Firestarter (4 page)

Then they went in through the electric-eye-controlled doors and the skycap forgot all about them until some forty minutes later, when the green car pulled up to the curb and the two men got out to talk to him.

It was ten past midnight. The lobby of the terminal had been given over to the early-morning people: servicemen at the end of their leaves, harried-looking women riding herd on scratchy, up-too-late children, businessmen with pouches of weariness under their eyes, cruising kids in big boots and long hair, some of them with packs on their backs, a couple with cased tennis rackets. The loudspeaker system announced arrivals and departures and paged people like some omnipotent voice in a dream.

Andy and Charlie sat side by side at desks with TVs bolted to them. The TVs were scratched and dented and painted dead black. To Andy they looked like sinister, futuristic cobras. He plugged his last two quarters into them so they wouldn't be asked to leave the seats. Charlie's was showing a rerun of
The Rookies
and Johnny Carson was yucking it up with Sonny Bono and Buddy Hackett on Andy's.

“Daddy, do I have to?” Charlie asked for the second time. She was on the verge of tears.

“Honey, I'm used up,” he said. “We have no money. We can't stay here.”

“Those bad men are coming?” she asked, and her voice dropped to a whisper.

“I don't know.” Thud, thud, thud in his brain. Not a rider-less black horse anymore; now it was mailsacks filled with sharp scraps of iron being dropped on him from a fifth-story window. “We have to assume they are.”

“How could I get money?”

He hesitated and then said, “You know.”

The tears began to come and trickled down her cheeks. “It's not right. It's not right to steal.”

“I know it,” he said. “But it's not right for them to keep coming at us, either. I explained it to you, Charlie. Or at least I tried.”

“About little bad and big bad?”

“Yes. Lesser and greater evil.”

“Does your head really hurt?”

“It's pretty bad,” Andy said. There was no use telling her that in an hour, or possibly two, it would be so bad he would no longer be able to think coherently. No use frightening her worse than she already was. No use telling her that he didn't think they were going to get away this time.

“I'll try,” she said, and got out of the chair. “Poor Daddy,” she said, and kissed him.

He closed his eyes. The TV played on in front of him, a faraway babble of sound in the midst of the steadily growing ache in his head. When he opened his eyes again, she was just a distant figure, very small, dressed in red and green, like a Christmas ornament, bobbing away through the scattered people on the concourse.

Please God, let her be all right, he thought. Don't let anyone mess with her, or scare her worse than she is already. Please and thank you, God. Okay?

He closed his eyes again.

Little girl in red stretch pants and a green rayon blouse. Shoulder-length blond hair. Up too late, apparently by herself. She was in one of the few places where a little girl by herself could go unremarked after midnight. She passed people, but no one really saw her. If she had been crying, a security guard might have come over to ask her if she was
lost, if she knew which airline her mommy and daddy were ticketed on, what their names were so they could be paged. But she wasn't crying, and she looked as if she knew where she was going.

She didn't, exactly—but she had a pretty fair idea of what she was looking for. They needed money; that was what Daddy had said. The bad men were coming, and Daddy was hurt. When he got hurt like this, it got hard for him to think. He had to lie down and have as much quiet as he could. He had to sleep until the pain went away. And the bad men might be coming … the men from the Shop, the men who wanted to pick them apart and see what made them work—and to see if they could be used, made to do things.

She saw a paper shopping bag sticking out of the top of a trash basket and took it. A little way farther down the concourse she came to what she was looking for: a bank of pay phones.

Charlie stood looking at them, and she was afraid. She was afraid because Daddy had told her again and again that she shouldn't do it … since earliest childhood it had been the Bad Thing. She couldn't always control the Bad Thing. She might hurt herself, or someone else, or lots of people. The time

(oh mommy i'm sorry the hurt the bandages the screams she screamed i made my mommy scream and i never will again … never … because it is a Bad Thing)

in the kitchen when she was little … but it hurt too much to think of that. It was a Bad Thing because when you let it go, it went … everywhere. And that was scary.

There were other things. The push, for instance; that's what Daddy called it, the push. Only she could push a lot harder than Daddy, and she never got headaches afterward. But sometimes, afterward … there were fires.

The word for the Bad Thing clanged in her mind as she stood nervously looking at the telephone booths:
pyrokinesis.
“Never mind that,” Daddy had told her when they were still in Port City and thinking like fools that they were safe. “You're a firestarter, honey. Just one great big Zippo lighter.” And then it had seemed funny, she had giggled, but now it didn't seem funny at all.

The other reason she wasn't supposed to push was because
they
might find out. The bad men from the Shop. “I don't know how much they know about you now,” Daddy had told her, “but I don't want them to find out any more. Your push
isn't exactly like mine, honey. You can't make people … well, change their minds, can you?”

“No-ooo …”

“But you can make things move. And if they ever began to see a pattern, and connect that pattern to you, we'd be in even worse trouble than we are now.”

And it was stealing, and stealing was also a Bad Thing.

Never mind. Daddy's head was hurting him and they had to get to a quiet, warm place before it got too bad for him to think at all. Charlie moved forward.

There were about fifteen phonebooths in all, with circular sliding doors. When you were inside the booth, it was like being inside a great big Contac capsule with a phone inside it. Most of the booths were dark, Charlie saw as she drifted down past them. There was a fat lady in a pantsuit crammed into one of them, talking busily and smiling. And three booths from the end a young man in a service uniform was sitting on the little stool with the door open and his legs poking out. He was talking fast.

“Sally, look, I understand how you feel, but I can explain everything. Absolutely. I know … I know … but if you'll just let me—” He looked up, saw the little girl looking at him, and yanked his legs in and pulled the circular door closed, all in one motion, like a turtle pulling into its shell. Having a fight with his girlfriend, Charlie thought. Probably stood her up. I'd never let a guy stand me up.

Echoing loudspeaker. Rat of fear in the back of her mind, gnawing. All the faces were strange faces. She felt lonely and very small, grief-sick over her mother even now. This was stealing, but what did that matter? They had stolen her mother's life.

She slipped into the phonebooth on the end, shopping bag crackling. She took the phone off the hook and pretended she was talking—hello, Grampa, yes, Daddy and I just got in, we're fine—and looked out through the glass to see if anyone was being nosy. No one was. The only person nearby was a black woman getting flight insurance from a machine, and her back was to Charlie.

Charlie looked at the pay phone and suddenly
shoved
it.

A little grunt of effort escaped her, and she bit down on her lower lip, liking the way it squeezed under her teeth. No, there was no pain involved. It felt
good
to shove things, and that was another thing that scared her. Suppose she got to
like
this dangerous thing?

She shoved the pay phone again, very lightly, and suddenly a tide of silver poured out of the coin return. She tried to get her bag under it, but by the time she did, most of the quarters and nickels and dimes had spewed onto the floor. She bent over and swept as much as she could into the bag, glancing again and again out the window.

With the change picked up, she went on to the next booth. The serviceman was still talking on the next phone up the line. He had opened the door again and was smoking. “Sal, honest to Christ I did! Just ask your brother if you don't believe me! He'll—”

Charlie slipped the door shut, cutting off the slightly whining sound of his voice. She was only seven, but she knew a snowjob when she heard one. She looked at the phone, and a moment later it gave up its change. This time she had the bag positioned perfectly and the coins cascaded to the bottom with a musical little jingling sound.

The serviceman was gone when she came out, and Charlie went into his booth. The seat was still warm and the air smelled nastily of cigarette smoke in spite of the fan.

The money rattled into her bag and she went on.

Eddie Delgardo sat in a hard plastic contour chair, looking up at the ceiling and smoking. Bitch, he was thinking. She'll think twice about keeping her goddam legs closed next time. Eddie this and Eddie that and Eddie I never want to see you again and Eddie how could you be so
crew-ool
. But he had changed her mind about the old I-never-want-to-see-you-again bit. He was on thirty-day leave and now he was going to New York City, the Big Apple, to see the sights and tour the singles bars. And when he came back, Sally would be like a big ripe apple herself, ripe and ready to fall. None of that don't-you-have-any-respect-for-me stuff went down with Eddie Delgardo of Marathon, Florida. Sally Bradford was going to put out, and if she really believed that crap about him having had a vasectomy, it served her right. And then let her go running to her hick schoolteacher brother if she wanted to. Eddie Delgardo would be driving an army supply truck in West Berlin. He would be—

Eddie's half-resentful, half-pleasant chain of daydreams
was broken by a strange feeling of warmth coming from his feet; it was as if the floor had suddenly heated up ten degrees. And accompanying this was a strange but not completely unfamiliar smell … not something burning but … something
singeing,
maybe?

He opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was that little girl who had been cruising around by the phonebooths, little girl seven or eight years old, looking really ragged out. Now she was carrying a big paper bag, carrying it by the bottom as if it were full of groceries or something.

But his feet, that was the thing.

They were no longer warm. They were
hot.

Eddie Delgardo looked down and screamed,
“Godamighty Jeesus!”

His shoes were on fire.

Eddie leaped to his feet. Heads turned. Some woman saw what was happening and yelled in alarm. Two security guards who had been noodling with an Allegheny Airlines ticket clerk looked over to see what was going on.

None of which meant doodly-squat to Eddie Delgardo. Thoughts of Sally Bradford and his revenge of love upon her were the furthest things from his mind. His army-issue shoes were burning merrily. The cuffs of his dress greens were catching. He was sprinting across the concourse, trailing smoke, as if shot from a catapult. The women's room was closer, and Eddie, whose sense of self-preservation was exquisitely defined, hit the door straight-arm and ran inside without a moment's hesitation.

A young woman was coming out of one of the stalls, her skirt rucked up to her waist, adjusting her Underalls. She saw Eddie, the human torch, and let out a scream that the bathroom's tiled walls magnified enormously. There was a babble of “What was that?” and “What's going on?” from the few other occupied stalls. Eddie caught the pay-toilet door before it could swing back all the way and latch. He grabbed both sides of the stall at the top and hoisted himself feet first into the toilet. There was a hissing sound and a remarkable billow of steam.

The two security guards burst in.

“Hold it, you in there!” one of them cried. He had drawn his gun. “Come out of there with your hands laced on top of your head!”

“You mind waiting until I put my feet out?” Eddie Delgardo snarled.

Charlie was back. And she was crying again.

“What happened, babe?”

“I got the money but … it got away from me again, Daddy … there was a man … a soldier … I couldn't help it …”

Andy felt the fear creep up on him. It was muted by the pain in his head and down the back of his neck, but it was there. “Was … was there a fire, Charlie?”

She couldn't speak, but nodded. Tears coursed down her cheeks.

“Oh my God,” Andy whispered, and made himself get to his feet.

That broke Charlie completely. She put her face in her hands and sobbed helplessly, rocking back and forth.

A knot of people had gathered around the door of the women's room. It had been propped open, but Andy couldn't see … and then he could. The two security guards who had gone running down there were leading a tough-looking young man in an army uniform out of the bathroom and toward the security office. The young man was jawing at them loudly, and most of what he had to say was inventively profane. His uniform was mostly gone below the knees, and he was carrying two dripping, blackened things that might once have been shoes. Then they were gone into the office, the door slamming behind them. An excited babble of conversation swept the terminal.

Andy sat down again and put his arm around Charlie. It was very hard to think now; his thoughts were tiny silver fish swimming around in a great black sea of throbbing pain. But he had to do the best he could. He needed Charlie if they were going to get out of this.