The Devil's Dream: Book One

by David Beers

  But that was a dumb question, wasn't it? He did exactly what you thought he would. He came here and took his vengeance while you watched.

  Brand moved easily across the lawn. Simply a man going on a stroll at three in the morning, through a backyard that wasn't his, probably holding a child that wasn't his. Jeffrey watched him open the backyard fence silently and disappear into the woods behind the house. The police car out front never moved.

  Jeffrey waited another ten minutes and then stood up. His shirt was covered with grass and dirt, his back with leaves and twigs from the bush. He stood in the yard like that for a long time, the moon shining down on him and the sounds of insects coming from the woods. He waited on Brand to return, to realize he had missed something, missed the person watching him from the yard, and return to take care of him. No one came though and Jeffrey finally realized he had to go inside to write this book. He couldn't just think about it anymore; he needed to get down to the blocking and tackling of it.

  He walked across the yard just as Matthew Brand had minutes ago. He pulled on the back sliding door, doing his best to keep the thing quiet on its tracks. He stepped into the house and felt the cool air touch his moist skin. The house was silent like a grave. Jeffrey stood for a few seconds looking around the kitchen. He finally moved, walking across the kitchen and into the living room.

  There he stopped and stared.

  A woman stared directly at him, only she couldn't see him because he was dead. Her eyelids remained half open and revealed glazed eyes. Five or six large, red holes were drying on her chest. Her shirt hung in tatters revealing the tan skin beneath. The tan skin and the open flesh that no longer served its purpose of holding blood inside the body.

  Jeffrey breathed slowly, measured. If he let his breathing go, everything else went as well. His heart rate would jack up and then any semblance of normalcy he was holding onto would collapse and he would lose it right here in the living room—would begin sobbing loud enough for the cops who sat outside to finally come inside and work.

  A man sat in a chair in front of the woman. The body sagged forward, his weight straining against tape that wrapped him like some kind of freak package. Dead too.

  Then the man's body hitched with a sob and Jeffrey looked away. The man, Joseph Welch, wasn't dead. His wife was and Joseph was staring at her. Had been looking right at her ever since Brand pranced out of the house with his new addition. There was one other person that should be in the house, but Jeffrey didn't think he would find the little boy anywhere. He turned down the hall, his feet making soft clicking noises on the floor, but as he looked over his shoulder, only the dead wife looked at him. The husband was lost, maybe forever.

  Jeffrey checked the rooms, finding the master, then the guest, then the baby's. A tiny empty bed without a blanket. A toy chest with all the toys stored away. No baby, anywhere.

  * * *

  The child lay on the metal table not making a sound. The perfect combination of sedatives flowed through his body so that he wouldn't wake up until there was nothing left to see.

  Not a he. An it.

  Don't call him that. Don't run from this. Face it.

  Years ago he looked at a grown man lying on a table very similar to this one, naked, and with a large dose of sedatives inside him. A grown man that had killed his son and left Matthew's life in shambles. Now he looked at a baby. A three year old kid who didn't deserve the same thing that befell his grandfather.

  "Deserve has nothing to do with it. Hilman didn't deserve what came down on him either."

  That didn't take away the sting though. Some part of Matthew, some part that he had thought would never show up was asking him not to do this. The child's perfect skin almost glowed from the artificial light above. His chest moved up and down slowly, his lungs new and practically unused.

  Matthew turned to the cart next to the boy, a metal thing full of tools.

  If you turn back now, you turn back on everything. If you return this child to his wifeless father, there's nowhere else to go for you. There's no Hilman. There's no one else to take. They'll find you and they'll kill you. They'll kill everything you wanted to do, everything you've attempted. So decide whether this child is worth it.

  The answer was simple.

  He turned around with a scalpel in his right hand and a long clear tube in his left. He put the tube down next to the child and put his gloved left hand on the baby's forehead. He brought the scalpel to the boy's temple and began to carve. Small drops of blood dripped out at first, but the deeper he went, the larger the drops grew.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Allison looked at the picture on her phone. Marley's brown hair and brown eyes were perfect. She remembered taking the photo, it had been Marley's ninth birthday and they ate at the Japanese Steakhouse down the road from their apartment. Her daughter hugged her husband and both were smiling like nothing bad had ever happened in the world. It was strange, Allison thought, how easily people could forget the horror in the world if they concentrated on something else for just a few moments. Perhaps people were little more than goldfish with thumbs. She was the same, having completely forgotten anything that could hurt her loved ones in that moment when she snapped the picture. Bliss was all she had known then.

  She stared at the photo and wondered how she could get back there, to that place where everyone ate food and loved each other? How she could get out of this current place, where the world shook beneath her feet and the buildings around her looked ready to collapse?

  You can quit, she thought. You can quit right now. Look up Art's number and tell him you're done. You can go home and take as many of these pictures as you want.

  The bed beneath her was not her own. Her clothes sat in suitcase instead of drawers. If she opened the door to her room she wouldn't be able to walk down the hall and find Marley, she'd walk out into a hallway with fifty other doors looking just like hers. Jerry wasn't in the bathroom. He wasn't here at all. This life wasn't her life.

  Yet she lived it just the same.

  Her phone showed it was one in the morning. She wouldn't sleep tonight at all, and needed to be up and moving around in fifteen minutes. The last call to come through was Art and the news not good. Joseph Welch's wife was dead, his child gone, and no one had a clue for eighteen hours after. The man, Joseph, sat in front of his dead wife for eighteen solid hours, in and out of consciousness, until the cops outside realized no one had come or gone from the house all day.

  So much work trying to find Brand and he walks right by their defenses, takes what he wants, and then leaves. Daytona Beach, Florida. That's where her plane would fly in two more hours. She would find another hotel waiting for her, more phone calls to Jerry and Marley, and from the looks of things, more death. She couldn't be the parent or the wife she needed to be; Jerry was reminding her of that every day, and now she couldn't be the cop she needed to be either. She was losing, barely able to keep her balance with the world shaking so violently.

  Allison turned her phone's screen off and sat up in the bed. Time to get going. Time to fly across the country to another state and meet a man who just lost his wife. Time to ask him as many questions as she could and then answer the one that he was sure to ask: where the fuck had she been two days ago when his wife was cut up in front of him?

  Jerry had his question too: When was she going to be a mother again?

  Allison didn't have an answer for either.

  * * *

  Dr. Tom Riley woke up and had The Wall back to himself and his staff. Well, mostly. A few agents were still stationed there, taking calls and making calls, but Moore's constant presence was gone. She left him here to continue his work in prying into Brand's brain, even if it was going to turn up fruitless as he now thought. The crimes were already being committed, apparently, and his work was slow work, although he enjoyed it.

  Something about Brand's brain kept him craving more. Even when Tom should be sleeping, he found himself driving back to The Wall. Foun
d himself using his key card to get in and found himself on the computer that housed what they knew of Brand's head. He could have stayed at his house, but when he told Moore he wanted the chance to work longer hours on this, she didn't have a problem with setting him up in a Holiday Inn three miles away.

  Brand's brain. That's what kept him here.

  It was seven in the morning and he knew what happened in Florida. Moore said the media would break it this morning. Brand took a baby and left a wife dead. Tom hadn't been able to stop it. No one in the entire organization Moore ran had been able to.

  Tom wasn't at The Wall early because he thought he would be able to help, though—he was here because Brand's brain kept pulling him back.

  He sat at his desk and turned on his monitor. A map of Brand's brain appeared, complete with painted green portions designating the areas that Tom had explored. The problem with his current process was that it could take a hundred years to just map out the places in Brand's mind, let alone understand anything in it. Still though, three small portions of the brain stood out in green. He moved the mouse, clicked on a new area, and dove inside.

  Here. Tom saw it yesterday but hadn't known what it meant. He thought it might be an anomaly in the mapping; he had gone through other places in the program detailing Brand's brain but saw this nowhere else, which made him think the Silo's gas had made a mistake.

  A white area deep in the recesses of Brand's brain, unable to be mapped. Tom couldn't click on it; he couldn't open it up if only to see what rested beneath the area. Every other part of Brand's mind could be clicked, opened, and then processed with computer power. It just took time. This area, though, couldn't be opened. It was like a vault.

  It's not possible. One can't decide where to store information and then decide who and who cannot look at it.

  Even as he thought the words, Tom believed that's exactly what he was seeing: a place in Brand's mind where he had stored information he didn't want anyone to look at, ever. He clicked the mouse again on the white area, but nothing happened. The screen simply looked back at him as if he hadn't done anything. Tom needed to dig in that spot, nowhere else. This one area about half an inch long.

  * * *

  The body was gone but the chair sat in the same place. Cops had already surveyed the entire place, taking any DNA they could find, picking up fingerprints and anything else as well. Allison just wanted to see the crime scene.

  The blood hadn't been cleaned up yet, as she requested. Dried on the floor, it looked like a small, frozen, red lake on the hard wood beneath it. Allison wondered how much blood had been left in the Welch woman when everything was done? The amount left on the floor said not much. She was probably as pale as a vampire when they pulled her from the chair.

  The husband, Joseph Welch, sat outside in a police cruiser, not being asked to come inside and not asking himself. The guy had been a childhood star for fifteen minutes until his father had passed from America's collective memory. Now he would be a star again. The whole world looking on and pitying him, thinking, God, that was just so awful. First his father and now his wife and child. The poor man.

  They wouldn't know the truth though, that he had watched his wife bleed out. That he had sat for a day with his wife in front of him, unable to call for help. That in the end her body had grown stiff and gray so that it didn't really even look like the woman he loved. The public would never know that, but she did, and so when she went back out to the police car and he only stared out his window without saying a word—she would know why.

  It had been Allison's job to protect him. Somehow she made sure he lived and the rest of his family died. Successful, huh?

  She looked out the window from where she stood, realizing that she could see all the cars on the road and that meant Joseph could have seen the police car outside while he remained taped and watching his dead wife. Unable to call for them. Unable to tell them to free him so that he could hug his dead wife one last time.

  Allison walked out of the house, leaving the cleaning crew that stood inside to process anything left and then begin on the job of making the place look like nothing ever happened. She went to the car that held Mr. Welch, getting in the front seat while he sat in the back.

  "I don't have much to say except I'm sorrier than you can know."

  The door was closed, her driver ready to go, and Welch staring out the back window. The car was silent and heavy, much quieter than the house with all the techs and cleaners walking through it.

  "I know you don't want to talk, Mr. Welch, but we have to. If we don't, what happened in there is going to happen to someone else and soon. You understand that, right?"

  Allison sat nearly turned around in her seat, her eyes on a man who wasn't turning an inch to acknowledge that she existed. He didn't cry, looked dry-eyed out the window towards his house. They had an hour to get this place cleaned up and then the jig was up. Everyone in the world would know that Brand had struck because Allison was due for a press conference outside on the lawn. Everyone would know that Brand went inside a place that was under police surveillance, tied people up, killed them, and then left with a child. Already, almost all of the other possible targets had been pulled from the playing field, picked up from their houses and brought to black spots that only the F.B.I. knew about. None of that would change what happened here or what the public would think about her and this investigation.

  "Mr. Welch, are you listening?"

  He nodded.

  "Talk to me. Tell me what happened in there."

  Not looking away from his house, he spoke. "I wanted him to come. I'm a fucking idiot. I wanted him to come for us because I was going to stop him. I was going to kill him for what he did to my dad and my entire life. He came, didn't he? I got what I wanted."

  "What did you see of him? Can you tell me that? What was he wearing? What did he look like? What did he say?"

  A smirk grew on one side of his lips. "He was wearing a knife in his right hand. Will that help? He might have left it in the kitchen though before he left, so his right hand might have been naked when he left. Can you find a naked right hand out here? He walked by you guys like the wind blows through leaves. I never saw him coming and I never saw him leave because I was too busy watching my wife die. He has my son but you're not even talking about him, because we both know what's happened, don't we? The same thing that happened to my Dad, except he was a lot older and a lot larger. So that means he's going to blow through more leaves of grass and have to find more bodies, doesn't it?"

  * * *

  Jeffrey sat in his car and stared at the warehouse.

  The car was turned off, and the Florida sun beat down without a care for how hot Jeffrey may have felt. Sweat blossomed on his skin and dripped down, withering on his clothes. He didn't mind, didn't notice really. He took a pull from the bottle of vodka in between his knees, and then a longer pull from the large Gatorade sitting in his passenger seat.

  He placed both back at their spots and continued staring.

  This is where Brand brought the child. This place that contained all those wooden boxes and was closed off from the world. That baby was somewhere inside, and Jeffrey knew better than most what was happening to him. He didn't know how the pain felt, because no one ever lived to talk about it. He knew the actions though. Knew exactly what steps Brand was taking with the kid's body—he detailed them down in the book that made him rich and famous.

  Rich and Famous.

  Maybe that would be the title of his next book. The one he wrote about watching a child being stolen from his parents and then carved up inside a warehouse. He had no doubt that he would have to publish it from another country. If he tried to stay here, getting locked up would be the least of his worries. A mob would descend on him and tear his limbs from his body, only to beat him with the bloodied ends.

  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.

  Chapter Twenty

  "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.