by David Beers
The phone was quiet for a few seconds.
“I can’t think of anything super important right now. I’ll call back if something comes up. You two take care. Bye now.”
The screen read call ended, leaving Art and Jake alone in the dark room.
“How long had that been going on?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know, five minutes maybe. The call woke me up.”
“You sounded awfully friendly with him.”
“Would you rather I had cussed him?” Art asked. “It doesn’t matter. He seems to think he’s going to keep calling back and we’re going to continue to have these little chats. The whole thing was recorded, probably being uploaded by my phone right now. Get a listen to it either on the plane or when we land. Something’s not right with him though.” Art sat down on the couch and started tying his shoes.
“What do you mean?”
“Not like the obvious ‘he’s a fucked up individual something’s not right with him’, but something is going wrong internally. He told me he was getting urges to rape. Flat out said it. You know anything about Arthur Morgant, the body he’s in?”
“He was abused heavily by his grandmother as a child. That’s one reason he didn’t get the death penalty. He graduated high school, worked for a fast food chain, and started raping women probably around the age of fifteen.”
Art looked up, a shoelace in each hand. “You got more?”
“Yeah. I just didn’t know if you wanted me to drone on about him.”
“No, that’s fine. More than fine really.” Art shook his head and went back to tying his second shoe. “He said that Morgant’s base instincts were bubbling up, and I don’t know what that means, but we need to run it by some of the medical guys. It sounds like he’s got some urges that aren’t indigenous to his own mind, and that could lead to him making some pretty serious mistakes.”
“Like raping women,” Jake said, putting his t-shirt back on his thin frame.
“Like raping women,” Art agreed.
It took Jake an hour to drive to the site where Brand left his letter. He drove it alone, telling Art he wanted to see the spot and wanted some time to think.
“You’re serious?”
“You pray alone; I think alone.”
Art let him go. It was an hour outside of Boston, where the operation was being housed.
He pulled his car to the side of road, got out, and walked to where the long wooden poles had been dug into the ground. The mayor of this little town had made sure they were pulled out as soon as humanly possible, not wanting anyone else to see such a horrible sight, probably. Jake had studied the pictures repeatedly over the past few days, looking at the coroner’s report, looking at both the lumber and the autopsy photos. Each one of the women died the same way, a puncture wound to their brain. All of the crosses were precisely the same. Same height. Same weight. Same dimensions. As far as Jake could tell, it looked like they had actually rolled off a Ford assembly line the same as a car would.
He looked down into one of the holes. It was deep, a good foot down. Brand had been out here in the early morning digging ten of these, then dragging everything out and planting them deep so that they wouldn’t shake. Jake didn’t know if he could accomplish that if given a week. Brand had done it in a night.
Jake’s father told him once about a soldier in one of his platoons. Pete said the guy wouldn’t back down to anyone. He would take orders, but if at any point he thought someone was getting lippy, the guy would just start punching. Didn’t matter if they were generals or private first class, if he felt insulted he was going to fight. Jake’s Dad said he admired the kid, in a way, but thought he was awesomely dumb as well. It was like he had to prove himself to every single thing on this planet. If a fern could somehow insult the guy, he would rip the fern out of the ground and burn it. He was set on letting the world know that he mattered, that no one could take that away from him. Except, his Dad said, they already had. They took it away from him the moment he decided to fight, because then he had already decided the world’s opinion mattered.
Jake was beginning to feel like that guy now. He wouldn’t call his pops and tell him, but he kept thinking back to Moore. Even now, walking around this grassy lawn, he was wondering what she would have seen here. The woman went right to the edge with Brand, pushing past limits that no one knew existed, and even though she lost, she won too. She went further than anyone dreamed against the smartest man to ever live. Now here Jake was, walking around by himself in this field, and faced with a very similar predicament.
You know, no one cares, right? His father said. Or, the voice that Jake created for his father.
It was completely true. If he brought this up to Art, this insecurity about his own contributions versus Moore’s, he’d be laughed at and possibly kicked off the case, sent back to Texas to work on local convenience store robberies. If he told it to his father, his father might listen, but in the end what did comparing yourself to a dead woman matter to a man that had most likely shot people in half with machine guns? No, no one else but him cared at all. What they cared about was stopping this man. They cared about killing a heinous criminal.
And Jake was here, looking into an empty hole, and comparing himself to Moore.
And what exactly is wrong with that? What’s wrong with wanting glory, with wanting to go up against the best?
In his mind, nothing. As long as he did his job, did it matter the reason he did it? As long as he did his best to find Brand, what did it matter if it was for his own glory or to stop a crime? The results would be the same.
The wooden crosses flashed through his mind with a speed that stopped all his self-analysis.
The wooden crosses.
The wood.
All of it was the exact same. Forty logs that were all cut the same, that all weighed the same.
Brand had to gather them all from the same spot. He didn’t go looking around for forty different logs at forty different stores. He bought them all from one place. How many people could have bought those exact dimensions in that exact quantity?
Don’t get half-cocked yet. He could have bought a massive quantity.
All the better. Easier to find.
And what if he bought a lot of lumber, all of it different sizes, and he pulled out those select pieces to make the crosses?
That was a definite possibility, but still, was anyone looking into this yet? He needed to find out.
He gazed out across the field once more, trying to forget his own internal drama, trying to forget his own drive. A lot of women had died and then been dragged out here, naked, thrown up on boards like the dolls of wicked children.
Try to remember them. At least some of the time.
11
My name is John Randolph and welcome to Nightline.
Tonight we’re going to show you the aftermath of Matthew Brand’s letter. The police, the FBI, and even the CIA are filing out across the nation, searching for the man who says he holds the key to the entire world’s salvation. A man who says that we will never see the key again, that he has no intention of saving the world, instead he’s going to throw it into eternal darkness. Matthew Brand’s letter shook America, and even the world, to its core. Tonight we’re going to show you images of the aftermath. Some of this will be shocking. Some of it will be heartwarming. If you have young children watching you may want to put them to bed. We’re going to show you a piece of America, a piece of the world, that many of you might not have known existed.
This is the small town of Licent where the ten crucified bodies were found. Ten women, all in a circle, found by an elderly couple making a yearly cross-country drive. The town is peaceful, even four days later. People are going to work like normal. People are acting, generally, as if one of the most horrific scenes in America’s criminal history had not just played out on their soil.
I had the opportunity to speak with a store clerk at Wal-Mart, the first and only national chain in the entire town.<
br />
“Why are things so calm here?”
“I, uh, well I’ve been here my whole life. I went to high school here. I’m even taking some classes at the community college here. This town, I guess it doesn’t spook easy. I mean, we’ve seen the news, watched what’s happening in other places, and I think we would just be embarrassed if that turned out to be us, you know? I was talking with my parents about this last night, they live here too, and my Dad just said, ‘well, we all die’, and I really think that’s how much of the town feels. No one else has said it, but I think we’re just kind of looking at this man, this Matthew Brand, as another possible way we could die. We’re not going to lose our minds about it though. There’s some good law enforcement after him, and they’ve caught him before, so they’ll do it again. We’re just not going to lose our minds.”
I heard that general sentiment echoed throughout my time in Licent.
The next city I went to was Atlanta, Georgia. I wanted to pick a major city, somewhere that people knew, and somewhere that could be representative of other large cities across the nation.
What you’re looking at right now is downtown Atlanta. The street is Peachtree Street North West, and what’s in front of you is a liquor store known as Green’s. There were bars on the windows yesterday, and now you can see them discarded amongst the broken glass across the parking lot. The store clerk, thank God, managed to survive the break-in, even if not much else of the store did.
“It seemed like they all came at once. I don’t know why here, why they came to a liquor store, but that’s what they did. It wasn’t a trickle of people showing up, but like a wave, a hundred or more. A lot came through the front door, which was unlocked—I mean we’re twenty-fours a day here, but that wasn’t enough. I was yelling at them, and I’ll probably lose my job for saying this on TV, but yelling at them just to take what they wanted and to leave. That wasn’t enough either, though. They pulled the bars off the windows, smashed the glass. Two guys started a fire in the back that ate up a lot of the store, but luckily the overhead sprinklers came on. It was just all at once, everything, all of them, they just came on.”
This happened two days after the letter was found, and it’s not the only area in Atlanta where this type of mass looting has occurred. The mayor held a press conference this morning, saying:
“We were, unfortunately, caught off guard. The vast majority of the people who live and work in Atlanta have been law-abiding, upstanding citizens. The actions of a few are what caused this, and the police force, which begins with myself, did not foresee it happening. We were caught with our pants down, as they saying goes. It will not happen again. We are strengthening the police presence on every major intersection in Atlanta. These police aren’t there to arrest those doing what they should be, they’re there to stop those that have decided the law no longer applies. It does apply, and we’re going to show them.”
I spoke with the police chief, and the arrest rates have skyrocketed. It’s not all burglary and theft. He told me rapes have increased tenfold and murders are coming in twice as fast. He declined to have an interview, but said I could quote him. “It’s like every hoodlum in the world decided they couldn’t be stopped because Matthew Brand hasn’t been stopped.”
Last night a young lady at the age of seventeen was pulled out of her car at seven-thirty pm, while stopped at a red light, and raped on the street. Cars passed and no one did a thing. The police presence the mayor spoke about had not been put in place yet. That young girl died from complications at the hospital just before the mayor’s press conference took place.
The President met with world leaders yesterday, dignitaries from six nations flew in to discuss this letter and what it might mean. As of now, the President is allowing no other foreign nations to establish a police force on United States land, and in his own press briefing yesterday, he said this:
“I know people are scared. I know they see this man, and they think back to four years ago when the whole country was in a panic, and then they think back ten years before that to nearly the same thing. They’re thinking, the government can’t stop this guy. The government can’t capture him, the government can’t even kill him properly. Let me be clear. We can stop him, but we’re not trying to capture Matthew Brand this time. Today, I received approval from Congress to declare war on a man who has declared himself a sovereign nation, where the laws of the United States, and indeed, the laws of the world, do not apply to him. My goal, this government’s goal, is not to capture anyone, but to put to death this man who has caused so much harm and instilled so much fear.
I want to talk about that fear some, too. We’re seeing on the news now about riots, about rapes, about murder, about mayhem. This isn’t who we are. This isn’t the America that I was brought up to believe in. It’s not the America that people fought and died for over the course of two hundred years. Those people gave their life so that we could have freedom, so that we could live free from fear—from outsiders and from ourselves. The enemy that we’re looking at right now isn’t Matthew Brand, though. The enemy is ourselves. This fear of death, this fear of Brand, is turning us all into his puppets. It is allowing him to create the mayhem that will strain our police resources. Instead of searching for Matthew Brand, we’re policing ourselves. America didn’t become the strongest nation in the world because we allowed one man to dictate what we did. No, we became the strongest nation in the history of the world because we refused to allow that to happen.”
The world is seeing this differently than the President, however. This is not a United States problem, say other leaders, but a world problem. Their argument is if Matthew Brand is able to succeed, it’s not only the United States that will suffer, but the entire world. Their demands to be included in the search efforts, to be included in whatever information has been gathered, are heating up. Nightline has been told that while everyone is still polite, the politeness is being strained by the President’s refusal to allow outside help into the United States.
I sat down with someone as famous in the world of physics as Ernest Hemmingway is to popular literature. I wanted to get his take on the possibilities of what Brand is threatening us with. Doctor Holland Lunz received his PhD from M.I.T. and graduated first in his class. Since then, his work has been published upwards of four hundred times in academic journals. While I don’t claim to understand any of it, I am told it has pushed the boundaries of what the entire world knows about themselves and our universe.
“Can Matthew Brand do what he is saying he will do? Can he really destroy the sun?”
“You know who I wanted to be thirty years ago? Matthew Brand. I was finishing up high-school, applying to colleges, and all I ever wanted to do was make the kind of contributions he was making. So, when someone asks me can Matthew Brand do something, the first answer that comes to mind is, ‘yes, of course he can’. Even with this, we had that meeting with the President, and that was my immediate reaction. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since, though, and I’m unsure. The issue I have, and this is an issue all scientists have, is that most of our great work is done before the age of forty. If you look at Nobel Laureates, the lot of them receive it for work done before they’re forty. Really, after that magical year, your productivity, your new ideas, all of it starts to slow down. Brand is pushing sixty. Brand is pushing retirement. I don’t think anyone has thought about that, but it does make me pause and wonder whether his brain can work like it used to. Without a doubt, he’s still smarter than me, still smarter than anyone else on this planet, but is he smarter than God anymore? I just don’t know.”
Matthew muted the television.
He knew who Holland Lunz was, had read every paper the man put out before Matthew’s first imprisonment. Hadn’t read much of his work since though. Never met him either. Matthew had been busy changing the world when the guy was just beginning to make his bones in the realm of physics.
Even so, Matthew didn’t like hearing this. The world was cowering
in fear right now, the entire world. Nations were holding meetings to discuss him, to try to understand how they could stop him, and here was a leader, in a field Matthew used to dominate, basically calling him a has been. When had Matthew ever promised something he didn’t deliver on? When had he ever disappointed? And yet here this man was, someone who professed to wanting to be Matthew Brand, saying that his brain wasn’t good enough anymore.
“Maybe it ain’t.”
Matthew turned to the voice, not quickly, but curiously wondering how anyone could possibly be in the room.
The old black woman from his daydream sat on the couch next to him.
“Maybe it’s all gone. Not everyone is great forever.” She took a drag on the cigarette, flicked her fingers and ash fell to the floor. She didn’t look over at Matthew, but watched the muted television.
“What is this?” He asked, unsure if the words he spoke were only in his head.
“I’m looking for my grandson and I think you got him. Somewhere.”
The man on the screen was still going through his spiel on the aftermath of Matthew’s letter.
“What’s your name?” Matthew asked, knowing without a doubt that this woman existed only inside his head, that he was speaking to no one.
“My momma named me Basheeba. Everybody called me Sheeb since I could walk though. Them people on the television, they talkin’ ‘bout you, right?”
Matthew turned back to the TV. A moment ago, his anger had been rising at the mere talk that he might not be able to deliver on his claims. Now, he was talking to someone who didn’t exist.
He nodded to the question.
“They gon come after you, I suppose. Which is fine. Like I said, I’m just here for my grandson.” The old woman turned her head so that her eyes met Matthew’s. They were the color of clouds before a storm, a dark gray with no pupil, as if all they waited on was a bolt of lightning to crack open the rain behind them. “You know where he is?”