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.