Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  There had been no lies, no manipulation, no calculation. He had been honest, and everything was just fine.

  It was a new day. He swore to make it a memorable one. He thought of the journal given him by Kelly Kerrigan, and laughed to himself. All thoughts of murder and conspiracy and Pulitzers seemed very far away now, vanquished by the power in one small woman’s dark eyes. He would get to it soon—perhaps by lunchtime he could begin.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF ALEXANDER MARCUS

  I spent a week in San Francisco, during which I was subjected to every non-invasive indignity imaginable. I answered thousands of questions, while leashed to EEGs, lie-detector-type devices, CAT scans and machines that, I was told, measured my brain waves from beta to theta.

  I performed the Chen style tai chi form, two sword forms and a Shotokan sanchin form I learned decades ago in a Chicago YMCA. My knees, elbows, shoulders, head, hips, knees, and ankles were marked with reflective tape. They said that computers were making a thorough model of my movement patterns and coordinating them with my breathing, heartbeat rates, and blood pressure.

  For dozens of hours I engaged in spontaneous discourse on subjects from economics to Bobby Fischer to Buckminster Fuller, while lights measured my eye motion and pupillary dilation. I cannot remember all of the things that were done during that time, but I ended every day exhausted.

  I knew only that they were attempting to gain as precise a picture as possible of my every thought and feeling. In future, they said, they would perform the same series of tests on a variety of people, and collate the results to determine which factors were consistent to successful types, and never or rarely found in those who have not experienced high-level success in multiple areas of their lives. The discovery of these core motion patterns, emotional sets and mental stratagems would allow Advanced Systems to transfer excellence from one individual to another “without simultaneously transferring non-essential, peripheral or undesirable traits.”

  Luckily, they said (and there was a great deal of good-natured jollity at this) in their initial role model they had found someone who needed very little of this filtering to insure a clean and positive transference to the proposed targets.

  78

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 4

  At approximately 1 P.M., a small fire in the Mingus Mountain area attracted the attention of the Prescott National Forest’s fire company. Their trucks traversed the narrow wooded trails and deployed effectively against a blaze that seemed to have been triggered by a common road flare, ignited and left in a tangle of brush, perhaps as some kind of sick prank.

  There was no emergency, no need to call units from further away. It might take an hour or two to get things under control, but everything was just fine.

  The identity of the person reporting the fire was never determined.

  79

  For the past hour the Whites and Greens had expended gigawatts of energy, playing a good, tough, fair game of touch football out on the soccer field. Sand found the spectacle intoxicating, enough to make his heart beat faster and trigger a longing to find some pretext to get into the game himself. Only the spectacle of a middle-aged man huffing and puffing and crumbling from a heart attack kept him on a leash.

  Vivian seemed to sense his thoughts. “Youth is wasted on the young,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “And wisdom is wasted on the old.” There followed a brief string of free-associations, and he found himself ruminating about Marcus. He had read two hundred pages into Marcus’s autobiography during the night, and while it had been fascinating, the pages had concealed no earthshaking revelations. This seemed like a good time to stretch out, watch the game, enjoy Vivian’s company, and maybe get some more pages under his belt. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  As they walked back toward the cabins, the camp’s single public phone, an unsheltered General Telephone hookup next to the craft center, bleated in mechanical irritation.

  “Excuse me,” Vivian said. “I have to get this.” She lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

  In five seconds, her expression went from jovial to puzzled. She handed the receiver to Renny. “It’s for you.”

  That caught him completely off guard. Who the devil knew he was here? He could only think of one person. “Hello? Kelly?”

  “No, not Kelly, Mr. Sand.” The voice was a man’s, one he had never heard before. “Kelly is probably dead by now. You, on the other hand, have an opportunity to live.”

  Sand heard his own breath reverberating in the receiver. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

  “Your apartment? Already cleaned out. Computer? Gone.”

  Sand felt frozen in place. “Who is this?”

  “Come now, Renny,” the voice chided. “You know who this is.”

  Did he know? Did this have to do with the story? It must. Then Marcus had shared his secret with at least one confidant.

  But not alone, Mr. Sand.

  “What do you want from me?”

  Cold eyes in a long-ago reception line. Cold eyes on the street of Diablo, set within a black parody of a sheriff’s garb.

  I think D’Angelo is sheriffing out west somewhere.

  “D’Angelo?”

  “Excellent. You really are quite intelligent, and have made a good beginning. Don’t squander it with stupidity. None of the children have to get hurt, if you answer my question: What is the password for your computer files?”

  “What?”

  “I need to know who you talked to. If you haven’t shared your suspicions with anyone else, it can end now. But for me to know that, I have to place those lovely children at risk. Do you know what a high-powered rifle would do to, say, the little blond girl in red playing football right now?”

  He saw the girl in red. He’d met Jessica last night, a darling possessed of boundless energy, idolized by a stubby kid named Frankie. “You wouldn’t,” he said. Then, despising the note of desperation in his voice, he said, “You can’t.”

  “Watch the stump to your right,” D’Angelo said.

  Not ten yards away, a can of Diet Coke sat on a severed pine stump. Without warning of any kind, the can exploded, flew into the air spraying soda, and bounced against the ground, leaking.

  Not one of the kids noticed. The game continued.

  “Tell me the code word, Mr. Sand. I will check. If it’s correct, our business is complete. You, and that lovely lady at your side? And the children? None of them will be hurt. I need an answer. Now.”

  Vivian was talking to the chunky kid named Bucky, and had noticed none of this. Sand scanned the woods, sick with fury that he had brought danger to these innocents.

  “I’m not a patient man, Mr. Sand.”

  “You helped him kill those women, didn’t you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Reporter’s curiosity?”

  “Human curiosity. I see a creature like you, and I want to understand.”

  A soft chuckle. “Some times you learn things about yourself you didn’t know. Alexander and I discovered that soon after we first met.”

  “In Vietnam?”

  “You have a decent memory. Yes. We were both involved in prisoner interrogation. A female prisoner. We found we liked it very much. The war ended, but our games didn’t have to.”

  Sand’s head was starting to pound. “Oh, God.”

  “Yes,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “Very much like that.”

  “And when the other Praetorians discovered Marcus, you convinced them that it was just him, and they helped you kill him.”

  “I’ve satisfied your curiosity, Mr. Sand. Satisfy mine. Or I’ll turn the little girl’s head into a piñata.”

  “Wait—”

  “Five seconds, Mr. Sand. Four, three, two—”

  “Mijenix.”

  “What?”

  “M.I.J.E.N.I.X. It’s the name of the utility software I use to maintain the computer.”
>
  Soft laughter on the other end. “Please wait.”

  Sand’s blood roared in his ears. He looked out at the field, wondering if it would be the last thing he would ever see. Certainly they would kill him. They had his computer, but the information in his head wouldn’t just go away. Or would they attempt murder in front of so many witnesses?

  After a gut-wrenching delay, the voice came back on line.

  “Very good, Mr. Sand. Our business is now complete.”

  He gritted his teeth, waiting for the spine-smashing blow. “And now?”

  “Have a warm day, Mr. Sand.”

  The phone clicked dead. He exited the booth, looking around, wondering if a bullet was going to shatter his spine. If a clear blue sky, a soccer game, the concerned and beautiful face of Vivian Emory would be the last things he ever saw in this world.

  He waited. Nothing.

  Vivian said, “What was that?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. Sand desperately needed time to think. What the hell was going on? A bluff?

  Fresh from the game and perspiring prettily, Courtney ran to the phone. She picked up the receiver, started to dial, and then held it away from her as if it were a snake. The youngster looked up with disappointment.

  “Hey,” she said. “It’s dead!”

  For the rest of his life, the next few moments would be indelibly inscribed on the inside of Renny’s skull. Everything seemed sharper, more vital. The kids on the sports field, the shingle-roofed cabins, the wisp of smoke drifting up from the kitchen. The walls of the hillsides, which now, almost irrationally, seemed like a trap.

  He detected a distant whizzing sound. Afterwards, he savagely castigated himself for not recognizing it.

  Vivian placed it first. “A little early for fireworks, isn’t it?” she said.

  And then the gates of hell opened.

  80

  Clearly now, Renny could hear the whirling and sputtering of skyrockets and pinwheels, some two hundred meters below the camp.

  Mr. Withers ran out of one of the Kiowa bunkhouses, where he had been making ceiling repairs. “What the hell…?” His tanned face reddened, and his jaw clinched tightly. He was so enraged that he seemed almost to have entered a state of wonderment. “What kind of goddamn idiot!?”

  As it did every day at two o’clock, the afternoon wind was blowing up the Folly’s south face. Although the wind was moving swiftly, in the landscape of Renny’s mind, the leaves and bits of grass tumbled in almost grotesquely slow motion.

  He stood, rooted in place with alarm. Renny heard the fireworks whistle and buzz, his mind still grappling with the implications of Withers’s anger. What kind of homicidal idiot would set off fireworks during the day? In a mass of shredded tinder? At a bone-dry children’s summer camp?

  What kind of idiot, indeed?

  * * *

  The afternooner swept the sparks up into the dry, waist-high grass below the camp.

  Several of the kids took halting steps down toward the fire, but Denise and Jason held them back.

  His marathoner’s legs pumping madly, Ocean sprinted to the road, seeking and gaining a better vantage point. The grass below them churned with white smoke. Red at the roots, it clawed steadily towards them. In the two minutes since smoke first began to curl skyward, the fire had grown to a front almost thirty feet deep and a hundred feet long, accelerating even as they watched, a few sparks transformed in mere seconds into a mindless, eyeless, flaming amoeba.

  Ocean ran closer, trotting this way and that, searching for a route back down the access road. Coughing violently, he was finally driven back by smoke that chewed at his eyes and lungs with burning teeth. Nowhere was the grass more than three feet high, but that actually worsened the situation: the fire raced along the blade-tips. It roared at them with its ravenous, unliving laughter.

  The brush fire fed the bone-dry knotted and snarled timber, each layer of fire pre-heating the fuel above it, transforming the scrub grass into a crawling, twisting, blazing maze. Superheated air rose and was funneled by the ridges to east and west, driven by the wind like steam channeled through a whistling teakettle’s narrow spout. The fire accelerated up the twenty-five percent grade as the air compressed and then exploded out again, sealing the narrow dirt road with a blistering wall of heat. Again Ocean attempted to brave it, and was driven back by what felt like a demonic, flaming hand.

  Del Withers fished the keys to his dusty old Dodge Dart from his pocket, and rounded up five of the closest kids, including Rory and Bucky. Bucky’s pink punk-spiked head swiveled back and forth frantically as he watched the fire approach. Withers herded them into his car, yelling, “Come on! Pile in!” He threw his wife the keys, and said: “You get them out of here, Diane. Get some help. The phones are dead.”

  She gave him a swift, solid kiss. “You take care of yourself, and get these kids up to the lake.”

  “Just get the hell out of here!”

  Without another word Diane backed the car up, and made a Y-turn, heading back down the narrow road, directly into the fire. Bucky stared back at them through the rear window, his pink hair no longer defiant or outrageous, merely a pitiful contrast to his whey-pale complexion.

  Renny watched carefully, holding his breath. Success for Diane would bode well for the rest of the camp. The car rolled on, apparently unaffected by the fire, and his hopes swelled. They were going to make it!

  The car rolled fifteen feet through the flames, then there was an odd sound, something completely, terribly out of place. A chuk-ing sound like rock hitting glass.

  The Dart slewed sideways into a ditch, instantly swathed by flames. He heard the screams of the trapped children as the flames closed in from all sides.

  The soccer game had long since ended. All the campers now gathered, staring down the hill into the fire, sniffing the smoke, their eyes tearing less from irritation than fear.

  Courtney sheltered her eyes against the gusts, gazing down at the blazing car. “Oh God,” she mouthed, but no sound passed her lips.

  The trapped children’s screams escalated until they barely seemed human at all. They uttered animal sounds, now, crying and cursing and begging, all intertwined in a pain-wracked cacophony. The smoke shifted for an instant, and they could see Bucky pounding his clenched fists madly against the glass.

  “Diane!” Withers screamed, and stumbled down the grade after her. Ocean tried to stop him, but Withers shook his hands off and picked his way down into the fire, staggering on unsteady legs. At first he seemed able to avoid the pockets of fire, reading the wind shifts and holding the tail of his shirt to his face, filtering enough breathable air to keep moving.

  Renny watched leaves swirl as the wind shifted, watched the fire close in around him, heard Del Withers scream and stagger but not fall, heard the desolate wail of the trapped children. Withers reeled back, hands protecting his eyes from flare and heat as the Dart’s gas tank detonated with a deafening roar. He was briefly, horribly outlined in flame, then he disappeared as flaming fuel showered everywhere and curled into a fireball.

  Burning bits of glass and steel showered around them, spreading the fire even further and faster. Smoke gushed toward the camp as the bleeding, smoking, starving thing crawled toward them.

  For a few seconds no one spoke, and then one of the boys whimpered. “Julie…?” he called questioningly. Then he screamed it. “Julie!!”

  The kids broke, and ran scrambling and screaming in three directions: to their cabins, toward the valley walls, toward the distant, hoped-for safety of Charisma Lake.

  Janie grabbed at Clint’s arm, but the boy twisted himself free. “Gotta get my stuff!”

  Behind Renny, Vivian screamed, “Patrick! Patrick! Come here now!” When there was no reply, she ran toward the cabins.

  Paris struggled to herd the kids into a manageable formation, fought to keep them calm and alert, but for once the campers’ odd bond of discipline seemed to have gone completely to hell.

  Renny
was forced to grab two of the smaller kids by the waist. Screaming and struggling, they fought him until he screamed “shut up!”, which finally bought him a moment’s peace. Which way? Toward the lake seemed most reasonable, but did that make it safest? They had to move, that was certain: the heat was so intense that his shirt was starting to smoke. Move! Move! His mind screamed at him, instincts older than conscious thought warring with higher brain functions.

  The lizard-mind won. Dragging the pair, he headed north, across the soccer field.

  * * *

  Gagging on smoke, Courtney tried to unwrap a garden hose from the side of the mess hall and play it out on the fire as it licked its way around the wooden panels. It had already crept around the other side, and was now tonguing the propane tanks behind her.

  She seemed frozen there on the spot, waving a long wavering finger of water at the approaching flame as if making some kind of mystical gesture, not seeing that the fire, craftier than she and sensing helpless prey, had almost completely encircled her.

  Ocean tried to pull her away, and she fought with him, struggled with him as if he were the enemy, not the faceless, armless horror between Courtney and the only route of escape.

  “Come on, damn it!” he screamed. Courtney clawed at his face, strained against him, then convulsed and ceased resistance to lay panting in his grasp like a panicked woodland creature.

  “Someone has to try. I think that—”

  Those words, and a metallic screech that raised the hair on the back of his neck, were the last sounds Ocean ever heard.

  Due to faulty thinking during the original set-up procedures, the twin propane tanks shared by kitchen and shower rooms were positioned to vent against each other. The valves screamed in protest, and then one of them ruptured, triggering the reaction known as a Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion. The BLEVE gushed a seething wall of flaming gas, which rolled out and caught Ocean like a scrap of driftwood in a tidal wave. His flayed body cushioned Courtney from the blast. She was tumbled into the bushes surrounding the fire pit, but Ocean, hair and clothing aflame, was hurled thirty feet against the wall of the craft center.