Firestarter(88)

"Help me," he said then, and Charlie stood in the bathroom doorway, trying to decide. Part of her fear had already dissolved into sympathy, but part of it remained questioning, hard and bright.

"Help me, oh somebody help me," he said in a low voice, so low it was as if he expected no one to hear or heed. And that decided her. Slowly she began to feel her way across the room toward him, her hands held out in front of her.

8

Rainbird heard her coming and could not forbear a grin in the dark-a hard, humorless grin that he covered with the palm of his hand, in case the power should come back on at that precise instant.

"John?"

He made a voice of strained agony through his grin. "I'm sorry, kid. I just... it's the dark. I can't stand the dark. It's like the place where they put me after I was captured."

"Who put you?"

"The Cong."

She was closer now. The grin left his face and he began to put himself into the part. Scared. You're scared because the Cong put you in a hole in the ground after one of their mines blew most of your face off... and they kept you there... and now you need a friend.

In a way, the part was a natural. All he had to do was make her believe that his extreme excitement at this unexpected chance was extreme fear. And of course he was afraid-afraid of blowing it. This made the shot from the tree with the ampul of Orasin look like child's play. Her intuitions were deadly sharp. Nervous perspiration was flowing off him in rivers.

"Who are the Cong?" she asked, very close now. Her hand brushed lightly past his face and he clutched it. She gasped nervously.

"Hey, don't be scared," he said. "It's just that-"

"You... that hurts. You're hurting me."

It was exactly the right tone. She was scared too, scared of the dark and scared of him... but worried about him, too. He wanted her to feel she had been clutched by a drowning man.

"I'm sorry, kid." He loosened his grip but didn't let go. "Just... can you sit beside me?" "Sure." She sat down, and he jumped at the mild thud of her body coming down on the floor. Outside, far away, someone hollered something to someone else. "Let us out!" Rainbird screamed immediately. "Let us out! Hey, let us out! People in here!" "Stop it," Charlie said, alarmed. "We're okay... I mean, aren't we?"

His mind, that overtuned machine, was clicking along at high speed, writing the script, always three or four lines ahead, enough to be safe, not enough to destroy hot spontaneity. Most of all he wondered just how long he had, how long before the lights went back on. He cautioned himself not to expect or hope for too much. He had got his chisel under the edge of the box. Anything else would be gravy.

"Yeah, I guess we are," he said. "It's just the dark, that's all. I don't even have a f**king match or-Aw, hey, kid, I'm sorry. That just slipped out."

"That's okay," Charlie said. "Sometimes my dad says that word. Once when he was fixing my wagon out in the garage he hit his hand with the hammer and said it five or six times. Other ones, too." This was by far the longest speech she had ever made in Rainbird's presence. "Will they come and let us out pretty soon?"

"They can't until they get the power back on," he said, miserable on the outside, gleeful on the inside. "These doors, kid, they've all got electric locks. They're built to lock solid if the power goes off: They've got you in a fuh-they've got you in a cell, kid. It looks like a nice little apartment, but you might as well be in jail."

"I know," she said quietly. He was still holding her hand tightly but she didn't seem to mind as much now. "You shouldn't say it, though. I think they listen."

They! Rainbird thought, and a hot triumphant joy flashed through him. He was faintly aware that he had not felt such intensity of emotion in ten years.

They! She's talking about they!

He felt his chisel slip farther under the corner of the box that was Charlie McGee, and he involuntarily squeezed her hand again.

"Ow!"

"Sorry, kid," he said, letting off. "I know damn well they listen. But they ain't listening now, with the power off: Oh kid, I don't like this, I gotta get out of here!" He began to tremble.

"Who are the Cong?"

"You don't know?... No, you're too young, I guess. It was the war, kid. The war in Vietnam. The Cong were the bad guys. They wore black pajamas. In the jungle. You know about the Vietnam war, don't you?"

She knew about it... vaguely.

"We were on patrol and we walked into an ambush," he said. That much was the truth, but this was where John Rainbird and the truth parted company. There was no need to confuse her by pointing out that they had all been stoned, most of the grunts smoked up well on Cambodian red, and their West Point lieutenant, who was only one step away from the checkpoint between the lands of sanity and madness, on the peyote buttons that he chewed whenever they were on patrol. Rainbird had once seen this looey shoot a pregnant woman with a semiautomatic rifle, had seen the woman's six-month fetus ripped from her body in disintegrating pieces; that, the looey told them later, was known as a West Point Abortion. So there they were, on their way back to base, and they had indeed walked into an ambush, only it had been laid by their own guys, even more stoned than they were, and four guys had been blown away. Rainbird saw no need to tell Charlie all of this, or that the Claymore that had pulverized half his face had been made in a Maryland munitions plant.