Vicky Peterwald: Survivor (Vicky Peterwald Series Book 2) (26 page)

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Grand Duchess Victoria allowed herself a full two minutes of floundering about in deep despair. No doubt that was twice as long as Princess Kris Longknife would ever give herself.

“Kris, next time we get together to dish dirt, you must tell me how you keep so damn upbeat. Assuming you do,” Vicky muttered.

Vicky took a deep breath and did something she’d rarely done before. She examined her options. They were few. She could somehow break out of this spiderweb of a bed, or she would die. Certainly, dying was what her stepmommy dearest wanted.

“You want me dead. You’ve already killed Captain Morgan and anyone who tried to help me that you could get your hands on.” Vicky almost spat that last at the corner she was talking to. It had to have a camera pointed right at her, so that witch could cackle at Vicky’s dying.

“But it’s not just me dead, is it Annah. You want anyone who won’t be your slave dead. That’s it, isn’t it? Wreck Greenfeld, reduce it to starvation and ruin, then offer the pieces a
few scraps of bread and a chance to live if they do it under your yoke.”

Vicky paused to listen to the echo of her own words. She’d said it. She’d said out loud what she and a whole lot of people were coming to realize but couldn’t spit out. Couldn’t say to anyone, not even themselves.

Vicky repeated it. “That’s what this is about. You and your clan want everything. Every scrap of power and property. You want every human being in Greenfeld as your personal slave. I bet you really are setting my dad up to be found by some jealous man in his wife’s bed. That’s what you want. With Dad dead, that would leave everything open to you and your family of grasping thugs.”

Vicky shook her head. “But you need me dead, too, don’t you? Don’t you?” Vicky screamed where she thought the camera was.

“So that’s the way it is. It’s you or me. You want me dead, and I have no intention of dying. Not until way after you.”

Strange, even in her naked rage, even with her conviction of what her stepmother was doing to Greenfeld—doing to Vicky—she still couldn’t say she’d kill her stepmother.

“Give me time,” she muttered to herself. “I’m sure Stepmommy will come up with some new twists that will make me madder than I am now.”

Now Vicky bent herself to busting out of the bed’s tight embrace.

“I can keep this up a lot longer than you can keep me in this,” she lied to herself and the bed.

The day was getting on to noonish and warm. She had the head of the bed pointed now at the door and was considering trying to upend it and see if she could work her way through the door and into whatever lay past it.

She examined that idea from several perspectives, including the one that had the bed upended and her hanging from one arm and leg or the other or sprawled naked and upside down, like a turtle, with no good handle on much of anything.

“We stay in the room,” she told herself.

She rocked the bed. She got the posters thumping a tattoo on the floor. She doubted any four naked bodies had ever
gotten a bed bouncing as wildly as she had this one all by her lonesome.

Still, the bed refused to weaken its grip on her.

“Well, I’m not going to stop my damn attack on you just ’cause you won’t budge,” she snapped.

She and the bed did another ten rounds before she paused for a breath. Then she did another fifteen rounds.

She was breathing hard, and sweat was running down into her eyes when it finally snapped.

The slat her left leg was cuffed to gave up the ghost, splintered into several pieces and fell away. Vicky finally had a leg loose.

She rejoiced for about a second, then scowled. There was not a lot she could do with just her left leg.

It would, however, let her get her head and the hairpin a bit closer to her right hand.

It did, but not all that much closer.

She softened her bite on the hairpin and slowly worked it out farther, praying her hold on the damn thing, either with her teeth or her lips, wouldn’t fail her now. She stretched for her wrist.

She could just barely get the edge of the pin into the lock. She got it in. She got it moving a little.

And she lost the pin.

It took her a couple of minutes wiggling around in the bed to find the pin, but no matter how she tried to twist her neck, she couldn’t pick it up again.

Near cross-eyed, she frowned at the hairpin, then decided desperate times called for desperate measures. Again, she began throwing herself from side to side. The bed bounced once, twice, then, with a mighty heave, it flipped over.

Vicky found herself facedown on the floor with the bed on top of her.

“Never tried it this way,” she told no one in particular.

The pin had followed its own path to the floor. She had to do a bit of wiggling, nothing new for her naked, but under the bed kind of added a new twist to matters. Finally, she had the hairpin back in her mouth.

She also had a sliver of wood in her right boob and another in her tongue.

Vicky lost it all, big-time.

“Damn it,” she shouted, “I’m a Peterwald. No one does this to a Peterwald. Certainly not someone who just slept her way into the family. Stepmom, you and me, we are going to finish this.”

Vicky got the hairpin back between her teeth and took another try at the lock.

Close, but no damn cigar.

She tried again.

No way.

“Okay, we got the bed to give up some space before. Bed, you and me are going to twist as much as we have to.”

Vicky worked the bed back up on its side. It was no easy thing with just one foot on the floor and the rest of her in the bed’s clutches, but she managed to get it where she wanted it.

Then she shoved it up against the door.

Nothing happened.

About the tenth or twentieth time she hit the door with the bed, the lock popped open, and she found the bed headed into a hall.

That didn’t do much for her, so she wedged the foot of the bed against the end of the door and started seeing what kind of leverage she could get on the bed between them.

The bed creaked and bent, but it did not snap.

Vicky alternated between shoving against the top of the headboard and pushing hard against its bottom. The wood did a lot of moaning and groaning as it strained against her efforts. Better yet, Vicky could feel the wood start working.

“Are you a loose bed?” Vicky asked. She knew she’d been a plenty loose woman. What she was now was a very hurting woman. She was feeling pain in places she didn’t know a woman could or should.

She was leaning into the headboard, putting all the torque on it that she could manage, thinking she might take another try at seeing if she could reach the cuff lock . . . when the bed emitted a snap, and something came very loose.

The post had parted from the upper sapling. The slat holding her right hand came loose and the handcuff slid up and off.

Vicky had a hand free!

She only needed a moment to work the lock and free her other hand.

Now she lay with the bed on its side, her falling out of it, but her right leg still held up high in the air.

“I’ve had a few boys who would have loved to see me in this predicament,” she muttered, and struggled to pull herself up on her one free leg. She was hurting. Hurting bad as she bounced on one leg to get herself in reach to work the damn cuff’s lock.

When the last lock snapped open, she made a grab for the bed, then, putting it to the best use yet, settled slowly to the floor.

For a long moment, she sat there, cross-legged on the floor, her body shaking uncontrollably.

Her body was shaken, but she wasn’t.

“I did it. I did it. I did it all by myself!” she shouted, over and over again.

When the trembling finally stopped, she used the bed again, this time to pull herself up. One of the slats would make a very nice spike in case she ran into any vampire that needed staking.

“It won’t be much good against a machine pistol,” she admitted, but considering her luck of late, she wouldn’t bet against her running into anything.

The hall that had been so close but so far away for so long turned out to be only the walking space between the cabin’s two bedrooms. The other room was as primitive as the one she’d been in. More so. The two pallets that lay on the floor didn’t even sport a bedstead.

Down the hall was a common room that included a fieldstone fireplace and a kitchen with a cast-iron woodstove and a metal sink.

There, glory be to one and all, was a water pump.

Vicky made a beeline to it. She worked the wooden handle on the pump, but only ugly noises came out, no water.

“Damn them,” she said, then her eyes lighted on a battered tin can. She lifted it to her lips. The water within was scummy and hot, but it was water.

Vicky barely stopped herself before she gulped it down.

“You’ve got to prime the pump,” Vicky said, remembering the words before she remembered where she’d heard them.

It was Doc Maggie who told her that. They’d been
discussing economics and the need to put money in if you wanted to take money out. Something Maggie didn’t think her father did often enough.

A young Vicky had asked what she meant. “Prime a pump?”

“You’ve never seen a pump, have you?” Maggie had said. “I doubt if any of you kids in the palace have ever seen one or likely ever will.”

But Maggie had done an internship in one of the more primitive areas of St. Petersburg, and she had actually worked an old-fashioned hand pump.

Now, Vicky suspected that she was also in one of those primitive areas, and the metal piping with a long wooden handle very likely was what Maggie had been talking about that day.

Vicky lifted a metal flap at the top of the pump. Yep, it was damp in there. With a prayer to a God she knew nothing about, Vicky poured the water down the hole.

Then she again applied herself to working the wooden pump handle. For an agonizing moment, nothing happened. Then all Vicky got was a racket that left her even more thirsty. Finally, with a gurgle and a gush, water poured forth from the rusty mouth of the pump.

Vicky kept pumping with one hand. The other she used to catch and lift to her mouth cool, deliciously wet, water. She lowered her head and dunked it in the spurting stream of water. Only after she had refilled the metal cup did she use a cork stopper to plug up the sink. She filled it before beginning to wash herself all over.

There was a lot of scum she needed to be rid of. Some was on her skin. A lot more of it was out there, waiting for her.

“Speaking of waiting for me,” Vicky muttered, and took a look out the window above the sink. She spotted a corral of rough-hewn logs, but it held no animals. There was a rusting old truck, but it was up on blocks, and its wheels lacked tires. Vicky was not likely to get a ride there.

She edged herself up to the other windows and peered out. There were wooded hills not too far away, snow-clad mountains in the distance. The meadow around the house was green and empty.

“Stepmom, you bastard, you really did intend for me to die of thirst,” she concluded. She measured the thirst she’d felt
before she quenched it at the pump, then multiplied it by several days.

“You bitch. I was toying with the idea of raising that banner of rebellion against you. Now you’ve bought it full price and full measure. Stepmom, only one of us is coming out of this alive, and it’s not going to be you.”

It was one thing to say that. At the moment, Vicky not only questioned her ability to kill her stepmother but kind of wondered at her chances of surviving the next couple of days. Hours even.

Being a hardheaded Peterwald, she set out to take stock of her empire. Hers was a bit smaller than her father’s, and it looked to have even less to offer.

A visit to the rusting truck showed that it not only lacked tires, but the engine was long gone. Vicky could find nothing worth stripping from the wreck. Most everything that could be taken had been.

The corral was empty. Its split rails were lashed together with some sort of plastic binding, not even a nail for Vicky to arm herself with.

From the lack of any droppings, it had been empty for a very long time. The only things in it were some huge flying things that buzzed Vicky. She could swat them away. It was the tiny things that swarmed around her that annoyed her. They didn’t bite but did seem attracted to the water on her skin.

She gave up slapping herself silly and did her best to ignore them.

The barn was no more generous than the rest of the ranchstead. There wasn’t as much as a rusting pitchfork or a piece of broken leather harness. Even the few bales of hay were broken and molding.

In its shade, Vicky did discover gnats or mosquitoes that bit. She swatted them and was rewarded with bloody splotches on her skin.

The walk around the barnyard reminded Vicky that she never even went to the pool without sandals. She was very tender of foot.

A return to the house and a thorough search turned up nothing of her uniform. No panties or bra. Most especially, no shoes.

Sitting on the edge of the porch, she examined her options. Somewhere in her survival training she remembered something about staying put. Wait in one place for rescue. Now she recalled sorry tales of lost people and rescuers wandering around in circles and missing each other.

Missing each other until someone stupid was dead.

While the prospects of sitting still might be nice on her tender feet, this place had nothing to offer her but water. She could probably last without food for a week or two, but what were the chances that her assassins would come back sooner for her desiccated body?

Sooner than any rescuers?

That raised the issue, was the house transmitting her tribulations for someone to enjoy or only recording them for retrieval and later enjoyment?

“No way would Stepmommy dearest allow her Vicky darling to die in private.”

If a shack like this one was transmitting live, it would have to attract attention. The Navy would not miss that. No, this place had to be off the grid.

She stood and walked into the middle of the yard. As she’d observed on her approach to the landing at Kiev, there were mountains to her east. Thus, there was likely a very wide river somewhere around here.