he alarm, the alarm!" Jules yelled.

"Do you have auth-"

"I've got all the authorization I need, you fucking twit! The girl! The girl's making a break for it!"

On Richard's console there were two simple combination-type dials, numbered from one to ten. Flustered, Richard dropped his pen and set the left-hand dial to a little past seven. Jules came around and set the right-hand dial just past one. A moment later a low burring began to come from the console, a sound that was being repeated all over the Shop compound.

Groundskeepers were turning off their mowers and running for sheds where rifles were kept. The doors to the rooms where the vulnerable computer terminals were slid closed and locked. Gloria, Cap's secretary, produced her own handgun. All available Shop agents ran toward loudspeakers to await instructions, unbuttoning coats to free weapons. The charge in the outer fence went from its usual mild daytime tickle to killing voltage. The Dobermans in the run between the two fences heard the buzzing, sensed the change as the Shop geared up to battle status, and began to bark and leap hysterically. Gates between the Shop and the outside world slid shut and locked automatically. A bakery truck that had been servicing the commissary had its rear bumper chewed off by one sliding gate, and the driver was lucky to escape electrocution.

The buzz seemed endless, subliminal.

Jules grabbed the mike from Richard's console and said, "Condition Bright Yellow. I say again, Condition Bright Yellow. No drill. Converge on stables; use caution." He searched his mind for the code term assigned to Charlie McGee and couldn't come up with it. They changed the fucking things by the day, it seemed. "It's the girl, and she's using it! Repeat, she's using it!"

13

Orv Jamieson was standing underneath the loudspeaker in the third-floor lounge of the north house, holding The Windsucker in one hand. When he heard Jules's message, he sat down abruptly and holstered it.

"Uh-uh," he said to himself as the three others he had been shooting eight ball with ran out. "Uh-uh, not me, count me out." The others could run over there like hounds on a hot scent if they wanted to. They had not been at the Manders farm. They had not seen this particular third-grader in action.

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! SNAAAYYYKE!"

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 of 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 ofd" 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 back of the stable had blown out in a tangle of smoking timbers and boards as the power passed Cap and Rainbird and bellowed onward, like something shot from a psychic cannon. The splintered shrapnel whistled for sixty yards or more in a widening fan, and those Shop agents who had been standing in its path might as well have been hit with a broadside blast of hot grapeshot. A fellow by the name of Clayton Braddock was nearly decapitated by a whirling slice of barnboard siding. The man next to him was cut in two by a beam that came whirling through the air like a runaway propeller. A third had an ear clipped off" by a smoking chunk of wood and was not aware of it for nearly ten minutes.

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 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 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 corner 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 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 comfort her. Blood trickled from both corners of his mouth. "You have got to get away if you can, Charlie." She wiped the blood away from 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 kawhummm! 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 faces wore the dull, twistedrag 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.

Then they all broke and ran. They ran the way they had run at the Manders farm.

Good thing, she thought. Good thing for you.

She did not want to kill people. That had not changed. What had changed was that she'd kill them if she had to. If they stood in her way. She began to walk toward the nearer of the two houses, which stood a little distance in front of a barn as perfect as the picture on a country calendar and facing its mate across the expanse of lawn.

Windows broke like gunshots. The ivy trellis climbing the east side of the house shuddered and then burst into arteries of fire. The paint smoked, then bubbled, then flamed. Fire ran up onto the roof like grasping hands.

One of the doors burst open, letting out the whooping, panicked bray of a fire alarm and two dozen secretaries, technicians, and analysts. They ran across the lawn toward the fence, veered away from the deaths of electricity and yapping, leaping dogs, and then milled like frightened sheep. The power wanted to go out toward them but she turned it away from them and onto the fence itself, making the neat chain-link diamonds droop and run and weep molten-metal tears. There was a low thrumming sound, a low-key zapping sound as the fence overloaded and then began to short out in segment after segment. Blinding purple sparks leaped up. Small fireballs began to jump from the top of the fence, and white porcelain conductors exploded like clay ducks in a shooting gallery.

The dogs were going mad now. Their coats stood out in crazy spikes and they raced back and forth like banshees between the inner and outer fences. One of them caromed into the spitting high-voltage fence and went straight up in the air, its legs splayed stiffly. It came down in a smoking heap. Two of its mates attacked it with savage hysteria.

There was no barn behind the house where Charlie and her father had been held, but there was a long, low, perfectly maintained building that was also red barnboard trimmed with white. This building housed the Shop motor pool. Now the wide doors burst open and an armored Cadillac limousine with government plates raced out. The sunroof was open and a man's head and torso poked through it. Elbows braced on the roof, he began to fire a light submachine gun at Charlie. In front of her, firm turf spun away in ragged digs and divots.

Charlie turned toward the car and let the power loose in that direction. The power was still growing; it was turning into something that was lithe yet ponderous, an invisible something that now seemed to be feeding itself in a spiraling chain reaction of exponential force. The limo's gas tank exploded, enveloping the rear of the car and shooting the tailpipe into the sky like a javelin. But even before that happened the head and torso of the shooter were incinerated, the car's windshield had blown in, and the limousine's special self-sealing tires had begun to run like tallow.

The car continued on through its own ring of fire, plowing out of control, losing its original shape, melting into something that looked like a torpedo. It rolled over twice and a second explosion shook it.

Secretaries were fleeing from the other house now, running like ants. She could have swept them with fire-and a part of her wanted to-but with an effort of her waning volition, she turned the power on the house itself, the house where the two of them had been kept against their will... the house where John had betrayed her.

She sent the force out, all of it. For just a moment it seemed that nothing at all was happening; there was a faint shimmer in the air, like the shimmer above a barbecue pit where the coals have been well banked... and then the entire house exploded.

The only clear image she was left with (and later, the testimony of the survivors repeated it several times) was that of the chimney of the house rising into the sky like a brick rocketship, seemingly intact, while beneath it the twenty-five-room house disintegrated like a little girl's cardboard playhouse in the flame of a blowtorch. Stone, lengths of board, planks, rose into the air and flew away on the hot dragon breath of Charlie's force. An IBM typewriter, melted and twisted into something that looked like a green steel dishrag tied in a knot, whirled up into the sky and crashed down between the two fences, digging a crater. A secretary's chair, the swivel seat whirling madly, was flung out of sight with the speed of a bolt shot from a crossbow.

Heat baked across the lawn at Charlie.

She looked around for something else to destroy. Smoke rose to the sky now from several sources from the two graceful antebellum homes (only one of them still recognizable as a home now), from the stable, from what had been the limousine. Even out here in the open, the heat was becoming intense.

And still the power spun and spun, wanting to be sent out, needing to be sent out, lest it collapse back on its source and destroy it.

Charlie had no idea what unimaginable thing might eventually have happened. But when she turned back to the fence and the road leading out of the Shop compound, she saw people throwing themselves against the fence in a blind frenzy of-panic. In some places the fence was shorted out and they had been able to climb over. The dogs had got one of them, a young woman in a yellow gaucho skirt who was screaming horribly. And as clearly as if he had still been alive and standing next to her, Charlie heard her father cry: Enough, Charlie! It's enough! Stop while you still can!

But could she?

Turning away from the fence, she searched desperately for what she needed, fending off the power at the same time, trying to hold it balanced and suspended. It began to scrawl directionless, crazy spirals across the grass in a widening pattern.

Nothing. Nothing except-

The duckpond.

22

OJ was getting out, and no dogs were going to stop him.

He had fled the house when the others began to converge on the stable. He was very frightened but not quite panicked enough to charge the electrified fence after the gates automatically, slid shut on their tracks. He had watched the entire holocaust from behind the thick, gnarled trunk of an old elm. When the little girl shorted the fence, he waited until she had moved on a little way and turned her attention to the destruction of the house. Then he ran for the fence, The Windsucker in his right hand.

When one section of the fence was dead, he climbed over it and let himself down into the dog run. Two of them came for him. He grasped his right wrist with his left hand and shot them both. They were big bastards, but The Windsucker was bigger. They were all done eating Gravy Train, unless they served the stuff" up in doggy heaven.

A third dog got him from behind, tore out the seat of his pants and a good chunk of his left buttock, knocked him to the ground. OJ turned over and grappled with it one-handed, holding The Windsucker with the other. He clubbed it with the butt of the gun, and then thrust forward with the muzzle when the dog came for his throat. The muzzle slid neatly between the Doberman's jaws and OJ pulled the trigger. The report was muffled.

"Cranberry sauce!" OJ cried, getting shakily to his feet. He began to laugh hysterically.

The outer gate was not electrified any longer; even its weak keeper charge had shorted out. OJ tried to open it. Already other people were crowding and jouncing him. The dogs that were left had backed away, snarling. Some of the other surviving agents also had their guns out and were taking potshots at them. Enough discipline had returned so that those with guns stood in a rough perimeter around the unarmed secretaries, analysts and technicians.

OJ threw his whole weight against the gate. It would not open. It had locked shut along with everything else. OJ looked around, not sure what to do next. Sanity of a sort had returned; it was one thing to cut and run when you were by yourself and unobserved, but now there were too many witnesses around.

If that hellacious kid left any witnesses.

"You'll have to climb over it!" he shouted. His voice was lost in the general confusion. "Climb over, goddammit!" No response. They only crowded against the outer fence, their faces dumb and shiny with panic.

OJ grabbed a woman huddled against the gate next to him.

"Nooooo!" she screamed.

"Climb, you cunt!" OJ roared, and goosed her to get her going. She began to climb.

Others saw her and began to get the idea. The inner fence was still smoking and spitting sparks in places; a fat man OJ recognized as one of the commissary cooks was holding onto roughly two thousand volts. He was jittering and jiving, his feet doing a fast boogaloo in the grass, his mouth open, his cheeks turning black.

Another one of the Dobermans lunged forward and tore a chunk from the leg of a skinny, bespectacled young man in a lab coat. One of the other agents snapped a shot at the dog, missed, and shattered the bespectacled young man's elbow. The young lab technician fell on the ground and began rolling around, clutching his elbow and screaming for the Blessed Virgin to help him. OJ shot the dog before it could tear the young man's throat out.

What a fuckup, he groaned inside. Oh dear God, what a fuckup.

Now there were maybe a dozen of them climbing the wide gate. The woman OJ had set in motion reached the top, tottered, and fell over on the outside with a strangled cry. She began to shriek immediately. The gate was high; it had been a nine foot drop; she had landed wrong and broken her arm.

Oh Jegus Christ, what a fuckup.

Clawing their way up the gate, they looked like a lunatic's vision of training exercises at Marine bootcamp.

OJ craned back, trying to see the kid, trying to see if she was coming for them: If she was, the witnesses could take care of themselves; he was up over that gate and gone.

Then one of the analysts yelled, "What in the name of God-"

The hissing sound rose immediately, drowning out his voice. OJ would say later that the first thing he thought of was his grandmother frying eggs, only this sound was a million times louder than that, as if a tribe of giants had all decided to fry eggs at once.

It swelled and grew, and suddenly the duckpond between the two houses was obscured in rising white steam. The whole pond, roughly fifty feet across and four feet deep at its center, was boiling.

For a moment OJ could see Charlie, standing about twenty yards from the pond, her back to those of them still struggling to get out, and then she was lost in the steam. The hissing sound went on and on. White fog drifted across the green lawn, and the bright autumn sun cast crazy arcs of rainbow in the cottony moisture. The cloud of steam billowed and drifted. Would-be escapees hung onto the fence like flies, their heads craned back over their shoulders, watching.

What if there isn't enough water? OJ thought suddenly. What if there isn't enough to put out her match or torch or whatever the hell it is? What happens then?

Orville Jamieson decided he didn't want to stick around to find out. He'd had enough of the hero bit. He jammed The Windsucker back into its shoulder holster and went up the gate at what was nearly a run. At the top he vaulted over neatly and landed in a flexed crouch near the woman who was still holding her broken arm and screaming.

"I advise you to save your breath and get the hell out of here," OJ told her, and promptly took his own advice.

23

Charlie stood in her own world of white, feeding her power into the duckpond, grappling with it, trying to bring it down, to make it have done. Its vitality seemed endless. She had it under control now, yes; it fed smoothly into the pond as if through an invisible length of pipe. But what would happen if all the water boiled away before she could disrupt its force and disperse it?

No more destruction. She would let it fall back in on herself and destroy her again before she allowed it to range out and begin feeding itself again.

(Back off! Back off!!) Now, at last, she could feel it losing some of its urgency, its... its ability to stick together. It was falling apart. Thick white steam everywhere, and the smell of laundries. The giant bubbling hiss of the pond she could no longer see.

(!!BACK OFF!!) She thought dimly of her father again, and fresh grief sliced into her: dead; he was dead; the thought seemed to diffuse the power still more, and now, at last, the hissing noise began to fade. The steam rolled majestically past her. Overhead, the sun was a tarnished silver coin.

I changed the sun, she thought disjointedly, and then, No-not really-it's the steam the fog-it'll blow away-But with a sudden sureness that came from deep inside she knew that she could change the sun if she wanted to... in time.

The power was still growing.

This act of destruction, this apocalypse, had only approached its current limit.

The potential had hardly been tapped.

Charlie fell to her knees on the grass and began to cry, mourning her father, mourning the other people she had killed, even John. Perhaps what Rainbird had wanted for her would have been best, but even with her father dead and this rain of destruction on her head, she felt her response to life, a tough, mute grasping for survival.

And so, perhaps most of all, she mourned herself.

24

How long she sat on the grass with her head cradled in her arms she didn't know; as impossible as it seemed, she believed she might even have dozed. However long it was, when she came to herself she saw that the sun was brighter and a little more westerly in the sky. The steam of the boiling pond had been pulled to tatters by the light breeze and blown away.

Slowly, Charlie stood up and looked around.

The pond caught her eye first. She saw that it had been close... very close. Only puddles of water remained, flatly sheened with sunlight like bright glass gems set in the slick mud of the pond's bottom. Draggled lilypads and water-weeds lay here and there like corroded jewelry; already in places the mud was beginning to dry and crack. She saw a few coins in the mud, and a rusted thing that looked like a very long knife or perhaps a lawnmower blade. The grass all around the pond had been scorched black.

A deadly silence lay over the Shop compound, broken only by the brisk snap and crackle of the fire. Her father had told her to make them know they had been in a war, and what was left looked very much like an abandoned battleground. The stable, barn, and house on one side of the pond were burning furiously. All that remained of the house on the other side was smoky rubble; it was as if the place had been hit by a large incendiary bomb or a World War II V-rocket.

Blasted and blackened lines lay across the grass in all directions, making those idiot spiral patterns, still smoking. The armored limo had burned itself out at the end of a gouged trench of earth. It no longer resembled a car; it was only a meaningless hunk of junk.

The fence was the worst. Bodies lay scattered along its inner perimeter, nearly half a dozen of them. In the space between there were two or three more bodies, plus a scattering of dead dogs. As if in a dream, Charlie began walking in that direction.

Other people were moving on the lawn, but not many. Two of them saw her coming and shied away. The others seemed to have no conception of who she was and no knowledge that she had caused it all. They walked with the dreamy, portentous paces of shock-blasted survivors.

Charlie began to clamber up the inner fence. "I wouldn't do that," a man in orderly's whites called over conversationally. "Dogs goan get you if you do that, girl."

Charlie took no notice. The remaining dogs growled at her but did not come near; they, too, had had enough, it seemed. She climbed the outer gate, moved slowly and carefully, holding tight and poking the toes of her loafers into the diamond-shaped holes in the link. She reached the top, swung one leg over carefully, then the other. Then, moving with the same deliberation, she climbed down and, for the first time in half a year stepped onto ground that didn't belong to the Shop. For a moment she only stood there, as if in shock.

I'm free, she thought dully. Free.

In the distance, the sound of wailing sirens arose, drawing near.

The woman with the broken arm still sat on the grass, about twenty paces from the abandoned guardhouse. She looked like a fat child too weary to get up. There were white shock circles under her eyes. Her lips had a bluish tinge.

"Your arm," Charlie said huskily.

The woman looked up at Charlie, and recognition came into her eyes. She began to scrabble away, whimpering with fear. "Don't you come near me," she hissed raggedly. "All their tests! All their tests! I don't need no tests! You're a witch! A witch!",

Charlie stopped. "Your arm," she said. "Please. Your arm. I'm sorry. Please?" Her lips were trembling again. It seemed to her now that the woman's panic, the way her eyes rolled, the way she unconsciously curled her lip up over her teeth-these were the worst things of all.

"Please!" she cried. "I'm sorry! They killed my daddy!" "Should have killed you as well," the woman said, panting. "Why don't you burn yourself up, if you're so sorry?" Charlie took a step toward her and the woman moved away again, screaming as she fell over on her injured arm. "Don't you come near me!" And suddenly all of Charlie's hurt and grief and anger found its voice.

"None of it was my fault!" she screamed at the woman with the broken arm. "None of it was my fault; they brought it on themselves, and I won't take the blame, and I won't kill myself! Do you hear me! Do you?"

The woman cringed away, muttering.

The sirens were closer.

Charlie felt the power, surging up eagerly with her emotions.

She slammed it back down, made it gone.

(and I won't do that either)

She walked across the road, leaving the muttering, cringing woman behind. On the far side of the road was a field, thigh-high with hay and timothy, silver white with October, but still fragrant.

(where am 1 going?)

She didn't know yet.

But they were never going to catch her again.

CHARLIE ALONE

1

The story appeared in fragments on the late television news that Wednesday night, but Americans were not greeted with the entire story until they rose the next morning. By then all the available data had been coordinated into what Americans really seem to mean when they say they want "the news"-and what they really mean is "Tell me a story" and make sure it has a beginning, a middle, and some kind of ending.

The story America got over its collective coffee cup, via Today, Good Morning, America, and The CBS Morning News, was this: There had been a terrorist firebomb attack at a top-secret scientific think tank in Longmont, Virginia. The terrorist group was not positively known yet, although three of them had already stepped forward to claim the credit-a group of Japanese Reds, the Khafadi splinter of Black September, and a domestic group who went by the rich and wonderful name of the Militant Midwest Weather-people.

Though no one was sure exactly who was behind the attack, the reports seemed quite clear on how it had been carried out. An agent named John Rainbird, an Indian and a Vietnam vet, had been a double agent who had planted the firebombs on behalf of the terrorist organization. He had either killed himself by accident or had committed suicide at the site of one of the firebombings, a stable. One source claimed that Rainbird had actually been overcome by heat and smoke while trying to drive the horses out of the burning stable; this occasioned the usual newscom irony about coldblooded terrorists who cared more for animals than they did for people. Twenty lives had been lost in the tragedy; forty-five people had been injured, ten of them seriously. The survivors had all been "sequestered" by the government.

That was the story. The name of the Shop hardly surfaced at all. It was quite satisfactory.

Except for one dangling loose end.

2

"I don't care where she is," the new head of the Shop said four weeks after the conflagration and Charlie's escape. Things had been in total confusion for the first ten days, when the girl might easily have been swept back into the Shop's net; they were still not back to normal. The new head sat behind a make-do desk; her own would not be delivered for another three days. "And I don't care what she can do, either. She's an eight-year-old kid, not Superwoman. She can't stay out of sight long. I want her found and then I want her killed."