.

This time,
Vivian had options. She plunked another fatty, thankful that it stayed down.
The others scattered, but now she had two.

Would it work?

It had to.

She studied the
canal’s surface, counting a total of eight gators in the water, and two more
sunning themselves on the far shore.

She located the
best place to cross, estimating a forty-yard swim. She’d been decent as a
child, but she hadn’t trotted out her competitive stroke in decades.

“No movement,
and it’s been almost an hour,” Terri said. “You coming, girl?”

Vivian collected
the iPad, peering into the screen. “How’s this for movement?” she said. She
hefted the device, working her wrist like a hinge before chucking it like a
frisbee. It sailed true, gliding across the canal and landing, seemingly none
the worse for wear, in a puff of dust on the far banks.

“It takes a
licking and keeps on ticking,” she muttered to herself as she tore long gashes
in the iguanas with the sod knife.

She threw the
irrigation key across the canal, careful to land it far from the iPad. She
removed her shoes and socks and tossed them across. The sand was scorching
beneath her feet.

She took the
first carcass as near to the shore of the canal as she dared. Alligators were
ambush hunters. If there were eight on the surface, there were probably that
many on the canal bed as well.

“Come and get
it!” she shouted, heaving the lizard out into the water. The iguana landed with
a hearty splash and the water boiled, a flurry of green and gray scales
writhing in a contest for the tiny scrap of food. A few of the gators blocking
her route moved closer to the feeding frenzy, and she lured them even closer by
tossing the second carcass.

As another
battle erupted there, she sprinted for the canal. She leaped, bounding out into
the water. One step, a second, and then she tucked into a shallow dive,
skimming through the murky water, repulsed by its stagnant warmth and the
threat of unseen monsters.

She surfaced,
churning the water with arms and legs, and swam as hard as she could for the
far banks.

Something big
knocked against her calf. Something attempted to grip her upper arm, and she
wrenched it free and kept flailing forward.

Her mind went
blank, instincts taking over. She felt the water thrashing all around her,
sensed the presence of reptiles beneath her and at her side.

And still she
flailed.

The canal was
deep and then, just as quickly, it was shallow. She’d covered the distance in a
blur; she felt silt beneath her feet, and then she was stumbling forward,
scrambling to free herself of the water.

She stood on
shaking legs and stumbled, half lurching and half running, up the gradual bank.
She fell hard on her ass and scuttled backward, hands slipping in the loose
sand, screaming as a reptile the size of a log pushed across the canal.

A gator, an
enormous
gator, sprang up out of the water. Its jaws sprang open and clamped shut, and
she felt the force of air on her face and chest. She smelled the creature’s
rancid breath—a sour, reptilian stench that she associated with water in
August, low in Florida’s retention ponds.

Instinct still
governed her, and it was instinct that shot her arm forward. Screaming, she
buried the knife in the creature’s head. It sunk to the hilt, the powerful
beast snapping again at her arm. She felt the creature’s leathery muzzle
against the exposed flesh of her forearm, and then the cursed monster backed
off.

The knife
sticking out of its head, it slipped back into the canal.

Still screaming,
Vivian scrambled backward from the canal.

She was whole.
Her hands darted about her body, double checking that she had, indeed, survived
the passage.

There was an
ugly gash on her calf, a wound probably torn open by the armored tail of one of
the gators, but she was whole and she had made it.

Dripping, she
looked up at the sky and loosed a feral shout. She snatched up the iPad.

“I’m coming,
Terri! You better be fucking ready, because I’m coming!”

“Good! See you
soon,” Terri said, smiling pleasantly. The map replaced the video feed, and
Vivian quickly pulled her shoes and socks on.

The iguanas were
gone. In the midst of the feeding frenzy, one of the gators had been ripped
apart. She watched, an eerie sense of satisfaction steeling her nerves, while a
twelve-footer crunched the bones of his vanquished competitor on the banks of
the island that had been her cell.

With a little
grin, she gathered the iPad and the irrigation key and jogged south.

***

“She’s not the
same person,” Miguel said. He bled from a dozen wounds, though the lashes
didn’t bother him as much as the mosquito bites. His skin crawled with
irritation, and he yearned to scratch the bites. “Please…you can still call
this off. It’s not like we can go to the authorities.”

Chaco listened
to the begging man. He wore a grin. “No? No authorities, eh? Well, that changes
everything! What do you say, then, Terri? Should we set him free?”

Terri sidled up
to Chaco. She had a set of pruning shears in her hand. “Can’t do it, Chacon.
You see, our friend here is not without blame himself.”

“Oh?” Chaco
said. Terri had filled him in on the research, about the information Benny
Hines had gathered for her. “Do tell.”

Terri put the
shears down and picked up the iPad. She made a racket, dragging her metal chair
close to Miguel’s. She navigated the machine until she found the folder and
pulled up a document.

“Read it,” she
said.

Miguel squinted.

“Out loud,
Mikey.”

He cleared his
throat. “William Allen Whethers entered into the kingdom of heaven on March 12,
2012. Mr. Whethers was a devoted father to his three children and a loving
husband to his wife, Marie. Other survivors include…”

He finished the
obituary and turned to Terri. Grimly, she moved to the next document. Another
obituary. Then there were news stories and photographs. The last image showed a
man and a woman and four children, standing about a make-shift campsite. A
ripped tarp had been tied to their SUV, which was stuffed to bursting with
clothes and other items.

“Why? Why show
me all of this?”

“These people
were victims of the Pegasus Funds collapse. They were regular people with good
jobs and decent lives. They paid their mortgages on time. They weren’t
speculators.”

Miguel’s face
fell. He looked away. “So? What does that have to do with me?”

“Oh, you know
exactly
what it has to do with you. Those first two obituaries were suicides, Mike. It
was Will Whethers’s young daughter that found him, hanging from the rafters in
the shed outside of their ranch home. The
same
home that had been his
own father’s—the one that was scheduled for foreclosure before the end of the
March. These people signed documents in good faith, and when Pegasus crashed,
they were pulled to the bottom through no fault of their own.”

Miguel shook his
head. “Fuck that, Terri. There were twenty mortgage traders working on those
funds. You going after every one of them?”

Terri smiled.
“Probably not. After all, none of them are fucking the woman that terrorized my
family and killed my husband, are they?”

“What are you
going to do to me?” Miguel said. His demeanor had shifted. The knowledge that
his captors were prepared, that they knew him intimately, deflated his bravado.

“Here. Take a
look at this picture. Tell me if you see anything…different about it.”

It was a
portrait of Terri, Mike and Erin—taken just a few weeks earlier. The kids wore
synthetic smiles. Terri had more lines around her eyes than ever before. She
barely recognized herself any more when it came to family photographs.

“It’s you and, I
guess, your kids. Good looking photograph, Terri. I don’t know what…”

“Look closer.”

He sighed. After
a moment, he had it.

“Your daughter.
She’s missing two fingers on her left hand.”

“Bingo! We’ve
got a winner here, Chaco!”

“Hey!”

“So,” Miguel
said, nodding at the table. “That’s what those shears are for, am I right?”

Terri shrugged.
“We’ll just have to wait and see.”

***

Vivian covered a
little over two miles before the posse caught up to her. Six riders screamed
across the desert on dirt bikes, the bandanas covering their mouths flapping in
the breeze.

Vivian slowed to
a walk, thankful for the chance to quell the stitch that was forming in her
side. They pulled up short, and she noticed that three riders had automatic
weapons strung across their shoulders.

They spoke in
rapid-fire Spanish for a moment before dismounting and surrounding her. The
bandanas fell, and she saw that only one of them was young. He had a round baby
face, and he took a position at the front of the group. He wore designer blue
jeans and an expensive tee-shirt. The others wore faded western shirts and
dusty Wranglers.

“You are her,”
the young man said. He spoke without even a hint of an accent. “Congratulations
on making it past the beasts.”

“Thank you.”

“What is your
name?”

Vivian told him,
and he smiled at her. His teeth were white and straight. “These fellows…they
want me to take you with us.”