The Devil's Dream: Book One (15 page)

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.

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. Found 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.