Firestarter(63)

"Daddy," Charlie said, and threw herself at him, buried her face against his chest. He hugged her briefly and then backed out of the parking lot. Turning his head was agony.

The black horse. In the aftermath, that was the thought that always came to him. He had let the black horse out of its stall somewhere in the dark barn of his subconscious and now it would again batter its way up and down through his brain. He would have to get them someplace and lay up. Quick. He wasn't going to be capable of driving for long.

"The black horse," he said thickly. It was coming. No... no. It wasn't coming; it was here. Thud... thud... thud. Yes, it was here. It was free.

"Daddy, look out!" Charlie screamed.

The blind man had staggered directly across their path. Andy braked. The blind man began to pound on the hood of the wagon and scream for help. To their right, the young mother had begun to breast feed her baby. Her husband was reading a paperback. The man from the information booth had gone over to talk to the two girls from the red Pinto-perhaps hoping for some quickie experience kinky enough to write up for the Penthouse Forum. Sprawled out on the pavement, Baldy slept on. The other operative pounded on the hood of the wagon again and again. "Help me!" he screamed. "I'm blind! Dirty bastard did something to my eyes! I'm blinds" "Daddy," Charlie moaned.

For a crazy instant, he almost floored the accelerator. Inside his aching head he could hear the sound the tires would make, could feel the dull thudding of the wheels as they passed over the body. He had kidnapped Charlie and held a gun to her head. Perhaps he had been the one who had stuffed the rag into Vicky's mouth so she wouldn't scream when they pulled out her fingernails. It would be so very good to kill him... except then what would separate him from them?

He laid on the horn instead. It sent another bright spear of agony through his head. The blind man leaped away from the car as if stung. Andy hauled the wheel around and drove past him. The last thing he saw in the rearview mirror as he drove down the reentry lane was the blind man sitting on the pavement, his face twisted in anger and terror... and the young woman placidly raising baby Michael to her shoulder to burp him.

He entered the flow of turnpike traffic without looking. A horn blared; tires squalled. A big Lincoln swerved around the wagon and the driver shook his fist at them. "Daddy, are you okay?" "I will be," he said. His voice seemed to come from far away. "Charlie, look at the toll ticket and see what the next exit is." The traffic blurred in front of his eyes. It doubled, trebled, came back together, then drifted into prismatic fragments again. Sun reflecting off bright chrome everywhere.

"And fasten your seatbelt, Charlie."

The next exit was Hammersmith, twenty miles farther up. Somehow he made it. He thought later that it was only the consciousness of Charlie sitting next to him, depending on him, that kept him on the road. Just as Charlie had got him through all the things that came after-the knowledge of Charlie, needing him. Charlie McGee, whose parents had once needed two hundred dollars.

There was a Best Western at the foot of the Hammersmith ramp, and Andy managed to get them checked in, specifying a room away from the turnpike. He used a bogus name. "They'll be after us, Charlie," he said. "I need to sleep. But only until dark, that's all the time we can take... all we dare to take. Wake me up when it's dark." She said something else, but then he was falling on the bed. The world was blurring down to a gray point, and then even the point was gone and everything was darkness, where the pain couldn't reach. There was no pain and there were no dreams. When Charlie shook him awake again on that hot August evening at quarter past seven, the room was stifling hot and his clothes were soaked with sweat. She had tried to make the air conditioner work but hadn't been able to figure out the controls.

"It's okay," he said. He swung his feet onto the floor and put his hands on his temples, squeezing his head so it wouldn't blow up. "Is it any better, Daddy?" she asked anxiously. "A little," he said. And it was... but only a little. "We'll stop in a little while and get some chow. That'll help some more." "Where are we going?"

He shook his head slowly back and forth. He had only the money he had left the house with that morning-about seventeen dollars. He had his Master Charge and his Visa, but he had paid for their room with the two twenties he always kept in the back of his wallet (my run-out money, he sometimes told Vicky, joking, but how hellishly true that had turned out to be) rather than use either one of them. Using either of those cards would be like painting a sign: THIS WAY TO THE FUGITIVE COLLEGE INSTRUCTOR AND HIS DAUGHTER. The seventeen dollars would buy them some burgers and top off the wagon's gas tank once. Then they would be stone broke.

"'I don't know, Charlie," he said. "Just away."

"When are we going to get Mommy?"

Andy looked up at her and his headache started to get worse again. He thought of the drops of blood on the floor and on the washing-machine porthole. Ire thought of the smell of Pledge.

"Charlie-"he said, and could say no more. There was no need, anyway.

She looked at him with slowly widening eyes. Her hand drifted up to her trembling mouth.

"Oh no, Daddy... please say it's no."

"Charlie-"

She screamed, "Oh please say it's no!"

"Charlie, those people who-"