by David Beers
“I love you,” Larry said after a while.
“I love you too,” Joe answered and then hung up.
Joe lay on the bed for quite a while, losing track of time. He didn’t think much, just stared up at the ceiling. He had called his brother an hour before he needed to leave, an hour before he needed to head to the bus stop. Be there at seven in the morning, Sally told him, and that’s exactly what he planned on doing.
“You ever hear voices talking to you?”
Brand sounded different, even from just a few days ago when Art spoke to him last. His voice wasn’t shaking, per se, but it felt weak. Art was in his own hotel room, his computer open, looking at reports and email from around the country. He realized they were never going to be able to trace the calls Brand made, the guys in IT said his location acted like a virus, bouncing across the world and anytime they tried to pin it down, it threatened to invade their own system—which meant Brand could talk to Art whenever he wanted.
Art could always hang up, but he hadn’t yet.
“Live or dead?” Art asked.
“Dead.”
“Can’t say I have. I listen for God a lot, but he doesn’t really speak back, not with words anyway.”
“You know, that’s a question I was asked a lot over my life. Whether or not I believed in God, much more before I started the latter half of my life though. I guess everyone assumed I couldn’t believe in a God if I was running around killing people.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah,” Matthew said. “My parents weren’t extremely religious and I’ve never studied it as deeply as I have other things, but I believe there’s something above all this,” Brand said.
“Something bigger than you?”
“Yeah. Something bigger than me.”
“You ever wonder why he doesn’t stop you, then, if there’s something out there?” Art asked. “You can’t possibly think a God exists that can’t stop you, right?”
“I don’t think he cares to be honest. I don’t think we matter to him anymore than other human life matters to me. We’re something he created, or didn’t create, but not something that plays into his thinking. If it was any other way, why wouldn’t he have stopped me? You’ve tried twice, and each time I somehow come out on the other side, and from the looks of things, you’re nowhere near finding me now. I’m not sure getting to the lumber seller would have worked, but it would have been a start. How’s your kid taking it?”
Art’s brow creased. “What do you mean?”
“Jake Deschaine, how’s he taking it?”
Brand knew. He knew that Jake had been trying to find whoever sold him the crucifixes. How? “Why do you think Jake had anything to do with it?”
Brand chuckled. “I talk too much. I do. It doesn’t matter how I know and it really doesn’t matter how he’s taking it, I suppose. These voices, they’re breaking me down, Art. I can’t even keep up with what I should and shouldn’t be saying anymore.”
Art typed the word ‘slip’ into his computer, reminding him to come back to it later, there wasn’t any point in pushing right now. “What voices?”
“Now you want to be my shrink, huh? Wouldn’t be my priest before.” Matthew said. Art kept quiet and so Matthew continued. “There are three of them, all kind of trying to convince me of different things. Rally, my wife. Morgant, and then some shade memory of Morgant’s grandmother. I’m pretty sure that woman was with him all the time, physically as a child, and mentally as an adult. He couldn’t escape her, and she’s back now, talking to me and wanting him.”
“This going on all the time?”
“No, not all the time. That would be truly unbearable. They come and go, but the coming is picking up and the going is slowing down. I think the freeze they put us in for all those years kind of atrophies the brain. Not immediately, but I think the brain gets so used to having to do almost no work on its own, that when it comes out of the freeze, it doesn’t have the lifespan it once had. The same thing probably would have happened to my body if Moore and I hadn’t been moving so quickly.”
Art knew he was talking to a killer. Knew he was talking to the most dangerous man in the world, but he somehow was forgetting it momentarily. He found himself interested, wanting to know more, wanting to go deeper into Brand’s thoughts. Was this how everyone had felt when they met him? Was this how the world became so enraptured with him and his ascent before he decided people needed to die? Art turned his computer screen down slightly so that he would stop scanning emails. Why not? Why not listen to him and learn more about this man? It didn’t mean Art wouldn’t kill him.
“How long do you think you have?”
“Off the record, of course?” Matthew said, laughing.
“Of course.”
“I’m not sure. There’s some evidence to show that intense meditation can create new gray matter in your brain, which is another way of saying it makes your brain younger. I’m doing that for three to four hours every morning. It keeps them at bay, at least during the meditation. If I wasn’t doing that, I’d say maybe a month? At the end of that, I might be Morgant, or I might just be a body that could breathe and do little else. I’m not sure. I’m hoping the meditation will give an extra month or two. Not long, is the answer,” Brand said.
“You planned out for all that.”
“Hell no. I planned for six months to a year, but I think I’ll make this new deadline. Things are moving fast in my head, but I have them moving fast outside of it as well.”
“That has to be the worst feeling for you, doesn’t it? The absolute worst. You create this thing that is supposed to cement your greatness and end humanity, and then you’re going to self-destruct before it can happen.”
“Yeah, I’m going to end up being the Dan Marino of intelligent individuals, aren’t I?” Matthew said.
Art found himself laughing, if awkwardly.
“Wouldn’t be anything I could do to speed up this process, would there?” Art asked, still smiling. “Put your brain meltdown in overdrive or something?”
“Probably is,” Matthew said, sounding much more sober. “I don’t know exactly what though. You’re right. This is all I have and I’ve got to finish it. That’s all that really matters anymore, finishing this. Does that scare you?”
Art looked down at his bare feet against the hotel carpet. He was more scared than he had ever been in his life. Art was in the midst of a battle fog so heavy it felt like he might suffocate.
“Yeah. It does. You scare me.”
Neither of them said anything for a few moments, and then, “Why?”
“Because you want to kill everyone,” Art laughed, not feeling the least bit humorous. “Because you’re going to try to kill everyone on this planet and I’m supposed to stop you. I have about seven billion lives resting on me. That’s a lot of responsibility, Brand. That’s something you’ve never had to deal with. All your brains and all your ideas, and you’ve never once had to deal with real responsibility. You’re only responsible to yourself, and so I imagine you may have never known fear. It’s hard to know fear when you have nothing to lose but your own life. That’s all that you have in this, your own skin. I have the skin of my grandkids and their future grandkids. This Jake guy, his skin too. Chinese parents and African orphans, all of them are depending on me. Your motivation comes from within, all of it, but I have billions of voices begging me to succeed. Does that scare you?”
“No,” Matthew said and ended the call.
At one in the morning, Art found himself out on the narrow streets of Boston. The wind was blowing, and despite it being summer, the heat had died away. He stood in front of his hotel, his hands shoved in his coat pockets. He stood at an intersection, no cars pulling through, but still one set of lights saying to stop and the other saying to drive. Art crossed the street, knowing the general direction he wanted to travel. Catholic churches abounded in Boston and he needed one now as bad as he had ever needed one before. He kept his eyes on the grou
nd, forcing away any thoughts that tried to enter his mind. He didn’t want to dwell on Brand and he didn’t want to think about how bad he was possibly fucking this all up. He wanted the safety of God. He wanted to pray and he wanted to be surrounded by the Saints of the past.
He entered the cathedral, lights on low, and empty. Art didn’t bother for the middle pews, but headed straight to the front, straight to the broken body of Christ hanging on his cross. He knelt, slowly, his knees popping as he did. He took his jacket off, then bowed his head and just as he began to pray, he heard the door to his right open.
“Hello?”
Art turned, looking at an old man, Hispanic, wearing pajamas, but still with a priest's collar around his neck. Perhaps he had put it on simply to open the door and see who the hell was in here.
“I’m sorry, Father. I needed to pray.”
The man blinked a few times and then stepped out of the door and fully into the cathedral. The man was thin, probably nearing sixty, but he walked well enough. “That’s no problem. I sometimes sleep here when the work piles up; it saves me the time of driving back and forth from home. Would you like me to leave you alone or do you need some company?”
Art turned his head to the statue of Jesus before him. His face looked so sad, like everyone in the world had forgotten him in his time of need—as they had. Art remembered Jesus saying, when two or more of you gather in my name, I am there also.
“I’d like you to stay, father, if that’s okay.”
“Not a problem. I was up anyway. Don’t let anyone tell you differently, son, when you get older, you sleep less and think more, and neither of those things are necessarily good.” The old priest crossed the room and sat down on the steps that Art kneeled against. “Forgive me for not kneeling, I’m trying to save my knees every chance I get. What’s bothering you this late at night?”
Art turned around, slowly, so that he sat too.
“Do you know who I am?” Art asked. If there was anyone in America that didn’t know who Art was at this point, it might be this priest who slept at the church because he was too busy to go home. Everyone else had seen him on the news, heard him on the radio, or in some other way been blasted with who was charged to catch Matthew Brand. The old priest looked carefully, almost making a show of it, moving his head from side to side as he looked over Art’s face.
“You’re the man that’s supposed to save us all, aren’t you?” The priest asked, smiling.
Art didn’t smile back. “Is that what the world sees me as?”
“That’s what the news tells me. That’s what the President tells me. Put my faith in you and everything is going to be okay. Are they right?”
Art looked between his feet. “You think I would be in here if they were right?”
“I don’t know, son. I’ve never had that much pressure on me. I don’t know if I would pray or curse God if that were to happen. You here to pray or curse Him?”
“I’ve never cursed Him,” Art said.
“Not even once?” The priest asked. “Have you wanted to?”
“Of course, but you don’t curse God, not the one that gave you life.”
“So then why are you here?”
Art looked out across the empty pews. “I don’t know. I just need to talk to Him I guess. I want to feel close to Him for a bit.”
The priest nodded.
“Are you frightened about all of this?” Art asked.
“About dying?”
“About the world ending.”
The priest went silent for a few moments and the only sound in the cathedral was the air conditioning running above.
“Does the pot become scared that the potter might break it?” He asked. “I’ll curse God, but I won’t question him. If he wills one of his creations to end us all, then there is reason behind it. God is not haphazard; He does not decide things on whims or let things enter His Holy Plan without a reason. This man, this Matthew Brand, he is here for a reason and I don’t know what that is. If it’s to kill us, then so be it. What will worrying about it do?”
“This rests on me though, Father. Not on God.”
“I imagine Noah might have said the same thing. Nothing rests on you. Everything is in His hands. You do your best here, you try to find this man, you do what your job pays you to do, and then God will need to decide what happens with His creation.”
“What do you think He will decide?”
A few minutes of silence passed. Art wasn’t sure if his question would be answered, so he stood up.
“Thank you, Father.”
He started to walk down the darkened aisle.
“Son, does the potter allow his pots to smash each other?”
Jake heard the laughter in Matthew’s voice as he mentioned Jake’s name. As he asked how Jake was handling it.
Jake had headphones over his ears and sat in front of his computer. He was listening to the recording for the third time, taking everything in, his eyes closed and leaning back in a chair. How had Brand known Jake was looking into the lumber?
The FBI could have a leak. That was doubtful though. First, few people actually knew Jake was looking into the lumber origination, and the ones that did weren’t too keen on having the world destroyed.
What else? Was Brand hacking their computers? That wasn’t impossible, he had managed to buy nearly anything he wanted off the internet over the past five years without anyone being able to stop him, but that would mean a lot of data for him to sift through. Jake saw a good bit of the data the FBI was running right now, Art less because he was thinking strategy rather than specifics. How would Matthew have known where to look, what emails to check, what ideas to follow?
Jake felt his phone buzzing in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw his father’s name on the screen. He removed the headphones and put the phone to his ear. He still hadn’t called his dad; he would blame it on time if his father asked, but Jake knew that wasn’t the reason.
“Enjoying the sun?” Jake asked.
“Your mother’s passed out right now,” Pete answered.
“What time is it over there?”
“Eleven in the morning.”
Jake laughed. “Jesus, you’re kidding. Is she that drunk?”
“She’s taken to calling it her afternoon nap, never mind that it’s before noon I suppose.”
“You enjoying it at all?”
“Yeah, it’s nice. Good to get away from everything. That stuff that’s on the news. That you?”
“Yeah,” Jake said.
“Well, that makes a good bit of sense then. That man did a number on a lot of families the last time he was running loose, so probably a smart idea for us to get down here. How’d you get involved in it, or can you not tell me?”
Jake sat up straighter in his chair and pressed the pause button on the recording still running through the headphones. “Nah, I don’t see any reason why I can’t. The head guy, Art Brayden, was down in Texas when this stuff started and he asked me to come aboard. I’m in Boston now, kinda acting like his right hand man, I suppose.”
“That’s one way to get a promotion,” his father chuckled. “When do you think you’ll find him?”
His father didn’t ask if Jake would capture him. Just asked when.
“It’s, well, it’s tough. I was onto something, something pretty big, and Brand turned everything on a dime. It was like all my work was destroyed as soon as the man thought about it, and more, he somehow knew I was the one working on it. He...I mean, he couldn’t have known that. No one knew, like ten people in the whole organization maybe, and yet he knew. Knew and then just put it all ablaze.”
“You don’t know how? Would someone have leaked the information?”
“I can’t imagine that happening. You don’t leak information to someone who is saying he’s going to destroy all life on the planet.”
His dad laughed. “That’s probably true. I’ve seen some news reports, people are going pretty crazy in the states, huh?”
“Yeah, some places. It’s not good, that’s for sure. They’re sending out the National Guard and upping the police force in a lot of the cities. How is it down there?”
“In the resort? I’m not sure anyone here has even heard of what’s happening, to be honest. Peace, alcohol, and weed. That’s what is in this resort.”
“How much is the phone call?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know. I’m just charging it to the room. Wanted to hear how things were going before your mother wakes up. I probably won’t tell her too much about it; she’ll be sober by then and start worrying. You’ll get him, don’t worry about that. Guys like this, they don’t win. There’s been a bunch of guys like this, throughout history, and in the end, they all die and the world goes on just fine for the most part. You’ll get him.”
Jake wasn’t listening. He stopped paying attention to his father after—wanted to hear how things were going before your mother wakes up.
Wanted. To. Hear.
“Dad, I’ve gotta go. I’ll give you a call back.”
15
Matthew never thought he could fit that many people into the back of his van. Fifteen people were bound and gagged, lying face down behind him. With the first group, he bound them, but allowed them to sit up against the sides of the van. Their wrists had been tied to their feet, so there was no chance of movement. Fifteen people couldn’t fit inside if they were all sitting up, so, Matthew tied them feet to wrists, and then lay them down on top of each other, like he was moving furniture rather than people. For the most part, they were silent, except when he hit a bump in the road or something and one of the girls might let off a noise through the tape around her head.
This group would put him at a total of twenty-two people. Mr. Bolden had delivered fifteen, and said he would deliver fifteen more in two weeks. If this kept up, Matthew would be finished pretty quickly. He had enjoyed his call yesterday with Art, enjoyed it probably more than Art could imagine. Matthew didn’t have anyone anymore. Not a soul in this world besides the ghosts growing inside his head. Art, though, while not the smartest person Matthew had ever interacted with, was better than those ghosts. He acted as a sounding board, not to ideas, but to the feelings surrounding Matthew’s impending death. It was something he never had to deal with before, the thought that he was going to die. Like a teenager, always thinking that the future was long and bright, not ever coming to grips with the impermanence of life. He understood impermanence now, understood that death was near. Matthew was a dead man walking and no amount of meditation would stop it.