Brewster's Brood - Ch. 37

Part Thirty-Seven

Jenny Westinghouse – 3/11/2017 – Sunday –11:27 pm

            Some people got off on the idea of anonymous sex, but it was clear that Max was getting a little nervous by the fact that he’d just ejaculated inside of a woman who hadn’t even introduced herself. They were going to keep getting pressed against him, and the longer he was here, the harder it was going to be to keep it from getting weird, so as soon as the band was off stage, they were going to need to give Max the yank, and pull him from the crowd to get him on the move again.

            He certainly seemed a little off guard when the ex-escort, Sally, had had her way with him on the dancefloor, but he was doing his best just to keep his head above water, it looked like. The advice for him to just go with the flow had been something he’d been taking to heart, but when the flow was coming down like a rushing river threatening to drown him beneath the undertow, it was hard not to get somewhat concerned about him.

            “You okay, Max?”

            “That… I’ve never even met that woman,” Max said, tucking his cock back into his pants, feeling just how wet she’d left him.

            “That was Sally,” Jenny said into his ear. “She’s a club member. She probably saw Kelly anging on you and just assumed you were also a club member.”

            “You think she wouldn’t ask first?”

            Jenny clicked her tongue with a giggle, the two of them able to talk for a minute or two while the band was changing instruments and tunings. “For some members, the thrill is in the risk of gambling whether or not someone’s a club member,” she said to him. “Just enjoy the show.”

            “A little hard to do that when I’m afraid I’m going to have my clothes ripped off at any moment.”

            “You want us to close ranks around you, make you feel safer?”

            “I actually think I might,” he laughed. “It was weird, suddenly losing my pants for a second back there, and then some girl I’ve never met shoving herself onto my dick. Just ‘cause you think her name’s Sally doesn’t mean that it is.”

            “Don’t worry,” Jenny told him. “If Kelly’s sure, then you can be sure. That girl’s got a photographic memory, and it’s never wrong. If she sees something, you better believe she’ll remember it. I tried testing her on it not long after we met when we were hanging out at the bar, and it’s pretty fucking scary, if I’m being honest.”

            “Oh yeah? How’d she fleece you out of your money?”

            “She told me I could deal out any number of cards in a deck and she could tell me what was remaining in it, so we tried it on the bar top, and I must’ve dealt out thirty or forty cards, but sure enough, she knew exactly what cards were left in the deck, down to the exact number and suit,” Jenny said to him, as the band looked like they were starting to get ready to play another number. “Hell of a skill to have.” It had occurred to Jenny that Kelly had probably memorized the names, pictures and general files of all the players in the Game, and that would give her an insane edge over most of the rest of the players. That had been yet another reason when Jenny had decided to throw her hat in with Kelly, beyond the fact that the two just naturally seemed to work very well together.

            “Sounds like a fast friendship was quickly formed,” Max joked, just as the band launched into their version of the Doors’ “People Are Strange,” and trying to continue a conversation became impossible for a little while again.

            The Catalyst was a strange place to hold a concert, a long hallway with a wide-open center section, with decks on the left and right that divided the space into upper and lower floors, both with a decent enough view of the stage. The acoustics weren’t the best in the world, but with most bands simply playing at ‘maximum volume,’ the end result of ‘good enough’ was fine on pretty much any given show.

            Echo & The Bunnymen had been at this for a very long time indeed, though, and Ian McCulloch, the band’s lead singer, seemed to know just the levels of adjustment they needed to make to their setup to get the whole place to ring like a cathedral, all the instruments perfectly filling the air, just the intended amount of distortion, not a drop less or more.

            For the next hour or so, the girls did their best to keep anyone from getting too hands on with Max, as they felt like one encounter in the middle of a crowded concert hall already had him suspicious, so the last thing they wanted was another one or two to really creep into his paranoia.

            Jenny wasn’t all that familiar with the band – she’d done a little bit of research on them on the drive down, but they were sort of before her time. Sure, a couple of the songs she knew, but mostly through osmosis, not from having really listened to them. They were a band whose heyday had been the mid to late 80s and hadn’t really broken into the charts at any point when she would’ve heard them, but they were skilled musicians, the songs were catchy, and at the very least, she’d pick up a best of or something, to help her remember this night.

            When the band finished their set, they did the typical ‘fake ending’ gimmick that it seemed like just about everybody did these days, where they walked off stage for 2 minutes, let the audience applaud and demand a return, then return to play a couple more songs as an ‘encore.’ It was more ritual these days than anything else, and very rare was it that a show ended without some kind of encore.

            Generally, Jenny liked to stick around for the encore, but they needed to use the brief lull in the action to get Max the hell out of the Catalyst before it turned into something of a feeding frenzy. So during the set, Jenny and Kelly had slowly been moving Max over towards one side, nearing one of the emergency exits, and as soon as the band went off stage with their fake ‘good night!’ Jenny was already hustling Max out of the side door, and Gwen had another Uber waiting for them. They were having to keep him constantly on the move, otherwise he was likely to be swarmed with women at any given moment, unable to move for all the women trying to introduce themselves to him. At least they weren’t far from all the players being in the game. The sooner all 100 women were in the game, the easier this would be, as all the newcomers would start to realize that they had plenty of time, and that while getting their goals met earlier would secure their individual place, they also needed to keep him collectively unaware of what was going on, or at least as best as they could.

            “What did you think?” Brooklyn asked him as they all climbed into the back of the Uber XL. “It’s definitely not a modern sound but…”

            “Oh, I always loved them,” Max said. “I’m just amazed they’re still together. Most of the bands from that generation can’t fucking stand each other anymore, even if they’re super megastars. But yet, somehow Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant never took the other’s shit personal enough to keep them from getting together and playing some great stuff.”

            “Weren’t they broken up for a while?”

            “For, like, three years, but it didn’t take,” Max said. “Which is good, because some bands hit the level of animosity that they’re never, ever, ever getting back together again.”

            “The Beatles?” Gwen volunteered.

            “Nah,” Max said. “I think if Lennon hadn’t been assassinated, The Beatles probably would’ve gotten back together again, and it might’ve even tainted their musical legacy. No, I’m talking about the groups that don’t seem like they’re ever getting back together again, even with all the members still alive, like The Stone Roses or the Talking Heads.”

            “The Talking Heads are all still alive?” Jenny asked.

            “Yep,” Max said. “And it seems like David Byrne doesn’t get along with any of the others, because reports are that a truly obscene amount of money has been offered to them to play just even a handful of shows, and they won’t do it, which, I mean, I can respect on principle, but damn would it be cool to see them playing ‘Life During Wartime’ or ‘Once In A Lifetime’ live again. Frankie went and saw Byrne’s solo tour, and he played ‘Once In A Lifetime’ there, so I was kind of jealous I didn’t go to that, just because of how much I love that song.”

            “I feel that way about Oasis,” Jenny admitted. “I’d kill to hear the brothers reunited and playing ‘Wonderwall’ again, but I don’t know that Liam and Noel will ever put their shit to bed, no matter how much people want them to.”

            “Liam’s not helping his cause any by constantly poking and prodding his brother in public,” Max laughed. “They’ve both got pretty solid solo careers, but Liam keeps saying all the snarky shit in any interview he gives, while Noel’s been diplomatic enough about it, pointing out that maybe it’ll happen eventually, if his brother stops being a prick.”

            “Yeah, and, y’know, nobody wants to pull a Frank Black,” Brooklyn said with a smirk.

            “What’s a Frank Black?” her sister Gwen asked her.

            “Frank Black of the Pixies, when they were broke up, was asked what it would take for the Pixies to get back together and he responded that they wouldn’t get back together unless they were all broke and desperate.”

            “Let me guess,” Gwen giggled.

            “Yep, they got back together a few years after he said that,” Brooklyn laughed. “Of course, Kim Deal, the bassist and secondary lead singer bailed on a band after a year or two, and they found a replacement for her, so I guess the tension was always between Black and Deal, and at the end of the day, the Pixies was more Black’s band than Deal’s, so she went off to do her own thing with her twin sister in the Breeders.”

            “Siblings never work in rock’n’roll,” Gwen sniffed.

            “Worked for the Reid brothers in The Jesus & Mary Chain,” Max offered.

            “And the Johnston twins in Biffy Clyro,” Kelly added.

            “Hell, there’s the Proclaimers just if we’re in twins alone,” Max added.

            “Okay, yes, thank you, I get it, I’m wrong,” Gwen laughed bitterly, shaking her head. “Stop talking now, please.”

            “Maybe you just meant to say siblings never work well in Hollywood instead,” Brooklyn added with another giggle.

            “I don’t think we get along that poorly, sis.”

            “But we don’t generally work together.”

            “But we’re both working plenty, so it’s not like we’re out of work,” Gwen said. “It’s not like either one of us is Billy Baldwin or something. At worst, one of us is Joan Cusack to the other one’s John.”

            “I mean, John doesn’t always take the best of pictures,” Brooklyn said.

            “Neither do we,” Gwen laughed. “I think we’ve each got a stinker or three in our filmography.”

            “Yeah, I suppose we do.”

            “Hey, look, we’re here,” Kelly said. “You can just let us out anywhere.”

            “You know the beach is closed, right, lady?” the driver asked her.

            “It’s good to break a rule now and then,” she giggled, hopping out of the vehicle, pulling Max along with her. “See ya!”

            Jenny, Gwen and Brooklyn all hopped out of the vehicle as quickly as they could and sprinted after Kelly and Max, who were running up the stairs. They were outside of the Santa Cruz boardwalk, a location that nonlocals recognized from its use in the film “The Lost Boys.” It was California’s oldest surviving amusement park, with one of the most historic wooden roller coasters still in existence, the Giant Dipper.

            None of that mattered, however, since it was nearly 2 a.m. and everything was closed, but Kelly seemed determined to have a quick walk through the waterfront beach, and was sprinting across the sand, having kicked off her shoes and socks somewhere along the way, giggling like a madwoman as she did. Technically, Jenny knew that the wet sand area was open 24 hours a day, in order to comply with mandates from the California Coastal Commission, so they weren’t actually breaking any laws as long as they were out there, but when Kelly began stripping down to go skinny dipping, Jenny started to wonder how much of a bad idea this would turn out to be.

Aaron Stamford – 3/12/2017 – Monday – 07:23 am

            Aaron and Larissa had spent much of yesterday trying to discern who the hell Max Brewster was and why he was so special, but after several hours, they’d been staring at their screens for too long and had broken off to work individually for the rest of the night, with the plan on meeting up in the morning, hoping to have made some progress at that point. Aaron had thought about working through the night, but he knew that he needed to take a break, and he’d gone to bed at nine pm and slept until close to daybreak, but just before dawn, he’d woken up and started in on a new search process.

            The endless scores of beautiful women weren’t all local, so they’d had to come from somewhere. That was where he started tracking backwards. They had identified a handful of people who had been swarming over Max Brewster, and with those names, Aaron had been able to start figuring out the window that these women had been arriving.

            From there, it hadn’t been too hard to start gathering together a list of all potential candidates, and starting to track how the women had arrived. He was breaking probably close to a hundred laws by tapping into the airlines manifests as well as the security cameras at all three of the major Bay Area airports, but it was letting him start to put together a bigger picture of when the fembot army had arrived. It was rare to have a completely beautiful woman on an airplane, but to have first class entirely filled by them? That was the kind of thing that had gotten noticed by airline staff, and some of them had discretely taken pictures of their first-class cabins stuffed to the walls with gorgeous women dressed in their most provocative fashions.

            This had all happened incredibly recently, too.

            And not just once. Between March 2nd and March 5th, there had been dozens of flights like this, with at least two or three beautiful women in first class. And, interestingly enough, all of the tickets had been bought by a shell company of some kind, International Brand Ambassador Events LLC., and that company had turned out to be a complete and total dead end. The company’s ‘office’ was an unoccupied warehouse in New Jersey that looked like it was little more than a mail drop and an internet router. But that router did seem to have pretty high level of traffic going through it, and a level of encryption that even gave him pause. Was it possible he could break through it? Sure, but in doing so, he’d probably tip his hand, and he wasn’t at that point yet. Obscurity was more important than kicking the hornet’s nest.

            Data research goes a lot faster when you have decided to ignore the law.

            From there, it wasn’t too hard to start looking for a similar pattern in hotels and AirBnBs across the Bay area, trying to find one large shell company that was renting in volume. He found that after about an hour’s worth of looking – the shell company was called Local Brand Consolidated Vacation Planning.

            Again, the kind of weird generic name that doesn’t seem to have any real links to anything he can trace, but the word ‘Brand’ had appeared in both shell companies, and maybe, he thought, that was some kind of tell. So he looked for vehicle rentals being done by any company with the word ‘Brand’ in the name and came across Bay Area Brand Door-To-Door Transportation.

            They had car rentals, hotel rentals and flights in… but no flights out.

            It was a start, and it let him get an estimated head count.

            No wonder it felt like Max Brewster was constantly being surrounded by beautiful women. Aaron’s estimate was that there were somewhere between eighty and a hundred and ten women all trying to get their hands on Max Brewster.

            But why?

            Was it some sort of dating show? That didn’t make any sense, because there weren’t camera crews all over the place, no endless number of filming permits filed. From there he pivoted that maybe it was some sort of prank show? Some relaunch of the Joe Schmoe Show, where everyone was an actor except one guy at the center of it? That didn’t make any sense either, though. Almost none of these beautiful women being flown in were actors. And what was most interesting was that the timeframe for these women’s stay was certainly longer than a few weeks or even a month or two for a film shoot – they were booked into their locations for over three months, and that was a long time to be housing and overseeing this many women.

            And that was the other thing. They were all women. And they were all between the ages of 18 and 45, mostly in their 20s.

            That meant he had to start digging into the only pool of information he had – the women themselves.

            At first, he was convinced it was a fool’s errand. The women had seemingly nothing in common, coming from all across the world, with no discernable links between any of them other than their staggering beauty

            But finally, he started to see it.

            The first thing he found was that almost none of the women were married or had boyfriends (or girlfriends). In fact, nearly every woman who had been brought in by the shell companies seemed to be without any recent emotional entanglements. (There were a couple of women that seemed like they might have been dodging former boyfriends, and with good reason.)

            After that, he had to get into really illegal stuff, because he needed to dive deep into all of these women to look for more common connections, and he was willing to trample all over laws to do that, diving into bank accounts, financial histories and even medical histories.

            That was where he started to see possible connections that he couldn’t have expected otherwise. Not the least of which was a number of the women had researched IVF or surrogate pregnancies. That was something he wasn’t expecting to find.

            Larissa met up with him at a Denny’s just shy of 9 am and he had a dozen pages of handwritten notes. “I was going to ask you if I should refill your coffee, but I think you’ve had more than a few cups this morning, haven’t you?”

            “This rabbit hole has no. Goddamn. Bottom.” Aaron sighed, looking up from his notes, spreading his hands wide. “Any theories I have… they don’t make sense.”

            “Well, you know what they say, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be true, no matter how implausible it seems,” she said, sitting down in the other side of the booth. “What’s implausible?”

            “I… I think this is some kind of competition to see who can get knocked up by this guy first?” Aaron told her.

            “That’s insane.”

            “I know.

            “THIS guy?” she said, holding up a picture of Max. “Why on Earth would anyone want to be carrying this guy’s kid?”

            “I almost think there’s an entire corporation dedicated to getting a kid out of this guy,” Aaron said. “I’ve got all these shell companies working to bring women looking to get pregnant here and putting them in front of him and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.”

            “It must be something we missed,” Larissa told him. “No rich relative or something lost in the shuffle we somehow overlooked?”

            “I don’t think so, but we can check the genealogy again.”

            “Max Brewster, born the son of Rachel Williams and John Brewster, with Rachel dying giving birth to him, and John dying less than a decade later. John’s parents had both been dead almost twenty years when Max was born, and John didn’t know that much about his wife’s family, other than they were dead too.”

            “How much have you been able to figure out about Rachel Williams?” Aaron asked her.

            “Surprisingly little, but we’re talking about the 1950s and 60s here,” Larissa grumbled. “A lot of the information’s on paper, and you know how great people are about getting that all entered digitally. Do we know where Rachel Williams came from?”

            “Hmmm.”

            “Hmmm what, Aaron?”

            “Well, I can tell you that wasn’t her real name,” Aaron said.

            “How so?”

            “The Social Security Number she provided to the hospital back in 1975, when she was giving birth to Max? It’s for a Rachel Williams alright. Who died at age 2, in 1953.”

            “I thought you promised me no spy shit, Aaron!”