Firestarter

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 ru

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 ru

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!”