Torched: A Thriller (11 page)

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 transaction 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.