The Devil's Dream: Book One
Read The Devil's Dream: Book One Online
Authors: David Beers
The Devil’s Dream
by
David Beers
Copyright © 2014 by David Beers
Ebook
formatting by
Jesse
Gordon
Table of Contents
Part
III: Dreams and Nightmares
For my mother, Cara Clark.
This
book was written with you
in mind every second of the way.
Miss
you, Mom.
Running From the Wall
Chapter One
The seat smelled of
vomit and piss.
Matthew understood the
smells, understood the past they revealed, but that understanding was
way in the back. His mind was still warming up and the smells
filtering in inspired wild appreciation but mattered little.
Matthew looked up the
long aisle even though he could only see a few feet in front of him.
His eyes were a cold, gray blue, like he had just been pulled from a
deep freezer—but he thought they would change back to the deep
ocean blue he remembered with a bit more time. His breath came out
measured, but he kept having to remind himself...
In
and out. In and out.
He hadn't needed to
move his lungs in ten years.
It'll
pass.
But would it? He didn't
know. He doubted anyone did, not after how long he had been behind
The Wall. No one tested
trials
based on ten-year escapees. His
lungs might just stop working, or his brain misfire without the gas
it had grown accustomed to and blood would begin flooding through the
gray matter inside his head. There was a strong possibility he might
die here on this piss stained bus seat.
In
and out. In and out.
That's all he could
control, and after ten years, it was almost more than he could
handle.
No. He could control
where he was going; he could get off at any stop he wanted on this
cross-country bus trip. Except Matthew knew where he was headed.
Florida. To warmth. To sun. A place to start again. A place to see
his son—to reunite with Hilman and forget about the ten years as a
prisoner, and the ten years before that. The Florida sun could do
that, right? That's why old people moved there, so that the sun's
rays could burn away their past. Could melt the years, leaving them
whole once more. That's what Matthew needed, to be whole.
Without any doubt,
people would be looking for him very soon. Perhaps even now. America
was a big country though and Matthew had learned from his mistakes.
Ten years ago he'd been rash, ambitious, and naive. You couldn't spit
in the eye of the government, of the collective police force. It
didn't matter if you were Matthew Brand or John F. Kennedy, they
would
put you down.
No, he'd learned. It was a big country with plenty of places to hide.
Plenty of ways to disappear. That's all he wanted now: no media, no
televised events of his life, no knowledge of him at all. The people
after him could look but they wouldn't find him. Matthew was going to
fade away, going to drop off the world.
Matthew was going to
find his son and live happily ever after.
* * *
Allison Moore put her
phone back on the nightstand and then turned to look at her husband.
He hadn't woken, and it would be another two hours before he did.
She raised her head and
double checked the clock—4 A.M.
Thirty minutes to get
ready. An hour to get out there. She would be there by six.
Allison laid her head
back down on the pillow and looked back at Jerry. This one wasn't
going to be just Phoenix. Wouldn't be just Arizona either. This one
would take her away and she didn't know for how long. Now she had to
wake up her husband and tell him the news, tell him that she was
quite possibly leaving for a month or more, and she had to do it in
the next five minutes or so in order to make sure she left on time.
She would wake him in the early morning, with darkness still
surrounding them, and tell him she was leaving.
"Babe," she
whispered.
Jerry didn't move.
"Babe," she
said louder. "Wake up. I need to talk to you."
His eyes opened, wide
and searching for who was speaking.
"Jerry, I just got
a call. It's important," she whispered. Marley's ears were too
sensitive for the size of house they lived in, and she didn't want to
wake her daughter up yet.
Jerry cleared his
throat. "What was it?"
"Someone escaped
from The Wall."
Silence, Jerry blinking
as his mind tried to wake up. "That science fiction thing?"
"Yeah. They're
putting me on it."
Jerry yawned and rolled
on his back. "Well that's good. You have to go in now?"
"Yeah, but there's
more. This guy isn't going to wait around here in Arizona. He's
leaving. I doubt he'll get out of the country, but certainly as far
away from this place as he can."
"And you have to
follow him?"
"Yes."
He sighed, placing his
hands together on his stomach. "You don't know how long?"
"No." She
wanted to hug him, wanted to wrap her arms and legs around him and
tell him how sorry she was, how it wasn't what she wanted but that
she didn't have a choice. None of those things would be true though.
The truth was she wanted this as much as she wanted anything else in
life and that short of him saying he would leave her, she was going
to be in her car heading towards Phoenix in a few minutes.
"This is big,
Jerry. Bigger than anything I've ever touched before. The guy who
escaped, it's Matthew Brand."
His head turned to her
so that they were looking into each other's eyes. "Who?"
"Matthew Brand."
He closed his eyes as
he did anytime he thought deeply, blocking out the rest of the world
so his mind could look for whatever he needed. "From all those
years ago?" He asked, his eyes still closed.
"He escaped
sometime tonight. He's already running and ahead by at least a few
hours."
Opening his eyes, he
turned back to the ceiling. "Are you going to tell Marley?"
"I was planning on
it."
Don't
roll over. Don't give me your back, please God, support me in this.
She was going to leave but she didn't want to leave with him angry,
with him bitter. A month, maybe a little longer, and the man would be
caught and they could go on living as normal.
Except
that's not true, is it? Because normal for you, Jerry, and Marley
isn't normal for anyone else. Normal doesn't have your husband not a
bit surprised when you wake him up and tell him you may be leaving
for a month.
"Yeah, you
probably should."
"You going to be
okay?" She asked after a few seconds.
"Of course. It's
just not the happiest thing I could ask for."
Allison moved in then,
putting her head on his shoulder and wrapping her arm around his
chest. "I love you," she said.
It took a few minutes,
but he finally responded. "I love you too."
They lay there, still
and silent, until Allison simply had no time left. She leaned over
him and kissed his lips. "I do love you."
"I know."
She showered and
dressed quickly, putting on the lightest bit of makeup. She was told
everyone who ran The Wall would be there when she showed up, which
was a necessity, because she had no idea how anything inside the
place worked. As far as she knew, no one else in the country did
either, not even the congressmen who authorized it. They all only
assumed it would simply keep working. It hadn't though. A computer
malfunction or a little dust in the wires, and now a dangerous person
was loose.
Allison went to
Marley's room, opening the door as softly as she could.
Her daughter's eyes
were open, looking at the door swinging open.
"Mom?"
"Yes, baby, it's
me. Did I wake you up?"
Marley pulled the
blankets up to her chin. "I heard you walking up to the door.
What time is it?"
"It's early. You
need to go back to bed when I leave, okay?"
"Okay."
Marley nodded.
"I have to go away
for a little while, baby," Allison said, kneeling down next to
the bed. "I'll still be able to talk to you every day, but I
won't be able to come home."
"Again? Why?"
Marley asked. No tears filled her eyes, not anymore, but Allison
still saw pain in them.
"Work. They want
me to go catch a bad guy that escaped."
"Will you be
careful?"
"Of course."
Allison kissed her daughter's cheek.
"How long are you
going to be gone?"
"It won't be too
long. They know I have to get back here to you and Dad."
This wasn't the first
time she'd left. This wasn't the first conversation that resembled
this. So when Marley closed her eyes and said 'I love you', it nearly
broke Allison’s heart. Her daughter was so used to Allison having
to leave that she didn't stay awake any longer than necessary. The I
Love Yous and kisses and then it was back to bed because it was too
early to be dealing with all this. She reached up and stroked
Marley's hair, tears coming to her own eyes. Was this the life she
wanted her daughter to have? Early morning wake-ups with a kiss and
an
I'll be back as soon as I
can, dear
? No. Of course not. She wanted her daughter to
have what all parents wanted for their children: birthdays with both
Mom and Dad snapping pictures and hugging all over her. (
How
many of those have you missed? Two out of ten?
) Everyone
around the dinner table every night. Both parents there in the
morning when she woke up. Instead, Allison’s daughter and her
husband were used to her leaving.
Allison kissed Marley's
cheek one more time and then left the room, closing the door as
softly as she had opened it.
The building looked
just like any other. Wood, metal, concrete. It sat on land about as
rural as one would find in Phoenix. The federal government had bought
up everything around it in a radial mile so that no structures could
border it. A building standing alone, by itself, and that was the
only thing that looked any different about it for Allison. It was
alone in a city. Except she knew the inside, the guts of this
building, were different. There wasn't another one like it in the
whole country; none of them contained what this one did. A building
that stretched across an acre and inside it held three men.
That wasn't right
though; it held two now. One left this morning, just up and checked
out of The Wall.
The name didn't suit
the building, that's what Allison realized as she sat in her car
looking up at it. It wasn't very high. Two stories. It was large, but
the moniker didn't fit.
The congressman who
introduced the legislation came up with the idea, not the scientists
who figured out how it would all work. The idea was simple and that's
why the name was too. The Wall would keep the people you couldn't
kill away from society. Forever. The one's that you couldn't let die,
for whatever reason, but couldn't let live either, they would be kept
behind The Wall for as long as needed.
It wasn't even invented
for Matthew Brand. The first, if Allison remembered correctly—she
probably didn't though, she never remembered names—was an Arthur
Morgant. The guy raped his niece and then murdered her. Was a real
piece of work. Nothing special about him, not like Brand, until they
got him into prison. They ran some blood work on him and found out he
was immune to the AIDS virus. Wasn't just immune, but would actively
attack the virus, wiping it out.