Firestarter(80)

He took out a sack of Red Man, a Zig-Zag paper, and made a quick cigarette. He sat and smoked and waited for it to be time to do down to the girl's quarters.

All things taken together, he felt better, more alive, than he had in years. He realised this and was grateful to the girl. In a way she would never know of, she had given him back his life for a while-the life of a man who feels things keenly and hopes for things mightily; which is to say, a man with vital concerns. It was good that she was tough. He would get to her eventually (tough cracks and easy cracks, but no impossible cracks); he would make her do her dance for them, for whatever that was worth; when the dance was done he would kill her and look into her eyes, hoping to catch that spark of understanding, that message, as she crossed over into whatever there was.

In the meantime, he would live.

He crushed his cigarette out and got up, ready to go to work.

3

The thunderheads built up and up. By three o'clock, the skies over the Longmont complex were low and black. Thunder rolled more and more heavily, gaining assurance, making believers out of the people below. The grounds-keepers put away their mowers. The tables on the patios of the two homes were taken in. In the stables, two hostlers tried to soothe nervous horses that shifted uneasily at each ominous thud from the skies.

The storm came around three-thirty; it came as suddenly as a gunslinger's draw and with all-out fury. It started as rain, then quickly turned to hail. The wind blew from west to east and then suddenly shifted around to exactly the opposite direction. Lightning flashed in great blue-white strokes that left the air smelling like weak gasoline. The winds began to swirl counterclockwise, and on the evening weathercasts there was film of a small tornado that had just skirted Longmont Center and had torn the roof off a shopping-center Fotomat in passing.

The Shop weathered most of the storm well. Two windows were driven in by hail, and the windstorm picked up a low picket fence surrounding a quaint little gazebo on the far side of the duckpond and threw it sixty yards, but that was the extent of the damage (except for flying branches and some ruined flowerbeds-more work for the groundskeeping force). The guard dogs ran between the inner and outer fences crazily at the height of the storm, but they calmed down quickly as it began to slack off:

The damage was done by the electrical storm that came after the hail, rain, and wind. Parts of eastern Virginia were without power until midnight as a result of lightning strikes on the Rowantree and Briska power stations. The area served by the Briska station included Shop headquarters.

In his office, Cap Hollister looked up in annoyance as the lights went off and the solid, unobtrusive hum of the air conditioner wound down to nothing. There were perhaps five seconds of shadowy semi-darkness caused by the power outage and the heavy stormclouds-long enough for Cap to whisper "Goddam!" under his breath and wonder what the hell had happened to their backup electrical system.

He glanced out the window and saw lightning flickering almost continuously. That evening one of the guardhouse sentries would tell his wife that he had seen an electrical fireball that looked as big as two serving platters bouncing from the weakly charged outer fence to the more heavily charged inner fence and back again.

Cap reached for the phone to find out about the power-and then the lights came on again. The air conditioner took up its hum, and instead of reaching for the phone, Cap reached for his pencil.

Then the lights went out again.

"Shit!" Cap said. He threw the pencil down and picked up the phone after all, daring the lights to come on again before he had the chance to chew someone's ass. The lights declined the dare.

The two graceful homes facing each other across the rolling lawns-and all of the Shop complex underneath-were served by the Eastern Virginia Power Authority, but there were two backup systems powered by diesel generators. One system served the "vital functions"-the electrical fence, the computer terminals (a power failure can cost unbelievable amounts of money in terms of computer time), and the small infirmary. A second system served the lesser functions of the complex-lights, air conditioning, elevators, and all of that. The secondary system was built to "cross"-that is, to come in if the primary system showed signs of overloading-but the primary system would not cross if the secondary system began to overload. On August 19, both systems overloaded. The secondary system crossed when the primary system began to overload, just as the power-system architects had planned (although in truth, they had never planned for the primary system to overload in the first place), and as a result, the primary system operated for a full seventy seconds longer than the secondary system. Then the generators for both systems blew, one after the other, like a series of firecrackers. Only these firecrackers had cost about eighty thousand dollars each.

Later, a routine inquiry had brought back the smiling and benign verdict of "mechanical failure," although a more accurate conclusion would have been "greed and venality." When the backup generators had been installed in 1971, a senator privy to the acceptable-low-bid figures on that little operation (as well as sixteen million dollars" worth of other Shop construction) had tipped his brother-in-law, who was an electrical-engineering consultant. The consultant had decided he could quite handily come in under the lowest bid by cutting a corner here and there.

It was only one favor in an area that lives on favors and under-the-table information, and it was notable only because it was the first link in the chain that led to the final destruction and loss of life. The backup system had been used only piecemeal in all the years since it had been constructed. In its first major test, during the storm that knocked out the Briska power station, it failed completely. By then, of course, the electrical-engineering consultant had gone onward and upward; he was helping to build a multimillion-dollar beach resort at Coki Beach, on St. Thomas.