Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  Ten minutes, and nothing. Birds mocked them from the trees.

  “All right, let’s try the next formula. And let’s leave the old one there—maybe it just needs more time.” For the next two hours they tried different mixtures, setting the cups in a widely spaced circle. They were working on the seventh when the sixth erupted into flame.

  Hands shaking, Shermie made very careful notes on a pad of paper. His expression was strictly clinical. Patrick had the sense that Shermie was lost in a world of abstraction and numbers, anything to shield himself from knowledge of what they were about to do.

  They tested the mixture three more times. No question about it: it worked. According to their instructions, when mixed together the oxidizer and the fuel generated heat. The heat built up until it exceeded the container’s ability to radiate it, at which point the little heap of chemicals smoked and burst into flame. The flame was blue-yellow, and flared three feet into the air accompanied by a sound like a low-yield rocket engine. When the fire burned down, it left a black bubbling tarry mass in the cup. A smoky, bleach-like stench filled the air.

  Speaking for all of them, Frankie said, “Awesome.”

  They discussed containers, detonators, timing and other concerns. No one mentioned human lives. They tested the mixture twice more, in sunshine and in shade, noting the difference in combustion time with a change in ambient temperature.

  After three hours the shadows were lengthening, and a mild rain began to fall. They tested the mixture again, and even with the watery mist, it smoked and sputtered and popped into ignition.

  “Jackpot,” Patrick said.

  They came down from the hill. It was time to go, and they had all the information that they needed. None of them were in a talkative mood. What they were about to do was entirely too sobering, even for Frankie.

  In the kitchen they prepared peanut butter and bologna sandwiches and ate them out on the porch, the silence slowly growing oppressive.

  The Reverend and Mrs. Darling entered the kitchen together. His father glanced out through the window, giving Frankie a small, low-wattage smile, the kind of smile someone might give seeing a new puppy in the hands of a barely remembered acquaintance. Frankie returned it in kind. They drifted back inside. Patrick watched Frankie.

  The brief light in Frankie’s eyes had retreated somewhere deep inside him. At that moment, Patrick understood Frankie better than he ever had. Understood what Frankie saw and felt. He suspected that Destiny understood the same chasm. Without being told, he knew that Lee and Shermie knew the same darkness, and feared it with all their hearts.

  45

  SATURDAY, JUNE 16

  Patrick was eating salad, baked chicken and fresh rolls with his mother. Over the sound of her radio they could hear a party, or perhaps a fight, going on over at Cap’s trailer.

  Vivian was trying to eat, struggling to maintain her calm, but her hands shook every time she brought the fork to her lips. A hoot of laughter arose from the other side of the park, followed by motorcycle sounds.

  Patrick squeezed his mother’s arm, and she looked up at him and tried to smile. She touched his wrist, a fond gesture, but he winced.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Skinned my arm playing soccer today,” Patrick lied automatically, and pulled his arm back.

  “Want me to look at it?”

  He shook his head. Vivian studied him carefully.

  “Is there anything you’d like to tell me? Anything I should know?”

  “You’ve asked that before, Mom.”

  “I just feel … I don’t know. Patrick, if I asked you a question, would you answer it? Honestly?”

  Patrick hesitated.

  “Honestly, Patrick. I need this.” She was breathing in small sips.

  “All right, Mom. I promise. What is it?”

  She took a deeper breath. “Do you blame me for what happened? I mean, I asked your father to move out. And he was living in that terrible neighborhood. Maybe if…”

  She put her head down, then looked back up again. “Because if you do, I just wanted you to know how sorry I am, how terribly sorry.”

  “Mom, no. I promise. I absolutely don’t blame you.”

  He got up, and scraped his plate carefully into the sink. Every motion seemed almost preplanned, robotic. As if he was operated by strings from above.

  “Patrick,” Vivian said. “Are you all right? If there was anything wrong with you, if I lost you … I don’t think I could bear it.”

  Patrick turned and looked at her with eyes that were as ancient as the Pacific. “Fine, Mom,” he said. “Never better.”

  * * *

  The clock read one o’clock.

  Patrick’s motions were almost preternaturally controlled. He carefully crept from bed, and to his mother’s room. He nudged the door open wide enough to make out her shape beneath the covers. She was asleep. With every breath, her body shook beneath her blankets. Even asleep, she was crying.

  He waited at the front window, watching Cappy’s trailer. Patrick didn’t yawn, wasn’t bored, his thoughts didn’t wander. He just watched, blinking as slowly and regularly as an iguana. At 2:30, the bearded giant emerged, pounded his palms against the swollen bulk of his belly, and jumped on his motorcycle. Before the roar died away, Patrick had slipped through the front door.

  He unchained his bike and rolled it silently away from the mobile home before seating himself and pedaling out onto the dark, wet road. After four minutes he stopped popping gravel beneath his wheels, and was on the main road heading north. Another fifteen minutes and he came to the section of the woods just north of their old meeting place.

  He rolled his bike up the dirt path, until he came to a fork in the road. He took the right path, past a sign saying PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING.

  There was another fork up farther, and he wasn’t sure which to take. Then he sniffed. As the breeze shifted, he caught a smell like a fully loaded litter box. He hared to the left.

  He paused again, eyes closed, letting himself acclimate to the darkness before he continued. Dirt and gravel crunched under his wheels and heels. One careful step after another, he went higher and deeper into the darkness between the trees. When his sensitized eyes caught the very first glimmer of light ahead, he took his bike off the road, and laid it carefully on its side.

  Patrick paused again, listening. Nothing. No sounds at all with the exception of wind and soft animal noises. Crickets, night wings. And then human words. Arguing. “Keep it up…”

  A fragment, not a complete sentence.

  “Behind, motherfuck—”

  He went down on his belly and wiggled in closer, commando-style. The wet grass dampened his shirt and slicked his face and palms. From the closer vantage point, he saw an oddly shaped house. It looked like something built of several different trailers patched together haphazardly to make a single dwelling. He counted four people through the windows. Two wore gauze masks. Closer now, he could hear more yelling. Patrick crawled, elbows scraped by rocks, face stung by low branches. Onward he came, clinging to the shadows.

  “Shit!” Cappy’s voice. Patrick could hear it clearly now. “I’m telling you that it’s shit, and it isn’t good enough to sell to a fucking retard!”

  “Well, your fucking chemist went south on us. Small matter of someone corn-holing him, near as I can tell. Now I can Nazi this stuff, or bathtub it for you, but we gotta make smaller batches, and if you don’t have his connections, it isn’t going to be as pure—”

  A flat smacking sound, and someone cried.

  “Don’t you ever talk to me that way—”

  Patrick crawled around to the other side, and he could still hear the muffled sounds.

  “Place stinks! One fucking match and the whole place—”

  There was a sudden pause.

  Cappy’s voice. “Wait. Did you hear something out there?”

  Patrick froze, willing himself to invisibility. If they caught him, they would k
ill him. He watched them balefully, a tiny fragment of his mind wondering why he wasn’t afraid.

  Cappy waddled out onto the porch, eyes sunken in the scarred puffiness of his face. His great meaty forearms rested on the wooden rails on the front deck. Cappy stared out into the darkness. He seemed gargantuan, but flabby. Hyper, but exhausted, a man burning his candle at both ends, then putting a blow torch to the middle.

  He slid a thick tongue across his lips, then went back inside.

  Patrick crawled more rapidly, taking a chance on sound. These last few yards, if someone looked in his direction, they would see him. There was no cover.

  As he reached the edge of the house, the iron control that had sustained him seemed to dissolve. His throat closed so tightly that he couldn’t breathe.

  Things crawled under the house. It was damp in a way that suggested sewage and rotting garbage. Something dripped down from the floor panels, something that smelled like very strong cider vinegar mixed with ammonia. Every breath dizzied him.

  Crawl. Breathe. Crawl. He found a vent almost a foot wide, and poked his head up through it.

  Jackpot. He could see into the living room. A bunch of half-empty bottles sat just in front of the vent. He could read through the label from the rear, and it read: rehte-regnaD.

  The fumes were awful, and suddenly his stomach revolted. For a ghastly sixty seconds he choked on his own stomach fluids, suffering in a desperately imposed silence.

  He dared not cough, just bore the awful convulsions and contractions until he gained sufficient control to choke his salad and chicken back down.

  From his backpack, he extracted a metal can, the kind used to package brake fluid. He set it carefully on the dirt in front of him, using the rays of a tiny penlight to guide him.

  The second item he pulled out was a condom packed full of powder, a special mixture of magnesium powder and a pair of common additives used by ordinary, everyday non-homicidal-psychopaths. It had been simple to acquire the chemicals—a hobby shop for the magnesium, Triangle Pool and Spa supply, and Kraagan Auto Parts. No one looked at him twice.

  The enormity of his intentions hit him like a sledge. Patrick felt horrific claustrophobia. The darkness and wet, the smells and crawling sensations all closed in on him like a collapsing tomb. What was he doing? Just what the hell was he thinking…? He started to snatch the can back up, when Cappy entered the room above him, booming: “You think I won’t do it? You think I won’t kill your yellow ass? Planted one asshole Wednesday, damn sure plant another one next week. All the same to me. Your call.”

  Patrick heard the other voice. Ellie’s voice. Backing down. “All right, honey. Whatever you say.”

  Patrick’s chest froze. Any small amount of humanity or regret he might have felt vanished utterly in that instant.

  Dizzy from fumes and fear, he unscrewed the can and set it down again. With a penknife, he carefully poked a hole in the condom, and then lowered it into the can. He screwed the top on tightly, and set it under the leaking grill.

  On knees and elbows, Patrick began to back out and away. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster. When he reached the edge of the house he paused. There were footsteps above his head. He had to wait. He couldn’t wait. God, he was right under the porch.

  More footsteps, then the sound of a zipper, and a stream of yellowish fluid arced out over his head into the dirt. Cappy grunted and sighed to himself. The stream stuttered, died. The sound of a zipper, then retreating footsteps.

  Patrick’s heart was almost bursting. Behind him, an irreversible chemical reaction was building up and up, and he was going to die, unless—

  The front door closed.

  Patrick edged out, crawling faster as he crossed the clearing’s no-man’s-land. When he reached the shadows he jumped up to a crouch and sprinted to his hidden bicycle, and rolled it down the hill and away.

  46

  Cappy stood on the porch again. For the fifth time in as many minutes he had returned there, staring, as if some atavistic cranny of his hindbrain intuited danger.

  He lumbered back into the lab, the collection of bottles and beakers and tubs that turned raw materials like diet tablets into pure chemical gold. The resulting drugs his runners sold around Claremont, sending the surplus to Portland and up to Seattle.

  When things were singing he had connections as far away as Vancouver, BC. If he could just get things running smooth they would dump this trailer setup and get with the smart way of doing things. To hell with making this shit on your own property. You rent a motel room or a beat-to-shit house in some nigger neighborhood. Make your score in a series of seventy-two-hour marathons, and when the place was so contaminated that the roaches couldn’t live in the walls, you got the hell out and found a new place.

  You did that over and over again, paying cash, using fake IDs, and in two years you could make a million dollars, cash. His whole future was right in front of him, if the clowns who worked for him could just keep their greasepaint on a little longer. That, and keep the competition under control. They’d beat the snot out of some coke dealers who had organized over in Allantown, and scared hell out of the hippies at the Inside Edge. A pothead could make discreet dope connections at the Inside Edge today, but you never knew what tomorrow might bring. Best to keep them mindful, a little nervous. Let them know who’s boss. Hell, if they folded up shop there’d be less grass around town, and that might mean more customers for him.

  True, he’d let his temper get the better of him. When he lost his chemist, when some asshole had set things up so that half his people got mugged and raped under the bridge, even Cappy could admit he’d gone a little nuts. Maybe big Otis had had something to do with it, maybe not, but Cappy had to admit that doing the bastard had certainly relieved his stress.

  He felt much better now.

  Cappy sniffed through his cotton mask. Even with the drops of Binaca on the strip covering his nose, the stench was barely tolerable. “Fucking stinks,” he said, but there was something in the chemical smell that was new, something he recognized, and his drug-addled mind fought to categorize it.

  One of the last things he saw was a curl of smoke rising from a grill behind a cluster of bottles. His eyes widened. There was a pop as a spiral of flame burst up.

  The ether bottle broke.

  Cappy’s mouth opened to scream—

  And suddenly the world was filled with flame.

  * * *

  Almost a mile away now, Patrick was pedaling like a demon. He heard the roar, turned and saw the orange and yellow fireball rolling up through the trees. It mushroomed in the night like a newly birthed sun, then died back down to a steady glow.

  Patrick pedaled on, dimly aware that he was laughing and crying at the same time.

  * * *

  Vivian woke up in darkness, the fragments of a dimly remembered nightmare slipping away from her like skeletal fingers. Groaning, she rolled over and checked the clock. It was five in the morning. She was about to try to slip back into slumber when she heard a scratching sound, followed by a dull thump. Then, the rush of running water.

  She sat up, stood unsteadily, wrapped her robe on and walked out to the bathroom. The light was off, and she flicked it on.

  Hunched over the face basin, Patrick was washing his hands and face, scrubbing them raw. In the flat light his thin, dark body appeared almost emaciated. He flinched as the door opened, shivered as she approached, as if his every nerve was stretched to the breaking point.

  She barely knew how to react, saying only: “Patrick…?”

  He looked up at her with red eyes and hollow cheeks. He reminded her of a concentration camp survivor. When she took him in her arms, he sobbed, pulling himself against her with all of his failing strength. His cries were those of an abandoned child, a shipwrecked mother who has watched her babies drown, an abandoned soul in hell’s darkest dungeon.

  Fear hammered at her. “Patrick? What is it?”

  His thin fingers gripped at her
robe, and he sagged so that she had to hold him erect.

  Perhaps, she thought, perhaps he was finally grasping that Otis was dead. Perhaps he was finally allowing himself to feel the pain, the loss, the helplessness. In a way she was glad. He had been so stoic, so impenetrably distant, bottling his feelings so tightly that she feared for his mind.

  This was better. Sometimes it was just best to acknowledge our terror of death, our feeling of utter helplessness in the face of such an overwhelming reality.

  Then, distantly, she heard the sirens wailing in the night.

  47

  CLAREMONT Courier, TUESDAY, JUNE 19

  Police report that the fire and explosion at Route 345 Riverfront Drive was not the result of a gas leak, as originally supposed, but rather the accidental explosion of a clandestine methamphetamine laboratory. Police discovered traces of “precursive” agents such as diet pills and Vicks inhalers, as well as lithium batteries, which imply that several different methods were being utilized to synthesize the illegal drug.

  “This tragedy almost certainly has put the largest meth ring in the Pacific Northwest completely out of business,” said Claremont Police Chief Darryl Haines. “There had been rumors of some kind of violence between them and a local group suspected of cocaine trafficking, and we may have to assume foul play until we have determined otherwise.”

  The explosion, at 3:30 A.M. on the 17th, originally seemed the result of spontaneous ether combustion, but recent discovery of what Vancouver arson investigators have referred to only as “a crude detonator” have suggested that the resulting blaze, which killed four and wounded one, may have been deliberately triggered. Killed in the blast were Reginald “Cappy” Swenson, 38, the suspected ringleader; Ellie Krup, 32; Reginald Hernandez, 27; and William R. “Mocha” Coffey, 41. Wounded and in serious condition is Majel Burroughs, 20.