The Devil's Dream: Waking Up (3 page)

M
atthew grabbed
the body from the back of the van. A few weeks ago he would have been able to carry one on each shoulder, but those days were gone. Now he could only carry one at a time, which was fine. He would get the job either way, even if a bit slower now.

Getting the job done. That was the important part.

He walked across the gravel, the rocks crunching together under his feet. The body felt heavy even though the woman weighed little over a hundred pounds. Were Jake and Art working right now? Were they trying to catch him with the same intensity that he worked with? Would they have been carrying a body on their shoulders if their own frame was starting to give out?

No. No way. They did what they did out of duty. Duty could come and go, depending on who paid the checks. Matthew worked out of love. Matthew carried this body for his son, for Rally. There wasn’t any way they could match that intensity.

* * *

H
enry lay
on the bed for a few hours after hanging up with Greg. He turned on the television and a rerun of
Will and Grace
played a laugh track into the room. Henry wasn't watching it, he was busy thinking about the phone call he needed to make but didn't want to. Greg had been bad enough, but his mother would be worse. Greg believed Henry shouldn't take the job because Greg understood he couldn't be Henry. Greg couldn't be the linchpin of the family. He wasn’t going to call their mother daily. He wasn’t going to make sure everyone showed up at the same place on Christmas and Thanksgiving. He wasn’t going to go to their mother’s and make sure her refrigerator was stocked. Greg loved their mother as much as Henry, but those things would fall by the wayside and they both knew it.

That was the truth even if Henry wouldn't say it aloud; he hated how it sounded, because of the light it cast Greg in, a light he didn't feel was warranted. His brother was himself and Henry was Henry. They had always been different and Henry had never wanted to turn Greg into another version of himself. Greg did well in school and Henry felt as long as that was happening, he would take care of everything else. And he had. Until now.

His mother wouldn’t see things like that at all though. Anything that created danger for Henry’s life was unacceptable in itself—lunacy, even. She wouldn't say she needed him, or that she relied on him, or that he held the family together. She was going to tell him she loved him, and he was her first born, and that he wasn't going to go get himself killed regardless of what new crazy person was running around. His mother wouldn't like this because she loved him, plain and simple.

It was six in the evening in California, and he knew he needed to call his mother now if he was going to call her tonight. She’d fall asleep soon and she deserved to have her say before he went in tomorrow morning and gave Brayden his answer.

He found her number and muted the television.

"Hey, honey," she said, answering the phone. She had adapted well to the technology Steve Jobs brought the world, understanding caller ID and how to use these new phones with an ease Henry thought he would envy when he reached her age.

"Hey, mom. What are you doing?"

"Just cleaning up after dinner. What about you?"

"I'm, uhh, I'm in Washington DC." He didn't know how to move this conversation forward, didn't know how to say what he needed to say because he couldn’t plan for this. He thought he would always be there for his mother, until she left this world—but he called to tell her he couldn’t be there, at least not for a little while, and a risk existed that he would never be there for her again.

"What are you doing way out there? When did you go? You didn't call me?"

"Calm down, mom. They brought me out here last night; it was kind of a rush job. They got me a private plane and everything and flew me out here," Henry said.

"Why?"

He sighed. "You're not going to like the reason."

"Well, I don't like what you just told me, so you might as well get it over with."

Henry pulled himself up in the bed so that his back rested against the headboard. "You've heard of Matthew Brand, right?"

"That's all they play on the news anymore. Matthew Brand twenty-four hours a day, non-stop. Tell me you're not getting involved with that."

"You want me to lie to you?" Henry asked.

"How dangerous is it?" His mother's voice always held nearly infinite jest. Everything was humorous; everything could be laughed at. She lived alone and had not, as far as Henry knew, had a lover in the past eight years, and yet he didn't think he knew a happier woman than his mother. Now though, with that question, her words contained no jest. She wasn't asking for details, but she was asking for the most important thing, maybe the only thing that mattered at all—how dangerous was his job?

"This would be...Jesus, mom. It would be pretty dangerous."

"I don't want you to do it then," she said.

"I knew you wouldn't."

"I'm a selfish old lady and, for the most part, I'm okay with that. All I have is my health and you two boys and if I'm going to be selfish about anything I figured those three things are perfectly fine. You know what they're saying this Brand fellow is capable of? Have you heard about it? They're saying he can kill the sun. I mean, just imagine that, what it would be like if he killed the sun."

She paused, either giving him time to think about it as if he hadn't before, or thinking about it herself. "I suppose they're asking you to do this because they think you'll do a good job. They wouldn't give this to someone incapable, huh?"

"Probably not," Henry said, not completely sure where his mother was heading.

"I don't mind being selfish, but I don't know if I have the right to be, if I have the right to tell you not to do it. If this was just your career we were talking about, then yeah, I'd probably feel comfortable telling you to sit at home and wait this one out, but we're not talking about your career are we?"

"No," he said.

"I didn't think so. The news has these people on all the time, these people discussing what would happen if this criminal does what he says. The plants will die. The animals die. We'll die, all of us. I start thinking about that and I realize you're not talking about you and me. At least, not just us. We're talking about a planet, but that's still not completely it, either. We're talking about the future of our planet, your kids, Greg's kids—the entire possibility of everyone that could ever live, gone. Just wiped out because of this guy. It's...well, I guess I'm just wondering if I have more of a right to you than the rest of the world." She paused for a few seconds and Henry didn't try to fill in the gap. "Are you scared?"

He hadn't thought about the question before. Up until now, until his mother asked, his mind focused on her and Greg, about how accepting this would trash his responsibilities to them. Was he scared? And if so, of what? Of dying? Because in the end, that's what this came down to. If it was a sure thing, if he knew that he could go in and act like Brand's son and end up bringing the entirety of the FBI down on his head, then Henry probably wouldn't be having this conversation. He would just go into work tomorrow and tell Brayden he’d do it, and then in a week's time be back in California to continue with his own cases. The possibility of dying put everything else into focus, and was he scared of it? He didn't know; and that, in itself, scared him. He didn't have any visceral reaction to the thought of his own death, outside of what it would do to his family, to his mom and brother.

"I don't know," he said.

"I don't think this Matthew Brand character is scared to die. If he was, I'm not sure he would go through all of this, because whether they catch him or not, he’s made it so he dies too. People that aren't scared to die, usually do, and faster than those that are."

Neither said anything into the phone. Henry knew she was thinking, reasoning out what he had told her and listening to her moral compass that always seemed to point true north.

"If I told you to stay, to not do this, would you listen?" She asked.

"No, I might still do it," he didn't exactly whisper the answer, but he didn't exactly speak it loud either.

"Why?"

"I guess because I feel like this is bigger than me and my family. That the world is bigger than one person."

"If I told you not to go, would it make your decision harder?" She asked.

"Of course."

"Well, then I'm just going to say: be afraid of dying. The world's bigger than me and I won't act like it's not. The children you'll have are bigger than me. The children Greg will have are bigger than me. So just be scared. Be so scared of dying that the minute you think you might, you run home. I know that doesn't make a lot of sense given that I just said the world's wants are more important than my own, but I'm okay with that. You go, and you do your best, but you don't have to give your life to do that. You can still come home."

Henry wasn't able to say anything. She wasn't going into hysterics, wasn't begging, wasn't doing anything that he thought she might. She'd lost a lot in her life, and at a lot younger age than she should have, too. He just told her that she might lose him, and her response...
Do what you have to do, but don't die doing it.

"You there?" She asked.

"Yeah," he managed to say.

"Listen, I love you, honey. Do the best you can and come back home. Greg and I will be fine until you do."

* * *

M
atthew tossed
the body on the floor. Five others lay in front of him, all gassed up and not moving. Again, a week ago they could have done whatever they wanted and he would have been able to put them down. Now though, he needed the gas. Fine, fine, fine. Just get the work done.

Two more bodies waited outside.

Whether or not he had a kid, he wasn’t going to stop building. And God, did it look beautiful. Even with the little mess of bodies in front of him, the statue of humans stretching a couple hundred feet in the air towered over it all.

If he did have another child, and in some off chance he decided this before him wasn’t needed, fine. The magnificence alone still staggered him. And if he didn’t have a child? If Art and Jake were playing games? He could find room for one more body.

* * *

"
A
nd you're just going
to listen to her?" Greg said. "She says it's okay and that makes it okay?"

Henry paced in front of his bed, the television still playing its silent shows. "I don't know if it makes it okay, but it means
she's
okay with it."

"You think she is? You don't think she's just telling you that?"

Henry may have been the patriarch of the family and Greg relied on him for a lot, but that didn't mean his younger brother wouldn't speak up. Henry felt somewhat better when he got off the phone with his mother, but as soon as he jumped back on with Greg, those feelings disappeared.

"She won't tell you not to go, Henry. How could she? One, it's your career, and two, she knows what this guy is trying to do. If she were to tell you no, to try and make you stay, I mean, that would make her one of the worst people to ever live."