Vicky Peterwald: Survivor (Vicky Peterwald Series Book 2) (25 page)

“I think I’ve done all the high gees I care to for one life,” she told Mannie.

“Oh, if you haven’t ridden the Twister, you haven’t taken gees.”

The security folks shook their heads firmly, saving her from telling Mannie what it was like to flee across the whole length of the galaxy spinning and accelerating and hoping to dodge the next slashing attack.

With a sigh, Vicky took in the vicarious, commonplace, and not deadly excitement of those around her. Still, she had more fun with Mannie than she’d ever had in her life.

More fun than I’ve ever had with my clothes on
or
off,
she had to admit.

Which was certainly food for thought.

The fun must have gone on for an hour or more. The day was just beginning to soften as evening approached on silken paws. Vicky knew it was time to go before her handlers insisted. She and Mannie made their way back toward the entrance.

They were passing along an avenue lined with entertainment opportunities. Up ahead, a woman was shouting at the men to take a chance, show their strength by pounding a huge mallet down on something that made another something rise. If you got it up to the top, it rang a bell.

Few of the men attempting it got it that far, but the woman waiting for them seemed to think that whatever their results, it earned a kiss.

There were ring tosses, ball tosses. Oh, and there was a shooting gallery.

A young fellow of maybe fifteen was trying his luck with an air rifle. He wasn’t a very good shot. The young girl waiting for him couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. A sister, no doubt.

For a moment, Vicky had a vision of her and Hank that had never been. Her eyes misted at the lost memory.

“Better luck next time,” the booth’s operator said in a voice that held no such wish.

“I’ll get you a bear some other place,” the boy said, dejected as he put the rifle back down on the board.

There was only one bear among the prizes. A huge pink thing, nearly as big as the girl.

“Kit, Kat, what’s your shooting like?” Vicky asked.

The two women said nothing, but stepped up to the board that held two air rifles. Vicky rested a restraining hand on the young girl’s elbow.

“I think I can get you that bear,” the Grand Duchess of the Greenfeld Empire said.

“You can?” came with saucer-wide eyes from the girl and a sad sigh from the boy.

Maybe I’m stomping on what budding manly pride the kid
has?

But the girl’s eyes won.

The assassins began shooting. They went for the smallest targets, the ones on the top row.

Each of them missed her first shot.

“Sights are off,” Kit said.

“Badly,” Kat added.

Each took one more shot, now at larger targets.

“Mine shoots high,” Kit said.

“Mine’s off to the right,” Kat observed coolly.

“You hear that?” Vicky said to the young fellow. “The gun’s sights are off. It wasn’t your fault you missed.”

He took the absolution in with a puzzled look.

The assassins plumped down money for five new shots. The looks they gave the huckster were pure venom.

Wise man, he took their money and handed out the shots before retreating well away from the killers.

The two shot as one. Two horses collapsed from the top row.

Another two shots, and tiny ducks flipped over.

The next two rounds put down miniature deer. Fish of some sort on a spinning wheel rang as Vicky’s two guards potted them. The last to fall were a pair of birds, eagles likely, that also swooped in circles.

Beside Vicky, the girl began clapping. The boy was smiling, too, as the guy running the rigged game brought the big bear over to the girl. She took it and seemed lost in its huge hug.

“You want somp’en else?” the guy asked.

The youth seemed puzzled by the question.

“You got a girl?” Mannie offered helpfully.

The kid’s eyes lit up. He pointed at a tiger, not all that much smaller than the bear. With that in his arms he turned, with his sister, to face Vicky.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the girl gushed.

“Ain’t you. I mean,
aren’t
you the Grand Duchess?” the boy asked.

“Yes, I am,” Vicky admitted with as cute a curtsy as she could manage in dress whites.

The boy’s face went to somewhere south of shocked. Maybe appalled.

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God,” the boy shouted. “Mom won’t believe this. Dad won’t believe this. Evie won’t believe this.”

“You don’t have to tell them,” Mannie suggested, an imp’s grin on his face.

“Oh no! I
have
to tell them. Excuse us, I have to find Mom,” the boy said, grabbed his sister’s arm . . . and pink bear . . . and the two of them galloped off.

“I wonder if that story will make the evening news?” Mannie said.

Vicky watched the two kids go. If only it were that easy to make everyone happy.

Then she heard a loud pop. Two more followed in quick succession.

And people began to scream.

S
MOKE
filled Vicky’s vision. Through it, she could make out her security guards bringing their weapons out. Kit and Kat produced their automatics and whirled, looking for a target.

Vicky could see plenty of people, but no one within sight showed evidence of a gun except those who should have them.

Vicky drew in a breath, and choked on it. She tried to hold her breath, but there was something in her lungs that demanded she breathe. The second breath was worse than the first.

People along the midway began to collapse. Through the smoke, Vicky spotted the two kids. They’d turned back to look at the first pops. The girl wanted to run back.

Her brother was smarter. He dragged her away, away from the smoke, away from the danger.

Good brother.

A Marine was pulling a face mask from the belt pouch of his dress black and reds. He was trying, but he still fell to the ground, retching up his last meal, mask hung up in the case.

Vicky was racked by coughs that only worsened as the
salads and bilbie came up, flooding her mouth and clogging her breath.

She collapsed.

Somewhere, she heard sirens.

Help was on the way as darkness took her.

T
HE
taste of vomit was the first thing Vicky became aware of as she fought her way back to consciousness.

The taste of vomit and the pain of cuffs wrenched in way too tight on her wrists.

She stifled a scream, a croak, any voice, any action.

She listened. She felt.

She lay on a ratty carpet. She was jostled and bounced about as if on a rough road.

Carefully, she edged her hands up. The girls had put two pins in her hair this morning, one behind each ear.

The first one she reached for wasn’t there.

She risked raising her head just a bit and felt behind that ear. Thanks to any heaven that looked after bad girls like her, the second hairpin was still there.

Carefully, silently, she pulled it out and slid it into her mouth. Despite the vile taste and dry lips, she tongued it into her right lip, the upper lip from where she lay on her side.

Vicky forced it back as far as she could without swallowing it.

It wouldn’t do to have to wait for her hairpin to cycle through her alimentary canal.

Confident she’d done as much as she could for her future safety, Vicky mumbled, “Water. How about some water here?”

“Sleeping beauty rejoins the living,” came from ahead of her.

Vicky managed to open her eyes through the gunk that glued them shut. It took several blinks before she could take in that she was in the back of some SUV or truck. To her back was a seat. The windows around her were blackened with paint. It still seemed to be night, though.

“Did you kill everyone?” she managed to mutter.

“No. Like you, they’ll wake up only wishing they were dead. But unlike them, you are going back to sleep.”

Vicky felt a sharp prick at her neck. She had time to draw in one deep breath before the darkness reclaimed her.

V
ICKY’S
dreams were horrible. From moment to confused moment, she couldn’t remember anything, but she felt her heart pounding and terror coursing through her veins.

The horror of the dreams slowly melded into wild, clashing sounds. But the first sounds Vicky actually recognized were the chirping of birds and the soft hum of insects.

So I can hear.

She concentrated on hearing, but could catalog nothing but birdsong and different clicks, hums, and other things she suspected were more insects.

Even as she listened . . . and forced her face to blandness and her body to water limpness . . . she found herself taking in more of her surroundings.

She was cuffed, spread-eagle, to a bed.

Not again!

She redoubled her listening, trying to catch any hint of human presence.

Nothing.

But she could feel a soft breeze play across her face.

And caress her breasts.

And other things.

Handcuffed spread-eagle to a bed, naked! Again! Can’t these people come up with some new ideas! What am I, trapped in a lousy movie!

Not that Vicky wanted to apply plan A to another pair of too-stupid-to-live scumbags.

Still, as much as she struggled to hear, there were no scumbags in evidence.

Vicky opened her eyes. They were gummy and stung from whatever had been used to put her and her security detail down. She blinked several times before her vision cleared.

There was not all that much to look at.

She was cuffed to a wooden bed. The walls were unpainted wood. There was a door of wood. Of furniture, there was none in evidence.

Her clothes weren’t in evidence, either, although she couldn’t see the floor very well around the bed.

That floor was also rough boards.

Until recently, Vicky had had no experience of wooden floors in wooden buildings, but she’d been in a lot of local schools of that construction. Schools and barns for harvest festivals.

She’d learned one thing about wooden buildings.

They creaked and groaned.

And when you walked across a wooden floor, it made all kinds of noises.

This house made sounds as the wind blew through the tree outside the open window, that same breeze that cooled Vicky’s body. The house groaned as it bent and twisted in the gentle breeze.

None of those groans reflected the movement of a person or persons.

“Hello,” Vicky croaked. “I really could use some water.”

No answer.

“Hey, guys, I’m awake, and I’m just lying here naked. We might as well have some fun.”

If that didn’t bring guys running, they were deaf.

Vicky checked her upper lip. Her hairpin was still in place. She worked the pin around her mouth. The metal of it brought forth saliva; that, at least, was good.

But of other human beings, Vicky could hear nothing.

“Well, it looks like it’s just you and me, babe,” she said to her favorite friend in the world, her lone hairpin.

Still, Vicky delayed spitting it out. It would be just like her stepmom to hire from the smarter end of the gene pool this time. Hire someone who would let her get started on her self-rescue before bringing it to a roaring halt.

Vicky lay back on the ratty blanket and thin mattress and waited for them to pop out and surprise her. She spent the time studying the room.

It was primitive, leading her to guess that she was well away from anything called civilization. She twisted her head around, going for a better view out her one window, but the tree was still in full leaf.

She could see nothing behind it.

Getting tired of waiting, she tried another tack. “Hello. I need to go to the bathroom. You really don’t want to clean up my mess, do you?”

That had gotten her leverage on her captors the last time.

It didn’t even get her an echo today.

So, no rerun. What kind of new trick has Stepmommy dearest got up her sleeve today? Clearly, I have nothing up my sleeve.

Vicky eyed the cuffs. They weren’t your standard-issue police cuffs. No, these were the fun types. Fur over soft rubber, they didn’t cut into her flesh even when she pulled hard.

They also didn’t loosen as she pulled.

“So, you don’t want to leave my wrists all cut and bruised. What does that tell me?”

They wanted her body in good shape.

She eyed the ceiling. If there was a camera up there, it was too small for her to spot. Knowing her stepmom’s tastes in entertainment, Vicky would bet all the money she had on her that Annah Bowlingame had ordered up a permanent record of Vicky’s final moments for her to soak in if she didn’t have some more recent atrocity to cackle over.

Vicky fell back on waiting. While she waited, she tried to estimate the time.

Her stomach said she was hungry. Way past any hungry she’d ever been in her whole pampered life. The light coming through
the window seemed to be edging from morning to noon. Likely it was a good twelve hours since she’d been snatched.

“Admiral, Mannie, please find me,” she pleaded to the thin air.

It was interesting that the Navy came first, ahead of Mannie. Interesting, but appropriate. The Navy had all kinds of search-and-rescue assets. Mannie was not only outside his own neck of the St. Petersburg woods, but hadn’t had to use all that much security before one Victoria Smythe-Peterwald darkened his doorway.

She broke that worthless train of thought to listen intently.

The house made its usual soft noises, but nothing that showed a human treading its boards.

Vicky promised herself to start working to get out of here as soon as the shadow on the floor reached a certain bent nail.

Then she broke her own promise and began yanking on her cuffs and the bed.

The bed looked flimsy.

It wasn’t.

The bed had four posts, but Vicky’s splayed-out body and cuffs hadn’t been able to reach that far. The headboard and the footboard looked to be about the same. There was a pair of rough-hewn saplings reaching across from post to post, reinforced by dowels that had been drilled through them. Vicky’s right ankle and left wrist were cuffed to the main saplings. Her other cuffs were to the dowels.

Vicky tried yanking.

The cuffs might be padded, but the fur didn’t keep it from hurting like hell when she applied all her strength to first one extremity, then another.

The bed creaked, moaned, groaned . . . and held.

“Hello, I’m trying to escape. I’m going to tear your flimsy bed apart,” brought nobody running.

Having nothing better to do, and still not trusting her kidnappers enough to bring out her last, best hope, Vicky attacked the bed again.

She threw herself around it. She tried to bounce herself right out of it. The bed bowed. It bent. It wobbled.

But it held her.

“This is the least amount of fun I’ve had naked and in bed
in my life,” she told any recording camera. “See, you bastard stepmom, I still have my sense of humor,” she growled.

And threw herself back at the bed. Was one of the spokes coming loose? One of the dowels was certainly getting wobbly in its hole. Vicky had it twirling in the sapling, but it refused to splinter. Not even a little bit.

The bed twisted as she threw herself at first one edge, then another. The bed gave a bit here and a bit there, but its very weakness seemed to give it a strength all its own. Vicky could bend it to her will but nowhere near enough.

Somewhere in school, Vicky had read a poem about the mighty oak that got uprooted and blown down while the gentle willow bowed to the hurricane’s blast and lived.

“This damn bed has too much willow in it,” she grumbled.

“But it’s got me,” she said, with a half-insane giggle. Then she went back to trying to wreck it.

She and the bed had worked their way away from the wall. As Vicky twisted and turned, it went first one way, then the other. Vicky thought she might use that to her advantage, but the thought was one thing.

Finding that advantage was something else.

She was hungry. She was thirsty. She was working up a sweat that she couldn’t afford, but she was damned if she was going to just lie here, waiting for some damn Prince Charming to come along and kiss her.

“To hell with your kiss,” Vicky told that AWOL Prince Charming, “I want your water canteen.”

Finally, Vicky decided to risk her hairpin. She worked it forward into her teeth and tried to stretch her neck to one of her wrists.

As she feared, she couldn’t reach the cuff.

She stretched her neck for the other wrist.

No better luck.

“I’m cuffed, naked to a bed. I’ve got a pin to work the lock on the cuffs, but I can’t reach the damn lock,” Vicky said slowly, enumerating the full depth of her imprisonment.

A wave of helplessness swept over her, the likes of which she hadn’t felt since Admiral Krätz forced her to listen to Kris Longknife as the Wardhaven princess enumerated all Vicky’s failings in her attempt to assassinate Kris.

Vicky had felt like crying.

She’d been too proud to cry in front of the admiral and the princess then.

Now, she lacked the moisture to cry and couldn’t afford to spare it if it came.

Vicky lay back on her ratty blanket and let herself wallow in the full hopelessness of her situation.