by David Beers
"I'll do it," she said. "I'll go down there."
"You're sure? I don't want to set you up for this for you to back out the morning of. It will be a lot of resources tied up in you rather than trying to find him or keep others safe. If you're not completely sure, you need to say it now."
She thought of that child, first taking the pictures that had leaked out years ago of the grown men, their bodies a mess of wires and tubes, carved up and barely alive, and then transposed the photos onto the little boy in her mind. More people were going to die, and while she wasn't helping Matt, she wasn't doing much to stop him by sitting in her house and talking with her husband.
More children becoming a mess, a bloody mixture of science and life, if she did nothing.
"I'm sure. He'll call again and I'll agree to go. Will you guys handle the rest?"
"Yes. We'll take care of everything the moment he calls. All you're going to need to do is meet him, and the rest will be us."
"Okay, then."
* * *
What Rally thought of as a bloody mess, Matthew saw the greatest feat of science known to the world. He took the last electrical wire, a small thing with split copper wires at the tip, and pushed it inside the hole he had made in the child. Matthew felt the small hitch as it latched onto the implanted metal hooks. Matthew looked down at his work, but felt no pride as he had years ago. Back then, this had been an event that the human race had never seen before. This was the second round and nothing here was new. The government might even be replicating what he had just done. No, this was no longer what it had once been because Matthew never tested his theory. Instead, society threw him away.
Instead of pride, he felt urgency. A need to keep going. A need to get this done so that his son could be here with him.
The boy wiggled a bit, as if he was trying to get more comfortable. The tube going directly into his forehead filled with blood. It flowed from the hole drilled into his skull to the hole in his stomach, moving the blood around quicker than his veins could—which would begin to stiffen from lack of movement. The child looked like a human wrapped in a cocoon of wires and tubes. One could, barely, see beneath them all to the naked flesh underneath; the kid looked like a weirdly wrapped package.
Matthew moved his hand to the switch attached to the side of the table. He flicked it and the hum started. That did make him feel something other than urgency—nostalgia.
It was going to happen this time. The humming was the electric nodes inserted into the child, all of the neurons in his brain, and consequently, the rest of his body being lit up as much as any Christmas tree. The boy's skin began to turn a bright red underneath it all, like an apple. He wouldn't burst open though; he would only burn and transmit.
"Good," Matthew said. Everything, so far, was working.
He turned the switch off and the child took in a deep breath of air as the current stopped flowing through him. It probably hurt; Matthew wouldn't kid himself, but more than Hilman had hurt?
Looking to his right, he saw the place where his own child would be born. Not hooked up to anything yet and resembling the same Silo they had stored Matthew in. A large glass rectangle, ten feet high and teen feet wide, sat completely transparent in the middle of the warehouse. The wires from the boy led to it, but were not plugged in. The lights from above shone into the rectangle, looking like beams from heaven.
It was time to decide who came next. The boy would live here indefinitely, fed from the same tubes that discarded his shit, he would live until Matthew told him to die. He would turn the lights off and lock the place up, but he needed to know where he went next. Getting out of Daytona for a while would be a pretty good idea, too, given the recent attention his nightly visit caused. Garret Lucent kept coming to mind, more so than the other three. Garret Lucent, a fucking monster who his wife referred to as the old cliché "a gentle giant" when asked about him. "He would never knowingly hurt anyone," she said. Matthew didn't agree with that, really. Didn't then and didn't now.
Garret Lucent, who did you leave in this world? Who could I take of your ilk?
Chapter Twenty One
The Devil’s Dream
By Jeffrey Dillan
Chapter Twelve
It bugged, or rather, infuriated Matthew Brand that Garret Lucent had been spoken of as a 'gentle giant'. To Brand, it was like calling Hitler a man of peace. Or George Bush a man of great wisdom. There are a lot of phrases that can be associated with those historical figures, but the two above don't fit. To Brand, gentle giant did not fit.
Garret Lucent stood six-foot-six and weighed three hundred pounds. What's the saying? Built like an oak? Garret was built like a mountain, one that looked like it could weather anything life threw at him. He worked out almost daily, seemingly obsessed with packing more muscle onto his frame. His wife told me that she thought it was a complex, that all those toys kids played with—toys like He-Man and Batman and Superman—made him think the only way he could ever be a real man was to pack on as much muscle as possible. It was improbable that Matthew Brand could ever kill him, at five-foot-eight, even reaching up to the man's mouth with chloroform would be a stretch.
Garret may have been a gentle giant. He may have never hurt anyone, outside of Hilman Brand, that didn't deserve it; and, as his wife said, he may have felt deep guilt about that particular mistake. Still, not everything about Officer Lucent was wholesome, and when I tried to breach that subject with Mrs. Lucent, a torrent of tears flowed from her eyes. She couldn't comment on that part of his life, she said, leading me to believe that she'd known about it and was forced to tolerate it.
He liked sex, perhaps was even addicted to it. There’s no record of him attending a Sex Addict meeting, but certainly he possessed all the usual traits that accompany addicts. His police partners said he would often pick up prostitutes, and in exchange for not bringing them in, receive some form of sexual favor. Garret had girlfriends on the side, although none showed at his funeral. Speaking with one, who asked to remain anonymous, she spoke highly of him.
"He loved his wife, there was no doubt about that. Just sometimes, in marriages, you can't get everything you need out of one person. I don't think Garrett could get everything he needed if he used every person in the world, so that's no knock on her. He certainly wasn't satisfied with me alone, was he?"
Bars, hookers, work, websites. Wherever. It didn't matter to Lucent, he would find women any possible way. It's good that the majority of Garret's life was lived before the Internet, because the next twenty years could have become quite unmanageable—indeed, at the end of his life, it already was because of the websites he visited. His computer records show that he spent hours on them every weekend. Whole days sometimes, and the usage reports I've seen showed the intensity increasing. He had accounts for five different pay sex websites, and another six free ones. His wife asked him what he was doing in their computer room so much, and his answer was always the same—"remoting into the office."
Garret lived in a world of lust. The women he met were pretty and ugly, skinny and fat, black and white. His tastes varied across the spectrum, taking anything he could get and practically smothering himself with it. He would spend all day Saturday looking, talking, and flirting on these sites. He would have a date every Sunday night—his wife thought this time was spent at the gym—and late Sunday evening he would find his way back to his own bed. Some of the women he met only once, some he would see again and again, but every Sunday he did his absolute best to have a new date. This went on for a year. Right up until Garret ran into Matthew Brand.
The picture was of Matthew Brand. Seeing it today, with hindsight's vision, it's hard to miss the direct similarities between how he looked on the sex site and how he looked in reality. Matthew wore a wig, placed make-up in the all right spots, and through Photoshop, showed cleavage that simply shouldn't have existed. For a woman, Matthew Brand looked extremely attractive. He never messaged Lucent though, and actually didn't respond to the man's firs
t two advances. Instead, Brand let them sit in his mailbox for a few weeks before finally responding to the third.
"Can't catch a hint, huh?" Brand asked Lucent on the sex site.
Lust was born again for Garret Lucent.
I imagine that it thrilled him, sending adrenaline rushing into his brain and throughout his body. A feeling that nothing else in his life matched, but at the same time some guilt must have manifested. That is the way for the addict, a joy that strikes to the core, and when striking, opens up the knowledge, the pain of what he or she is actually doing. The guilt didn't matter though, not to Lucent's actions, because he kept going.
Garret and the person pretending to be a woman agreed to meet, finally, all of his persistence paid off. Garret would get what he wanted, what his body thirsted for, that which no one in his life could fully satisfy.
A hotel. There wasn't any question of exactly what they would be doing. No movie. No dinner. Just sex.
Brand waited for Lucent in the room, dressed as the beautiful woman he had shown Garret on the internet. The bell boy in the hotel remembered the woman walking in, a black dress that curved to her body, long blonde hair, and breasts that went "for days" as the employee told me.
Garret knocked on the door and the woman, 'Felecia', answered with a smile and two glasses of wine in her hands. They entered, him taking a glass from her and leaning in to kiss her neck. Her voice probably was deep for a woman, but wasn't that erotic? They spoke, they drank, and at some point Garret must have made his move. Thrusting himself on Felecia, or Brand, with a force only a man of three hundred pounds could truly muster. Throwing Brand on the bed in a way that was supposed to be sexy, and probably would have been under any other circumstances. Instead, it was the last amount of pseudo-manhood that Lucent would ever show. Already, his stomach was digesting a chemical agent that would make sure he never saw the sun again. All women understand you should never take a drink from a stranger; Lucent didn't, and after a few seconds of rough kissing, he slumped to the side letting out a long breath that sounded like a fart. He lay on the bed, staring straight forward, paralyzed but able to see. Brand undressed, taking off his clothes, then the fake breasts he wore, leaving himself standing in white underwear. The thin man had taken down the gentle giant and after a few hours, as the night deepened, Brand ushered Lucent from the building in a large laundry basket, taking him down the service elevator.
No one saw Garret Lucent again, not until his funeral, and by then his body was a shriveled version of the man that walked into the hotel.
Chapter Twenty Two
Matthew hated Lucent more than the others. It was the sex addiction and his weak wife that didn't put a stop to it. That sanctioned it by allowing him to continue, to meet person after person on the Internet, to fuck anything he wanted. He hated both of them, had really wanted to take Lucent and his wife. Someone needed to feel pain though; someone had to know what it felt like to lose the person they loved most.
Now though, he could take that weak woman and put her to some good use. Maybe she had parents that would miss her and maybe she didn't. Maybe she remarried and mothered children. There could be people connected to her that would feel the pain when he took her.
Then again, maybe she was only ten years older and alone. Matthew didn't care. She let that monster Lucent run wild with his sex life, let him leave their marriage hollow and meaningless, and then called him a gentle giant after he murdered a seventeen year old kid for being black. If anyone in this world, besides the four men who gunned down Hilman, deserved to die in Hilman's place—it was this weak scum of a woman who didn't care anything for her own life.
Matthew still looked at the glass box in front of him. He'd gotten lost inside his head for a few minutes but found his way back out. He didn't like being in there anymore, not after all those years with no release. He wanted to be in the present, to view the world around him as it came instead of focusing only on how he could manipulate it all.
He walked to the glass box and pushed opened the door. He stepped inside, closed it behind him, and sat down.
He could see his finger prints on the glass and knew he would need to clean them, probably over and over until his son was born. That was fine. He'd cleaned up after Hilman as a child, and now he would clean up after himself in the same manner. Nothing could pollute the inside of this birthing room, nothing could harm the chances that he would return. Matthew lay down, his arms spread out to the side and stared up at the lights shining from the ceiling. He listened for the tubes pumping blood around the boy's body, exiting one hole and entering another, but heard nothing. Only silence in this room. He would have to do something about that. He didn't want the first thing Hilman heard to be silence, the absence of life.
A few more adjustments for this room, with four to five new additions outside of it, and everything would be ready.
The next addition would be Linda Lucent.
* * *
"I'm not going into protective custody. That's all there is to it. If you try to make me, I promise that I'll be on Good Morning America by Tuesday."
Allison looked at the computer screen, the woman on it much older than Allison remembered. She'd been pretty ten years ago, beautiful if a bit meek. The last ten years had been a lot harder than the preceding forty, apparently. Gray hair, wrinkles at her eyes and forehead. She still possessed some of the beauty from her youth, but now Linda Lucent looked more regal than beautiful. With the passing of her beauty, it appeared the meekness went with it, to Allison's dismay.
Allison was still in Daytona, the city almost in a state of Martial Law with cops and F.B.I. agents combing through every possible building they could get a warrant on. All for nothing, as of now. Not a shadow of the child or a sound from Brand. He had shown up at the house and walked out with a child, then dissipated into the air.
Now this broad was refusing to hide.
"Mrs. Lucent, I want you to think about what you're saying. Everyone else, everyone with any kind of connection to the Hilman Brand case has been taken away and hidden. They can't be found, not even by me. You're saying you want to stay exactly where you are, the only person who was directly involved in this case, and just kind of broadcast yourself to him. You think he won't come for you?"
"I hope he does, Agent Moore. I hope he comes right to my doorstep so that I can speak with him a bit. I'm not leaving, not running to some hotel room you guys have set up to hide."
"Ma'am, in all honesty, Joseph Welch said he felt the same thing. His wife is dead and his child is missing, so he's not feeling like that now."
"Well, ma'am, I don't have any wives or kids to worry about, so we should be okay on that front."
"And when he hooks you up to those machines next to that little boy, what do you plan on saying to him then?" Allison asked.
"I have a few things to say to my late husband as well, so that'll be fine."
Allison opened her mouth to speak and then closed it. Lucent sat in another police station in a suburb outside of Durham, North Carolina. They hooked up this Skype connection when she refused to get in a police car and leave her house, allowing Moore a chance to convince her. To no avail. And maybe that was okay. If they lost her, if Brand took her from Durham to his lair, there would certainly be a lot of outrage in both the media and from up the F.B.I.'s food chain. If they lost her, Allison might just lose her job. If they took everyone away though, took every single possible target out of the picture, Brand would probably start killing strangers which would be a lot easier for him. Walk out onto the street, find someone, and snatch them into a van, disappearing to his laboratory. He wasn't going to stop just because they took away his original targets. He wanted to kill the people who'd put his son in the ground, but even more than that, he wanted his son out of the ground.
If they left the bug light out though, the insects would fly to it as soon as darkness came. Fly to it and fry.
"We cannot guarantee you'll be protected. You're going to have
to sign some forms saying you understand that, that you're doing this at your own risk."
"That's fine. I'll sign whatever you need me to," the woman said.
"We're going to increase the police presence around you as well. You'll notice some of them and you won't notice others."
"You guys do whatever you need to, but I'm not changing my life in anyway just because you're following me."
"Alright. I'll talk with the Police Chief over there and we'll get you out of the station in just a few minutes. Thank you, Mrs. Lucent."
The screen on the other end replaced the aging woman with a man whose belly seemed to know no ends. It stretched out over his belt, looking like entire fields of cotton were picked to create the shirt covering him.
"Let her go. Have her sign the necessary paperwork saying she is taking on all risk, that she understands we can't protect her, yadda, yadda, yadda."
"You're sure?" The man asked.
"What other choice do we have?"
"I like America, but sometimes I wish we were red China. Just lock her up and let her out when we think it's good for her."
"Well, make sure you use your vote wisely, Chief," she glanced down quickly at the name on the sticky note at her desk, "Chief Landrum, we'll be in contact pretty soon. We'll need to increase surveillance around her, but I've got to talk to my boss first."
"Sounds good. Give us a call anytime."
Allison shut down the program.
She would tell Art, without a doubt. He would know there wasn't a lot more she could do with it. This wasn't the first time the F.B.I. used bait, but it was the first time she had ever tried it. There was a real danger of losing this woman, and at the same time, Brand might not even come for her. He would surely know all the rest of his possible victims were hidden except for Linda Lucent and that meant she was being watched, so would he try to take her or simply follow a path of lesser resistance?
