Faces in the Fire

by Hines

  At roughly seventy miles per hour, the van had cartwheeled, going end over end once, twice, three times. Corrine knew this because the whole event had slowed down, happened in slow motion for her.

  Both she and Terrance, in tandem, had slid forward in their third-row seat. She had clipped the back headrest of Jenny, just in front of her. But Terrance had somehow become more airborne than she, as if he were lighter, and he actually slid over the top of Brad, the freckle-faced kid sitting just ahead of him.

  At the next revolution, Terrance had disappeared, sliding out of the van somewhere—one of the windows? the windshield?—and Corrine had time to think that this was what it must feel like inside a clothes dryer. She tumbled, her face hitting the ceiling of the van and then her shoulder being painfully wrenched away, and then it all stopped.

  It was only then she realized that all of this had happened in utter silence; amazing as it was, she’d never heard a scream, or a shudder of metal, or a screech of brakes, during the whole accident. It was only after they’d come to a stop, the van slowly rocking back and forth on its collapsed roof, that sound returned.

  Jenny, of course, was wailing. Outside, something sounded like rain coming down on the van, even though Corrine knew the sky above had been blue. After a moment, she realized it was dirt, kicked up by the rolling van, coming back down in a fine mist on the van itself.

  “Shut up, Jenny,” she said, and amazingly, Jenny did. The fine spray of dirt ended, and Corrine pushed herself away from the ceiling of the van; next to Jenny, the window was literally gone.

  “Crawl out the window,” she said to Jenny.

  The girl sniffed a few times, muttered something under her breath, and managed to slide out the window.

  Corrine shifted position, feeling a deep twinge in her shoulder, and slid forward, then out the window behind Jenny.

  Now there was a new sound surrounding them. A ticking sound, punctuated by a slow hiss. Steam from the radiator, maybe?

  “Help me get them out,” she said to Jenny, deciding she needed to go back into the van. She went in and pulled out Brad, dragging him across the ceiling and onto the dewed grass of the field where the van now lay on its back like a helpless bug.

  Jenny remained outside, rocking back and forth with her knees pulled up toward her chest. Corrine started to say something, then decided it really didn’t matter.

  Now she smelled smoke, and when she slid back inside the van, she saw a thick black cloud starting to spew from under the dash. Or rather, above the dash, since the van was upside down. Terrance had slipped out of the van somehow, and so had Dianna, who had been sitting in the front seat beside Marcus. Marcus was the only one left.

  Corrine slid outside once more, noticed the driver’s door beside Marcus was wedged open just a few inches, tried to push at it. It was stuck. She stepped back, kicked at it a few times, finally got it open another foot or so.

  Black smoke now filled the interior of the van, making her cough.

  “Leave him.”

  Corrine spun around, and Jenny said it again.

  Still sitting on the grass, still pulling her knees in toward her chest, still rocking. She stared at nothing in particular and repeated her command: “Just leave him.”

  Odd words coming from the one person who seemed to care anything about Marcus, but Corrine had no intention of leaving him. She didn’t know why, and now was no time to start wondering.

  She slid into the door, grabbed hold of Marcus’s purple button-up shirt, and pulled. His body came easily, as if he were nothing more than a bag of flour or something, and she continued to pull at him until he was free of the van. Grass now stained his purple shirt.

  Corrine stared back at Jenny, sitting on the grass next to Brad, who still hadn’t stirred. “You better get away from the van,” she said to Jenny as orange flames joined the black smoke.

  Then, out on the lonesome secondary highway, which seemed an impossibly long way off, she saw a blue pickup pull to the side of the road. Evidently, it was the first vehicle to pass since the accident.

  An older man in a straw cowboy hat popped out of the door, yelled something she couldn’t understand, then disappeared into the ditch for a second and began running in her direction. She walked toward him, making it fifty feet or so before Cowboy Hat met her and clutched at her arms a little too tightly; her shoulder rumbled in pain.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, and she thought it an odd question.

  She’d just been in a huge car wreck—how could she be all right? She laughed, realizing it was an inappropriate reaction but knowing she couldn’t control it. Laughing was her natural reaction.

  She started to point back toward the van, then pulled her arm back when the shoulder protested. “Can you check on them?” she asked, and Cowboy Hat nodded before continuing toward the van, eager for his chance to be a hero.

  Corrine ran toward the blue pickup, stumbling down into the ditch and crawling up the other side. The pickup was still running, idling at the side of the highway, where dark chunks of dirt marked the path of the van.

  Without looking back, she crawled into the pickup, shifted it into first, and sped out onto the highway.

  Toward her future.

  42b.

  Corrine awoke, shuddering as she shook off the effects of the bad dream. She’d dreamed about that morning on the Oklahoma prairie so many times. But not in the last few years.

  She opened her eyes, peered into hazy darkness, felt someone rubbing at her tingling arm.

  Oh yeah. Be impulsive. She was in a tattoo shop. Parlor. Whatever.

  She turned to look at her arm, to see what Grace had chosen to do, and for a moment she stared breathlessly.

  She’d heard people call tattoos body art, and now she fully understood why. Her upper arm had been transformed into a colorful catfish, sparkling with iridescent blues and greens, the entire image outlined in a heavy, black line.

  A catfish. A bottom-feeder. It even tied in with her Catfish Compound in China. Perfect.

  “A catfish,” she said in wonder.

  Grace looked at her, as if shocked to hear her speak. And maybe she was shocked to hear Corrine speak, after she had obviously slept through the whole tattoo experience.

  “What’s that?” Grace asked.

  “I said, a catfish. A beautiful catfish.”

  Grace stared at the tattoo, as if seeing it for the first time. “I was thinking more like a dragon,” she said.

  Corrine smiled. “Same thing, really, in Chinese culture.” She thought about the Heilongjiang Province, the Black Dragon River province, home to her Catfish Compound. “To the Chinese, the catfish is a dragon, a fighter, a symbol of strength,” she said. “That makes it perfect.”

  Grace was scrubbing her arm, looking intently at the tattoo, so Corrine shut up for a few minutes.

  Finally, Grace spoke again. “I . . . uh, need to give you something,” she said. She turned, picked up a couple of needles and some other piece off the tattoo gun, transferred them to a plastic sharps container.

  “Yeah? What is it?” Corrine asked, staring at the back of Grace’s head. At the thick, real hair.

  “You’re gonna think it’s weird, but it’s . . . I guess it’s a memento of something I’ve been holding on to for a long time. Call it a good luck charm.”

  Now Grace crumpled everything into the paper lining the top of the table, threw it into a garbage container somewhere out of Corrine’s sight.

  Well, it had to happen, didn’t it? Everyone felt sorry for the Poor Cancer Victim at some point, decided they needed to offer advice or comfort. Corrine looked at the wonderful fish, a symbol of strength and perseverance, on her arm, and felt a stab of guilt. Accepting Grace’s lucky charm would be the least she could do.

  She flexed the arm, amazed that it didn’t seem sore at all. In fact, it felt stronger. Come to think of it, she felt stronger, better, all over.

  “Hang on just a second,” Grace said. She left the
room and returned a few moments later, clutching a small plastic sandwich bag in her hands.

  “What is it?” Corrine asked, taking the bag from her. Inside, she saw a napkin with a ten-digit number written on it: 1595544534.

  “It’s a . . . I don’t know. I’ve held on to it for years now, and . . . anyway, I want you to have it. Sometime, after you’ve beaten this cancer, you’ll hand it to someone else who needs a good luck charm.”

  Corrine smiled. After you’ve beaten this cancer. She liked the sound of that. “It’s Fu,” she said, clutching the plastic bag tightly in her hands.

  “Fu?”

  “Chinese symbol for good luck. So this is your symbol for good luck—your Fu.”

  Grace smiled. “No, it’s your Fu now.”

  44.

  Corrine was shocked to discover she’d spent more than four hours inside the tattoo shop, and it had felt like nothing so much as a fifteen-minute catnap.

  She decided she was going to avoid cabs for a while, and she didn’t feel like riding public transit, so she ambled down the street, enjoying the sunshine.

  She thought about Marcus as she walked, wondering, not for the first time, what had happened to him. She’d done a couple Internet searches for his name a year after the whole accident, and found he’d been convicted of manslaughter for the deaths of Brad Franklin and Terrance Tompkins, but he would only serve a couple of years, thanks to a plea bargain.

  Corrine had been surprised at her reaction. She expected she would feel rage or hostility toward Marcus, but instead, she felt . . . nothing. Not exactly nothing; in an odd way, she felt relieved Marcus would only serve limited time. Maybe he would go on and do something useful, actually help other people. He’d said something once about being a truck driver . . . maybe he could go back to that.

  In the end, she couldn’t feel anything but kinship for Marcus. He was, after all, a bottom-feeder like herself. Had been the one to give her the term bottom-feeder, in fact. So in a way, she owed her sense of self to Marcus.

  Eventually, old thoughts tired her, and she hailed a cab after all. When it dropped her off at her building, she decided against offering a giant tip. One good deed a day was enough.

  Safely cocooned in her apartment, she went back to work on the script for her next e-mail message, filling in blocks of ten-digit IP addresses that would relay it. She felt good, invigorated after the tattoo session; the catfish was a symbol of power, of triumph. She’d hold on to that as long as she could. Already, she felt a sense of calm she hadn’t felt for so long. Maybe not ever at all. She was comfortable in her own skin, comfortable in who she was, comfortable in her journey, wherever it may take her. Even if it meant that journey would last only a few more months, dead-ended by cancer.

  Grace’s Fu? Maybe. Maybe it was. She pushed herself away from her computer, away from the next spam mail she was composing, her mind occupied by the gift Grace had given her. She dug through her bag, brought out the plastic baggie, peered at the napkin inside.

  1595544534

  A ten-digit number. An IP address. Why hadn’t she seen that before?

  She went back to her screen, hooked to the backbone of the Catfish Compound in China, and did a search on 159.554.45.34. After a few minutes she found it. A server somewhere in New Zealand, it looked like. She did a bit of exploring, testing the security; it looked like an old Unix box running an outdated version of Apache. She knew of several security vulnerabilities that would give her an open door.

  She smiled, enjoying herself. Why not embrace the Fu? She could use some of Grace’s good luck, after all.

  Half an hour later she had control of the IP address, rerouting all the traffic to one of her own servers. She sent a message to one of her test accounts, then flipped to her e-mail client to check.

  It came through perfectly, followed immediately by another e-mail.

  A spam e-mail.

  Odd. She’d locked this e-mail address down tight; she never used it for outside correspondence of any kind, to keep it clean. Even as a SpamLord, her accounts weren’t immune to other spam; in fact, it was something of a game among the SpamLord group, trying to hack each other’s addresses, flood in-boxes.

  She used this e-mail address for testing only; she’d never actually sent a message from it, let it relay over the vast connections of the Internet. And yet, she’d received a spam message. Catfish Cancer Cure!! the mail’s subject line said, stopping her cold. She’d never seen this particular e-mail before, and yet its coincidences with her current condition were . . . well, like other recent events, they didn’t seem like coincidences.

  She opened the e-mail, letting the message load an image. Like many spams, the entire sales pitch was contained in an image, rather than in text, to help it bypass spam-blocking software.

  Amazing cancer cure breakthrough! the image said. New 1500 milligram tablets, manufactured with GENUINE fatty oils and extracts from catfish—a staple of Eastern medicine for centuries. FIRST ORDER FREE!!!

  Corrine opened the header information, sent a ping to her mail server, and traced the origin of the message. It came from the IP address she’d just activated. Odd; she was the only one controlling that address.

  She looked at the napkin, the numbers scribbled on it, then back at the screen. Instead of clicking on the image to follow the order link, she copied the URL, opened her browser, masked her current IP address, and pasted the destination into a new window.

  The browser chugged for a few seconds, bouncing the traffic, then resolved with an order screen.

  She stared for a few minutes, wondering who might be behind this. At least five people she could think of, off the top of her head. Maybe one of the other SpamLords had discovered some new back door into her world, which meant she needed to discover the back door herself. She couldn’t leave herself vulnerable.

  She smiled. Couldn’t leave herself vulnerable. Her life motto, wasn’t it?

  After further consideration, Corrine decided the best way to find the back door was to go down this new wormhole; she filled in order information using a fake name and address and billing information from one of the many credit card numbers she had on file. She clicked on the order button, then returned to her e-mail script.

  She’d see where the package came from, track the shipping label, see if she could get a handle on who might be in her system. Yes, one of the other SpamLords was trying to mess with her mind.

  But she was the smartest SpamLord of all. They would find that out, because she would continue to teach them.

  She would not be a victim.

  46.

  The next morning, as she lay in bed, Corrine heard a solid thump at her door. At first she thought it was a knock, a single rap beckoning her. Then she realized something had actually hit the front door itself.

  She waited a few minutes, slipped on some shorts and a T-shirt, and went to the door. A quick look through her peephole didn’t show anyone, but she kept the chain secured, opening the door just a crack.

  On the floor of the concrete walkway outside her apartment she saw a small square box with a multicolored label. Odd. She never received mail or packages at her real address, always getting shipments sent to fake names at vacant addresses around the greater Seattle area. It was better to do that, because as a SpamLord you might need to pack up and change your whole base of operations with just a few hours’ notice. Like the IP addresses that bounced all of her messages, Corrine had to bounce from address to address herself to stay hidden.

  She undid the chain lock, opened the door, grabbed the package, and closed the door again.

  Inside her apartment, she shook the box. Something shifted inside. She went to the kitchen, retrieved a steak knife from the utensil drawer, cut through the packing tape, ripped off the top of the box. Inside, buried under some packing peanuts, sat a white bottle. CATFISH CANCER CURE! it declared in plain block letters on the label.

  No FDA warnings. No manufacturer name. No nothing.

 
Corrine was puzzled. Yes, she’d ordered this—just yesterday, in fact—but she hadn’t given her real name or her real address. And yet, here it was.

  Mentally she started cataloging the names of the other SpamLords who might have the means to pull off this level of intrusion. There really were none. She was careful—maybe even a bit paranoid—about sharing any of her information with others. Even so-called friends. Be quiet, keep to yourself, don’t stand out. The great lessons she’d learned on the traveling sales crew.

  So if this wasn’t from one of the other SpamLords, who could it be from? Really, there was no logical explanation.

  Fu.

  The word came to her, instantly and suddenly. It was Fu, it was good luck, it was exactly what Grace had talked about. Hadn’t Grace said she’d held on to those numbers for a long time, waiting to share them with someone else who needed them? Hadn’t Grace known, deep down, the power of those numbers, the Fu they represented?

  Corrine was quite sure Grace knew all that.

  She opened the top of the bottle, pulled out a plug of cotton, shook out a couple of the tablets. They looked like vitamins. Probably were.

  She knew better, of course, than to order anything off spam e-mail. She knew better than to actually use any product ordered off spam e-mail.

  And yet: Fu.

  What was the worst that could happen? She’d die? She’d been concerned about the tattoo yesterday—she admired it now, glowing brightly in the morning sun spilling through the window—and that had been a smashing success.

  Be impulsive.

  She went to the sink, drew a glass of water, and swallowed three of the pills.

  48.

  Late that morning, her cell phone rang. It was Swain’s office—specifically, the woman with the tight blouses—calling to schedule an appointment and tell her to drop by the lab at the hospital for her weekly blood tests. Tight Blouse informed her that Dr. Swain had cleared an hour this afternoon to talk to her about “next steps,” and if she went in right away for blood tests, he could look at the results in time for the appointment.