by Hadena James
For six days, I sat in my air locked room with its own special ventilation system. There was a TV. There was a chair. There was a table. My meals were given to me by people in HAZMAT suits. The doctor that visited wore a HAZMAT suit. The nurses wore suits. No one was allowed to visit.
I read just over a hundred books in six days, none of them about crime, which was surprising. All of them were about the paranormal or clinical lycanthropy. On the fifth day, I got a text from Green. My tip about the full moon had worked out. Since I had killed Morgan McClure, they had returned to Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan to search for their serial killer. On the second night of the full moon, they had caught some idiot in a suit made entirely from wolf pelts stalking some girl. He was already claiming insanity.
The CDC had found almost two miles of tubes in Morgan McClure’s outbuilding. It was an enclosed carport that looked like a normal shed. They also found more rats. Inside the tubes, running around like crazy, as well as in Dallas and San Antonio. There were no reported cases of plague yet in those cities, but they were watching.
The strain of plague turned out not to be as antibiotic resistant as originally thought. A mixture of doxycycline and ciprofloxacin was effective. However, both were required and it didn’t hurt to add some streptomycin in the first twenty-four hours.
Not a single person had died. The cities with the infected fleas had called in the National Guard to help them exterminate the vermin. All stray dogs and cats were being rounded up. Emergency flea dip centers were opened by the Humane Society of Texas where people could get their pets dipped for free. Even the wildlife was receiving treatment.
After six days, I was still symptom free. I had not caught the plague. This made me feel pretty good about the outcome. I still had questions without answers, but there was always going to be that possibility.
Epilogue
My mother and my mutant puppy greeted me when I arrived home. Obviously, they had missed me. The puppy was exceptionally happy about seeing me. So much so, that he peed on me. I gave him to my mother.
“You were on the news. They are calling you a hero,” my mother informed me as she put the puppy in the backyard.
“Why?” I asked.
“You stopped an epidemic.” She walked into the kitchen and washed her hands. “They glossed over the fact that you killed someone to do it.”
“Mom, if you want to live here...” I started.
“I’m not judging. I’m just saying that the news pretty much ignored that. I thought it was big of them. Your talk with the Chadwicks has had some unexpected consequences. They are trying to sue you.”
“Oh, really.” I pulled out my phone. My intent was to call Franklin and see how his investigation was going. He didn’t answer, so I left a message, including the new information regarding a lawsuit.
“I’m making roast for dinner. Elle and Cassie are coming over.”
“What about my nephew?” His name had escaped me. I would have to work on that.
“He is at camp already,” my mother chided me.
“Camp? Doesn’t he have school?”
“They ended while you were in quarantine. He left the next day for smart kids’ camp.”
“Oh, is he smart?”
“Both of them are very bright. You should take some interest.” My mother came into the living room. “It’s good to have you home, honey.”
I wouldn’t admit it, but it was good to be home, even if it did include a leaky puppy and my mother.
A Note About The Series
For seven books, I have argued that sociopaths and psychopaths do not have much emotional depth. This is true and also, untrue.
Since the first diagnosis of the condition, researchers have mostly relied upon the sociopaths and psychopaths themselves to explain it. As Ted Bundy said, he felt nothing, all the time. The problem with that is, both are known as adept liars. Bundy was once in love, proving that he had to feel something. So how much of our understanding is based upon the lies?
It turns out, quite a bit. Groundbreaking research was published in 2006 by Danish researchers. They used a control group, a group of psychopaths, and a group of sociopaths in their study and tested them in three areas: empathy, the ability to recognize emotions, and their brain structures.
In the first test, they hooked everyone up to a brainwave monitor and showed all three groups a video of a person getting their hand smacked with a ruler. The control group (normal people) reacted with the proper empathy, their brain waves registering they felt the pain experienced by the person in the video. The psychopaths and sociopaths did not.
The group was then asked to “feel what the person in the video was feeling.” The control group actually over empathized. Their brain waves reporting that they not only understood pain was involved, but actually had been struck themselves. Surprisingly, the brain waves of psychopaths showed they were able to empathize when asked to do so. Oddly, the sociopaths tended to laugh when asked to empathize.
In the second test, everyone was shown pictures and asked to identify what the person was feeling. Sociopaths and the control group did very well. Psychopaths were unable to identify fear. As one poetically put it, “I don’t know that emotion, but it’s the same look people get when I stab them.” Surprised by how well the sociopaths did, they retested the subjects with a real person in a one-on-one situation. The results were confusing. Psychopaths were still unable to recognize fear, but the sociopaths failed the test miserably. Often they mistook sadness and pain as happiness when they were face-to-face.
The third test did indeed find structural differences in the brain of both psychopaths and sociopaths. Psychopaths have underdeveloped olfactory systems, resulting in a poor sense of taste and smell. They have an excessive number of dopamine receptors, which is where people experience pleasure. They have fewer receptors for pain, so they actually don’t feel it like a normal person. Sociopaths were found to have higher baselines of epinephrine and norepinephrine. They also had fewer pain receptors. And for some reason, while their olfactory system was fine, they had trouble distinguishing colors of similar hues when they were near each other.
What this means: Psychopaths do not feel fear, do not recognize fear and actually do have emotions. Sociopaths are not capable of empathizing and have trouble with interpersonal relationships because their brains become confused by emotions when they are dealing with a real person.
The real telling piece of information, the one that brought about this study, was given to the world by a serial killer named Andrei Chikatilo. He told doctors he “could feel, [he] just choose not to, it was something [he] could control, like a switch, turning [his] emotions on and off to meet the requirements of the situation.”
This has led to a better understanding of psychopaths such as John Wayne Gacy, who entertained hospitalized children and then killed an unknown amount of young men. It also reminds us that Ted Bundy, who provided the basis for most of understanding of the modern day sociopath and psychopath, was lying to us.
About the Author
I’ve been writing for over two decades and before that, I was creating my own bedtime stories to tell myself. I penned my first short story at the ripe old age of eight. It was a fable about how the raccoon got its eye-mask and was roughly three pages of handwritten, eight year old scrawl. My mother still has it, and occasionally I still dig it out and admire it.
When I got my first computer, I took all my handwritten stories and typed them in. Afterwards, I tossed the originals. In my early twenties, I had a bit of a writer’s meltdown and deleted everything. So, with the exception of the story about the raccoon, I actually have none of my writings from before I was 23. Which is sad, because I had a half dozen other novels and well over two hundred short stories. It has all been offered up to the computer and writing gods as a sacrifice and show of humility or some such nonsense that makes me feel less like an idiot about it.
I have been offered contracts with publishing houses in t
he past and always turned them down. Now that I have experimented with being an Indie Author, I really like it and I’m really glad I turned them down. However, if you had asked me this in the early years of 2000, I would have told you that I was an idiot (and it was a huge contributing factor to my deleting all my work).
When I’m not writing, I play in a steel-tip dart league and enjoy going to dart tournaments. I enjoy renaissance festivals and sanitized pirates who sing sea shanties. My appetite for reading is ferocious and I consume two to three books a week as well as writing my own. Aside from introducing me to darts, my Significant Other has introduced me to camping, which I, surprisingly, enjoy. We can often be found in the summer at Mark Twain Lake in Missouri, where his parents own a campground.
I am a native of Columbia, Missouri, which I will probably call home for the rest of my life; but I love to travel. Day trips, week trips, vacations on other continents, wherever the path takes me is where I want to be and I’m hoping to be able to travel more in the future.
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