Firestarter

11

“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.

He gathered himself to do it. She was already standing on the first rung, her hands grasping the next one over her head.

And that was when Cap-they had all forgotten him-began to scream.

12

When Don Jules got back to the building Cap and Andy had left only minutes before, he was so wild-looking that Richard, on door duty, grasped the gun inside his drawer.

“What-“he began.

“The alarm, the alarm!” Jules yelled.

“Do you have auth-”

“I’ve got all the authorization I need, you fucking twit! The girl! The girl’s making a break for it!”

On Richard’s console there were two simple combination-type dials, numbered from one to ten. Flustered, Richard dropped his pen and set the left-hand dial to a little past seven. Jules came around and set the right-hand dial just past one. A moment later a low burring began to come from the console, a sound that was being repeated all over the Shop compound.

Groundskeepers were turning off their mowers and running for sheds where rifles were kept. The doors to the rooms where the vulnerable computer terminals were slid closed and locked. Gloria, Cap’s secretary, produced her own handgun. All available Shop agents ran toward loudspeakers to await instructions, unbuttoning coats to free weapons. The charge in the outer fence went from its usual mild daytime tickle to killing voltage. The Dobermans in the run between the two fences heard the buzzing, sensed the change as the Shop geared up to battle status, and began to bark and leap hysterically. Gates between the Shop and the outside world slid shut and locked automatically. A bakery truck that had been servicing the commissary had its rear bumper chewed off by one sliding gate, and the driver was lucky to escape electrocution.

The buzz seemed endless, subliminal.

Jules grabbed the mike from Richard’s console and said, “Condition Bright Yellow. I say again, Condition Bright Yellow. No drill. Converge on stables; use caution.” He searched his mind for the code term assigned to Charlie McGee and couldn’t come up with it. They changed the fucking things by the day, it seemed. “It’s the girl, and she’s using it! Repeat, she’s using it!”

13

Orv Jamieson was standing underneath the loudspeaker in the third-floor lounge of the north house, holding The Windsucker in one hand. When he heard Jules’s message, he sat down abruptly and holstered it.

“Uh-uh,” he said to himself as the three others he had been shooting eight ball with ran out. “Uh-uh, not me, count me out.” The others could run over there like hounds on a hot scent if they wanted to. They had not been at the Manders farm. They had not seen this particular third-grader in action.

What OJ wanted more than anything at that point in time was to find a deep hole and pull it over him.

14

Cap Hollister had heard very little of the three-way conversation between Charlie, her father, and Rainbird. He was on hold, his old orders completed, no new ones yet issued. The sounds of the talk flowed meaninglessly over his head and he was free to think of his golf game, and snakes, and nine irons, and boa constrictors, and mashies, and timber rattlers, and niblicks, and pythons big enough to swallow a goat whole. He did not like this place. It was full of loose hay that reminded him of the way the rough on a golf course smelled. It had been in the hay that his brother had been bitten by a snake when Cap himself was only three, it wasn’t a very dangerous snake, but his big brother had screamed, he had screamed, and there had been the smell of hay, the smell of clover, the smell of timothy, and his big brother was the strongest, bravest boy in the world but now he was screaming, big, tough, nine-year-old Leon Hollister was screaming “Go get Daddy!” and tears were running down his cheeks as he held his puffing leg between his hands and as three-year-old Cap Hollister turned to do what his brother said, terrified and blubbering, it had slithered over his foot, his own foot, like deadly green water and later the doctor had said the bite wasn’t dangerous, that the snake must have bitten something else only a little while before and exhausted its poison sac, but Lennie thought he was dying and everywhere had been the sweet summer smell of grass and the hoppers were jumping, making their eternal rickety- rickety sound and spitting tobacco juice (“Spit and I’ll let you go” had been the cry in those long-ago Nebraska days); good smells, good sounds, golf-course smells and sounds, and the screaming of his brother and the dry, scaly feel of the snake, looking down and seeing its flat, triangular head, its black eyes… the snake had slithered across Cap’s foot on its way back into the high grass… back into the rough, you might say… and the smell had been like this… and he didn’t like this place.

Four irons and adders and putters and copperheads-

Faster and faster now the ricochet bounded back and forth, and Cap’s eyes moved vacuously around the shadowy stable while John Rainbird confronted the McGees. Eventually his eyes fixed upon the partially fused green plastic hose by the burst waterpipe. It hung in coils on its peg, still partially obscured by the last of the drifting steam.