Firestarter

by Stephen King

  Rainbird bought none of it. It wasn't the drugs, it wasn't being locked up and watched constantly, it wasn't being separated from her father.

  She was just tough, that was all.

  She had made up her mind somewhere along the line that she wasn't going to cooperate, no matter what. The end. Toot finnee. The psychiatrists could run around showing her inkblots until the moon was blue, the doctors could play with her medication and mutter in their beards about the difficulty of successfully drugging an eight-year-old girl. The papers could pile up and Cap could rave on.

  And Charlie McGee would simply go on toughing it out.

  Rainbird sensed it as surely as he sensed the coming of rain this afternoon. And he admired her for it. She had the whole bunch of them chasing their tails, and if it was left up to them they would still be chasing their tails when Thanksgiving and then Christmas rolled around. But they wouldn't chase their tails forever, and this more than anything worried John Rainbird.

  Rammaden, the safecracker, had told an amusing story about two thieves who had broken into a supermarket one Friday night when they knew a snowstorm had kept the Wells Fargo truck from arriving and taking the heavy end-of-the-week receipts to the bank. The safe was a barrel box. They tried to drill out the combination dial with no success. They had tried to peel it but had been totally unable to bend back a corner and get a start. Finally they had blown it. That was a total success. They blew that barrel wide open, so wide open in fact that all the money inside had been totally destroyed. What was left had looked like the shredded money you sometimes see in those novelty pens.

  "The point is," Rammaden had said in his dry and wheezing voice, "those two thieves didnt beat the safe. The whole game is beating the safe. You don't beat the safe unless you can take away what was in it in usable condition, you get my point? They overloaded it with soup. They killed the money. They were assholes and the safe beat them."

  Rainbird had got the point.

  There were better than sixty college degrees in on this, but it still came down to safecracking. They had tried to drill the girl's combination with their drugs; they had enough shrinks to field a softball team, and these shrinks were all doing their best to resolve the "basic fire conflict"; and all that particular pile of horseapples boiled down to was that they were trying to peel her from the back.

  Rainbird entered the small Quonset hut, took his time card from the rack, and punched in. T. B. Norton, the shift supervisor, looked up from the paperback he was reading.

  "No overtime for punching in early, Injun."

  "Yeah?" Rainbird said.

  "Yeah." Norton stared at him challengingly, full of the grim, almost holy assurance that so often goes with petty authority.

  Rainbird dropped his eyes and went over to look at the bulletin board. The orderlies' bowling team had won last night. Someone wanted to sell "2 good used washing machines." An official notice proclaimed that ALL w-1 THROUGH W-6 WORKERS MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE LEAVING THIS OFFICE.

  "Looks like rain," he said over his shoulder to Norton.

  "Never happen, Injun," Norton said. "Why don't you blow? You're stinking the place up."

  "Sure, boss," Rainbird said. "Just clockin in."

  "Well next time clock in when you're spozed to."

  "Sure, boss," Rainbird said again, going out, sparing one glance at the side of Norton's pink neck, the soft spot just below the jawbone. Would you have time to scream, boss? Would you have time to scream if I just stuck my forefinger through your throat at that spot? Just like a skewer through a piece of steak ... boss.

  He went back out into the muggy heat. The thunderheads were close now, moving slowly, bowed down with their weight of rain. It was going to be a hard storm. Thunder muttered, still distant.

  The house was close now. Rainbird would go around to the side entrance, what had once been the pantry, and take C elevator down four levels. Today he was supposed to wash and wax all the floors in the girl's quarters; it would give him a good shot. And it wasn't that she was unwilling to talk with him; it wasn't that. It was just that she was always so damned distant. He was trying to peel the box in his own way, and if he could get her to laugh, just once get her to laugh, to share a joke with him at the Shop's expense, it would be like prying up that one vital comer. It would give him a place to set his chisel. Just that one laugh. It would make them insiders together, it would make them a committee in secret session. Two against the house.

  But so far he hadn't been able to get that one laugh, and Rainbird admired her for that more than he could have said.

  2

  Rainbird put his ID card in the proper slot and then went down to the orderlies' station to grab a cup of coffee before going on. He didn't want coffee, but it was still early. He couldn't afford to let his eagerness show; it was bad enough that Norton had noticed and commented on it.

  He poured himself a slug of mud from the hotplate and sat down with it. At least none of the other nerds had arrived yet. He sat down on the cracked and sprung gray sofa and drank his coffee. His blasted face (and Charlie had shown nothing but the most passing interest in that) was calm and impassive. His thoughts ran on, analyzing the situation as it now stood.

  The staff on this were like Rammaden's green safecrackers in the supermarket office. They were handling the girl with kid gloves now, but they weren't doing it out of any love for the girL Sooner or later they would decide that the kid gloves were getting them nowhere, and when they ran out of "soft" options, they would decide to blow the safe. When they did, Rainbird was almost sure that they would "kill the money," in Rammaden's pungent phrase.

  Already he had seen the phrase "light shock treatments" in two of the doctors' reports--and one of the doctors had been Pynchot, who had Hockstetter's ear. He had seen a contingency report that had been couched in such stultifying jargon that it was nearly another language. Translated, what it boiled down to was a lot of strongarm stuff: if the kid sees her dad in enough pain, she'll break. What Rainbird thought the kid might do if she saw her dad hooked up to a Delco battery and doing a fast polka with his hair on end was to go calmly back to her room, break a waterglass, and eat the pieces.

  But you couldn't tell them that. The Shop, like the FBI and CIA, had a long history of killing the money. If you can't get what you want with foreign aid, go in there with some Thompsons and gelignite and assassinate the bastard. Put some cyanide gas in Castro's cigars. It was crazy, but you couldn't tell them that. All they could see were RESULTS, glittering and blinking like some mythical Vegas jackpot. So they killed the money and stood there with a bunch of useless green scraps sifting through their fingers and wondered what the hell had happened.

  Now other orderlies began to drift in, joking, smacking each other on the fat part of the arm, talking about the strikes they made and the spares they converted the night before, talking about women, talking about cars, talking about getting shitfaced. The same old stuff that went on even unto the end of the world, hallelujah, amen. They steered clear of Rainbird. None of them liked Rainbird. He didn't bowl and he didn't want to talk about his car and he looked like a refugee from a Frankenstein movie. He made them nervous. If one of them had smacked him on the heavy part of the arm, Rainbird would have put him in traction.

  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 go down to the girl's quarters.

  All things taken together, he felt better, more alive, than he had in years. He realized 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 mes
sage, 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 ekies over the Longmont complex were low and black. Thunder rolled more and more heavily, gaining assurance, making believers out of the people below. The groundskeepers 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 Foto-Kwik 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 Bowerbeds--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 or 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.

  The Shop didn't get its power back until the Briska station came on line again ... which is to say, at the same time the rest of eastern Virginia got its juice back--around midnight.

  By. then, the next links had already been forged. As a result of the storm and the blackout, something tremendous had happened to both Andy and Charlie McGee, although neither of them had the slightest idea of what had happened to the other.

  After five months of stasis, things had begun to roll onward again.

  4

  When the power went off, Andy McGee was watching The PTL Club on TV. The PTL stood for "Praise the Lord." On one of the Virginia stations, The PTL Club seemed to run continuously, twenty-four hours a day. This was probably not the case, but Andy's perceptions of time had become so screwed up it was hard to tell.

  He had put on weight. Sometimes--more often when he was straight--he would catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror and think of Elvis Presley and the way the man had softly ballooned near the end of his life. At other times, he would think of the way a tomcat that had been "fixed" would sometimes get fat and lazy.

  He wasn't fat yet, but he was getting there. In Hastings Glen, he had weighed himself on the bathroom scale in the Slumberland Motel and had come in at one-sixty-two. These days he was tipping the scales at about one-ninety. His cheeks were fuller, and he had the suggestion of a double chin and what his old high-school gym teacher used to call (with utter contempt) "man-tits." And more than a suggestion of a gut. There was not much exercise--or much urge to exercise while in the grip of a solid Thorazine high--and the food was very good.

  He did not worry about his weight when he was high, and that was most of the time. When they were ready to make some more of their fruitless tests, they would iron him out over an eighteen-hour period, a doctor would test his physical reactions, an EEG would be taken to make sure his brainwaves were nice and sharp, and then he would be taken into a testing cubicle, which was a small white room with drilled-cork paneling.

  They had begun, back in April, with human volunteers. They told him what to do and told him that if he did anything overenthusiastic--like striking someone blind, for instance--that he would be made to suffer. An undertone to this threat was that he might not suffer alone. This threat struck Andy as an empty one; he didn't believe that they would really harm Charlie. She was their prize pupil. He was very much the B feature on the program.

  The doctor in charge of testing him was a man named Herman Pynchot. He was in his late thirties and perfectly ordinary except for the fact that he grinned too much. Sometimes all that grinning made Andy nervous. Occasionally an older doctor named Hockstetter would drop by, but mostly it was Pynchot.

  Pynchot told him as they approached the first test that there was a table in the small testing room. On this table was a bottle of grape Kool-Aid, labeled INK, a fountain pen in a stand, a pad of notepaper, a p
itcher of water, and two glasses. Pynchot told him that the volunteer would have no idea that there was anything other than ink in the ink bottle. Pynchot further told Andy that they would be grateful if he would "push" the volunteer into pouring himself a glass of water, then dumping a goodish quantity of the "ink" into it, and then quaffing the whole mess.

  "Neat," Andy said. He himself had not been feeling so neat. He missed his Thorazine and the peace that it brought.

  "Very neat," Pynchot said. "Will you do it?"

  "Why should I?"

  "You'll get something in return. Something nice."

  "Be a good rat and you get the cheese," Andy said. "Right?"

  Pynchot shrugged and grinned. His smock was screamingly neat; it looked as if it might have been tailored by Brooks Brothers.

  "All right," Andy said. "I give up. What's my prize for making this poor sucker drink ink?"

  "Well, you can go back to taking your pills, for one thing."

  Suddenly it was a little hard to swallow, and he wondered if Thorazine was addicting, and if it was, if the addiction was psychological or physiological. "Tell me, Pynchot," he said.

  "How does it feel to be a pusher? Is that in the Hippocratic oath?"

  Pynchot shrugged and grinned. "You also get to go outdoors for a while," he said. "I believe you've expressed an interest in that?"

  Andy had. His quarters were nice--so nice you could sometimes almost forget they were nothing but a padded jail cell. There were three rooms plus a bath; there was a color TV equipped with Home Box Office, where a new choice of three recent films appeared each week. One of the munchkins--possibly it had been Pynchot--must have pointed out that there was no use taking away his belt and giving him only Crayolas to write with and plastic spoons to eat with. If he wanted to commit suicide, there was just no way they could stop him. If he pushed hard enough and long enough, he would simply blow his brain like an old tire.