The Devil's Dream: Book One (22 page)

The
Devil’s Dream

By Jeffrey Dillan

Appendix
I

I
was able to interview Matthew Brand one time. Both the court and the
public didn't want it to happen, but his and my lawyers made it
possible. He made no requests about what we would talk about, only
that it would last two hours before he headed back to his cell and
waited on the trial to commence.

The
following is the transcript of our conversation. Please visit my
website to watch the video in its entirety.

Dillan:
What made you let me come here? You've been incredibly reluctant to
engage the media since you were caught, why me and why now?

Brand:
You're thorough. The rest of the media isn't. Your lawyers gave me
some of the pages of the book you're writing, and you're getting a
lot of it right. I'm not Satan incarnated in your eyes, and so it
makes a conversation a bit easier, I suppose. They're going to kill
me or lock me away until I die, and I don't know how many more
opportunities I'll have to tell someone my side. A cop could easily
have me shanked in jail for what I've done, so even without the death
penalty I'm in danger of dying.

Dillan:
The book is close to being done. It will come out after the trial, so
I'm not sure if you'll get a chance to read it entirely, but the
piece I'm missing is why you were caught? Everyone is lying about it,
but I've researched it and know you led them right to you. Right at
that moment, and you sat there with a gas mask on and waited until
you could see them. Why? You could have flipped that switch and
things might be completely different now. Why didn't you?

Brand:
My son's murder was broadcast day and night. The cop's pleas of
not-guilty were published far and wide, to other continents even.
Their acquittal was no less famous. My son's entire life was shown
for all to see as if he was an object, rather than someone who
breathed air and had been silenced unjustly. I couldn't imagine
bringing him back without the world knowing that his death wasn't
forever, that the wrongs committed were righted. I've been vain since
I was a child and I suppose this isn't any different, not when you
get down to the essence of it. I wanted to say fuck you to all of
those cops coming after me, to Malone and to the T.V. stations that
put his face up on the screen for everyone to look at whenever he
asked. I wanted to say fuck you. Ten years had passed but I hadn't
forgotten.

Dillan:
I can understand that, but how, how did you think you were going to
get away with it? You had nothing but a switch in your hand when two
hundred cops showed up with weapons ranging from gas to grenade
launchers.

Brand:
I...I'm able to create life. Myself, without the need for sperm and
egg, I'm able to take life from others and bring back someone from
the dead. Whenever I want. Right now, if they allowed me the tools, I
could bring my son back. I could bring your mother back. I could
bring back Ronald Reagan if people wanted him to run for President
again. I think I lost it a little at the end, to be honest. What I
was doing made me feel like I was a God. Like no one on Earth held
the power I did, and that meant they couldn't stop me. I figured they
would show up and they would watch as I did what no one had been able
to before, watch in awe. Turned out they didn't think anything in
there was too awe-worthy.

Dillan:
Would you have done it differently, now, if you could?

Brand:
I'm not too interested in either dying or being locked away forever,
so yeah, I probably would be a little more low key about my plans.

Dillan:
There's a chance that they'll keep you around just for your brain
power. They're talking about some new science that can allow people
to live indefinitely. They could lock you up in a cell for another
year, and when it's ready, transfer you to it and pretty much freeze
you. Have you thought much about it? Everyone dies, but they're
saying they might not let you.

Brand:
The science is there, for sure. I've worked through a lot of it in my
jail cell, as soon as I heard that I might be one of the first trial
runs. If they give me life without parole, I might have another
forty-five years left. And honestly, the chances of me getting out,
by state mechanisms or my own volition, are low. I'll die an old man
with only memories. I don't look forward to that. I also don't want
to die a relatively young man with ambition. I know I failed. I know
that Hilman is no closer to being back right now than when I started
this thing ten years ago. To me though, it's like I learned what not
to do. It's not over, not in my mind. It's a setback, and at some
point, another chance will emerge for me to see my son again. I'm not
talking in any spiritual sense; I mean here, on this planet,
hopefully while you're still alive to watch it happen. If they put an
electric charge through me, there is very little chance that ambition
will get realized. So this is a very long answer to your question,
but I think out of all the options the state is considering for the
rest of my life, the deep freeze is the one that is most suitable to
my desires.

Dillan:
You're talking about doing this again, am I right?

Brand:
Doing this again isn't going to be possible. Those that killed my son
are all dead. I said that I failed, and I did, but there's still some
silver lining to it.

Dillan:
But you're talking about bringing your son back. You can't do that
without someone else dying right?

Brand:
Right, and yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. The dream I
dreamed isn't dead, Jeffrey. It's been postponed.

Dillan:
Look around. There's a guard with a gun outside this door. Two more
outside the next one. You're chained to this table. How can you
possibly think that you'll ever get the chance again?

Brand:
How could I possibly think I could get this far in the first place? A
nation trying to find me and the only reason they did is because I
told them where and when to show up. I just need the opportunity to
show itself, Jeffrey. I'll take care of the rest.

Dillan:
It just seems incredulous to believe something like that. You're in
the jaws of the beast now, and it's preparing to grind you up or save
you for a later date, but it's not planning on letting you go.

Brand:
Did you think they were going to catch me? Or did you think I was
going to succeed, that I would bring Hilman back?

Dillan:
I didn't think they would find you. I didn't know if you could bring
your son back. I don't understand the science and there are people on
both sides of its possibility.

Brand:
You didn't think they would catch me and you're unsure about what I
could do because of your lack of knowledge. What makes you think
they'll be able to hold me, then?

Jeffrey took the orange
juice from behind him and downed it.

He vomited it up thirty
seconds later, dropping the plastic bottle on the asphalt.

There couldn't be any
questions going through Brand's head about who he had just seen. He
wasn't thinking coincidence had made that possible. Brand knew
Jeffrey was following him.

God, why did he start
drinking? Why had he allowed himself to think that the stars would
align for two minutes and Jeffrey could empty his bladder and return
to his car without being seen?

Stars
don't fucking align
.

The book was no longer
a thought in his head. The book could float away to some other
writer's head; he would never write it. He would never put another
word down, because Jeffrey's time on this Earth had just become
limited to a number of days probably in the single digits. If he made
it ten days out of this, he was doing something exceedingly well—and
right now, half drunk and staring at his puke on the pavement, he
didn't know what he could possibly do to make that happen. Brand
would be coming for him now, coming for him before he went after
anyone else in this horrid web. He would want to silence the only man
who knew where he was and what he was doing. Jeffrey was dead.
Sitting here, in this abandoned parking lot, he was already dead and
just waiting on his heart to understand it.

The book, his editor,
that F.B.I. agent, they could all go fuck themselves. He had to
figure out a way—

The cop. The F.B.I.
agent. Moore. That was his only chance. He'd face some criminal
charges but even that could put him out of Brand's reach. Throw him
in a jail cell for all he cared, as long as Brand didn't end up next
to him. He would call Moore and he would tell her everything. Where
he had been, what he had seen, and the exact spot they could march to
find Brand and his entire experiment. Hell, if they hurried, Lucent
might still be alive. That was his bargaining chip, but he had to
play it quickly. If he waited longer than today, than right now,
there would be no such thing as immunity for the man that watched
Brand steal a baby from its bed.

"Fine," he
said, reaching his hand into his pocket, searching for his cell
phone. He felt only the soft fabric of his jeans. An atomic bomb
sized panic ballooned inside his stomach. His left hand frantically
made a grab for his other pocket, only to find emptiness there too.
He knelt outside of his car, his knee dropping directly into his
vomit, and turned around to look inside his car. He stretched out
across the front seat, searching for the phone, looking inside
cracks, between his seats, under seats, in glove compartments, in any
possible place it could be.

The phone was gone.

* * *

Matthew went back to
the bathroom. Sometimes luck shone on you and he supposed he was due
some after the last twenty years. He supposed luck had a lot of red
in whatever account Matthew held, and it was going to have to work
some serious overtime in order to get it in the black. He'd needed to
use the bathroom, and standing in front of him was the man who'd
written the definitive account of Matthew's first attempt. Hat pulled
down, older, with a three or four day beard growing across his face.
It was
him though.
Jeffrey Dillan. Live and in the flesh, a literature rock star, just
happening to be using the same restroom as the most wanted man in the
country. The same man he'd profiled in an honest and courageous way,
then profited heavily from that portrayal.

A small world.

Matthew watched
Dillan's car leave, watched him screech out of the parking lot and
begin hauling ass down the tiny road in front of the gas station.
Headed where? To Daytona Beach? Is that where Mr. Dillan intended to
go, had intended
following
Matthew to? The vodka on his breath had been mixed with the sweet
smell of processed orange juice. If it wasn't for that, perhaps the
whole thing could have been a coincidence. Perhaps Dillan had
accidentally stumbled into the same gas station as Matthew, perhaps
the only man in the entirety of the state that could identify him
even with a wig and makeup on. No one would be so dumb as to follow
him inside. No one following him would risk it. He would have
believed that except for the smell of alcohol coming from his mouth.
The alcohol though, that made idiocy more likely, made the accidental
nature of what just happened nearly impossible.

He read up on Jeffrey
during his nights in the hotel room. He knew the literary genius from
ten years ago had developed a drinking problem and stopped writing.
Was he now carrying the burden of alcoholism
and
a new idea for a novel?

What did that say about
Matthew? A drunk writer had made his way down to Florida and found
him? Matthew hadn't even known until the man decided he quite simply
wasn't going to hold his piss any longer and followed the object of
the nation's manhunt into a gas station?

Matthew stood just
inside the bathroom door and looked at the floor. Had he been that
careless? Had he been that
dumb
?
If Jeffrey Dillan had walked into the bathroom with booze practically
spraying from his mouth, then yes, Matthew had been that fucking
dumb.

He pulled the bathroom
door closed behind him, locking it. The place smelled of both piss
and bleach, the tile floor yellow from use. Matthew pulled the
sunglasses from his face and stuck them on the collar of his shirt.
His thought of actually using the toilet was gone, his survival
taking precedence. He looked close, looked at the empty stall and the
flushed urinal. His eyes went to the mirror over the sink, looking
for anything that would be of more help than what he currently knew.
All he had at this moment was the bathroom the man had just used.

Looking in the urinal
nothing but a red mat stared back up at him. Nothing in the stall,
not even feces floating in the toilet. He walked to the sink and
found gold sitting there. A cell phone. It could have been left hours
ago, or it could have been left ten minutes before. Matthew pressed
the button at the top, and the touchscreen came to life. He picked it
up, looking for evidence to who had left this phone here. It didn't
take long.

Too many contacts had a
last name of Dillan.

Jeffrey had been
looking at his phone while pissing, set it down to wash his hands,
and the alcohol in his system allowed him to walk away from it for
just a second. Had Matthew not been walking in when he did, Dillan
would have turned around and picked it up, but instead he completely
forgot it. Left it sitting on the sink for Matthew to find.

He clicked the email
app, opening it to Dillan's personal address. He typed in a few words
and sent an email from Dillan to Dillan.