Faces in the Fire (4 page)

Yeah, some time in the sleeper berth. That's what he needed.

59.

Something woke him.

Static.

He sat up in his sleeper, pausing and listening. A few moments later, a brief burst of static filled the cabin again, followed by the forlorn voice he'd heard earlier.

“Give her a ride, Kurt.”

Then the image of the catfish appeared in his mind, oddly comforting after the terror inspired by the voice speaking his name.

Kurt sat still, waiting, listening. It had to be late, really late, right now. He fumbled, hit the illumination dial on his watch, which displayed 3:23 in soft blue.

He pushed himself out of bed, crawled out of the sleeper, worked his way into the cab of his truck. Outside, the sky above glowed with a million pinpricks of light from distant stars. Out here, in the deep forests of the Pacific Northwest, far from the lights of cities, the stars multiplied in the dark fabric of the sky.

He opened the door of his cab quietly, listening. No footsteps or scuffling outside; only the chirr of a few crickets and the overbearing stillness of the forest canopy above. This rest area near the eastern edge of the Idaho panhandle was one of his favorite stops. Very little traffic, and a thick cove of trees surrounding it, making it seem like a hidden fortress.

He peered into the parking area around him. He was all alone at this time of morning. Most truckers preferred the big stops and plazas scattered along I-90, and at least two of them were within thirty miles of where he now sat. Other motorists who stopped at rest areas invariably passed this one by, as if afraid of the deep woods. Held-over fears from bedtime stories of Hansel and Gretel, perhaps.

He stared around the cab of his truck, now illuminated by the interior lights. Nothing out of the ordinary. He shut the door, enveloping himself in darkness once again.

60.

Early that morning, Kurt settled in for a long haul.

He decided not to wear the dead man's shoes as he'd done the day before.

They stayed in the sleeper.

The voice, speaking his name, had been too close a connection. A connection he needed to break. That door between his world and the world of the ghosts inside the clothing needed to stay comfortably closed.

He could get close to Fargo before he had to pull over and log another break tonight. From there, he'd be within an eleven-hour drive of Chicago. Yeah, he could still make it in three days, even though he'd had a slow start out of Seattle yesterday.

He shifted and relaxed, finally reaching an easier stretch of road that ribboned out from the base of the Rocky Mountains in western Montana. The miles began to fly by, and Kurt retreated to that empty place inside, a place filled with nothingness.

A favorite place.

When things were just right, he could move his mind to this place, a neutral, blank landscape devoid of any thoughts at all. Nothing to do but stare at that long strip of white line, streaming down the road for miles. Part of why he still said yes whenever he was offered a quick OTR route.

Yes, he was there, so there.

Until the static broke the silence inside the cab.

And then, after a few moments of static, the familiar voice returned. “Give her a ride, Kurt.”

Then the catfish, swimming in orange, penetrating his mind. Even from behind him, the dead man's shoes continued to pump out their message.

He decided he didn't want to hear that message anymore. It was time for the shoes to go.

He slowed his rig, pulling it to the side of the road with a hiss of the air brakes. He threw on the flashers, sat staring at the road for a moment.

Then he scrambled into the sleeper cab, digging under his bunk to find the shoes. When he touched them, he felt energy radiating from them. The catfish swam inside his mind, even as he fought to push it away.

Yes, the shoes had to go. The catfish, comforting as it was, had now spawned a different kind of fear that didn't just swim in his mind, but in his very veins.

He returned to the cab, opened the passenger door, slid to the ground. Outside, the scent of pine wafted by on a soft breeze. The concrete surface of the interstate stretched away from him in both directions with no visible traffic.

He held the shoes away from him, looked at them, then heaved them as hard as he could down the steep embankment just off the highway. Several feet below him, the shoes bounced a few times off gravel riprap rock lining the slope, tumbling slowly away and out of sight. Maybe, eventually, they would make it all the way to the bottom of this canyon, where the Clark Fork River flowed.

Kurt caught himself holding his breath, waiting for . . . he wasn't sure what. He'd half expected the dead man's shoes to protest or something, to latch onto his wrist with jagged teeth, to pierce his brain with a dull, overbearing stab of pain.

That was ridiculous, of course. But he'd never experienced clothing with such a strong vibe. He needed to get rid of the shoes before they did something bad. He knew this, felt this, deep in his bones.

Kurt turned back toward his rig, just a few steps behind him, and noticed something about the trailer for the first time. When he'd picked it up, it hadn't seemed at all unusual: a large shipping container on a flatbed trailer. Something he'd hauled many times.

But now, for the first time, he noticed markings on the side of the trailer.

Radiation symbols, along with
DANGEROUS CARGO
warnings painted in garish yellow paint.

He was hauling radioactive cargo.

That was impossible, of course. If the shipping container
did
contain something like that, he'd have government vehicles accompanying him and a mountain of forms and extra paperwork at every weigh station.

Not that he knew this firsthand. He'd never hauled radioactive materials before; he just assumed there would be . . . regulations. Extra hoops. There had to be. The government wouldn't just let dangerous materials out on the road.

He swallowed, trying to replay the images of yesterday in his mind. Okay. Think. What was different about this trip? He rewound, recalling the freight pickup the previous day. Down on the docks in Seattle, nothing out of the ordinary. He'd hooked up the trailer, pulled out of the loading zone, and hit the interstate within half an hour.

So what about the bill of lading? He tried to picture it but couldn't quite remember. Truth be told, he'd barely glanced at it; he'd been too intent on the dead man's shoes, on the catfish image, on the sculpture that he'd started in his workshop. This whole trip he had planned to let those images coalesce in his own mind, give him a fully formed idea of where to take his beginning efforts on a giant catfish sculpture.

Kurt returned to his rig, climbed through the open passenger door, pulled the paperwork out of the console between the seats.

He was at once surprised and not surprised to discover that the company listed on the paperwork was called Catfish Industries.

When he read this, the image of the catfish bathed in orange returned to his mind. Even from their current location at the bottom of that deep canyon, it seemed, the dead man's shoes were still able to send signals.

So what did that say about this particular load? After all, hauling for a company called Catfish Industries seemed a bit too coincidental to be . . . well, coincidental.

The question was: what, exactly, was he hauling? Could it be something radioactive? Was that why the catfish swam in orange?

(brain damage)

There. He'd let himself think it again. The most obvious explanation for all this. Of course he had brain damage; he knew this from long ago, from his first therapy sessions with Todd. The brain damage had somehow awakened an unused part of his brain—the part that received messages from ghosts on the other side of the door.

What waited behind that door had terrified him at first, yes, but had soon become normal. Almost comforting, in a way. Without the moans and screams and wails of the dead, he would be utterly alone in his small cabin and large shop. But hearing them, knowing they were there, meant someone needed him. It let him feel, however briefly, he wasn't utterly alone, cut off from his own past or anyone else's future.

So now, this image of the catfish projected by the shoes . . . well, that had to be part of the brain damage. Maybe his injured gray matter had continued to map new pathways, rerouting signals even after making contact with the clothing ghosts. And now those newer pathways were firing, illuminating portions of the brain long dormant. Maybe forever dormant.

Brain damage. Yes.

But then, none of that had any bearing on what might be inside the shipping container on his flatbed trailer right now. Brain damage or not, he needed to see what was inside. If nothing else, he needed to prove his mind was getting away from him, because he knew it would just be box after box of canned peaches bound for grocery shelves in Michigan or pallets of toys ready for excited children in Iowa or something else innocuous.

Just go look, get it over with, and move on.

He climbed back to the cab and once again opened the storage compartment in the console. He retrieved a flashlight and a safety tool that helped open shipping containers, a bent piece of metal called “the persuader.” As a bonus, the persuader could act as a weapon, if need be.

He climbed down to the road again. On the horizon, waves of heat radiated from the surface of the road, even though the overnight chill still hadn't totally left the air. Diesel fumes from his clattering rig filled his nostrils. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just he and his rig on a lonely stretch of Montana highway.

He swallowed, felt his dry throat clicking. Why did he feel such an overwhelming sense of dread?

Kurt walked to the end of the trailer, past the high metal sides, until he came to the large steel doors at the back.

He stared at the container for several seconds, trying to decide what he should do. Eventually he reached for the back door, touching the warm metal, and ran his finger over the yellow-and-black radiation symbol. The paint almost seemed wet, as if it were nothing more than some hastily scrawled gang graffiti. Maybe that's what it was: a joke, some kids who thought it would be great fun to see trailers traveling America's highways with radiation symbols painted on the sides.

But it didn't feel like a joke. And . . . well, if brain damage wasn't causing the hallucinations, surely a bit of radiation would do it, wouldn't it? There it was: another perfectly logical explanation. He was being poisoned by radioactive cargo that had somehow slipped in beneath the rules and regulations.

Which made opening the container, exposing himself to the possible radiation inside, a ludicrous thought. Yeah, he was definitely brain injured to be thinking this was in any way a good idea. Kurt took a deep breath, slipped the persuader inside the container door, and pushed. The door held for a few moments, then came open with a long shudder. Kurt put down the persuader on the flatbed trailer's deck, thumbed the flashlight's power switch.

Maybe he hadn't been exposed to the radiation at all yet. Maybe he'd been perfectly safe until he cracked open the container. Maybe the container was lined with lead, and he was going to kill himself by—

Kurt huffed, pushing the jumbled thoughts from his mind as he swept the beam of the flashlight across the container's contents.

As he'd expected, he saw hundreds of boxes inside, stacked floor to ceiling. The sides of the boxes were printed with the words
Catfish Industries
, as well as Chinese characters he didn't recognize. Or maybe they were Japanese.
For a moment he half expected to see a reversed numeral 3 in the mass of markings, a clear tie to the ghost shoes he'd just discarded, but he let himself exhale slowly when he found nothing of the kind.

Okay, so he was hauling boxes. That made him feel a little better. If he were truly hauling something dangerous, it would be in something else. What, he didn't know. Giant cylinders, maybe. Or sealed barrels. Something. He didn't really know what radioactive containers looked like, and that thought was more troublesome than he cared to admit.

The boxes were wrapped tightly in cellophane to prevent them from shifting during shipping. Standard. Kurt retrieved his persuader once more and used the edge of it to hack into the thick plastic coating, cutting a crude gash into the packing material. He reached above him, squeezed his fingers around the edge of a box, slid it out a bit to test the weight. Something inside shifted.

The box wasn't extra heavy, maybe twenty pounds, so he pulled it down from the stack.
Black Tar,
a simple label said on the box's packing slip, inside a clear plastic envelope. He stared a few moments, bent down to pick up the persuader again, and used its edge to cut through the packing tape that sealed the box.

Inside, covered by Styrofoam packing material, were several bottles of dark black liquid, each bottle plainly marked with the words
Black Tar.
Just like the outside of the box. He pulled out a bottle and held it up, shining the flashlight on its surface. The liquid inside swallowed the flashlight's beam. He tilted the bottle; the liquid started to move slowly, like . . . well, like tar. But within a few seconds its viscosity seemed to change, become lighter, and the liquid easily sloshed inside the bottle.

Kurt shrugged, returned the bottle back into the box. He slid the box back into its place, then scanned the other boxes stacked before him. Did they all hold the same thing? He doubted it; no two boxes were the same.

He picked another box from the top of the stack and pulled it down, cut the tape to open the lid. Inside he found bottles that looked like vitamin pills.
AMAZING CATFISH CURE!
the plain label announced. Inside were tablets, lozenges of some kind. He shook a bottle of the pills and put it back before sliding the large box back into its place.

Okay. He'd opened this storage container, expecting radiation sickness or a laser beam or some other far-fetched, deadly calamity. Instead, he'd found boxes filled with bottles of soy sauce and aspirin, shipped from somewhere in China.