The Devil's Dream: Book One (16 page)

Pull from the vodka.

Pull from the chaser.

Why had he romanticized
any of this? Why had he forgotten what Brand was, what he would do,
despite having written a book on the subject?

Because
your own Dad wouldn't have spent the time picking up a candy bar at
the store for you.

And maybe it did stem
back to his father, this idea of Brand being something more than a
murderer. Something more than a psychopath. But his own Dad was dead
and it didn't matter what he would or would not have done for
Jeffrey, because Jeffrey now sat outside of a warehouse where a young
boy was being cut up.

He shook his head and
looked down at his lap. Even now, even scared and drunk, he couldn't
begin believing Matthew was complete evil though. Some part of
Jeffrey respected the man for what he was doing, for the length he
would take this to see his son.

You're
as crazy as he is.

Jeffrey wasn't turning
back. That was sure. He would drink himself to death but he was going
to write this book. Because the child was gone. The child would never
come back, not after what Brand did inside that huge, metal coffin.
Jeffrey could get on top of the warehouse and scream with a bullhorn
until his lungs collapsed in his chest and the entire United States
Army showed up to find Brand, and the child would still never return.

So why tell?

Why not let Brand keep
going after this? It didn't get worse than what he'd just done.

Jeffrey understood who
the next victims could be and none of them were a child.

In
for a penny, in for a pound, Jeffrey.

Pull from the vodka.

Pull from the chaser.

"Is it true?"
Rally asked. "He took the child?"

"It's true,"
the answer came back.

Rally held back the
tears that wanted to come. Tears that would flow for the child,
herself, and her ex-husband if she let them. The child, just like
hers, had been stolen from parents that loved him. That wanted to see
him grow and prosper and have children of his own. Her ex-husband,
Matt, was no longer anyone she had ever known. Whatever change began
in him when their son died had finished inside that Wall, and the man
she once loved was gone. Erased. Bleached from this world.

"I'll do it,"
she said. "I'll go down there."

"You're sure? I
don't want to set you up for this for you to back out the morning of.
It will be a lot of resources tied up in you rather than trying to
find him or keep others safe. If you're not completely sure, you need
to say it now."

She thought of that
child, first taking the pictures that had leaked out years ago of the
grown men, their bodies a mess of wires and tubes, carved up and
barely alive, and then transposed the photos onto the little boy in
her mind. More people were going to die, and while she wasn't helping
Matt, she wasn't doing much to stop him by sitting in her house and
talking with her husband.

More children becoming
a mess, a bloody mixture of science and life, if she did nothing.

"I'm sure. He'll
call again and I'll agree to go. Will you guys handle the rest?"

"Yes. We'll take
care of everything the moment he calls. All you're going to need to
do is meet him, and the rest will be us."

"Okay, then."

* * *

What Rally thought of
as a bloody mess, Matthew saw the greatest feat of science known to
the world. He took the last electrical wire, a small thing with split
copper wires at the tip, and pushed it inside the hole he had made in
the child. Matthew felt the small hitch as it latched onto the
implanted metal hooks. Matthew looked down at his work, but felt no
pride as he had years ago. Back then, this had been an event that the
human race had never seen before. This was the second round and
nothing here was new. The government might even be replicating what
he had just done. No, this was no longer what it had once been
because Matthew never tested his theory. Instead, society threw him
away.

Instead of pride, he
felt urgency. A need to keep going. A need to get this done so that
his son could be here with him.

The boy wiggled a bit,
as if he was trying to get more comfortable. The tube going directly
into his forehead filled with blood. It flowed from the hole drilled
into his skull to the hole in his stomach, moving the blood around
quicker than his veins could—which would begin to stiffen from lack
of movement. The child looked like a human wrapped in a cocoon of
wires and tubes. One could, barely, see beneath them all to the naked
flesh underneath; the kid looked like a weirdly wrapped package.

Matthew moved his hand
to the switch attached to the side of the table. He flicked it and
the hum started.
That
did
make him feel something other than urgency—nostalgia.

It was going to happen
this time. The humming was the electric nodes inserted into the
child, all of the neurons in his brain, and consequently, the rest of
his body being lit up as much as any Christmas tree. The boy's skin
began to turn a bright red underneath it all, like an apple. He
wouldn't burst open though; he would only burn and transmit.

"Good,"
Matthew said. Everything, so far, was working.

He turned the switch
off and the child took in a deep breath of air as the current stopped
flowing through him. It probably hurt; Matthew wouldn't kid himself,
but more than Hilman had hurt?

Looking to his right,
he saw the place where his own child would be born. Not hooked up to
anything yet and resembling the same Silo they had stored Matthew in.
A large glass rectangle, ten feet high and teen feet wide, sat
completely transparent in the middle of the warehouse. The wires from
the boy led to it, but were not plugged in. The lights from above
shone into the rectangle, looking like beams from heaven.

It was time to decide
who came next. The boy would live here indefinitely, fed from the
same tubes that discarded his shit, he would live until Matthew told
him to die. He would turn the lights off and lock the place up, but
he needed to know where he went next. Getting out of Daytona for a
while would be a pretty good idea, too, given the recent attention
his nightly visit caused. Garret Lucent kept coming to mind, more so
than the other three. Garret Lucent, a fucking monster who his wife
referred to as the old cliché "a gentle giant" when asked
about him. "He would never knowingly hurt anyone," she
said. Matthew didn't agree with that, really. Didn't then and didn't
now.

Garret
Lucent, who did you leave in this world? Who could I take of your
ilk?

The
Devil’s Dream

By Jeffrey Dillan

Chapter
Twelve

It
bugged, or rather, infuriated Matthew Brand that Garret Lucent had
been spoken of as a 'gentle giant'. To Brand, it was like calling
Hitler a man of peace. Or George Bush a man of great wisdom. There
are a lot of phrases that can be associated with those historical
figures, but the two above don't fit. To Brand, gentle giant did not
fit.

Garret
Lucent stood six-foot-six and weighed three hundred pounds. What's
the saying? Built like an oak? Garret was built like a mountain, one
that looked like it could weather anything life threw at him. He
worked out almost daily, seemingly obsessed with packing more muscle
onto his frame. His wife told me that she thought it was a complex,
that all those toys kids played with—toys like He-Man and Batman
and Superman—made him think the only way he could ever be a real
man was to pack on as much muscle as possible. It was improbable that
Matthew Brand could ever kill him, at five-foot-eight, even reaching
up to the man's mouth with chloroform would be a stretch.

Garret
may have been a gentle giant. He may have never hurt anyone, outside
of Hilman Brand, that didn't deserve it; and, as his wife said, he
may have felt deep guilt about that particular mistake. Still, not
everything about Officer Lucent was wholesome, and when I tried to
breach that subject with Mrs. Lucent, a torrent of tears flowed from
her eyes. She couldn't comment on that part of his life, she said,
leading me to believe that she'd known about it and was forced to
tolerate it.

He liked sex, perhaps was even
addicted to it. There’s no record of him attending a Sex Addict
meeting, but certainly he possessed all the usual traits that
accompany addicts. His police partners said he would often pick up
prostitutes, and in exchange for not bringing them in, receive some
form of sexual favor. Garret had girlfriends on the side, although
none showed at his funeral. Speaking with one, who asked to remain
anonymous, she spoke highly of him.

"He loved his wife, there was no doubt about that. Just
sometimes, in marriages, you can't get everything you need out of one
person. I don't think Garrett could get everything he needed if he
used every person in the world, so that's no knock on her. He
certainly wasn't satisfied with me alone, was he?"

Bars,
hookers, work, websites. Wherever. It didn't matter to Lucent, he
would find women any possible way. It's good that the majority of
Garret's life was lived before the Internet, because the next twenty
years could have become quite unmanageable—indeed, at the end of
his life, it already was because of the websites he visited. His
computer records show that he spent hours on them every weekend.
Whole days sometimes, and the usage reports I've seen showed the
intensity increasing. He had accounts for five different pay sex
websites, and another six free ones. His wife asked him what he was
doing in their computer room so much, and his answer was always the
same—"remoting into the office."

Garret
lived in a world of lust. The women he met were pretty and ugly,
skinny and fat, black and white. His tastes varied across the
spectrum, taking anything he could get and practically smothering
himself with it. He would spend all day Saturday looking, talking,
and flirting on these sites. He would have a date every Sunday
night—his wife thought this time was spent at the gym—and late
Sunday evening he would find his way back to his own bed. Some of the
women he met only once, some he would see again and again, but every
Sunday he did his absolute best to have a new date. This went on for
a year. Right up until Garret ran into Matthew Brand.

The
picture was of Matthew Brand. Seeing it today, with hindsight's
vision, it's hard to miss the direct similarities between how he
looked on the sex site and how he looked in reality. Matthew wore a
wig, placed make-up in the all right spots, and through Photoshop,
showed cleavage that simply shouldn't have existed. For a woman,
Matthew Brand looked extremely attractive. He never messaged Lucent
though, and actually didn't respond to the man's first two advances.
Instead, Brand let them sit in his mailbox for a few weeks before
finally responding to the third.

"Can't
catch a hint, huh?" Brand asked Lucent on the sex site.

Lust
was born again for Garret Lucent.

I
imagine that it thrilled him, sending adrenaline rushing into his
brain and throughout his body. A feeling that nothing else in his
life matched, but at the same time some guilt must have manifested.
That is the way for the addict, a joy that strikes to the core, and
when striking, opens up the knowledge, the pain of what he or she is
actually doing. The guilt didn't matter though, not to Lucent's
actions, because he kept going.

Garret
and the person pretending to be a woman agreed to meet, finally, all
of his persistence paid off. Garret would get what he wanted, what
his body thirsted for, that which no one in his life could fully
satisfy.

A
hotel. There wasn't any question of exactly what they would be doing.
No movie. No dinner. Just sex.

Brand
waited for Lucent in the room, dressed as the beautiful woman he had
shown Garret on the internet. The bell boy in the hotel remembered
the woman walking in, a black dress that curved to her body, long
blonde hair, and breasts that went "for days" as the
employee told me.

Garret
knocked on the door and the woman, 'Felecia', answered with a smile
and two glasses of wine in her hands. They entered, him taking a
glass from her and leaning in to kiss her neck. Her voice probably
was deep for a woman, but wasn't that erotic? They spoke, they drank,
and at some point Garret must have made his move. Thrusting himself
on Felecia, or Brand, with a force only a man of three hundred pounds
could truly muster. Throwing Brand on the bed in a way that was
supposed to be sexy, and probably would have been under any other
circumstances. Instead, it was the last amount of pseudo-manhood that
Lucent would ever show. Already, his stomach was digesting a chemical
agent that would make sure he never saw the sun again. All women
understand you should never take a drink from a stranger; Lucent
didn't, and after a few seconds of rough kissing, he slumped to the
side letting out a long breath that sounded like a fart. He lay on
the bed, staring straight forward, paralyzed but able to see. Brand
undressed, taking off his clothes, then the fake breasts he wore,
leaving himself standing in white underwear. The thin man had taken
down the gentle giant and after a few hours, as the night deepened,
Brand ushered Lucent from the building in a large laundry basket,
taking him down the service elevator.

No
one saw Garret Lucent again, not until his funeral, and by then his
body was a shriveled version of the man that walked into the hotel.

Matthew hated Lucent
more than the others. It was the sex addiction and his weak wife that
didn't put a stop to it. That sanctioned it by allowing him to
continue, to meet person after person on the Internet, to fuck
anything he wanted. He hated both of them, had really wanted to take
Lucent and his wife. Someone needed to feel pain though; someone had
to know what it felt like to lose the person they loved most.