The Devil's Dream: Book One (34 page)

Allison kept pressing
her trigger, but hers was little good compared to the weapons SWAT
carried. She watched as the bullet holes ripped through the metal
death above, shutting down each gun in front of her one by one.

She turned around to
fire at Art's side, her gun raised at the ceiling, and then realized
it wasn't firing anymore either. The only sound arising around her
was that of men dying: the sound of agony, of blood leaking onto the
floor rather than passing through veins. The dying would all be dealt
with later. Her daughter, her husband, those were the only things
that mattered right now. She swung her gun to the center of the room,
the team there untouched and cautiously climbing to their feet. Her
eyes searched, looking for danger, for Brand, for Marley or Jerry.

Her ears found
something she wasn't looking for, the whine of a teapot on a stove,
the whole world sounding like an emergency.

* * *

Matthew knew death
surrounded him. Knew the weapons he hung the first week he rented
this place were being triggered, that they were fulfilling their
purpose, murdering everything in their path. He also heard the
high-pitched scream the Conductor made, knowing it was fulfilling its
purpose as well. Everything around him was in harmony with why it was
created: the police were hunting him, the guns were killing, the
Conductor was using blood and his genius to create—and for the
first time in years, with all this chaos surrounding him, Matthew
felt himself completing his own purpose.

He stood in front of
the glass box, watching as it heated. Electricity flirted around the
corners of the box, climbing from space to space like spider webs. A
bolt shot across the container, lighting up the inside as bright as a
string of lightening across the sky. Matthew didn't close his eyes
and didn't look away. He knew what came next because he designed it;
he had seen this all years before anyone thought it possible.
Whatever was happening around him, the silenced machine guns, the
people screaming, and the whine of the Conductor—all of it was
secondary, somewhere away in the distance. He was present in this
moment, twenty years in the making.

Another bolt. Then
another. The box, and the larger room, lighting up as electricity
crashed inside. Silent lightening illuminated Matthew's face. The
hair on his skin stood straight and his body tingled as some of the
electrons inside the box escaped, forced out by the pressure growing
inside. They jumped to his skin like tiny bugs, but he didn't move.
His hands were shaking again, and inside the glass a ball of great
light grew.

Soon.

* * *

Allison saw the man she
had come to kill. He stood with his back to her, his back to them
all—those that came to take him away and now lay discarded amongst
the floor like forgotten toys. Brand's arms at his sides and not a
weapon to be seen anywhere. Standing as if this was a beach and the
ocean lay before him, the tide ebbing in around his toes.

Allison followed his
gaze and understood.

She was too late. A
large box, made of glass, now looked almost like a light bulb.
Inside, she could see endless electricity shooting around inside. It
hurt to look at, her eyes begging her to turn away and shield them
from the light. She didn't. She watched from twenty feet away as
electricity continued to consume the empty space inside.

Her whole body flinched
as a single bolt escaped the glass structure and shot to the ceiling.

Brand didn't move.

Another escaped.

And another.

The electricity was
grounding itself on the building. Everywhere it touched, a fire
burned in the blackened area it left.

The building was soon
in flames, and the electricity continued its forced escape from the
box, creating more fires and picking up its intensity. Each bolt that
exploded outside created a deafening thunder that drowned out both
the dying and that incessant whine.

She took a step closer,
her gun dropping a few inches as her mind refused to focus on
anything but the glory in front of her. The electricity inside the
box was focusing, all of it seeming to search for a single place on
the floor. It no longer sparked around randomly, but resembled laser
beams all pointing at the same spot. She stared at it, at the beauty
of perfect light and perfect clarity, even as stray runners continued
creating fires in the rafters.

The box darkened, or
rather, turned opaque and blocked out her view of the lightening. It
happened slowly, so that at first Allison didn't notice, but after a
few seconds, she could only see the lightening shooting across the
ceiling—one of the dead machine guns now on fire.

The beauty gone,
momentarily, Allison thought of her daughter—of why she had come.

* * *

Matthew's mouth was
dry, his palms sweaty and twitching, his whole body feeling like it
might explode from the electricity flowing through him. He didn't
budge.

The glass grayed out
and Matthew dropped to his knees, tears running down his face and
mixing with his sweat. He put his hands together in front of him as
if he were praying to a God. Maybe he was, maybe this was his God:
his son who he was so close to meeting once again.

The clarity of
untouched glass started at the top of the box, the opaque grayness
washing away in streams of invisible water, flowing from some unseen
center at the top. Streaks of clarity and Matthew could see inside. A
smile bloomed on his face as large as any happiness ever witnessed.
He saw through, saw the single ball of light in the center of the
glass sphere.

"Dad?" The
voice echoed out into the fire filled chamber. "What's going
on?"

Matthew bowed all the
way down to the concrete floor so that his forehead touched it. Tears
bled from his eyes as his body heaved up and down with sobs.

The first shot rang out
across the building.

* * *

Everyone in the
building heard the voice. The voice of a teenager. The voice of
someone questioning what was happening around him, not understanding
and scared. The voice of someone alive.

Allison's head cocked
to the side just as Matthew bowed to the voice speaking to him.

He
was right
, she thought.

Then the sound of a
single bullet cracked into the air, and the entirety of the room
opened fire on the man and his boy.

She ran past the body,
barely glancing down. It laid still, bullets holes filling up with
blood and spilling over. She ran past, to the gurneys, the metal
trays holding bodies wrapped in gauze and plastic tubing. She found
her husband, the tallest of the three bodies, and ripped out tubes
until she could see his face. His hollowed out face.

Allison screamed.

What she saw might once
have been her husband, but no more. His face was still as bruised as
when he had left her house. His hair the same color. The rest of his
face though, did it even resemble Jerry? His skin was wax, pale and
almost translucent. His skull looked deflated, like the bones had
constricted in on themselves, and his skin hung off in large folds
like play-doh. His eye lay on the gurney next to him, the vein that
had connected it to his brain lying lifelessly on his cheek. She
reached for his hand and felt dead, cold skin. Even the skin on his
hands tried to melt from his bones.

Allison released his
hand and turned back to the room, tears streaming down her face and
feeling the world around her turning hazy. People were everywhere,
addressing the dead and dying, some searching the room with weapons
drawn. She ran forward, not knowing where she was going but only
knowing that she had to keep looking, had to find her daughter.

"MARLEY!" She
screamed into the warehouse. "MARLEY, WHERE ARE YOU?"

She ran in and out of
rows that held equipment she could not begin to understand, searching
frantically but seeing almost nothing. The room was a strange place,
a confused mix of objects and people and none of it was Marley. None
of it was the only thing that mattered in this world and she felt her
breath rushing too fast from her lugs, felt her vision begin to swim
in a hazy world, but she couldn't slow down, couldn't stop looking,
had to keep running forward.

"I found her!"
A voice echoed across the warehouse, creeping high above the sounds
of groans and bodies being moved.

Allison stopped, wiping
at tears.

"I found the
little girl!"

She heard herself
whimper, like a dog unable to come in from the cold, but she didn't
move.

"Over here!"

The whimper stopped and
her feet moved again, not worrying the least about whether or not she
would fall on the ground from lack of oxygen, only following the
voice of whoever was screaming. Following the voice to her daughter.

Allison rounded a
corner to see a group of people surrounding a gurney, pushed up
against the wall—somehow, and God bless that somehow, clear of all
the destruction around her. She charged to the gurney, pushing people
out of her way as they unstrapped the body from the metal slab.
Marley wasn’t moving, her eyes closed as if she was asleep. Allison
knocked people away from her daughter and reached for the little
girl’s neck, trying desperately to feel for a pulse.

"She's alive,
ma'am," Allison heard someone say above her, but it was like
someone whispering to her through a pillow.

She felt the beautiful
soft pulsing of blood in her daughter's neck and buried her face
there, crying, wrapping her arms around Marley.

Allison climbed the ten
concrete steps she was accustomed to, opened the door she knew well,
and walked into the receptionist area.

Long
Meadows Psychiatric Institute.

“Hi, Mrs. Moore,”
Truitt said from his desk.

“Hi, Truitt,”
Allison answered, walking to him. She picked up the pen and scribbled
her name and the time down on the sign-in sheet.

“Having a good day?”
He asked.

“Sure am,” she
nodded, smiling at the twenty-something year old. “Will be better
after I see her.”

“Enjoy it,” she
heard him say as she walked onward.

She moved down this
same hall every day at five-thirty, coming straight from work. She
never thought of going to the gym or heading home to work on chores.
Most of the day, even eighteen months later, she thought of Marley.
Thought of getting here to this place and spending the few hours they
could with each other. Every night Allison left and went home, left
Marley here even thought she wanted to bring her daughter with her.
Allison wanted to take Marley home, wanted to hold her in the bed
that Allison and Jerry had once shared. She couldn’t though, not if
Marley was to have any chance of improving. She needed to be here,
with doctors that could try and work her out of this nearly comatose
shock.

Allison turned down a
few halls and found her daughter’s room. She knocked on the
door—not that it mattered—and opened it.

Her heart broke every
day at the sight. Broke fresh, and made her want to weep an endless
supply of tears. Marley sat on the other side of the bed, wearing a
white gown, and stared out the window before her. She didn’t turn
around at the sound of the door opening.

“Hey, babe. How are
you today?” Allison asked.

Her daughter didn’t
even tilt her head in response.

Allison closed the door
and walked to the other side of the bed, taking a seat next to
Marley. Her hair was brushed, but not to the specificity that Allison
liked it. Or maybe it was, Allison didn’t care. She would brush it
anyway, just like she did every other day. Allison would brush and
tell Marley about her day at work and ask questions that wouldn’t
be answered. Allison was at a local insurance company now, managing a
small team of sales people. She got off at five every day and never
had to worry about spending a night in a different city.

Jerry had been right
and she so wrong. Now he wasn’t here and Marley didn’t speak, and
Allison finally understood the truth of what Jerry had said.

She pulled her brush
from her purse, but didn’t bring it to Marley’s hair yet. She had
an hour, no need to rush anything.

Allison felt her phone
buzzing inside her purse.

No one called during
this hour. Not that Allison had many people that would call her
anymore, not too many friends, and the ones she had knew where she
went from five-thirty to six-thirty each day.

She took the phone out
and saw an Arizona number she didn’t recognize.

“Just one second,
honey. I need to see who this is,” she said to Marley. “Hello?”

“Agent Moore?” A
man asked, the voice familiar but only vaguely.

“This is Allison
Moore. I’m not with the F.B.I. though. Who is this?”

“This is Dr. Riley,
um, Mrs. Moore.”

“Hey!” She said
into the phone. “How are you doing?”

“Not well, Mrs.
Moore. Something’s happened.”

“What can I do for
you? I don’t work for the bureau anymore, but it’s nice to hear
your voice, Dr. Riley.”

“I’m not even sure
who I should be calling. Not you, I guess. Maybe you can call the
right people?”

Nothing in his voice
matched the happiness or levity in Allison’s.

“What’s going on?”

“The Vault, Mrs.
Moore. I opened it an hour ago. I’ve been working on it ever since
we last spoke, a few hours each night, trying to understand what he
was hiding. I don’t even know how to say this. He was hiding
himself, Mrs. Moore. In our systems, in digital space, he had copied
his entire genetic structure. He recreated himself while he was
inside the Silo.”

“What are you
saying?”

“I’m saying I went
to the Silos this morning, and Arthur Morgant is gone. He’s not
here. Brand’s ghost, which I guess was in our machines, must have
inhabited his body…and fled.”