Torched: A Thriller Read online

  Terri grinned. She held the can to his mouth and he drank deeply. It tasted like rust and it was warm, but he took down as much as he could, gagging a little at the end.

  “I like it when you beg, Mike. Hey, did Mr. Whethers ever come begging to you when the final foreclosure documents were served on his family home? When he was asked to send his keys in to the bank? This would have been before his daughter found him hanging from the rafters in the barn.”

  Miguel turned away.

  People had called. That was the thing—people had called.

  He never understood how they had found his number at Pegasus Funds, but they somehow managed to. Hell, anything was out there on the internet nowadays. By the time that their banks had closed every door on them, many had simply gone to the source—to the firms that bundled the loans and moved them around like shells in a game of chance, never understanding that there were people’s lives and homes at stake.

  And my, how they had pleaded with him! A few times, he’d simply hung the phone up on them in mid-sentence. It was all he could do.

  He didn’t recognize William Whethers’s name, but that didn’t mean the man hadn’t contacted him.

  “He might have,” Miguel finally replied, his voice little more than a whisper.

  Terri’s eyes narrowed, the smirk vanishing. “What was that like?”

  “It was hell. The very worst part of the job. We never…we weren’t supposed to take those calls.”

  Chaco had drawn near. He was watching Terri intently.

  “Did you know that Pegasus was about to tank?”

  He nodded.

  “And so you ran. Just like my husband did. Just like Vivian. Christ, Mike, don’t people accept responsibility for their actions anymore?”

  “Before I left, I hear a rumor that my supervisors were going up on federal charges. It had to do with robo-signing documents, with bait-and-switch deals on interest rates. I’m not sure what happened to them, Terri, but I knew I couldn’t stand prison. I know it’s a…it’s a cowardly move on my part, but I had to leave. I had to go someplace else.”

  “Those were people, Mike. Ordinary people with regular loans that were bundled and sold to your greed factory. They lost everything while you moved to Mexico to play mysterious American in some tropical village.”

  Miguel’s cheeks colored. “And what am I, Terry? I’m a person, too. And look at you. You’re a monster, Terri! Him?” he nodded at Chaco. “You should see the way he was looking at you when you let those ants swarm on me. You’re a monster!

  “What about me, Terry? Aren’t I a person in your eyes?”

  Terri bent forward until their foreheads were almost touching. She could feel the heat radiating from his skin—a combination of the baking sun and the venom surging through his veins. “I don’t know yet,” she replied, “but you better pray I come around to that conclusion, Mikey. You better…”

  They were interrupted by the iPad’s chime.

  Terri jogged over and collected it from her chair. “Vivian? That you?”

  “Miguel, it’s me! I’m coming!” Vivian shouted, ignoring Terri. Despite his condition, Miguel smiled. Somehow, she’d managed to get away.

  “I’m impressed,” Terri said. “You’re…well, you’re just about here, aren’t you, Vivian? You covered all that space with plenty of time to spare.”

  “Still got eight miles to go,” Vivian said. “They broke the iPad, Terri. Getting kind of hard to read this map, but I think I can manage. What…what’s the end game here?”

  “I stand by the things I say, Vivian. I only wanted a word with you. If you make it in time, then you’ll have your precious Miguel back. And you and I can have a little chat about loss.”

  “What do you mean ‘if,’ Terri? I’ll be there in less than ten minutes. I only turned this piece of shit tablet back on to get the GPS back on track.”

  “Ten minutes can be an eternity, Vivian. I mean jeez, things can get really hot in just ten minutes! Ever pre-heat a convection oven? Goodbye for now, dear. We eagerly await your arrival.”

  Vivian began to protest, but Terri switched off the iPad and let it fall to the ground. That portion of the game was finished. “Help me, Chaco. We need to get this sun torch set up.”

  He just shook his head. “No, Terri. I won’t. I told you from the start—I won’t kill a man. You’ve made your point here, and now it’s time for us to go. Vivian can untie him, and we can all just go our separate ways.”

  Terri’s features wrinkled in confusion. “No, Chaco! No! Are you saying you…are you done helping me?”

  “Look, Terri, I’ve already done too much. I’ve already done more than I might be able to live with, but I did it for you. You want to hear something? I could feel your sorrow in that little johnboat. Sitting across from you on the Rio Grande, I could feel your sorrow. It was coming off of you in waves. And I wanted to help you.”

  Terri blinked back the tears. “And you’ve done so much, Chacon. Please…just help me do this last thing, and then we’ll go. I promise.”

  “No,” he said. He turned and started to walk away. He passed the Beretta, pausing briefly to drop the keys on the front seat. Before disappearing around the corner of the warehouse, he turned back to Terri. “You can still live with yourself. If you leave right now, Terri, you can still have a decent life. Don’t go through with it.”

  “Goodbye, Chacon. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

  His shoulders slumped and he vanished behind the warehouse. Terri set to work and Chaco walked away.

  He’d covered about three hundred yards when he heard the first screams.

  NINETEEN

  Vivian hobbled over to the metal post and undid the chain. She nosed the pickup across the barrier before climbing out to reattach it.

  Better to fly under the radar if things got messy.

  She took the dirt road for most of one final mile before cresting a bluff and descending down into a little valley that was home to about a dozen buildings in various states of disrepair. From her vantage point at the top of the hill, she could see the glint of the torch. It blazed in the tropical sun, its light focused on a writhing figure strapped into a chair.

  She saw Terri, pacing back and forth behind it.

  She punched the accelerator and the truck shot down the road. Terri looked up, then went running. Vivian was close now—maybe fifty yards—and she saw Terri digging around in the front seat of a maroon clunker.

  When she came out, she had a pistol in her hand.

  The first shot splintered the windshield on the passenger side. The second plinked the grill; a geyser of steam and radiator fluid sprinkled down on the windshield.

  “Shit!” Vivian screamed, fighting to keep control of the truck. She skidded around the final curve and across a cattle guard, and then she was surging across gravel.

  There it was.

  She creamed the torch at fifteen miles an hour. The tripod crumpled beneath the tires, the glass lens arcing high over the truck before shattering in a thousand kernels of light.

  Vivian stood up on the brakes, but they were spongy. The truck skidded over concrete before hitting the side of the warehouse with a mighty thud. Vivian grabbed the rifle and scrambled out of the passenger side before taking a defensive position behind the front wheel well.

  “Miguel!” she screamed. “Miguel, are you there?”

  “I’m here,” he croaked.

  She risked a glance across the courtyard and her stomach buckled at the sight of him. His face was impossibly discolored, his legs like columns of mashed potatoes. Christ, what had they done to him?

  “I made it!” Vivian shouted, ducking down, the rifle clutched to her chest. “Do you hear me, Terry! I made it past your alligators and your outlaws and these…these crazy fucking farmhands! I made it through a hundred miles of fucking desert! Honor your word and let us leave. We’re done, you and me! Do you hear me! We’re done, Terri!”

  The only response
came from Miguel—a moan so low and weak that she didn’t think he had much time left at all. He was losing it.

  “I’m coming out now!” Vivian said. She stood, the rifle butt in the crux of her armpit. “I’m walking over to Miguel, Terri.”

  Terri just watched her, the pistol clutched in shaking hands. “Kind of funny, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “This,” Terri replied with a shoulder shrug. “You and me. We’re stuck out here in a Mexican standoff.”

  Vivian took small steps toward Miguel. Terri tracked her with the barrel of Chaco’s pistol.

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Vivian replied. Her voice was eerily calm, despite the panic she felt in her heart. “We’re quits, you and me. This thing between us is done.”

  Terri noticed movement from the corner of her eye. It was Chaco.

  “I heard the gunshots,” he said. “I had to come back for you. That’s the second time I’ve come back, Terri.”

  She turned her attention to him, the barrel of the gun sagging ten inches. Vivian thought about snapping off a shot.

  Instead, she bent and placed the rifle on the concrete.

  Terri turned back to her, the suspicion clear in her expression.

  “Nothing either one of us do will bring back what we had—what we lost. My husband and my daughter and that life—they’re gone,” Vivian said. “They’re gone forever.

  “I know that now—I feel that now—more than I ever have before. You need to let this thing between us end, Terri. Let me help Miguel, and let us go.”

  Terri’s shoulders hitched as she sobbed. She wept not for Sheldon, although she would always have some beautiful memories of their lives together before things had turned to shit.

  No, she wept for her children, who still cried themselves into a nightly slumber filled with dreams of dreadful cold and sickening isolation. She cried for her daughter and her son, and she cried for herself.

  She dropped the pistol. It clattered to the concrete, and she looked at Miguel.

  Had she…had she really done that to another human being?

  His skin was black where she had directed the torch. A patch on his left shoulder still smoked. Blisters and welts covered every bit of exposed skin, and flies buzzed over the pool of urine that was quickly evaporating near his mutilated feet.

  Chaco walked across the courtyard. He picked up the pistol and put it in his pocket, then pulled Terri into his arms.

  “You got him?” Chaco said, motioning with his head at Miguel.

  Vivian nodded, limping over to him. She cupped his jaw, saw light in his eyes, and carefully brushed his blistered lips with her own.

  “Vi,” he whispered. “Help…me.”

  “I promise, honey, we’ll get you some help.”

  She worked at the restraints.

  Terri buried her face in Chaco’s chest, sobbing. “This is it, right? You two are finished now?” he called out to Vivian.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Vivian said. “We’re quits.”

  Chaco grasped Terri’s shoulders. He bent his head to make eye contact. “No more. Right?”

  “No more,” she said.

  Vivian undid the final restraint around Miguel’s waist and he slumped out of the chair and fell face first on the pavement. She knelt and looped his arm over her shoulder. It was painful, but she helped him stand.

  Chaco guided Terri to the Beretta while Vivian helped Miguel to the pickup truck.

  She put the rifle in the bed of the truck and paused, just for an instant, as Chaco helped Terri down into the passenger seat.

  The sun glinted on the windshield, obscuring the woman’s features. Still, Vivian raised a hand. Whether Terri caught the gesture or not, it didn’t matter.

  It was merely a final acknowledgement—a way of saying that they were finished.

  Vivian climbed into the cab. After a few anxious cranks, the engine turned over. She backed the battered pickup away from the wall and nosed it onto the dirt drive. Miguel was unconscious in the passenger seat, his blistered face pressed up against the glass.

  The Beretta filled the rearview, crawling along behind her. She couldn’t see Terri, but she didn’t need to in order to understand that she never would again.

  Quits.

  She didn’t so much as tap the brakes as she pushed the truck through the chain. It snapped with a twang and she spun the wheel and angled south on the paved road.

  The Beretta went north.

  TWENTY

  The trio sat together on the sidelines, sipping Slurpees and rising occasionally from their lawn chairs whenever Mike took possession of the ball.

  “Go, Mikey!” Erin whooped after he stole the ball and delivered a nice cross-field pass. “That’s the way!”

  Something had changed in her while Terri had been in Mexico. When she’d left, Erin had been anxious and skittish—often walking with her head down and her eyes darting about suspiciously. Terri often caught her with her hand in her pocket, self-consciously hiding the disfigurement of her amputations.

  Now, she seemed like a different girl.

  “She just needed some pampering,” Janet had said, after Terri remarked about it after dinner one night. Janet had agreed to stick around for the rest of the summer, with Rob coming up on weekends. It was nice to have another adult in the house, and Terri was thankful for all the help her sister was offering with the kids. “I told you, sis—the kids will adapt. They’re more resilient than you think, generally speaking. But these ones? Well, they’ve got something on their side that most other kids don’t.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Terri had asked. “What’s that?”

  “They’re your kids,” she replied with a laugh. “Of course they’re going to be stubborn. And determined. And driven.”

  Terri thought about that conversation often. Mike was doing better as well. There had been fewer sleepless nights—fewer horrific nightmares.

  Janet put her drink down and took her sunglasses off. Eyebrows raised, she stared at her sister. “C’mon, Terri! Just who is this Latin lover?”

  “I already told you, Jan—just somebody I met online. Will you stop bugging me about this?” Her cheeks were flushed, and she looked away in embarrassment.

  “Online my ass,” Janet said, pulling her shades back on. “I think you met this hottie on your vision quest, or whatever the hell it was you were doing out there in the desert.”

  Terri just wore a little smile. “Woo hoo! Go Mike!” she shouted, when he hit a cross that led to a goal. “There you go, son! There you go!”

  ***

  Chaco picked her up at 8:00.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Fortune had smiled on Mike Hill and Vivian Bowles. Though it took her most of a full week, and him more than twice that time, their injuries healed. The swelling subsided in her sprained knee, and the circulation returned to his legs and feet.

  After a month, he returned to work at El Principe; she took once again to the fields.

  One cool night in September, Mike called Vivian out on the porch. He had a little Gateway computer in his lap with a blocky device plugged into the USB port.

  “It’s Felipe’s. I asked him for a special favor, and he agreed. We backed up his files, and we’ll just re-install everything tomorrow. When I’m finished here, I’ll wipe the hard drive. C’mere, Vi. See what I’ve done.”

  She sat on the arm of the chair, sliding her arm over his shoulder. “What are all these numbers?”

  They were dollar amounts—some of them pretty damned sizable.

  “These numbers,” he replied, “are the fresh start I was hoping for. Here, let’s do it together.”

  He placed the arrow icon over the “confirm transaction” button. “Ready?”

  She laughed. “Sure—although I have no idea what this is all about!”

  “Doesn’t matter, honey. Doesn’t matter. It’s a good thing. One…two…three!”

  They clicked the button and the transactio
n was processed. He jotted down the confirmation number and closed the laptop. He stood, helping Vivian to her feet.

  “My Carmen,” he said, grinning. He kissed her temple.

  Her smile was radiant. “Really? We can use them now?”

  He nodded, and she pushed up on her toes and kissed him full on the mouth. “My Miguel,” she purred.

  “Celebrate with some champagne?”

  “Sure thing.”

  He was getting down the flutes when Carmen said, “That sure seemed like a lot of money.”

  “Just about everything I had,” Miguel replied. He poured the champagne and they clinked glasses before sipping.

  “Well, good for you, honey. So who is this W. Whethers?”

  “Just somebody that I owed, Carmen. Somebody from another life that I owed an awful lot to.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Daniel teaches a variety of writing courses at Florida State College at Jacksonville. His fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Redstone Science Fiction, Brain Harvest, Buzzy Mag, Weber: The Contemporary West, Something Wicked and Leading Edge.

  He lives near Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway with his wife and daughter. Please visit The Byproduct, his web journal on speculative storytelling, for news and updates on forthcoming projects.

  Additional works:

  · Frozen (the prequel to Torched)

  · Survival

  · These Strange Worlds: Fourteen Dark Tales

  · The Silver Coast and Other Stories

  · The Reaper’s Harvest

  You can contact Daniel at [email protected] with thoughts or feedback.