Firestarter

by Stephen King

  "Get me up," Irv said. "Legs feel all rubber. Think maybe I pissed myself. Shouldn't be surprised. One of those bastards shot me. Don't know which one. Lend a hand, Frank."

  "It's Andy," he said, and got an arm around Irv's back. Little by little Irv came up. "I don't blame your missus. You should have passed us by this morning."

  "If I had it to do over again, I'd do it just the same way," Irv said. "Gosh-damn people coming on my land with guns. Gosh-damn bastards and fucking bunch of government whoremasters and ... oooww-oooh, Christ!"

  "Irv?" Norma cried.

  "Hush, woman. I got it nocked now. Come on, Frank, or Andy, or whatever your name is. It's gettin hot."

  It was. A puff of wind blew a coil of sparks onto the porch as Andy half dragged Irv down the steps and into the dooryard. The chopping block was a blackened stump. There was nothing left of the chickens Charlie had set on fire but a few charred bones and a peculiar, dense ash that might have been feathers. They had not been roasted; they had been cremated.

  "Set me down by the barn," Irv gasped. "I want to talk to you."

  "You need a doctor," Andy said.

  "Yeah, I'll get my doctor. What about your girl?"

  "Fainted." He set Irv down with his back against the barn door. Irv was looking up at him. A little color had come into his face, and that bluish cast was leaving his lips. He was sweating. Behind them, the big white farmhouse that had stood here on the Baillings Road since 1868 was going up in flames.

  "There's no human being should be able to do what she can," Irv said.

  "That may well be," Andy said, and then he looked from Irv and directly into Norma Manders's stony, unforgiving face. "But then, no human being should have to have cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy or leukemia. But it happens. And it happens to children."

  "She didn't get no say." Irv nodded. "All right."

  Still looking at Norma, Andy said, "She's no more a monster than a kid in an iron lung or in a home for retarded children."

  "I'm sorry I said that," Norma replied, and her glance wavered and fell from Andy's. "I was out feeding the chickens with her. Watching her pet the cow. But mister, my house is burning down, and people are dead."

  "I'm sorry."

  "The house is insured, Norma," Irv said, taking her hand with his good one.

  "That doesn't do anything about my mother's dishes that her mother gave to her," Norma said. "Or my nice secretary, or the pictures we got at the Schenectady art show last July." A tear slipped out of one eye and she wiped it away with her sleeve. "And all the letters you wrote to me when you were in the army."

  "Is your button going to be all right?" Irv asked.

  "I don't know."

  "Well, listen. Here's what you can do if you want to. There's an old Willys Jeep out behind the barn--"

  "Irv, no! Don't get into this any deeper!"

  He turned to look at her, his face gray and lined and sweaty. Behind them, their home burned. The sound of popping shingles was like that of horse chestnuts in a Christmas fire.

  "Those men came with no warrants nor blueback paper of any kind and tried to take them off our land," he said. "People I'd invited in like it's done in a civilized country with decent laws. One of them shot me, and one of them tried to shoot Andy here. Missed his head by no more than a quarter of an inch." Andy remembered the first deafening report and the splinter of wood that had jumped from the porch support post. He shivered. "They came and did those things. What do you want me to do, Norma? Sit here and turn them over to the secret police if they get their peckers up enough to come back? Be a good German?"

  "No," she said huskily. "No, I guess not."

  "You don't have to--" Andy began.

  "I feel I do," Irv said. "And when they come back ... they will be back, won't they, Andy?"

  "Oh yes. They'll be back. You just bought stock in a growth industry, Irv."

  Irv laughed, a whistling, breathless sound. "That's pretty good, all right Well, when they show up here, all I know is that you took my Willys. I don't know more than that. And to wish you well."

  "Thank you," Andy said quietly.

  "We got to be quick," Irv said. "It's a long way back to town, but they'll have seen the smoke by now. Fire trucks'll be coming. You said you and the button were going to Vermont. Was that much the truth?"

  "Yes," Andy said.

  There was a moaning sound to their left. "Daddy--" Charlie was sitting up. The red pants and green blouse were smeared with dirt. Her face was pale, her eyes were terribly confused. "Daddy, what's burning? I smell something burning. Am I doing it? What's burning?"

  Andy went to her and gathered her up. "Everything is all right," he said, and wondered why you had to say that to children even when they knew perfectly well, as you did, that it wasn't true. "Everything's fine. How do you feel, hon?"

  Charlie was looking over his shoulder at the burning line of cars, the convulsed body in the garden, and the Manders house, which was crowned with fire. The porch was also wrapped in flames. The wind was carrying the smoke and heat away from them, but the smell of gas and hot shingles was strong.

  "I did that," Charlie said, almost too low to hear. Her face began to twist and crumple again.

  "Button!" Irv said sternly.

  She glanced over at him, through him. "Me," she moaned.

  "Set her down," Irv said. "I want to talk to her."

  Andy carried Charlie over to where Irv sat propped up against the barn door and set her down.

  "You listen to me, button," Irv said. "Those men meant to kill your daddy. You knew it before I did, maybe before he did, although I'll be damned if I know how. Am I right?"

  "Yes," Charlie said. Her eyes were still deep and miserable. "But you don't get it. It was like the soldier, but worse. I couldn't ... couldn't hold onto it anymore. It was going everyplace. I burned up some of your chickens ... and I almost burned up my father." The miserable eyes spilled over and she began to cry helplessly.

  "Your daddy's fine," Irv said. Andy said nothing. He remembered that sudden strangling sensation, being enclosed in that heat capsule.

  "I'm never going to do it again," she said. "Never."

  "All right," Andy said, and put a hand on her shoulder. "All right, Charlie."

  "Never," she repeated with quiet emphasis.

  "You don't want to say that, button," Irv said, looking up at her. "You don't want to block yourself off like that. You'll do what you have to do. You'll do the best you can. And that's all you can do. I believe the one thing the God of this world likes best is to give the business to people who say 'never.' You understand me?"

  "No," Charlie whispered.

  "But you will, I think," Irv said, and looked at Charlie with such deep compassion that Andy felt his throat fill with sorrow and fear. Then Irv glanced at his wife. "Bring me that there stick by your foot, Norma."

  Norma brought the stick and put it into his hand and told him again that he was overdoing it, that he had to rest. And so it was only Andy that heard Charlie say "Never" again, almost inaudibly, under her breath, like a vow taken in secrecy.

  17

  "Look here, Andy," Irv said, and drew a straight line in the dust. "This is the dirt road we came up. The Baillings Road. If you go a quarter of a mile north, you'll come to a woods road on your right A car can't make it up that road, but the Willys should do it if you keep her wound up and use an educated foot on the clutch. A couple of times it's gonna look like that road just up and died, but you keep going and you'll pick it up again. It's not on any map, you understand? Not on any map."

  Andy nodded, watching the stick drawing the woods road.

  "It'll take you twelve miles east, and if you don't get stuck or lost, you'll come out on Route One-fifty-two near Hoag Comers. You turn left--north--and about a mile up One-fifty-two you'll come to another woods road. It's low ground, swampy, mushy. The Willys might do it, might not. I ain't been on that road in five years, I guess. It's the only one I know that goe
s east toward Vermont and won't be roadblocked off. That second road is gonna bring you out on Highway Twenty-two, north of Cherry Plain and south of the Vermont border. By then you should be out of the worst of it--although I s'pose they'll have your name and pictures on the wire. But we wish you the best. Don't we, Norma?"

  "Yes," Norma said, and the word was almost a sigh. She looked at Charlie. "You saved your dad's life, little girL That's the thing to remember."

  "Is it?" Charlie said, and her voice was so perfectly toneless that Norma Manders looked bewildered and a little afraid. Then Charlie tried a hesitant smile and Norma smiled back, relieved.

  "Keys are in the Willys, and--" He cocked his head to one side. "Hark!"

  It was the sound of sirens, rising and falling in cycles, still faint but drawing closer.

  "It's the FD," Irv said. "You better go, if you're goin."

  "Come on, Charlie," Andy said. She came to him, her eyes red from her tears. The small smile had disappeared like hesitant sunlight behind the clouds, but Andy felt greatly encouraged that it had been there at all. The face she wore was a survivor's face, shocked and wounded. In that moment, Andy wished he had her power; he would use it, and he knew whom he would use it on.

  He said, "Thank you, Irv."

  "I'm sorry," Charlie said in a small voice. "About your house and your chickens and ... and everything else."

  "It sure wasn't your fault, button," Irv said. "They brought it on themselves. You watch out for your daddy."

  "All right," she said.

  Andy took her hand and led her around the barn to where the Willys was parked under a shakepole leanto.

  The fire sirens were very close by the time he had got it started and driven it across the lawn to the road. The house was an inferno now. Charlie would not look at it. The last Andy saw of the Manderses was in the rearview mirror of the canvas-topped Jeep: Irv leaning against the barn, the piece of white skirting knotted around his wounded arm stained red, Norma sitting beside him. His good arm was around her. Andy waved, and Irv gestured a bit in return with his bad arm. Norma didn't wave, thinking, perhaps, of her mother's china, her secretary, the love letters--all the things of which insurance money is ignorant and always has been.

  18

  They found the first woods road just where Irv Manders had said they would. Andy put the Jeep in four-wheel drive and turned onto it.

  "Hold on, Charlie," he said. "We're gonna bounce."

  Charlie held on. Her face was white and listless, and looking at her made Andy nervous. The cottage, he thought. Granther McGee's cottage on Tashmore Pond. If we can only get there and rest. She'll get herself back together and then we'll think about what we should do.

  We'll think about it tomorrow. Like Scarlett said, it's another day.

  The Willys roared and pitched its way up the road, which was no more than a two-wheel track with bushes and even a few stunted pines growing along the crown. This land had been logged over maybe ten years ago, and Andy doubted if it had been used since then, except by an occasional hunter. Six miles up it did seem to "up and die," and Andy had to stop twice to move trees that had blown down. The second time he looked up from his exertions, heart and head pounding almost sickeningly, and saw a large doe looking at him thoughtfully. She held a moment longer and then was gone into the deeper woods with a flip of her white tail. Andy looked back at Charlie and saw she was watching the deer's progress with something like wonder ... and he felt encouraged again. A little farther on they found the wheel-ruts again, and around three o'clock they came out on the stretch of two-lane blacktop that was Route 152.

  19

  Orville Jamieson, scratched and muddy and barely able to walk on his bad ankle, sat by the side of the Baillings Road about a half a mile from the Manders farm and spoke into his walkie-talkie. His message was relayed back to a temporary command post in a van parked in the main street of Hastings Glen. The van had radio equipment with a built-in scrambler and a powerful transmitter. OJ's report was scrambled, boosted, and sent to New York City, where a relay station caught it and sent it on to Longmont, Virginia, where Cap sat in his office, listening.

  Cap's face was no longer bright and jaunty, as it had been when he biked to work that morning. OJ's report was nearly unbelievable: they had known the girl had something, but this story of sudden carnage and reversal was (at least to Cap) like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. Four to six men dead, the others driven helter-skelter into the woods, half a dozen cars in flames, a house burning to the ground, a civilian wounded and about to blab to anyone and everyone who cared to listen that a bunch of neo-Nazis had turned up on his doorstep with no warrant and had attempted to kidnap a man and a little girl whom he had invited home to lunch.

  When OJ finished his report (and he never really did; he only began to repeat himself in a kind of semihysteria), Cap hung up and sat in his deep swivel chair and tried to think. He did not think a covert operation had gone so spectacularly wrong since the Bay of Pigs--and this was on American soil.

  The office was gloomy and filled with thick shadows now that the sun had got around to the other side of the building, but he didn't turn on the lights. Rachel had buzzed him on the intercom and he had told her curtly he didn't want to talk to anyone, anyone at all.

  He felt old.

  He heard Wanless saying: I am talking about the potential for destruction. Well, it wasn't just a question of potential any longer, was it? But we're going to have her, he thought, looking blankly across the room. Oh yes, we're going to have her.

  He thumbed for Rachel.

  "I want to talk to Orville Jamieson as soon as he can be flown here," he said. "And I want to talk to General Brackman in Washington, A-one-A priority. We've got a potentially embarrassing situation in New York State, and I want you to tell him that right out."

  "Yes, sir," Rachel said respectfully.

  "I want a meeting with all six subdirectors at nineteen hundred hours. Also A-one-A. And I want to talk to the chief of state police up there in New York." They had been part of the search sweep, and Cap wanted to point that out to them. If mud was going to be thrown, he would be sure to save back a good, big bucket of it for them. But he also wanted to point out that behind a united front, they might still all be able to come out of this looking fairly decent.

  He hesitated and then said, "And when John Rainbird calls in, tell him I want to talk to him. I have another job for him."

  "Yes, sir."

  Cap let go of the intercom toggle. He sat back in his chair and studied the shadows.

  "Nothing has happened that can't be fixed," he said to the shadows. That had been his motto all his life--not printed in crewel and hung up, not embossed on a copper desk plaque, but it was printed on his heart as truth.

  Nothing that can't be fixed. Until tonight, until OJ's report, he had believed that. It was a philosophy that had brought a poor Pennsylvania miner's kid a long way. And he believed it still, although in a momentarily shaken manner. Between Manders and his wife, they probably had relatives scattered from New England to California, and each one was a potential lever. There were enough top-secret files right here in Longmont to ensure that any congressional hearing on Shop methods would be ... well, a little hard of hearing. The cars and even the agents were only hardware, although it would be a long time before he would really be able to get used to the idea that A1 Steinowitz was gone. Who could there possibly be to replace Al? That little kid and her old man were going to pay for what they had done to A1, if for nothing else. He would see to it.

  But the girl. Could the girl be fixed?

  There were ways. There were methods of containment.

  The McGee files were still on the library cart. He got up, went to them, and began thumbing through them restlessly. He wondered where John Rainbird was at this moment.

  Washington, D.C.

  1

  At the moment Cap Hollister had his passing thought about him, John Rainbird was sitting in his room at t
he Mayflower Hotel watching a television game called The Crosswits. He was naked. He sat in the chair with his bare feet neatly together and watched the program. He was waiting for it to get dark. After it got dark, he would begin waiting for it to get late. When it was late, he would begin waiting for it to get early. When it got early and the pulse of the hotel was at its slowest, he would stop waiting and go upstairs to Room 1217 and kill Dr. Wanless. Then he would come down here and think about whatever Wanless would have told him before he died, and sometime after the sun came up, he would sleep briefly.

  John Rainbird was a man at peace. He was at peace with almost everything--Cap, the Shop, the United States. He was at peace with God, Satan, and the universe. If he was not yet at complete peace with himself, that was only because his pilgrimage was not yet over. He had many coups, many honorable scars. It did not matter that people turned away from him in fear and loathing. It did not matter that he had lost one eye in Vietnam. What they paid him did not matter. He took it and most of it went to buy shoes. He had a great love of shoes. He owned a home in Flagstaff, and although he rarely went there himself, he had all his shoes sent there. When he did get a chance to go to his house, he admired the shoes--Gucci, Bally, Bass, Adidas, Van Donen. Shoes. His house was a strange forest; shoe trees grew in every room, and he would go from room to room admiring the shoefruit that grew on them. But when he was alone, he went barefoot. His father, a full-blooded Cherokee, had been buried barefoot. Someone had stolen his burial moccasins.

  Other than shoes, John Rainbird was interested in only two things. One of them was death. His own death, of course; he had been preparing for this inevitability for twenty years or more. Dealing death had always been his business and was the only trade he had ever excelled at. He became more and more interested in it as he grew older, as an artist will become more interested in the qualities and levels of light, as writers will feel for character and nuance like blindmen reading braille. What interested him most was the actual leaving ... the actual exhalation of the soul ... the exit from the body and what human beings knew as life and the passing into something else. What must it be like to feel yourself slipping away? Did you think it was a dream from which you would awake? Was the Christian devil there with his fork, ready to jam it through your shrieking soul and carry it down to hell like a piece of meat on a shish kebab? Was there joy? Did you know you were going? What is it that the eyes of the dying see?