by David Beers
Matthew stood against the fence, in between the large pines planted for the very purpose of keeping lookers from coming to catch a glimpse. He pressed his face up to the fence, looking through tiny cracks at the children running around, clueless that they were being watched by anyone but their teachers. He looked for the little brunette girl named Marley Moore. Trying to get a glimpse of the girl that was never going to grow into a woman. He had found one picture on the school website, that an errant administrator had put for advertising purposes most likely.
A week and a half ago he had been all that the world could think about, and in his recovery, he'd been nearly forgotten. Which was fine. That was how he wanted it, because in a few hours, he would be in everyone's mouth again. In a few hours, the world would never hear from him again and Allison Moore would wonder for the rest of her life where he had gone.
He figured that out on his way out to Phoenix.
He didn't know if he'd beaten the demon inside him for good, the one that said notice me, pay attention here because something great is going to happen, but he knew that for now it had to disappear. He had to disappear, to take these last two people and go create his family. There was still Jeffrey Dillan to deal with, but his warehouse hadn't been possessed yet, so maybe he could be dealt with a little later. These two here in Phoenix, Jeffrey wherever he went to, and then Hilman and he could live where people wouldn't chase them. Where they could do whatever they wanted.
First though, Allison needed to pay for what she ordered.
His eye caught the straight brown hair pulled back in a pony-tail. His hands tensed on the wood in front of him. He wouldn't try to take her now. His stomach still felt like corrosive acid was leaking into it when he exerted any effort, and here, she would be missed if she didn't show up to class. No, there would be a better time.
He just needed to wait.
* * *
The glass doors to The Wall opened for her, but not from the card she passed along the building's security device. The glass doors had remained shut when she tried that, letting her know that she was no longer welcome here. Things moved quick, and the moment Art removed her from the case, someone else realized she would no longer need access to this place.
Allison had to press a button and state her purpose before the doors opened.
She went in and met a guard at the front who made her a small paper pass and asked her to sit in the waiting room while Dr. Riley came for her. She did what he asked, not remembering his face from when she'd been here before. Maybe he was new or maybe she had just been too busy to see everyone. She sat down in the large leather chairs and looked at the magazines on the table. Science Daily. The Journal of Science. Nothing about law enforcement here. Nothing about the purpose of this place; the people here only cared about the science, keeping prisoners from escaping was a secondary concern. It was such a different mindset and maybe that was how Brand escaped in the first place. Maybe if Riley and his crew had been a bit more concerned with keeping Brand locked away rather than understanding his mind and the magic they were playing with, a lot more people would be alive.
"Agent Moore?" Dr. Riley called from behind her. He sounded unsure, like he didn't know if he was in trouble or why she would be here. She stood from her chair and turned around.
"Hi, Dr. Riley. Please call me Allison." She extended her hand and he took it.
"I'm sorry about you being removed from the case."
"It happens."
They looked at each other awkwardly for a moment, neither breaking eye contact nor saying anything.
"How can I help you, Allison?"
"I'm here as a civilian, and I really just need to take my mind off of some things. Would you mind showing me around? I'd appreciate it more than you know."
"They moved most of your guys out of here last week. Not that they'd been doing much. Once the operation moved east, what we did here didn't matter as much. I haven't lost my job though and that's a blessing. I still may, but as of now I'm employed. You're welcome to come look, we've actually made some pretty good progress into Matthew's head."
"Thank you," Allison said. She wanted to say more, to say sorry for never looking back once she left, to say sorry for showing up here because the rest of her life was in tatters. None of it would really matter to this man. He would show her around and he wouldn't care in the slightest what was going on outside of these walls; he probably felt relieved at having not been involved any longer. So instead of talking, she followed him into the bowels of The Wall.
"What were you wanting to see?" Riley asked as they walked.
Everything looked exactly the same, white floors and white walls, but the business inside this place had changed. When she was here last, the place was full of people in suits and ties rushing up and down the halls—heading into makeshift offices to discuss whatever new documents they carried. The place had been a beehive and now looked like someone gassed the hive. Empty corridors and empty rooms.
"I'm not even sure. Whatever you want to show me, for as long as you'll show me. I just need some time away."
"Okay. I suppose we can look at Matthew some. We've uploaded all of our data into the F.B.I. mainframes, and there's not much we have left to map out. He has a vault in his head, which sounds insane, but it's true. We've been hacking at the vault the past few weeks, with some success—not a lot, but some. It's like chipping at a large rock and seeing flakes come off. We get bits and pieces of things that he didn't want us to see, but as a whole, it remains locked up. Brand is," he paused as he sat down at his computer and moved the mouse around. "Miraculous. Come over here on this side and I'll show you what we have."
Allison walked to Riley's side of the desk, standing beside his chair.
"You see this, here? This is his brain."
She was looking at a house on the screen. A large thing surrounded by a high fence, barbed wire wrapped over the top. The yard was dead, no sign of green anywhere, and on either side of the winding pathway leading up to the house were huge dogs held to their spots by chains hooked to posts that were planted in the ground. The yard, the dogs, the fence, all of it looked like a decrepit property run by someone who hated the world.
Until she looked past the yard and saw the house. It was beautiful. Stone laid upon stone, with a high roof that seemed a mere breath away from touching the clouds. The windows all revealed white lace curtains blocking the view inside.
The property wasn't fleshed out of a cartoon, but real, looking alive. She could see the dogs breathing, watched one lie down in the brown dirt.
"What is this?" She asked.
"We had it designed when we kept getting lost inside his mind. We were pointing and clicking on the parts of the brain we had mapped out, but Brand somehow managed to put down traps for us and it would completely shut the computer down, which would then take a day or two to get back up. This yard here? That was one of the hardest spots to navigate, because at first we had no idea there was a fence up, then we didn't realize there was this barbed wire." He made air quotes as he said the word, "And these dogs? Jesus, that took a while. It became too much marking down everything on the actual spots of his brain, so we created this."
"But the dogs are moving?"
"Yeah, this thing isn't static, it isn't like a picture because the map of Brand's brain isn't static. What we gathered from him is all here, but it's constantly moving, constantly adapting."
"How is that possible? His mind is no longer hooked up, right?"
"Yes and no. Physically, he's gone. However, after being hooked up for ten years, the system learned everything about him—how his brain reacts, where he wanted things to move and when, how his thought patterns changed. That doesn't mean we control this thing, only that it's going to move and adapt the way Brand would if he was still hooked to a Silo. Yesterday we lost a dog. The chain is still there in the back of the yard, but it ran into the house and is probably lost somewhere inside. To be honest, I haven't played around with this th
ing much since the cops were removed last week. The vault is inside the house, as well as other traps. Most of it's mapped out, but we could probably find more tricks he set up. He knew he couldn't get the information he wanted if he closed himself off to our systems, but he did everything he could to keep us out."
Allison understood why she had lost her job. Brand wasn't human. He was something from another planet, something that wasn't meant to be born here on Earth, something that was almost a blasphemy to the rest of God's creations. She couldn't compete, couldn't be asked to stop someone like this.
"What if I had been put in a Silo for ten years?"
"It would be like the other two prisoners we have. Point and click on parts of the brain to understand what they mean. Not complex. The arduousness of what he's done here, I can't even begin to describe it. I would have said it was impossible before I saw it, that no one could program their mind against our computers, but he has. Would you like to see the vault?"
Impossible. That's the word Riley used to describe this little scenario set up on his computer screen. Everything this man had done was looked at as impossible until he did it. Then it simply became part of his legend.
"Yes, show it to me, please," Allison said.
He clicked along the path and the screen moved as if someone was actually walking. The dogs didn't try to leap off their chain, only laid or sat with their eyes following the invisible stranger on the path they were meant to guard.
"Why don't they do anything?"
"Brand didn't want them to alert us. When we were stumbling along here blind, we couldn't hear or see the dogs, which are just traps, because they didn't jump out at us. We would just basically walk into them and then the computer would lock up. At one point we had to bring in a whole new computer because of his traps."
Riley navigated the path with the speed of someone who had done this countless times. Through the heavy wooden door and then into the house. He didn't slow down once inside, and what Allison saw was a blur as he walked forward. A mirror standing the length of the wall, a black hole in the middle of the floor that seemed to drop forever as Riley trotted around it. He went up a staircase, going to the left and right because large spikes were driven up through the wooden floorboards; spikes so long they would pierce completely through the foot with multiple inches to spare. She could see from the top of the staircase that there were others stairs, some going down, some going up, and she began to get the sense that this place was more a maze than a house—that if she were to take control of the mouse she would quickly find herself lost.
He opened a door and there it stood.
A bank vault sat in the room, touching the ceiling in its vastness. It stretched across half the room, more than twice the length of a man.
"Here it is," he said. "It's literally the closest thing I can think of to represent what he did, and the combination is beyond anyone I know. The metaphor I used about flakes coming off a rock might not have been apt, but until you saw this, it would be hard for you to understand. When we mapped out the dimensions of the vault, there were things we learned. Little things. One was his hate for Linda Lucent. Perhaps he had meant to put that inside, maybe he didn't, but there was residual knowledge on the outside of this thing. I sent it up the chain of command, but I'm not sure how much help it was given the attention she was already getting. There's probably more information inside this thing," he said, pointing at the screen, "than we would know what to do with. Unfortunately, I don't think we can open it."
Allison stared, almost not believing any of this. The hate for Linda Lucent was a residual on the outside of it? What did that even mean? Like instead of Brand leaving fingerprints on something, he left hate? The whole thing was completely beyond her.
"Why can't you get in? Couldn't you blast it open?"
"If we tried something like that, kind of wiring the piece of his brain that hides this thing, the whole structure would collapse. We would get inside, but in doing so, the whole house would fall down around us. The impact would destroy the computer, but more importantly, we would have no way to get back inside his brain. Everything would disappear. He couldn't delete anything he came across or anything he gave us, but he set everything up so perfectly we have no chance of getting to it."
"What would it take to get in?"
Riley laughed. "If I knew, I'd already be there. We've tried hacking it, we've tried letting the computer hack it. There's a combination of numbers that will open it, but we don't know what they are. Every algorithm we've ran came up empty."
"So you're giving up?"
"We've got other people to look after, and I have to do a good job of making sure I'm not fired over the next couple of months. A lot of people could trace this right back to me and there wouldn't be much I could say."
Allison nodded. "Luckily I think they might have stopped the firings with me, and don't plan on looking much further back right now."
"What else can I do for you, Agent Moore?"
"Nothing else to show me?"
"We could go deeper into his brain, I could let you look around. There's a room created for his son and another for his wife. They're both pretty magnificent. It's hard to look at those and not feel for the guy. Would you like to see?"
She didn't want to look at his son's room. She didn't want to be reminded of Marley, of her not waiting at home for Allison to come back. She didn't want to think about this man's willingness to sacrifice innumerable humans while she couldn't sacrifice a job. Rally though. She felt for Rally because she knew the woman. He was separated from her for fifteen years, and yet he came to the restaurant for her, to take her away and then bring her back because she asked it of him. Allison didn't think that Brand ever entertained thoughts of keeping Rally against her will. Allison had listened to the calls; she understood that his love wasn't a charade.
"Will you show me what his wife's room looks like?"
"Sure. We can go there. Grab a chair from across the room and we'll give it a look."
* * *
The door opened in front of Allison, and while she couldn't actually smell it, she saw the rose petals immediately on the floor. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, covering the entirety of the room. No one who stepped inside here need ever touch the floor. She imagined the sweet smell of flowers reaching her nose if this place actually existed.
The door swung all the way open, and Allison, sitting in her chair, lost her breath.
The ceiling was the moon. There were no painted wooden panels, no bricks or stone, but the actual moon's curvature sinking into the room. It shone a cool, pale light, illuminating everything. Allison walked in, reached up and stretched to her tippy toes, her finger caressing the sand of the moon. It shifted under her hand, but didn't fall to the floor—the moon holding some strange gravity. A shelf lined the wall: a dark, red wood, unbroken as it stretched along the circular room. Allison brought her hand away from the moon, ignoring the statue in the middle of the room, and walked to the wall.
Jewelry was strung along the shelf. Rally's jewelry. Gold necklaces, diamond earrings, bracelets. Nothing was matched, but placed randomly, gorgeously. Allison imagined that if Rally could walk in here, could see this, she would understand he placed everything exactly as he wanted it. She touched a black earring on the shelf, but didn't pick it up. She didn't want to disturb what had been done here. Years of dedication in making everything perfect and she was walking through as an unwanted visitor, prying into someone else's thoughts. Behind the shelf, on the wall, a video streamed, also stretching across the entirety of the room. The video was built directly into the wall, showing different parts of their life together on what looked like an infinite reel. Allison walked along the shelf watching the movie, looking at the couple hugging, the couple arguing, the couple sleeping. There were no parts of the video where they were separated; whatever it showed, be it a good memory or a poor one, they were together.
Rose petals were scattered amongst the jewelry, lightly sprinkl
ed as if they had fallen from the sky in a sparse rain. She found Brand's wedding band sitting under Rally's at the center of the shelf. She stopped, looking down as Rally's sat partly on top of his, leaning on it for support.
Allison looked on for a second and then turned to see the middle of the room.
The statue stood, something carved out of stone in the same manner the Greeks had praised their Gods. It was Rally, standing in a dress, wearing no shoes, her right hand partly covering a smile and her left reaching out in a 'stop' gesture as if someone was making her laugh too hard. Allison reached up and nearly touched the stone, realizing as she did the effort that had gone into this. True, everything was a representation Riley created, but the underlying world was all Brand. The curved mouth, the fingernails that stuck just so far from the fingers. Individual strands of hair somehow showing out of the granite block. The mental effort it took to remember every single detail and then recreate it in stone. Allison didn't deserve to touch it, didn't deserve to take part in it because she had done nothing to create it.
She put her hand back to her side.
Brand had stored his wife here for all those years that he had no one. How many times had he visited this, understanding that he would never see her again, that he could only watch the memories flowing across the screens he created and look on at the statue he built. This was his sanctuary, the place where he kept his wife.
Briefly, for a few seconds only, Allison allowed herself to forget all the people Matthew killed.
* * *
"Want to see his son's room? It's even harder to look at than this."
Allison wiped tears from her eyes, sitting in the chair next to Riley.
"I think I'll pass. Looking at this almost makes you root for him and that's not something either of us needs to do."
"Probably right. It was pretty jarring for me too the first time I saw it. Now I just see a puzzle I'll never finish. Would you like a tissue?" Dr. Riley asked.
"No, I'll be fine. It's hard to see all of that and understand what the woman meant to him."
