Faces in the Fire

by Hines

  Stan smiled, tilted his head as he watched the fire, brought his hand to Grampa Mick’s arm and touched the leathery skin.

  A simple touch. A loving touch.

  A last touch.

  10.

  Another city. Another extended-stay suite. Another binge of pills that would let him sleep the dreamless sleep.

  Except none of that was happening, because his cell phone was ringing. He’d ignored its first two outbursts, but now the third one was starting, and there was no way he could ignore it forever.

  Viktor, on the other hand, would keep calling forever. He knew that.

  Stan took a deep sigh, picked up the phone.

  “What happened, Bleach?” Viktor’s voice asked.

  “Hello to you, too, Viktor.”

  “You will tell me what happened in Seattle,” Viktor repeated.

  “Sounds like you already know.”

  “I will hear it from you.”

  Stan sniffed, scratched at his arm, remembering the puckered pink scars on the woman’s arms. “You could have told me he was your brother.”

  For a few moments, only the sound of Viktor’s steady, measured breathing. Then: “He is no longer my brother. Only a liability.”

  Stan smiled grimly. In Viktor’s world there were only assets and liabilities. Mostly liabilities. He sighed, made himself stop itching his arm. “I don’t know what happened, Viktor. Some woman.”

  “Some woman?”

  “She . . . she wasn’t there at first, but maybe she was a friend or something, dropping by to check on him.”

  “What about her?”

  “After . . .” Stan swallowed, finding it difficult to continue for a reason he couldn’t put his finger on, ha-ha. “After I did the job, this woman showed up. And she did CPR, brought him back.”

  “CPR?”

  “Cardiopulmonary—”

  “Yes, yes, I know the term. I was just confirming. Her name?”

  “I . . . didn’t ask.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Well, uh, pale. Stringy hair, blonde, more like uncombed than stringy. Dark, hollow eyes, cut marks on her arms.”

  “Cut marks on her arms.”

  Viktor sometimes had the odd habit of repeating things you said, as if he were practicing to become a parrot. Now probably wasn’t the time to let his irritation show, though. Stan stared at the closed drapes covering the window, fluttering in the air from the air conditioner. He wanted this call to be over.

  “You owe me another project,” Viktor said.

  Stan shook his head. “Because of your brother,” he said.

  “I told you, he is no longer my brother.”

  Stan itched his arm again, shrugged to himself. Like another project mattered at this point. “Whatever.”

  Viktor was quiet on the other end of the line for a few moments. “And how is your dear mother?” he asked.

  Stan could hear forced sweetness, coming across as pure menace, in Viktor’s voice.

  Stan found the bottle of sleeping pills on the nightstand, shook a few more out, popped them into his mouth. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said into the phone. “Everything’s okay. One fluke doesn’t mean I’ll be bailing.”

  “I hope so. And your mother, I’m sure, hopes so too. They take such good care of her at that facility. It would be a shame if she took a sudden turn for the worse.”

  “Yeah, Viktor, I can tell you’re all broken up about it.”

  “You will leave next week.”

  “Next week? It’s only been—I dunno—a couple days.”

  “When you fail to do your projects as scheduled, it throws off my own schedule. We must get back on schedule.”

  “Fine.”

  “Your documentation is at the front desk. You will fly to San Francisco next Tuesday, the eleventh.”

  “Tuesday the eleventh. Got it. Just one question.”

  “Yes?”

  “What city am I in right now?”

  “Newark.”

  Newark.

  11.

  After he ended the call with Viktor, he immediately dialed another number.

  A clipped voice answered after three rings. “Aspen Meadows.”

  “Is Janna working today?”

  “I’ll connect you; one moment, please.”

  Evidently that was a yes.

  A couple short clicks, and another voice came on the line. “Janna Schillinger,” the voice said, and Stan felt inrelief at hearing her voice.

  “Hi, Janna,” he said, hoping his voice sounded brighter than he felt.

  “Stan,” she said. “I’m guessing you’ve been thinking about that clinical trial.”

  “Huh?” he said, then remembered. “Oh, that. Well, no, I’m actually just calling to see . . . I mean, is she all right?”

  “Just saw her at lunch. Same as it ever was. Can’t get her to eat much of anything unless I sit there. Not that I’d want to eat much of this stuff myself.”

  He swallowed. “Okay, I just . . . wanted to check.”

  He heard a chair scrape, as if Janna had shifted in her seat a bit. “You got a pen?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “I’m gonna give you a number.”

  “A number for what?”

  Janna sighed. “I really think you need to look at this clinical trial. You’re on the road, you can probably find a computer with a modem somewhere.”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “I’m gonna give you the protocol number for this trial, and you can read about it. I just need an okay and . . . I can make everything happen.”

  Did he detect a bit of subtext in what she was saying? Once again, so hard to know. He sighed, unsure how to feel about Janna. He liked her, but she scared him.

  “Okay,” he said, pulling a pad of paper and a pen from the nightstand beside his hotel bed. “Give me the number.”

  He heard paper shuffling. “Okay, it’s 159554—”

  He felt his blood turning to ice. “534,” he finished.

  A slight pause on the line. “So you have been reading that information I sent you.”

  Stan ran a jittery hand through his hair, wishing for a couple more sleeping pills. Not just yet. The protocol number for the clinical trial was the number his mother had shakily written on a napkin. He stood, searched his pockets, came up empty: no napkin. But that was the number. He remembered it well. His whole body was numb, and he felt like a piece of fragile paper inside a Category 5 hurricane, powerless to stop the world whirling around him.

  Still, wasn’t this some kind of sign? Why else would his mother scribble that exact number on a napkin? It had to mean something, because there was no way it could mean nothing. Not in these circumstances.

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said.

  Janna seemed surprised, taken aback. Maybe for the first time in her life, he guessed.

  “What?” she asked.

  “The clinical trial. I’ll sign her up for it.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay, Stan. You’ll need to send me the signed consent form.”

  “I think I have the papers you sent me,” he said. And he did; they were in the single briefcase he carried from project to project.

  “I can do . . . fax machine or something. From the hotel here.”

  “Okay, that will be good.” She gave him a fax number, and he wrote it on the notepad.

  After another pause, Janna spoke once more. “She’ll be moved, Stan. To another facility. You understand that?”

  “You said it before.”

  “Yes, I did. But I want to be sure you think about that, what it means.”

  He waited. “So what does it mean?”

  “It means, I think, you’ll be able to move too.”

  He smiled, hoping she wasn’t a traitor. He had to put his trust in her now.

  “Give me a couple days and call back,” Janna said. “I’ll have some more information for you.” She hung up the phone without waiting for a
response.

  Stan listened to the dead air of the disconnected line before closing his cell phone again.

  12.

  After he picked up the package for his next assignment at the desk, he asked the clerk if she could fax a page for him.

  “Certainly, sir,” she said, taking the page from him. “I’ll be back in a moment with a confirmation.”

  He waited, wondering why he felt nervous, until she returned with a printout confirming his signed acceptance form had been sent to Janna.

  Stan thanked her and returned to his room to examine the contents of his new package.

  The unsmiling visage of his own face stared blankly from his new passport. KURT MARLOWE, it said, and he immediately recognized the name from somewhere. He had known a Kurt Marlowe at some point. Not one of his assignments. Even though he received names and background information on each assignment, he never let himself commit any of it to long-term memory. Their faces already haunted him; it would be unbearable to be haunted by their names as well.

  Wait. Kurt Marlowe. Yes. From P.S. 238. From his old school days. Hadn’t he even had a dream about that kid recently? The sleeping pills formed a dull curtain of haze around most of his days, but he thought that yes, he did remember just such a dream.

  Kurt, or Marlowe, if you were a Mr. Sherman kind of guy, was the kid who was always picked last in gym. The kid who was there when he killed Sherman. The kid who had said You told him not to touch you.

  What a fitting summary of his life since. No one could touch him. Not since puberty, since his voice changed, specifically. Stan had figured out that much. His voice had squeaked, then shifted timbre to his lower, adult tone for a brief moment just before he touched Sherman and his Grandpa. His changing voice, his passage into adulthood, had somehow awakened this deadly power inside. When his voice changed, when he became a man, he became a monster who could kill people just by touching them.

  (You got the dead blood in you, child)

  Yes. Well. The voice from the woman at the hotel nailed that.

  And now he had come full circle by becoming the weird kid who had unknowingly summed up Stan’s entire adult life in just seven small words: You told him not to touch you.

  The identities he received were always entirely fictional, he knew. But when you became a dozen different men in a year’s time, there were bound to be some confluences with reality. But with the numbers from his mother, the touch and voice from the woman at the hotel, and now this reopened wound into his ancient past, he was experiencing a sudden torrent of unreality.

  Occasionally, he faintly recognized names. Once or twice, he had to smile at the black humor behind his identities. He’d been Jonathan Hinckley once, the same name as the man who shot John Lennon—but common enough not to raise too many eyebrows. He’d been William Clinton during the last presidential election; someone was evidently a fan of the outgoing president.

  The identities were usually unimportant. They were rarely checked anywhere, since he always traveled in the United States. His boarding passes always carried his fake names, of course, but rare was the gate agent who actually looked at the name on any printed boarding pass.

  It was easy—too easy, really—to be a ghost of the skies, a man with an ever-changing past and future.

  Kurt Marlowe. Surely the man making his identities didn’t have access to his past. He assumed it was a man; most people in the Organization were. No. Even if the guy knew his past, Kurt Marlowe would be a minor character. He wouldn’t pick up on that.

  Stan put the passport in his pocket, then glanced inside the accompanying folder. His cover this time: he was traveling to a truck driving school in Oakland, California. He smiled. Truck driver. Right. He folded the letter of acceptance from the HIGH ROAD TRUCK DRIVING SCHOOL and put it in his pocket with his passport.

  Next item in the folder, some background information on the real reason he was traveling to Oakland: a man named Franklin, who looked like some kind of drug scum.

  Finally, he looked at his forged boarding pass. He always wondered why the Organization booked him on commercial flights; it would be so much more efficient, it seemed, to charter them. Or maybe not. Maybe charters could be traced, whereas his ghost identities on more than a dozen flights each year were more invisible. Probably so. Which was why he was about to fly—he checked the ticket—United Airlines, leaving Newark, bound for San Francisco on September 11. Flight 93.

  Kurt Marlowe was ready for the friendly skies.

  13.

  His driver’s license and admission papers for the truck driving school tucked into the front of his jacket, Stan—or the newly minted Kurt Marlowe—handed his boarding pass to the gate agent. She tore off the top and handed back the stub without looking at him. Or the pass, for that matter. Same as it ever was.

  He was a bit sorry to be leaving the Northeast in September, in the midst of the fall blooming all around him. Not that color meant that much to him, but it penetrated his senses occasionally. One of the few things. Hadn’t even remembered where he was, and had to ask Viktor when he called.

  He walked down the Jetway to board the plane, another giant 757 set to take him to the West Coast. He entered the jet, looking at his ticket. Row 5, which put him in first class. Odd; he’d never flown first class. His Mystery Travel Agent had given him an upgrade, which seemed a little . . . too visible.

  He settled into the seat, tugging at the new money belt he’d bought to carry his extra cash. If he was going to stash the money from the Organization, he might as well be more, well, organized.

  He closed his eyes as he waited for the other passengers to board. The upgrade didn’t matter, of course. Nothing mattered.

  Maybe it would matter even less in a few days, when his mother would be at another facility, taking part in a clinical trial, hidden away from the prying eyes of Viktor and the Organization. Could such a thing even be possible? His gut told him so, because his gut also told him Janna knew exactly what she was doing.

  That would mean he’d be able to walk away, disappear like a true ghost. True, he’d have to plan carefully. And he probably wouldn’t be able to contact his mother for a long time. Maybe a few years. He’d have to wait for his trail to go cold.

  Yes, after this he would disappear. Somehow, he would think of a way to do it. Somehow he knew Fate, or God, or whatever, was going to show him a way.

  He fished in his pocket, took out his prescription bottle, shook a few tablets into his mouth. Wasn’t sure whether it was the painkillers or the sleeping pills. Like it mattered. Either one, he hoped, would keep away the dreams that continued to haunt him. The old dreams of Sherman, of Grampa Mick. Of Kurt Marlowe. And the newest sensation on the dream scene: that woman in the hotel room. The one who had lived after his touch. The first and only person to do so since he’d become an adult. What did that mean?

  Maybe most of all, the dreams of her needed to be quieted.

  Some time later—couldn’t have been more than a few minutes—he was jolted from a stupor by the sound of the flight attendants running through the obligatory safety check. He must have been dozing.

  He sat up in his seat, noting that the plane was about half-full. The first-class seat next to him was empty, but both seats across the aisle had passengers.

  Stan turned and looked at other passengers behind him, taking note of whom he saw. It wouldn’t be unlike Viktor to send along someone to keep watch, especially after the . . . unfinished project.

  He didn’t spy anyone taking an unhealthy interest in him, although the guy behind him, in row 6 of first class, seemed nervous. Sweaty. Maybe afraid of flying.

  He turned, thinking he could maybe take another sleeping pill. Or pain pill. Or whatever. No way he was afraid of flying.

  A few minutes after everyone had boarded the plane, the pilot informed them their departure had been delayed.

  No worries. No worries at all. Stan was already flying, thanks to the pills.

  But the pills co
uldn’t control his thoughts, occupied now by the woman in the hotel. Her hand tugging on his arm, pulling him to his knees. Her arms wrapped tight around her, her eyes staring at him in wonder.

  She’d felt the touch, too, hadn’t she? Something inside it had scared her as much as it had him. (You got the dead blood in you, child)

  His eyes opened once more as his foggy brain made a connection it should have seen before. They had connected, he realized, because she carried a curse like him.

  The Dead Blood, as her inner voice had told him. He most certainly was haunted by it, but she, in some fundamental way, was haunted by it as well. And so his touch had no effect on her.

  Finally the plane began to roll. Stan checked his watch and was surprised to discover they’d been delayed more than forty minutes; maybe the drugs had made the time pass quickly for him. In a few minutes they were airborne, banking and turning west.

  He let his lids flutter shut once more, concentrating on nothing, embracing the emptiness of the drugs in his system.

  A scream woke him.

  Stan’s eyes sprang open. His vision swam in lazy circles a few moments. No worries; he was in a hotel room, surrounded by cool air and emptiness, stretched out on the cool sheets of the bed and—

  Sobbing filtered through his consciousness. No, he wasn’t in his hotel room. His vision came into focus, and he remembered: he was on a plane, bound for the West Coast. In the aisle, the flight attendant appeared; behind her, a man held a knife at her throat.

  “Move to the back of the plane,” the man hissed, staring at Stan.

  Stan stood from his seat slowly. Eye contact seemed to make the man nervous, so Stan looked down as he moved into the aisle and toward the back of the plane. A few other people, five or six at the most, stumbled down the aisle ahead of him. At row 23, Stan turned and sat slowly, awkwardly, in a new seat. The rest of the passengers—a couple dozen at most—had all been pushed to this area at the back of the jet.

  He looked up the aisle at a hijacker. That’s what he was, wasn’t he? Had to be.

  As if to confirm, a voice came over the intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen: here the captain, please sit down keep remaining seating. We have bomb on board. So sit.”