Firestarter (19 page)

Another gun went off. A window shattered.

“Not the girl!” Al shouted. “
Not the girl!”

Andy was seized roughly. The porch swirled with a confusion of men. He was dragged toward the railing through the chaos. Then someone tried to pull him a different way. He felt like a tug-of-war rope.

“Let him go!” Irv Manders shouted, bull-throated “Let him—”

Another gun went off and suddenly Norma was screaming again, screaming her husband's name over and over.

Charlie was looking down at Al Steinowitz, and suddenly the cold, confident look was gone from Al's face and he was in terror. His yellow complexion grew positively cheesy.

“No, don't,” he said in an almost conversational tone of voice. “Don't—”

It was impossible to tell where the flames began. Suddenly his pants and his sportcoat were blazing. His hair was a burning bush. He backed up, screaming, bounced off the side of his car, and half-turned to Norville Bates, his arms stretched out.

Andy felt that soft rush of heat again, a displacement of air, as if a hot slug thrown at rocket-speed had just passed his nose.

Al Steinowitz's face caught on fire.

For a moment he was all there, screaming silently under a transparent caul of flame, and then his features were blending, merging, running like tallow. Norville shrank away from him. Al Steinowitz was a flaming scarecrow. He staggered blindly down the driveway, waving his arms, and then collapsed facedown beside the third car. He didn't look like a man at all; he looked like a burning bundle of rags.

The people on the porch had frozen, staring dumbly at this unexpected blazing development. The three men whose hair Charlie had fired had all managed to put themselves out. They were all going to look decidedly strange in the future (however short that might be); their hair, short by regulation, now looked like blackened, tangled clots of ash on top of their heads.

“Get out,” Andy said hoarsely. “Get out quickly. She's never done anything like this before
and I don't know if she can stop.
”

“I'm all right, Daddy,” Charlie said. Her voice was calm, collected, and strangely indifferent. “Everything's okay.”

And that was when the cars began to explode.

They all went up from the rear; later, when Andy replayed the incident at the Manders farm in his mind, he was quite sure of that. They all went up from the rear, where the gas tanks were.

Al's light-green Plymouth went first, exploding with a muffled
whrrr-rump!
sound. A ball of flame rose from the back of the Plymouth, too bright to look at. The rear window blew in. The Ford John and Ray had come in went next,
barely two seconds later. Hooks of metal whickered through the air and pattered on the roof.

“Charlie!” Andy shouted.
“Charlie, stop it!”

She said in that same calm voice: “I can't.”

The third car went up.

Someone ran. Someone else followed him. The men on the porch began to back away. Andy was tugged again, he resisted, and suddenly no one at all was holding him. And suddenly they were all running, their faces white, eyes stare-blind with panic. One of the men with the charred hair tried to vault over the railing, caught his foot, and fell headfirst into a small side garden where Norma had grown beans earlier in the year. The stakes for the beans to climb on were still there, and one of them rammed through this fellow's throat and came out the other side with a wet punching sound that Andy never forgot. He twitched in the garden like a landed trout, the bean-pole protruding from his neck like the shaft of an arrow, blood gushing down the front of his shirt as he made weak gargling sounds.

The rest of the cars went up then like an ear-shattering string of firecrackers. Two of the fleeing men were tossed aside like ragdolls by the concussion, one of them on fire from the waist down, the other peppered with bits of safety glass.

Dark, oily smoke rose in the air. Beyond the driveway, the far hills and fields twisted and writhed through the heat-shimmer as if recoiling in horror. Chickens ran madly everywhere, clucking crazily. Suddenly three of them exploded into flame and went rushing off, balls of fire with feet, to collapse on the far side of the dooryard.

“Charlie, stop it right now! Stop it!”

A trench of fire raced across the dooryard on a diagonal, the very dirt blazing in a single straight line, as if a train of gunpowder had been laid. The flame reached the chopping block with Irv's ax buried in it, made a fairy-ring around it, and suddenly collapsed inward. The chopping block whooshed into flame.

“CHARLIE FOR CHRISTS SAKE!”

Some Shop agent's pistol was lying on the verge of the grass between the porch and the blazing line of cars in the driveway. Suddenly the cartridges in it began to go off in a series of sharp, clapping explosions. The gun jigged and flipped bizarrely in the grass.

Andy slapped her as hard as he could.

Her head rocked back, her eyes blue and vacant. Then she was looking at him, surprised and hurt and dazed, and he suddenly felt enclosed in a capsule of swiftly building heat. He took in a breath of air that felt like heavy glass. The hairs on his nose felt as if they were crisping.

Spontaneous combustion,
he thought.
I'm going up in a burst of spontaneous combustion—

Then it was gone.

Charlie staggered on her feet and put her hands up to her face. And then, through her hands, came a shrill, building scream of such horror and dismay that Andy feared her mind had cracked.

“DAAAAADEEEEEEEEE—”

He swept her into his arms, hugged her.

“Shh,” he said. “Oh Charlie, honey, shhhh.”

The scream stopped, and she went limp in his arms. Charlie had fainted.

Andy picked her up in his arms and her head rolled limply against his chest. The air was hot and rich with the smell of burning gasoline. Flames had already crawled across the lawn to the ivy trellis; fingers of fire began to climb the ivy with the agility of a boy on midnight business. The house was going to go up.

Irv Manders was leaning against the kitchen screen door, his legs splayed. Norma knelt beside him. He had been shot above the elbow, and the sleeve of his blue workshirt was a bright red. Norma had torn a long strip of her dress off at the hem and was trying to get his shirtsleeve up so she could bind the wound. Irv's eyes were open. His face was an ashy gray, his lips were faintly blue, and he was breathing fast.

Andy took a step toward them and Norma Manders flinched backward, at the same time placing her body over her husband's. She looked up at Andy with shiny, hard eyes.

“Get away,” she hissed. “Take your monster and get away.”

OJ ran.

The Windsucker bounced up and down under his arm as he ran. He ignored the road as he ran. He ran in the field. He fell down and got up and ran on. He twisted his ankle in what might have been a chuckhole and fell down again, a scream jerking out of his mouth as he sprawled. Then he got up and ran on. At times it seemed that he was running alone, and at times it seemed that someone was running with him. It didn't matter. All that mattered was getting away, away from that blazing bundle of rags that had been Al Steinowitz ten minutes before, away from that burning train of cars, away from Bruce Cook who lay in a small garden patch with a stake in his throat. Away, away, away. The Windsucker fell out of its holster, struck his knee painfully, and fell in a tangle of weeds, forgotten. Then OJ was in a patch of woods. He stumbled over a fallen tree and sprawled full length. He lay there, breathing raggedly, one hand pressed to his side, where a painful stitch had formed. He lay weeping tears of shock and fear. He thought:
No more assignments in New York. Never. That's it. Everybody out of the pool. I'm never setting foot in New York again even if I live to be two hundred.

After a little while OJ got up and began to limp toward the road.

“Let's get him off the porch,” Andy said. He had laid Charlie on the grass beyond the dooryard. The side of the house was burning now, and sparks were drifting down on the porch like big, slow-moving fireflies.

“Get away,” she said harshly. “Don't touch him.”

“The house is burning,” Andy said. “Let me help you.”

“Get away! You've done enough!”

“Stop it, Norma.” Irv looked at her. “None of what happened was this man's fault. So shut your mouth.”

She looked at him as if she had a great many things to say, and then shut her mouth with a snap.

“Get me up,” Irv said. “Legs feel all rubber. Think maybe I pissed myself. Shouldn't be surprised. One of those bastards shot me. Don't know which one. Lend a hand, Frank.”

“It's Andy,” he said, and got an arm around Irv's back. Little by little Irv came up. “I don't blame your missus. You should have passed us by this morning.”

“If I had it to do over again, I'd do it just the same way,” Irv said. “Gosh-damn people coming on my land with guns. Gosh-damn bastards and fucking bunch of government whoremasters and … oooww-oooh,
Christ!
”

“Irv?” Norma cried.

“Hush, woman. I got it nocked now. Come on, Frank, or Andy, or whatever your name is. It's gettin hot.”

It was. A puff of wind blew a coil of sparks onto the porch as Andy half dragged Irv down the steps and into the dooryard. The chopping block was a blackened stump. There was nothing left of the chickens Charlie had set on fire but a few charred bones and a peculiar, dense ash that might have been feathers. They had not been roasted; they had been cremated.

“Set me down by the barn,” Irv gasped. “I want to talk to you.”

“You need a doctor,” Andy said.

“Yeah, I'll get my doctor. What about your girl?”

“Fainted.” He set Irv down with his back against the barn door. Irv was looking up at him. A little color had come into his face, and that bluish cast was leaving his lips. He was sweating. Behind them, the big white farmhouse that had stood here on the Baillings Road since 1868 was going up in flames.

“There's no human being should be able to do what she can,” Irv said.

“That may well be,” Andy said, and then he looked from Irv and directly into Norma Manders's stony, unforgiving face. “But then, no human being should have to have cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy or leukemia. But it happens. And it happens to children.”

“She didn't get no say.” Irv nodded. “All right.”

Still looking at Norma, Andy said, “She's no more a monster than a kid in an iron lung or in a home for retarded children.”

“I'm sorry I said that,” Norma replied, and her glance
wavered and fell from Andy's. “I was out feeding the chickens with her. Watching her pet the cow. But mister, my house is burning down, and people are dead.”

“I'm sorry.”

“The house is insured, Norma,” Irv said, taking her hand with his good one.

“That doesn't do anything about my mother's dishes that her mother gave to her,” Norma said. “Or my nice secretary, or the pictures we got at the Schenectady art show last July.” A tear slipped out of one eye and she wiped it away with her sleeve. “And all the letters you wrote to me when you were in the army.”

“Is your button going to be all right?” Irv asked.

“I don't know.”

“Well, listen. Here's what you can do if you want to. There's an old Willys Jeep out behind the barn—”

“Irv, no! Don't get into this any deeper!”

He turned to look at her, his face gray and lined and sweaty. Behind them, their home burned. The sound of popping shingles was like that of horse chestnuts in a Christmas fire.

“Those men came with no warrants nor blueback paper of any kind and tried to take them off our land,” he said. “People I'd invited in like it's done in a civilized country with decent laws. One of them shot me, and one of them tried to shoot Andy here. Missed his head by no more than a quarter of an inch.” Andy remembered the first deafening report and the splinter of wood that had jumped from the porch support post. He shivered. “They came and did those things. What do you want me to do, Norma? Sit here and turn them over to the secret police if they get their peckers up enough to come back? Be a good German?”

“No,” she said huskily. “No, I guess not.”

“You don't have to—” Andy began.

“I feel I do,” Irv said. “And when they come back … they will be back, won't they, Andy?”

“Oh yes. They'll be back. You just bought stock in a growth industry, Irv.”

Irv laughed, a whistling, breathless sound. “That's pretty good, all right. Well, when they show up here, all I know is that you took my Willys. I don't know more than that. And to wish you well.”

“Thank you,” Andy said quietly.

“We got to be quick,” Irv said. “It's a long way back to
town, but they'll have seen the smoke by now. Fire trucks'll be coming. You said you and the button were going to Vermont. Was that much the truth?”

“Yes,” Andy said.

There was a moaning sound to their left. “Daddy—”

Charlie was sitting up. The red pants and green blouse were smeared with dirt. Her face was pale, her eyes were terribly confused. “Daddy, what's burning? I smell something burning. Am I doing it?
What's burning?
”

Andy went to her and gathered her up. “Everything is all right,” he said, and wondered why you had to say that to children even when they knew perfectly well, as you did, that it wasn't true. “Everything's fine. How do you feel, hon?”

Charlie was looking over his shoulder at the burning line of cars, the convulsed body in the garden, and the Manders house, which was crowned with fire. The porch was also wrapped in flames. The wind was carrying the smoke and heat away from them, but the smell of gas and hot shingles was strong.