Firestarter

long it was, when she came to herself she saw that the sun was brighter and a little more westerly in the sky. The steam of the boiling pond had been pulled to tatters by the light breeze and blown away.

Slowly, Charlie stood up and looked around.

The pond caught her eye first. She saw that it had been close… very close. Only puddles of water remained, flatly sheened with sunlight like bright glass gems set in the slick mud of the pond’s bottom. Draggled lilypads and water-weeds lay here and there like corroded jewelry; already in places the mud was beginning to dry and crack. She saw a few coins in the mud, and a rusted thing that looked like a very long knife or perhaps a lawnmower blade. The grass all around the pond had been scorched black.

A deadly silence lay over the Shop compound, broken only by the brisk snap and crackle of the fire. Her father had told her to make them know they had been in a war, and what was left looked very much like an abandoned battleground. The stable, barn, and house on one side of the pond were burning furiously. All that remained of the house on the other side was smoky rubble; it was as if the place had been hit by a large incendiary bomb or a World War II V-rocket.

Blasted and blackened lines lay across the grass in all directions, making those idiot spiral patterns, still smoking. The armored limo had burned itself out at the end of a gouged trench of earth. It no longer resembled a car; it was only a meaningless hunk of junk.

The fence was the worst. Bodies lay scattered along its inner perimeter, nearly half a dozen of them. In the space between there were two or three more bodies, plus a scattering of dead dogs. As if in a dream, Charlie began walking in that direction.

Other people were moving on the lawn, but not many. Two of them saw her coming and shied away. The others seemed to have no conception of who she was and no knowledge that she had caused it all. They walked with the dreamy, portentous paces of shock-blasted survivors.

Charlie began to clamber up the inner fence. “I wouldn’t do that,” a man in orderly’s whites called over conversationally. “Dogs goan get you if you do that, girl.”

Charlie took no notice. The remaining dogs growled at her but did not come near; they, too, had had enough, it seemed. She climbed the outer gate, moved slowly and carefully, holding tight and poking the toes of her loafers into the diamond-shaped holes in the link. She reached the top, swung one leg over carefully, then the other. Then, moving with the same deliberation, she climbed down and, for the first time in half a year stepped onto ground that didn’t belong to the Shop. For a moment she only stood there, as if in shock.

I’m free, she thought dully. Free.

In the distance, the sound of wailing sirens arose, drawing near.

The woman with the broken arm still sat on the grass, about twenty paces from the abandoned guardhouse. She looked like a fat child too weary to get up. There were white shock circles under her eyes. Her lips had a bluish tinge.

“Your arm,” Charlie said huskily.

The woman looked up at Charlie, and recognition came into her eyes. She began to scrabble away, whimpering with fear. “Don’t you come near me,” she hissed raggedly. “All their tests! All their tests! I don’t need no tests! You’re a witch! A witch!”,

Charlie stopped. “Your arm,” she said. “Please. Your arm. I’m sorry. Please?” Her lips were trembling again. It seemed to her now that the woman’s panic, the way her eyes rolled, the way she unconsciously curled her lip up over her teeth-these were the worst things of all.

“Please!” she cried. “I’m sorry! They killed my daddy!” “Should have killed you as well,” the woman said, panting. “Why don’t you burn yourself up, if you’re so sorry?” Charlie took a step toward her and the woman moved away again, screaming as she fell over on her injured arm. “Don’t you come near me!” And suddenly all of Charlie’s hurt and grief and anger found its voice.

“None of it was my fault!” she screamed at the woman with the broken arm. “None of it was my fault; they brought it on themselves, and I won’t take the blame, and I won’t kill myself! Do you hear me! Do you?”

The woman cringed away, muttering.

The sirens were closer.

Charlie felt the power, surging up eagerly with her emotions.

She slammed it back down, made it gone.

(and I won’t do that either)

She walked across the road, leaving the muttering, cringing woman behind. On the far side of the road was a field, thigh-high with hay and timothy, silver white with October, but still fragrant.

(where am 1 going?)

She didn’t know yet.

But they were never going to catch her again.

CHARLIE ALONE

1

The story appeared in fragments on the late television news that Wednesday night, but Americans were not greeted with the entire story until they rose the next morning. By then all the available data had been coordinated into what Americans really seem to mean when they say they want “the news”-and what they really mean is “Tell me a story” and make sure it has a beginning, a middle, and some kind of ending.

The story America got over its collective coffee cup, via Today, Good Morning, America, and The CBS Morning News, was this: There had been a terrorist firebomb attack at a top-secret scientific think tank in Longmont, Virginia. The terrorist group was not positively known yet, although three of them had already stepped forward to claim the credit-a group of Japanese Reds, the Khafadi splinter of Black September, and a domestic group who went by the rich and wonderful name of the Militant Midwest Weather-people.

Though no one was sure exactly who was behind the attack, the reports seemed quite clear on how it had been carried out. An agent named John Rainbird, an Indian and a Vietnam vet, had been a double agent who had planted the firebombs on behalf of the terrorist organization. He had either killed himself by accident or had committed suicide at the site of one of the firebombings, a stable. One source claimed that Rainbird had actually been overcome by heat and smoke while trying to drive the horses out of the burning stable; this occasioned the usual newscom irony about coldblooded terrorists who cared more for animals than they did for people. Twenty lives had been lost in the tragedy; forty-five people had been injured, ten of them seriously. The survivors had all been “sequestered” by the government.

That was the story. The name of the Shop hardly surfaced at all. It was quite satisfactory.

Except for one dangling loose end.

2

“I don’t care where she is,” the new head of the Shop said four weeks after the conflagration and Charlie’s escape. Things had been in total confusion for the first ten days, when the girl might easily have been swept back into the Shop’s net; they were still not back to normal. The new head sat behind a make-do desk; her own would not be delivered for another three days. “And I don’t care what she can do, either. She’s an eight-year-old kid, not Superwoman. She can’t stay out of sight long. I want her found and then I want her killed.”

She was speaking to a middle-aged man who looked like a small-town librarian. Needless to say, he was not.

He tapped a series of neat computer printouts on the head’s desk. Cap’s files had not survived the burning, but most of his information had been stored in the computer memory banks. “What’s the status of this?”

“The Lot Six proposals have been tabled indefinitely,” the head told him. “It’s all political, of course. Eleven old men, one young woman, and three blue-haired old ladies who probably own stock in some Swiss goat-gland clinic… all of them with sweat under their balls about what would happen if the girl showed up. They-”

“I doubt very much if the senators from Idaho, Maine, and Minnesota have any sweat under their balls,” the man who was not a librarian murmured.

The head shrugged it off: “They’re interested in Lot Six. Of course they are. I would describe the light as amber.” She began to play with her hair, which was long-a shaggy, handsome dark auburn.

“‘Tabled indefinitely” means until we bring them the girl with a tag on her toe.”

“We must be Salome,” the man across the desk murmured. “But the platter is yet empty.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” he said. “We seem to be back to square one.”

“Not exactly,” the head replied grimly. “She doesn’t have her father to watch out for her anymore. She’s on her own. And I want her found. Quickly.” “And if she spills her guts before we can find her?”

The head leaned back in Cap’s chair and laced her hands behind her neck. The man who was not a librarian eyed appreciatively the way her sweater pulled taut across the rounds of her breasts. Cap had never been like this.

“If she were going to spill her guts, I think she would have by now.” She leaned forward again, and tapped the desk calendar. “November fifth,” she said, “and nothing. Meantime, I think we’ve taken all the reasonable precautions. The Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune… we’re watching all the majors, but so far, nothing.”

“Suppose she decides to go to one of the minors? The Podunk Times instead of the New York Times? We can’t watch every news organ in the country.” “That is regrettably true,” the head agreed. “But there has been nothing. Which means she has said nothing.” “Would anyone really believe such a wild tale from an eight-year-old girl anyway?”

“If she lit a fire at the end of the story, I think that they might be disposed to,” the head answered. “But shall I tell you what the computer says?” She smiled and tapped the sheets. “The computer says there’s an eighty-percent probability that we can bring the committee her dead body without lifting a finger… except to ID her.”