Firestarter (37 page)

“John?”

He made a voice of strained agony through his grin. “I'm sorry, kid. I just … it's the dark. I can't stand the dark. It's like the place where they put me after I was captured.”

“Who put you?”

“The Cong.”

She was closer now. The grin left his face and he began to put himself into the part.
Scared. You're scared because the Cong put you in a hole in the ground after one of their mines blew most of your face off
…
and they kept you there and now you need a friend
.

In a way, the part was a natural. All he had to do was make her believe that his extreme excitement at this
unexpected chance was extreme fear. And of course he
was
afraid—afraid of blowing it. This made the shot from the tree with the ampul of Orasin look like child's play. Her intuitions were deadly sharp. Nervous perspiration was flowing off him in rivers.

“Who are the Cong?” she asked, very close now. Her hand brushed lightly past his face and he clutched it. She gasped nervously.

“Hey, don't be scared,” he said. “It's just that—”

“You … that hurts. You're hurting me.”

It was exactly the right tone. She was scared too, scared of the dark and scared of him … but worried about him, too. He wanted her to feel she had been clutched by a drowning man.

“I'm sorry, kid.” He loosened his grip but didn't let go. “Just … can you sit beside me?”

“Sure.” She sat down, and he jumped at the mild thud of her body coming down on the floor. Outside, far away, someone hollered something to someone else.

“Let us out!” Rainbird screamed immediately. “Let us out! Hey, let us out! People in here!”

“Stop it,” Charlie said, alarmed. “We're okay … I mean, aren't we?”

His mind, that overtuned machine, was clicking along at high speed, writing the script, always three or four lines ahead, enough to be safe, not enough to destroy hot spontaneity. Most of all he wondered just how long he had, how long before the lights went back on. He cautioned himself not to expect or hope for too much. He had got his chisel under the edge of the box. Anything else would be gravy.

“Yeah, I guess we are,” he said. “It's just the dark, that's all. I don't even have a fucking match or— Aw, hey, kid, I'm sorry. That just slipped out.”

“That's okay,” Charlie said. “Sometimes my dad says that word. Once when he was fixing my wagon out in the garage he hit his hand with the hammer and said it five or six times. Other ones, too.” This was by far the longest speech she had ever made in Rainbird's presence. “Will they come and let us out pretty soon?”

“They can't until they get the power back on,” he said, miserable on the outside, gleeful on the inside. “These doors, kid, they've all got electric locks. They're built to lock solid if the power goes off. They've got you in a fuh—they've got
you in a cell, kid. It looks like a nice little apartment, but you might as well be in jail.”

“I know,” she said quietly. He was still holding her hand tightly but she didn't seem to mind as much now. “You shouldn't say it, though. I think they listen.”

They!
Rainbird thought, and a hot triumphant joy flashed through him. He was faintly aware that he had not felt such intensity of emotion in ten years.
They! She's talking about they!

He felt his chisel slip farther under the corner of the box that was Charlie McGee, and he involuntarily squeezed her hand again.

“Ow!”

“Sorry, kid,” he said, letting off. “I know damn well they listen. But they ain't listening now, with the power off. Oh kid, I don't like this, I gotta get out of here!” He began to tremble.

“Who are the Cong?”

“You don't know? … No, you're too young, I guess. It was the war, kid. The war in Vietnam. The Cong were the bad guys. They wore black pajamas. In the jungle. You know about the Vietnam war, don't you?”

She knew about it … vaguely.

“We were on patrol and we walked into an ambush,” he said. That much was the truth, but this was where John Rainbird and the truth parted company. There was no need to confuse her by pointing out that they had all been stoned, most of the grunts smoked up well on Cambodian red, and their West Point lieutenant, who was only one step away from the checkpoint between the lands of sanity and madness, on the peyote buttons that he chewed whenever they were out on patrol. Rainbird had once seen this looey shoot a pregnant woman with a semiautomatic rifle, had seen the woman's six-month fetus ripped from her body in disintegrating pieces; that, the looey told them later, was known as a West Point Abortion. So there they were, on their way back to base, and they had indeed walked into an ambush, only it had been laid by their own guys, even more stoned than they were, and four guys had been blown away. Rainbird saw no need to tell Charlie all of this, or that the Claymore that had pulverized half his face had been made in a Maryland munitions plant.

“There were only six of us that got out. We ran. We ran through the jungle and I guess I went the wrong way. Wrong way? Right way? In that crazy war you didn't know which
way was the right way because there weren't any real lines. I got separated from the rest of my guys. I was still trying to find something familiar when I walked over a land mine. That's what happened to my face.”

“I'm very sorry,” Charlie said.

“When I woke up,
they
had me,” Rainbird said, now off into the never-never land of total fiction. He had actually come to in a Saigon army hospital with an IV drip in his arm. “They wouldn't give me any medical treatment, nothing like that, unless I answered their questions.”

Now carefully. If he did it carefully it would come right; he could feel it.

His voice rose, bewildered and bitter. “Questions, all the time questions. They wanted to know about troop movements … supplies … light-infantry deployment … everything. They never let up. They were always at me.”

“Yes,” Charlie said fervently, and his heart gladdened.

“I kept telling them I didn't know anything, couldn't tell them anything, that I was nothing but a lousy grunt, just a number with a pack on its back. They didn't believe me. My face … the pain … I got down on my knees and begged for morphine … they said after … after I told them I could have the morphine. I could be treated in a good hospital … after I told them.”

Now Charlie's grip was the one that was tightening. She thought about Hockstetter's cool gray eyes, of Hockstetter pointing at the steel tray filled with curly woodshavings.
I think you know the answer … if you light that, I'll take you to see your father right away. You can be with him in two minutes.
Her heart went out to this man with the badly wounded face, this grown man who was afraid of the dark. She thought she could understand what he had been through. She knew his pain. And in the dark she began to cry silently for him, and in a way the tears were also for herself … all the unshed tears of the last five months. They were tears of pain and rage for John Rainbird, her father, her mother, herself. They burned and scourged.

The tears were not silent enough to go unheard by Rainbird's radar ears. He had to struggle to suppress another smile. Oh yes, the chisel was well-planted. Tough cracks and easy cracks, but no impossible cracks.

“They just never believed me. Finally they threw me into a hole in the ground, and it was always dark. There was a little … a room, I guess you'd say, with roots sticking out of the
earth walls … and sometimes I could see a little sunlight about nine feet up. They'd come—their commandant, I guess he was—and he'd ask me if I was ready to talk yet. He said I was turning white down there, like a fish. That my face was getting infected, that I'd get gangrene in my face and then it would get into my brain and rot it and make me crazy and then I'd die. He'd ask me if I'd like to get out of the dark and see the sun again. And I'd plead with him … I'd beg … I'd swear on my mother's name that I didn't know anything. And then they'd laugh and put the boards back and cover them up with dirt. It was like being buried alive. The dark … like this …”

He made a choked sound in his throat and Charlie squeezed his hand tighter to show him that she was there.

“There was the room and there was a little tunnel about seven feet long. I had to go down to the end of the tunnel to … you know. And the air was bad and I kept thinking I'm going to smother down here in the dark, I'm going to choke on the smell of my own sh—” He groaned. “I'm sorry. This is nothing to tell a kid.”

“That's all right. If it makes you feel better, it's all right.”

He debated, and then decided to go just a little further.

“I was down there for five months before they exchanged me.”

“What did you eat?”

“They threw down rotted rice. And sometimes spiders. Live spiders. Great big ones—tree spiders, I guess. I'd chase after them in the dark, you know, and kill them and eat them.”

“Oh,
gross!
”

“They turned me into an animal,” he said, and was quiet for a moment, breathing loudly. “You got it better than me, kid, but it comes down to pretty much the same thing. A rat in a trap. You think they'll get the lights on pretty soon?”

She didn't say anything for a long time, and he was coldly afraid that he had gone too far. Then Charlie said, “It doesn't matter. We're together.”

“All right,” he said, and then in a rush: “You won't tell, will you? They'd fire me for the way I been talking. I need this job. When you look the way I do, you need a good job.”

“No, I won't tell.”

He felt the chisel slip smoothly in another notch. They had a secret between them now.

He was holding her in his hands.

In the dark, he thought how it would be to slip his hands around her neck. That was the final object in view, of course—not their stupid tests, their playground games. Her … and then perhaps himself. He liked her, he really did. He might even be falling in love with her. The time would come when he would send her over, looking carefully into her eyes all the time. And then, if her eyes gave him the signal he had looked for for so long, perhaps he would follow her. Yes. Perhaps they would go into the real darkness together.

Outside, beyond the locked door, eddies of confusion passed back and forth, sometimes near, sometimes far away.

Rainbird mentally spat on his hands and then went back to work on her.

Andy had no idea that they hadn't come to get him out because the power failure had automatically locked the doors. He sat in a half-swoon of panic for some unknown time, sure the place was burning down, imagining the smell of smoke. Outside, the storm had cleared and late afternoon sunshine was slanting down toward dusk.

Quite suddenly Charlie's face came into his mind, as clearly as if she had been standing there in front of him.

(she's in danger charlie's in danger)

It was one of his hunches, the first he'd had since that last day in Tashmore. He thought he had lost that along with the push, but apparently that was not so, because he had never had a hunch clearer than this one—not even on the day Vicky was killed.

Did that mean the push was still there, too? Not gone at all, but only hiding?

(charlie's in danger!)

What sort of danger?

He didn't know. But the thought, the fear, had brought her face clearly in front of him, outlined on this darkness in every detail. And the image of her face, her wide-set blue eyes and fine-spun blond hair, brought guilt like a twin … except that guilt was too mild a word for what he felt; it was something like horror that he felt. He had been in a craze of panic ever since the lights went out, and the panic had been
completely for himself. It had never even occurred to him that Charlie must be in the dark, too.

No, they'll come and get her out, they probably came and got her out long ago. Charlie's the one they want. Charlie's their meal ticket
.

That made sense, but he still felt that suffocating surety that she was in some terrible danger.

His fear for her had the effect of sweeping the panic for himself away, or at least of making it more manageable. His awareness turned outward again and became more objective. The first thing he became aware of was that he was sitting in a puddle of ginger ale. His pants were wet and tacky with it, and he made a small sound of disgust.

Movement. Movement was the cure for fear.

He got on his knees, felt for the overturned Canada Dry can, and batted it away. It went clink-rolling across the tiled floor. He got another can out of the fridge; his mouth was still dry. He pulled the tab and dropped it down into the can and then drank. The ringtab tried to escape into his mouth and he spat it back absently, not pausing to reflect that only a little while ago, that alone would have been excuse enough for another fifteen minutes of fear and trembling.

He began to feel his way out of the kitchen, trailing his free hand along the wall. This level was entirely quiet now, and although he heard an occasional faraway call, there seemed to be nothing upset or panicky about the sound. The smell of smoke had been a hallucination. The air was a bit stale because all the convectors had stopped when the power went off, but that was all.

Instead of crossing the living room, Andy turned left and crawled into his bedroom. He felt his way carefully to the bed, set his can of ginger ale on the bedtable, and then undressed. Ten minutes later he was dressed in fresh clothes and feeling much better. It occurred to him that he had done all of this with no particular trouble, whereas after the lights went out, crossing the living room had been like crossing a live minefield.