Faces in the Fire

by Hines

  The voice spoke in a heavy accent, broken English. Like Viktor’s brother, only more broken.

  Stan tried to access his memory banks. From what he remembered, the captain hadn’t spoken in broken English when they were sitting on the tarmac in Newark.

  “That’s not the captain,” he heard someone hiss from behind him, as if to confirm his own thoughts.

  He leaned into the aisle. Three men, all of them wearing red bandanas, had moved the rest of the passengers behind row 20. But now only one of the hijackers, wearing a red belt with wires sprouting from it, was visible.

  Around him, other passengers chattered nervously. The drugs made it difficult for him to concentrate on individual voices, and they all coalesced into a constant din. As if they were voices of ghosts, speaking to him. Some of them cried, which was a sound he’d heard more than a few times on assignment. A few were on cell phones, or the air phones built into the plane’s seats.

  Above the babbles and sobs, another announcement blared over the intercom.

  “Ah. Here the captain. I would like to tell you all remain seated. We have bomb aboard, and we are going back to airport. We have our demands. So, please remain quiet.”

  The English seemed marginally better this time; was it a different person speaking? Still not the captain, though.

  His plane had been hijacked. Would Viktor orchestrate such a thing, to get back at him for the botched hit on his brother?

  No. It made no sense. No sense at all. Even Viktor wouldn’t go this far; the other passengers, the plane itself, were too much collateral damage. Too visible.

  He turned and caught the eye of a man who had just hung up his cell phone.

  The man said something, but Stan couldn’t make out what it was.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I said, two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center.” The man’s face looked tired, gray.

  For a few moments, the area around them went quiet and still. No more screaming. No more sobbing.

  Outside, the thin atmosphere rumbled past their windows as the jet set its new course.

  Another man crept up the aisle on his knees, leaning down to speak to them. Stan chanced another glance toward the front of the cabin, where the lone hijacker continued to clutch the neck of the flight attendant. That red belt couldn’t really be a bomb. Stan was no explosives expert, but the belt wasn’t very convincing.

  “That’s not a real bomb,” the man in the aisle said. “We gotta do something.” Crouching in the aisle, the man looked at each of them in turn. “We know what’s happening here.”

  Stan nodded, swallowed hard, still trying to process it all. He looked at all the other scared faces of passengers around him, recognized the people across the aisle from row 5 in first class.

  But Stan wasn’t scared; he was a disinterested participant, a mile high on the plane and a mile high on the pills he’d popped before boarding the flight. Let the plane crash; he would welcome his personal slide into oblivion.

  Wait. People from row 5 in first class. He sat up straight as the first numbers clicked into place. Three fives: him, and the two others in row 5.

  “What row were you seated in?” he asked the man in the aisle.

  The man looked at him, a puzzled look on his face. “Fifteen,” he said.

  Stan turned the numbers over in his mind. A fifteen and three fives. “Anyone from row 9?” he asked. A woman raised her hand.

  “What about 44?” he asked.

  A man behind him spoke. “Only thirty-four rows—I was in that one.”

  Stan closed his eyes. “Row 4?” he asked, then opened his eyes again. Two people raised their hands. He didn’t recognize them, though they’d been in the row directly in front of him. Probably part of the haze created by the pain pills—a haze that had now burned away as all the numbers glowed in his mind: Fifteen. Nine. Five. Five. Four. Four. Five. Thirty-four.

  1595544534.

  The number on the napkin, once again. He hadn’t seen the napkin since . . . since the woman in Seattle. But still, he knew the number. From somewhere else. He looked at the other passengers, and a strange sense of calm descended on him. Now it made sense. He was meant to do this; his mother had seen something, scribbled the mysterious numbers on the napkin as a warning. As a command to do something.

  “I’m in,” he said to the man in the aisle.

  In answer, the man in the aisle held out his hand. Stan raised his own hand, his gloved, latexed hand, and shook.

  “I’ll lead the way,” he said, beginning to peel the latex off his fingers. Like shedding an old skin.

  “You sure?” the man asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “How we gonna get in the cockpit?” he asked.

  Stan stopped, looked at the man. “No idea,” he said.

  From somewhere behind him he heard a man utter the words “You guys ready? Let’s roll.”

  Stan rose, feeling the air rush around his face, feeling the wheels of the universe click into place, feeling whole for the first time in his life. The drugs had somehow sharpened his senses now, making him more alert, more aware.

  He pushed down the aisle, feeling the plane shift. The man with the red belt screamed something unintelligible at him, but Stan merely smiled as he reached out with hands, hands now bare and exposed. The bomber swung his metal knife—

  (not a knife, not a knife, a box cutter)

  —at him, and Stan let the cutter bite into his bare skin, because with his other hand he grasped the man’s bare arm, stopping the movement.

  For a moment, the bomber looked into his eyes. Stan felt the current building inside, and then . . . nothing.

  For the first time, Stan wanted the curse. And for the second time, it had failed.

  The bomber struggled to break his grip, but Stan’s body coursed with strength he’d never felt before. His fingers found the windpipe and blocked the man’s air, his hands tight, unmoving.

  Finally, the bomber collapsed.

  Stan stared at his hands. Somehow, the curse had left him. At this, of all times. And yet, he felt . . . perfect. As if his whole life had been preparing him for this moment.

  And in a way, it had.

  Blood pouring from his cut hand, Stan stepped over the bomber’s unmoving body, catching a glimpse of the wires on the man’s belt. No way those wires would complete a circuit and detonate a bomb of any kind, even if—

  Stan stopped, and the man behind him, the man in the aisle whose hand he had shaken, bumped into him.

  A circuit. That was the explanation. When he had touched the woman in the hotel room, he had felt the electrical connection. She had felt the electrical connection. But it wasn’t the normal connection he usually felt; it was a short circuit. Both of them had the dead blood, the curse, which meant both of them were like positively charged batteries. Somehow, touching her, connecting with her dead blood, had killed his curse inside.

  He smiled. And somehow he knew, the woman now had the napkin with the numbers on it. Someday, perhaps it would lift the curse from her.

  Ahead of him he saw the door to the cockpit. Everything was falling into place so perfectly. He had escaped his curse. He could escape this existence. And his mother could escape her prison.

  The numbers had led him here, and all he had to do was bust through the final doorway blocking his path.

  The plane tilted hard to the left, then to the right. Behind him, Stan heard a few more screams from people being thrown around.

  Chaos surrounded him. Two of the men who had followed him down the aisle had worked their way around him while he choked the fake bomber, and now they were pounding on the cockpit door. Finally the door cracked, coming off its hinges and gaping as the plane continued a hard roll. The air around smelled like blood and smoke, felt like hammers and knife blades, sounded like terror and destruction.

  The door was fully open now, and Stan pushed his way toward it. As he came through, the man at the plane’s controls
turned, locking gazes. It was the one who had been sitting behind him in row 6, the one who seemed afraid of flying.

  Now he seemed more afraid than ever. Anger flashed in the man’s eyes, followed by terror as Stan grasped his shirt in his bare hands.

  Stan understood his entire life for the first time. When his voice had changed, he hadn’t become a man. He’d become a victim, because he’d let the curse take over everything about his life. He let it define him. He let it swallow him. He let it become him.

  But ironically, that curse, with all of its pain and anguish, had brought him to this very moment in this very airplane on this very day.

  He had seen the bait through the murkiness, and now he would rise for it. Perhaps he would die in the effort, burn in the flames like Grampa Mick’s catfish etched forever in his mind, but for a few brief moments, he would never be more alive.

  The fake pilot struggled to pull free, but Stan’s hand became a vise; with his other hand, his right hand, he reached for the man’s face, grabbing it by the jaw, feeling the bristling whiskers of the unshaved skin as he twisted the man’s face toward him again.

  He tightened his hands into a chokehold, smiling as the man’s eyes rolled back into his head, leaning down to whisper one word into the fake pilot’s ear.

  “Catfish.”

  14.

  He awoke, the stench of fire and fuel in his nostrils. He opened his eyes to see a blue sky overhead, punctuated by thick, roiling smoke. Somewhere behind him, a monster roared.

  Dazed, he sat up and looked at his surroundings. The roaring monster was a fire, a giant curtain of flame several yards away. Chunks of metal hung on smoking trees. Searing wind pushed the flames toward him. The panorama spun wildly for a few seconds, then steadied again. He lifted a bloody hand to his head, pushed himself to his knees, and stood. Immediately he fell again; neither of his legs wanted to work.

  Hell burned around him.

  He pushed himself to standing again, and his legs worked this time. He had no memory of what had happened—something horrible, certainly—but he had to get away. He began to walk, trying to ignore the wreckage around him.

  Then he ran. Because he had to.

  At last, lungs feeling as if they’d been dipped in rubbing alcohol, he stopped to catch his breath and thoughts. He stood on a gravel road leading away from a barren field—the field where the fire had burned—to a dark thicket of trees.

  He didn’t want to, but he turned to look at the destruction behind him before he disappeared into the trees and concentrated a few moments on the pillar of black smoke rising to the heavens above. In the distance, the sound of alarms pierced the air around him.

  He had no idea what had happened—had no idea, in fact, who he was or why he was here—but he knew, as he took in the scene of carnage, that it was important to keep moving forward. Like a shark. (Or a catfish?)

  He felt a lump in his pocket and retrieved the items held there. A driver’s license with his photo, from the state of New Jersey. Kurt Marlowe. The familiarity of the name struck him immediately. Yes, that had to be him. The license was wrapped in a sheet of paper indicating acceptance to a truck driving school in California.

  He folded the paper back around the driver’s license, slipped both into his pocket again, took one last look at the burning inferno, and turned to walk down the gravel path.

  Behind him lay death and destruction, yes, but ahead of him, down this lonely gravel road, lay everything else.

  And he would not look back again.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to God, for helping me see the opportunities in every challenge; to my Lovely Wife and Lovely Daughter, for continuing to be lovely when I’m lost in schemes to torture characters in new and interesting ways; to Allen Arnold, Amanda Bostic, and the team at Thomas Nelson for planting the seeds that became the stories in this book; to editors Ed Stackler and LB Norton for helping those seeds take root and grow; to Lee Hough for his constant guidance (yeah, I had to give up that seed metaphor before it went too far); to Todd Michael Greene, for lending his name to Kurt’s therapist; and to you, dear reader, for lending me a few hours of your time.

  Words fueled by the music of Adele; Broken Social Scene; Fountains of Wayne; David Crowder Band; Peter Bjorn & John; Robbie Seay Band; Better Than Ezra; Clodhopper; Starfield; Sweet; Pixies; Future of Forestry; and Wilco; among many others.

  Reading Group Guide

  1. Why do you think the book is called Faces in the Fire? What are the “faces” the title references? What are the “fires”?

  2. Faces in the Fire is told through a series of seemingly disjointed scenes that take place out of order. Why do you think the author chose this narrative technique? Did it add anything to the stories for you? Did it detract from the stories?

  3. Scientists have described the human brain’s tendency to identify patterns in seemingly unrelated data as “patternicity.” In other words, we see faces in clouds, identify coded messages in long texts, and detect conspiracies tying together coincidences. Each of the main characters in Faces in the Fire exhibits patternicity by reading meaning into the number 1595544534—and yet, their paths are changed by their unique interpretations. Do you think their paths would have led to the same place if they hadn’t come into contact with the numbers? Why or why not? Are there seemingly random events that have changed the course of your own life?

  4. In the first story, Kurt seems haunted by anguished voices trapped inside articles of clothing. Despite this, Kurt actually seeks out new articles of clothing, searching for more voices. Why do you think Kurt seems paradoxically driven to look for something that he wants to hide from himself?

  5. Corrine, the main character in the second story, says she’s proud to be a “bottom feeder.” Judging by her behavior, would you agree that she’s comfortable thinking of herself as a bottom feeder?

  6. In the third story, when Grace’s tattoos begin to offer her glimpses into the lives of her clients, she doesn’t seem terrified; instead, she seems to gain a sense of purpose, and even begins to kick her heroin habit. Why do you think this is? What does it say about Grace as a character?

  7. Stan, the main character in the final story, is fixated on the image of a catfish from his childhood. What do you think the catfish represents for him?

  8. How are the main characters in each of the stories alike? How are they different? Do they change or grow as they interact with each other?

  9. Do you think the paths of these characters may cross again at some point in the future? Why or why not?

  10. If you asked each of the main characters at the beginning of their stories what they most want in life, what would their answers be? Would their answers be different at the end of their stories?

  About the Author

  T.L. Hines writes “Noir Bizarre” stories, mixing mysteries with oddities in books such as The Unseen, Waking Lazarus, and The Dead Whisper On. Waking Lazarus received Library Journal’s “25 Best Genre Fiction Books of the Year” award.