by David Beers
"Then I guess you hope he dies from the wound Rally gave him. Other than that, I don't know how you stop him."
"Alright, Allison. Thanks for everything. Call me when you get home."
Art looked away from her, releasing her from the car, from this horrible conversation. She looked at him again, wanting to cry, to release all the anger pinned up inside her, but she couldn't. The tears weren't there and she certainly wouldn't release that anger in this car in front of this man. She was going to get out of the car and go back to her hotel. There, she would pack her things and find the first flight home she could. By late tonight, or early tomorrow morning, she would be home with her family and all of this would be over. For her. For the rest of the world, Brand was still out there, still after someone, still ripping through the world like a tornado with no end.
It didn't matter to Allison anymore. Her part was over.
* * *
The string hung loosely through the eye of the needle, and the needle rested between two of Matthew's fingers. A sawed off wooden broom handle set between his teeth, his jaw clamped on it. His eyes were red and his face pale, his bald head pouring sweat down his cheeks. The flesh on his stomach was red and inflamed, looking like a small mouth with all of its teeth bashed out. The knife hadn't destroyed anything vital, but it definitely nicked some things. This wasn't a flesh wound. Rally hadn't known what she was doing, but Matthew was still lucky he wasn't coughing up blood form internal bleeding.
He had a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He needed both and knew they were going to hurt worse than just about anything Matthew had ever experienced. No doctors, no hospitals, no modern medicine. There were a few small blessings: first the knife she found had been a small kitchen blade, and second, the body suit had taken much of that blade, with only his flesh ending up wounded—the vital organs protected. He only needed to patch up his gut and then hopefully everything would heal. He needed antibiotics, but thought he could get those from a drug store with a bit of forgery. Then it was in God's hands, because his own were going to be completely full.
He placed the needle on the sink and picked up the clear bottle of rubbing alcohol. He unscrewed the cap and with his free hand opened up the wound. Red, irritated flesh looked out at him, angry at what he'd allowed to happen. It was swollen, so swollen that he couldn't see a hole really, only red meat staring back.
Matthew flexed his jaw.
With two fingers he kept the wound open, and with his other hand, he doused the flesh with alcohol.
Pain from another world grabbed him. Pain that opened up consciousness and destroyed universes raged. His teeth snapped down onto the wooden pipe and a guttural noise roared from his lips: a long, loud growl that seemed to have no end, coming from whatever dimension this new pain was born from. His skin felt like he had lit it on fire, the same as those agents who had rolled on the floor trying to put themselves out in the restaurant. The inflamed nature of it, the tender skin, all of it seemed a memory of someone else's body; now, all of his skin was a volcano, erupting droves of rage into his central nervous system.
He felt his teeth lodge deep into the wood.
Hands shaking, he reached for the peroxide, simply wanting something cool, something wet, something else on his skin besides this hate he had poured.
He dropped the peroxide cap and simply poured the clear liquid onto his body. The pain didn't disappear, not at once, but lessened. He felt his jaw loosen its grasp on the pipe in his mouth, and he brought his fingers to the wound, staring with wide eyes as he poured more of the cooling peroxide inside. Bubbles grew, still finding bacteria to kill despite the alcohol he had drenched the wound in.
Matthew closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing, letting the liquid do its work.
After a few minutes, he looked back down at the wet opening. More pain. That's what was coming. More pain and then he would rest. He would get through this, he would sew himself up and then he would figure out the rest. Just fix himself so he didn't die and then the rest of the world could feel this pain.
The needle slid through his crimson skin with relative ease, his flesh almost numb from what it had been subjected to. In and out, in and out, he looked on as he crossed his skin with the needle and thread, bringing his flesh back together and hoping that whatever infection might have grown was wiped away. He needed sleep and he needed antibiotics, then he would need to get on the road.
* * *
The clock on the nightstand showed twelve hours had passed. Matthew couldn't remember if it had been day or night when he fell into the hotel bed. The shades were drawn making it impossible to tell if the sun had risen. The world might have stopped turning for all he knew, it could be just a ball resting in space, no longer rotating, slowly cooling so that everything on it would die in cold, still, silence.
He remembered dreaming while he slept, but none of the details. He touched his forehead, feeling hot skin. Hot and wet. He would need those antibiotics sooner than he thought or else he was going to die. The longer he lay here, the weaker he would become, and the more likely he was to never get up again.
Antibiotics now. He would rest later, for a few days if needed, eating pills and hoping he would turn the corner.
He needed to get out of bed and find a drugstore. He would think of Rally and her death, everyone's death in his whole fucking life, when he was sure that his body wasn't going to die next. He swung his legs from the bed and felt his head nearly roll off his neck. Pain wrapped in dizziness threatened to take him to the floor.
Get up. Get pills. Get back to bed.
Three things that he had to do. Up, pills, bed, and then he would see if he could live a few more days. The alcohol, the peroxide, all had been for nothing because whatever little bugs lived on that knife had made themselves at home deep inside his body and were now using it for house parties.
Up, pills, bed.
Chapter Thirty Four
He had enough.
He really did.
What he knew so far would get him deep into a book; Jeffrey could leave the country and write everything he experienced so far, wait on Brand to be captured, and then begin interviewing everyone still alive from this ordeal. Hell, he could fly everyone he wanted to speak with to whichever country he lived in—his publisher would have to pay for it, because this book was going to shake the world completely off its axis. Jeffrey could write about meeting Brand in the bathroom, about knowing he was going to die just like everyone else that crossed the man. He would be able to describe every step Brand took up until the very end, when he had to flee for his own life. In Cold Blood would be a poor man's version of what he was going to create.
And your family? What if he goes for them?
Why would he? If Jeffrey left, made it known that he was leaving the country, why would Brand try to hunt him down? Wouldn't he take it simply as a truce? As a gesture that Jeffrey wasn't going to turn him in? Live and let live, because really, all the man wanted was his son back. If Jeffrey wasn't coming between him and that goal, Brand would have no reason to hunt him or anyone he knew. Leave the country, write your book, and let the rest of the world deal with Matthew Brand.
He needed to do something first. He needed to look inside Brand's warehouse.
Jeffrey hadn't had a drink in twelve hours, and he felt like his hands were going to split open from the all the white-knuckling it took to keep the vodka from his mouth. He wanted his head clear, just for a few days, just until he could figure out exactly how he would do this. Brand might even be dead; he didn't know. No one did. The man had blown up an entire restaurant, killed his wife, and then ran off again like some mythical creature rather than a person made of bone. This time Brand had been injured though, if Jerry was to believe the television.
He had waited in the hotel room a hundred miles out from Daytona, waited on Brand to send him some kind of return email, waited in a drunken stupor that left him with headaches every morning and a fresh
drink in his hand shortly after he woke. He did this until the news showed before and after pictures with the headline of Brand Strikes Again like this was a Star Wars film rather than reality. Jeffrey had set his drink down and watched, understanding why he hadn't heard anything back. The man had been too busy murdering his ex-wife and burning down buildings. Jeffrey set the drink down and hadn't picked it back up, just watched and watched and watched as people kept speculating on Brand's whereabouts. Bottom line? No one knew, but he took a knife in his gut during the whole thing, and not even Brand would be able to go out and kill with a hole in him.
Twelve hours sober and he was thinking about calling his agent. Thinking about getting her on the phone with the publisher to let them know exactly what he had been doing and exactly what he still wanted to do. He could go back to Daytona, a two-hour drive, go directly to the warehouse and get inside. He'd pay the guard whatever he wanted, a grand, two? He'd expense it all out to the publisher and he would witness exactly what the place looked like on the inside. Then he would flee the country to one that wouldn't extradite him when the government found out exactly what he'd done. The point was, if he were to do this, it had to be now. While Brand was hurt. Not tomorrow, not the next day, not postponed because Jeffrey was too drunk to drive down there. He thought he probably had a six-hour window to make all this happen, and that was based on fear more than anything else. It'd been a day since Brand destroyed the restaurant, and while Jeffrey was no doctor, he didn't think Brand would be able to get down here and start working immediately. He would have to take time, would have to get his stomach fixed. Jeffrey just didn't know how long it would take. Didn't know the severity of the injury. Six hours is all he wanted to give himself. Two hours to get down there, two hours looking around inside, and two hours to get back. He would let the people in his phone know—hey, a killer may be coming your way in the near future, so you might want to arm up—and then he was getting on a plane and getting out of here.
He couldn't be expected to sacrifice himself to Brand. He couldn't be expected to give up the chance of writing this book in its entirety—of having it play out to the very end—for an outside risk.
The police could protect the people in his phone, and if they couldn't, he'd fly them to wherever he relocated if they wished.
Six hours to make this happen and then he needed to be gone, from this country, from this boiler with no release valve.
* * *
"You not gonna say nothin' right?"
"No, man. I'm paying you to open it. Just let me in and you'll never see me again, I promise," Jeffrey said.
"Why do you want in here?"
The Florida sun didn't care what anyone was saying beneath it, or how much time this kid wasted asking Jeffrey questions—it only knew to continue burning and roast anyone that stood outside too long. Jeffrey had his hat on, though at this point it was a silly thing to wear. His hair was sweating through it and his arms were already turning red. Maybe Brand had left the air on inside the warehouse. He couldn't imagine why the man wouldn't, certainly cost wasn't a factor. In The Brightest Killer, he traced Brand's finances as far as possible, and while he couldn't say Brand's exact net worth, it was north of ten million. Either way, Jeffrey wanted out of this heat and away from this redneck kid as fast as possible.
"Look, the thousand dollars in your hands is all you need to know. If you don't like it, or don't want the money, I'll wait until tonight and see if the guy working that shift wants the money. Are you going to let me in or not?"
The kid's hand went to his pants' pocket, feeling the envelope there, not wanting to let the thick wad of money out of his possession. "Was just curious, ain't no big deal. I'll let you in, just don't fuckin' take nothin', okay?"
"I'm not taking anything. I just need to look around."
The kid went to the keypad installed in the door, typed a few numbers, and then let the world finally get a glimpse of Matthew Brand's work.
"You're not coming in with me," Jeffrey said, his hand on the large overhead door. "If you come in here later, I can't stop you, but I promise you you'll regret it with everything you have. I'm not going to do anything to you, one way or the other, but if you go in there, someone else will."
In his mid-twenties, and expecting a life of everyday pot usage and probably drinking on the weekends, the kid looked at Jeffrey with a dull sense of understanding. He didn't nod, didn't put the keys away, just looked at him.
"You get what I'm saying?" Jeffrey asked.
"I won't go in."
"Good. Now head to the front. You really don't even want to look in here."
Jeffrey waited until the golf cart that carried him down here disappeared around the corner. He took a second to look up and down the road, seeing the tree that he hid in a week ago. He almost wished he'd stayed at home to begin with, never came to Daytona, never climbed the tree and watched Brand enter this place. The thought of his own death had passed; Jeffrey felt he would survive this but wasn't sure about the people close to him. He was going to make it, and with any luck, they would too. He was made to do this. He was made to write about Matthew Brand, and if denied that, if he had remained at home while Matthew went through the world taking what he wanted, he would have denied his reason for living. This was how his life was supposed to go, standing outside of surely the most disgusting sight he would ever witness. Jeffrey wrote the first book and he would write the sequel, because Matthew's and his lives were intertwined.
"You're wasting time," he said into the hot, humid air.
He pulled open the door just enough for him to slip under and then let it back down.
Not a single window lined the walls but light poured down from the ceiling with beautiful clarity. No yellow, dingy light—just white beauty that illuminated everything in front of Jeffrey. The cool air defied the sun's will outside, refusing to bend to the heat all those miles away.
Jeffrey looked at a genius the world would never truly appreciate.
The world around him was created inside someone's mind, just one person's, and that alone was frightening. The rest of the world, the places Jeffrey walked around all day, were created by hundreds, thousands, millions of human minds. Each person molding the world in a slight way, whether a beggar lying on the street, or a businessman parking his BMW. Here though, in this place, only one person had created everything that Jeffrey viewed. Made a world unto himself, without any help.
And it was so beautiful.
Jeffrey's eyes saw the glass box on the other side of warehouse and knew magic would happen there. This place was missing the large metal canisters that had been in the cabin. Here Brand had gurneys, six of them all surrounding the glass box, perhaps thirty feet from it creating a circle around it. A large tube ran from each gurney—Jeffrey couldn't tell if it was plastic or glass—but he could see through them. Inside were the wires that Jeffrey wrote about in his book, the things that carried electrical currents and blood. The things that carried souls. Four of the gurneys were empty, but Jeffrey could see that two contained the specimens meant for them.
He pulled out the disposable camera he'd picked up on the way over and began snapping photos. He could write about this. He could use his memory to tell a story. All of that had served him well in the past, and he would remember the details of this room for the rest of his life. Pictures though, to tell this story through words as well as images—the world was almost not ready for it. He walked forward, clicking the camera as he did. Behind both the circle of gurneys and the glass box, was a glass tube that stood on one end without any supports, without any metal underneath to keep it from brushing the concrete. If Matthew wanted, he could walk over and simply shove it to the ground, sending pieces of glass flying through the air and breaking whatever was inside.
Jeffrey found himself standing in front of it, camera in hand.
Six clear tubes connected to the side of the object, all of them surely making their way back to the gurneys. This was the impetus of everyt
hing. This was what Brand originally thought of twenty years ago, everything else in the room was only a conduit for this to work. A piece of equipment that could take, could understand, the life of someone dead—programmed to extremely detailed specifications, and then through blood and other bodily materials, rebuild those specifications. Gunfire destroyed the last one, smashed until nothing was left but pieces of wire and shards of glass. A dream murdered, and here it was again, standing by itself quietly in this room. Capable of something that shouldn't be possible. Waiting on its owner to get back and start everything up, to let it complete its purpose.
Jeffrey took a picture.
He turned around and looked at the people lying on the gurneys. One was tiny, the size of a doll, wrapped in tubes and wires as if it was a package ready to be mailed. He walked to it, his camera at his side, wondering if the boy was still alive. Wondering if the grandson of Hilman's murderer was still breathing. Or was the boy laying still, the smell of death coming off him?
Looking down at him, Jeffrey saw the tubes filling with blood and emptying regularly across his body. His eyes were closed like he was sleeping. A tube went deep into his throat but it remained clear. The holes that drilled into his chest, his back, his forehead, all were slightly red, but not infected. Looking closer, he thought the skin may have begun to grow around the plastic tubes, accepting them as part of the child's body.
Jeffrey didn't tear up. He only took another picture.
He went to the woman, Linda Lucent, who had been stolen from her home when police surrounded it. If the child looked like a package, the woman looked like a mummy, wrapped in the same things as the child, but stretching over a much longer distance. Her hair spread out amongst the web of tubes going into her nose and mouth, as well as the wires coming from her ears. The child had been blessed, if that was possible, with the surgery Brand performed. Lucent looked like she might have been born machine and these tubes grew out of her like fingernails. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling, two tubes exiting her mouth, stretching it open like some grotesque caricature of fellatio. Her eyes had shrunk into her skull, dried out by her never ending staring. They looked to be turning into raisins, wrinkling as they dried. If she ever walked again, she would never see anything else. Soon they would be little more than soft pieces of fruit lying in her head. Jeffrey looked down at the rest of the body and saw her holes hadn't been given nearly the care of the boy's. The skin surrounding the tubes peeled back, red and scabbed over. Dried blood splattered most of the tubing. Either time had been running out for Brand or he hadn't cared what happened to the woman.
