by David Beers
Her ears found something she wasn't looking for, the whine of a teapot on a stove, the whole world sounding like an emergency.
* * *
Matthew knew death surrounded him. Knew the weapons he hung the first week he rented this place were being triggered, that they were fulfilling their purpose, murdering everything in their path. He also heard the high-pitched scream the Conductor made, knowing it was fulfilling its purpose as well. Everything around him was in harmony with why it was created: the police were hunting him, the guns were killing, the Conductor was using blood and his genius to create—and for the first time in years, with all this chaos surrounding him, Matthew felt himself completing his own purpose.
He stood in front of the glass box, watching as it heated. Electricity flirted around the corners of the box, climbing from space to space like spider webs. A bolt shot across the container, lighting up the inside as bright as a string of lightening across the sky. Matthew didn't close his eyes and didn't look away. He knew what came next because he designed it; he had seen this all years before anyone thought it possible. Whatever was happening around him, the silenced machine guns, the people screaming, and the whine of the Conductor—all of it was secondary, somewhere away in the distance. He was present in this moment, twenty years in the making.
Another bolt. Then another. The box, and the larger room, lighting up as electricity crashed inside. Silent lightening illuminated Matthew's face. The hair on his skin stood straight and his body tingled as some of the electrons inside the box escaped, forced out by the pressure growing inside. They jumped to his skin like tiny bugs, but he didn't move. His hands were shaking again, and inside the glass a ball of great light grew.
Soon.
* * *
Allison saw the man she had come to kill. He stood with his back to her, his back to them all—those that came to take him away and now lay discarded amongst the floor like forgotten toys. Brand's arms at his sides and not a weapon to be seen anywhere. Standing as if this was a beach and the ocean lay before him, the tide ebbing in around his toes.
Allison followed his gaze and understood.
She was too late. A large box, made of glass, now looked almost like a light bulb. Inside, she could see endless electricity shooting around inside. It hurt to look at, her eyes begging her to turn away and shield them from the light. She didn't. She watched from twenty feet away as electricity continued to consume the empty space inside.
Her whole body flinched as a single bolt escaped the glass structure and shot to the ceiling.
Brand didn't move.
Another escaped.
And another.
The electricity was grounding itself on the building. Everywhere it touched, a fire burned in the blackened area it left.
The building was soon in flames, and the electricity continued its forced escape from the box, creating more fires and picking up its intensity. Each bolt that exploded outside created a deafening thunder that drowned out both the dying and that incessant whine.
She took a step closer, her gun dropping a few inches as her mind refused to focus on anything but the glory in front of her. The electricity inside the box was focusing, all of it seeming to search for a single place on the floor. It no longer sparked around randomly, but resembled laser beams all pointing at the same spot. She stared at it, at the beauty of perfect light and perfect clarity, even as stray runners continued creating fires in the rafters.
The box darkened, or rather, turned opaque and blocked out her view of the lightening. It happened slowly, so that at first Allison didn't notice, but after a few seconds, she could only see the lightening shooting across the ceiling—one of the dead machine guns now on fire.
The beauty gone, momentarily, Allison thought of her daughter—of why she had come.
* * *
Matthew's mouth was dry, his palms sweaty and twitching, his whole body feeling like it might explode from the electricity flowing through him. He didn't budge.
The glass grayed out and Matthew dropped to his knees, tears running down his face and mixing with his sweat. He put his hands together in front of him as if he were praying to a God. Maybe he was, maybe this was his God: his son who he was so close to meeting once again.
The clarity of untouched glass started at the top of the box, the opaque grayness washing away in streams of invisible water, flowing from some unseen center at the top. Streaks of clarity and Matthew could see inside. A smile bloomed on his face as large as any happiness ever witnessed. He saw through, saw the single ball of light in the center of the glass sphere.
"Dad?" The voice echoed out into the fire filled chamber. "What's going on?"
Matthew bowed all the way down to the concrete floor so that his forehead touched it. Tears bled from his eyes as his body heaved up and down with sobs.
The first shot rang out across the building.
* * *
Everyone in the building heard the voice. The voice of a teenager. The voice of someone questioning what was happening around him, not understanding and scared. The voice of someone alive.
Allison's head cocked to the side just as Matthew bowed to the voice speaking to him.
He was right, she thought.
Then the sound of a single bullet cracked into the air, and the entirety of the room opened fire on the man and his boy.
Chapter Forty Two
She ran past the body, barely glancing down. It laid still, bullets holes filling up with blood and spilling over. She ran past, to the gurneys, the metal trays holding bodies wrapped in gauze and plastic tubing. She found her husband, the tallest of the three bodies, and ripped out tubes until she could see his face. His hollowed out face.
Allison screamed.
What she saw might once have been her husband, but no more. His face was still as bruised as when he had left her house. His hair the same color. The rest of his face though, did it even resemble Jerry? His skin was wax, pale and almost translucent. His skull looked deflated, like the bones had constricted in on themselves, and his skin hung off in large folds like play-doh. His eye lay on the gurney next to him, the vein that had connected it to his brain lying lifelessly on his cheek. She reached for his hand and felt dead, cold skin. Even the skin on his hands tried to melt from his bones.
Allison released his hand and turned back to the room, tears streaming down her face and feeling the world around her turning hazy. People were everywhere, addressing the dead and dying, some searching the room with weapons drawn. She ran forward, not knowing where she was going but only knowing that she had to keep looking, had to find her daughter.
"MARLEY!" She screamed into the warehouse. "MARLEY, WHERE ARE YOU?"
She ran in and out of rows that held equipment she could not begin to understand, searching frantically but seeing almost nothing. The room was a strange place, a confused mix of objects and people and none of it was Marley. None of it was the only thing that mattered in this world and she felt her breath rushing too fast from her lugs, felt her vision begin to swim in a hazy world, but she couldn't slow down, couldn't stop looking, had to keep running forward.
"I found her!" A voice echoed across the warehouse, creeping high above the sounds of groans and bodies being moved.
Allison stopped, wiping at tears.
"I found the little girl!"
She heard herself whimper, like a dog unable to come in from the cold, but she didn't move.
"Over here!"
The whimper stopped and her feet moved again, not worrying the least about whether or not she would fall on the ground from lack of oxygen, only following the voice of whoever was screaming. Following the voice to her daughter.
Allison rounded a corner to see a group of people surrounding a gurney, pushed up against the wall—somehow, and God bless that somehow, clear of all the destruction around her. She charged to the gurney, pushing people out of her way as they unstrapped the body from the metal slab. Marley wasn’t moving, her eyes closed as if she was
asleep. Allison knocked people away from her daughter and reached for the little girl’s neck, trying desperately to feel for a pulse.
"She's alive, ma'am," Allison heard someone say above her, but it was like someone whispering to her through a pillow.
She felt the beautiful soft pulsing of blood in her daughter's neck and buried her face there, crying, wrapping her arms around Marley.
Part IV
Epilogue
Chapter Forty Three
Allison climbed the ten concrete steps she was accustomed to, opened the door she knew well, and walked into the receptionist area.
Long Meadows Psychiatric Institute.
“Hi, Mrs. Moore,” Truitt said from his desk.
“Hi, Truitt,” Allison answered, walking to him. She picked up the pen and scribbled her name and the time down on the sign-in sheet.
“Having a good day?” He asked.
“Sure am,” she nodded, smiling at the twenty-something year old. “Will be better after I see her.”
“Enjoy it,” she heard him say as she walked onward.
She moved down this same hall every day at five-thirty, coming straight from work. She never thought of going to the gym or heading home to work on chores. Most of the day, even eighteen months later, she thought of Marley. Thought of getting here to this place and spending the few hours they could with each other. Every night Allison left and went home, left Marley here even thought she wanted to bring her daughter with her. Allison wanted to take Marley home, wanted to hold her in the bed that Allison and Jerry had once shared. She couldn’t though, not if Marley was to have any chance of improving. She needed to be here, with doctors that could try and work her out of this nearly comatose shock.
Allison turned down a few halls and found her daughter’s room. She knocked on the door—not that it mattered—and opened it.
Her heart broke every day at the sight. Broke fresh, and made her want to weep an endless supply of tears. Marley sat on the other side of the bed, wearing a white gown, and stared out the window before her. She didn’t turn around at the sound of the door opening.
“Hey, babe. How are you today?” Allison asked.
Her daughter didn’t even tilt her head in response.
Allison closed the door and walked to the other side of the bed, taking a seat next to Marley. Her hair was brushed, but not to the specificity that Allison liked it. Or maybe it was, Allison didn’t care. She would brush it anyway, just like she did every other day. Allison would brush and tell Marley about her day at work and ask questions that wouldn’t be answered. Allison was at a local insurance company now, managing a small team of sales people. She got off at five every day and never had to worry about spending a night in a different city.
Jerry had been right and she so wrong. Now he wasn’t here and Marley didn’t speak, and Allison finally understood the truth of what Jerry had said.
She pulled her brush from her purse, but didn’t bring it to Marley’s hair yet. She had an hour, no need to rush anything.
Allison felt her phone buzzing inside her purse.
No one called during this hour. Not that Allison had many people that would call her anymore, not too many friends, and the ones she had knew where she went from five-thirty to six-thirty each day.
She took the phone out and saw an Arizona number she didn’t recognize.
“Just one second, honey. I need to see who this is,” she said to Marley. “Hello?”
“Agent Moore?” A man asked, the voice familiar but only vaguely.
“This is Allison Moore. I’m not with the F.B.I. though. Who is this?”
“This is Dr. Riley, um, Mrs. Moore.”
“Hey!” She said into the phone. “How are you doing?”
“Not well, Mrs. Moore. Something’s happened.”
“What can I do for you? I don’t work for the bureau anymore, but it’s nice to hear your voice, Dr. Riley.”
“I’m not even sure who I should be calling. Not you, I guess. Maybe you can call the right people?”
Nothing in his voice matched the happiness or levity in Allison’s.
“What’s going on?”
“The Vault, Mrs. Moore. I opened it an hour ago. I’ve been working on it ever since we last spoke, a few hours each night, trying to understand what he was hiding. I don’t even know how to say this. He was hiding himself, Mrs. Moore. In our systems, in digital space, he had copied his entire genetic structure. He recreated himself while he was inside the Silo.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I went to the Silos this morning, and Arthur Morgant is gone. He’s not here. Brand’s ghost, which I guess was in our machines, must have inhabited his body…and fled.”
Chapter Forty Four
Jeffrey stood on his balcony and looked out across his lawn. The mid-afternoon sun caused sweat to bead on his bare chest, his skin a deep brown. How had he not done this before? How had he spent so many days inside his house rather than out in the sun?
A woman lay next to him, not looking out over the yard, but lying in a chair letting the sun wash over her. Jeffrey had seen every inch of her body more times than he could count, and while he hadn't tired of it yet—he found the grass beneath him more fascinating right now. The lawn stretched out for acres. He'd thought about building a small winery on it and hiring a few people to run the operations. Nothing that he would sell, only personal usage. The perfectly cut lawn was treeless, the lines his landscapers created looking almost like a baseball field. Trees did encircle the vast expanse of green, each one tall with plenty of leaves. Jeffrey didn't know what kind they were and really didn't care. He cared about what they looked like, and to him the entire place looked perfect. The woman lying next to him looked perfect. The balcony he sat on, all perfect.
He took a sip of the drink next to him. He needed to take it slow. For himself. For the woman he was sharing his house with now. Drinking all day, every day, was becoming a thing of the past. No Twelve Step Program needed, but if he let himself he would still find himself buzzing every day. He'd like it, but Angeline probably wouldn't stand for it too long. It surprised him that he cared what she thought, but he did. He hadn't verbalized it over the six months since she moved in, but he knew it internally: she was the reason the drinking had slowed. He liked having her around; he hadn't said the 'L' word yet, but he might be getting close. His selfishness kept him from telling her, the place inside that wanted his life to be his and no one else's. The part of him that traded...
Don't go there.
A year and a half later and his mind still brought it up. Jeffrey wondered if he would ever be able to let it go, to let the past just live in the past and allow his new life to continue forward.
Probably not, because every single book he signed had a cover shot of Matthew's body lying face down, full of bullets and dead. He hadn't wanted to use it but his publisher insisted. Most bookstores refused to display it, hiding it in the back under true crime, but that only helped boost sales.
The book came out six months ago and—
Well, life changed. He hadn't needed to move to Paris, but he had moved away from his former house in California. He went south. Nearly to the Mexican border and found this little slice of paradise, which he bought and then asked Angeline to share with him. No neighbors for miles and it took twenty minutes to get to a grocery store, but Jeffrey kind of felt that if he never saw anyone again, that would be fine. Him, his woman, and this place were all he needed. The rest of the world could do whatever it needed to keep spinning.
The sales poured in and his publisher was requiring him to do media appearances, but that was really the only time he left this place. He had his food shipped in; any entertainment they needed could be found on the premises. The sales though...were beyond anyone's foresight. Six months number one on the New York Times and all that, which was done easily enough when selling nonfiction. The powerful part was that it outsold fiction titles as well. He was moving a hun
dred thousand units a week, unheard of in publishing. He outsold his advance and now checks were just adding up in his bank account. He didn't even look anymore, just knew he had more money that he would ever spend in this life. More money than any potential children would ever be able to spend either.
And yet, he didn't want to spend.
He didn't want to do anything but sit inside this house, or on this balcony, and enjoy the world as a near recluse.
Therapy.
The word came up more and more. His brain spitting it out almost as often as it tried to bring up Matthew Brand's name. He didn't throw therapy away as he did Brand, though. He knew he needed it. He knew he had to tell someone what happened those last few weeks before the world made him a hero and the F.B.I. publicly thanked him for his help. Before the country decided that he had been the one to end the fever stretching from coast to coast. He needed to tell someone that he never wanted to turn in Brand. That he didn't even want Brand caught, that if anything, he wanted him to have his son. Someone needed to know that, because the longer Jeffrey kept it in, the further he sank. He named the feeling last week, when he woke at three in the morning, his hands extended straight into the air and a dream quickly fading that had something to do with Matthew's body lying dead on concrete. He slowly let his hands down, knowing that sleep wouldn't come to him anymore that night. He left the bed as quietly as he could and went out to the balcony. The air felt cool on his skin, but his robe managed to keep him relatively warm. He sat there until the sun came up, struggling to name what was happening inside him.
Sinking.
That was the word.
Deciding, maybe consciously and maybe not, that he no longer cared for this world and no longer wanted to live in it. The purpose of his book had been to explain a different side of Brand, to tell the truth of what happened—both the first and the sequel. Both sold radically well, the sequel on pace to break every publishing record ever, and yet no one understood. They devoured the book but it did nothing to actually nourish their minds. Matthew Brand was the devil and if anything, his book had named him that. Jeffrey wrote about how far a man would go for his son, but the world saw it as a book about a serial killer. He wrote a book about someone he legitimately respected, and the man was dead now because Jeffrey sold him away. Sold him so that he didn't have to move out of the country. Forfeited Brand's son's life, too.
