Firestarter (44 page)

The technician who had been monitoring at the EEG cried out in fear and made a sudden, crazy dash for the door. The sound of his cry hurled Charlie suddenly back in time to the Albany airport. It was the cry of Eddie Delgardo, running for the ladies' bathroom with his army-issue shoes in flames.

She thought in sudden terror and exaltation,
Oh God it's gotten so much stronger!

The steel wall had developed a strange, dark ripple. The room had become explosively hot. In the other room, the digital thermometer, which had gone from seventy degrees to eighty and then paused, now climbed rapidly past ninety to ninety-four before slowing down.

Charlie threw the firething at the tub; she was nearly panicked now. The water swirled, then broke into a fury of bubbles. In a space of five seconds, the contents of the tub went from cool to a rolling, steaming boil.

The technician had exited, leaving the testing-room door heedlessly ajar. In the observation room there was a sudden, startled turmoil. Hockstetter was bellowing. Cap was standing gape-jawed at the window, watching the tubful of water boil. Clouds of steam rose from it and the one-way glass began to fog over. Only Rainbird was calm, smiling slightly, hands clasped behind his back. He looked like a teacher whose star pupil has used difficult postulates to solve a particularly aggravating problem.

(back off!)

Screaming in her mind.

(back off! back off! BACK OFF!)

And suddenly it was gone. Something disengaged, spun free for a second or two, and then simply stopped. Her concentration broke up and let the fire go. She could see the room again and feel the heat she had created bringing sweat to her skin. In the observation room, the thermometer crested at ninety-six and then dropped a degree. The wildly bubbling
caldron began to simmer down—but at least half of its contents had boiled away. In spite of the open door, the little room was as hot and moist as a steam room.

Hockstetter was checking his instruments feverishly. His hair, usually combed back so neatly and tightly that it almost seemed to scream, had now come awry, sticking up in the back. He looked a bit like Alfalfa of
The Little Rascals
.

“Got it!” he panted. “Got it, we got it all … it's on tape … the temperature gradient … did you see the water in that tub boil? … Jesus! … did we get the audio? … we did? … my
God,
did you see what she did?”

He passed one of his technicians, whirled back, and grabbed him roughly by the front of his smock. “Would you say there was any doubt that she
made
that happen?” he shouted.

The technician, nearly as excited as Hockstetter, shook his head. “No doubt at all, Chief. None.”

“Holy God,” Hockstetter said, whirling away, distracted again. “I would have thought … something … yes, something … but that tray …
flew
…”

He caught sight of Rainbird, who was still standing at the one-way glass with his hands crossed behind his back, that mild, bemused smile on his face. For Hockstetter, old animosities were forgotten. He rushed over to the big Indian, grabbed his hand, pumped it.

“We got it,” he told Rainbird with savage satisfaction. “We got it all, it would be good enough to stand up in court!
Right
up in the fucking Supreme Court.”

“Yes, you got it,” Rainbird agreed mildly. “Now you better send somebody along to get
her
.”

“Huh?” Hockstetter looked at him blankly.

“Well,” Rainbird said, still in his mildest tone, “the guy that was in there maybe had an appointment he forgot about, because he left in one hell of an ass-busting rush. He left the door open, and your firestarter just walked out.”

Hockstetter gaped at the glass. The steaming effect had got worse, but there was no doubt that the room was empty except for the tub, the EEG, the overturned steel tray, and the flaming scatter of woodchips.

“One of you men go get her!” Hockstetter cried, turning around. The five or six men stood by their instruments and didn't move. Apparently no one but Rainbird had noticed that Cap had left as soon as the girl had.

Rainbird grinned at Hockstetter and then raised his eye to include the others, these men whose faces had suddenly gone almost as pale as their lab smocks.

“Sure,” he said softly. “Which of you wants to go get the little girl?”

No one moved. It was amusing, really; it occurred to Rainbird that this was the way the politicians were going to look when they found out it was finally done, that the missiles were really in the air, the bombs raining down, the woods and cities on fire. It was so amusing he had to laugh … and laugh … and laugh.

“They're so beautiful,” Charlie said softly. “It's all so beautiful.”

They were standing near the duckpond, not far from where her father and Pynchot had stood only a few days previously. This day was much cooler than that one had been, and a few leaves had begun to show color. A light wind, just a little too stiff to be called a breeze, ruffled the surface of the pond.

Charlie turned her face up to the sun and closed her eyes, smiling. John Rainbird, standing beside her, had spent six months on stockade duty at Camp Stewart in Arizona before going overseas, and he had seen the same expression on the faces of men coming out after a long hard bang inside.

“Would you like to walk over to the stables and look at the horses?”

“Oh yes, sure,” she said immediately, and then glanced shyly at him. “That is, if you don't mind.”

“Mind? I'm glad to be outside, too. This is recess for me.”

“Did they assign you?”

“Naw,” he said. They began to walk along the edge of the pond toward the stables on the far side. “They asked for volunteers. I don't think they got many, after what happened yesterday.”

“It scared them?” Charlie asked, just a little too sweetly.

“I guess it did,” Rainbird said, and he was speaking
nothing but the truth. Cap had caught up with Charlie as she wandered down the hall and escorted her back to her apartment. The young man who had bolted his position at the EEG was now being processed for duty in Panama City. The staff meeting following the test had been a nutty affair, with the scientists at both their best and worst, blue-skying a hundred new ideas on one hand and worrying tiresomely—and considerably after the fact—about how to control her on the other hand.

It was suggested that her quarters be fireproofed, that a full-time guard be installed, that the drug series be started on her again. Rainbird had listened to as much of this as he could bear and then rapped hard on the edge of the conference table with the band of the heavy turquoise ring he wore. He rapped until he had the attention of everyone there. Because Hockstetter disliked him (and perhaps “hated” would not have been too strong a word), his cadre of scientists also disliked him, but Rainbird's star had risen in spite of that. He had, after all, been spending a good part of each day with this human blowtorch.

“I suggest,” he had said, rising to his feet and glaring around at them benignly from the shattered lens of his face, “that we continue exactly as we have been. Up until today you have been proceeding on the premise that the girl probably didn't have the ability which you all knew had been documented two dozen times over, and that if she did have it, it was a small ability, and if it wasn't a small ability, she would probably never use it again anyway. Now you know differently, and you'd like to upset her all over again.”

“That's not true,” Hockstetter said, annoyed. “That is simply—”

“It is true!”
Rainbird thundered at him, and Hockstetter shrank back in his chair. Rainbird smiled again at the faces around the table. “Now. The girl is eating again. She has put on ten pounds and is no longer a scrawny shadow of what she should be. She is reading, talking, doing paint-by-the-numbers kits; she has asked for a dollhouse, which her friend the orderly has promised to try and get for her. In short, her frame of mind is better than it has been since she came here. Gentlemen, we are not going to start monkeying around with a fruitful status quo, are we?”

The man who had been monitoring the videotape equipment earlier had said hesitantly, “But what if she sets that little suite of hers on fire?”

“If she was going to,” Rainbird said quietly, “she would have done it already.” To that there had been no response.

Now, as he and Charlie left the edge of the pond and crossed toward the dark-red stables with their fresh piping of white paint, Rainbird laughed out loud. “I guess you did scare them, Charlie.”

“But you're not scared?”

“Why should I be scared?” Rainbird said, and ruffled her hair. “I only turn into a baby when it's dark and I can't get out.”

“Oh John, you don't have to be ashamed of that.”

“If you were going to light me up,” he said, rephrasing his comment of the night before, “I guess you would've by now.”

She stiffened immediately. “I wish you wouldn't … wouldn't even say things like that.”

“Charlie, I'm sorry. Sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my brains.”

They went into the stables, which were dim and fragrant. Dusky sunlight slanted in, making mellow bars and stripes in which motes of haychaff danced with dreamy slowness.

A groom was currying the mane of a black gelding with a white blaze on its forehead. Charlie stopped, looking at the horse with delighted wonder. The groom looked around at her and grinned. “You must be the young miss. They told me to be on the watch-out for you.”

“She's so
beautiful,
” Charlie whispered. Her hands trembled to touch that silky coat. One look in the horse's dark, calm, mellow eyes and she was in love.

“Well, it's a boy, actually,” the groom said, and tipped a wink at Rainbird, whom he had never seen before and didn't know from Adam. “After a fashion, that is.”

“What's his name?”

“Necromancer,” the groom said. “Want to pet him?”

Charlie drew hesitantly near. The horse lowered his head and she stroked him; after a few moments she spoke to him. It did not occur to her that she would light another half-dozen fires just to ride on him with John beside her … but Rainbird saw it in her eyes, and he smiled.

She looked around at him suddenly and saw the smile, and for a moment the hand she had been stroking the horse's muzzle with paused. There was something in that smile she didn't like, and she had thought she liked everything about John. She got feelings about most people and did not consider this much; it was part of her, like her blue eyes and her
double-jointed thumb. She usually dealt with people on the basis of these feelings. She didn't like Hockstetter, because she felt that he didn't care for her any more than he would care for a test tube. She was just an object to him.

But with John, her liking was based only on what he did, his kindness to her, and perhaps part of it was his disfigured face: she could identify and sympathize with him on that account. After all, why was she here if not because she was also a freak? Yet beyond that, he was one of those rare people—like Mr. Raucher, the delicatessen owner in New York who often played chess with her daddy—who were for some reason completely closed to her. Mr. Raucher was old and wore a hearing aid and had a faded blue number tattooed on his forearm. Once Charlie had asked her father if that blue number meant anything, and her daddy had told her—after cautioning her never to mention it to Mr. Raucher—that he would explain it later. But he never had. Sometimes Mr. Raucher would bring her slices of kielbasa which she would eat while watching TV.

And now, looking at John's smile, which seemed so strange and somehow disquieting, she wondered for the first time,
What are you thinking?

Then such trifling thoughts were swept away by the wonder of the horse.

“John,” she said, “what does ‘Necromancer' mean?”

“Well,” he said, “so far as I know, it means something like ‘wizard,' or ‘sorcerer.”

“Wizard. Sorcerer.” She spoke the words softly, tasting them as she stroked the dark silk of Necromancer's muzzle.

Walking back with her, Rainbird said: “You ought to ask that Hockstetter to let you ride that horse, if you like him so much.”

“No … I couldn't …” she said, looking at him wide-eyed and startled.

“Oh, sure you could,” he said, purposely misunderstanding. “I don't know much about geldings, but I know they're supposed to be gentle. He looks awful big, but I don't think he'd run away with you, Charlie.”

“No—I don't mean that. They just wouldn't let me.”

He stopped her by putting his hands on her shoulders. “Charlie McGee, sometimes you're really dumb,” he said. “You done me a good turn that time the lights went out, Charlie, and you kept it to yourself. So now you listen to me and I'll do you one. You want to see your father again?”

She nodded quickly.

“Then you want to show them that you mean business. It's like poker, Charlie. If you ain't dealin from strength … why, you just ain't dealin. Every time you light a fire for them, for one of their tests, you get something from them.” He gave her shoulders a soft shake. “This is your uncle John talking to you. Do you hear what I'm sayin?”

“Do you really think they'd let me? If I asked?”

“If you
asked?
Maybe not. But if you
told
them, yeah. I hear them sometimes. You go in to empty their wastebaskets and ashtrays, they think you're just another piece of the furniture. That Hockstetter's just about wettin his pants.”

“Really?” She smiled a little.

“Really.” They began to walk again. “What about you, Charlie? I know how scared of it you were before. How do you feel about it now?”