Faces in the Fire (14 page)

She shook her head. Like any of it mattered. The send time was likely forged, anyway, or set to the server of origination. This mail, in truth, seemed more like a true spam message than either of the first two she'd received. Corrine had seen a thousand—no, a million—just like this one. Maybe she'd even seen this very one. For that matter, maybe she'd even written it, many years ago, and now the endless waves of Internet forwarding had deposited it once again on her beach. These kinds of messages were something of a primitive way of gathering e-mail addresses; they contained a virus that searched computers for vulnerabilities, then retrieved e-mail addresses from people who opened the forwarded message.

Kind of amateur hour, really. Corrine had passed this level of sophistication early in her rise.

So there it was: this message was nothing like the others. She closed it and let her hand hover over the delete button for a few moments.

So if this message was unlike the others, why did she feel a dark pit in her stomach? Why did the catfish on her arm twist and constrict as she read it? This message had come to her secret e-mail address, just like the other two mystical messages; couldn't it be a test, as well?

DISASTER!!

She smirked at the screen. What could be more disastrous than cancer? She'd already beaten that in the last twenty-four hours.

Corrine pressed the delete button and went back to her bedroom. Five minutes later, she was asleep again.

55b.

Late that night, her doorbell awakened her. Someone ringing it seven or eight times in quick succession, then pounding on the door. She sat up and immediately forgot the doorbell.

The strong, earthy odor of smoke floated around her.

(She was dreaming again Marcus it was Marcus inside the van and the smoke was filling the van and she just needed to get Marcus out so she could leave and say good-bye to this life forever)

She sat up in her bed, reached for the lamp on her nightstand. No, she wasn't dreaming. And yes, she could smell smoke. She clicked the switch to turn on the light, but nothing happened.

And now she coughed as the smoke infiltrated her lungs, making them burn.

She fumbled for the flashlight she kept in her nightstand—the power seemed to blink out in this building at least once a month—and thumbed it on. Instantly, the beam illuminated the haze in the air. She coughed again as she ran the flashlight's beam across the bottom of the door.

Bad news; smoke poured into the room from beneath it, which meant fire on the other side. If she opened her bedroom door, she would create a vacuumlike effect that would instantly suck heat and flames into her room and kill her. She knew this from her school days.

Okay, okay. At least she was awake. She knew every fire safety precaution would tell her to get out of the room immediately, but she slipped on jeans, a shirt, and shoes first, then grabbed her bag and opened the window of her bedroom. Every unit in the Villa Apartment building was exactly the same. The apartments were little more than glorified hotel rooms, with the front door and the bedroom window both opening to a concrete slab and black iron stairs on each of the four stories.

Corrine easily climbed out of the window and onto the concrete. She scrambled down the stairs, taking her cell phone from her bag and opening it to call 911. Just as she dialed, she heard the scream of sirens approaching. Someone had already called.

People were milling about outside, unsure where to go, what to do. Maybe a couple dozen of them in all, including some weird guy who sat on the grass with a leg wound of some kind; he sat transfixed as he stared at the building, his injury evidently forgotten. She didn't recognize him. Probably one of the guys from the ground floor.

Then the text of the e-mail came back to her.
Forward
this to avoid DISASTER!!
it had screamed, begging her to do it within twenty-four hours. She looked at the time on her cell phone. 12:36 a.m. The e-mail had been sent twenty-four hours and twenty-nine minutes ago. Yet another seeming coincidence.

Had she brought this on herself by ignoring a message she should have heeded? Even worse, had she brought it on all the people who lived in her apartment complex?

The catfish on her arm moved in response.

Corrine looked around her. Children crying. Men in pajamas, staring dumbfounded. Mothers holding robes close to them, pulling their kids near. One woman in hysterics, trying to get back into the building as two men held her back.

She didn't know anyone else in her apartment building; she'd always kept to herself, to her computer. And now she understood that was what had made her bottom feeding so easy. She never had to see the faces of the people she targeted. Even back on the sales crew, she only saw people for a few minutes as she stood with them, filling out a magazine order form.

This was different. She'd ignored an important message, failed the latest mystical test, and this was what she had created. She couldn't face them. Couldn't stand there with them and wonder aloud what had happened, pray that the firefighters would get everyone out.

She couldn't do those things, because she
knew
what had happened.

And so she ran. She ran as fast as she could, letting her feet carry her anywhere, anywhere but here.

For the second time in her life she ran from a fire, and she never looked back. Not even once.

57.

The next morning Corrine awoke in Gas Works Park, a surreal setting of rusted metal and pipes on Lake Union. Once upon a time it had been a refinery or some such thing; in the nineties it had become a city park, and the original industrial pipes and ductwork still stood, rusted reminders of what had once been.

Corrine sat up on the bench where she'd slept, checked her wig to make sure it hadn't come loose.

Wait. She didn't have a wig anymore; her hair was real.

Unfortunately, the rest of her life was fake. Yes, she'd miraculously been cured of cancer, miraculously grown a full head of hair. But then she'd put the lives of other people in jeopardy by concentrating solely on herself. Stupid stupid stupid.

Even worse, she was terrified of what she might face next, because she had no doubt it was going to get worse. The e-mail said as much in big block letters:
DISASTER!!
And to top it all off, she had no idea what she should have done to answer the latest test. Forward that disaster message to thousands, even millions, of other people? How would that help?

(It might have helped the people in your building)

She sighed, rose to her feet, twisted to stretch her back, and started walking, bag strung over her shoulder. She was traveling light, everything she now owned in the world slung on her arm, but each step felt heavy and awkward.

She knew of an Internet café a few blocks away where she could find coffee.

She tried to clear her mind as she walked, but it didn't work. It didn't help that her clothing smelled like smoke, a constant reminder that she didn't
Forward to Avoid
DISASTER!!

Standing in front of the glass door of the coffee shop, she wiped at her face, brushed off her clothes, couldn't help but run a hand through her hair as she looked at her ragged reflection. Then she opened the door and walked in.

She ordered a giant latte and a scone, dug into her bag, and started to bring out one of the several unused fake credit cards she carried. But as her fingers closed around the small wallet that held all the fake cards, she felt the catfish move again, and something inside her resisted.

Instead, she reached into the front pocket of her jeans, found a twenty, and handed it to the barista. She received back $12.38, which would have to hold her for . . . she didn't know how long. She had thousands of dollars pigeonholed away in dozens of accounts overseas, most of them in China. But she never used real credit cards or debit cards, anything that could be traced or linked to an identity. She, better than anyone, knew those
dangers.

She'd have to get into a bank sometime, have cash wired to her from one of her foreign accounts. But that would take time, and something told her she didn't have much time right now.

She took her coffee and scone to an open Internet workstation tucked in the back corner, sat down, and opened the browser.

She punched in the IP address of her secure mail server in China, then entered her username and password, hesitating just a moment before punching the enter key.

At the top of the in-box sat the
Forward to Avoid
DISASTER!!
message she'd read the day before. Hadn't she deleted it?

Then, as she watched, new unread e-mail messages began to roll into the box: five of them, then ten, and more. She stopped counting when it reached fifty unread messages, even as new messages continued to flood her in-box.

Every message was a carbon copy of the one she'd received the day before.

Every subject line told her to
Forward to Avoid
DISASTER!!

The color drained from her face, and suddenly she didn't feel like eating her scone or drinking her coffee. She wanted only to crawl under the table where she currently sat, curl into a ball, and cry.

And still, the messages in the in-box kept piling up, now more than seventy-five of them. All sent at the exact same time: 12:07 p.m. Just after noon, Pacific time.

She looked at the clock on the computer, surprised to discover it was almost one in the afternoon. Had she really slept that long?

That meant twenty-three hours until more fire and destruction. Or worse. And it would happen seventy-five times over. Or worse.

A thought popped into her mind immediately. She had a database of more than ten million names on her servers in China. That meant ten million addresses she could forward this message to—more than enough addresses to take care of a couple million
DISASTER!!
messages.

It would take just a couple hours to write the script, and she was pretty sure she could spool up to a hundred thousand messages or more in the next fifteen hours.

Her e-mail list could save her. Her bottom feeding could, as ever, be useful.

But she dismissed the thought even as it happened. It was one thing to send mostly harmless e-mail, clog someone's in-box with text or images. Even harvesting e-mails, phishing for identities, stealing from unsuspecting souls, well . . . none of that had killed anyone, and buyer beware. Those scams only snagged the people who were dumb enough to fall for them. If anything, they taught people valuable lessons, made them smarter. She'd always been able to tell herself she was performing a crude public service.

Forwarding this message, however, would create thousands of disasters around the world. Like the fire last night. Or worse. She knew this with absolute certainty. For those poor souls who were stupid enough to forward the message—and Corrine knew all too well there were plenty of those people—the disasters would be magnified among friends and family.

No. It would end with her. She would sacrifice herself to the disaster, whatever it might be, to avoid taking anyone else down with her. At least she could do that.

Better that than to be the person who sacrifices the rest of humanity to try and save herself.

Corrine sighed, feeling a tear threaten the corner of her eye. She was becoming a weaker bottom-feeder all the time.

61b.

The next morning she was somewhere in Idaho. She'd tried to thumb rides all afternoon and evening, headed east on I-90, but she realized, with her unkempt hair, her dirty clothes, that she probably looked more like a desperate addict than a nice young girl on her way to see Mom somewhere back in the Midwest.

Still, she'd managed to make it to the next state, to the wild uninhabited woods, in less than a day. That was progress. A T-shirt for sale inside the last truck stop had read
This ain't the middle of nowhere, but you can see it from here
. That's what she wanted. The middle of nowhere. So whenever
DISASTER!!
came, it would claim her only. No one else would be around, to be swept up in the dark deal she had made with the devil.

And now she was walking down a lonely stretch of the interstate, surrounded on all sides by nothing but giant pine trees. Not a bad place to die, she decided.

Corrine was out of money now, and desperately hungry. Sure, she could have used one of the fake credit cards to buy something at that truck stop, but she was past that. She'd dropped all the cards into a garbage can before blowing out of Seattle.

A breeze moved past her, almost lemon-scented in its freshness, and a quiet seemed to settle over the heavy forest. Corrine stopped walking, forgetting her blistered and swollen feet, forgetting the hunger in her stomach, forgetting everything.

She closed her eyes, noting that the highway had suddenly become abandoned. Granted, this didn't strike her as a section of highway that would ever be packed bumper to bumper, but the sudden stillness only punctuated the emptiness. She couldn't even hear the sound of traffic in the distance, which had been a constant for so very long.

And then the sound returned, suddenly and brutally. Not the sound of traffic, to be exact; as near as she could tell, it was just a truck, its diesel engine laboring, coming around a corner somewhere behind her.

She opened her eyes, looked back down the road. The truck—a large, red behemoth—came barreling around the corner, weaving and changing lanes. Abruptly, she heard a hiss of air as the driver hit the brakes; the vehicle's front end chattered and shuddered, and the large trailer behind it weaved back and forth, threatening to break free.

Corrine backed away into the ditch, not wanting to be anywhere on the paved surface as the truck went by. It blew past her in a rush of air and a scream of air brakes, the smell of its diesel exhaust obliterating any scent of the fresh forest she'd been enjoying.

A hundred yards or so down the road, the truck finally came to a halt beside the road and sat, idling.