Firestarter

by Stephen King

  Norville Bates had handed over the reins--and the responsibility--of the operation to A1 with genuine relief and with a question about the local and state police who had been rung in on the operation.

  "We're keeping this one dark for now," A1 said. "If we get them, we'll tell them they can fold their roadblocks. If we don't, we'll tell them to start moving in toward the center of the circle. But between you and me, if we can't handle them with sixteen men, we can't handle them, Norv."

  Norv sensed the mild rebuke and said no more. He knew it would be best to take the two of them with no outside interference, because Andrew McGee was going to have an unfortunate accident as soon as they got him. A fatal accident. With no bluesuits hanging around, it could happen that much sooner.

  Ahead of him and A1, the brakelights of OJ's car flashed briefly, and then the car turned onto a dirt road. The others followed.

  12

  "I don't understand any of this," Norma said. "Bobbi ... Charlie ... can't you calm down?"

  "You don't understand," Charlie said. Her voice was high and strangled. Looking at her made Irv jumpy. Her face was like that of a rabbit caught in a snare. She pulled free of Norma's arm and ran to her father, who put his hands on her shoulders.

  "I think they're going to kill you, Daddy," she said.

  "What?"

  "Kill you," she repeated. Her eyes were staring and glazed with panic. Her mouth worked frantically. "We have to run. We have to--"

  Hot. Too hot in here.

  He glanced to his left. Mounted on the wall between the stove and the sink was an indoor thermometer, the kind that can be purchased from any mail-order catalogue. At the bottom of this one, a plastic red devil with a pitchfork was grinning and mopping his brow. The motto beneath his cloven hooves read: HOT ENOUGH FOR YA?

  The mercury in the thermometer was slowly rising, an accusing red finger.

  "Yes, that's what they want to do," she said. "Kill you, kill you like they did Mommy, take me away, I won't, I won't let it happen, Iwon't let it--"

  Her voice was rising. Rising like a column of mercury.

  "Charlie! Watch what you're doing!"

  Her eyes cleared a little. Irv and his wife had drawn together.

  "Irv ... what--?"

  But Irv had seen Andy's glance at the thermometer, and suddenly he believed. It was hot in here now. Hot enough to sweat. The mercury in the thermometer stood just above ninety degrees.

  "Holy Jesus Christ," he said hoarsely. "Did she do that, Frank?"

  Andy ignored him. His hands were still on Charlie's shoulders. He looked into her eyes. "Charlie--do you think it's too late? How does it feel to you?"

  "Yes," she said. All the color was gone from her face. "They're coming up the dirt road now. Oh Daddy, I'm scared."

  "You can stop them, Charlie," he said quietly.

  She looked at him.

  "Yes," he said.

  "But--Daddy--it's bad. I know it is. I could kill them."

  "Yes," he said. "Maybe now it's kill or be killed. Maybe it's come down to that."

  "It's not bad?" Her voice was almost inaudible.

  "Yes," Andy said. "It is. Never kid yourself that it isn't. And don't do it if you can't handle it, Charlie. Not even for me."

  They looked at each other, eye to eye, Andy's eyes tired and bloodshot and frightened, Charlie's eyes wide, nearly hypnotized.

  She said: "If I do ... something ... will you still love me?"

  The question hung between them, lazily revolving.

  "Charlie," he said, "I'll always love you. No matter what."

  Irv had been at the window and now he crossed the room to them. "I think I got some tall apologizing to do," he said. "There's a whole line of cars coming up the road. I'll stand with you, if you want. I got my deer gun." But he looked suddenly frightened, almost sick.

  Charlie said: "You don't need your gun."

  She slipped out from under her father's hands and walked across to the screen door, in Norma Manders's knitted white sweater looking even smaller than she was. She let herself out.

  After a moment, Andy found his feet and went after her. His stomach felt frozen, as if he'd just gobbled a huge Dairy Queen cone in three bites. The Manderses stayed behind. Andy caught one last look at the man's baffled, frightened face, and a random thought--that'll teach you to pick up hitchhikers--darted across his consciousness.

  Then he and Charlie were on the porch, watching the first of the cars turn up the long driveway. The hens squawked and fluttered. In the barn, Bossy mooed again for someone to come and milk her. And thin October sunshine lay over the wooded ridges and autumn-brown fields of this small upstate-New York town. It had been almost a year of running, and Andy was surprised to find an odd sense of relief mixed in with his sharp terror. He had heard that in its extremity, even a rabbit will sometimes turn and face the dogs, driven back to some earlier, less meek nature at the instant before it must be torn apart.

  At any rate, it was good not to be running. He stood with Charlie, the sunshine mellow on her blond hair.

  "Oh Daddy," she moaned. "I can't hardly stand up."

  He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her more tightly against his side.

  The first car stopped at the head of the dooryard and two men got out.

  13

  "Hi, Andy," A1 Steinowitz said, and smiled. "Hi, Charlie." His hands were empty, but his coat was open. Behind him the other man stood alertly by the car, hands at his sides. The second car stopped behind the first and four more men spilled out. All the cars were stopping. all the men getting out. Andy counted a dozen and then stopped counting.

  "Go away," Charlie said. Her voice was thin and high in the cool early afternoon.

  "You've led us a merry chase," Al said to Andy. He looked at Charlie. "Honey, you don't have to--"

  "Goaway!" she screamed.

  A1 shrugged and smiled disarmingly. "Fraid I can't do that, honey. I have my orders. No one wants to hurt you or your daddy."

  "You liar! You're s'posed to kill him! I know it!"

  Andy spoke and was a little surprised to find that his voice was completely steady. "I advise you to do as my daughter says. You've surely been briefed enough to know why she's wanted. You know about the soldier at the airport."

  OJ and Norville Bates exchanged a sudden uneasy look.

  "If you'll just get in the car, we can discuss all of this," A1 said. "Honest to gosh, there's nothing going on here except--"

  "We know what's going on," Andy said.

  The men who had been in the last two or three cars were beginning to fan out and stroll, almost casually, toward the porch.

  "Please," Charlie said to the man with the strangely yellow face. "Don't make me do anything."

  "It's no good, Charlie," Andy said.

  Irv Manders came out onto the porch. "You men are trespassing," he said. "I want you to get the hell off my property."

  Three of the Shop men had come up the front steps of the porch and were now standing less than ten yards away from Andy and Charlie, to their left. Charlie threw them a warning, desperate glance and they stopped--for the moment.

  "We're government agents, sir," A1 Steinowitz said to Irv in a low courteous voice. "These two folks are wanted for questioning. Nothing more."

  "I don't care if they're wanted for assassinating the President," Irv said. His voice was high, cracking. "Show me your warrant or get the Christ off my property."

  "We don't need a warrant," A1 said. His voice was edged with steel now.

  "You do unless I woke up in Russia this morning," Irv said. "I'm telling you to get off, and you better get high-step-pin, mister. That's my last word on it."

  "Irv, come inside!" Norma cried.

  Andy could fed something building in the air, building up around Charlie like an electric charge. The hair on his arms suddenly began to stir and move, like kelp in an invisible tide. He looked down at her and saw her face, so small, now so strange.

 
; Its coming, he thought helplessly. It's coming, oh my God it really is.

  "Get out!" he shouted at A1. "Don't you understand what she's going to do? Can't you feel it? Don't be a fool, man!"

  "Please," A1 said. He looked at the three men standing at the far end of the porch and nodded to them imperceptibly. He looked back at Andy. "If we can only discuss this--"

  "Watch it, Frank!" Irv Manders screamed.

  The three men at the end of the porch suddenly charged at them, pulling their guns as they came. "Hold it, hold it!" one of them yelled. "Just stand still! Hands over your--"

  Charlie turned toward them. As she did so, half a dozen other men, John Mayo and Ray Knowles among them, broke for the porch's back steps with their guns drawn.

  Charlie's eyes widened a little, and Andy felt something hot pass by him in a warm puff of air.

  The three men at the front end of the porch had got halfway toward them when their hair caught on fire.

  A gun boomed, deafeningly loud, and a splinter of wood perhaps eight inches long jumped from one of the porch's supporting posts. Norma Manders screamed, and Andy flinched. But Charlie seemed not to notice. Her face was dreamy and thoughtful. A small Mona Lisa smile had touched the comers of her mouth.

  She's enjoying this, Andy thought with something like horror. Is that why she's so afraid of it? Because she likes it?

  Charlie was turning back toward A1 Steinowitz again. The three men he had sent running down toward Andy and Charlie from the front end of the porch had forgotten their duty to God, country, and the Shop. They were beating at the flames on their heads and yelling. The pungent smell of fried hair suddenly filled the afternoon.

  Another gun went off. A window shattered.

  "Not the girl!" A1 shouted. "Not the girl!"

  Andy was seized roughly. The porch swirled with a confusion of men. He was dragged toward the railing through the chaos. Then someone tried to pull him a different way. He felt like a tug-of-war rope.

  "Let him go!" Irv Manders shouted, bull-throated. "Let him--"

  Another gun went off and suddenly Norma was screaming again, screaming her husband's name over and over.

  Charlie was looking down at A1 Steinowitz, and suddenly the cold, confident look was gone from Al's face and he was in terror. His yellow complexion grew positively cheesy.

  "No, don't," he said in an almost conversational tone of voice. "Don't--"

  It was impossible to tell where the flames began. Suddenly his pants and his sportcoat were blazing. His hair was a burning bush. He backed up, screaming, bounced off the side of his car, and half-turned to Norville Bates, his arms stretched out.

  Andy felt that soft rush of heat again, a displacement of air, as if a hot slug thrown at rocket-speed had just passed his nose.

  A1 Steinowitz's face caught on fire.

  For a moment he was all there, screaming silently under a transparent caul of flame, and then his features were blending, merging, running like tallow. Norville shrank away from him. A1 Steinowitz was a flaming scarecrow. He staggered blindly down the driveway, waving his arms, and then collapsed facedown beside the third car. He didn't look like a man at all; he looked like a burning bundle of rags.

  The people on the porch had frozen, staring dumbly at this unexpected blazing development. The three men whose hair Charlie had fired had all managed to put themselves out. They were all going to look decidedly strange in the future (however short that might be); their hair, short by regulation, now looked like blackened, tangled clots of ash on top of their heads.

  "Get out," Andy said hoarsely. "Get out quickly. She's never done anything like this before and I don't know if she can stop."

  "I'm all right, Daddy," Charlie said. Her voice was calm, collected, and strangely indifferent. "Everything's okay."

  And that was when the cars began to explode.

  They all went up from the rear; later, when Andy replayed the incident at the Manders farm in his mind, he was quite sure of that. They all went up from the rear, where the gas tanks were.

  Al's light-green Plymouth went first, exploding with a muffled whrrr-rump! sound. A ball of flame rose from the back of the Plymouth, too bright to look at. The rear window blew in. The Ford John and Ray had come in went next, barely two seconds later. Hooks of metal whickered through the air and pattered on the roof.

  "Charlie!" Andy shouted. "Charlie, stop it!"

  She said in that same calm voice: "I can't."

  The third car went up.

  Someone ran. Someone else followed him. The men on the porch began to back away. Andy was tugged again, he resisted, and suddenly no one at all was holding him. And suddenly they were all running, their faces white, eyes stare-blind with panic. One of the men with the charred hair tried to vault over the railing, caught his foot, and fell headfirst into a small side garden where Norma had grown beans earlier in the year. The stakes for the beans to climb on were still there, and one of them rammed through this fellow's throat and came out the other side with a wet punching sound that Andy never forgot. He twitched in the garden like a landed trout, the bean-pole protruding from his neck like the shaft of an arrow, blood gushing down the front of his shirt as he made weak gargling sounds.

  The rest of the cars went up then like an ear-shattering string of firecrackers. Two of the fleeing men were tossed aside like ragdolls by the concussion, one of them on fire from the waist down, the other peppered with bits of safety glass.

  Dark, oily smoke rose in the air. Beyond the driveway, the far hills and fields twisted and writhed through the heat-shimmer as if recoiling in horror. Chickens ran madly everywhere, clucking crazily. Suddenly three of them exploded into flame and went rushing off, balls of fire with feet, to collapse on the far side of the dooryard.

  "Charlie, stop it right now! Stop it!"

  A trench of fire raced across the dooryard on a diagonal, the very dirt blazing in a single straight line, as if a train of gunpowder had been laid. The flame reached the chopping block with Irv's ax buried in it, made a fairy-ring around it, and suddenly collapsed inward. The chopping block whooshed into flame.

  "CHARLIE FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!"

  Some Shop agent's pistol was lying on the verge of the grass between the porch and the blazing line of cars in the driveway. Suddenly the cartridges in it began to go off in a series of sharp, clapping explosions. The gun jigged and flipped bizarrely in the grass.

  Andy slapped her as hard as he could.

  Her head rocked back, her eyes blue and vacant. Then she was looking at him, surprised and hurt and dazed, and he suddenly felt enclosed in a capsule of swiftly building heat. He took in a breath of air that felt like heavy glass. The hairs on his nose felt as if they were crisping.

  Spontaneous combustion, he thought. I'm going up in a burst of spontaneous combustion--

  Then it was gone.

  Charlie staggered on her feet and put her hands up to her face. And then, through her hands, came a shrill, building scream of such horror and dismay that Andy feared her mind had cracked.

  "DAAAAADEEEEEEEE--"

  He swept her into his arms, hugged her.

  "Shh," he said. "Oh Charlie, honey, shhhh."

  The scream stopped, and she went limp in his arms. Charlie had fainted.

  14

  Andy picked her up in his arms and her head rolled limply against his chest. The air was hot and rich with the smell of burning gasoline. Flames had already crawled across the lawn to the ivy trellis; fingers of fire began to climb the ivy with the agility of a boy on midnight business. The house was going to go up.

  Irv Manders was leaning against the kitchen screen door, his legs splayed. Norma knelt beside him. He had been shot above the elbow, and the sleeve of his blue workshirt was a bright red. Norma had torn a long strip of her dress off at the hem and was trying to get his shirtsleeve up so she could bind the wound. Irv's eyes were open. His face was an ashy gray, his lips were faintly blue, and he was breathing fast.

  Andy t
ook a step toward them and Norma Manders flinched backward, at the same time placing her body over her husband's. She looked up at Andy with shiny, hard eyes.

  "Get away," she hissed. "Take your monster and get away."

  15

  OJ ran.

  The Windsucker bounced up and down under his arm as he ran. He ignored the road as he ran. He ran in the field. He fell down and got up and ran on. He twisted his ankle in what might have been a chuckbole and fell down again, a scream jerking out of his mouth as he sprawled. Then he got up and ran on. At times it seemed that he was running alone, and at times it seemed that someone was running with him. It didn't matter. All that mattered was getting away, away from that blazing bundle of rags that had been A1 Steinowitz ten minutes before, away from that burning train of can, away from Bruce Cook who lay in a small garden patch with a stake in his throat. Away, away, away. The Windsucker fell out of its holster, struck his knee painfully, and fell in a tangle of weeds, forgotten. Then OJ was in a patch of woods. He stumbled over a fallen tree and sprawled full length. He lay there, breathing raggedly, one hand pressed to his side, where a painful stitch had formed. He lay weeping tears of shock and fear. He thought: No more assignments in New York. Never. That's it. Everybody out of the pool. I'm never setting foot in New York again even if I live to be two hundred.

  After a little while OJ got up and began to limp toward the road.

  16

  "Let's get him off the porch," Andy said. He had laid Charlie on the grass beyond the dooryard. The side of the house was burning now, and sparks were drifting down on the porch like big, slow-moving fireflies.

  "Get away," she said harshly. "Don't touch him."

  "The house is burning," Andy said. "Let me help you."

  "Get away! You've done enough!"

  "Stop it, Norma." Irv looked at her. "None of what happened was this man's fault. So shut your mouth."

  She looked at him as if she had a great many things to say, and then shut her mouth with a snap.