Faces in the Fire (15 page)

Okay, so what now?

Had the driver seen her and decided to pull over to check her out? No, she knew that wasn't the case; the truck had been weaving all over the road as it came around the corner, before the driver could have seen her.

In all likelihood the driver was in trouble. A heart attack, maybe. A seizure.

She should help. It might not be the safest idea, but actually choosing to help someone else might, in some small way, make up for all the times she'd been so wrapped up inside her own skin. The last time, the only time, she'd helped others had been at the scene of the car wreck. When she'd escaped from the sales crew. She'd pulled Marcus and Jenny to safety. Brad, too, though she had no way of knowing at the time he was already dead.

She probably only had an hour or two to live. The least she could do was help someone else, genuinely and selflessly, for once.

She ran to the truck, ignoring the pain in her swollen feet, and knocked on the passenger door. “Everything okay?” she asked, then had to stifle another inappropriate laugh. She'd used one of Dr. Swain's famous one-liners in a rather unseemly situation.

She tried again. “Hello?” she asked, unsure what else to say.

After a few seconds she heard movement inside the truck's cab, and the door above her popped open. A man, sweaty and pale, looked down and tried to smile.
Tried
being the operative word.

She'd heard about truckers, had maybe even seen a documentary at some point that talked about how a lot of them were druggies. That's what this guy had to be. He was on drugs and having a bad trip.

“I . . . I saw you go by me just down the road back there, and you were . . . um . . . looked like you were having problems.”

She winced inside, knowing she was stumbling over her words but unsure how to extricate herself. This truck driver scared her, and she just wanted him to leave so she could keep walking. Maybe in an hour or so, she'd just step off the interstate's
path and wander into the forest itself, keep herself isolated as she waited for the end.

“Problems,” the trucker parroted back to her. She wasn't sure if it was a question or a statement. Or maybe he was mocking her.

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I thought you were having some kind of problem with the truck at first, the steering or something. But when you got it pulled to the side here . . .”

She wasn't really sure how to finish that sentence, so she didn't. She looked at him, tried to show resolve, let him know she wasn't scared, she wasn't some victim he could pick up and beat in a drug-induced frenzy.

“You thought maybe I was the one having problems, rather than the truck,” he said.

Okay, so she'd been ready to say something very much like that, but she'd decided against it. She didn't want to suggest to the driver that he was somehow incompetent. No telling how he'd react. But she found herself nodding anyway.

“I'm fine,” he said. “Just dropped something on the floor, tried to get it. Stupid, I know.”

Wow, this guy was the world's worst liar.

“Okay,” she said. “I just, uh . . .” What could she say? She just wanted him to leave. “I'll let you get back to it.”

She stepped back, hoping he'd just close the door and leave her life forever. What little bit of it might remain, that was;
DISASTER!!
lurked just around the corner, after all, a much larger and faster-working adversary than cancer, evidently. Or maybe this guy, this truck, was part of the disaster; she hadn't thought of that. She wanted to check her watch to find out.

Then he said the one thing she was most terrified of hearing. “You need a ride?”

DISASTER!!

“I . . . uh . . .” she said, trying to think of a way out of the situation.

“Look,” he continued, “there's a truck plaza down the road about ten miles. Me, I think I probably need to pull off for a quick break. I'll buy you breakfast.”

Think, think, think. No, don't think. Just turn and walk away.
Run
away. What was he going to do, scramble out of the cab and chase her? Maybe, but at least she'd have a chance of getting away. Standing here, staring dumbly, wasn't going to do much for her.

Then the druggie truck driver said something that sucked all the air from her lungs: “Your arm.”

Instantly, she knew what he was referring to, even before she turned to look at the catfish tattoo peeking out from beneath her sleeve. Not for the first time, she wished she'd grabbed a jacket before leaving her apartment to the flames. She'd grabbed her bag, why not a jacket along with it?

“What about it?” she heard herself ask, terrified of the answer—whatever it might be.

“It's a catfish,” he said, and something about his face had changed. He didn't look quite so drug-crazed, quite so scary. He looked . . . harmless.

“Long story.” Longer than he could imagine.

“What do the numbers mean?” he asked.

Numbers? What numbers? She turned her head back to the tattoo, heard the truck driver speaking from somewhere in the distance.

“Numbers, kind of hidden inside the tattoo,” he was saying, but she lost the rest of it because the catfish was moving, and there
were
numbers inside the tattoo, something like ripples of water. Even before seeing all the numbers, she knew what they were.

“1595544534,” she whispered.

Fu.

She was supposed to accept a ride from this trucker. Maybe it would end in
DISASTER!!
but that was her
Fu
, and she would accept it.

“I guess I will take that breakfast,” she said, pulling herself up into the cab.

At least she might die with a full stomach.

62a.

She told the waitress she wanted hash browns and gravy. A greasy, artery-clogging breakfast she'd loved as a teen but hadn't let herself eat in years.

Of course, her arteries were the least of her worries right now.

The trucker ordered coffee, steak, and eggs. “Hungry?” she asked him after the waitress had retreated.

“Always.” He smiled as if he knew some private joke he was keeping from her.

Corrine liked that; she, herself, had worked her way through most of her life by smiling when she was dumbfounded. She'd laughed her way through cancer, thanks to the high jinks of that joker Dr. Swain.

“I'm Corrine,” she said. “I suppose we should get that out of the way.”

He nodded. “Nice to meet you, Corrine. I'm Kurt.”

“And what's your story, Kurt?”

He smiled. “Still working on it.”

Well, everyone had to have secrets. Even freaky truckers who took an unnatural interest in tattoos.

“Guess that's as much as I'm gonna get right now, huh?”

“Trust me, you really don't want to know.”

But she did want to know; she'd spent the last several hours, several days, several months, worrying about herself and her cancer. She wanted to concentrate on someone else for just a few minutes. Even if that was all she had left.

“You think I'm worried about you escaping from a prerelease program?”

The waitress, her poor timing impeccable, chose that moment to bring Kurt's coffee. Corrine waited patiently while the waitress poured, noticing how Kurt stared at her across the table.

He spoke in a low, monotonous tone after the waitress retreated. “I had a brain injury several years ago,” he said. “Since then, I . . . well, I can hear ghosts. Ghosts in the clothing of dead people.”

Well. Certainly not the story she'd expected to hear, but much more interesting. Somehow, it put everything she was going through in context. Kinda like finding out you weren't the only one in solitary confinement when you heard someone scratching on the walls of the cell next to you.

“And what do the ghosts say?” she asked. She hoped she didn't sound flippant, even though she knew she usually did.

“They ask me for help. Finding relatives, giving messages to others, that kind of thing.”

“And you like doing that?” Now she did have to suppress a nervous giggle. As if she were asking him about his hobbies and interests:
So, you enjoy talking to ghosts . . . how do
you feel about stamp collecting?

“I don't,” he said.

“Why don't you like it?” Seemed like a natural enough next question, something any well-trained therapist might say. Not that she was one of those.

He looked at her, blinked a few times. “No, I mean I don't do it,” he said matter-of-factly. As if he'd answered the question thousands of times before. “I ignore them.”

Her mouth suddenly felt dry, so she picked up her glass of water and sipped. “You don't do it,” she repeated.

“I go to estate sales, auctions, buy all the clothing that belongs to the dead so I can listen to the ghosts inside,” he said. “But I don't talk to them. I don't answer them. I don't help them.”

He was staring at her now, studying her for a reaction. He'd bared a deep, dark secret, and he was worried about her reaction. It was obvious he felt this was some shameful secret, and if he knew how she really felt about what he was saying—and she believed
every word, because after all, she was the woman who had just cured her cancer and grown her hair after ordering strange concoctions off the Internet, which made ghost-talk seem perfectly plausible—he'd probably be appalled.

Because the truth was, she wanted to say
Good for you
. Or
Smart move
. Or
You're a genius
. The ghosts he talked to, they were invitations to disaster, weren't they? By ignoring their calls he stayed grounded in reality—or what counted as everyone else's reality—and he didn't veer off the deep end that was filled with
DISASTER!!

If she herself had done something else with the last spam (exactly what, she didn't know), she wouldn't be sitting here right now, waiting for the end of the world. Or the end of her world at the very least.

At least she would die cancer-free. After all that, she was ashamed to admit, the thought of being cancer-free still felt fresh and cleansing.

How was that for a deep, dark secret? But she couldn't say any of that, couldn't say anything she really felt. So she relied on her good old crutch: use a little black humor, see if it worked on him.

“Well,” she said. “It would seem you're one sick puppy.” She raised her glass of water in a mock toast. “Welcome to the club. I'm the president.”

He smiled. Good.

“What qualifies you to be the president?”

Well, heck, he'd let his inner freak out to play; why not do the same?

“Cancer, for one,” she said. “But that's not the half of it. You got an e-mail account?”

“Yeah.”

“Get spam?”

“Who doesn't?”

“Well, you can thank me for that. You're about to have breakfast with a woman who sends out millions of e-mails every week for fake degrees, online prescriptions, and—what's a delicate way to say this?—male enhancement. Bon appetit.”

His brow furrowed for a moment, and a trace of a smile stayed on his lips. Probably trying to decide if she was telling the truth. Either way, she hoped that she'd helped him feel a bit better about himself, provided a bit of absolution. Because this Kurt guy, she decided, wasn't really a bottom-feeder. Didn't seem to have the stomach, or the heart, for it.

So he was at least a few rungs up from the basement where she resided.

He wasn't saying anything, so she continued. “Those numbers on my arm. I didn't even know they were there, but—they're kind of what brought me here.”

This time he spoke immediately. “Well, if you don't mind going a bit deeper into the twilight zone, one of the ghosts told me I was supposed to give you a ride. Just before you showed up. So—no offense—I'm a little worried this is all some kind of hallucination. The brain injury I told you about.”

She smiled bitterly, biting her tongue. If only that were true: her whole life, nothing more than a hallucination, an illusion. So much easier.

“Oh, I'm real, Kurt,” she said, almost without realizing she was speaking. “I'm so real it hurts.”

The waitress, true to her perfect bad timing, picked that exact moment to set big platters of food in front of them. Or maybe it was good timing in this instance. Corrine was still trying to decide.

After a few minutes, Kurt spoke again. “So about the numbers . . .”

“I don't know much about them,” she said, truthfully.

“You don't know? So why'd you get them?”

“I didn't ask for them. I didn't even know they were there until you saw them.”

“But they mean something to you, don't they?”

She thought of the numbers, written on a napkin inside a plastic sandwich baggie, still safely held inside her bag. A curse. Grace had passed along a curse to her, told her there would be a time when she would know she should share it with someone else. Something like that. Only at that time, she thought it had been a good thing.

“Yeah, they mean something.”

“They . . . they mean something to me too. I just can't put my finger on it right now.”

She stared at him. Maybe that was it. All she had to do was pass along the numbers, pass along the curse to someone else. Then she would be free of . . . everything. And this man, sitting in front of her . . . well, it sounded harsh to say it, but he was a little simple wasn't he? She was already thinking of him as Forrest Gump.

She dismissed the thought and suddenly felt a little sick to her stomach. She'd just sat here and thought about killing someone else to save herself. Once again. She'd thought of herself first for . . . forever. No more. Last couple hours of her life weren't exactly an opportune time to make some big moral stand, but that was where she was. No, she wouldn't condemn this man. She wouldn't condemn anyone else. She had been a bottom-feeder, and she would pay whatever price needed to be paid now. Even so, the hash browns sat uneasily in her stomach.