The Devil's Dream: Book One (27 page)

Jeffrey found himself
standing in front of it, camera in hand.

Six clear tubes
connected to the side of the object, all of them surely making their
way back to the gurneys. This was the impetus of everything. This was
what Brand originally thought of twenty years ago, everything else in
the room was only a conduit for this to work. A piece of equipment
that could take, could understand, the life of someone
dead—programmed to extremely detailed specifications, and then
through blood and other bodily materials, rebuild those
specifications. Gunfire destroyed the last one, smashed until nothing
was left but pieces of wire and shards of glass. A dream murdered,
and here it was again, standing by itself quietly in this room.
Capable of something that shouldn't be possible. Waiting on its owner
to get back and start everything up, to let it complete its purpose.

Jeffrey took a picture.

He turned around and
looked at the people lying on the gurneys. One was tiny, the size of
a doll, wrapped in tubes and wires as if it was a package ready to be
mailed. He walked to it, his camera at his side, wondering if the boy
was still alive. Wondering if the grandson of Hilman's murderer was
still breathing. Or was the boy laying still, the smell of death
coming off him?

Looking down at him,
Jeffrey saw the tubes filling with blood and emptying regularly
across his body. His eyes were closed like he was sleeping. A tube
went deep into his throat but it remained clear. The holes that
drilled into his chest, his back, his forehead, all were slightly
red, but not infected. Looking closer, he thought the skin may have
begun to grow around the plastic tubes, accepting them as part of the
child's body.

Jeffrey didn't tear up.
He only took another picture.

He went to the woman,
Linda Lucent, who had been stolen from her home when police
surrounded it. If the child looked like a package, the woman looked
like a mummy, wrapped in the same things as the child, but stretching
over a much longer distance. Her hair spread out amongst the web of
tubes going into her nose and mouth, as well as the wires coming from
her ears. The child had been blessed, if that was possible, with the
surgery Brand performed. Lucent looked like she might have been born
machine and these tubes grew out of her like fingernails. Her eyes
were open and staring at the ceiling, two tubes exiting her mouth,
stretching it open like some grotesque caricature of fellatio. Her
eyes had shrunk into her skull, dried out by her never ending
staring. They looked to be turning into raisins, wrinkling as they
dried. If she ever walked again, she would never see anything else.
Soon they would be little more than soft pieces of fruit lying in her
head. Jeffrey looked down at the rest of the body and saw her holes
hadn't been given nearly the care of the boy's. The skin surrounding
the tubes peeled back, red and scabbed over. Dried blood splattered
most of the tubing. Either time had been running out for Brand or he
hadn't cared what happened to the woman.

Jeffrey reached for the
tiny red wire running into her ear and gave it a soft tug.

A soft moan escaped the
woman's throat. She didn't move, didn't turn her head and ask what
the fuck he thought he was doing—only the groan that seemed to come
from her chest.

He stepped back,
staring at the wire, realizing he had pulled it as if it connected
into a wall instead of a human.

She was alive, able to
feel. Had the rest been able to? He didn't think so. The rest had all
been like the child, in some chemically induced coma, simply serving
a purpose. This woman though, her purpose wasn't just to bring back
Brand's son because she was...
awake
.
She might not be able to talk, might not be able to walk, but she
wasn't lying there as the boy, a passive piece of furniture in all
this. She felt it all. She had felt her eyes begin to shrivel,
understanding that she would never see again. Her mouth—the tubes
shoved in there like a child trying to fit all his toys into a box
that would never close—must be just as dry, her tongue nothing more
than a thin flap of skin now. The tubes were deep, drilled into her
skin and reaching bone; had he gone that deep just to make a point?

"Mrs. Lucent?"
He asked.

A few seconds passed
without any sound from her.

"Mrs. Lucent, can
you hear me?"

Nothing.

He reached forward, put
two of his fingers on the tube coming out of her temple, and pressed
on it. The groan was louder this time, sounding like some weird
combination of sexual ecstasy and pain. He pressed harder, gripping
it with his whole hand, and the woman screamed—an "Aagghhhhh"
escaping from her mouth.

Jeffrey let go and the
scream tapered off to measured breathing.

He was going to walk
out and write about this woman? He was going to snap a picture of
this and then write a book about it? He was going to leave her here?

He tried to swallow,
but there wasn't any saliva in his mouth.

Call
the police. Call the police and end it all now.

Another part of him
knew this woman wouldn't live. Knew that if he called the police,
within minutes of being unhooked from all this, she would die. The
pain she felt now would be the last thing she ever felt and his
telling the authorities wouldn't change that. It wouldn't change what
happened with the child on the other gurney either. For these two
people, there was no going back; Jeffrey would be the only one to
lose if he called anyone. The police may or may not catch Brand, but
they wouldn't be able to save the people here. They would only make
sure that what Jeffrey wanted to write, and the way he wanted to
write it, would never happen.

Jeffrey snapped the
picture and continued his inventory.

Dreams of all kinds
passed through his sleep. They intermixed with reality in such an
intricate tapestry that Matthew never knew when he was awake. If he
hadn't been sweating in all of his dreams, he could have reached to
his forehead and felt the near puddle of perspiration to know when he
woke up—but, alas, he couldn't. He floated in and out of
consciousness: vomiting, pissing and shitting, taking pills. He
didn't know if the pills he ate were ones made of dreams or reality,
but he took them all the same. Hoping they would choke off the
sickness trying to kill him. He ate nothing, only finding water in
his hotel's bathroom, turning the faucet on and letting it run down
his throat.

Matthew thought he was
going to die.

Before the delirium
took over, he had believed this would be the best course of action.
He picked up the antibiotics and locked himself away from the world.
Had he gotten the wrong pills? Had he misunderstood what was wrong
inside his body? Whatever his mistake, the fever that gripped him
refused to let go.

All in all, it took a
week before he opened his eyes with any sense of clarity. Seven days
and seven nights with all of his nutrients stemming from antibiotics
and tap water. He looked around the room, his nose smelling what he
had done to himself for the first time. The room smelled so strong,
it nearly tasted of his excrement and urine; the air conditioner
obviously had been off and the heat only amplified the pervasiveness
of his bodily functions. Matthew lay on his side, staring at the
floor, the carpet so flat he wondered if a MAC truck had laid it.

He sat up, his arms
shaking as he rose on the bed, and leaned against the headboard
behind him. He moved his hand to check the fever, and in doing so,
saw where he had gnawed on his knuckles. They were red and
swollen—looking like he swung at a brick wall for much longer than
he should have. He placed the back of his hand on his forehead and
felt coolness.

"Thank God,"
he said, the air running through his vocal chords like sandpaper over
cement.

He looked around the
room at the mess, not understanding in the slightest how he had kept
the hotel staff from coming in. Had he said something to them before
he went under? Had he simply told them each day, no room service? If
they had come in, he would be in jail right now, or dead at the
hospital, killed by either a cop or his illness. Instead, he lived in
a disaster, looking like a rabid dog was locked up in here for a week
instead of a human being.

Matthew reached down to
his stomach, gently pressing on the area he had sewn up. It was
painful, but not excruciatingly so. He let out a sigh and closed his
eyes.

It took him turning on
the television to understand he had been under for a week. His mind
immediately calculated if Lucent and the child were alive. They would
be. Probably could last another week before he would need to dial
into their blood again and make sure everything was cleaning out
right.

There was more to think
about though, so much more.

The writer, Dillan,
where had he gone? Matthew thought he remembered receiving an email
from him, but had that been before Ral—

Before Rally.

Before Rally lay cold,
her neck snapping like a popsicle stick.

Before he killed Rally.

"Oh no," he
said. "Oh no."

He killed her. That's
why he was here, that's why he fought with death, because she had
stuck a knife into him before looking him in the face.

Then
you took her face and twisted it until she couldn't look at anything
ever again.

Matthew wept. Amid the
room he had laid waste to, he wept for the wife he murdered.

* * *

Did hours pass? Days?
How long did he sit on the bed, smelling all of his bodily functions
from the past week, and only thinking of the woman he loved? He
didn't know and he didn't try to count it. He mourned in a way he had
not done for twenty years. He mourned because he knew he would never
see his wife again; he would never attempt to bring her back like
Hilman. To bring her back would be to blaspheme her, and the amount
of time it would take, the pressure that would grow around him as he
brought back not one life, but two—all of it would stretch a rubber
balloon until it had no choice but to burst. Even if he could find
the time, could resurrect his boy and move to another country, start
kidnapping there—what would he tell her when she returned? That he
was sorry he killed her? That he was sorry he did so many horrible
things that she felt the need to kill him? That he still loved her?

Because, when it came
down to the nitty-gritty, that was the point, wasn't it? That he
loved her. That he had loved her his whole life and that he would
continue loving her for the rest of it. Knife wound, infection,
death, none of it would stop him from continuing to love her. Rally
had loved him too. As much? He didn't know. Even in the end, when she
waited there in that burning restaurant, a knife at her side, she
loved him. She loved him enough to look him in the eye while she
tried to kill him.

His son and his wife
were gone. He was alone. No one in this world wanted him to live;
everyone saw him as a monster, as the devil incarnate, and the last
person to understand him just passed from this Earth.

The payment for taking
his son would still be extracted. Matthew wouldn't be alone for too
much longer; he would have someone else in his life again.

Who paid for this
feeling though? This momentary understanding of what complete
desolation felt like? Who could he extract that from? Someone
allowed
Rally to be in that restaurant. Someone
allowed
Rally to stand there with that knife. She had to have been coached,
and only through her own character had she done what they asked,
knifed him before the police could. Someone made her do it. Rally
could have killed him anytime she wanted. Could have asked to spend a
night with him ten years ago and nothing in this world would have
stopped him from making it happen. While they slept, she could have
put a gun to his temple and ended it all. Matthew doubted it ever
crossed her mind, until now, until this time. Until she
finally
agreed to see him, and whose idea was that? Not hers, but his, and
someone listening on the phone line okay'd it.

He stood up from the
bed on shaky legs, holding onto the headboard to make sure he didn't
fall to the floor. When he thought he could walk, he began with small
steps, heading towards the bathroom.

The water from the tub
poured out hot, and he didn't bother turning it colder. He wanted his
skin to burn during this. Steam rose, filling the bathroom and
fogging the mirror. He put his foot in, feeling the water nearly
engulf his skin. He waited and when he felt used to it, his other
foot followed. He sat down on the edge of the tub, knowing better
than to put his raw wound into that heat, and slowly brought water up
with his hand to begin washing his body.

His son would be
reborn. That was a nonnegotiable in this life. He would die before he
let that opportunity pass. Someone had to pay for
this
though. Someone bought it and now they had to pay.

Agent Allison Moore.
Why not? He didn't know if the idea originated with her, but he knew
she was constantly talking on the television about him. She was the
one chasing him. Allison Moore would take responsibility. She must
care about things in her life, must not want to lose certain things.
So Matthew would take them from her. He would find out what she
wanted, what she loved, and he would make sure she never saw it
again.

Then he would finish
creating his son, and life would go on as best it could.

"He might be
dead," Art said.

Allison set her coffee
on the table next to the couch.

"You think so?"

"It's been a week
and we haven't heard anything. Even the news cycle is changing."