Firestarter Read Online Free PDF

chair. “Poor Daddy,” she said, and kissed him.
    He closed his eyes. The TV played on in front of him, a faraway babble of sound in the midst of the steadily growing ache in his head. When he opened his eyes again, she was just a distant figure, very small, dressed in red and green, like a Christmas ornament, bobbing away through the scattered people on the concourse.
    Please God, let her be all right, he thought. Don’t let anyone mess with her, or scare her worse than she is already. Please and thank you, God. Okay?
    He closed his eyes again.
5
    Little girl in red stretch pants and a green rayon blouse. Shoulder-length blond hair. Up too late, apparently by herself. She was in one of the few places where a little girl by herself could go unremarked after midnight. She passed people, but no one really saw her. If she had been crying, a security guard might have come over to ask her if she waslost, if she knew which airline her mommy and daddy were ticketed on, what their names were so they could be paged. But she wasn’t crying, and she looked as if she knew where she was going.
    She didn’t, exactly—but she had a pretty fair idea of what she was looking for. They needed money; that was what Daddy had said. The bad men were coming, and Daddy was hurt. When he got hurt like this, it got hard for him to think. He had to lie down and have as much quiet as he could. He had to sleep until the pain went away. And the bad men might be coming … the men from the Shop, the men who wanted to pick them apart and see what made them work—and to see if they could be used, made to do things.
    She saw a paper shopping bag sticking out of the top of a trash basket and took it. A little way farther down the concourse she came to what she was looking for: a bank of pay phones.
    Charlie stood looking at them, and she was afraid. She was afraid because Daddy had told her again and again that she shouldn’t do it … since earliest childhood it had been the Bad Thing. She couldn’t always control the Bad Thing. She might hurt herself, or someone else, or lots of people. The time
    (oh mommy i’m sorry the hurt the bandages the screams she screamed i made my mommy scream and i never will again … never … because it is a Bad Thing)
    in the kitchen when she was little … but it hurt too much to think of that. It was a Bad Thing because when you let it go, it went … everywhere. And that was scary.
    There were other things. The push, for instance; that’s what Daddy called it, the push. Only she could push a lot harder than Daddy, and she never got headaches afterward. But sometimes, afterward … there were fires.
    The word for the Bad Thing clanged in her mind as she stood nervously looking at the telephone booths: pyrokinesis. “Never mind that,” Daddy had told her when they were still in Port City and thinking like fools that they were safe. “You’re a firestarter, honey. Just one great big Zippo lighter.” And then it had seemed funny, she had giggled, but now it didn’t seem funny at all.
    The other reason she wasn’t supposed to push was because they might find out. The bad men from the Shop. “I don’t know how much they know about you now,” Daddy had told her, “but I don’t want them to find out any more. Your pushisn’t exactly like mine, honey. You can’t make people … well, change their minds, can you?”
    â€œNo-ooo …”
    â€œBut you can make things move. And if they ever began to see a pattern, and connect that pattern to you, we’d be in even worse trouble than we are now.”
    And it was stealing, and stealing was also a Bad Thing.
    Never mind. Daddy’s head was hurting him and they had to get to a quiet, warm place before it got too bad for him to think at all. Charlie moved forward.
    There were about fifteen phonebooths in all, with circular sliding doors. When you were