The Devil's Dream: Book One (26 page)

Matthew flexed his jaw.

With two fingers he
kept the wound open, and with his other hand, he doused the flesh
with alcohol.

Pain from another world
grabbed him. Pain that opened up consciousness and destroyed
universes raged. His teeth snapped down onto the wooden pipe and a
guttural noise roared from his lips: a long, loud growl that seemed
to have no end, coming from whatever dimension this new pain was born
from. His skin felt like he had lit it on fire, the same as those
agents who had rolled on the floor trying to put themselves out in
the restaurant. The inflamed nature of it, the tender skin, all of it
seemed a memory of someone else's body; now, all of his skin was a
volcano, erupting droves of rage into his central nervous system.

He felt his teeth lodge
deep into the wood.

Hands shaking, he
reached for the peroxide, simply wanting something cool, something
wet, something
else
on his skin besides this hate he had poured.

He dropped the peroxide
cap and simply poured the clear liquid onto his body. The pain didn't
disappear, not at once, but lessened. He felt his jaw loosen its
grasp on the pipe in his mouth, and he brought his fingers to the
wound, staring with wide eyes as he poured more of the cooling
peroxide inside. Bubbles grew, still finding bacteria to kill despite
the alcohol he had drenched the wound in.

Matthew closed his eyes
and concentrated on his breathing, letting the liquid do its work.

After a few minutes, he
looked back down at the wet opening. More pain. That's what was
coming. More pain and then he would rest. He would get through this,
he would sew himself up and then he would figure out the rest. Just
fix himself so he didn't die and then the rest of the world could
feel this pain.

The needle slid through
his crimson skin with relative ease, his flesh almost numb from what
it had been subjected to. In and out, in and out, he looked on as he
crossed his skin with the needle and thread, bringing his flesh back
together and hoping that whatever infection might have grown was
wiped away. He needed sleep and he needed antibiotics, then he would
need to get on the road.

* * *

The clock on the
nightstand showed twelve hours had passed. Matthew couldn't remember
if it had been day or night when he fell into the hotel bed. The
shades were drawn making it impossible to tell if the sun had risen.
The world might have stopped turning for all he knew, it could be
just a ball resting in space, no longer rotating, slowly cooling so
that everything on it would die in cold, still, silence.

He remembered dreaming
while he slept, but none of the details. He touched his forehead,
feeling hot skin. Hot and wet. He would need those antibiotics sooner
than he thought or else he was going to die. The longer he lay here,
the weaker he would become, and the more likely he was to never get
up again.

Antibiotics now. He
would rest later, for a few days if needed, eating pills and hoping
he would turn the corner
.

He needed to get out of
bed and find a drugstore. He would think of Rally and her death,
everyone's death in his whole fucking life, when he was sure that his
body wasn't going to die next. He swung his legs from the bed and
felt his head nearly roll off his neck. Pain wrapped in dizziness
threatened to take him to the floor.

Get
up. Get pills. Get back to bed.

Three things that he
had to do. Up, pills, bed, and then he would see if he could live a
few more days. The alcohol, the peroxide, all had been for nothing
because whatever little bugs lived on that knife had made themselves
at home deep inside his body and were now using it for house parties.

Up, pills, bed.

He had enough.

He really did.

What he knew so far
would get him deep into a book; Jeffrey could leave the country and
write everything he experienced so far, wait on Brand to be captured,
and then begin interviewing everyone still alive from this ordeal.
Hell, he could fly everyone he wanted to speak with to whichever
country he lived in—his publisher would
have
to pay for it, because this book was going to shake the
world completely off its axis. Jeffrey could write about meeting
Brand in the bathroom, about knowing he was going to die just like
everyone else that crossed the man. He would be able to describe
every step Brand took up until the very end, when he had to flee for
his own life.
In Cold Blood
would be a poor man's version of what he was going to create.

And
your family? What if he goes for them?

Why would he? If
Jeffrey left, made it known that he was leaving the country, why
would Brand try to hunt him down? Wouldn't he take it simply as a
truce? As a gesture that Jeffrey wasn't going to turn him in? Live
and let live, because really, all the man wanted was his son back. If
Jeffrey wasn't coming between him and that goal, Brand would have no
reason to hunt him or anyone he knew.
Leave
the country, write your book, and let the rest of the world deal with
Matthew Brand.

He needed to do
something first. He needed to look inside Brand's warehouse.

Jeffrey hadn't had a
drink in twelve hours, and he felt like his hands were going to split
open from the all the white-knuckling it took to keep the vodka from
his mouth. He wanted his head clear, just for a few days, just until
he could figure out exactly how he would do this. Brand might even be
dead; he didn't know. No one did. The man had blown up an entire
restaurant, killed his wife, and then ran off again like some
mythical creature rather than a person made of bone. This time Brand
had been injured though, if Jerry was to believe the television.

He had waited in the
hotel room a hundred miles out from Daytona, waited on Brand to send
him some kind of return email, waited in a drunken stupor that left
him with headaches every morning and a fresh drink in his hand
shortly after he woke. He did this until the news showed before and
after pictures with the headline of
Brand
Strikes Again
like this was a Star Wars film rather than
reality. Jeffrey had set his drink down and watched, understanding
why he hadn't heard anything back. The man had been too busy
murdering his ex-wife and burning down buildings. Jeffrey set the
drink down and hadn't picked it back up, just watched and watched and
watched as people kept speculating on Brand's whereabouts. Bottom
line? No one knew, but he took a knife in his gut during the whole
thing, and not even Brand would be able to go out and kill with a
hole in him.

Twelve hours sober and
he was thinking about calling his agent. Thinking about getting her
on the phone with the publisher to let them know exactly what he had
been doing and exactly what he still wanted to do. He could go back
to Daytona, a two-hour drive, go directly to the warehouse and get
inside. He'd pay the guard whatever he wanted, a grand, two? He'd
expense it all out to the publisher and he would witness exactly what
the place looked like on the inside. Then he would flee the country
to one that wouldn't extradite him when the government found out
exactly what he'd done. The point was, if he were to do this, it had
to be now. While Brand was hurt. Not tomorrow, not the next day, not
postponed because Jeffrey was too drunk to drive down there. He
thought he probably had a six-hour window to make all this happen,
and that was based on fear more than anything else. It'd been a day
since Brand destroyed the restaurant, and while Jeffrey was no
doctor, he didn't think Brand would be able to get down here and
start working immediately. He would have to take time, would have to
get his stomach fixed. Jeffrey just didn't know how long it would
take. Didn't know the severity of the injury. Six hours is all he
wanted to give himself. Two hours to get down there, two hours
looking around inside, and two hours to get back. He would let the
people in his phone know—
hey,
a killer may be coming your way in the near future, so you might want
to arm up—
and then he was getting on a plane and getting
out of here.

He couldn't be expected
to sacrifice himself to Brand. He couldn't be expected to give up the
chance of writing this book in its entirety—of having it play out
to the very end—for an outside risk.

The police could
protect the people in his phone, and if they couldn't, he'd fly them
to wherever he relocated if they wished.

Six hours to make this
happen and then he needed to be gone, from this country, from this
boiler with no release valve.

* * *

"You not gonna say
nothin' right?"

"No, man. I'm
paying you to open it. Just let me in and you'll never see me again,
I promise," Jeffrey said.

"Why do you want
in here?"

The Florida sun didn't
care what anyone was saying beneath it, or how much time this kid
wasted asking Jeffrey questions—it only knew to continue burning
and roast anyone that stood outside too long. Jeffrey had his hat on,
though at this point it was a silly thing to wear. His hair was
sweating through it and his arms were already turning red. Maybe
Brand had left the air on inside the warehouse. He couldn't imagine
why the man wouldn't, certainly cost wasn't a factor. In
The
Brightest Killer
, he traced Brand's finances as far as
possible, and while he couldn't say Brand's exact net worth, it was
north of ten million. Either way, Jeffrey wanted out of this heat and
away from this redneck kid as fast as possible.

"Look, the
thousand dollars in your hands is all you need to know. If you don't
like it, or don't want the money, I'll wait until tonight and see if
the guy working that shift wants the money. Are you going to let me
in or not?"

The kid's hand went to
his pants' pocket, feeling the envelope there, not wanting to let the
thick wad of money out of his possession. "Was just curious,
ain't no big deal. I'll let you in, just don't fuckin' take nothin',
okay?"

"I'm not taking
anything. I just need to look around."

The kid went to the
keypad installed in the door, typed a few numbers, and then let the
world finally get a glimpse of Matthew Brand's work.

"You're not coming
in with me," Jeffrey said, his hand on the large overhead door.
"If you come in here later, I can't stop you, but I promise you
you'll regret it with everything you have. I'm not going to do
anything to you, one way or the other, but if you go in there,
someone else will."

In his mid-twenties,
and expecting a life of everyday pot usage and probably drinking on
the weekends, the kid looked at Jeffrey with a dull sense of
understanding. He didn't nod, didn't put the keys away, just looked
at him.

"You get what I'm
saying?" Jeffrey asked.

"I won't go in."

"Good. Now head to
the front. You really don't even want to look in here."

Jeffrey waited until
the golf cart that carried him down here disappeared around the
corner. He took a second to look up and down the road, seeing the
tree that he hid in a week ago. He almost wished he'd stayed at home
to begin with, never came to Daytona, never climbed the tree and
watched Brand enter this place. The thought of his own death had
passed; Jeffrey felt he would survive this but wasn't sure about the
people close to him. He was going to make it, and with any luck, they
would too. He was made to do this. He was made to write about Matthew
Brand, and if denied that, if he had remained at home while Matthew
went through the world taking what he wanted, he would have denied
his reason for living. This was how his life was supposed to go,
standing outside of surely the most disgusting sight he would ever
witness. Jeffrey wrote the first book and he would write the sequel,
because Matthew's and his lives were intertwined.

"You're wasting
time," he said into the hot, humid air.

He pulled open the door
just enough for him to slip under and then let it back down.

Not a single window
lined the walls but light poured down from the ceiling with beautiful
clarity. No yellow, dingy light—just white beauty that illuminated
everything in front of Jeffrey. The cool air defied the sun's will
outside, refusing to bend to the heat all those miles away.

Jeffrey looked at a
genius the world would never truly appreciate.

The world around him
was created inside someone's mind, just one person's, and that alone
was frightening. The rest of the world, the places Jeffrey walked
around all day, were created by hundreds, thousands, millions of
human minds. Each person molding the world in a slight way, whether a
beggar lying on the street, or a businessman parking his BMW. Here
though, in this place, only one person had created everything that
Jeffrey viewed. Made a world unto himself, without any help.

And it was so
beautiful.

Jeffrey's eyes saw the
glass box on the other side of warehouse and knew magic would happen
there. This place was missing the large metal canisters that had been
in the cabin. Here Brand had gurneys, six of them all surrounding the
glass box, perhaps thirty feet from it creating a circle around it. A
large tube ran from each gurney—Jeffrey couldn't tell if it was
plastic or glass—but he could see through them. Inside were the
wires that Jeffrey wrote about in his book, the things that carried
electrical currents and blood. The things that carried souls. Four of
the gurneys were empty, but Jeffrey could see that two contained the
specimens meant for them.

He pulled out the
disposable camera he'd picked up on the way over and began snapping
photos. He could write about this. He could use his memory to tell a
story. All of that had served him well in the past, and he would
remember the details of this room for the rest of his life. Pictures
though, to tell this story through words as well as images—the
world was almost not ready for it. He walked forward, clicking the
camera as he did. Behind both the circle of gurneys and the glass
box, was a glass tube that stood on one end without any supports,
without any metal underneath to keep it from brushing the concrete.
If Matthew wanted, he could walk over and simply shove it to the
ground, sending pieces of glass flying through the air and breaking
whatever was inside.