Faces in the Fire Read Online Free PDF

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