Free The Devil's Dream: A Nightmare by David Beers Page A

happening now, except the otters were also destroying the home they both shared. Their workarounds were causing synapses to misfire inside Matthew’s head. Causing blood vessels to burst. Causing him to faint.
    It would continue to worsen unless he found some way to slow it down. Found some way to reconnect the broken pieces. Because they were breaking, that’s what was happening. His brain was breaking.
    Which meant he didn’t have the time he had envisioned when he dreamed this plan up four years ago. He thought that he could do this slowly, allow the world to wait in agony, searching everywhere they possibly could but unable to find him. And then, when he’d gathered his bodies, he would shut off the power source to this whole place. That was the plan, and now because of his recent daydream, things had to be expedited. He didn’t have time to gather the bodies as he wanted: in slow shipments. That would need to change.
    And as far as this crucifixion a day thing, his damn pride had once again created disaster in a plan that didn’t need disaster. He didn’t have the time to do both, to crucify women for Brayden’s sake and collect the bodies for his lighthouse. He had to choose.
    Matthew looked at ten crosses nailed down across his warehouse. There wasn’t anything else in this place, not a single piece of wiring, not a single table. Just the wooden crosses lying across the cement. He liked Massachusetts for a few reasons. He had access to a major city, he had access to his lighthouse, and he had access to acres and acres of practically untended land. He had a busy night ahead of him. A night that would be spent in cities, not Boston—he knew he couldn’t go back into Boston ever again, but there were other cities and other places to grab the women he needed. Ten would be a lot. It was audacious, actually, but his pride had gotten him into this mess and his pride would see him through it. He needed an audacious number, because the message he was sending out with these ten crosses needed to be understood. The message needed to be felt.
    Ten ladies would do the trick.

    * * *
    T he worst part about being on the road in an RV with your husband was, when you started arguing, there wasn’t a whole lot that could be done. There was no going to a friend’s house, no going to see a movie by yourself, no heading to a bar for a beer. You simply rode along together, not talking, until one of you decided to be the bigger person.
    Karen wasn’t going to be the bigger person today. Maybe tomorrow, if Martin stretched it out that long, but not today. Under no circumstances. One would think that after being married for fifty years, there wouldn’t be much left to fight about. One would be wrong, if that’s what one thought however. Today, Martin told her that he had changed his mind on abortion, after twenty-five years, and he no longer thought it should be legal. Told her, matter of fact, that he didn’t think there was any such thing as a right to privacy, and that was just some liberal gobbledygook to kill babies that women didn’t want after they bumped uglies with the wrong guy.
    This information came from nowhere.
    Karen. Did not. Agree.
    The argument went on for about an hour. Martin continued on and on about the child’s right to life, using every argument that pro-lifers had used since 1975. Nothing original, just the same old, tired arguments. She asked how he could go against the past twenty years or so of voting democrat, of actively engaging people in conversations about women’s reproductive rights—of being a liberal—all in the past few months.
    “Truth doesn’t need time,” is what he told her, and Karen could take no more. She wasn’t going to sit here and listen to his nonsense the whole way up the coast. She told him to stop talking if he didn’t have anything else to talk about, and so he had, and now they drove in silence.
    Karen didn’t mind looking out the window anyway. She’d been