Faces in the Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

part that received messages from ghosts on the other side of the door.
    What waited behind that door had terrified him at first, yes, but had soon become normal. Almost comforting, in a way. Without the moans and screams and wails of the dead, he would be utterly alone in his small cabin and large shop. But hearing them, knowing they were there, meant someone needed him. It let him feel, however briefly, he wasn’t utterly alone, cut off from his own past or anyone else’s future.
    So now, this image of the catfish projected by the shoes . . . well, that had to be part of the brain damage. Maybe his injured gray matter had continued to map new pathways, rerouting signals even after making contact with the clothing ghosts. And now those newer pathways were firing, illuminating portions of the brain long dormant. Maybe forever dormant.
    Brain damage. Yes.
    But then, none of that had any bearing on what might be inside the shipping container on his flatbed trailer right now. Brain damage or not, he needed to see what was inside. If nothing else, he needed to prove his mind was getting away from him, because he knew it would just be box after box of canned peaches bound for grocery shelves in Michigan or pallets of toys ready for excited children in Iowa or something else innocuous.
    Just go look, get it over with, and move on.
    He climbed back to the cab and once again opened the storage compartment in the console. He retrieved a flashlight and a safety tool that helped open shipping containers, a bent piece of metal called “the persuader.” As a bonus, the persuader could act as a weapon, if need be.
    He climbed down to the road again. On the horizon, waves of heat radiated from the surface of the road, even though the overnight chill still hadn’t totally left the air. Diesel fumes from his clattering rig filled his nostrils. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just he and his rig on a lonely stretch of Montana highway.
    He swallowed, felt his dry throat clicking. Why did he feel such an overwhelming sense of dread?
    Kurt walked to the end of the trailer, past the high metal sides, until he came to the large steel doors at the back.
    He stared at the container for several seconds, trying to decide what he should do. Eventually he reached for the back door, touching the warm metal, and ran his finger over the yellow-and-black radiation symbol. The paint almost seemed wet, as if it were nothing more than some hastily scrawled gang graffiti. Maybe that’s what it was: a joke, some kids who thought it would be great fun to see trailers traveling America’s highways with radiation symbols painted on the sides.
    But it didn’t feel like a joke. And . . . well, if brain damage wasn’t causing the hallucinations, surely a bit of radiation would do it, wouldn’t it? There it was: another perfectly logical explanation. He was being poisoned by radioactive cargo that had somehow slipped in beneath the rules and regulations.
    Which made opening the container, exposing himself to the possible radiation inside, a ludicrous thought. Yeah, he was definitely brain injured to be thinking this was in any way a good idea. Kurt took a deep breath, slipped the persuader inside the container door, and pushed. The door held for a few moments, then came open with a long shudder. Kurt put down the persuader on the flatbed trailer’s deck, thumbed the flashlight’s power switch.
    Maybe he hadn’t been exposed to the radiation at all yet. Maybe he’d been perfectly safe until he cracked open the container. Maybe the container was lined with lead, and he was going to kill himself by—
    Kurt huffed, pushing the jumbled thoughts from his mind as he swept the beam of the flashlight across the container’s contents.
    As he’d expected, he saw hundreds of boxes inside, stacked floor to ceiling. The sides of the boxes were printed with the words Catfish Industries , as well as Chinese characters