Firestarter

where his eyes had been. His heart was a live thing in his throat.

No one there.

No thing there.

But his nerve was broken and then the branch began its implacable knocking again, he fled, not bothering to close the classroom door behind him. He sprinted down the narrow corridor and suddenly footfalls were pursuing him, echoes of his own running feet. He went down the stairs two at a time and so came back into the lobby, breathing hard, the blood hammering at his temples. The air in his throat prickled like cut hay.

He didn’t see the security man anywhere about.

He left, shutting one of the big glass lobby doors behind him and slinking down the walk to the quad like the fugitive he would later become.

17

Five days later, and much against her will, Andy dragged Vicky Tomlinson down to Jason Gearneigh Hall. She had already decided she never wanted to think about the experiment again. She had drawn her two-hundred-dollar check from the Psychology Department, banked it, and wanted to forget where it had come from.

He persuaded her to come, using eloquence he hadn’t been aware he possessed. They went at the two-fifty change of classes; the bells of Harrison Chapel played a carillon in the dozing May air. “Nothing can happen to us in broad daylight,” he said, uneasily refusing to clarify, even in his own mind, exactly what he might be afraid of. “Not with dozens of people all around.”

“I just don’t want to go, Andy,” she had said, but she had gone.

There were two or three kids leaving the lecture room with books under their arms. Sunshine painted the windows a prosier hue than the diamond-dust of moonlight Andy remembered. As Andy and Vicky entered, a few others trickled in for their three-o'clock biology seminar. One of them began to talk softly and earnestly to a pair of the others about an end-ROTC march that was coming off that weekend. No one took the slightest notice of Andy and Vicky.

“All right,” Andy said, and his voice was thick and nervous. “See what you think.”

He pulled the chart down by the dangling ring. They were looking at a naked man with his skin flayed away and his organs labeled. His muscles looked like interwoven skeins of red yarn. Some wit had labeled him Oscar the Grouch.

“Jesus!” Andy said.

She gripped his arm and her hand was warm with nervous perspiration. “Andy,” she said. “Please, let’s go. Before someone recognizes us.”

Yes, he was ready to go. The fact that the chart had been changed somehow scared him more than anything else. He jerked the pull ring down sharply and let it go. It made that same smacking sound as it went up.

Different chart. Same sound. Twelve years later he could still hear the sound it made-when his aching head would let him. He never stepped into Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall after that day, but he was acquainted with that sound.

He heard it frequently in his dreams… and saw that questing, drowning, bloodstained hand.

18

The green car whispered along the airport feeder road toward the Northway entrance ramp. Behind the wheel, Norville Bates sat with his hands firmly at ten and two o'clock. Classical music came from the FM receiver in a muted, smooth flow. His hair was now short and combed back, but the small, semicircular scar on his chin hadn’t changed-the place where he had cut himself on a jagged piece of Coke bottle as a kid. Vicky, had she still been alive, would have recognized him.

“We have one unit on the way,” the man in the Botany 500 suit said. His name was John Mayo. “The guy’s a stringer. He works for DIA as well as us.”

“Just an ordinary whore,” the third man said, and all three of them laughed in a nervous, keyed up way. They knew they were close; they could almost smell blood. The name of the third man was Orville Jamieson, but he preferred to be called OJ, or even better, The Juice. He signed all his office memos OJ. He had signed one The Juice and that bastard Cap had given him a reprimand. Not just an oral one; a written one that had gone in his record.

“You think it’s the Northway, huh?” OJ asked. Norville Bates shrugged. “Either the Northway or they headed into Albany,” he said. “I gave the local yokel the hotels in town because it’s his town, right?”

“Right,” John Mayo said. He and Norville got along well together. They went back a long way. All the way back to Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall, and that, my friend, should anyone ever ask you had been hairy. John never wanted to go through anything that hairy again. He had been the man who zapped the kid who went into cardiac arrest. He had been a medic during the early days in Nam and he knew what to do with the defibrillator-in theory, at least. In practice, it hadn’t gone so well, and the kid had got away from them. Twelve kids got Lot Six that day. Two of them had died-the kid who had gone into cardiac arrest and a girl who died six days later in her dorm, apparently of a sudden brain embolism. Two others had gone hopelessly insane-one of them the boy who had blinded himself, the other a girl who later developed a total paralysis from the neck down. Wanless had said that was psychological, but who the fuck knew? It had been a nice day’s work, all right.

“The local yokel is taking his wife along,” Norville was saying. “She’s looking for her granddaughter. Her son ran away with the little girl. Nasty divorce case, all of that. She doesn’t want to notify the police unless she has to, but she’s afraid the son might be going mental. If she plays it right, there isn’t a night clerk in town that won’t tell her if the two of them have checked in.”

“If she plays it right,” OJ said. “With these stringers you can never tell.”

John said, “We’re going to the closest on-ramp, right?”

“Right,” Norville said. “Just three, four minutes now.”

“Have they had enough time to get down there?”

“They have if they were busting ass. Maybe we’ll be able to pick them up trying to thumb a ride right there on the ramp. Or maybe they took a shortcut and went over the side into the breakdown lane. Either way, all we have to do is cruise along until we come to them.”

“Where you headed, buddy, hop in,” The Juice said, and laughed. There was a.357 Magnum in a shoulder holster under his left arm. He called it The Windsucker.

“If they already hooked them a ride, we’re shit out of luck, Norv,” John said.

Norville shrugged. “Percentage play. It’s quarter past one in the morning. With the rationing, traffic’s thinner than ever. What’s Mr. Businessman going to think if he sees a big guy and a little girl trying to hitch a ride?”

“He’s gonna think it’s bad news,” John said.

“That’s a big ten-four.”

The Juice laughed again. Up ahead the stop-and-go light that marked the Northway ramp gleamed in the dark. OJ put his hand on the walnut stock of The Windsucker. Just in case.

19

The van passed them by, backwashing cool air… and then its brakelights flashed brighter and it swerved over into the breakdown lane about fifty yards farther up.

“Thank God,” Andy said softly. “You let me do the talking, Charlie.”

“All right, Daddy.” She sounded apathetic. The dark circles were back under her eyes. The van was backing up as they walked toward it. Andy’s head felt like a slowly swelling lead balloon.

There was a vision from the Thousand and One Nights painted on the side-caliphs, maidens hiding under gauzy masks, a carpet floating mystically in the air. The carpet was undoubtedly meant to be red, but in the light of turnpike sodiums it was the dark maroon of drying blood.

Andy opened the passenger door and boosted Charlie up and in. He followed her. “Thanks, mister,” he said. “Saved our lives.”

“My pleasure,” the driver said. “Hi, little stranger.”

“Hi,” Charlie said in a small voice.

The driver checked the outside mirror, drove down the breakdown lane at a steadily increasing pace, and then crossed into the travel lane. Glancing past Charlie’s slightly bowed head, Andy felt a touch of guilt: the driver was exactly the sort of young man Andy himself always passed by when he saw him standing on the shoulder with his thumb out. Big but lean, he wore a heavy black beard that curled down to his chest and a big felt hat that looked like a prop in a movie about feudin Kentucky hillbillies. A cigarette that looked home rolled was cocked in the corner of his mouth, curling up smoke. Just a cigarette, by the smell; no sweet odor of cannabis.

“Where you headed, my man?” the driver asked.

“Two towns up the line,” Andy said.

“Hastings Glen?”

“That’s right.”

The driver nodded. “On the run from someone, I guess.”

Charlie tensed and Andy put a soothing hand on her back and rubbed gently until she loosened up again. He had detected no menace in the driver’s voice.

“There was a process server at the airport,” he said.

The driver grinned-it was almost hidden beneath his fierce beard-plucked the cigarette from his mouth, and offered it delicately to the wind sucking just outside his half-open vent window. The slipstream gulped it down.

“Something to do with the little stranger here is my guess,” he said.