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 corners 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 Al 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 Al 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.
Al 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. Al 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 founds.
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 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 in 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.
“DAAAAADEEEEEEEEE-”
He swept her into his arms, hugged her.
“Shhh,” 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.