Firestarter(133)

"I wouldn't, Charlie.'." His voice was a little louder now, but still calm. It cut through the fog of rage and confusion. "You ought to come down here!" Charlie cried loudly. She was trembling. "You ought to come down before I decide to set everything on fire! I can do it!" "I know you can," the soft voice responded. It floated down from nowhere, everywhere. "But if you do, you're going to burn up a lot of horses, Charlie. Can't you hear them?"

She could. Once he had called it to her attention, she could. They were nearly mad with fear, whinnying and battering at their latched doors. Necromancer was in one of those stalls.

Her breath caught in her throat. Again she saw the trench of fire running across the Manders yard and the chickens exploding. She turned toward the bucket of water again and was now badly frightened. The power was trembling on the edge of her ability to control it, and in another moment

(back off!)

it was going to blow loose

(!BACK OFF)

and just go sky high.

(!!BACK OFF, BACK OFF, DO YOU HEAR ME, BACK OFF!!)

This time the half-full bucket did not just steam; it came to an instant, furious boil. A moment later the chrome faucet just over the bucket twisted twice, spun like a propeller, and then blew off the pipe jutting from the wall. The fixture flew the length of the stable like a rocket payload and caromed off the far wall. Water gushed from the pipe. Cold water; she could feel its coldness. But moments after the water spurted out it turned to steam and a hazy mist filled the corridor between the stalls. A coiled green hose that hung on a peg next to the pipe had fused its plastic loops.

(BACK OFF!)

She began to get control of it again and pulled it down. A year ago she would have been incapable of that; the thing would have had to run its own destructive course. She was able to hold on better now... ah, but there was so much more to control!

She stood there, shivering.

"What more do you want?" she asked in a low voice. "Why can't you just let us go?"

A horse whinnied, high and frightened. Charlie understood exactly how it felt.

"No one thinks you can just be let go," Rainbird's quiet voice answered. "I don't think even your father thinks so. You're dangerous, Charlie. And you know it. We could let you go and the next men that grabbed you might be Russians, or North Koreans, maybe even the Heathen Chinese. You may think I'm kidding, but I'm not."

"That's not my fault!" she cried. "No," Rainbird said meditatively. "Of course it isn't. But it's all bullshit anyway. I don't care about the Z factor, Charlie. I never did. I only care about you." "Oh, you liar!" Charlie screamed shrilly. "You tricked me, pretended to be something you weren't-"

She stopped. Rainbird climbed easily over a low pile of bales, then sat down on the edge of the loft with his feet dangling down. The pistol was in his lap. His face was like a ruined moon above her.

"Lied to you? No. I mixed up the truth, Charlie, that's all I ever did. And I did it to keep you alive."

"Dirty liar," she whispered, but was dismayed to find that she wanted to believe him; the sting of tears began behind her eyes. She was so tired and she wanted to believe him, wanted to believe he had liked her.

"You weren't testing," Rainbird said. "Your old man wasn't testing, either. What were they going to do? Say 'Oh, sorry, we made a mistake" and put you back on the street? You've seen these guys at work, Charlie. You saw them shoot that guy Manders in Hastings Glen. They pulled out your own mother's fingernails and then k-"

"Stop it!" she screamed in agony, and the power stirred again, restlessly close to the surface.

"No, I won't," he said. "Time you had the truth, Charlie. I got you going. I made you important to them. You think I did it because it's my job? The f**k I did. They're ass**les. Cap, Hockstetter, Pynchot, that guy Jules who brought you over here-they're all ass**les."

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 ass**les, 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.