The Devil's Dream: Book One (2 page)

That wouldn't have
changed things too much for Arthur except he just happened to be
extremely unlucky in his timing. Had he raped the young girl five
years before, he probably would have just went to the gas chamber and
been done with the whole life thing. Instead, the science evolved at
just the right time to go into human trials, and thus The Wall was
born. The ACLU and other civil rights groups protested against it,
but in the end the Senator got his way and Arthur was inducted as the
First Member of The Wall. They froze him, basically, his mind and
body, so that they could run tests on his blood. The story faded from
view shortly after Matthew was locked up, and Allison thought no more
about it. She imagined they were still draining blood from him, still
trying to replicate what his body could do, but there didn't seem to
be any major breakthroughs yet. Poor Arthur was still suspended in
some type of hibernation.

Brand had been put in
there too, but for a different reason. He didn't have anything that
the US could use immediately, like Arthur, but he could have uses in
the future, The Powers That Be reasoned. Every time someone went into
The Wall, it was national news, with discussion on both sides about
the pros and cons to such a measure. Allison was for it, had been
since the beginning. If they weren't in here, they were just going to
be locked up or put to death, so what did it really matter?

She opened her car door
and stepped on the asphalt. Cars filled the parking lot, even at six
in the morning. The sun still rested below the horizon, but Allison
was the last to arrive apparently. This is what she had waited for,
to be walking into a building like this with an assignment seemingly
picked from heaven. A career assignment. Art called her and let her
know he selected her name to head up the task force. Fifteen years
and here it was, laid out before her, and all she had to do was
perform. All she had to do was find Brand and bring him back. To
here. To the electric chair. To wherever they wanted him, it was her
job to simply bring him there.

She closed her door and
walked across the parking lot to The Wall.

* * *

"This is it?"

The man next to her
gave a small laugh, his first sign of happiness since being
introduced to Allison.

"Not what you were
expecting?"

The building seemed
endless. Hallways upon hallways, offices branching out from the
hallways like small homes in an underground labyrinth. Massive rooms
full of computers that, she was told, could hold the entire Internet
in them if needed. The place felt like a separate world, something
other than the Earth that she inhabited before stepping in here. The
vastness, the people traveling the hallways, and the words this man
spoke with—all of it was so
different
.

And all of it created
for the objects in front of her.

Which was, when
compared with the rest of the building, nothing.

She looked at The Wall,
the core to this entire operation, feeling like she'd been lied to.
You're told Santa Clause brings your presents every Christmas, and
then at some point you either see your parents wrapping the boxes or
they simply have a conversation with you, and you realize that Santa
had never been there. You realized your parents had been there doing
it for you the entire time, because they loved you obviously, but
nonetheless, in that love they had lied. It felt the same here; The
Wall protected the world from the worst and at the same time gave the
world access to whatever those prisoners possessed that it might
need. The Wall, though, was three oval glass containers, each about
ten feet long and five feet wide. That was it. Nothing huge, nothing
to inspire awe in those looking upon it.

"I guess, I
thought it would be bigger or something," Allison responded.

"Nope, just these
three containers, which we call Silos. Might surprise you to know
that each one costs ten million dollars to create. That's thirty
million dollars of glass in front of you."

Allison walked closer,
not asking permission. This had been Dr. Tom Riley's building last
night; now it was hers and he knew it. Dr. Riley would be lucky to
have his job when this was all over with, not by any of Allison's
doing, but simply because he was the man that presided over Matthew
Brand's escape from an escape-proof prison. The best he could do now
would be to assist in any way possible, and she hoped he understood
that.

She placed her hand on
the empty Silo, the one in the middle. It was cool to the touch, like
it might have just been pulled from a refrigerator. Her fingers ran
across the smooth glass feeling no imperfections. The thing sat at an
angle, two clear glass poles attached both to the ground and the
middle of the Silo kept it a few inches off the ground. The door to
the Silo stood open, Dr. Riley saying they had not touched it. No
handles on either side, just opened outward and left there.

Allison turned to look
at the Silo on her left. This was old Arthur, child rapist and
perhaps savior of Africa if his blood could be figured out. Gas
surrounded him, creating a hazy shield that she peered through. No
prisoners were actually frozen; they were inserted naked and subdued,
magnets attached to their skin so that they would remain suspended,
and then the gas did the rest of the work. It preserved both the
skin, the inside organs, and the brain as the prisoner breathed it in
and out.

"It won't keep
them forever. A couple hundred years probably, but he is aging inside
there. Just much slower than the rest of us."

Allison didn't turn
around, but gazed in at the black man's face. His eyes were open, but
he only stared at the ceiling blankly. "So if they can't figure
out how his body attacks the AIDS virus in a few hundred years, he'll
die?"

"Yeah, his heart
or something else will give out."

No one else stood in
the room with them.

"What about Brand,
are there going to be any lingering effects for him?"

"Yes, I would
imagine so. There were in the animal trials. Nothing permanent, but
he's going to be moving rather slowly over the next few days."

"Too bad he
probably isn't on foot," Allison said, turning away from the
prisoner to look at the empty Silo again. "So how did he get
out, Dr. Riley?" She leaned over and stuck her head inside the
Silo, looking around as if she would see something new.

"We don't know
yet. We're checking right now, looking through every bit of data we
have, but it's not theoretically possible. The patient is asleep. I
mean, we can even see their dreams."

"Yet here we are,
looking at an empty jail cell, huh?"

Dr. Riley nodded but
said nothing.

Allison pulled herself
out of The Silo and looked at him.

"You know we're
going to be operating out of this place for a while, right? You'll be
able to continue with your work, but you'll be expected to contribute
to the investigation in that we need you to discover how he got out.
Anything else you find out too. Can you do that?"

"Yes, of course."

"Good. Now if our
people shouldn't be setting up somewhere, let me know and I'll make
sure to move them somewhere else. We're in charge but we're also
guests and I'll remember that."

Riley only nodded
again. He didn't look good, like a kid just finding out that his
first day at Disney World was going to be rained out. A sadness the
kid hadn't known was possible until that very moment. He wasn't
crying, but Allison wasn't sure that would be true for the entire
day.

"Okay, doc, let's
get started."

If there was one thing
he shouldn't be doing right now, it was this. Still, Matthew couldn't
stop staring at the pay phone. He knew her number, or rather, knew
how to find it. Matthew figured out a couple decades ago that phone
companies didn't assign numbers randomly. They wanted the customer to
think that, of course, but it didn't make a lot of sense in the
larger picture of the world. It would be easy to have a computer
program come up with endless amounts of permutations of ten numbers
and assign them at random, crossing them off the list of
possibilities when they were used, but how would that help the
government track someone? That meant the government had to go through
courts and obtain warrants and any number of other things. So a few
decades ago government officials sat down with the CEOs of the phone
companies and made a deal no one could resist.

Matthew hadn't figured
this out by studying history; he figured it out by studying the
numbers. What he discovered was that they are assigned using a
combination of a person's name and social security number. Different
letters combined with different numbers gave different possible
combinations, so even when someone changed their number, the
government could track them down if necessary. Today? He imagined all
they needed to do was press a single button and see every possible
number for each person they were looking for, then ping them to see
which one was active. Each person probably had around ten possible
numbers they could use in a lifetime. Matthew still knew the
permutation of how the numbers were created, even after ten years of
practically living in a dream. Rally had only ten numbers she could
be using, and he remembered the three she had used before he went
into The Wall.

He was sure she had it
changed after his arrest, so there were seven combinations left to
try.

And yet, to call them
would be the dumbest thing he could do. Why call her? She'd report
him the very minute they got off the phone. They would trace the
number to here and then know he was heading east. If they had any
sense, it would be easy to find out a Greyhound Bus went through this
route and stopped at this gas station to fill up and let people grab
something to eat. The call wouldn't throw him back in cuffs but it
would move him a lot closer to that point.

And yet, here he was
looking at the phone, holding two quarters someone on the bus lent
him.

When it came down to it
though, he knew he couldn't tell himself no with Rally.

He walked to the pay
phone, picked it up and dropped the quarters in. He ran the
permutation in his head, coming up with the most likely candidate for
his ex-wife's phone number and then dialed.

Matthew knew he was
right when he heard the first ring; the number was active and he
would soon be talking to the last person on Earth he loved and at the
same time setting himself up to see an actual gas chamber, one where
he would die instead of float in a coma.

This
is your problem. Right here. This is why you were caught and this is
why you'll be caught again. You're addicted to idiocy. You're
addicted to doing the dumbest possible thing you can at any given
moment and then hoping your brains can get you out of it. You're
going to die because you couldn't leave Rally out of this. Because
you have to let her know you're getting your son even though she will
never come along. She'd rather turn you in than help you.

Matthew didn't hang up.

"Hello?"

She'd aged. He could
hear it in the slight strain of her voice box. What had he thought
would happen? That she would remain unchanged while time went on
around her, looking the same as she did when they gassed him ten
years ago? That maybe she was gassed too and had just recently
escaped her prison as well? No, only he looked the same; Rally went
ahead and did what was normal, she aged.

"Hey, Rally,"
he said.

She said nothing for a
few seconds and then, "Is this a joke?"

"No. It's no
joke."

"How?" She
spoke only that one word.

"It doesn't really
matter, does it? Not by any legal means, which is all you're really
concerned with."

More silence permeated
the line.

"What are you
going to do?" He didn't hear any fear in her voice. Had he
thought he might? That she might be frightened he would come for her?
There were reasons for him to, of course, but Matthew wouldn't. Not
ever—and apparently she knew it too.

"I'm going to do
the same thing I've been trying to do for twenty years. I'm going to
get our son back."

Matthew could hear the
tears over the phone as she wept.

"You can't get him
back, Matthew," She said.

"You know that's
not true. I'm going to bring him back. I just wanted you to know."

He heard her trying to
stifle the tears, probably wiping her face and nose with a tissue.
"I'm going to hang up, Matt, and then I'm going to call the
police."

Matthew breathed in
deep, closing his eyes. He didn't know if he would love her like he
did if she had decided to do anything else but that. He was here,
outside of The Wall, because he was going to see his son again. He
wanted her to know that, but he also wanted to know that not all of
her had changed.

"You using your
maiden name now?" He asked, eyes still closed.

"I'm remarried,
Matthew."

"Oh."

Neither spoke for a few
seconds.

"I have to go,"
Rally said. "You don't have to do this. You can disappear. You
can live any life you want, solve any number of problems you see, but
you don't have to go through with this. You can let it go; I have,
Matthew. I've let the past go and I've forgiven. You can too."

"There doesn't
have to be any such thing as the past, Rally. Our son can live and
there's no reason he shouldn't."

"Fine then.
Goodbye, Matthew. Don't call again—you know the line will be
tapped."

He heard the click from
her side of the line. He stood next to the pay phone, looking at the
large bus in front of him, watching the travelers walk slowly back to
it with bags of pork rinds and plastic bottles filled with soda. None
of them noticed him.