Firestarter (40 page)

“The way you told it, it sounded like self-defense.”

“Yes, but that's no excuse to—”

“It also sounded like maybe you saved your old man's life.”

Silence from Charlie. But he could feel trouble and confusion and misery coming off her in waves. He hastened on, not wanting her to remember right now that she had come very close to killing her father as well.

“As for that guy Hockstetter, I've seen him around. I saw guys like him in the war. Every one of them a ninety-day wonder, King Shit of Turd Mountain. If he can't get what he wants from you one way, he'll try some other way.”

“That's what scares me the most,” she admitted in a low voice.

“Besides, there's one guy who could use a hotfoot.”

Charlie was shocked, but giggled hard—the way a dirty joke could sometimes make her laugh harder just because it was so bad to tell them. When she was over her giggles, she said: “No, I won't light fires. I promised myself. It's bad and I won't.”

It was enough. It was time to stop. He felt that he could keep going on pure intuition, but he recognized that it might be a false feeling. He was tired now. Working on the girl had been every bit as exhausting as working on one of Rammaden's safes. It would be too easy to go on and make a mistake that could never be undone.

“Yeah, okay. I guess you're right.”

“You really will see my dad?”

“I'll try, kid.”

“I'm sorry you got stuck in here with me, John. But I'm awful glad, too.”

“Yeah.”

They talked of inconsequential things, and she put her head on his arm. He felt that she was dozing off again—it was very late now—and when the lights went on about forty minutes later, she was fast asleep. The light in her face made her stir and turn her head into his darkness. He looked down thoughtfully at the slender willow stem of her neck, the tender curve of her skull. So much power in that small, delicate cradle of bone. Could it be true? His mind still rejected it, but his heart felt it was so. It was a strange and somehow wonderful feeling to find himself so divided. His heart felt it was true to an extent they wouldn't believe, true perhaps to the extent of that mad Wanless's ravings.

He picked her up, carried her to her bed, and slipped her between the sheets. As he pulled them up to her chin, she stirred half awake.

He leaned over impulsively and kissed her. “Goodnight, kid.”

“Goodnight, Daddy,” she said in a thick, sleeping voice. Then she rolled over and became still.

He looked down at her for several minutes longer, then went back into the living room. Hockstetter himself came bustling in ten minutes later.

“Power failure,” he said. “Storm. Damn electronic locks, all jammed. Is she—”

“She'll be fine if you keep your goddam voice down,” Rainbird said in a low voice. His huge hands pistoned out, caught Hockstetter by the lapels of his white lab coat, and jerked him forward, so that Hockstetter's suddenly terrified face was less than an inch from his own. “And if you ever behave as if you know me in here again, if you ever behave toward me as if I am anything but a D-clearance orderly, I'll kill you, and then I'll cut you into pieces, and Cuisinart you, and turn you into catmeat.”

Hockstetter sputtered impotently. Spit bubbled at the corners of his lips.

“Do you understand? I'll kill you.” He shook Hockstetter twice.

“I-I-I un-un-understand.”

“Then let's get out of here,” Rainbird said, and shoved Hockstetter, pale and wide-eyed, out into the corridor.

He took one last look around and then wheeled his cart out and closed the self-locking door behind him. In the bedroom, Charlie slept on, more peacefully than she had in months. Perhaps years.

The violent storm passed. Time passed—three weeks of it. Summer, humid and overbearing, still held sway over eastern Virginia, but school was back in session and lumbering yellow school buses trundled up and down the well-kept rural roads in the Longmont area. In not-too-distant Washington, D.C., another year of legislation, rumor, and innuendo was beginning, marked with the usual freak-show atmosphere engendered by national television, planned information leaks, and overmastering clouds of bourbon fumes.

None of that made much of an impression in the cool, environmentally controlled rooms of the two antebellum houses and the corridors and levels honeycombed beneath. The only correlative might have been that Charlie McGee was also going to school. It was Hockstetter's idea that she be tutored, and Charlie had balked, but John Rainbird had talked her into it.

“What hurt's it gonna do?” he asked. “There's no sense in a smart girl like you getting way behind. Shit—excuse me, Charlie—but I wish to God sometimes that I had more than an eighth-grade education. I wouldn't be moppin floors now—you can bet your boots on that. Besides, it'll pass the time.”

So she had done it—for John. The tutors came: the young man who taught English, the older woman who taught mathematics, the younger woman with the thick glasses who began to teach her French, the man in the wheelchair who taught science. She listened to them, and she supposed she learned, but she had done it for John.

On three occasions John had risked his job to pass her father notes, and she felt guilty about that and hence was more willing to do what she thought would please John. And he had brought her news of her dad—that he was well, that he was relieved to know Charlie was well too, and that he was cooperating with their tests. This had distressed her a little, but she was now old enough to understand—a little bit, anyway—that what was best for her might not always be best for her father. And lately she had begun to wonder more and more if John might know best about what was right for her. In his earnest, funny way (he was always swearing and then apologizing for it, which made her giggle), he was very persuasive.

He had not said anything about making fires for almost ten days after the blackout. Whenever they talked of these things, they did it in the kitchen, where he said there were no “bugs,” and they always talked in low voices.

On that day he had said, “You thought any more about that fire business, Charlie?” He always called her Charlie now instead of “kid.” She had asked him to.

She began to tremble. Just thinking about making fires had this effect on her since the Manders farm. She got cold and tense and trembly; on Hockstetter's reports this was called a “mild phobic reaction.”

“I told you,” she said. “I can't do that. I won't do that.”

“Now, can't and won't aren't the same thing,” John said. He was washing the floor—but very slowly, so he could talk to her. His mop swished. He talked the way cons talk in prison, barely moving his lips.

Charlie didn't reply.

“I just had a couple of thoughts on this,” he said. “But if you don't want to hear them—if your head's really set—I'll just shut up.”

“No, that's okay,” Charlie said politely, but she did really wish he would shut up, not talk about it, not even think about it, because it made her feel bad. But John had done so much for her … and she desperately didn't want to offend him or hurt his feelings. She needed a friend.

“Well, I was just thinking that they must know how it got out of control at that farm,” he said. “They'd probably be really careful. I don't think they'd be apt to test you in a room full of paper and oily rags, do you?”

“No, but—”

He raised one hand a little way off his mop. “Hear me out, hear me out.”

“Okay.”

“And they sure know that was the only time you caused a real—what's it?—a conflagration. Small fires, Charlie. That's the ticket. Small fires. And if something did happen—which I doubt, cause I think you got better control over yourself than you think you do—but say something
did
happen. Who they gonna blame, huh? They gonna blame you? After the fuck-heads spent half a year twisting your arm to do it? Oh hell, I'm sorry.”

The things he was saying scared her, but still she had to put her hands to her mouth and giggle at the woebegone expression on his face.

John smiled a little too, then shrugged. “The other thing I was thinkin is that you can't learn to control something unless you practice it and practice it.”

“I don't care if I ever control it or not, because I'm just not going to do it.”

“Maybe or maybe not,” John said stubbornly, wringing out his mop. He stood it in the corner, then dumped his soapy water down the sink. He began to run a bucket of fresh to rinse with. “You might get
surprised
into using it.”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Or suppose you got a bad fever sometime. From the flu or the croup or, hell, I dunno, some kind of infection.” This was one of the few profitable lines Hockstetter had given him to pursue. “You ever have your appendix out, Charlie?”

“No-ooo …”

John began to rinse the floor.

“My brother had his out, but it went bust first and he almost died. That was cause we were reservation Indians and nobody gave a—nobody cared much if we lived or died. He got a high fever, a hundred and five, I guess, and he went ravin right off his head, sayin horrible curses and talkin to people who weren't there. Do you know he thought our father was the Angel of Death or somethin, come to carry him off, and he tried to stick im with a knife that was on his beside table there? I told you this story, didn't I?”

“No,” Charlie said, whispering now not to keep from being overheard but out of horrified fascination. “Really?”

“Really,” John affirmed. He squeezed the mop out again. “It wasn't his fault. It was the fever that did it. People are apt to say or do anything when they're delirious.
Anything
.”

Charlie understood what he was saying and felt a sinking fear. Here was something she had never even considered.

“But if you had control of this pyro-whatsis …”

“How could I have control of it if I was delirious?”

“Just because you
do
.” Rainbird went back to Wanless's original metaphor, the one that had so disgusted Cap almost a year ago now. “It's like toilet-training, Charlie. Once you get hold of your bowels and bladder, you're in control for good. Delirious people sometimes get their beds all wet from sweat, but they rarely piss the bed.”

Hockstetter had pointed out that this was not invariably true, but Charlie wouldn't know that.

“Well, anyway, all I mean is that if you got
control,
don't you see, you wouldn't have to worry about this anymore. You'd have it licked. But to get control you have to practice and practice. The same way you learned to tie your shoes, or to make your letters in kinnygarden.”

“I … I just don't want to make fires! And I won't! I
won't!
”

“There, I went and upset you,” John said, distressed. “I sure didn't mean to do that. I'm sorry, Charlie. I won't say no more. Me and my big fat mouth.”

But the next time she brought it up herself.

It was three or four days later, and she had thought over the things he had said very carefully … and she believed that she had put her finger on the one flaw. “It would just never end,” she said. “They'd always want more and more and more. If you only knew the way they
chased
us, they
never
give up. Once I started they'd want bigger fires and then even bigger ones and then bonfires and then … I don't know … but I'm afraid.”

He admired her again. She had an intuition and a native wit that was incredibly sharp. He wondered what Hockstetter would think when he, Rainbird, told him that Charlie McGee had an extremely good idea what their top-secret master plan was. All of their reports on Charlie theorized that pyrokinesis was only the centerpiece of many related psionic talents, and Rainbird believed that her intuition was one of them. Her father had told them again and again that Charlie had
known
Al Steinowitz and the others were coming up to the Manders farm even before they had arrived. That was a scary thought. If she should ever get one of her funny intuitions about
his
authenticity … well, they said hell had no fury like a woman scorned, and if half of what he believed about
Charlie was true, then she was perfectly capable of manufacturing hell, or a reasonable facsimile. He might suddenly find himself getting very hot. It added a certain spice to the proceedings … a spice that had been missing for too long.

“Charlie,” he said, “I'm not sayin you should do any of these things for
free.
”

She looked at him, puzzled.

John sighed. “I don't hardly know how to put it to you,” he said. “I guess I love you a little. You're like the daughter I never had. And the way they're keeping you cooped up here, not letting you see your daddy and all, never getting to go out, missing all the things other little girls have … it just about makes me
sick
.”

Now he allowed his good eye to blaze out at her, scaring her a little.

“You could get all kinds of things just by going along with them … and attaching a few strings.”

“Strings,” Charlie said, utterly mystified.

“Yeah! You could get them to let you go outside in the sun, I bet. Maybe even into Longmont to shop for things. You could get out of this goddam box and into a regular house. See other kids. And—”

“And see my father?”

“Sure, that, too.” But that was one thing that was never going to happen, because if the two of them put their information together they would realize that John the Friendly Orderly was just too good to be true. Rainbird had never passed along a single message to Andy McGee. Hockstetter thought it would be running a risk for no gain, and Rainbird, who thought Hockstetter a total bleeding asshole about most things, agreed.