The Devil's Dream: A Nightmare (4 page)

“I heard him,” Art said.

“I can’t remember his voice, because that body and mind died. I had to read about it in Dillan’s book, unfortunately. However, I’m glad you told the truth; I’d hate to hear a man of God lie. Art, I’ve given up my chase for Hilman. I’ve realized that no matter what I do, you, your world, won’t let me have him back. You’ll fight me at every turn. You’ve taken everything in this world I had. My career. My son. My wife. My own body. I lost that battle and it took me being reborn into this body to understand. I get it now and I’m at peace. I’m not here for my son any longer. I’m here for the world, Art. I’m here to end all of your lives as you so effectively ended mine.”

Art paused and seconds passed. He found Jake’s eyes, and the kid was squinting, not fully in the present, but somewhere inside his own head.

“You’re going to kill everyone in the world. That’s what you’re saying?”

“Exactly. You. The cops next to you. The people farming rice patties in North Korea. They’re all going to die over the next couple of months.”

“You planning on purchasing a few nukes? Terrorists have been trying that for years; we have some pretty sophisticated ways of stopping them.”

Matthew laughed. “Moore thought a lot differently than you, didn’t she? I don’t think you’re dumb, per se, maybe just too old to be involved in this. I won’t be using nukes, Art.”

“Enough with the bullshit. What do you want?” Art asked, his temper finally igniting. The man on the other end of this phone—Morgant, Brand, or some other psycho—was fucking around. He was saying shit just to say it, and none of it led anywhere. The guy was getting off on this, and Art stood here with his hand on the man’s dick, just jacking him off.

“I want you to tell the world what’s coming. That’s all. Will you do that for me?”

“And what is coming? Because all I can see is that I’m going to catch you if you are who you say you are.”

Matthew chuckled. “Would I call you if I thought there was even the remotest chance of that? It doesn’t matter. Hear me out, and when I’m done, I want you to tell the world what I’ve told you, okay? I imagine within three months, there won’t be a single living thing on this planet. I may be overstating my case, because there might be some life in the bottom of the oceans or underneath the Earth’s surface, but not much more than that. I’m going to kill the sun, Art. Do you know how much energy rests inside a human body? Seventy trillion suns’ worth. All of it tied up inside our atoms, most of the time unable to be released. I’m going to release it though, Art, and not just the energy in one body, but the energy in fifty-five bodies. I’m going to fire all of that energy directly at the sun, and then, I’m going to watch as it explodes. It may burn us out in a sort of supernovae explosion, or it may simply die, leaving a black mass floating in space. I’m hoping it’s the black mass route, and I think it will be. That way humanity sits here for a few weeks in complete darkness, before they rot away. If it’s a supernovae type thing, that’ll be fine too. Everyone will feel a good bit of pain before life ends here. Do you understand what I’m saying, what I want you to communicate? I’m going to end the sun and that’s going to end life here on Earth. Can you get that to some news stations or maybe up on a website somewhere?”

Art stared at the phone lying on the desk. The two men with pens in their hands had stopped writing. Art didn’t look up to see what Jake was doing.

He didn’t believe any of it. Not just the destruction of the sun, but the fact that someone was sitting here telling him they could accomplish such a feat, and expecting him to go along.

Art laughed. He put his hands on the desk, leaned over the phone, closed his eyes, and just laughed.

“No, motherfucker. I’m not putting that up on any website. Not because I don’t want to do your bidding, but because I’m not going to lose my job over some farce. You may have taken Moore, you may have taken Dillan, but that’s all you can do, Brand. Hell, you may be able to bring your son back, and ya know what? It seems like you have the amount of people needed to do it if my math is right. So all the power to you there. But what you can’t do is stop the sun from shining. So quit with the bullshit.”

Art listened as a sigh came through the phone. “How many times do I have to show you people? Why make this so hard?” He paused and no one on Art’s side said anything. “Fine. Since you’re a believer in The Christ, I’m going to do something for you until you do what I’m asking—I’m going to crucify someone publicly every day until my story is run nationally, that I’m going to end the world. You there, Art? I want to make sure you hear this. A crucifixion a day until you wise up. Talk soon.”

The phone went dead.

A
crucifix was harder
to make than Matthew originally thought. He had been able to build a machine which basically crushed human atoms and then directed them as a weapon into space, but here he was, trying to keep these two boards from swiveling around on one another. He finally put four more nails through the top board and that kept it from moving. Even so, he wished he had promised to do something else.

The woman lay across the board now, dead. He’d taken a simple drill bit and went through her skull into her brain. The pain was pretty excruciating for her at first, but ended quickly. He couldn’t use a gun, because she needed to look as whole as possible for the greatest effect. So he used the drill, placing the woman’s head in a vice and simply bearing down until the swirling piece of metal sank into her brain.

Matthew grabbed a nail, or rather, Matthew’s relatively new, strong, black hands grabbed a nail. He placed it in the center of her hand and gently began sinking it into her flesh with tiny swings of his hammer.

Without a doubt, this was a waste of time. He needed to be hanging bodies inside the lighthouse, not hanging them on crosses so he could decorate the city.

His plan involved murder, involved inflicting his own pain back on the world. That was only part of it though, because he wanted the people of Earth to understand a few other things. The first was fear. He wanted the entire world to wait, knowing they could do nothing, hoping that if they hugged their loved ones they could stop it, thinking about their entire species' impending doom. He also wanted the world to know that
he
was doing it. When the sun stopped burning and darkness descended across the entire world, he didn’t want a single person on this rock to wonder why. They needed to understand that he had done it, and the reason he had done it was because they took everything else from him. They gave him nothing, had effectively banded together as one society to say that Matthew Brand and everything he wanted did not matter. Hell, they even put him in a freezer for ten years just in case they needed his brain. They had no need for Matthew the person, though. That was clear. So they denied him his son and took his wife as well, and now they would know what came from that. He would take all of their wives and sons. He would take their grandkids and everyone they held dear. Their pets. Their walks in the park. He was going to steal all of their lives and all of the lives of the unborn.

For them to know that this was
his
plan—that when the sun stopped shining,
he
had done it—he needed officials to make an announcement. Matthew knew that part would be hard; no one simply gave terrorists what they wanted. So, he needed to show them that if they didn’t do what he said, there would be a different kind of terror on their hands. He was only taking women, and they would hang from wooden boards all around the city until Art Brayden and his boss decided to listen. Matthew would do it once a day for the next two weeks, and if they hadn’t done their part by then, he would receive his first shipment of people to hang up in his lighthouse, and then he would start back with the crucifixes.

There were two rules to this game: the world would end, and the world would know he ended it.

Matthew was a simple man.

* * *

T
he sun rose
over the buildings in downtown Boston as it had every morning for the past two hundred years. It rose, chasing away the darkness and trying its best to chase away some of the cold.

The priest always opened the doors to the church at the same time. Monday through Sunday, he made sure the doors were open to the public just as the sun peeked its head over the building across the street from the cathedral. He had done it for the past ten years and he had no plans to quit. He enjoyed opening the doors because it gave him solitude with the image of Christ for a few moments before others began their daily pilgrimage to give thanks and ask forgiveness.

The priest stepped from his car, which he parallel parked every day, unless someone stole his spot—which happened more than he would prefer. He looked down at his shoes, hoping he hadn’t scuffed them on his drive in. It wasn’t so much vanity, but that he didn’t want to bring anything but his best before the Lord each day he served. They looked good, though, so he reached back into the car and grabbed his messenger bag.

He closed the door and walked ten feet before stopping.

It was the first time in ten years he had ever stopped on his way to opening the doors.

“Oh, dear God,” he whispered.

A naked woman was plastered on the doors before him. She hung—literally hung as her body sagged down and her arms stretched upwards—on two pieces of wood. A cross, which leaned up against the doors the priest had arrived to unlock. Nails or something like them were shoved through both of her hands; her feet were crossed and a large stake had been driven through them. Blood pooled beneath her body, drying slowly. The blood appeared to have stopped dripping, although her hands and feet were smeared with it. Her head hung limply on her chest, her breasts lying lifelessly without any outward movement of breath from her lungs.

The priest crossed himself.

Then he collapsed and vomited on the sidewalk. It took another thirty minutes before someone walked by and saw both bodies.

The cops were finally called.

* * *

A
rt stared
over his desk at Jake.

The kid was typing away at the computer; his fingers moving like the keys were merely an extension of his body rather than separate entities.

It was time to go home, or rather, to Art’s office. Home was a long way off, probably. A lot more nights were going to be spent away from home over the next few months.

Brand. Art now thought the man who had called him could only be Matthew Brand. He wasn’t thinking about him as a copycat. He wasn’t thinking about him as Arthur Morgant, the rapist. Art finally believed that the man on the other side of the phone yesterday had been Matthew Brand. The street camera which recorded the drop off of the crucifix at the Catholic church (
and what a nice choice of venue, Matthew
) showed a black man, tall and strong, pulling the cross (with the woman already attached) out of the van and then dragging it to the building. The guys in DC examined the video every which way, and they were ninety percent positive Arthur Morgant was the person in the video. And that meant, according to that scientist all those years ago, Brand was controlling Morgant’s body.

And here was this kid, Jake—he knew that Brand put the body at that Catholic church in Boston, knew that the FBI was already moving in on his turf quite quickly, and yet here he was at the office, looking at photos and calling neighbors. Here he was, still working. Art had watched him over the past few days with a curiosity he didn’t normally have for people. The kid was smart, flat out. The way he handled the call yesterday, when Art was almost shitting his pants, showed he had some leadership capabilities too. He seemed to understand the case as well, although Art hadn’t asked him how. He could have read the books, but it was more than that. The books centered on Brand, and this kid knew about Allison. He knew about Allison’s husband.

He even knew a relatively good bit about the science that allowed Brand to force himself into Morgant. Relatively being compared with Art’s complete lack of knowledge.

“How do you know all that shit?” Art had asked.

“They wrote tons of articles about it when it first happened, even in Popular Science.”

“Say it again, and dumb it down some.”

Jake had smiled, making him look even younger than twenty-eight. “The Wall, it was like, the smartest computer ever built. You remember that computer which beat all the world championship chess players? Think like that, but on steroids. You can program a computer with almost anything you want. Brand was in there so long, he simply programmed a piece of The Wall to be as near a replica of himself as he could create. It’s not Brand in the sense that Brand was alive in there, it’s Brand in that all his knowledge, his preferences, his history was uploaded into a single file. They have a few theories of how he got out of there, but the most likely thing is, he gave it a timed activation. It didn’t matter if you guys killed him or not, Morgant was going to be filled with that file sooner or later, and Brand did that as a fail-safe, I imagine. If you guys killed him, which was a good possibility, he wouldn’t be gone. If you didn’t kill him, well, he could deal with Morgant when that time came.”

“But how did he just take over Morgant?”

Jake nodded, looking away, gathering his thoughts. “The brain is nothing like a computer, so no one is really sure exactly how he made it happen. He might not even have known if it would work, might have only suspected or did it out of some kind of desperation. They think though, the brain took to it like it does with any new information it's fed—it tried to absorb it, and at some point, the data that made up Brand took over.”

Art still didn’t really understand it, but the kid did.

What are you trying to get at here?
Art asked himself.

He wanted to know whether he was going back to DC alone, or whether Jake Deschaine should come with him. The detective was smart, capable, knowledgeable about the case, and the motherfucker worked. What did Art have now? Directives from his boss, and that was about it, so bringing in someone wouldn’t hurt. They would need anyone that could contribute, and this guy could.

“Why not?” Art asked himself. “If he says no, so what.”

Art stood from his desk and walked to Jake’s cubicle.

“What’s up?” Jake said, a phone in between his ear and his shoulder.

“You got a second?” Art asked.

Jake frowned a bit, but nodded, hanging up the phone. “What can I help you with?”

“Heard back from my boss today. We talked about Boston. I imagine you’ve figured it out, but you’re done here. This whole office is off the case and you guys are going to go back to whatever the most pressing thing is for Katy, Texas police officers and detectives. I don’t say that to be insulting, I just want you to know what your boss is going to be telling you in the next hour.”

Jake nodded. “Yeah, most likely.”

“So, I’m heading back to D.C. in a few hours. I’m about to go to my hotel, put my shit in my bag, and get to the airport. Do you want to come with me?”

Jake leaned back in his chair. “With you? To DC?”

“Yeah. To DC. The President is meeting with all the directors of every law enforcement agency in the country today. He’s called scientists too. They’re trying to see if what Brand told us yesterday is even remotely possible. If it isn’t, then we’re going to deal with this the same way we would any other crime. If it is, then we’re going to have to figure out another plan. I’d like you on my team either way. You think you’d want to go?”

Jake leaned back in his chair and said, “Yeah, man. I’ll go. What time is the flight?”

* * *

J
ake folded
a shirt and tossed it into the open suitcase sitting on his bed. He was almost packed and the cab would be here in thirty minutes to take him to the airport—and then what? Then he would get on a plane with the Director of Operations for the FBI and…become an FBI agent? Stay a detective for Katy, Texas? He didn’t know but you didn’t ask questions like that when the Director of Operations said he wanted you to come along. When that happened, one simply went along.