Firestarter

forgiveness or understanding for the people who had done this. In finding peace with himself, he had banked the fires of his hate for the faceless bureaucretins who had done this in the name of national security or whatever it was. Only they weren’t faceless now: one of them stood before him, smiling and twitching and vacant. Andy felt no sympathy for Cap’s state at all.

You brought it on yourself, chum.

“Hello, Andy,” Cap said. “All ready?” “Yes,” Andy said. “Carry one of my bags, would you?” Cap’s vacuity was broken by one of those falsely shrewd glances. “Have you checked them?” he barked. “Checked them for snakes?” Andy pushed-not hard. He wanted to save as much as he could for an emergency.

“Pick it up,” he said, gesturing at one of the two suitcases.

Cap walked over and picked it up. Andy grabbed the other one.

“Where’s your car?”

“It’s right outside,” Cap said. “It’s been brought around.”

“Will anyone check on us?” What he meant was Will anyone try to stop us?

“Why would they?” Cap asked, honestly surprised. “I’m in charge.”

Andy had to be satisfied with that. “We’re going out,” he said, “and we’re going to put these bags in the trunk-”

“Trunk’s okay,” Cap broke in. “I checked it this morning.”

“-and then we’re going to drive around to the stable and get my daughter. Any questions?”

“No,” Cap said.

“Fine. Let’s go.”

They left the apartment and walked to the elevator. A few people moved up and down the hall on their own errands. They glanced cautiously at Cap and then looked away. The elevator took them up to the ballroom and Cap led the way down a long front hall.

Josie, the redhead who had been on the door the day Cap had ordered A1 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 ball-point. 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 bad 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 the 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.

10

“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, BACK OFF!!)

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 pulled 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 Chinese. 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.