by Stephen King
What OJ wanted more than anything at that point in time was to find a deep hole and pull it over him.
14
Cap Hollister had heard very little of the three-way conversation between Charlie, her father, and Rainbird. He was on hold, his old orders completed, no new ones yet issued. The sounds of the talk flowed meaninglessly over his head and he was free to think of his golf game, and snakes, and nine irons, and boa constrictors, and mashies, and timber rattlers, and niblicks, and pythons big enough to swallow a goat whole. He did not like this place. It was full of loose hay that reminded him of the way the rough on a golf course smelled. It had been in the hay that his brother had been bitten by a snake when Cap himself was only three, it wasn't a very dangerous snake, but his big brother had screamed, he had screamed, and there had been the smell of hay, the smell of clover, the smell of timothy, and his big brother was the strongest, bravest boy in the world but now he was screaming, big, tough, nine-year-old Leon Hollister was screaming "Go get Daddy!" and tears were running down his cheeks as he held his puffing leg between his hands and as three-year-old Cap Hollister turned to do what his brother said, terrified and blubbering, it had slithered over his foot, his own foot, like deadly green water--and later the doctor had said the bite wasn't dangerous, that the snake must have bitten something else only a little while before and exhausted its poison sac, but Lennie thought he was dying and everywhere had been the sweet summer smell of grass and the hoppers were jumping, making their eternal rickety-rickety sound and spitting tobacco juice ("Spit and I'll let you go" had been the cry in those long-ago Nebraska days); good smells, good sounds, golf-course smells and sounds, and the screaming of his brother and the dry, scaly feel of the snake, looking down and seeing its flat, triangular head, its black eyes ... the snake had slithered across Cap's foot on its way back into the high grass ... back into the rough, you might say ... and the smell had been like this ... and he didn't like this place.
Four irons and adders and putters and copperheads--
Faster and faster now the ricochet bounded back and forth, and Cap's eyes moved vacuously around the shadowy stable while John Rainbird confronted the McGees. Eventually his eyes fixed upon the partially fused green plastic hose by the burst waterpipe. It hung in coils on its peg, still partially obscured by the last of the drifting steam.
Terror flashed up in him suddenly, as explosive as flames in an old blowdown. For a moment the terror was so great that he could not even breathe, let alone cry a warning. His muscles were frozen, locked.
Then they let go. Cap drew in a great lungful of breath in a convulsive, heaving lurch and let out an earsplitting, sudden scream. "Snake! SNAKE! SANAAYYYKE!"
He did not run away. Even reduced as he was, it wasn't in Cap Hollister to run. He lurched forward like a rusty automaton and seized a rake that was leaning against the wall. It was a snake and he would beat it and break it and crush it. He would ... would ...
He would save Lennie!
He rushed at the partially fused hose, brandishing the rake.
Then things happened very fast.
15
The agents, most of them armed with handguns, and the gardeners, most of them with rifles, were converging on the low L-shaped stable in a rough circle when the screaming began. A moment later there was a heavy thudding sound and what might have been a muffled cry of pain. Only a second later there was a low ripping sound, then a muted report that was surely a silenced revolver.
The circle around the stable paused and then began to move inward once more.
16
Cap's scream and sudden dash for the rake only broke Rainbird's concentration for a moment, but a moment was enough. The gun jerked away from Andy's head toward Cap; it was an instinctive movement, the quick and alert shift of a hunting tiger in the jungle. And so it was that his keen instincts betrayed him and caused him to tumble off the thin edge he had walked so long.
Andy used the push just as quickly and just as instinctively. When the gun jerked toward Cap, he called up to Rainbird, "Jump!" and pushed harder than he ever had in his life. The pain that ripped through his head like splintering shards of shrapnel was sickening in its force, and he felt something give, finally and irrevocably.
Blowout, he thought. The thought was thick and sludgy. He staggered back. The entire left side of his body had gone numb. His left leg no longer wanted to hold him.
(it finally came it's a blowout damn thing finally let go)
Rainbird pushed himself away from the edge of the overhead loft with one hard thrust of his arms. His face was almost comically surprised. He held onto his gun; even when he hit the floor badly and sprawled forward with a broken leg, he held onto the gun. He could not stifle a cry of pain and bewilderment, but he held onto the gun.
Cap had reached the green hose and was beating it wildly with the rake. His mouth worked, but no sound came out--only a fine spray of spit.
Rainbird looked up. His hair had fallen over his face. He jerked his head to flip it out of his line of sight. His one eye glimmered. His mouth was drawn down in a bitter line. He raised the gun and pointed it at Andy.
"No!" Charlie screamed. "No!"
Rainbird fired, and smoke belched from the vents of the silencer. The bullet dug bright, fresh splinters beside Andy's lolling head. Rainbird braced one arm on the floor and fired again. Andy's head snapped viciously to the right, and blood flew from the left side of his neck in a flood.
"No!" Charlie screamed again, and clapped her hands to her face. "Daddy! Daddy!"
Rainbird's hand slid out from under him; long splinters whispered into the palm of his hand.
"Charlie," he murmured. "Charlie, look at me."
17
They ringed the outside of the stable now and paused, uncertain of just how to handle this.
"The girl," Jules said. "We rub her--"
"No!" the girl screamed from inside, as if she had heard what Jules had planned. Then: "Daddy! Daddy!"
Then there was another report, this one much louder, and a sudden, vicious flash that made them shade their eyes. A wave of heat rolled out of the open stable doors, and the men standing in front reeled back from it.
Smoke came next, smoke and the red glimmer of fire.
Somewhere inside that infant hell, horses began to scream.
18
Charlie ran for her father, her mind in a horrified whirl, and when Rainbird spoke, she did turn toward him. He was sprawled on his belly, trying to steady the gun with both hands.
Incredibly, he was smiling.
"There," he croaked. "So I can see your eyes. I love you, Charlie."
And he fired.
The power leaped crazily out of her, totally out of control. On its way to Rainbird, it vaporized the chunk of lead that otherwise would have buried itself in her brain. For a moment it seemed that a high wind was rippling Rainbird's clothes--and those of Cap behind him--and that nothing else was happening. But it was not just clothes that were rippling; it was the flesh itself, rippling, running like tallow, and then being hurled off bones that were already charring and blackening and flaming.
There was a soundless flashgun sizzle of light that momentarily blinded her; she saw no more but could hear the horses in their stalls, going mad with fear ... and she could smell smoke.
The horses! The horses! she thought, groping in the dazzle before her eyes. It was her dream. It was changed, but it was here. And suddenly, momentarily, she was back in the Albany airport, a little girl who had been two inches shorter and ten pounds lighter and ever so much more innocent, a little girl with a shopping bag scavenged from a wastecan, going from phonebooth to phonebooth, shoving at them, the silver cascading out of the coin returns....
She shoved now, almost blindly, groping with her mind for what she needed to do.
A ripple ran along the doors of the stalls that formed the L's long side. The latches fell, smoking, to the board floor one after another, twisted out of shape by the heat.
The skirmish line of Shop agents dissolved. Those who could not run crawled. Only one man kept his position even momentarily. This was George Sedaka, the man who, in the company of Orv Jamieson, had hijacked Andy's letters in New Hampshire. Sedaka had only been laying over at the Shop compound before going on to Panama City. The man who had been on Sedaka's left was now lying on the ground, groaning. The man on Sedaka's right had been the unfortunate Clayton Braddock.
Sedaka himself was miraculously untouched. Splinters and hot shrapnel had flown all around him. A baling hook, sharp-edged and lethal, had buried itself in the earth less than four inches from his feet. It glowed a dull red.
The back of the stable looked as if half a dozen sticks of dynamite had gone off there. Tumbled, burning beams framed a blackened hole that was perhaps twenty-five feet across. A large compost heap had absorbed the bulk of Charlie's extraordinary force when it made its explosive exit; it was now in flames, and what remained of the rear of the stable was catching.
Sedaka could hear horses whinnying and screaming inside, could see the lurid red-orange gleam of fire as the flames raced up into the lofts full of dry hay. It was like looking through a porthole into Sheol.
Sedaka suddenly decided he wanted no more of this.
It was a little heavier than sticking up unarmed mailmen on back-country roads.
George Sedaka reholstered his pistol and took to his heels.
19
She was still groping, unable to grasp all that had happened. "Daddy!" she screamed. "'Daddy! Daddy!"
Everything was blurred, ghostly. The air was full of hot, choking smoke and red flashes. The horses were still battering at their stall doors, but now the doors, latchless, were swinging open. Some of the horses, at least, had been able to back out.
Charlie fell to her knees, feeling for her father, and the horses began to flash past her on their way out, little more than dim, dreamlike shapes. Overhead, a flaming rafter fell in a shower of sparks and ignited the loose hay in one of the lower bays. In the short side of the L, a thirty-gallon drum of tractor gas went up with a dull, coughing roar.
Flying hooves passed within scant inches of Charlie's head as she crawled with her hands out like a blind thing. Then one of the fleeing horses struck her a glancing blow and she fell backward. One of her hands found a shoe.
"Daddy?" she whimpered. "Daddy?"
He was dead. She was sure he was dead. Everything was dead; the world was flame; they had killed her mother and now they had killed her father.
Her sight was beginning to come back, but still everything was dim. Waves of heat pulsed over her. She felt her way up his leg, touched his belt, and then went lightly up his shirt until her fingers reached a damp, sticky patch. It was spreading. There she paused in horror, and she was unable to make her fingers go on.
"Daddy," she whispered.
"Charlie?"
It was no more than a low, husky croak ... but it was he. His hand found her face and tugged her weakly. "Come here. Get ... get close."
She came to his side, and now his face swam out of the gray dazzle. The left side of it was pulled down in a grimace; his left eye was badly bloodshot, reminding her of that morning in Hastings Glen when they woke up in that motel.
"Daddy, look at this mess," Charlie groaned, and began to cry.
"No time," he said. "Listen. Listen, Charlie!"
She bent over him, her tears wetting his face.
"This was coming, Charlie.... Don't waste your tears on me. But--"
"No! No!"
"Charlie, shut up!" he said roughly. "They're going to want to kill you now. You understand? No ... no more games. Gloves off." He pronounced it "glubs" from the comer of his cruelly twisted mouth. "Don't let them, Charlie. And don't let them cover it up. Don't let them say ... just a fire ..."
He had raised his head slightly and now he lay back, panting. From outside, dim over the hungry crackle of the fire, came the faint and unimportant pop of guns ... and once more the scream of horses.
"Daddy, don't talk ... rest ..."
"No. Time." Using his right arm, he was able to get partway up again to confront her. Blood trickled from both corners of his mouth. "You have to get away if you can, Charlie." She wiped the blood away with the hem of her jumper. From behind, the fire baked into her. "Get away if you can. If you have to kill the ones in your way, Charlie, do it. It's a war. Make them know they've been in a war." His voice was failing now. "You get away if you can, Charlie. Do it for me. Do you understand?"
She nodded.
Overhead, near the back, another rafter let go in a flaming Catherine wheel of orange-yellow sparks. Now the heat rushed out at them as if from an open furnace flue. Sparks lit on her skin and winked out like hungry, biting insects.
"Make it"--he coughed up thick blood and forced the words out--"make it so they can never do anything like this again. Burn it down, Charlie. Burn it all down."
"Daddy--"
"Go on, now. Before it all goes up."
"I can't leave you," she said in a shaking, helpless voice.
He smiled and pulled her even closer, as if to whisper in her ear. But instead he kissed her.
"--love you, Ch--" he said, and died.
20
Don Jules had found himself in charge by default. He held on as long as he could after the fire started, convinced that the little girl would run out into their field of fire. When it didn't happen--and when the men in front of the stables began to catch their first glimpse of what had happened to the men behind it--he decided he could wait no longer, not if he wanted to hold them. He began to move forward, and the others came with him ... but their faces were tight and set. They no longer looked like men on a turkey shoot.
Then shadows moved rapidly inside the double doors. She was coming out. Guns came up; two men fired before anything at all came out. Then--
But it wasn't the girl; it was the horses, half a dozen of them, eight, ten, their coats flecked with foam, their eyes rolling and white-rimmed, mad with fear.
Jules's men, on hair trigger, opened fire. Even those who had held back, seeing that horses rather than humans were leaving the stable, seemed unable to hold back once their colleagues had begun firing. It was a slaughter. Two of the horses pitched forward to their knees, one of them whinnying miserably. Blood flew in the bright October air and slicked the grass.
"Stop!" Jules bawled. "Stop, dammit! Stop shooting the fucking horses!"
He might as well have been King Canute giving orders to the tide. The men--afraid of something they could not see, hyped by the alarm buzzer, the Bright Yellow alert, the fire that was now pluming thick black smoke at the sky, and the heavy ka-whummm! of the exploding tractor-gas--finally had moving targets to shoot at ... and they were shooting.
Two of the horses lay dead on the grass. Another lay half on and half off the crushed-stone driveway, sides heaving rapidly. Three more, crazed with fear, veered to the left and made at the four or five men spread there. They gave way, still shooting, but one of the men tripped over his own feet and was trampled, screaming.
"Quit it!" Jules screamed. "Quit it! Cease--cease firing! Goddammit, cease firing, you assholes!"
But the slaughter went on. Men were reloading with strange, blank expressions on their faces. Many of them, like Rainbird, were veterans of the Vietnam war, and their fac
es wore the dull, twisted-rag expressions of men reliving an old nightmare at lunatic intensity. A few others had quit firing, but they were a minority. Five horses lay wounded or dead on the grass and in the driveway. A few others had run away, and Necromancer was among these, his tail waving like a battle flag.
"The girl!" someone screamed, pointing at the stable doors. "The girl!"
It was too late. The slaughter of the horses had barely ended and their attention was divided. By the time they swung back toward where Charlie stood with her head down, small and deadly in her denim jumper and dark-blue knee socks, the trenches of fire had already begun to radiate from her toward them, like strands of some deadly spider's web.
21
Charlie was submerged in the power again, and it was a relief.
The loss of her father, as keen and sharp as a stiletto, receded and became no more than a numb ache.
As always, the power drew her, like some fascinating and awful toy whose full range of possibilities still awaited discovery.
Trenches of fire raced across the grass toward the ragged line of men.
You killed the horses, you bastards, she thought, and her father's voice echoed, as if in agreement: If you have to kill the ones in your way, Charlie, do it. It's a war. Make them know they've been in a war.
Yes, she decided, she would make them know they had been in a war.
Some of the men were breaking and running now. She skewed one of the lines of fire to the right with a mild twist of her head and three of them were engulfed, their clothes becoming so many flaming rags. They fell to the ground, convulsed and screaming.
Something buzzed by her head, and something else printed thin fire across her wrist. It was Jules, who had got another gun from Richard's station. He stood there, legs spread, gun out, shooting at her.
Charlie pushed out at him: one hard, pumping bolt of force.
Jules was thrown backward so suddenly and with such force that the wrecking ball of a great invisible crane might have struck him. He flew forty feet, not a man anymore but a boiling ball of fire.