Firestarter (58 page)

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!” 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 Jesus 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.

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 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 gasping for survival.

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

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 waterweeds 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, moving 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 I going?)

She didn't know yet.

But they were never going to catch her again.

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

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

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

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

Except for one dangling loose end.