Firestarter

3

Albany albany airport mister hey mister, this is it we’re here.

Hand, shaking him. Making his head roll on his neck. Terrible headache-Jesus! Thudding, shooting pains.

“Hey mister, this is the airport.”

Andy opened his eyes, then shut them against the white light of an overhead sodium lamp. There was a terrible, shrieking whine, building up and up and up, and he winced against it. It felt as if steel darning needles were being jammed into his ears. Plane. Taking off: It began to come to him through the red fog of pain. Ah yes, Doc, it all comes back to me now.

“Mister?” The cabby sounded worried. “Mister, you okay?” “Headache.” His voice seemed to come from far away, buried in the jet-engine sound that was, mercifully, beginning to fade off. “What time is it?” “Nearly midnight. Slow haul getting up here. Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you. Buses won’t be running, if that was your plan. Sure I can’t take you home?”

Andy groped in his mind for the story he had told the cabby. It was important that he remember, monster headache or not. Because of the echo. If he contradicted the earlier story in any way, it could set up a ricochet effect in the cabby’s mind. It might die out-in fact, probably would-but it might not. The cabby might seize on one point of it, develop a fixation on it; shortly it would be out of control, it would be all the cabby could think about; shortly after that, it would simply tear his mind apart. It had happened before.

“My car’s in the lot,” he said. “Everything is under control.”

“Oh.” The cabby smiled, relieved. “Glyn isn’t gonna believe this, you know. Hey! Don’t tell me, I’ll t-”

“Sure she’ll believe it. You do, don’t you?”

The driver grinned widely. “I got the big bill to prove it, mister. Thanks.”

“Thank you,” Andy said. Struggle to be polite. Struggle to go on. For Charlie. If he had been alone, he would have killed himself long ago. A man wasn’t meant to bear pain like this.

“You sure you’re okay, mister? You look awful white.”

“I’m fine, thanks.” He began to shake Charlie. “Hey, kid.” He was careful not to use her name. It probably didn’t matter, but the caution came as naturally as breathing. “Wake up, we’re here.”

Charlie muttered and tried to roll away from him.

“Come on, doll. Wake up, hon.”

Charlie’s eyes fluttered open-the direct blue eyes she had got from her mother-

and she sat up, rubbing her face. “Daddy? Where are we?”

“Albany, hon. The airport.” And leaning closer, he muttered, “Don’t say anything yet.”

“Okay.” She smiled at the cab driver, and the cabby smiled back. She slipped out of the cab and Andy followed her, trying not to stagger.

“Thanks again, man,” the cabby said. “Listen, hey. Great fare. Don’t tell me, I’ll tell you.”

Andy shook the outstretched hand. “Take care.”

“I will. Glyn’s just not gonna believe this action.”

The cabby got back in and pulled away from the yellow-painted curb. Another jet was taking of, the engine revving and revving until Andy felt as though his head would split in two pieces and fall to the pavement like a hollow gourd. He staggered a little, and Charlie put her hands on his arm.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, and her voice was far away.

“Inside. I have to sit down.”

They went in, the little girl in the red pants and the green blouse, the big man with the shaggy black hair and the slumped shoulders. A skycap watched them go and thought it was a pure sin, a big man like that out after midnight, drunk as a lord by the look of him, with his little girl who should have been in bed hours ago leading him around like a Seeing Eye dog. Parents like that ought to be sterilized, the skycap thought.

Then they went in through the electric-eye-controlled doors and the skycap forgot all about them until some forty minutes later, when the green car pulled up. to the curb and the two men got out to talk to him.

4

It was ten past midnight. The lobby of the terminal had been given over to the early-morning people: servicemen at the end of their leaves, harried-looking women riding herd on scratchy, up-too-late children, businessmen with pouches of weariness under their eyes, cruising kids in big boots and long hair, some of them with packs on their backs, a couple with cased tennis rackets. The loudspeaker system announced arrivals and departures and paged people like some omnipotent voice in a dream.

Andy and Charlie sat side by side at desks with TVs bolted to them. The TVs were scratched and dented and painted dead black. To Andy they looked like sinister, futuristic cobras. He plugged his last two quarters into them so they wouldn’t be asked to leave the seats. Charlie’s was showing a rerun of The Rookies and Johnny Carson was yucking it up with Sonny Bono and Buddy Hackett on Andy’s.

“Daddy, do I have to?” Charlie asked for a second time. She was on the verge of tears.

“Honey, I’m used up,” he said. “We have no money. We can’t stay here.”

“Those bad men are coming?” she asked, and her voice dropped to a whisper.

“I don’t know.” Thud, thud, thud in his brain. Not a riderless black horse anymore; now it was mailsacks filled with sharp scraps of iron being dropped on him from a fifth-story window. “We have to assume they are.”

“How could I get money?” He hesitated and then said, “You know.” The tears began to come and trickled down her cheeks. “It’s not right. It’s not right to steal.”

“I know it,” he said. “But it’s not right for them to keep coming at us, either. I explained it to you, Charlie. Or at least I tried.”

“About little bad and big bad?”

“Yes. Lesser and greater evil.”

“Does your head really hurt?”

“It’s pretty bad,” Andy said. There was no use telling her that in an hour, or possibly two, it would be so bad he would no longer be able to think coherently. No use frightening her worse than she already was. No use telling her that he didn’t think they were going to get away this time.

“I’ll try,” she said, and got out of the chair. “Poor Daddy,” she said, and kissed him.

He closed his eyes. The TV played on in front of, him, a faraway babble of sound in the midst of the steadily growing ache in his head. When he opened his eyes again, she was just a distant figure, very small, dressed in red and green, like a Christmas ornament, bobbing away through the scattered people on the concourse.

Please God, let her be all right, he thought. Don’t let anyone mess with her, or scare her worse than she is already. Please and thank you, God Okay?

He closed his eyes again.

5

Little girl in red stretch pants and a green rayon blouse. Shoulder-length blond hair. Up too late, apparently by herself. She was in one of the few places where a little girl by herself could go unremarked after midnight. She passed people, but no one really saw her. If she had been crying, a security guard might have come over to ask her if she was lost, if she knew which airline her mommy and daddy were ticketed on, what their names were so they could be paged. But she wasn’t crying, and she looked as if she knew where she was going.

She didn’t exactly-but she had a pretty fair idea of what she was looking for. They needed money; that was what Daddy had said. The bad men were coming, and Daddy was hurt. When he got hurt like this, it got hard for him to think. He had to lie down and have as much quiet as he could. He had to sleep until the pain went away. And the bad men might be coming… the men from the Shop, the men who wanted to pick them apart and see what made them work-and to see if they could be used, made to do things.

She saw a paper shopping bag sticking out of the top of a trash basket and took it. A little way farther down the concourse she came to what she was looking for: a bank of pay phones.

Charlie stood looking at them, and she was afraid. She was afraid because Daddy had told her again and again that she shouldn’t do it… since earliest childhood it had been the Bad Thing. She couldn’t always control the Bad Thing. She might hurt herself, or someone else, or lots of people. The time

(oh mommy I’m sorry the hurt the bandages the screams she screamed i made my mommy scream and i never will again… never… because it is a Bad Thing) in the kitchen when she was little… but it hurt too much to think of that. It was a Bad Thing because when you let it go, it went… everywhere. And that was scary.

There were other things. The push, for instance; that’s what Daddy called it, the push.

Only she could push a lot harder than Daddy, and she never got headaches afterward. But sometimes, afterward… there were fires.

The word for the Bad Thing clanged in her mind as she stood nervously looking at the telephone booths: pyrokinesis “Never mind that,” Daddy had told her when they were still in Port City and thinking like fools that they were safe. “You’re a firestarter, honey. Just one great big Zippo lighter.” And then it had seemed funny, she had giggled, but now it didn’t seem funny at all.

The other reason she wasn’t supposed to push was because they might find out. The bad men from the Shop. “I don’t know how much they know about you now,” Daddy had told her, “but I don’t want them to find out anymore. Your push isn’t exactly like mine, honey. You can’t make people… well, change their minds, can you?”

“No-ooo…” “But you can make things move. And if they ever began to see a pattern, and connect that pattern with you, we’d be in even worse trouble than we are now.”

And it was stealing, and stealing was also a Bad Thing.

Never mind. Daddy’s head was hurting him and they had to get to a quiet, warm place before it got too bad for him to think at all. Charlie moved forward.

There were about fifteen phonebooths in all, with circular sliding doors. When you were inside the booth, it was like being inside a great big Contac capsule with a