Heat Stroke Page 0,69
been a few hours at most between leaving the Prentiss house and landing at the corner of Davis and Cunningham, right next to a sign that said seacasket chamber of commerce welcomes you, decorated with the seal of the Rotary Club and logos for Hardee's and McDonald's. A smaller sign below read home of THE CRIMSON PIRATES, STATE CHAMPIONS LADIES BASKETBALL 1998.
Seacasket, for all its rural sensibility, had a Starbucks directly across the street from me. There were five or six people in there, sitting at tiny uncomfortable tables sipping mochas or cappuccinos or half-caff skim deluxe grande lattes. There were a couple of kids running down the sidewalk chasing a runaway beagle puppy, and a few cars driving by, people talking, laughing, oblivious to the death I was bringing with me.
No. No no no no.
I tried. I tried with all my might to stop it, but my hands went out, and the power that I'd sucked out of Kevin, that rich textured power that filled me to bursting, it shot up into a hot dome over the town.
No!
I couldn't stop it, but I could try to mitigate it. At the same time as that compulsive part of me started authoring destruction, the other part of me-the part that was still partially free, at least-started desperately weaving together the wind. Not enough time for this, not nearly enough; weatherworking required subtlety, delicacy, like neurosurgery. This was more like a battlefield amputation, with the patient alive and screaming. I increased the density of the air, heated it faster than a microwave oven, created a corresponding cold front and slammed the two together.
Instant chaos. Overhead, beyond the hot fury of fire that was gathering over the town, I saw clouds exploding in blue and black mushrooms. Silent, but incredibly powerful. I watched it in Oversight as the cotton white anvil cloud boiled up, and up, and up, hot air struggling to climb over cold, water molecules slamming together in so much violence that the energy generated exploded outward in waves. The collisions sparked even more motion, forced expansion against the unmoving wall of the low pressure system.
Go, go, go! I was begging it to move faster, even though it was the fastest I'd ever built anything like this-fifteen seconds, from clear sky to first pale pink flash of lightning.
I wasn't looking for rain, though. Rain wouldn't even begin to derail the firestorm I was about to unleash on this place. It would instantly evaporate into steam, and for all I knew, kill even more people. The kind of power I was carrying wasn't something that could be put out with a fire hose, anyway.
Chapter Eighteen
The kids on the street stopped, looking up, open-mouthed with amazement. The dog started yapping.
Thunder boomed like cannon. It rattled glass in windows. Two car alarms shrieked in fright, and I felt the pressure of bad weather building, hot and still and green. Yes.
I couldn't hold the fire. It was coming down, an acid rain of napalm from the sky. It hit the tallest building in sight-a bank, maybe-and draped it in orange-red streamers that exploded white-hot when it found something to feed on. Seven floors above the street, hell had descended. I could feel people screaming, feel the pulse of their terror, and I couldn't stop it.
Fire crawled lazily over the building, dripping in hot strings from windows. Burning the place from the outside in, from the top down. Get out. Get the hell out, now! Because that place would be an inferno in minutes. Could I do something else, anything?
I looked down at myself and saw that I was surrounded by a thick, sparkling layer of blue. Cold-light, moving over me like a crawling blanket. Oh God. What in the hell was it doing to me? I couldn't feel it. Couldn't feel it at all.
I stared blindly up into the storm, willing it, begging it to do what I needed it to do.
And something answered. It was raw and primitive and barely more than an instinct, Mother Nature twitching in a nightmare. The blast of energy broke over me like a drowning wave, and I went to my knees, still staring up at the arching, strangely beautiful firefall that was going to destroy this place.
And then the tornado formed above it.
It started small, an indrawn breath of the storm, a tentative wisp of vapor like a tongue tasting