Firestarter

roar.

Flying hooves passed within scant inches of Charlie’s head as she crawled with her hands out like a blind thing. Then one of the fleeing horses struck her a glancing blow and she fell backward. One of her hands found a shoe.

“Daddy?” she whimpered. “Daddy?” He was dead. She was sure he was dead. Everything was dead; the world was flame; they had killed her mother and now they had killed her father.

Her sight was beginning to come back, but still everything was dim. Waves of heat pulsed over her. She felt her way up his leg, touched his belt, and then went lightly up his shirt until, her fingers reached a damp, sticky patch. It was spreading. There she paused in horror, and she was unable to make her fingers go on.

“Daddy,” she whispered. “Charlie?” It was no more than a low, husky croak… but it was he. His hand found her face and tugged her weakly. “Come here. Get… get close.”

She came to his side, and now his face swam out of the gray dazzle. The left side of it was pulled down in a grimace; his left eye was badly bloodshot, reminding her of that morning in Hastings Glen when they woke in that motel.

“Daddy, look at this mess,” Charlie groaned, and began to cry.

“No time,” he said. “Listen. Listen, Charlie!”

She bent over him, her tears wetting his face.

“This was coming, Charlie… Don’t waste your tears on me. But-”

“No! No!”

“Charlie, shut up!” he said roughly. “They’re going to want to kill you now. You understand? No… no more games. Gloves off.” He pronounced it “glubs” from the corner of his cruelly twisted mouth. “Don’t let them, Charlie. And don’t let them cover it up. Don’t let them say… just a fire…”

He had raised his head slightly and now lay back, panting. From outside, dim over the hungry crackle of the fire, came the faint and unimportant pop of guns… and once more the scream of horses.

“Daddy, don’t talk… rest…”

“No. Time.” Using his right arm, he was able to get partway up again to comfort her. Blood trickled from both corners of his mouth. “You have got to get away if you can, Charlie.” She wiped the blood away from the hem of her jumper. From behind, the fire baked into her. “Get away if you can. If you have to kill the ones in your way, Charlie, do it. It’s a war. Make them know they’ve been in a war.” His voice was failing now. “You get away if you can, Charlie. Do it for me. Do you understand?”

She nodded…

Overhead, near the back, another rafter let go in a flaming Catherine wheel of orange-yellow sparks. Now the heat rushed out at them as if from an open furnace flue. Sparks lit on her skin and winked out like hungry, biting insects.

“Make it”-he coughed up thick blood and forced the words out-“make it so they can never do anything like this again. Burn it down, Charlie. Burn it all down.”

“Daddy-”

“Go on, now. Before it all goes up.”

“I can’t leave you,” she said in a shaking, helpless voice.

He smiled and pulled her even closer, as if to whisper in her ear. But instead he kissed her. “-love you, Ch-“he said, and died.

20

Don Jules had found himself in charge by default. He held on as long as he could after the fire started, convinced that the little girl would run out into their field of fire. When it didn’t happen-and when the men in front of the stables began to catch their first glimpse of what had happened to the men behind it-he decided he could wait no longer, not if he wanted to hold them. He began to move forward, and the others came with him… but their faces were tight and set. They no longer looked like men on a turkey shoot.

Then shadows moved rapidly inside the double doors. She was coming out. Guns came up: two men fired before anything at all came out. Then-But it wasn’t the girl; it was the horses, half a dozen of them, eight, ten, their coats flecked with foam, their eyes rolling and white-rimmed, mad with fear.

Jules’s men, on hair trigger, opened fire. Even those who had held back, seeing that horses rather than humans were leaving the stable, seemed unable to hold back once their colleagues had begun firing. It was a slaughter. Two of the horses pitched forward to their knees, one of them whinnying miserably. Blood flew in the bright October air and slicked the grass.

“Stop!” Jules bawled. “Stop, dammit! Stop shooting the fucking horses!”

He might as well have been King Canute giving orders to the tide. The men-afraid of something they could not see, hyped by the alarm buzzer, the Bright Yellow alert, the fire that was now pluming thick black smoke at the sky, and the heavy kawhummm! of the exploding tractor-gas-finally had moving targets to shoot at… and they were shooting.

Two of the horses lay dead on the grass. Another lay half on and half off” the crushed-stone driveway, sides heaving rapidly. Three more, crazed with fear, veered to the left and made at the four or five men spread there. They gave way, still shooting, but one of the men tripped over his own feet and was trampled, screaming…

“Quit it!” Jules screamed. “Quit it! Cease-cease firing! Goddammit, cease firing, you assholes!”

But the slaughter went on. Men were reloading with strange, blank expressions on their faces. Many of them, like Rainbird, were veterans of the Vietnam war, and their faces wore the dull, twistedrag expressions of men reliving an old nightmare at lunatic intensity. A few others had quit firing, but they were a minority. Five horses lay wounded or dead on the grass and in the driveway. A few others had run away, and Necromancer was among these, his tail waving like a battle flag.

“The girl!” someone screamed, pointing at the stable doors. “The girl.”

It was too late. The slaughter of the horses had barely ended and their attention was divided. By the time they swung back toward where Charlie stood with her head down, small and deadly in her denim jumper and dark-blue knee socks, the trenches of fire had already begun to radiate from her toward them, like strands of some deadly spider’s web.

21

Charlie was submerged in the power again, and it was a relief.

The loss of her father, as keen and sharp as a stiletto, receded and became no more than a numb ache.

As always, the power drew her, like some fascinating and awful toy whose full range of possibilities still awaited discovery.

Trenches of fire raced across the grass toward the ragged line of men.

You killed the horses, you bastards, she thought, and her father’s voice echoed, as if in agreement. If you have to kill the ones in your way, Charlie, do it. It’s a war. Make them know they’ve been in a war.

Yes, she decided, she would make them know they had been in a war.

Some of the men were breaking and running now. She skewed one of the lines of fire to the right with a mild twist of her head and three of them were engulfed, their clothes becoming so many flaming rags. They fell to the ground, convulsed and screaming.

Something buzzed by her head, and something else printed thin fire across her wrist. It was Jules, who had got another gun from Richard’s station. He stood there, legs spread, gun out, shooting at her.

Charlie pushed out at him: one hard, pumping bolt of force.

Jules was thrown backward so suddenly and with such force that the wrecking ball of a great invisible crane might have struck him. He flew forty feet, not a man anymore but a boiling ball of fire.

Then they all broke and ran. They ran the way they had run at the Manders farm.

Good thing, she thought. Good thing for you.

She did not want to kill people. That had not changed. What had changed was that she’d kill them if she had to. If they stood in her way. She began to walk toward the nearer of the two houses, which stood a little distance in front of a barn as perfect as the picture on a country calendar and facing its mate across the expanse of lawn.

Windows broke like gunshots. The ivy trellis climbing the east side of the house shuddered and then burst into arteries of fire. The paint smoked, then bubbled, then flamed. Fire ran up onto the roof like grasping hands.

One of the doors burst open, letting out the whooping, panicked bray of a fire alarm and two dozen secretaries, technicians, and analysts. They ran across the lawn toward the fence, veered away from the deaths of electricity and yapping, leaping dogs, and then milled like frightened sheep. The power wanted to go out toward them but she turned it away from them and onto the fence itself, making the neat chain-link diamonds droop and run and weep molten-metal tears. There was a low thrumming sound, a low-key zapping sound as the fence overloaded and then began to short out in segment after segment. Blinding purple sparks leaped up. Small fireballs began to jump from the top of the fence, and white porcelain conductors exploded like clay ducks in a shooting gallery.

The dogs were going mad now. Their coats stood out in crazy spikes and they raced back and forth like banshees between the inner and outer fences. One of them caromed into the spitting high-voltage fence and went straight up in the air, its legs splayed stiffly. It came down in a smoking heap. Two of its mates attacked it with savage hysteria.

There was no barn behind the house where Charlie and her father had been held, but there was a long, low, perfectly maintained building that was also red barnboard trimmed with white. This building housed the Shop motor pool. Now the wide doors burst open and an armored Cadillac limousine with government plates raced out. The sunroof was open and a man’s head and torso poked through it. Elbows braced on the roof, he began to fire a light submachine gun at Charlie. In front of her, firm turf spun away in ragged digs and divots.

Charlie turned toward the car and let the power loose in that direction. The power was still growing; it was turning into something that was lithe yet ponderous, an invisible something that now seemed to be feeding itself in a spiraling chain reaction of exponential force. The limo’s gas tank exploded, enveloping the rear of the car and shooting the tailpipe into the sky like a javelin. But even before that happened the head and torso of the shooter were incinerated, the car’s windshield had blown in, and the limousine’s special self-sealing tires had begun to run like tallow.

The car continued on through its own ring of fire, plowing out of control, losing its original shape, melting into something that looked like a torpedo. It rolled over