Firestarter(89)

"There were only six of us that got out. We ran. We ran through the jungle and I guess I went the wrong way. Wrong way? Right way? In that crazy war you didn't know which way was the right way because there weren't any real lines. I got separated from the rest of my guys. I was still trying to find something familiar when I walked over a land mine. That's what happened to my face."

"I'm very sorry," Charlie said. "When I woke up, they had me," Rainbird said, now off into the never-never land of total fiction. He had actually come to in a Saigon army hospital with an IV drip in his arm. "They wouldn't give me any medical treatment, nothing like that, unless I answered their questions."

Now carefully. If he did it carefully it would come right; he could feel it.

His voice rose, bewildered and bitter. "Questions, all the time questions. They wanted to know about troop movements... supplies... light-infantry deployment... everything. They never let up. They were always at me."

"Yes," Charlie said fervently, and his heart gladdened.

"I kept telling them I didn't know anything, couldn't tell them anything, that I was nothing but a lousy grunt, just a number with a pack on its back. They didn't believe me. My face... the pain... I got down on my knees and begged for morphine... they said after... after I told them I could have the morphine. I could be treated in a good hospital... after I told them."

Now Charlie's grip was the one that was tightening. She thought about Hockstetter's cool gray eyes, of Hockstetter pointing at the steel tray filled with curly woodshavings. I think you know the answer... if you light that, I'll take you to see your father right away. You can be with him in two minutes. Her heart went out to this man with the badly wounded face, this grown man who was afraid of the dark. She thought she could understand what he had been through. She knew his pain. And in the dark she began to cry silently for him, and in a way the tears were also for herself... all the unshed tears of the last five months. They were tears of pain and rage for John Rainbird, her father, her mother, herself. They burned and scourged.

The tears were not silent enough to go unheard by Rainbird's radar ears. He had to struggle to suppress another smile. Oh yes, the chisel was well planted. Tough cracks and easy cracks, but no impossible cracks.

"They just never believed me. Finally they threw me into a hole in the ground, and it was always dark. There was a little... a room, I guess you'd say, with roots sticking out of the earth walls... and sometimes I could see a little sunlight about nine feet up. They'd come-their commandant, I guess he was-and he'd ask me if I was ready to talk yet. He said I was turning white down there, like a fish. That my face was getting infected, that I'd get gangrene in my face and then it would get into my brain and rot it and make me crazy and then I'd die. He'd ask me if I'd like to get out of the dark and see the sun again. And I'd plead with him... I'd beg... I'd swear on my mother's name that I didn't know anything. And then they'd laugh and put the boards back and cover them up with dirt. It was like being buried alive. The dark... like this..."

He made a choked sound in his throat and Charlie squeezed his hand tighter to show him that she was there.

"There was the room and there was a little tunnel about seven feet long. I had to go down to the end of the tunnel to... you know. And the air was bad and I kept thinking I'm going to smother down here in the dark, I'm going to choke on the smell of my own sh-"He groaned. "I'm sorry. This is nothing to tell a kid."

"That's all right. If it makes you feel better, it's all right."

He debated, and then decided to go just a little further.

"I was down there for five months before they exchanged me."

"What did you eat?"

"They threw down rotted rice. And sometimes spiders. Live spiders. Great big ones-tree spiders, I guess. I'd chase after them in the dark, you know, and kill them and eat them."

"Oh, gross!"

"They turned me into an animal," he said, and was quiet for a moment, breathing loudly. "You got it better than me, kid, but it comes down to pretty much the same thing. A rat in a trap. You think they'll get the lights on pretty soon?"

She didn't say anything for a long time, and he was coldly afraid that he had gone too far. Then Charlie said, "It doesn't matter. We're together."

"All right," he said, and then in a rush: "You won't tell, will you? They'd fire me for the." way I been talking. I need this job. When you look the way I do, you need a good job."

"No, I won't tell."

He felt the chisel slip smoothly in another notch. They had a secret between them now.

He was holding her in his hands.

In the dark, he thought how it would be to slip his hands around her neck. That was the final object in view, of course-not their stupid tests, their playground games. Her... and then perhaps himself. He liked her, he really did. He might even be falling in love with her. The time would come when he would send her over, looking carefully into her eyes all the time. And then, if her eyes gave him the signal he had looked for for so long, perhaps he would follow her. Yes. Perhaps they would go into the real darkness together.

Outside, beyond the locked door, eddies of confusion passed back and forth, sometimes near, sometimes far away.

Rainbird mentally spat on his hands and then went back to work on her.