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.