Westbrook’s gaze passed quickly over them, his eyes settling on the person standing in the middle of the room.
It was a man, his hands clasped behind his back and facing away from the window that Westbrook approached. He was richly dressed, in a pseudo-military style suit that was severely wrinkled, as if he had slept in it many times recently. Westbrook could see the man’s face in the reflection of the opposite window. Apart from the slicked back hair, lack of glasses, and fewer wrinkles, and a leaner figure he looked almost exactly like Westbrook.
The man in the box turned around. The two stared at each other for a long, silent moment. Then the man spoke, his voice filtering out through a speaker box set just below the window.
“Hello, Isaac,” he said, his deep, rich voice diminished by the speaker box.
“Matthew,” Isaac Westbrook said, “What has it been? Four years?”
“Add six months and twenty-seven days on to that,” Matthew said, “You were always bad at keeping up with dates.”
The two looked at each other in silence once again, a lot of unspoken words passing between them. Then, the man in the box, Matthew, spoke.
“How’s mother?” he said in a quiet voice.
“She died two years ago,” Isaac said, his own voice quiet but with an undertone that suggested a storm approaching on the horizon. “She died before she saw the worst of what you did, thank God.”
Matthew turned away again. Not looking at his brother, he said, “Everything I did was necessary—all necessary in the pursuit of higher goals. I thought you understood that, and that’s why you didn’t interfere.”
Isaac chuckled. “Who do you think invented the device that disabled your Mark III Flying Sabers?” He said, “Nasty little things they were.”
Matthew turned at the waist. “That was you?” he said, genuine surprise in his voice. “I thought the morons finally got lucky.” He started chuckling, lightly at first but it turned into a hearty belly laugh. “So you’re working for the government?”
“I have a research position, yes,” Isaac said, slightly embarrassed.
“So that’s what you put your brilliant mind to, brother?” Matthew shook his head slowly and showed his back once more. The gulf of silence set in again like high tide.
“She asked for you, every day, in the end,” Isaac said finally. “She tried to understand why you did what you did, but she never fully grasped it. I think she expected to see you walk through the door covered in cuts and bruises, like you did when we were little, as if you’d just been fighting the bullies at school again.”
Matthew scoffed. “No one ever understood why I did what I did,” he said in a small voice. Isaac recognized it as vulnerable, but he was the only living person who could have heard it. “It was time someone stood up to the bullies, regardless if they were in the playground or in Washington.” He turned and looked at his brother with an arched eyebrow, “It seems that you didn’t recognize it either.”
“There are those that would disagree,” Isaac said, sarcastically casual. “Several million corpses, for starters. Add to that an incredibly mean woman and her Army of attack dogs that are vying for your blood this very moment.”
“I had no choice. History will show what I did as right, magnanimous even.”
Isaac shook his head. “History will show you for what you are, true enough,” he said. “Nothing more than a madman.”
Matthew turned suddenly and rushed the glass, stopping only an inch in front of it. Isaac didn’t flinch—he simply watched.
“And someone who votes to allow a morally bankrupt corporation to dump toxins into a small town’s only water supply, simply so they can add another new car to their garage of thirty, is he not a madman?” Spittle flecked the window. Matthew’s face was contorted in an obscene rage. “What about the interest group of senators who cornered the market on pharmaceuticals, causing people who had less than nothing to have to pay outrageously, artificially inflated prices in order to keep the miserable lives that they have? Are they not mad?”
The rage subsided—unsustainable when Isaac gave him nothing to feed it, watching his brother with a face blank of expression. Matthew composed himself once again into his handsome, intelligent serenity. Isaac’s expression broke, looking at him in a mixture of disbelief and pity.
“The time for excuses are over,” he said, “You haven’t been compassionate since before high school. I don’t know if dad beat it out of you or what. I know he went harder on you than me.”
“And you were mom’s favorite,” Matthew said, “But that was never really a secret.”
Isaac ignored this because he felt, with a sick guilty feeling in his stomach, that it was true. “You did what you did because you wanted power, to control. You might have had a dream of fairness once, but it won’t happen on a regime with a foundation of bones with blood for mortar.” He stepped closer to his side of the window. If there had been no barrier, the two would have almost been touching.
“You never saw the aftermath of what you did,” he said, his voice hard with anger, “How many children do you think you killed. I kept count. Did you?”
Matthew didn’t say anything, he just stared daggers at his brother. Then he said, “Don’t trot in here on you high horse. You were never such a Good Boy. I never saw you riding to your little brother’s rescue when he was cornered in an alley. You never said anything to father,” Matthew sneered, disgustingly, at his brother. “Don’t come in here and parade your tissue thin morality in front of me. You lived your life like so many others did: complacent—prepared to endure anything simply so you would have to endure the inconvenience of action.”
Isaac lost his control on his temper. “Look at you, here in your little bomb-proof box!” he yelled, the speaker squelching in feedback. “You had all of that opportunity to do anything you wanted! Absolutely anything! And you decide to declare a one-man war against a bunch decadent old men, scared shitless that anyone would take too close a look at their little petty corruptions, and a nation of sloths! But you did achieve one thing: you motivated them all to stand against you. They would have fought you to their destruction if I hadn’t stepped in. And all because you wanted to feel like the big man of the world.” Scorn began to drip from his voice like thick, amber poison. “You would have been nothing but the lord of ash and rubble.”
Isaac reset his glasses that had slipped down his nose. When he next spoke, he was quieter, bitterer. “I had to be the good one when you left,” he said, “You were off building your toys and making your threats on a hijacked television show. I’m the one that had to look after our sick mother, to be presentable, because I didn’t think that she could take another disappointment from one of her sons.
“You squandered yourself on your small-minded revenges set to a large scale. Do you think you were the only one that had dreams? If I were in your shoes, I would have done so much more. I wouldn’t be hiding in a hole in the ground but dancing in an ivory tower. I could have bent the world to my will not only without a drop of blood shed, but the stupid masses would have asked me to do it. Now it’s ruined for both of us. I’m lucky to have the middle salary job I do with the government, simply because my name is ‘Westbrook.’ And you’ll be lucky to avoid execution on live television.”
Matthew stared at Isaac blankly for a few moments before suddenly striding over to a comfortable-looking leather arm chair. He sat down regally, as if it was a throne. His whole demeanor had changed—he now looked smug, satisfied.
“I don’t think that is going to happen,” he said matter-of-factly, crossing his legs.
Isaac raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “I must have missed that,” he said, “It sounded like you believe you can still come out on top of this.
“You say this,” he continued, “while sitting in your impotent throne room miles beneath the ground with the armies of one of the most powerful nations on the planet that are so beside themselves with fury that they’re prepared to dig you up wi
th their bare hands. Not to mention that I gave them all the tools that they would need to defeat you. Please, tell me, where you have an advantage.”
Matthew smiled widely. “My advantage is something less definable. And, for that, it is less reliable,” he said, obviously enjoying his cryptic words, “But it was a risk I was willing to take.”
Isaac looked at him, waiting for him to continue. When no explanation was forthcoming, he decided to play along. “Please don’t tell me it’s some sort of doomsday device,” he said, “That ploy is old. ‘Destroying the planet’ is the card that you play when you’ve run out of good ideas.”
Matthew shook his head, remaining infuriatingly silent.
“What is it then?” Isaac said, not hiding his waning patience, “Some sort of resurgence plan? Are you going to fake your death and come back as a brain in a jar?”
Again, a silent shake of the head.
“Do you have some grand scheme that is so convoluted and relying upon so many factors that it can’t possibly work in the chaos of the real world?”
“You’re getting closer,” Matthew said with something approaching glee.
“Well, brother, then I am truly stumped,” Isaac said, folding his arms across his chest.
Matthew seemed to be relishing drawing out the moment of the big reveal. Eventually he stood up and paced to the window once again in slow, measured steps.
“My advantage,” he said, slowly, lovingly, “Is that you’re here.”
Isaac stared at him. “I don’t follow you,” he said.
“You were always smarter than me. And we’ve never really liked one another. That might have been one of the reasons why: jealousy,” Matthew said. He walked over to his bed and sliding aside a small secret compartment on one of the wooden posts, revealed a red button beneath. “Crude, I know, but even we’re subject to base emotions sometimes. In fact, I’m counting on it.
“Another reason is that, I think, because we’re too much alike. Still, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t feel something for me—you would have just allowed the soldiers to come down here and riddle me with bullets otherwise.”
“So is that you super, secret plan?” Isaac said, ignoring the comments as rambling and nodding to the revealed button. “Some mystery device that will allow you to win?”
“In a way.” Matthew pressed the button. Concealed vents in the floor of his room opened. Yellow-green gas immediately started to gush from them. The gas pooled around Matthew’s feet but, as the rich carpet became obscured, it started to slowly rise.
“What are you doing?” Isaac said, panic rising.
Matthew looked back over at his brother. A look of triumph on his face. “In less than a minute,” he said, “I’ll be dead.” Isaac looked alarmed, but Matthew continued, calmly. “I’m not going to be paraded through the farce of a trial and sentenced to a life-term in prison only to die mysteriously when the media attention is off of me.” He coughed into his hand, examined what he saw in it, and wiped it on his bed sheet. The gas was up to his knees now and churning like a thick, boiling soup. He continued as if he had not been interrupted by his dying body.
“As you said, mother’s dead. I have no idea where father is, so he may as well be dead. All that’s left, dear brother, are the two of us. I’m all the family you have left.”
Isaac hurriedly dug into a pocket of his coat and took out a device different from the one that he used to disable the power. It looked like a baton made of glass tubes and metal. He placed it against the window and activated it. It erupted in jagged limbs of electricity, grounding uselessly against the glass. Matthew watched with an amused look on his face. He is skin had become noticeably greyer.
Isaac tossed the electric baton aside and took his wrist watch off. He placed it flush against the window and, turning the metal band around its glass face, he screwed his face up in the anticipation of pain. Isaac then pressed one of the nearly invisible buttons on the side.
It emitted a tiny, hi-pitched charging sound and then, five seconds later, the watch detonated with a nearly inaudible sonic force. It shattered the glass screens of the devices lining the walls of the cavernous control room, but the glass of Matthew’s safe room remained unbroken. The gas had reached his waist by now.
Isaac threw the ruined watch away, the palm of his hand badly burned. Even so, he balled them both into fists and began to pound uselessly against the window.
“Open the door!” he shouted, “Open it now!”
Matthew watched him with a mingled expression of humor and pity.
“No,” he said. The speaker had been damaged by the sonic blast and his voice came out of the small, wire mesh box slightly warped. “I knew, from the start, that the only way I could dominate would be with your help. I also knew that you would never willingly help me. Everything you need to finish what I started is in my base: devices, material, blueprints, contact information of various terrorist groups that have been waiting to strike. And, most importantly of all, your mind—you can make it all better, make an even more effective use of it.”
The gas was at shoulder level now and Matthew was hit by a fit of coughing. When they subsided he continued, unconcerned. “You, and what’s here, and the legacy that I’ve started will be all that’s left of the Westbrooks. You now face a choice: you can give it over to the morons waiting above and they can shake their collective empty heads over it, confounded, for the next one-hundred years. There won’t even be a body for them to hide away or publicly humiliated, this gas will see to it. Then you can go back to working for that useless government think tank until they find the courage to make you disappear.
“Or, you can continue what I did. I will live on in the regime you create and the society that you lead forward into a better, saner future. They will resist, as they did with me, but any bacteria would before they are obliterated by the cleansing medicine. Not only will the name Westbrook life forever in the history of the world, you can erect statues of me and name institutions of great thinking after your pioneering brother. Your family can live on, forever. That’s the choice you face: erasure or glory.” He began to cough more, blood dribbling down his chin. “If you choose to continue, just press that big, red button on the console over there. It will give you access to everything.”
The yellow-green gas was now up to Matthew’s neck. With a final, contented smile, he lay down on the bed, enveloped in the lethal gas. Isaac beat his fists against the glass for so long and so hard that blood began to fleck the window with each strike.
Isaac stopped as he stared into the room, the view inside had become completely obscured by the gas. He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes with his hands, smearing his blood across his face and (despite years of being told not to) he wiped his running nose on his sleeve. He replaced his glasses and turned around without a further glance back.
The control panel that his brother had indicated was directly behind him. Despite the power outage, there was a large button on one of the panels that glowed a deep red. Isaac walked over and stared down at it.
Possibilities raced through his mind. The illogical and cruel nature of continuing what his brother had done was gradually pushed aside by a frightening sense that he was right: this was it—it was all that was left of them. He could call in Colonel Kaktos and her war dogs and it would all be obliterated. Or, even worse, repurposed for someone less worthy’s use in time. Or he could continue along his brother’s insane campaign and see where it ended.
He lifted his blood-stained hand and poised a thumb directly over the button. A drop of blood trickled down his thumb and dripped off of the end. It splashed against the button and ran down it in a dark line.
A small, twittering noise sounded. Isaac pressed a section of his glasses and the concealed speaker in the two temples hooked over his ears brought him the grating voice of Colonel Kaktos.
“Westbrook!” she barked, “Have you got him yet? Can we come down?”
Isaac didn’t answer for
some time. He continued to stare at the button, considering.
“Westbrook, answer me!” Kaktos yelled again, “Can we come down?”
Isaac took the device he used to disable the power out of his pocket and triggered it again. The lights returned to life and the massive spider robot at the door whirred to life and stood a little straighter.
“Yes, I’m ready for you,” he said, and pressed the button on the console.
LOOKING AFTER THE PARENTS
Ken Preston
Saturday, 7:45 pm
Father has an infection. The transplant sites are open sores, running with pus. He is hot and feverish and I am having to constantly bathe him with cold water to keep his temperature down to a manageable level. I considered releasing him from the straps but decided against it. I have noticed that he is getting stronger, and I can’t risk letting him free.
Mother has responded much better to the donor skin and muscle. Of the two I thought she would be the one whose body would struggle to accept the new flesh. But no, the transplant has taken well. The donor site still looks bruised and raw, but that will heal. I think she will be very pleased with the result.
It is a good job that I prepared for the possibility of a raised temperature in both parents by keeping them down here in the cellar where it is cool. Ensuring they remain naked at all times will also help the donor sites to heal quickly.
I can’t write much in my diary today as I need to get back to bathing father. I must endeavor to keep his temperature down as much as possible.
Sunday, 8:30 am
I have decided to risk operating on Father. He’s not well enough to go through another procedure, and it might well kill him. But if I do nothing he is going to die anyway. His temperature is climbing and this morning I awoke to the sounds of him vomiting. It was a wise decision on my part to sleep in the basement with them as Father was choking on his own sick.
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