by David Beers
“Okay, okay. I’ll get to packing.” He heard his mother hang up the phone.
“You’re okay?” His Dad asked, the two of them alone on the phone now.
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“And we’re going to be okay?”
“Yeah. No one even knows you exist. I imagine in a week or so you’ll hear about what’s going on, and then you’ll think, yeah, it made sense we left,” Jake said.
“Okay. We’ll call from Mexico. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
His new boss had gone down the street to pray and Jake was alone in his office. The first call he made was to his parents, to get them out of the country. He didn’t like hearing what the director had said on that subject, but the man was right. Brand wouldn’t think twice about stealing Jake’s parents if it meant his message might get out quicker. It was better to have them somewhere else, away from all this.
What was Art praying about? He hadn’t even tried to hide it, hadn’t said, “Got to deal with some personal things, be back in a few.” He just said, “I’m going to pray,” and then headed out of the building. Jake couldn’t remember the last time he had prayed. The thought of God didn’t take up much of his time, and based on Art’s colorful language, Jake thought the same would hold true for him. Religious people were supposed to be pious, definitely supposed to watch their mouth.
Still, Art had left twenty minutes after receiving the most important assignment in the world, heading to a church to kneel down and ask some God in the sky for help.
The assignment.
That’s what Jake would pray about if he had been one to pray.
Was this how things always worked in the FBI? Gyle James had given them almost nothing. Go out and find Matthew Brand, use whatever you need to do it. Jake was almost stupefied at it; how had this man risen so high in the organization? It strengthened his level of respect for Allison Moore, or at least what he knew about her. If that was the direction she’d received, she did a fine job of tracking down Brand on her own. And now Jake was here, sitting at his boss’ desk with the same opportunity.
Had she been scared?
Would his father have been scared?
Jake felt fear, but not the kind he imagined Art was feeling right now. He wasn’t going to pray for strength or pray for wisdom. His fear rested with his father, it rested with Moore, it rested with those that came before him—and all that was to say, his fear rested within himself.
He looked down at the phone on the desk. Jake had seen one of Art’s blind spots but he needed to see more. That was fine, Jake thought he would be able to find plenty of blind spots if this place kept receiving its current level of direction. The blind spots would be the easy part. He was going to pick up the phone right now, find every soup kitchen and homeless shelter in Boston, and start asking for inventory levels—if not in those exact terms. Were the homeless disappearing? If not in Boston, then Jake would spread out to other cities. If Brand was taking bodies, he wasn’t doing it in public, he was doing it in the shadows, and no one lived in the shadows more than the homeless.
8
Matthew remembered sitting down at his kitchen table. A small piece of furniture in a small apartment. He was using up a lot of the cash he had stored off shore in building his new creation, but he wouldn’t use an unnecessary penny for his dwelling. He had lived for ten years in an ice chamber, and now he inhabited another body, so what surrounded this body didn’t matter very much to him.
He remembered sitting down for dinner though, a microwaved meal in front of him, the Salisbury steak smelling almost like steak, with only a whiff of the lab chemicals used to create his entre. He remembered picking up his fork, ready to bring the first bite to his mouth.
But now he sat in another kitchen. No fork in his hand. No plastic tray of food before him. Instead of fake Salisbury steak, he smelled cigarette smoke. Both the smell of someone currently lighting up, and also the deep, permeating smell of an area that had been smoked in for years. Matthew looked around, the kitchen he had sat down in now completely replaced. He looked at yellow tinged countertops, yellow tinged tiled floors. The sink that should have been directly in front of him lay behind him, the table he sat at was older but sturdier. A black woman was next to him, the cigarette he smelled burning in her hand. An ashtray rested beneath her cigarette so that all she needed do was flick her fingers and the ashes would fall directly to it.
“Hello?” Matthew said, unsure of anything.
“Hush yo mouth, now. I gotsta deal with something here,” the black woman said without even glancing over at him. The wrinkles in her face looked like they might have been made around the time of Noah’s Ark. They crisscrossed every part of her skin, looking like old road maps. Her hair was graying at the corners, but full, splaying out in a bunch of directions, untamed.
Matthew looked outside the window above the kitchen sink and he didn’t recognize the neighborhood. Faded asphalt lived beneath the apartment, with two basketball goals that were missing rims sprouting up from the pavement. Another apartment complex stood directly in front of the one he was in. Matthew rose from his chair and walked to the sink, trying to get a better view of the outside world. He looked to the street, seeing cars roll slowly down tightly packed roads, cars that hadn’t been in production for thirty years. There might be a few left now, but a whole road full of them? Not that many even existed anymore. Cars honked beneath him, and he tried to see their license plates, but they were too far away.
“Get in here, Arthur! Right now!” The old black lady screamed behind Matthew. He jumped, turned around, and saw that the old woman hadn’t moved. She sat at the kitchen table just as calm as she had been a moment ago, despite her outburst. Matthew heard footsteps coming from somewhere in the apartment, small though, not heavy, not those of a grown man.
A little black boy walked into the kitchen. His hair was not trimmed, although not as bad as the woman at the table. Matthew knew immediately the kid was suffering from some psychological trauma, displaying symptoms from the moment he stepped into the room. He rubbed his hands against each other but didn’t look down at them. His eyes stood wide open, alert, staring at the old black woman. There was fear in them, but also love. Fear and admiration. Matthew thought that this kid probably had no one else in the world. Just this old woman who might be his grandmother or his great grandmother.
“Where’s your report card?” She asked.
“I gave it to you, Gramma. Gave it to you a month ago.”
“You ain’t give me nuttin, but you gon’ give it to me. Where is it?”
The boy rubbed his hands together faster. His eyes never left his grandmother, never looked anywhere else in the kitchen. Matthew could tell the boy knew where the danger lay: the old, wrinkled woman in front of him. Nothing else in the kitchen mattered. Just what this woman decided to do.
“Gramma, I gave it to you. You looked it over. I had four B’s and two A’s.”
“My daughter, I hope she’s burning in hell right now to have pushed something out like you. You ain’t given me no nothin’ of a report card. Get over here,” she said, flattening the butt of her cigarette into the ashtray.
Arthur walked forward. Matthew knew he didn’t want to. Matthew knew the boy had some idea of what came next, and Matthew didn’t think the boy was lying about the grades. Pain waited for this kid and if he had a report card he could give this old battle-axe, he would have given it to her. Instead he walked forward, hands worrying against one another.
The black woman moved with a speed Matthew found amazing. She snatched up the little boy’s arms and drug him over to the kitchen sink, yelling, “Outta my way,” to Matthew as she did, shoving him with a force her arms didn’t seem capable of producing. She turned the knob on the faucet just as quickly as she’d wrenched the little boy from one end of the kitchen to the other.
“Now you ain’t gon’ lie to me no mo’. You gon’ give me yo report card when I ask for it, ‘cuz I a
in’t lettin’ you turn out like yo mother or yo daddy. You understand that?”
The little boy cried, nodding, unable to pull away and unable to create an argument that would let this wild-haired lady understand that he had given her the report card, that she had looked it over.
And then the hot water touched the kid’s arm, and all he could do was scream and cry.
Scream and cry.
Scream and cry.
Matthew opened his eyes.
He stared at the side of a black tray, the one he had pulled from the microwave and placed on the kitchen table. He blinked a few times, realizing he was lying face down on his table, his head turned toward his dinner. Blood pooled before him—dark, red blood. Matthew lifted himself up slowly, placing his hands on the table. Vertigo rose in his head as he pushed himself to a sitting position.
He looked down at the blood which nearly surrounded the entire tray of food. He brought his hand to his face and wiped at his nose; when he pulled away, his black skin was covered with the same red liquid as the table.
What had he just seen? Who was that boy?
You know who that was. That boy was the body of the man you now inhabit. That boy, Arthur, that’s the rapist’s body you decided to take over when you sprang out of The Wall for the second time.
Jesus Christ.
Where had he been? New York in the 1970’s? No. Detroit. Morgant was from Detroit. Somehow Matthew had relapsed back into the man’s memories, experiencing life as the boy had lived it, but also inserting himself into those memories. The old woman spoke to him, actually shoved him. Morgant’s mind had somehow supplanted his own, somehow risen to the top in a way much stronger than when Matthew had looked at Allison Moore’s unconscious body. Morgant’s mind, what was left of it, had taken over Matthew’s. It hadn’t made Matthew do anything besides experience that memory, but there was a hell of a lot of blood on the table that wasn’t there before.
This is getting worse.
It was perhaps the most obvious and frightening statement Matthew had ever thought.
Matthew needed to think about what happened. He would have to think deep about what it meant and what he might be able to do to control it. He didn’t think he could stop it, had actually thought this might happen. His mind had so severely overwhelmed Morgant’s; he settled in like a Tyrannosaurus Rex might with a family of otters. The otters could do nothing but try and hide, try not to become food. Given enough time though, the otters would adapt and learn to work around the dinosaur. That’s what was happening now, except the otters were also destroying the home they both shared. Their workarounds were causing synapses to misfire inside Matthew’s head. Causing blood vessels to burst. Causing him to faint.
It would continue to worsen unless he found some way to slow it down. Found some way to reconnect the broken pieces. Because they were breaking, that’s what was happening. His brain was breaking.
Which meant he didn’t have the time he had envisioned when he dreamed this plan up four years ago. He thought that he could do this slowly, allow the world to wait in agony, searching everywhere they possibly could but unable to find him. And then, when he’d gathered his bodies, he would shut off the power source to this whole place. That was the plan, and now because of his recent daydream, things had to be expedited. He didn’t have time to gather the bodies as he wanted: in slow shipments. That would need to change.
And as far as this crucifixion a day thing, his damn pride had once again created disaster in a plan that didn’t need disaster. He didn’t have the time to do both, to crucify women for Brayden’s sake and collect the bodies for his lighthouse. He had to choose.
Matthew looked at ten crosses nailed down across his warehouse. There wasn’t anything else in this place, not a single piece of wiring, not a single table. Just the wooden crosses lying across the cement. He liked Massachusetts for a few reasons. He had access to a major city, he had access to his lighthouse, and he had access to acres and acres of practically untended land. He had a busy night ahead of him. A night that would be spent in cities, not Boston—he knew he couldn’t go back into Boston ever again, but there were other cities and other places to grab the women he needed. Ten would be a lot. It was audacious, actually, but his pride had gotten him into this mess and his pride would see him through it. He needed an audacious number, because the message he was sending out with these ten crosses needed to be understood. The message needed to be felt.
Ten ladies would do the trick.
The worst part about being on the road in an RV with your husband was, when you started arguing, there wasn’t a whole lot that could be done. There was no going to a friend’s house, no going to see a movie by yourself, no heading to a bar for a beer. You simply rode along together, not talking, until one of you decided to be the bigger person.
Karen wasn’t going to be the bigger person today. Maybe tomorrow, if Martin stretched it out that long, but not today. Under no circumstances. One would think that after being married for fifty years, there wouldn’t be much left to fight about. One would be wrong, if that’s what one thought however. Today, Martin told her that he had changed his mind on abortion, after twenty-five years, and he no longer thought it should be legal. Told her, matter of fact, that he didn’t think there was any such thing as a right to privacy, and that was just some liberal gobbledygook to kill babies that women didn’t want after they bumped uglies with the wrong guy.
This information came from nowhere.
Karen. Did not. Agree.
The argument went on for about an hour. Martin continued on and on about the child’s right to life, using every argument that pro-lifers had used since 1975. Nothing original, just the same old, tired arguments. She asked how he could go against the past twenty years or so of voting democrat, of actively engaging people in conversations about women’s reproductive rights—of being a liberal—all in the past few months.
“Truth doesn’t need time,” is what he told her, and Karen could take no more. She wasn’t going to sit here and listen to his nonsense the whole way up the coast. She told him to stop talking if he didn’t have anything else to talk about, and so he had, and now they drove in silence.
Karen didn’t mind looking out the window anyway. She’d been married to her husband long enough that she knew what he was thinking. Right now the man was sitting over there, wondering how his wife could be so dense on something that seemed so clear—without a single inclination that his complete flip-flop was incomprehensible. So, yes, she would pass on discussing anything else about abortion with him. The hills in Massachusetts weren’t bad to look at either. They had traveled this road before, maybe ten times over the years, always on their trip up to Canada. They would park the RV another two hundred miles up the road, sleep for the night (they were past the point in their marriage that either one of them would ever sleep on the couch), and finish the last leg of their journey tomorrow.
“What’s that?” Martin asked.
Karen didn’t know if he thought she had said something or if he was asking about an object on the road, but she didn’t care either way. She wasn’t answering him until he either recanted the statement about abortion or at least started making sense on his new stance.
“Right there, Karen. What is that?”
He was pointing now and she followed his finger with her eyes.
Twenty feet off the road were...crosses. Ten of them in a circle, with each of the ‘arms’ touching the other. And...
The RV rolled closer.
People hung on the crosses.
The first thing Karen thought was that this had to be some kind of new-age art, stuff that passed for art but really wasn’t even in the same genetic pool.
Martin pulled the RV to the side of the road, thirty feet away from the circle of crosses. He got out of the driver’s seat without a word to her and walked along the front of the RV so that he stood on the green grass. Karen cracked her door, then opened it fully and stepped out herself.
Karen vomited on the grass, some of it spraying onto her shoes.
9
Hi, world.
My name is Matthew Brand; perhaps you remember me? Of course, there will be some newcomers to this spinning rock who were not yet born or were not yet old enough to hear about me. For them, hi! Your parents, or whoever it is you are close with, should be able to give you a brief background on me, so I need not go into it now.
Surrounding this letter are the crucified corpses of ten women. I found them all last night, nailed them all to their current homes, and then planted them all in New England soil. I had a busy night last night, and I’m tired now. Had I thought this thing out a bit more, I would have written this letter first, but if you bear with me, I think I may be able to make some progress in educating you all on my goals. This letter would have received no real traction if it wasn’t combined with a dramatic display, thus the poor women who will need to be identified by their parents at morgues over the next few days. Fear not, they suffered little and were not sexually harmed. In reality, their fate is going to be much better than the people still surviving, than those reading this letter—whether that be on a newscast or the Internet, it makes no difference.
The FBI knows what I’m up to, they simply haven’t made you aware of it. I’ve contacted them. I’ve told them that this would happen if they did not get my message out to you all. They refused. So, I’ve taken it into my hands. In a way, it’s better. Now they know I’m not playing, and hopefully, you, dear citizen, know this is not a game as well. Four years ago, I killed a handful of people. Ten years before that, I killed the same number. Last night, I killed ten, and for no other purpose than to get your attention.