Faces in the Fire (16 page)

She turned and rummaged through her bag for a few seconds, hoping that doing something else, anything else, would take her mind off the sick feeling inside.

Instead, she felt even worse, knowing she was on the verge of throwing up. She slid out of the booth awkwardly, pulling her bag behind her. “Be right back. I'm going to the restroom.”

She moved toward the restroom, bag in hand, made it through the door and into a stall before the hash browns came back up.

Her stomach felt a bit better after that, but her hands started to tremble. After a few dry heaves, she finally gave a deep sigh and opened the stall door.

Another woman was at the counter, ostensibly washing her hands, but obviously staring at the stall Corrine occupied; she dropped her gaze when Corrine left the stall.

Probably thought she was bulimic. Heck, might as well run with it. She moved to the sink beside the woman.

“Well,” she said brightly, looking into the mirror, “there's a couple pounds I won't have to work off at the gym.”

The woman recoiled, actually sprang back in horror, then grabbed for a paper towel and rushed out the bathroom door.

Corrine laughed, knowing she would at least be immortalized at the woman's next kaffeeklatsch.

She looked at herself in the mirror, and suddenly, inexplicably, she was terrified. In a few hours, it would be—

DISASTER!!

Yes, disaster. By that time, she had to be alone, away from here, away from everyone. Go for a hike in the forest. Maybe get eaten by a bear.

She smiled, looked at her smirk in the bathroom mirror, ran a hand through her hair, secretly thrilled to see it so full, finally wiped at the tears welling in her eyes. Cured of cancer, only to be killed a day later.
I'll take Irony for
100, Alex.

Deep breath.
You can do this
, she said to her reflection. But her reflection didn't seem to be convinced.

She left the restroom and returned to the table. Kurt was standing with his back to her, studying something.

“So where you headed?” she asked as she walked up behind him.

He turned, surprised, stuffed something into his pocket. A fresh secret. Let him have the secret; she'd just thought of killing him by passing along the cursed numbers. Her stomach did one more uneasy flip, so she did her best to think about anything else.

“Huh?” he said. “Oh, Chicago.”

He smiled, and for a moment, she panicked; was he really going to ask her to come with him? Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

“How about you? Where you going?”

“No clue,” she said. “Just trying to outrun my past.”

“It's a vicious circle,” he agreed.

When he said it, the idea bloomed in her mind instantly. Something she hadn't thought of before, but something that just might be a way out. A way to relieve the curse and a way to redeem herself, all in one. “What did you say?” she whispered, even though she knew exactly what he had said. The words still rang hollowly inside her head.

“A vicious circle,” he repeated.

“Yes, it is.” Then: “Do they . . . ah, have a computer I could use in here?” she asked.

A clumsy segue, to be sure, but this vicious circle idea was expanding in her mind even as she stood here. She needed to start on it. Now.

He looked at her. “Truckers' lounge upstairs. Wireless Internet, a computer workstation you can use. Nothing special.”

She bit her lip. “I don't need anything special.” She hoped.

“I think . . .” he started, then shook his head. “I need to get going.”

They had stopped at the doors to the truck plaza, the flow of people entering and leaving moving around them like smooth water in a river.

He offered that goofy smile, held out an awkward hand, waiting for her to shake.

Instead, she stepped close, kissed his cheek, hugged him tight. For some kind of human contact, if . . . just if. Maybe some penance for her thoughts. “You take care of yourself,” she said.

Corrine stepped back, watched him walk toward his truck, then pulled out her cell phone to check the time. It was 9:43 a.m. That meant 8:43 a.m. Pacific time. Three hours and change before . . . well, before
DISASTER!!
If she could get on a computer upstairs, and if she worked quickly, she might make it.

The “truckers' lounge” was a bit more barren than she'd pictured, and only one person—a guy at a small counter or bar, reading a newspaper—was in it. He glanced at her, nodded, went back to reading. Maybe this time of morning wasn't exactly trucker rush hour. In the corner, a TV sat on a stand, images flickering silently. In front of the TV, two large overstuffed chairs. On the back wall, a couple of wooden desks.

She moved to the desk that held a computer, surprised. It was actually a somewhat newer model, not one of the old gerbil-powered workstations she'd expected.

A few minutes later, she was connected to her e-mail. Her in-box now held more than five hundred e-mail messages promising
DISASTER!!

She logged in to her communications backbone in China. Well, not hers alone; along with the other SpamLords, she'd bought the equipment, rented the space, developed the bandwidth. In China, no one could take them, and they could route all their own e-mail traffic without fear of getting mails bounced by stateside providers. Blacklists were an entirely different thing, of course, which was why they'd registered literally thousands of individual IP addresses through their Chinese backbone; once an IP address moved to a published blacklist, they could simply switch to another IP address and keep pumping the e-mails through.

It was a solid system, really. One she'd been proud of, in a freakish way. And now, the closed system was going to be her salvation. She hoped.

What triggered the idea was Kurt's comment.
Vicious
circle.
When he said it, the entire architecture popped into her head instantly. Block out five hundred IP addresses, assign them to all the servers hooked into her Chinese backbone—currently, about two hundred servers in all. Then create e-mail accounts at each of those IP addresses, and set each account to automatically forward to five addresses on other machines on the backbone.

A vicious circle. The e-mails would keep forwarding, back and forth, until the software or hardware started to melt down. She was sure the system would easily handle at least a hundred million forwards before it bogged down; it was, after all, designed to move a lot of traffic.

And when it did start to melt down, well, what of it? She would be ridding the world of some of the heaviest spammers on the Internet. Including herself.

Her fingers flew, installing software remotely, setting up auto-forwards, configuring IP addresses and databases.

And more than ever, she enjoyed her work.

63.

At 12:15 p.m. Montana time, 11:15 a.m. Seattle time, Corrine decided she had to quit. That only left her forty-five minutes to set everything in motion, then get away from the truck stop, away from everything, in case her scheme didn't work.

And there was no guarantee it would work, was there?

She logged into her secure e-mail account from the Web, selected the five hundred
DISASTER!!
e-mails waiting in the in-box, then forwarded them to the first e-mail address in the vicious circle.

It would either work or it wouldn't. She would either live or she wouldn't.

But she had one last task.

She'd thought of the correct answer to the last test. All the signs had been there: her computer, magically harvesting thousands of e-mails from cancer patients all night. The spam message, begging her to forward to five others. The eye-opening experience of seeing the misery she'd caused at her apartment.

And more than anything, the exhilaration of discovering what had saved her.

It hadn't been the catfish pills that staved off the cancer, hadn't been the cream that restored her hair.

It had been her decision to be impulsive, to actually live rather than simply exist. She had built a wall around herself for so many years, vowing she would never be a victim.

But she'd learned in the last few days that there was a huge difference between being a victim and being vulnerable. By admitting her own frailties, she had opened new avenues of strength she never knew she had. By pulling herself out of the impersonal world of spam mail and phishing scams, she had entered the personal world of pain and joy and sacrifice.

And that world was much more real than anything she'd ever created.

She opened her master SQL database, told it to extract all the contacts tagged with cancer as a keyword; a few minutes later, she had about ten thousand addresses.

She went back to her e-mail and hit the Compose New Message button. The subject line was obvious: 1595544534. Then she moved to the body of the message and paused for a few moments before beginning to type.

Four months ago I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma, and I thought it was the end.

I now realize it was the beginning.

Corrine continued to type, pouring out her story until the screen blurred. Only then did she realize she was crying as the words poured out of her.

She would pass along the numbers. She would share what she had learned. She would check this e-mail address every day, responding to every person who wrote, just as long as the vicious circle held. She would share her story, her pain, her frustrations, with anyone else who wanted to share their stories, their pain, their frustrations.

It was her
Fu
, after all. And her
Fu
, she now understood, was not about luck. It was about love.

Even for bottom-feeders.

Third Stanza

Dragon Chaser

19.

You chased the dragon, and it chased you.

Grace knew this, thought about it often as she lit up and inhaled, feeling the lazy tendrils of white smoke wrap around her face. Like dragon tails, yes.

She closed her eyes, losing herself in the embrace, waiting for the dragon to begin its roar inside. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes tops. So much slower, of course, than shooting it, but there was always a trade-off. Shooting gave you an immediate
hit, punched you in the gut with instant euphoria. But it was more dangerous.

And it left tracks, that particular dragon. Puckered pink tracks. Not that it mattered much in her case; her arms had been ruined long ago, before she'd even hit her teen years.

She caught herself absently itching at the insides of her forearms, forced herself to stop. The junkie's tattoos. She had many of them. Too many. But what had she known then? It was positively punk rock, this constant companion with exotic names like horse and Harry Jones and smack. Sid's sedative. Cobain's candy.

And so, because she needed to forget, it became her choice. How old-school of her.

She leaned back on her ratty sofa, closing her eyes, trying her best to close all her senses. It would come soon, maybe as soon as five minutes. Not that long at all. A small trade-off, really, to save her skin: a few minutes weren't too long to wait. She could do that. Usually. Plus, smoking staved the real danger of an OD or a bad batch of tar.

Okay, so she wasn't totally off the tar. Once a week, maybe, she brought out the sharps, trying her best to find a gutter on her stomach. Or her thighs. Sometimes, the bottoms of her feet. No sense adding more junkie tattoos on her arms. She did a different kind of tattoo now, didn't she?

How many more minutes? Three? Maybe. Maybe.

Grace opened her eyes, tried to ignore the itch behind her corneas, the itch that simmered when she needed a hit, turning to a steady boil when she was desperate. That itch would be gone soon.

Chasing the dragon worked.

It always worked.

Of course, the dragon always chased you too.

21.

Grace unlocked the gate in front of the shop, rolled up the metal framework, enjoying the feel of the iron sliding into the frame above. A solid sound, a solid feel.

She keyed the front door, opened it, walked inside, set down her bag, and flipped on the lights. She'd named her shop GraceSpace because it fit—fit her and fit the funky Fremont location here in Seattle.

The shop always smelled the same: a bit like soap, a bit like iodine, a bit like . . . well, like ink. They were both here: the antiseptic soap and iodine to wash skin, the ink to fuel the designs.

She looked at the clock. First one in, as usual. Vaughn would be here within the next hour, probably; Zoey sometime after noon. Vaughn and Zoey weren't their real names; they were stage names, concocted personas so adored by some folks in the body-art trade. Affected names aside, she couldn't complain about either of them; they were both going to do just fine when she cut them loose. She'd taken them on as apprentices at roughly the same time a couple years ago. It was how you learned the trade, how she herself had learned it.

She smiled. Here she was, mentally hacking on Vaughn and Zoey for using fake names, and Grace wasn't even her own given name. A bit of “do as I say, not as I do,” she supposed. Grace seemed like a perfect persona for her, so she started using it soon after coming to Seattle.

Amend that: soon after coming to Seattle for the second time. But the first time, something of a disaster, didn't count in her mind.

And now she was probably the oldest working tattoo artist in the area. Maybe people should call her Ancient Grace. She told everyone she was from the Midwest, which was only a slight fib since she'd come from Montana, and that seemed to satisfy them; like her, many of them had left behind so-called normal lives. That was also part of this body-art persona. You lived an invented existence, a world filled with skulls and stars and flames. Really, it was like a real-life comic book sometimes, the only difference being that the pages were human skin.

She looked at the appointment book. Chelsea would be here in fifteen minutes or so, a twenty-something girl who wanted to get twin violin f-holes tattooed on her lower back as a gift to her boyfriend. As if she were a Stradivarius, some instrument to be played.