The Devil's Dream: Waking Up (5 page)

"Yes, sir. I'll do it."

Jake didn't exactly sigh, but he felt all the rigid tenseness in his muscles dissipate at once. He hadn't even realized his lungs weren't moving—still, holding in oxygen. He breathed out, slowly, not wanting to show his relief.

"Good." Art stood up. "I want to thank you for this. You'll be owed a debt much greater than gratitude. I don't know if you'll ever get paid on it, but right here, right now, I want to say thank you for this." He extended his hand again and Werzen shook it.

"Now, we have a lot of things to cover. A lot. Are you ready for a crash course on Brand and your new life?"

"I suppose I am. What're the next steps?"

"Next step is we all sit in this room and you play Repeat Everything I Tell You. Then, in six hours, you give Matthew Brand a call."

* * *

"
A
rtie boy
! How are ya!" The person on the other end of the conversation shouted.

Henry reflexively backed his face a few inches away from the speaker sitting on the middle of the desk. He didn't expect this enthusiasm and his eyes widened some as he looked at Art, sitting in front of him, behind his desk. They hadn't mentioned this, that the man who answered would sound so...exuberant.

Six hours passed quicker than he thought possible. Art had named the game accurately and they kept Henry’s new life simple on purpose, so that it would be harder for Henry to mess it up, which was fine. Messing up in this meant a painful death and Henry held no delusions about that. Brayden began the lesson with pictures: pictures of Brand's deeds over the past twenty-five years. Pictures of dead cops. Pictures of a baby with holes drilled into his head and wrapped in so much white gauze, he could have been an Egyptian mummy. Henry even saw a picture of a man's tongue, some author who had penned a book on Brand before selling him out to the cops.

Lesson time was over though. Now he was live. Now Brand was shouting on the phone at Art.

It's fine
, Art mouthed, nodding. Henry looked down at the floor, trying to focus back on the call. Trying to focus on the man's voice. It was deep, sounded like a black man, so it must be Brand or the body Brand inhabited or whatever. That didn't matter. Only the plan mattered.

"Matthew Brand?" He asked.

The person didn't answer at first.

"This isn't Art, I presume?"

"No. I'm with Art Brayden, but this isn't him. My name is Victor Trust."

Henry heard Brand draw in air, a deep pull into his lungs. "Victor, huh? They got you to call? Did they tell you who you are?"

Now it was Henry's turn to pause, his turn to add dramatic affect to this whole thing. "They did," he said finally. "They said I'm your son."

"Do you believe them?" Brand asked.

Art and Jake told Henry how smart this guy was, how much he did in his earlier life, before deciding that grotesque experiments on the human body were the way to go. They told him that Brand would surprise him, that whatever he was thinking, Brand most likely had thought it four times already. Henry understood it in theory, but until this moment, he didn't understand the practicality of it. He'd always been the smartest. From grade school on up, he never met anyone that out-shined or out performed him when it came to a test of brains, and here, in this man's second question, he was asking something that Henry hadn't foreseen. That none of them had spoken about. And damn it, the question was an easy one. Here he was, Victor Trust, eighteen years old and being told for the first time he was son to the most famous criminal in the world. Maybe Victor should doubt it a bit. Maybe Victor should have some questions about the veracity of the FBI's claims. But no, the three of them, in all their planning, hadn't even thought the question a possibility.

He didn't have time to be shocked, though. Henry needed to improvise.

"I don't know what to believe. This is the first time I've been told that my father's name isn't Will Trust."

"And what's old William have to say about this? I'm sure they called him in just like they called you in, gave your whole family the run down."

"He says I was adopted. He says they weren't told who my original parents were."

Brand didn't say anything for a bit, the silence dragging out.

"You see, Vick, I'm in kind of an awkward position here. It would be a pretty clever thing for the FBI to plant you like this. Let's say that Art figured out I was tracing Jake's phone. Or rather, let's say Jake figured it out because Art is more of an operations guy, not an idea guy, ya know? Either way, they plant this little bug in my head that you're my son, my actual son, from my loins and all that poetic garbage. Then they brief you, and they have you call me, and you're supposed to what, beg me to stop? Ask to meet me? What's next in this game that they're playing? And you do know what's at stake, right? That if you're not Victor Trust, if Rally wasn't your mother? What's at stake, Vick, is your very life. Because I'll tell you what I'm looking at right now. I see some forty people hanging in front of me, bolts through their hands and feet and wires through the pupils of their eyes. Every one of them is alive, and they all have tubes shoved down their throats so that I can feed them the slop I've concocted. That's what is at stake if you're not who you say you are."

Henry felt sweat on his hands, felt it on his brow, felt his shirt sticking to his back from it. He spent the past six hours learning Victor Trust's history, not how Brand would react to it, and now Brand seemed to know everything.

"You're an actor," Art had told him at the start of this. "Your job is to make him believe you, just like Brando made me believe he was the head of the mafia in
The Godfather.
As long as you believe it, as long as you believe the lie, then he won't have a choice but to believe it too. You are Victor Trust. You're not Henry Werzen and you don't have a brother or a mother you look after. You have two parents and you lived a pretty sheltered life. You're an only child. That's who you are."

That's who he had to be and he hadn't really understood that when he made the call. He was still Henry Werzen, Henry Werzen playing Victor Trust. He couldn't be Henry anymore. He couldn't be his mother's son or his brother's best friend. He had to be this new person.

"You know, man, to be honest, I don't really need to be here. They asked me to call you, and maybe part of it is a plan to get you to chill the fuck out some, but if they're right, and you're going to end the world pretty soon, then sitting here being threatened isn't really where I need to be."

Henry closed his eyes, with no idea of what came next.

"Is Art there with you?" The man asked.

"Yeah. He's listening right now."

"Of course he is. Hi, Art."

"How ya doing, Matthew?"

"You're going to get this boy killed, you know that right?" Brand asked.

Art said nothing.

"Victor, you know there's no way I'm meeting on their terms. If we met the way they want us to, even if you are who you say you are, I'd be shot dead the minute they saw me. But, however stupid this may be, I believe you. I'll be in touch."

They all listened to the click as Brand hung up.

* * *

M
atthew set his phone down
. He had lied to them; he wasn't standing in the lighthouse looking at his work. It was daylight and he couldn't be there during the day. Instead, he stood in his small living room, looking down at his coffee table.
Living room
might have stretched the definition of the term, as the whole apartment consisted of three rooms, all of them
rooms
by the thinnest of walls: a bathroom, a kitchen, and a main room—which Matthew partitioned into a bedroom and a living room.

He couldn't say this was impossible, because it simply wasn't. The person on the other end of that phone could have been his son. The person on the other end of the phone could have Rally's and his DNA. The person could be the last piece of Rally in existence besides the voice in his own head.

All his happiness of last night had been dashed at the sound of the boy’s voice.

Did he want that to be true? He needed to be careful. If the person was his son, fine. If it wasn't, fine as well. Matthew had to first understand, and then be honest about, whether he wanted a son—because if he did, that would change his entire approach to this situation. It would change the way he interacted with the boy and the way he wanted things to unfold. He wouldn't be able to help it; his mind simply wouldn't be able to look at this objectively.

Of course you want him to be your son,
Rally spoke up.
How could you not? You're alone, Matthew. You're all alone besides me and the other voice that keeps trying to break out. You want him to be your son because you don't want to be alone. You don't want to do this no matter how hard you push and how intent you are on completing it. You don't want to. You just want a little bit of justice, even if your idea of justice is completely warped.

He listened to her. Was she right or toying with him? He couldn't tell anymore. He wasn't even trying to remind himself that she didn't exist, that it was just himself speaking to himself.
You don't want to.
That wasn't true. He wanted to; he wanted this whole place to turn into a cold rock floating through space and he wanted it because he wanted justice. Not his own version of justice, but the justice that his son deserved, that she deserved—

And if he's your son, does that change anything?
Rally barged in.
Would justice kill the son that I gave away at birth, to never give him a chance to grow and experience life? Is that not warped?

Tears welled in his eyes. He hadn't cried since Rally's death years ago. When he snapped her neck and left her lying on the floor of that burning restaurant. He didn't fight the tears; he let them come, let them pool and then fall over his eyelids, to his cheeks. If it was his son, what then? What should he do? Continue on with this plan? End the entire world including his own bloodline?

He's not my son. He's Brayden and Deschaine's last ditch effort to stop me. He's their son.

Maybe,
Rally said.
But how do you know? You need to meet him, Matt. You need to go see him and then you can make the decision whether or not he's yours or theirs. You can't know sitting here in this room, looking at this beat up table.

Matthew watched one of the tears fall on his discarded phone.

Go to him. You can find him and you can speak to him, and then you can find out the truth.

So he could; so he could.

J
ake rubbed his head
, gritting his teeth as he did. He watched dandruff fall out, not caring in the slightest if the other two men saw it.

"I'm not sure that could have gone much better, to be honest," he said.

No one had moved and no one had spoken in the last two minutes. They all just sat looking at the speaker on the middle of Art's desk.

"You might be right there," Art said, not looking up at either of them.

"You're kidding?" Henry asked.

"No, he's not. If you think we have some kind of grand plan here to find this guy, you're wrong. I'm not sure if I should tell you that, but I want to be honest with you since it's your life on the line. We're playing all this by ear, and it sounds like he's at least interested in seeing you."

"If he's interested in seeing you that means he can't blow up the world until he does," Jake said.

"You guys just keep making me feel better and better."

Jake smiled at the joke, feeling like a person standing in front of a tornado and watching it move slightly to the right, like it might consider leaving him on the ground instead of ripping him apart.

"
Y
ou gotta look the part
, although your mind was probably better suited for it a day ago than it is now," Charles said.

Joe sat in a chair in front of a mirror and watched as his hair fell to the floor. The clipper’s buzz vibrated in his ear and his head shook as the tiny razors chomped away at his hair. They were giving him a buzz-cut, although he wasn't completely sure why.

"Is this the current style of sex slaves or something?"

"Man, I don't know, but I imagine these dudes aren't looking their best, you know? You already have the coke addict look down, at least physically. We're getting rid of the hair for two reasons, the first being so that you look just a bit more ragged."

Joe saw himself in the mirror before them, still trying to come to terms with exactly how much damage he did over the past few years. He had seen himself in mirrors before, but not this clearly. His eyes were sunken in, not to the point of an Auschwitz victim, but getting close. Bags as large as Santa's hung under his eyes. His cheekbones protruded on his face like his ribs did on his torso. How long would it take for him to look normal again? But that question didn't really matter, did it? He wasn’t trying to look 'normal' again. He planned on continuing this look for as long as possible. That was the idea, to go deeper, not further away.

"What's the second reason?" he asked.

"First the hair, then we can talk about the second reason," Charles said, and kept cutting.

Joe started liking Charles a little bit over the past twenty-four hours. Not
hang out with him when this was over
type like, but Joe was beginning to see him as more than someone who pointed a gun at his face and said he would die. For one thing, the man was dedicated. A different type of dedication than Joe possessed, but dedicated all the same. He gave up a 'career' to look for Brand, and not with any intention of saving the world, but only wanting to kill the man that murdered his brother. To Joe, that counted for something, probably because he sat in a chair having his head shaved for nearly the same reason. Charles wasn't some prostitute with a heart of gold caricature though, not at all. The man was ruthless, and would probably still murder Joe if Joe gave him a reason, but once Joe looked past that, Manning wasn't all bad.

Joe laughed at the thought.
Once you got past his homicidal tendencies, he wasn't such a bad guy.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing, just looking at my head," Joe said.

"Yeah, a bit shocking when you see it, huh? I really don't think they're going to study you that hard. They never do. They simply gas you and then you're gone."

Joe's stopped thinking about Charles. "Gas me?" He hadn't bothered considering what came next. He had been too busy enjoying life, enjoying a world that wasn't fueled by a cocaine addiction. He knew the plan intellectually, the same way he had known detox, but he hadn't given any real thought to it. He figured Charles would deal with it and tell him as needed, except this sounded pretty needed, and Charles threw it around like celebrity gossip.

"Yeah, man. You're going to get a little laughing gas. It's just to put you under so that they can move you without any problems." Charles' hand bared down on Joe's skull, trying to get the last bits of hair sticking up.

"Are you going to tell me how this all works?"

"I only know the part they let me see, man. I'm a delivery boy for these guys. I make pick-ups and I make drop-offs. Anything before and after that is out of my purview."

"So we're just throwing me to the wolves?"

Charles turned the clippers off and set them down. He looked at Joe's head for a second, measuring his work, and then looked into the mirror, meeting Joe's gaze. "That's exactly what we're doing. We're throwing you into a lion's den, and we're hoping the king motherfucking lion shows up. What did you think was about to happen? You know where I stand in all this: on the outside, trying to get a glimpse at Brand. You're my glimpse. You're both of our glimpses. They're going to gas you, then they're going to pull you out of my van, and then they're going to drag you away. That's all I know. They won't kill you, because as far as I understand, you won't be worth much money to Brand if you're dead. That's what we're hoping for here, that and the little thing I'm about to put inside you."

Joe raised his eyebrows. "Inside me?"

"Chill. Nothing is going up your ass. We're going to put a tracking chip inside your skin, at your neck. It'll be just like a miniature GPS so that I can see where you're at. This way, when they start moving you from the original location, I'll be able to follow. Once you've stopped, me and my big dicked goons show up and that's all she wrote for Brand."

"Jesus Christ," Joe said. He left one type of insanity for another. "I'm selling myself as a sex slave with some kind of science experiment GPS nonsense as my backup."

"Joe, if you have another way, I'd like to hear it." Charles took a few steps away and sat down on the couch behind him. "Just tell me any other way we can get you in there and track you, and I'll do it."

Both of them waited in silence. Joe knew of nothing. The plan wasn't
that
bad, if things worked the way Charles said. It was dangerous, sure, but again, Brand's purpose wasn't to kill him. It was to turn him into some kind of human battery, and for that, Joe's heart still had to pump blood. That meant Brand needed to keep him alive for a while—if the GPS tracker went out for some reason, Joe was lost—but if it didn't, and Charles minded his P's and Q's, then Joe might make it out of this.

"You better have bought the best GPS you could find, Charles. Garmin or whatever it is, and it better not stop transmitting or else I'm dead."

Charles raised a tiny piece of metal in between his thumb and forefinger, looking like a miniature pill. "This is the model they use to track whales to the bottom of the ocean. You won't be able to go anywhere that I can't see."

* * *

H
e couldn’t move
his mouth, taped so tight that he couldn't even breathe from it if he tried. Everyone else was taped up the exact same, all of them chained to the van the same as well: hands behind their backs and attached to poles running along the bottom of the walls. He counted the amount of people over and over again, not fully able to believe the total number. Twelve people sitting in this stuffy van with him. Twelve people that probably had parents, siblings, friends. Twelve people that had a life before they ended up in this place. He looked around, wanting to make eye contact with the people he shared this cell with. Some looked back. Some were frantic in their fear, struggling against the ties like a newly caged beast. Some cried, all their noises muffled because of the tape blocking their mouths. White women and white men made up most of the crew, although women and men might be a stretch. Joe wasn't looking at adults here, but at children just a few years into puberty. They wore make-up and clothes that made them look older, but all he only needed a quick look at the lack of wrinkles on their face to know that they hadn't been at life long. Their skin was smooth, even with smeared make up dripping down their cheeks and over the tape around their mouths. Kids surrounded Joe, and quite a few of them were nearing the point of panic attacks.

Some weren’t scared at all, though.

These people resembled the dead, except they still breathed.

Their eyes stood open and their mouths taped shut and their chests moving up and down as their noses took in air, but they weren't alive. Dead people don't know fear and their eyes said that there wasn't anything left to be afraid of. Four of the people in the van were Asians, all of them young girls, and if life meant emotion, then they were all as dead as any coffin’s inhabitant. They knew what came next, that's what Joe thought. All of them experienced some version of this before.

The others, the young kids that looked like prostitutes, they had no idea where they were. Charles or someone like him had picked these kids up off the street, probably propositioning them for sex, and then thrown them in the back of this van.

Joe felt like vomiting.

The guy he had hung out with the past two days, the guy that had injected some kind of tracking device in his neck, he was responsible for this. Him and whatever crew he worked with came across these kids, grabbed them, and now knowingly sold them into the most horrible existence possible. If these kids didn't find their way to Brand, where he would perform unspeakable acts on them, then they would find themselves in basements, sodomized weekly, if not daily. And then, when they grew too old or their 'owners' simply didn't want them anymore, they would be discarded like a hamburger wrapper. Maybe actually thrown into a trash heap, their bodies mixing in with the pounds on pounds of disposable garbage people throw out yearly. And Joe was a part of this now. Joe looked at these kids, none of them over the age of eighteen, and instead of calling the police, he went along with it. He sat here, strapped to the side of the van, helping sell these kids into a life that he couldn’t help them out of, all for his own crusade. All so that he could lay eyes on Brand and then hopefully his hands. He was sacrificing these kids for that crusade, these and how many more to come after these? Because this wasn't the last group to be sold to whoever opened the back doors of this vehicle. More vans would come and more kids like these would be torn from their current lives, no matter how poor, and thrown into something much, much worse.

Patricia. Jason.

Patricia. Jason.

Joe closed his eyes and repeated those names over and over, because they were the only things that could save him in this place. Not his soul, Joe had no doubt that he gave that away long ago, and if in some miracle he bought it back by sobering up, he had certainly sold it tonight. No, his soul was gone. Those two names might be able to save his sanity, though. They might be able to keep him focused long enough to find Brand, to kill him.

He didn't open his eyes again until he heard the back doors of the van open. He saw street lights behind a shadowed figure, and then a canister shooting out a white gas. It landed in the middle of the metal floor with a clang. The door closed as quickly as it had opened and then, in a few seconds, Joe fell asleep—all thoughts of souls and focus evaporating into the void of darkness.

* * *

T
he van had been uncomfortable
. He sat with his knees forced up to his stomach and his hands locked down low behind his back, down around his ass. He couldn't stand, couldn't shift positions, only sit in place and try not to think about the cramps that he couldn't rub out.

Now Joe realized that had been, relatively, a day at the spa.

His hands were above his head, tied with a zip so tight that he couldn't feel his fingers at all. More, the blood that pumped through his arms now drained back to his core, so that the dead feeling in his fingers extended all the way to his shoulders. His feet were strapped similarly, but they were tied in such a way that forced the bottom of his feet against the wall.

Joe hung from the wall, and if it wasn't for the tape covering his mouth, only his vocal chords rupturing would have stopped his screaming. A near constant low groan came from his throat, and he could hear others around him doing the same. Except for the dead people, the ones from the van, they hung silently. Joe's rotator cuffs felt near the point of snapping from the weight of his body falling directly on his shoulders. He wondered, when he could think of anything outside the pain, if his arms wouldn't breaking snap off, leaving him to fall face first to the floor with two bloodied stumps replacing his once attached arms.

The room was dark now, the lights having been turned off once they placed the last person on the wall, feet planted firmly against it so that there was no chance they could attack anyone. No chance that they could fight back at all.

Joe tried to sleep, to find the void that had come to him in the van, but he only found pain and the muffled screams of the children surrounding him.