Firestarter

1

At the moment Cap Hollister had his passing thought about him, John Rainbird was sitting in his room at the Mayflower Hotel watching a television game called The Crosswits. He was naked. He sat in the chair with his bare feet neatly together and watched the program. He was waiting for it to get dark. After it got dark, he would begin waiting for it to get late. When it was late, he would begin waiting for it to get early. When it got early and the pulse of the hotel was at its slowest, he would stop waiting and go upstairs to Room 1217 and kill Dr. Wanless. Then he would come down here and think about whatever Wanless would have told him before he died, and sometime after the sun came up, he would sleep briefly.

John Rainbird was a man at peace. He was at peace with almost everything-Cap, the Shop, the United States. He was at peace with God, Satan, and the universe. If he was not yet at complete peace with himself, that was only because his pilgrimage was not yet over. He had many coups, many honorable scars. It did not matter that people turned away from him in fear and loathing. It did not matter that he had lost one eye in Vietnam.

What they paid him did not matter. He took it and most of it went to buy shoes. He had a great love of shoes. He owned a home in Flagstaff, and although he rarely went there himself, he had all his shoes sent there. When he did get a chance to go to his house, he admired the shoes-Gucci, Bally, Bass, Adidas, Van Donen. Shoes. His house was a strange forest; shoe trees grew in every room and he would, go from room to room admiring the shoefruit that grew on them. But when he was alone, he went barefoot. His father, a full-blooded Cherokee, had been buried barefoot. Someone had stolen his burial moccasins.

Other than shoes, John Rainbird was interested in only two things. One of them was death. His own death, of course; he had been preparing for this inevitability for twenty years or more. Dealing death had always been his business and was the only trade he had ever excelled at. He became more and more interested in it as he grew older, as an artist will become more interested in the qualities and levels of light, as writers will feel for character and nuance like blindmen reading braille. What interested him most was the actual leaving… the actual exhalation of the soul… the exit from the body and what human beings knew as life and the passing into something else. What must it be like to feel yourself slipping away? Did you think it was a dream from which you would wake? Was the Christian devil there with his fork, ready to jam it through your shrieking soul and carry it down to hell like a piece of meat on a shish kebab? Was there joy? Did you know you were going? What is it that the eyes of the dying see?

Rainbird hoped he would have the opportunity to find out for himself. In his business, death was often quick and unexpected, something that happened in the flick of an eye. He hoped that when his own death came, he would have time to prepare and feel everything. More and more lately he had watched the faces of the people he killed, trying to see the secret in the eyes.

Death interested him.

What also interested him was the little girl they were all so concerned with. This Charlene McGee. As far as Cap knew, John Rainbird had only the vaguest knowledge of the McGees and none at all of Lot Six. Actually, Rainbird knew almost as much as Cap himself-something that surely would have marked him for extreme sanction if Cap had known. They suspected that the girl had some great or potentially great power-maybe a whole batch of them. He would like to meet this girl and see what her powers were. He also knew that Andy McGee was what Cap called “a potential mental dominant,” but that did not concern John Rainbird. He had not yet met a man who could dominate him.

The Crosswits ended. The news came on. None of it was good. John Rainbird sat, not eating, not drinking, not smoking, clean and empty and husked out, and waited for the killing time to come around.

2

Earlier that day Cap had thought uneasily of how silent Rainbird was. Dr. Wanless never heard him. He awoke from a sound sleep. He awoke because a finger was tickling him just below the nose. He awoke and saw what appeared to be a monster from a nightmare hulking over his bed. One eye glinted softly in the light from the bathroom, the light he always left on when he was in a strange place. Where the other eye should have been there was only an empty crater.

Wanless opened his mouth to scream, and John Rainbird pinched his nostrils shut with the fingers of one hand and covered his mouth with the other. Wanless began to thrash.

“Shhh,” Rainbird said. He spoke with the pleased indulgence of a mother to her baby at fresh diaper time.

Wanless struggled harder.

“If you want to live, be still and be quiet,” Rainbird said.

Wanless looked up at him, heaved once, and then lay still.

“Will you be quiet?” Rainbird asked.

Wanless nodded. His face was growing very red.

Rainbird removed his hands and Wanless began to gasp hoarsely. A small rivulet of blood trickled from one nostril.

“Who… are you… Cap… send you?”

“Rainbird,” he said gravely. “Cap sent me, yes.”

Wanless’s eyes were huge in the dark. His tongue snaked out and licked his lips. Lying in his bed with the sheets kicked down around his knuckly ankles, he looked like the world’s oldest child.

“I have money,” he whispered very fast. “Swiss bank account. Lots of money. All yours. Never open my mouth again. Swear before God.”

“It’s not your money that I want, Dr. Wanless,” Rainbird said.

Wanless gazed up at him, the left side of his mouth sneering madly, his left eyelid drooping and quivering.

“If you would like to be alive when the sun comes up,” Rainbird said, “you will talk to me, Dr. Wanless. You will lecture me. I will be a seminar of one. I will be attentive; a good pupil. And I will reward you with your life, which you will live far away from the view of Cap and the Shop. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Wanless said hoarsely.

“Do you agree?”

“Yes… but what-?”

Rainbird held two fingers to his lips and Dr. Wanless hushed immediately. His scrawny chest rose and fell rapidly.

“I am going to say two words,” Rainbird said, “and then your lecture will begin. It will include everything that you know, everything you suspect, everything you theorize. Are you ready for those two words, Dr. Wanless?”

“Yes,” Dr. Wanless said.

“Charlene McGee,” Rainbird said, and Dr. Wanless began to speak. His words came slowly at first, and then he began to speed up. He talked. He gave Rainbird the complete history of the Lot Six tests and the climactic experiment. Much of what he said Rainbird already knew, but Wanless also filled in a number of blank spots. The professor went through the entire sermon he had given Cap that morning, and here it did not fall on deaf ears. Rainbird listened carefully, frowning sometimes, clapping softly and chuckling at Wanless’s toilet training metaphor. This encouraged Wanless to speak even faster, and when he began to repeat himself, as old men will, Rainbird reached down again, pinched Wanless’s nose shut with one hand again, and covered his mouth with the other again.

“Sorry,” Rainbird said.

Wanless bucked and sunfished under Rainbird’s weight. Rainbird applied more pressure, and when Wanless’s struggles began to lessen, Rainbird abruptly removed the hand he had been using to pinch Wanless’s nose shut. The sound of the good doctor’s hissing breath was like air escaping from a tire with a big nail in it. His eyes were rolling wildly in their sockets, rolling like the eyes of a fear maddened horse… but they were still too hard to see.

Rainbird seized the collar of Dr. Wanless’s pajama jacket and yanked him sideways on the, bed so that the cold white light from the bathroom shone directly across his face.

Then he pinched the doctor’s nostrils closed again.

A man can sometimes survive for upward of nine minutes without permanent brain damage if his air is cut off and he remains completely quiet; a woman, with slightly greater lung capacity and a slightly more efficient carbon-dioxide-disposal system, may last ten or twelve. Of course, struggling and terror cuts that survival time a great deal.

Dr. Wanless struggled briskly for forty seconds, and then his efforts to save himself began to flag. His hands beat lightly at the twisted granite that was John Rainbird’s face. His heels drummed a muffled retreat tattoo on the carpeting. He began to drool against Rainbird’s callused palm.

This was the moment.

Rainbird leaned forward and studied Wanless’s eyes with a childlike eagerness.

But it was the same, always the same. The eyes seemed to lose their fear and fill instead with a great puzzlement. Not wonder, not dawning comprehension or realization or awe, just puzzlement. For a moment those two puzzled eyes fixed on John Rainbird’s one, and Rainbird knew he was being seen. Fuzzily, perhaps, fading back and back as the doctor went out and out, but he was being seen. Then there was nothing but glaze. Dr. Joseph Wanless was no longer staying at the Mayflower Hotel; Rainbird was sitting on this bed with a life size doll.

He sat still, one hand still over the doll’s mouth, the other pinching the doll’s nostrils tightly together. It was best to be sure. He would remain so for another ten minutes.

He thought about what Wanless had told him concerning Charlene McGee. Was it possible that a small child could have such a power? He supposed it might be. In Calcutta he had seen a man put knives into his body-his legs, his belly, his chest, his neck-and then pull them out, leaving no wounds. It might be possible. And it was certainly… interesting.

He thought about these things, and then found himself wondering what it would be like to kill a child. He had never knowingly done such a thing (although once he had placed a bomb on an airliner and the bomb had exploded, killing all sixty-seven aboard, and perhaps one or more of them had been children, but that was not the same thing; it was impersonal). It was not a business in which the death of children was often required. They were not, after all, some terrorist organization like the IRA or the PLO, no matter how much some people-some of the yellowbellies in the Congress, for instance-would like to believe they were.

They were, after all, a scientific organization.

Perhaps with a child the result would be different. There might be another expression in the eyes at the end, something besides the puzzlement that made him feel so empty and so-yes, it was true-so sad.

He might discover part of what he needed to know in the death of a child.

A child like this Charlene McGee.

“My life is like the straight roads in the desert,” John Rainbird said softly. He looked absorbedly into the dull blue marbles that had been the eyes of Dr. Wanless. “But your life is no road at all, my friend… my good friend.”

He kissed Wanless first on one cheek and then on the other. Then he pulled him back onto the bed and threw a sheet over him. It came down softly, like a parachute, and outlined Wanless’s jutting and now tideless nose in white lawn.

Rainbird left the room.

That night he thought about the girl who could supposedly light fires. He thought about her a great deal. He wondered where she was, what she was thinking, what she was dreaming. He felt very tender about her, very protective.

By the time he drifted off to sleep, at just past six A.M… he was sure: the girl would be his.