The Devil's Dream: Book One (8 page)

Matthew looked up from his
computer when he heard this.

"He smiled," Dr. Watson said. "It was as if he was
saying, okay, challenge accepted. I'm over eighty years old now and
I've seen what this guy ended up doing and the myth is that I'm the
one that got his brain to actually start moving. I don't know about
that and I don't really care what anyone thinks. I was just pissed
that he was going to take my class and not put in the same effort
everyone else was. That's what I cared about. Effort. When he looked
up from that computer though, I wouldn't have said it then and I
wouldn't have said it for years after, but I guess at eighty-plus I
can. I was scared. It looked like someone had turned on a nuclear
reactor inside his head, like the heat of the sun was coming through
his eyes. He wasn't going to fail out of college, as lazy as people
said he was, I didn't think he'd simply sit there on his computer
knowing he would be front page news when they kicked him out of Yale.
No, I thought he would participate, I just didn't know what it
meant."

The
class was eighteen weeks long, an hour and a half on Tuesday and
Thursday.

Matthew
Brand left his computer at home for only that class, showing up with
his hands swinging, not holding pencil or paper. Apparently he didn't
need them.

"I
started the class as I did every time I had taught it before. I
didn't understand then that I would never teach it again."

It
was an eighteen-week class in which Matthew began as meekly as a
single wave against a vast beach. He asked if he could come to the
board.

"Said
he had a question about the previous class' assignment."

He
built out the problem across the large board while everyone watched.
Ten years younger than anyone else in the class, and mentally
remembering every number, letter, and symbol used for a problem that
contained over one hundred steps. When he got to the answer, he asked
Dr. Watson if it was correct.

"I
told him it was. I was pretty amazed at what he did. No one else in
that room could have laid out the problem as quickly and simply as he
did."

Matthew
told him no, the answer was incorrect, and he hoped by the end of the
semester, Dr. Watson would see it.

"I
laughed right out loud at him. I understood he was smart and I had
just seen what he was capable of, but to say that basically an entire
field of mathematics was wrong? That would be like me telling you
that your belief in the earth revolving around the sun was
misplaced."

It
was eighteen weeks of the most intense brain power anyone in the
class had ever seen. All of them, including Dr. Watson, struggled to
keep up. Every class period Watson would send them away with work and
so would Brand. Brand's became necessary because in discussing
Watson's homework, they always had to bring in the antithesis that
was Brand's work.

A
classmate of Brand's told me "it was like unlearning English and
then learning it again, except instead of the alphabet we were using
grains of sand."

He
tore down the field Dr. Watson loved, right in front of his face.

"There
wasn't anything I could do. I'd stare at the work he put on the
board, and I'd study it, and then I'd tell him I'd get back to him at
the next class. I studied it for hours over the next few days,
searching every database I could, consulting other professors. I mean
literally not sleeping. And in the end, I'd show back up at class and
say let's continue. He was morphing mathematics in front of my eyes.
Changing it from what I believed to be true, what I was taught for
thirty years, into something similar but with stark differences that
mattered. With differences that were supposed to be there and somehow
the rest of the world had missed them. It was, it is, the most
beautiful thing I've ever seen."

Jerome
Watson was dry eyed when he said those words to me but he looked out
into some space that existed beyond his wall, talking to himself as
well as me, and remembering all those years back when he watched an
eighteen year old kid stand up from his seat and change the course of
mathematics in a few hours. Dr. Watson never taught the class again,
and within three years, no one else ever taught that class either
because it no longer existed. The whole field of Complex Function
Theory had been dramatically altered, whole textbooks being rewritten
because of those eighteen weeks.

Matthew
Brand quit school after that semester. Everything that came next
rested on Dr. Watson's class. The eight years prior were a warm up,
Brand trying to figure out how to get the things in his head out into
the world. What came next, no one expected.

What had he thought
once? That life was beautiful? Had he been so young as to think
something so incredibly false? He had and he understood differently
now. He no longer looked out of a twenty-eight year old's eyes. He no
longer saw his wife and their son. No longer held any of them.
Instead he gripped the steering wheel of the paint-peeling car he'd
picked up miles down the road and looked at the beach in front of
him. People walked back and forth in front of his car, wearing almost
nothing and smiling as they did it. Adam and Eve hid from Christ when
they realized they were naked, these people rejoiced in it. He looked
at the different body shapes: thin, fat, and looking like they had
just stepped out of a fitness magazine. It had been years since he
was able to look at people like this, been able to admire the human
body.

Matthew stepped from
his stolen car and walked out onto Daytona Beach, his shoes left
behind and his toes in the sand. No one looked at him. Here, he was
just another person on vacation trying to tan his pale skin. Here, he
was just another person trying to enjoy life. There was some truth to
that, too. He did want to enjoy this, for the first time in years, to
enjoy something besides murder.

He had no towel with
him, nothing to lay across the sand, but that was okay. He had his
shirt, and he'd ball that up and put it under his head and he would
be fine.

He found a spot that
gave him a little room, but not much. Summer season at Daytona was no
joke and people packed the beach. Matthew Brand took his shirt off in
front of anyone looking, probably having seen him on the news the
night before but not realizing it. His white skin and protruding ribs
made him resemble an AIDS patient in the last few months. Only his
eyes showed something that resembled life, completely taking in
everything around him, thirsting, trying to drink in all of the
vitality. His home of ice was sinking away, allowing him to remember
what life was like before they put him in that endless cage.
Remembering what it all meant. What he had fought so fucking hard to
give his son again. These people here, greased up and smiling,
drinking booze and talking about where they would eat tonight. It was
a waste of life and at the same time was life. All of these people
could be producing, could be making the world better in some small
way, but instead they sat here fulfilling themselves. Was he any
different?

No. He was only after
his own fulfillment as well.

He sat down on the
beach before reclining all the way, feeling the hot sand beneath his
fish-scale white skin. He didn't close his eyes but stared up into
the cloudless, blue sky not wanting to miss a bit of the world. He
knew he'd burn soon, within thirty minutes of sitting under these
rays his skin would turn a bright red and within an hour he would be
in danger of sun poisoning. The Silo they kept him in had delivered
all the vitamin D he needed, but not a speck of sunlight.

Matthew wanted to
think, though. Wanted to think and feel alive once again. He'd been
thinking for the past ten years, but it had been dead thoughts. The
closest thing to being a zombie any human being would ever know. Here
though, his thoughts danced instead of crawled.

The man he wanted lived
in Daytona, the son of Don Welch. His name was Joseph Welch and
Matthew imagined he went by Joe. Twenty years ago the boy had been
five. When they murdered Hilman, Joe Welch had only started
kindergarten, probably knowing his father as a police officer but not
knowing what his father had done or how he would be given a
not-guilty verdict. The child knew nothing of it. At fifteen, Joe's
father had been ripped from him from him, the elder Welch murdered by
Brand. Now Joe was twenty-five and living just a few miles from where
Matthew lay. He lived there with his wife and his child, a three-year
old boy whose name Matthew could not find in his searches. His
mother, Don Welch's widow, was still alive, still living off the
money that came to her through the pension and death pay. If
anything, that should be Hilman's money, and thus Matthew's. She
wouldn't be receiving any of it if her husband had left Matthew's son
alone.

No matter. What he
needed to figure out was who he would take. Four options. Mother,
grandmother, father, or child? There were two goals, and after those
ten years spent with his brain full of icicles, the second one seemed
a bit more important this go-around. The families needed to feel
pain, just as he had. They needed to understand what he had gone
through, what Rally had gone through, what it felt like to not just
lose someone close, but to lose your world. To lose your future. To
lose what gave your life meaning.

The child was three and
that meant small. How much power could a child of three generate? How
much life could it sustain? Twenty years ago he worked out the
formulas for grown men, intent on taking the lives that had taken his
son. Now, he might need to redo those formulas a bit. He might need
to see if a child could perform the same tasks.

Because if he could use
the little boy, the whole endeavor became just a bit more satisfying.
Self-fulfillment, that's what this was about, at least partly. Losing
a child that young, the boy's parents would never recover.

Sand scattered across
his chest and Matthew looked to his right, the direction of the sand,
ready to bolt.

"Sorry, sir,"
a young teenager said. He was a black kid, with long, smooth muscles
and light skin. He picked up the football that landed a few feet from
Matthew. He turned around ready to run back to his friends, but
paused and looked back at Matthew. "Sir, sorry to bother you,
but you're getting really red. Need some sunscreen?"

Matthew smiled, glad
that no one here needed to die. "I appreciate it, but I'm
actually leaving."

"How serious is
this?" Patricia Welch asked.

The thing was, Joe
didn't have any idea. He knew of the man, knew what he had done to
his father, had attended the funeral and then, somehow, moved on with
his life. He left Matthew Brand in a horrible past, mourned his
father, but eventually the pain had...dulled? Not disappeared, that
wasn't possible, but it had certainly become something manageable.
Something he thought about more on certain days than others, and
could he expect anything else? He wasn't the same person he had been
when his father died. He was a father himself and a grown man now. He
never thought of Brand any longer. The man had been taken from the
world and put in a suspended hibernation, and the world—as it
always did—kept rotating.

Now, the same man was
walking around somewhere and Joe had a police car sitting at the end
of his driveway.

"I don't know,"
Joe answered. "I don't have any idea what he could be thinking."

"What if he's
thinking that he wants you?"

Joe picked up both
their plates and took them to the sink. He turned around and looked
at Jason, sitting in his high chair, making a mess with his food. "I
don't know," he said, unable to grasp the type of man that would
break out of jail just to start another murder spree. They caught him
once and without a doubt would catch him again, especially if he
tried to restart everything. His face was everywhere, on every
channel, on every news program and morning show. "He can't be
thinking about that. He'd be an idiot. If he shows his face anywhere,
someone is going to recognize him."

Patricia turned her
chair so that she could see him at the sink. "Maybe, but maybe
he's just fucking nuts. Your mom hasn't stopped calling all day, and
she doesn't think he's done."

"I know. She's
calling me too."

"She's terrified.
She said none of your dad's old buddies have come by and they have
just one police car outside of the house, just like here. She told me
there wasn't any way two cops could stop Brand if he wanted in
somewhere."

"She's old and
scared, Patricia," Joe said. "She's under twenty-four hour
surveillance and this guy isn't going to be able to get her out of
her house any more than he's going to be able to get us out of this
one. I asked her if she wanted us to come up there, but she said no
way, that Jason shouldn't be anywhere near her right now. I'm trying
to get her to come down here instead."

Patricia looked over at
their son, whose finger was painting ketchup across his plastic
plate. "Mama," he said absently, not looking up.

"Yeah, I'm not
sure I want him near her right now, just in case. You really think
one car is enough for us?"

"Yes. He's not
Michael Meyers, bullets will put him down the same as anyone else."

* * *

Allison looked at the
wall before her, staring at a taped up map of the country. Eight red
tacks littered it, pinned in different cities across the tiny veins
of roads that made up the country's arteries.

"Hand me that
tack, doc," she said.

Riley stood just inside
the door.