The Devil's Dream: Waking Up (9 page)

J
oe closed
his eyes and tried to brace himself. He knew what was coming, but he didn't know what it would feel like. He'd only seen people hosed like this, and then only on documentaries about the Civil Rights movement.

He and twenty other people, all naked, stood in a cell made of cinder blocks. He didn't know where it was in relation to the holding cell—the place in which his hands were held above his head twenty-four hours a day and the ligaments in his shoulders slowly ripped apart from the pressure. They gagged and blindfolded him on the way here, removing both when they finally threw him into this room. Other men and women stood around him, all of them naked too. The smell of filth filtered up through Joe's nose, even after so much time spent with it. Perhaps because they were moving around now, or perhaps because a few had pissed themselves standing in this cold room, barefoot and naked, with a large fire house lying in the open doorway.

A man walked in, picked it up, and then screamed behind him.

"READY!"

Joe closed his eyes then. His back was against the wall, having moved as far away as he could get, but he knew it wouldn't make any difference. The water thrown from that hose wouldn't lose its ferocity in an extra ten feet.

Joe put one knee on the floor and tried to cover his head with his arms. He didn't see what the others were doing because he kept his eyes closed. The best bet would be for them all to come together as a group, to try to protect at least some people in the middle, but that wasn't going to happen—none of these people were capable of communication anymore. However they arrived here, their roads had been a much harder travel than his, and this hosing would be just another piece in the destruction of their mind.

Joe heard the water, then screams from the first people it blasted, heard their bodies slamming against the back wall with the
whack
of skin on tile. People shrieked, and he tried to move without opening his eyes, tried to move away from the sound of their shrieking, but in the end the water found him too. It smashed into his ribs—bare because his arms cradled his head—and all the air in his body rushed from his mouth in one heaving push. The water pried down on him, ripping his arms from their position over his face and flattening him against the wall. He tried to slip to the floor but the hose held him up, held him solid while the water wiped the filth from him and burnt his skin with the pressure.

He tried to scream but water filled his mouth as soon as he opened it.

Finally the hose passed, and he heard others screaming as it approached them. He collapsed to the ground, trying to find the air that had left his body. He sucked in and sucked in but nothing came, nothing filled his lungs. And he knew then, knew without any doubt, that death was here. That this whole mess, from traveling the country to detoxing in a strange house had been for nothing because he was going to die in this cell, unable to find a single breath of air.

He felt the water blast him again, dashing his thoughts about oxygen. It was quick though, as if the man in charge of the hose was only doing a once over to make sure he'd gotten everything.

On his hands and knees, naked, Joe's brain screamed at his lungs to work. And eventually, they did, sucking in a huge gasp of air. He fell to the floor, on his side and curled his knees up to his stomach, his eyes open now, staring straight ahead at the man and his hose. The water was off, and the man stood staring at his captives. Joe, shaking, looked across the room and saw many of the others in the same fetal position as he. Some were still trying to find that first gasp of air that had evaded Joe. Some cried. Some remained with that dead stare on their face, virtually unchanged.

Joe looked back at the man holding the hose, but he was leaving, closing the door behind him. Joe lay on the concrete floor—the left over water flowing to the center where a drain awaited it—and shivered. He didn't cry. He didn't think. He only shivered.

* * *

T
he sounds
of the hose disappeared, but Charles could still hear people gasping. He couldn't make out Joe's voice, but Joe hadn't spoken in days anyway. He still lived, though, because Charles still heard the audio.

Charles sat in his house, but had a crew about ten miles away from Welch, ready to move if needed. He would be there with them when they moved, but he couldn’t handle those shitty hotel rooms, with a bathroom about the size of a coffin and the bed not much bigger. The bed was really the problem—his weight just wouldn't allow him to sleep in something like that if he wanted to wake and be able to move at all. (When this was over, he was losing fifty pounds, maybe a hundred—without a doubt.) None of his crew had access to the audio, but he kept them up to date. Though, the audio only showed one thing, that there seemed to be no real end in sight of Joe’s torture. Charles thought that the process would move quicker than this; that Brand would make the pick up fast and then Charles and his crew would be on their way. That wasn't happening, though.

Which was a problem, from what Charles was ascertaining.

He hadn't told Joe that the chip they put in him would be able to pick up audio. Not great quality, of course, because the sounds still needed to pass through a few layers of skin, but Charles could tell what was happening in a general sense. And, in that general sense, Charles didn’t know if Joe could live through this. The chip brought back silence much of the time, so much that Charles wondered whether any of them were even being fed. In fact, during the past forty-eight hours, the first real sounds Charles heard came from this ‘shower’. There was the occasional crying, but even that was sparse. Silence, that's what Charles heard the most of, and he didn't like that.

He turned the sound down on the walkie-talkie connected to Joe and walked to his back door. He opened it and stepped outside onto the porch. He let the door close behind him, feeling a cool breeze blow across him.

What had he expected?

Not this, although he was realizing he hadn't thought through what happened once they put Joe Welch inside. The plan was simple, follow the tracking system, listen to whatever he could hear, and when Brand showed up—kill him. Too simple. Not enough of a plan. Because now the man inside might be dying. He might be starving to death, and Charles had thought the captors would show some level of care until Brand showed up. He thought they would value the merchandise, especially because of its scarcity, but apparently the people handling it didn't give a damn one way or the other.

There wasn't any back up plan. He had no idea what he would do if the GPS started moving and ended up in a landfill somewhere, Joe's dead body tossed in with the rest of the trash. If Joe didn't make it to Brand, then this whole thing ended and Charles went back to the proverbial drawing board.

Charles pulled his pack of cigarettes from his pocket, took one out, lit it and started smoking. The sun fell behind the trees, casting a dying, orange glow across the land in front of him.

He had to hope Joe pulled through. That was the only real option left—to hope. If he died, maybe Charles could cobble together something else, but right now, he only had this. Joe needed to live, needed to get in front of Brand. If he could do those two things, goddamnit, Charles would take care of the rest. Every last bit of it. And after that, he'd give Joe all the cocaine and women he could handle; hell, he'd kill Joe with drugs if that's what the man wanted. He just had to make it there, make it to Brand.

H
enry didn't look
over at his hands or down at his feet. When his head dropped to his chest, he closed his eyes, that way he didn't have to see what lay below him. The pain in his hands somehow radiated all the way to his shoulders, and the pain in his feet all the way to his hips. He couldn't escape the pain; he realized that now. At first he tried bargaining, tried reasoning with the person that did this to him, but the person seemed to have a unique talent of ignoring both screams and pleas.

"Don't do this. Please, God, please don't do this," he had whispered to the man in front of him, the creature. Humans didn't do this to one another. Humans weren't made with the ability to inflict this type of torture.

"This is going to be the easy part, Henry. The hard part comes about twelve hours in. That's when you're going to know real pain. These nails? These are just an appetizer," Brand said and then with a single whack struck a nail, half an inch thick, through Henry's right palm.

Henry screamed with such ferocity that his vocal chords felt near rupture. The nail actually rubbed against his bone, actually moved bones inside his hand as it made room for itself. Spit flew from Henry’s mouth and veins raged in his neck. Blood spurted outward from his hand, falling quickly to the floor. Henry lay on a wooden cross, his arms and legs taped tight to the wood so that he couldn't move while Brand went to work with the hammer.

"You can thank Art Brayden for this interesting device, as well. I would never have considered crucifying people, ya know, if it wasn't for his Catholic tendencies. The Romans, they were onto something here. I imagine I could improve upon the initial design given a bit of time, but this thing really works."

Whack
.

The second nail moved through his left hand and the pain started fading as he started losing consciousness, blackness swarming around the outside of his vision.

"Not yet," Brand said. "You're going to feel this, every last bit of it."

Henry breathed in the smelling salts that Brand placed under his nose, and all his hope of blacking out disappeared in a breath. The pain sprung from in his hands again, his whole being screaming at him to make this all stop.

"These nails are just to make sure you don't go anywhere. Or, rather, that's why the Romans used them. I could simply use the tape, but that wouldn't be as fun, would it? What's going to happen is when I stand you up, all of your organs will sag towards the ground. Especially your lungs. Over time, you're not going to be able to breathe in enough air, and you're going to try and surge upwards to get more of it."

Henry heard Brand move away, not knowing what he was after and not caring. He could only focus on the pain, the burning that went from his palms almost to his heart.

"Eventually though, you won't be able to pull in anymore air and you'll suffocate. You'll suffocate while surrounded by oxygen. That's something, huh? Knowing that if you could just get down off these two pieces of wood, you'd be able to breathe as much as you wanted."

Whack
.

And the greatest pain Henry had ever known birthed in his feet. He looked down and saw the nail was only half way through, and then another
whack
as Brand's hammer sent it the rest of the way. Grinding through his bones and meat, sticking itself deep into the wood beneath his feet.

"There, that should do it," Brand said, standing up and looking at Henry's naked, bleeding body.

Henry remembered little else of how he went from lying on the floor to hanging upright. He could see, now, how Brand did it, although he couldn't remember going through it. Brand hung the cross from the top of the lighthouse; long metal cords stretched down from the ceiling, and so the cross that Henry hung from, actually swung from the ceiling. Henry had hours to think about it, hours alone with only himself and the rest of Brand's victims. It made sense, hanging the cross like this, because how else would Brand have made it stand straight? He could have leaned it against the wall, but that might have missed the desired effect. He could have placed it in some freshly poured concrete, but that would take hours to dry. No, this was the quickest and easiest.

He looked out at the giant metal pole before him, with rings circling it all the way to the top. He looked at the people hanging from the rings, very similar to him, except tubes were shoved down all their throats. Maybe Brand had some kind of breathing mechanism built in that would keep their lungs pumping long after they should have shut down.

The pain in Henry’s hands and feet had dulled, although not disappeared. It wasn't the shocking, all-consuming pain that Brand first delivered; his body somehow tempered it. Somehow said,
if this is what we have to live with, then so be it
. And that gave Henry time to think, time to look around.

His mind went back and forth between the hanging people in front of him and his family. He had called his brother two days ago.
Two days ago
. Had all this really taken place in that amount of time? Had he been stolen from a bed and nailed to a cross in less than forty-eight hours? What had he been thinking? How had he ever let them talk him into something like this? And then to be swept away without reconnecting with his brother, all of it to follow some ideal, some duty he felt towards his country, to this world.

Where was his country now?

Where were the people he was trying to protect?

They weren't here in this room. They weren't beating down the doors of this light-tower and they hadn't helped any of the other people that Brand had dragged in here. He hadn't called Greg again because Art said no. He shook his head, his chin against his chest, his eyes closed. Because Art made the rules. What rules were there in this place, though?

If he moved his legs a bit, surging upwards as Brand said he would, the cross swung. When Henry figured that out, he really put effort into it, pressing down on the nails and pushing his body upward, trying to swing the goddamn cross as hard as he could. Trying to rip it down from the ceiling. Eventually, his feet dripping blood to the floor fifty feet below him, the pain grew too much and he stopped, realizing that the cross wouldn't fall to the ground, that he was stuck. He would rather risk the fifty-foot fall than remain here. It wasn't going to work though; he wasn't going to be able to fall, breaking bones or killing himself, but no longer having to hang like this.

What would his mother do if she walked in here and saw him like this? What would Greg do? His mother would probably sob, and what about Greg? Would his anger still carry him? Would he say I told you so? Or had he forgiven Henry for his stupidity? Henry held no delusions about his decision now—stupidity was a gracious term for this. He sacrificed his family for this. To hang here next to living corpses, to hang here alone, dying second by second.

He apologized to Greg, but had left anyway. He wished he could apologize again, wished he could leave another message and tell his brother how right he had been, and that Henry was sorry and that Greg had to take care of their mother now. Henry wouldn't be able to do it ever again. He knew he wouldn’t make it out of here, that his body would begin to smell as it decomposed on these two wooden posts long before he ever walked again. Maybe someone would bury him eventually, if they showed up in time to stop Matthew Brand, or maybe he would hang here after the world had gone black, his bones eventually being all the evidence left of him up here on this cross. He wasn't going back to his family, though. He wasn't seeing Greg again and he wasn't going to help his mom pay her AT&T bill online.

His thoughts silenced when Brand walked back in. Henry didn't know the time, only that the sun didn’t shine in from above. The coolness of night had replaced the hot, stifled air of the day. Brand hit a button and the entire building lit up, showing a grotesque portrait of naked, distorted bodies. Brand didn't look over at Henry, and for a second, Henry felt relieved. Then Brand started removing his clothes and that relief fled. Brand took everything off, standing naked next to the lighthouse door; his cock erect, sticking out like someone had attached the largest Snicker's Bar in the history of man to Brand's midsection. He went to the pole and started climbing the rings, his muscles moving him quickly, efficiently—the whole time his cock stood at attention. And then Brand found the thing he searched for, a woman hanging three levels up. She might have been pretty at one time, maybe, but not anymore.

Brand pushed, a loud grunt erupting from his mouth as all of his muscles struggled at once, slowly moving the woman from the poles trapping her. At last, Brand won out and the body slid forward, beginning its long fall to the floor. The woman didn't cry out; she gave no acknowledgment at all of what was happening. She simply fell, hitting the floor with a sound like wet sand being thrown against a wall. Brand moved down as quickly as he had moved up, and then Henry witnessed something he had never thought he would endure.

Of course, Henry never thought he would have to endure any of this.

* * *

M
atthew first felt
the sticky substance covering his hand—his right hand, and not just his fingertips, but the whole thing. He looked over at it expecting to find out what covered his hand, but finding horror instead. Blood coated his hand—drying blood. He gripped his penis, which was itself covered with the same maroon substance. His hand moved up and down, up and down, but Matthew felt no pleasure. Instead, pain grew from his groin. His penis was raw, repeatedly meeting the friction of his blood crusted hand going up and down on it.

Matthew shrieked, loud and uncontrolled, into the lighthouse. He stood up, the chair he sat on falling backwards. He held his right hand, the one that had been performing the deed, away from his body as if he wanted to cast it away forever. A filthy piece of him that shouldn’t contaminate anything else. He looked up, across the room, and...

Dear, God, no.

Five bodies littered the floor. Blood leaked everywhere, the ground nearly a puddle of sticky life from the bodies lying on it. Matthew could see the one closest to him, could see straight through the holes in her hands to the blood covered floor beneath. All of them dead. All of their legs spread open from where he—
except it's not just he, Matthew. It's you too
—had went at them. Five bodies, now truly bodies and not living people, all raped and dead.

Matthew collapsed to the floor, his ass hitting the ground with a loud
whap
.

What happened?

He couldn't remember. None of it, not a single recollection. Matthew couldn't remember, but he knew the responsible party. Morgant had come alive again and hadn't been content with simply tugging at one of the women. He ripped them from their resting places, thrown them to the floor beneath, and then...

Matthew vomited, turning his head to the side just in time to miss hitting himself.

"Oh, God, what's happening?" He said aloud.

"He's comin' back. I told you he would," the black woman, Sheeb, said from behind him. "He comin' back and he gone take all dis from you. Every bit of it."

Matthew didn't turn around. He continued looking straight ahead, his eyes moving upward to the man he had hung from a cross. Werzen stared back at him, his mouth closed, his legs bent.

"You cain't stop him. Not even if you try," Sheeb said.

Maybe she was right. Maybe next time Matthew woke up there weren't just five bodies on the floor, but forty. All of them dead. All of them completely unusable, their atoms unable to be harnessed. And what then? All of this, every single bit from Rally's death to the man hanging above him, for nothing. All of it destroyed by some rapist who Matthew couldn't put down.

"No, no. There's no puttin' him down. He's comin' and soon he gon' be here fo good."

"Shut up," Matthew said to the old woman. He saw Henry's eyebrows rise at the words.

Maybe he should just do it now, forget the whole thing of fifty-five bodies and just start the entire process at this very moment. Morgant wouldn't have another chance to commit his atrocities, and maybe Brand already had enough people to do what he needed. If he pulled Werzen off the cross and hung him from the rings, that would be one more he could add to the mix. It might be enough, although he couldn't tell right now. He couldn't focus his mind on the necessary math to determine the energy these bodies could generate.

"No," he heard himself say, not knowing the words were coming. He turned his head to Dillan, still hanging in a complete blackness but yet totally aware of the words said around him. Dillan, the oldest of the lighthouse residents, the one who had earned his spot here more than anyone else. Dillan had stopped him. Dillan had kept him from seeing his son again. And what was this interruption from Morgant, if not another Jeffrey Dillan? Just another person, or entity, that didn't want Matthew to do as he had set out. He understood a psychiatrist might say he was suffering from delusions of persecution, thinking that the world was out to get him—but Matthew only needed to turn on a television to understand such a diagnosis was wrong. Now Morgant, indeed Matthew's own mind, was turning against him. Trying to shut him down, to stop him, and if he set this place off now—today—he'd let all of them stop him. His pride had led the first group of police to his cabin in the woods, thinking they couldn't stop him, but now, maybe his pride could keep him going. Because from the look of this place, he was well on his way to being stopped. Maybe not by the police, but by his own mind saying enough was enough, by Morgant's brain demanding payment for the time he resided in it. If Matthew didn't go forward, then he lost. Then
they
won.