Firestarter

1

At six o'clock on Wednesday morning, Charlie McGee got up, took off” her nightgown, and stepped into the shower. She washed her body and her hair, then turned the water to cold and stood shivering under the spray for a minute more. She toweled dry and then dressed carefully-cotton underpants, silk slip, dark-blue knee socks, her denim jumper. She finished by putting on her scuffed and comfortable loafers.

She hadn’t thought she would be able to sleep at all last night; she had gone to bed full of fear and nervous excitement. But she had slept. And dreamed incessantly not of Necromancer and the run through the woods but of her mother. That was peculiar, because she didn’t think of her mother as often as she used to; at times her face seemed misty and distant in her memory, like a faded photograph. But in her dreams of last night, her mother’s faceher laughing eyes, her warm, generous mouth-had been so clear that Charlie might last have seen her just the day before.

Now, dressed and ready for the day, some of the unnatural lines of strain had gone out. of her face and she seemed calm. On the wall beside the door leading into the kitchenette there was a call button and a speaker grille set into a brushed-chrome plate just below the light switch. She pressed the button now.

“Yes, Charlie?”

She knew the owner of the voice only as Mike. At seven o'clock-about half an hour from now-Mike went off and Louis came on. “I want to go out to the stables this afternoon,” she said, “and see Necromancer. Will you tell someone?”

“I’ll leave a note for Dr. Hockstetter, Charlie.”

“Thank you.” She paused, just for a moment. You got to know their voices. Mike, Louis, Gary. You got pictures of how they must look in your mind, the way you got pictures of how the DJs you heard on the radio must look. You got to like them. She suddenly realized that she would almost certainly never talk to Mike again.

“Was there something else, Charlie?”

“No, Mike. Have… have a good day.”

“Why, thank you, Charlie.” Mike sounded both surprised and pleased. “You too.” She turned on the TV and tuned to a cartoon show that came on every morning over the cable. Popeye was inhaling spinach through his pipe and getting ready to beat the sauce out of Bluto. One o'clock seemed an age away.

What if Dr. Hockstetter said, she couldn’t go out? On the TV screen, they were showing a cutaway view of Popeye’s muscles. There were about sixteen turbine engines in each one.

He better not say that. He better not. Because I’m going. One way or the other, I’m going.

2

Andy’s rest hadn’t been as easy or as healing as his daughter’s. He had tossed and turned, sometimes dozing, then starting out of the doze just as it began to deepen because the terrible leading edge of some nightmare touched his mind. The only one he could remember was Charlie staggering down the aisle between the stalls in the stable, her head gone and red-blue flames spouting from her neck instead of blood.

He had meant to stay in bed until seven o'clock, but when the digital face of the clock beside the bed got to 6:15, he could wait no longer. He swung out and headed for the shower.

Last night at just past nine, Pynchot’s former assistant, Dr. Nutter, had come in with Andy’s walking papers. Nutter, a tall, balding man in his late fifties, was bumbling and avuncular. Sorry to be losing you; hope you enjoy your stay in Hawaii; wish I was going with you, ha-ha; please sign this.

The paper Nutter wanted him to sign was a list of his few personal effects (including his keyring, Andy noticed with a nostalgic pang). He would be expected to inventory them once in Hawaii and initial another sheet that said that they had, indeed, been returned. They wanted him to sign a paper concerning his personal effects after they had murdered his wife, chased him and Charlie across half the country, and then kidnapped and held them prisoner: Andy found that darkly hilarious and Kafkaesque. I sure wouldn’t want to lose any of those keys, he thought, scrawling his signature; I might need one of them to open a bottle of soda with sometime, right, fellows?

There was also a carbon of the Wednesday schedule, neatly initialed by Cap at the bottom of the page. They would be leaving at twelve-thirty, Cap picking Andy up at his quarters. He and Cap would proceed toward the eastern checkpoint, passing Parking Area C, where they would pick up an escort of two cars. They would then drive to Andrews and board the plane at approximately fifteen hundred hours. There would be one stop for refueling-at Durban Air Force Base, near Chicago.

All right, Andy thought. Okay.

He dressed and began to move about the apartment, packing his clothes, shaving tackle, shoes, bedroom slippers. They had provided him with two Samsonite suitcases. He remembered to do it all slowly, moving with the careful concentration of a drugged man.

After he found out about Rainbird from Cap, his first thought had been a hope that he would meet him: it would be such a great pleasure to push the man who had shot Charlie with the tranquilizer dart and later betrayed her in even more terrible fashion, to put his gun to his temple and pull the trigger. But he no longer wanted to meet Rainbird. He wanted no surprises of any kind. The numb spots on his face had shrunk to pinpricks, but they were still there-a reminder that if he had to overuse the push, he would very likely kill himself.

He only wanted things to go off smoothly.

His few things were packed all too soon, leaving him with nothing to do but sit and wait. The thought that he would be seeing his daughter again soon was like a small coal of warmth in his brain.

To him too one o'clock seemed an age away.

3

Rainbird didn’t sleep at all that night. He arrived back from Washington around five-thirty A.M… garaged his Cadillac, and sat at his kitchen table drinking cup after cup of coffee. He was waiting for a call from Andrews, and until that call came, he would not rest easy. It was still theoretically possible for Cap to have found out what he had done with the computer. McGee had messed up Cap Hollister pretty well, but it still did not pay to underestimate.

Around six-forty-five, the telephone rang. Rainbird set his coffee cup down, rose, went into the living room, and answered it. “Rainbird here.” “Rainbird? This is Dick Folsom at Andrews. Major Puckeridge’s aide.” “You woke me up, man,” Rainbird said. “I hope you catch crabs as big as orange crates.

That’s an old Indian curse.”

“You’ve been scrubbed,” Folsom said. “I guess you knew.”

“Yes, Cap called me himself last night.”

“I’m sorry,” Folsom said. “It’s standard operating procedure, that’s all.”

“Well, you operated in standard fashion. Can I go back to sleep now?”

“Yeah. I envy you.” Rainbird uttered the obligatory chuckle and hung up. He went back into the kitchen, picked up his coffee cup, went to the window, looked out, saw nothing.

Floating dreamily through his mind was the Prayer for the Dead.

4

Cap did not arrive in his office that morning until almost ten-thirty, an hour and a half later than usual. He had searched his small Vega from stem to stern before leaving the house. He had become sure during the night that the car was infested with snakes. The search had taken him twenty minutesthe need to make sure there were no rattlers or copperheads (or something even more sinister and exotic) nesting in the darkness of the trunk, dozing on the fugitive warmth of the engine block, curled up in the glove compartment. He had pushed the glove-compartment button with a broomhandle, not wanting to be too close in case some hissing horror should leap out at him, and when a map of Virginia tumbled out of the square hole in the dash, he had nearly screamed.

Then, halfway to the Shop, he had passed the Greenway Golf Course and had pulled over onto the shoulder to watch with a dreamy sort of concentration as the golfers played through the eighth and ninth. Every time one of them sliced into the rough, he was barely able to restrain a compulsion to step out of the car and yell for them to beware of snakes in the tall grass.

At last the blare of a ten-wheeler’s airhorn (he had parked with his lefthand wheels still on the pavement) had startled him out of his daze and he drove on.

His secretary greeted him with a pile of overnight telex cables, which Cap simply took without bothering to shuffle through them to see if there was anything hot enough to demand immediate attention. The girl at the desk was going over a number of requests and messages when she suddenly looked up at Cap curiously. Cap was paying no attention to her at all. He was gazing at the wide drawer near the top of her desk with a bemused expression on his face.

“Pardon me,” she said. She was still very much aware of being the new girl, even after all these months, of having replaced someone Cap had been close to. And perhaps had been sleeping with, she had sometimes speculated.

“Hmmmm?” He looked around at her at last. But the blankness did not leave his eyes. It was somehow shocking… like looking at the shuttered windows of a house reputed to be haunted.

She hesitated, then plunged. “Cap, do you feel all right? You look… well, a little white.”

“I feel fine,” he said, and for a moment he was his old self, dispelling some of her doubts. His shoulders squared, his head came up, and the blankness left his eyes. “Anybody who’s going to Hawaii ought to feel fine, right?”

“Hawaii?” Gloria said doubtfully. It was news to her.

“Never mind these now,” Cap said, taking the message forms and interdepartmental memos and stuffing them all together with the telex cables. “I’ll look at them later. Anything happening with either of the McGees?”

“One item,” she said. “I was just getting to it. Mike Kellaher says she asked to go out to the stable this afternoon and see a horse-”

“Yes, that’s fine,” Cap said.

“-and she buzzed back a little later to say she’d like to go out at quarter of one.”

“Fine, fine.”

“Will Mr. Rainbird be taking her out?”

“Rainbird’s on his way to San Diego,” Cap said with unmistakable satisfaction. “I’ll send a man to take her over.”

“All right. Will you want to see the…” She trailed off. Cap’s eyes had wandered away from her and he appeared to be staring at the wide drawer again. It was partway open. It always was, per regulations. There was a gun in there. Gloria was a crack shot, just as Rachel before her had been.

“Cap, are you sure there’s nothing wrong?”

“Ought to keep that shut,” Cap said. “They like dark places. They like to crawl in and hide.”

“They?” she asked cautiously.

“Snakes,” Cap said, and marched into his office.

5

He sat behind his desk, the cables and messages in an untidy litter before him. They were forgotten. Everything was forgotten now except snakes, golf clubs, and what he was going to do at quarter of one. He would go down and see Andy McGee. He felt strongly that Andy would tell him what to do next. He felt strongly that Andy would make everything all right.

Beyond quarter of one this afternoon, everything in his life was a great funneling darkness.

He didn’t mind. It was sort of a relief.

6

At quarter of ten, John Rainbird slipped into the small monitoring room near Charlie’s quarters. Louis Tranter, a hugely fat man whose buttocks nearly overflowed the chair he sat in, was watching the monitors. The digital thermometer read a steady sixty-eight degrees. He looked over his shoulder when the door opened and his face tightened at the sight of Rainbird.

“I heard you were leaving town,” he said.

“Scrubbed,” Rainbird said. “And you never saw me this morning at all, Louis.” Louis looked at him doubtfully.

“You never saw me,” Rainbird repeated. “After five this afternoon I don’t give a shit. But until then, you never saw me. And if I hear you did, I’m going to come after you and cut me some blubber. Can you dig it?”

Louis Tranter paled noticeably. The Hostess Twinkie he had been eating dropped from his hand onto the slanted steel panel that housed the TV monitors and microphone pickup controls. It rolled down the slant and tumbled to the floor unheeded, leaving a trail of crumbs behind. Suddenly he wasn’t a bit hungry. He had heard this guy was crazy, and now he was seeing that what he had heard was certainly true.

“I can dig it,” he said, whispering in the face of that weird grin and glittering oneeyed stare.

“Good,” Rainbird said, and advanced toward him. Louis shrank away from him, but Rainbird ignored him altogether for the moment and peered into one of the monitors. There was Charlie, looking pretty as a picture in her blue jumper. With a lover’s eye, Rainbird noted that she had not braided her hair today; it lay loose and fine and lovely over her neck and shoulders. She wasn’t doing anything but sitting on the sofa. No book. No TV. She looked like a woman waiting for a bus.

Charlie, he thought admiringly, I love you. I really do.

“What’s she got going for today?” Rainbird asked.

“Nothing much,” Louis said eagerly. He was, in fact, nearly babbling. “Just going out at quarter of one to curry that horse she rides. We’re getting another test out of her tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow, huh?”

“Yep.” Louis didn’t give a tin shit about the tests one way or the other, but he thought it would please Rainbird, and maybe Rainbird would leave.

He seemed to be pleased. His grin reappeared.

“She’s going out to the stables at quarter of one, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Who’s taking her? Since I’m on my way to San Diego?”

Louis uttered a highpitched, almost female giggle to show that this piece of wit was appreciated.

“Your buddy there. Don Jules.”

“He’s no buddy of mine.”

“No, course he isn’t,” Louis agreed quickly. “He… he thought the orders were a little funny, but since they came right from Cap-““Funny? What did he think was funny about them?” “Well, just to take her out and leave her there. Cap said the stable boys would keep an eye on her. But they don’t know from nothing. Don seemed to think it would be taking a helluva-”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t get paid to think. Does he, fatty?” He slapped Louis on the shoulder, hard. It made a sound like a minor thunderclap.

“No, course he doesn’t,” Louis came back smartly. He was sweating now.

“See you later,” Rainbird said, and went to the door again.

“Leaving?” Louis was unable to disguise his relief.

Rainbird paused with his hand on the doorknob and looked back. “What do you mean?” he said. “I was never here.” “No sir, never here,” Louis agreed hastily.

Rainbird nodded and slipped out. He closed the door behind him. Louis stared at the closed door for several seconds and then uttered a great and gusty sigh of relief. His armpits were humid and his white shirt was stuck to his back. A few moments later he picked up his fallen Twinkie, brushed it off, and began to eat it again. The girl was still sitting quietly, not doing anything. How Rainbird-Rainbird of all people-had got her to like him was a mystery to Louis Tranter.

7

At quarter to one, an eternity after Charlie had awakened, there was a brief buzz at her door, and Don Jules came in, wearing a baseball warmup jacket and old cord pants. He looked at her coldly and without much interest.

“C'mon,” he said.

Charlie went with him.

8

That day was cool and beautiful. At twelve-thirty Rainbird strolled slowly across the still-green lawn to the low, L-shaped stable with its dark-red paint-the color of drying blood-and its brisk white piping. Overhead, great fair-weather clouds marched slowly across the sky. A breeze tugged at his shirt. If dying was required, this was a fine day for it. Inside the stable, he located the head groom’s office and went in. He showed his ID with its A-rating stamp.

“Yes, sir?” Drabble said.

“Clear this place,” Rainbird said. “Everyone out. Five minutes.”

The groom did not argue or bumble, and if he paled a bit, his tan covered it. “The horses too?”

“Just the people. Out the back.”

Rainbird had changed into fatigues-what they had sometimes called gookshooters in Nam. The pants pockets were large, deep, and flapped. From one of these he now took a large handgun. The head groom looked at it with wise, unsurprised eyes. Rainbird held it loosely, pointed at the floor.

“Is there going to be trouble, sir?”

“There may be,” Rainbird said quietly. “I don’t really know. Go on, now, old man.”

“I hope no harm will come to the horses,” Drabble said.

Rainbird smiled then. He thought, So will she. He had seen her eyes when she was with the horses. And this p?ace, with its bays of loose hay and its lofts of baled hay, with its dry wood all about, was a tinderbox with NO SMOKING signs posted everywhere.

It was a thin edge. But, as the years had drawn on and he had become more and more careless of his life, he had walked thinner ones.

He walked back to the big double doors and looked out. No sign of anyone just yet. He turned away and began to walk between the stall doors, smelling the sweet, pungent, nostalgic aroma of horse.

He made sure all of the stalls were latched and locked.

He went back to the double doors again. Now someone was coming. Two figures. They were still on the far side of the duckpond, five minutes” walk away. Not Cap and Andy McGee. It was Don Jules and Charlie.

Come to me, Charlie, he thought tenderly. Come to me now.

He glanced around at the shadowed upper lofts for a moment and then went to the ladder-simple wooden rungs nailed to a support beam-and began to climb with lithe ease.

Three minutes later, Charlie and Don Jules stepped into the shadowed, empty coolness of the stable. They stood just inside the doors for a moment as their eyes adjusted to the dimness. The.357 Mag in Rainbird’s hand had been modified to hold a silencer of Rainbird’s own construction; it crouched over the muzzle like a strange black spider. It was not, as a matter of fact, a very silent silencer: it is nearly impossible to completely quiet a big handgun. When-if-he pulled the trigger, it would utter a husky bark the first time, a low report the second time, and then it would be mostly useless. Rainbird hoped not to have to use the gun at all, but now he brought it down with both hands and leveled it so that the silencer covered a small circle on Don Jules’s chest.

Jules was looking around carefully.

“You can go now,” Charlie said.

“Hey!” Jules said, raising his voice and paying no attention to Charlie. Rainbird knew Jules. A book man. Follow each order to the letter and nobody could put you in hack. Keep your ass covered at all times. “Hey, groom! Somebody! I got the kid here!”

“You can go now,” Charlie said again, and once more Jules ignored her.

“Come now,” he said, clamping a hand over Charlie’s wrist. “We got to find somebody.”

A bit regretfully, Rainbird prepared to shoot Don Jules. It could be worse; at least Jules would die by the book, and with his ass covered. “I said you could go now,” Charlie said, and suddenly Jules let go of her wrist. He didn’t just let go; he pulled his hand away, the way you do when you’ve grabbed hold of something hot.

Rainbird watched this interesting development closely.

Jules had turned and was looking at Charlie. He was rubbing his wrist, but Rainbird was unable to see if there was a mark there or not.

“You get out of here,” Charlie said softly.

Jules reached under his coat and Rainbird once more prepared to shoot him. He wouldn’t do it until the gun was clear of Jules’s jacket and his intention to march her back to the house was obvious.

But the gun was only partway out when he dropped it to the barnboard floor with a cry. He took two steps backward, away from the girl, his eyes wide.

Charlie made a half turn away, as if Jules no longer interested her. There was a faucet protruding from the wall halfway up the long side of the L, and beneath it was a bucket half full of water.

Steam began to rise lazily from the bucket.

Rainbird didn’t think Jules noticed that; his eyes were riveted on Charlie.

“Get out of here, you bastard,” she said, “or I’ll burn you up. I’ll fry you.”

John Rainbird raised Charlie a silent cheer.

Jules stood looking at her, indecisive. At this moment, with his head down and slightly cocked, his eyes moving restlessly from side to side, he looked ratlike and dangerous. Rainbird was ready to back her play if she had to make one, but he hoped Jules would be sensible. The power had a way of getting out of control.

“Get out right now,” Charlie said. “Go back where you came from. I’ll be watching to see that you do. Move! Get out of here!”

The shrill anger in her voice decided him. “Take is easy,” he said. “Okay. But you got nowhere to go, girl. You got nothing but a hard way to go.”

As he spoke he was easing past her, then backing toward the door.

“I’ll be watching,” Charlie said grimly. “Don’t you even turn around, you… you turd.”

Jules went out. He said something else, but Rainbird didn’t catch it.

“Just go!” Charlie cried.

She stood in the double doorway, back to Rainbird, in a shower of drowsy afternoon sunlight, a small silhouette. Again his love for her came over him. This was the place of their appointment, then.

“Charlie,” he called down softly.

She stiffened and took a single step backward. She didn’t turn around, but he could feel the sudden recognition and fury flooding through her, although it was visible only in the slow way that her shoulders came up.

“Charlie,” he called again. “Hey, Charlie.”

“You!” she whispered. He barely caught it. Somewhere below him, a horse nickered softly. ”

It’s me,” he agreed. “Charlie, it’s been me all along.”

Now she did turn and swept the long side of the stable with her eyes. Rainbird saw her do this, but she didn’t see him; he was behind a stack of bales, well out of sight in the shadowy second loft.

“Where are you?” she rasped. “You tricked me! It was you! My daddy says it was you that time at Granther’s!” Her hand had gone unconsciously to her throat, where he had laid in the dart. “Where are you?”

Ah, Charlie, wouldn’t you like to know?

A horse whinnied; no quiet sound of contentment this, but one of sudden sharp fear. The cry was taken up by another horse. There was a heavy double thud as one of the thoroughbreds kicked at the latched door of his stall.

“Where are you?” she screamed again, and Rainbird felt the temperature suddenly begin to rise. Directly below him, one of the horses-Necromancer, perhapswhinnied loudly, and it sounded like a woman screaming.

9

The door buzzer made its curt, rasping cry, and Cap Hollister stepped into Andy’s apartment below the north plantation house. He was not the man he had been a year before. That man had been elderly but tough and hale and shrewd; that man had possessed a face you might expect to see crouching over the edge of a duck blind in November and holding a shotgun with easy authority. This man walked in a kind of distracted shamble. His hair, a strong iron gray a year ago, was now nearly white and babyfine. His mouth twitched infirmly. But the greatest change was in his eyes, which seemed puzzled and somehow childlike; this expression would occasionally be broken by a shooting sideways glance that was suspicious and fearful and almost cringing. His hands hung loosely by his sides and the fingers twitched aimlessly. The echo had become a ricochet that was now bouncing around his brain with crazy, whistling, deadly velocity.

Andy McGee stood to meet him. He was dressed exactly as he had been on that day when he and Charlie had fled up Third Avenue in New York with the Shop sedan trailing behind them. The cord jacket was torn at the seam of the left shoulder now, and the brown twill pants were faded and seatshiny,

The wait had been good for him. He felt that he had been able to make his peace with all of this. Not understanding, no. He felt he would never have that, even if he and Charlie somehow managed to beat the fantastic odds and get away and go on living. He could find no fatal flaw in his own character on which to blame this royal balls-up, no sin of the father that needed to be expiated upon his daughter. It wasn’t wrong to need two hundred dollars or to participate in a controlled experiment, anymore than it was wrong to want to be free. If I could get clear, he thought, I’d tell them this: teach your children, teach your babies, teach them well, they say they know what they are doing, and sometimes they do, but mostly they lie.

But it was what it was, n'est-ce pas? One way or another they would at least have a run for their money. But that brought him no feeling of 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.

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.

Terror flashed up in him suddenly, as explosive as flames in an old blowdown. For a moment the terror was so great that he could not even breathe, let alone cry a warning. His muscles were frozen, locked.

Then they let go. Cap drew in a great lungful of breath in a convulsive, heaving lurch and let out an earsplitting, sudden scream. “Snake! SNAKE! SNAAAYYYKE!”

He did not run away. Even reduced as he was, it wasn’t in Cap Hollister to run. He lurched forward like a rusty automaton and seized a rake that was leaning against the wall. It was a snake and he would beat it and break it and crush it. He would… would…

He would save Lennie!

He rushed at the partially fused hose, brandishing the rake.

Then things happened very fast.

15

The agents, most of them armed with handguns, and the gardeners, most of them with rifles, were converging on the low L-shaped stable in a rough circle when the screaming began. A moment later there was a heavy thudding sound and what might have been a muffled cry of pain. Only a second later there was a low ripping sound, then a muted report that was surely a silenced revolver.

The circle around the stable paused and then began to move inward once more.

16

Cap’s scream and sudden dash for the rake only broke Rainbird’s concentration for a moment, but a moment was enough. The gun jerked away from Andy’s head toward Cap; it was an instinctive movement, the quick and alert shift of a hunting tiger in the jungle.

And so it was that his keen instincts betrayed him and caused him to tumble of the thin edge he had walked so long.

Andy used the push just as quickly and just as instinctively. When the gun jerked toward Cap, he called up to Rainbird, “Jump!” and pushed harder than he ever had in his life. The pain that ripped through his head like splintering shards of shrapnel was sickening in its force, and he felt something give, finally and irrevocably.

Blowout, he thought. The thought was thick and sludgy. He staggered back. The entire left side of his body had gone numb. His left leg no longer wanted to hold him.

(it finally came it’s a blowout damn thing finally let go)

Rainbird pushed himself away from the edge of the overhead loft with one hard thrust of his arms. His face was almost comically surprised. He held onto his gun; even when he hit the floor badly and sprawled forward with a broken leg, he held onto the gun. He could not stifle a cry of pain and bewilderment, but he held onto the gun.

Cap had reached the green hose and was beating it wildly with the rake. His mouth worked, but no sound came out-only a fine spray of spit.

Rainbird looked up. His hair had fallen over his face. He jerked his head to flip it out of his line of sight. His one eye glimmered. His mouth was drawn down in a bitter line. He raised the gun and pointed it at Andy.

“No!” Charlie screamed. “No!”

Rainbird fired, and smoke belched from the vents of the silencer. The bullet dug bright, fresh splinters beside Andy’s lolling head. Rainbird braced one arm on the floor and fired again. Andy’s head snapped viciously to the right, and blood flew from the left side of his neck in a flood.

“No!” Charlie screamed again, and clapped her hands to her face. “Daddy! Daddy!” Rainbird’s hand slid out from under him; long splinters whispered into the palm of his hand. “Charlie,” he murmured. “Charlie, look at me.”

17

They ringed the outside of the stable now and paused, uncertain of just how to handle this.

“The girl,” Jules said. “We rub her-”

“No!” the girl screamed from inside, as if she had heard what Jules had planned. Then “Daddy! Daddy!”

Then there was another report, this one much louder, and a sudden, vicious flash that made them shade their eyes. A wave of heat rolled out of the open stable doors, and the men standing in front reeled back from it.

Smoke came next, smoke and the red glimmer of fire.

Somewhere inside that infant hell, horses began to scream.

18

Charlie ran for her father, her mind in a horrified whirl, and when Rainbird spoke, she did turn toward him. He was sprawled on his belly, trying to steady the gun with both hands.

Incredibly, he was smiling. “There,” he croaked. “So I can see your eyes. I love you, Charlie.”

And he fired.

The power leaped crazily out of her, totally out of control. On its way to Rainbird, it vaporized the chunk of lead that otherwise would have buried itself in her brain. For a moment it seemed that a high wind was rippling Rainbird’s clothes-and those of Cap behind him-and that nothing else was happening. But it was not just clothes that were rippling; it was the flesh itself, rippling, running like tallow, and then being hurled ofd” bones that were already charring and blackening and flaming.

There was a soundless flashgun sizzle of light that momentarily blinded her; she saw no more but could hear the horses in their stalls, going mad with fear… and she could smell smoke.

The horses! The horses! she thought, groping in the dazzle before her eyes. It was her dream. It was changed, but it was here. And suddenly, momentarily, she was back in the Albany airport, a little girl who had been two inches shorter and ten pounds lighter and ever so much more innocent, a little girl with a shopping bag scavenged from a wastecan, going from phonebooth to phonebooth, shoving at them, the silver cascading out of the coin returns…

She shoved now, almost blindly, groping with her mind for what she needed to do. A ripple ran along the doors of the stalls that formed the L’s long side. The latches fell, smoking, to the board floor one after another, twisted out of shape by the heat.

The back of the stable had blown out in a tangle of smoking timbers and boards as the power passed Cap and Rainbird and bellowed onward, like something shot from a psychic cannon. The splintered shrapnel whistled for sixty yards or more in a widening fan, and those Shop agents who had been standing in its path might as well have been hit with a broadside blast of hot grapeshot. A fellow by the name of Clayton Braddock was nearly decapitated by a whirling slice of barnboard siding. The man next to him was cut in two by a beam that came whirling through the air like a runaway propeller. A third had an ear clipped off” by a smoking chunk of wood and was not aware of it for nearly ten minutes.

The skirmish line of Shop agents dissolved. Those who could not run crawled. Only one man kept his position even momentarily. This was George Sedaka, the man who, in the company of Orv Jamieson, had hijacked Andy’s letters in New Hampshire. Sedaka had only been laying over at the Shop compound before going on to Panama City. The man who had been on Sedaka’s left was now lying on the ground, groaning. The man on Sedaka’s right had been the unfortunate Clayton Braddock.

Sedaka himself was miraculously untouched. Splinters and hot shrapnel had flown all around him. A baling hook, sharp-edged and lethal, had buried itself in the earth less than four inches from his feet. It glowed a dull red.

The back of the stable looked as if half a dozen sticks of dynamite had gone off there. Tumbled, burning beams framed a blackened hole that was perhaps twenty-five feet across. A large compost heap had absorbed the bulk of Charlie’s extraordinary force when it made its explosive exit; it was now in flames, and what remained of the rear of the stable was catching.

Sedaka could hear horses whinnying and screaming inside, could see the lurid red orange gleam of fire as the flames raced into the lofts full of dry hay. It was like looking through a porthole into Sheol.

Sedaka suddenly decided he wanted no more of this.

It was a little heavier than sticking up unarmed mailmen on back-country roads.

George Sedaka reholstered his pistol and took to his heels.

19

She was still groping, unable to grasp all that had happened. “Daddy!” she screamed. “Daddy! Daddy!”

Everything was blurred, ghostly. The air was full of hot, choking smoke and red flashes. The horses were still battering at their stall doors, but now the doors, latchless, were swinging open. Some of the horses, at least, had been able to back out.

Charlie fell to her knees, feeling for her father, and the horses began to flash past, her on their way out, little more than dim, dreamlike shapes. Overhead, a flaming rafter fell in a shower of sparks and ignited the loose hay in one of the lower bays. In the short side of the L, a thirty-gallon drum of tractor gas went up with a dull, coughing 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 twice and a second explosion shook it.

Secretaries were fleeing from the other house now, running like ants. She could have swept them with fire-and a part of her wanted to-but with an effort of her waning volition, she turned the power on the house itself, the house where the two of them had been kept against their will… the house where John had betrayed her.

She sent the force out, all of it. For just a moment it seemed that nothing at all was happening; there was a faint shimmer in the air, like the shimmer above a barbecue pit where the coals have been well banked… and then the entire house exploded.

The only clear image she was left with (and later, the testimony of the survivors repeated it several times) was that of the chimney of the house rising into the sky like a brick rocketship, seemingly intact, while beneath it the twenty-five-room house disintegrated like a little girl’s cardboard playhouse in the flame of a blowtorch. Stone, lengths of board, planks, rose into the air and flew away on the hot dragon breath of Charlie’s force. An IBM typewriter, melted and twisted into something that looked like a green steel dishrag tied in a knot, whirled up into the sky and crashed down between the two fences, digging a crater. A secretary’s chair, the swivel seat whirling madly, was flung out of sight with the speed of a bolt shot from a crossbow.

Heat baked across the lawn at Charlie.

She looked around for something else to destroy. Smoke rose to the sky now from several sources from the two graceful antebellum homes (only one of them still recognizable as a home now), from the stable, from what had been the limousine. Even out here in the open, the heat was becoming intense.

And still the power spun and spun, wanting to be sent out, needing to be sent out, lest it collapse back on its source and destroy it.

Charlie had no idea what unimaginable thing might eventually have happened. But when she turned back to the fence and the road leading out of the Shop compound, she saw people throwing themselves against the fence in a blind frenzy of-panic. In some places the fence was shorted out and they had been able to climb over. The dogs had got one of them, a young woman in a yellow gaucho skirt who was screaming horribly. And as clearly as if he had still been alive and standing next to her, Charlie heard her father cry: Enough, Charlie! It’s enough! Stop while you still can!

But could she?

Turning away from the fence, she searched desperately for what she needed, fending off the power at the same time, trying to hold it balanced and suspended. It began to scrawl directionless, crazy spirals across the grass in a widening pattern.

Nothing. Nothing except-

The duckpond.

22

OJ was getting out, and no dogs were going to stop him.

He had fled the house when the others began to converge on the stable. He was very frightened but not quite panicked enough to charge the electrified fence after the gates automatically, slid shut on their tracks. He had watched the entire holocaust from behind the thick, gnarled trunk of an old elm. When the little girl shorted the fence, he waited until she had moved on a little way and turned her attention to the destruction of the house. Then he ran for the fence, The Windsucker in his right hand.

When one section of the fence was dead, he climbed over it and let himself down into the dog run. Two of them came for him. He grasped his right wrist with his left hand and shot them both. They were big bastards, but The Windsucker was bigger. They were all done eating Gravy Train, unless they served the stuff” up in doggy heaven.

A third dog got him from behind, tore out the seat of his pants and a good chunk of his left buttock, knocked him to the ground. OJ turned over and grappled with it one-handed, holding The Windsucker with the other. He clubbed it with the butt of the gun, and then thrust forward with the muzzle when the dog came for his throat. The muzzle slid neatly between the Doberman’s jaws and OJ pulled the trigger. The report was muffled.

“Cranberry sauce!” OJ cried, getting shakily to his feet. He began to laugh hysterically.

The outer gate was not electrified any longer; even its weak keeper charge had shorted out. OJ tried to open it. Already other people were crowding and jouncing him. The dogs that were left had backed away, snarling. Some of the other surviving agents also had their guns out and were taking potshots at them. Enough discipline had returned so that those with guns stood in a rough perimeter around the unarmed secretaries, analysts and technicians.

OJ threw his whole weight against the gate. It would not open. It had locked shut along with everything else. OJ looked around, not sure what to do next. Sanity of a sort had returned; it was one thing to cut and run when you were by yourself and unobserved, but now there were too many witnesses around.

If that hellacious kid left any witnesses.

“You’ll have to climb over it!” he shouted. His voice was lost in the general confusion. “Climb over, goddammit!” No response. They only crowded against the outer fence, their faces dumb and shiny with panic.

OJ grabbed a woman huddled against the gate next to him.

“Nooooo!” she screamed.

“Climb, you cunt!” OJ roared, and goosed her to get her going. She began to climb.

Others saw her and began to get the idea. The inner fence was still smoking and spitting sparks in places; a fat man OJ recognized as one of the commissary cooks was holding onto roughly two thousand volts. He was jittering and jiving, his feet doing a fast boogaloo in the grass, his mouth open, his cheeks turning black.

Another one of the Dobermans lunged forward and tore a chunk from the leg of a skinny, bespectacled young man in a lab coat. One of the other agents snapped a shot at the dog, missed, and shattered the bespectacled young man’s elbow. The young lab technician fell on the ground and began rolling around, clutching his elbow and screaming for the Blessed Virgin to help him. OJ shot the dog before it could tear the young man’s throat out.

What a fuckup, he groaned inside. Oh dear God, what a fuckup.

Now there were maybe a dozen of them climbing the wide gate. The woman OJ had set in motion reached the top, tottered, and fell over on the outside with a strangled cry. She began to shriek immediately. The gate was high; it had been a nine foot drop; she had landed wrong and broken her arm.

Oh Jegus Christ, what a fuckup.

Clawing their way up the gate, they looked like a lunatic’s vision of training exercises at Marine bootcamp.

OJ craned back, trying to see the kid, trying to see if she was coming for them: If she was, the witnesses could take care of themselves; he was up over that gate and gone.

Then one of the analysts yelled, “What in the name of God-”

The hissing sound rose immediately, drowning out his voice. OJ would say later that the first thing he thought of was his grandmother frying eggs, only this sound was a million times louder than that, as if a tribe of giants had all decided to fry eggs at once.

It swelled and grew, and suddenly the duckpond between the two houses was obscured in rising white steam. The whole pond, roughly fifty feet across and four feet deep at its center, was boiling.

For a moment OJ could see Charlie, standing about twenty yards from the pond, her back to those of them still struggling to get out, and then she was lost in the steam. The hissing sound went on and on. White fog drifted across the green lawn, and the bright autumn sun cast crazy arcs of rainbow in the cottony moisture. The cloud of steam billowed and drifted. Would-be escapees hung onto the fence like flies, their heads craned back over their shoulders, watching.

What if there isn’t enough water? OJ thought suddenly. What if there isn’t enough to put out her match or torch or whatever the hell it is? What happens then?

Orville Jamieson decided he didn’t want to stick around to find out. He’d had enough of the hero bit. He jammed The Windsucker back into its shoulder holster and went up the gate at what was nearly a run. At the top he vaulted over neatly and landed in a flexed crouch near the woman who was still holding her broken arm and screaming.

“I advise you to save your breath and get the hell out of here,” OJ told her, and promptly took his own advice.

23

Charlie stood in her own world of white, feeding her power into the duckpond, grappling with it, trying to bring it down, to make it have done. Its vitality seemed endless. She had it under control now, yes; it fed smoothly into the pond as if through an invisible length of pipe. But what would happen if all the water boiled away before she could disrupt its force and disperse it?

No more destruction. She would let it fall back in on herself and destroy her again before she allowed it to range out and begin feeding itself again.

(Back off! Back off!!) Now, at last, she could feel it losing some of its urgency, its… its ability to stick together. It was falling apart. Thick white steam everywhere, and the smell of laundries. The giant bubbling hiss of the pond she could no longer see.

(!!BACK OFF!!) She thought dimly of her father again, and fresh grief sliced into her: dead; he was dead; the thought seemed to diffuse the power still more, and now, at last, the hissing noise began to fade. The steam rolled majestically past her. Overhead, the sun was a tarnished silver coin.

I changed the sun, she thought disjointedly, and then, No-not really-it’s the steam the fog-it’ll blow away-But with a sudden sureness that came from deep inside she knew that she could change the sun if she wanted to… in time.

The power was still growing.

This act of destruction, this apocalypse, had only approached its current limit.

The potential had hardly been tapped.

Charlie fell to her knees on the grass and began to cry, mourning her father, mourning the other people she had killed, even John. Perhaps what Rainbird had wanted for her would have been best, but even with her father dead and this rain of destruction on her head, she felt her response to life, a tough, mute grasping for survival.

And so, perhaps most of all, she mourned herself.

24

How long she sat on the grass with her head cradled in her arms she didn’t know; as impossible as it seemed, she believed she might even have dozed. However 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.