by Hines
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.
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 rathe
r 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.