Firestarter (55 page)

Josie, the redhead who had been on the door the day Cap had ordered Al Steinowitz to Hastings Glen, had gone on to bigger and better things. Now a young, prematurely balding man sat there, frowning over a computer-programming text. He had a yellow felt-tip pen in one hand. He glanced up as they approached.

“Hello, Richard,” Cap said. “Hitting the books?”

Richard laughed. “They're hitting me is more like it.” He glanced at Andy curiously. Andy looked back noncommittally.

Cap slipped his thumb into a slot and something thumped. A green light shone on Richard's console.

“Destination?” Richard asked. He exchanged his felt-tip for a ballpoint. It hovered over a small bound book.

“Stable,” Cap said briskly. “We're going to pick up Andy's daughter and they are going to escape.”

“Andrews Air Force Base,” Andy countered, and pushed. Pain settled immediately into his head like a dull meat cleaver.

“Andrews AFB,” Richard agreed, and jotted it into the book, along with the time. “Have a good day, gentlemen.”

They went out into breezy October sunshine. Cap's Vega was drawn up on the clean white crushed stone of the circular driveway. “Give me your keys,” Andy said. Cap handed them over, Andy opened the trunk, and they stowed the luggage. Andy slammed the trunk and handed the keys back. “Let's go.”

Cap drove them on a loop around the duckpond to the
stables. As they went, Andy noticed a man in a baseball warmup jacket running across to the house they had just left, and he felt a tickle of unease. Cap parked in front of the open stable doors.

He reached for the keys and Andy slapped his hand lightly. “No. Leave it running. Come on.” He got out of the car. His head was thudding, sending rhythmic pulses of pain deep into his brain, but it wasn't too bed yet. Not yet.

Cap got out, then stood, irresolute. “I don't want to go in there,” he said. His eyes shifted back and forth wildly in their sockets. “Too much dark. They like the dark. They hide. They bite.”

“There are no snakes,” Andy said, and pushed out lightly. It was enough to get Cap moving, but he didn't look very convinced. They walked into the stable.

For one wild, terrible moment Andy thought she wasn't there. The change from light to shadow left his eyes momentarily helpless. It was hot and stuffy in here, and something had upset the horses; they were whinnying and kicking at their stalls. Andy could see nothing.

“Charlie?” he called, his voice cracked and urgent.
“Charlie?”

“Daddy!” she called, and gladness shot through him—gladness that turned to dread when he heard the shrill fear in her voice. “Daddy, don't come in! Don't come—”

“I think it's a little late for that,” a voice said from somewhere overhead.

“Charlie,” the voice had called down softly. It was somewhere overhead, but where? It seemed to come from everywhere.

The anger had gusted through her—anger that was fanned by the hideous unfairness of it, the way that it never ended, the way they had of being there at every turn, blocking every lunge for escape. Almost at once she felt
it
start to come up from inside her.
It
was always so much closer to the surface now … so much more eager to come bursting out. Like with the man who had brought her over. When he drew his gun, she had simply made it hot so he would drop it. He was lucky the bullets hadn't exploded right inside it.

Already she could feel the heat gathering inside her and beginning to radiate out as the weird battery or whatever it was turned on. She scanned the dark lofts overhead but couldn't spot him. There were too many stacks of bales. Too many shadows.

“I wouldn't, Charlie,” His voice was a little louder now, but still calm. It cut through the fog of rage and confusion.

“You ought to come down here!” Charlie cried loudly. She was trembling. “You ought to come down before I decide to set everything on fire! I can do it!”

“I know you can,” the soft voice responded. It floated down from nowhere, everywhere. “But if you do, you're going to burn up a lot of horses, Charlie. Can't you hear them?”

She could. Once he had called it to her attention, she could. They were nearly mad with fear, whinnying and battering at their latched doors. Necromancer was in one of those stalls.

Her breath caught in her throat. Again she saw the trench of fire running across the Manders yard and the chickens exploding.

She turned toward the bucket of water again and was now badly frightened. The power was trembling on the edge of her ability to control it, and in another moment

(back off!)

it was going to blow loose

(!BACK OFF!)

and just go sky high.

(!!BACK OFF, BACK OFF, DO YOU HEAR ME, BACKOFF!!)

This time the half-full bucket did not just steam; it came to an instant, furious boil. A moment later the chrome faucet just over the bucket twisted twice, spun like a propeller, and then blew off the pipe jutting from the wall. The fixture flew the length of the stable like a rocket payload and caromed off the far wall. Water gushed from the pipe. Cold water; she could
feel
its coldness. But moments after the water spurted out it turned to steam and a hazy mist filled the corridor between the stalls. A coiled green hose that hung on a peg next to the pipe had fused its plastic loops.

(BACK OFF!)

She began to get control of it again and pull it down. A year ago she would have been incapable of that; the thing would have had to run its own destructive course. She was
able to hold on better now … ah, but there was so much more to control!

She stood there, shivering.

“What more do you want?” she asked in a low voice. “Why can't you just let us go?”

A horse whinnied, high and frightened. Charlie understood exactly how it felt.

“No one thinks you can just be let go,” Rainbird's quiet voice answered. “I don't think even your father thinks so. You're dangerous, Charlie. And you know it. We could let you go and the next men that grabbed you might be Russians, or North Koreans, maybe even the Heathen Chinee. You may think I'm kidding, but I'm not.”

“That's not my fault!” she cried.

“No,” Rainbird said meditatively. “Of course it isn't. But it's all bullshit anyway. I don't care about the Z factor, Charlie. I never did. I only care about you.”

“Oh, you liar!”
Charlie screamed shrilly. “You tricked me, pretended to be something you weren't—”

She stopped. Rainbird climbed easily over a low pile of bales, then sat down on the edge of the loft with his feet dangling down. The pistol was in his lap. His face was like a ruined moon above her.

“Lied to you? No. I mixed up the truth, Charlie, that's all I ever did. And I did it to keep you alive.”

“Dirty liar,” she whispered, but was dismayed to find that she
wanted
to believe him; the sting of tears began behind her eyes. She was so tired and she wanted to believe him, wanted to believe he had liked her.

“You weren't testing,” Rainbird said. “Your old man wasn't testing, either. What were they going to do? Say ‘Oh, sorry, we made a mistake' and put you back on the street? You've seen these guys at work, Charlie. You saw them shoot that guy Manders in Hastings Glen. They pulled out your own mother's fingernails and then k—”

“Stop it!”
she screamed in agony, and the power stirred again, restlessly close to the surface.

“No, I won't,” he said. “Time you had the truth, Charlie. I got you going. I made you important to them. You think I did it because it's my job? The fuck I did. They're assholes. Cap, Hockstetter, Pynchot, that guy Jules who brought you over here—they're all assholes.”

She stared up at him, as if hypnotized by his hovering face. He was not wearing his eyepatch, and the place where his eye
had been was a twisted, slitted hollow, like a memory of horror.

“I didn't lie to you about this,” he said, and touched his face. His fingers moved lightly, almost lovingly, up the scars gored in the side of his chin to his flayed cheek to the burned-out socket itself. “I mixed up the truth, yeah. There was no Hanoi Rathole, no Cong. My own guys did it. Because they were assholes, like these guys.”

Charlie didn't understand, didn't know what he meant. Her mind was reeling. Didn't he know she could burn him to a crisp where he sat?

“None of this matters,” he said. “Nothing except you and me. We've got to get straight with each other, Charlie. That's all I want. To be straight with you.”

And she sensed he was telling the truth—but that some darker truth lay just below his words. There was something he wasn't telling.

“Come on up,” he said, “and let's talk this out.”

Yes, it was like hypnosis. And, in a way, it was like telepathy. Because even though she understood the shape of that dark truth, her feet began to move toward the loft ladder. It wasn't talking that he was talking about. It was ending. Ending the doubt, the misery, the fear … ending the temptation to make ever bigger fires until some awful end came of it. In his own twisted, mad way, he was talking about being her friend in a way no one else could be. And … yes, part of her wanted that. Part of her wanted an ending and a release.

So she began to move toward the ladder, and her hands were on the rungs when her father burst in.

“Charlie?”
he called, and the spell broke.

Her hands left the rungs and terrible understanding spilled through her. She turned toward the door and saw him standing there. Her first thought

(daddy you got fat!)

passed through her mind and was gone so quickly she barely had a chance to recognize it. And fat or not, it was he; she would have known him anywhere, and her love for him spilled through her and swept away Rainbird's spell like
mist. And the understanding was that whatever John Rainbird might mean to her, he meant only death for her father.

“Daddy!” she cried. “Don't come in!”

A sudden wrinkle of irritation passed over Rainbird's face. The gun was no longer in his lap; it was pointed straight at the silhouette in the doorway.

“I think it's a little late for that,” he said.

There was a man standing beside her daddy. She thought it was that man they all called Cap. He was just standing there, his shoulders slumped as if they had been broken.

“Come in,” Rainbird said, and Andy came. “Now stop.”

Andy stopped. Cap had followed him, a pace or two behind, as if the two of them were tied together. Cap's eyes shifted nervously back and forth in the stable's dimness.

“I know you can do it,” Rainbird said, and his voice became lighter, almost humorous. “In fact, you can both do it. But, Mr. McGee … Andy? May I call you Andy?”

“Anything you like,” her father said. His voice was calm.

“Andy, if you try using what you've got on me, I'm going to try to resist it just long enough to shoot your daughter. And, of course, Charlie, if you try using what you've got on me, who knows what will happen?”

Charlie ran to her father. She pressed her face against the rough wale of his corduroy jacket.

“Daddy, Daddy,” she whispered hoarsely.

“Hi, cookie,” he said, and stroked her hair. He held her, then looked up at Rainbird. Sitting there on the edge of the loft like a sailor on a mast, he was the one-eyed pirate of Andy's dream to the life. “So what now?” he asked Rainbird. He was aware that Rainbird could probably hold them here until the fellow he had seen running across the lawn brought back help, but somehow he didn't think that was what this man wanted.

Rainbird ignored his question. “Charlie?” he said.

Charlie shuddered beneath Andy's hands but did not turn around.

“Charlie,” he said again, softly, insistently. “Look at me, Charlie.”

Slowly, reluctantly, she turned around and looked up at him.

“Come on up here,” he said, “like you were going to do. Nothing has changed. We'll finish our business and all of this will end.”

“No, I can't allow that,” Andy said, almost pleasantly. “We're leaving.”

“Come up, Charlie,” Rainbird said, “or I'm going to put a bullet into your father's head right now. You can burn me, but I'm betting I can pull this trigger before it happens.”

Charlie moaned deep in her throat like a hurt animal.

“Don't move, Charlie,” Andy said.

“He'll be fine,” Rainbird said. His voice was low, rational, persuasive. “They'll send him to Hawaii and he'll be fine. You choose, Charlie. A bullet in the head for him or the golden sands there on Kalami Beach. Which is it going to be? You choose.”

Her blue eyes never leaving Rainbird's one, Charlie took a trembling step away from her father.

“Charlie!” he said sharply. “No!”

“It'll be over,” Rainbird said. The barrel of the pistol was unwavering; it never left Andy's head. “And that's what you want, isn't it? I'll make it gentle and I'll make it clean. Trust me, Charlie. Do it for your father and do it for yourself. Trust me.”

She took another step. And another.

“No,” Andy said. “Don't listen to him, Charlie.”

But it was as if he had given her a reason to go. She walked to the ladder again. She put her hands on the rung just above her head and then paused. She looked up at Rainbird, and locked her gaze with his.

“Do you promise he'll be all right?”

“Yes,” Rainbird said, but Andy felt it suddenly and completely: the force of the lie … all his lies.

I'll have to push her,
he thought with dumb amazement.
Not him, but her
.