by Jack Kilborn
He wasn’t worried about getting in trouble for the gun incident. A large component of his ADHD was an inability to take responsibility for his actions. Tom didn’t feel empathy, or remorse, especially since everything that went wrong in his life was someone else’s fault.
Tom was getting close now, because he saw the flickering orange light of the campfire through the trees. He was so intent on reaching it, and the food, that he didn’t watch his footing and tripped over an exposed tree root. Right into a burr bush.
“Aw…shit.”
The burrs clung to his shirt like little Velcro jelly beans. He got on his knees, fussing to tug them off, then on impulse he reached up and checked his hair.
More burrs.
“God damn it!”
They were stuck good, too. The last time Tom encountered burrs he was a kid, maybe six or seven. The only way to remove them was with a haircut. A drastic haircut that made him look like frickin’ Homer Simpson. He yanked at one stuck in his bangs, pulling until his eyes watered.
Frickin’ great.
Tom didn’t like being laughed at, and he was sure everyone else would think this was the funniest thing ever. It wasn’t even his fault. Stupid root. Stupid burr bush. Stupid Martin and Sara for taking him on this stupid trip. He debated whether he even wanted to go back to camp. Maybe if he went back to the lake, went swimming, the burrs would loosen up.
No. Bad idea. It was too easy to get lost.
He sucked in air through his teeth, seriously annoyed, and decided he would punch anyone who made fun of him. Ten steps later, he was at the campsite.
Except this wasn’t the right campsite. First of all, there were no tents. Second, what he thought was a fire wasn’t really a fire. It was a big patch of glowing orange sticks and what looked like charcoal. And there was some kind of broken swing-set sitting in the middle of the fire.
Tom walked around the fit pit, searching for people. No one was around. But the cooked meat smell was definitely coming from here. In fact, it was coming from that swing-set thingy.
He gave it his full attention. There was some kind of meat roasting there, a large hunk between the metal bars. Maybe half a cow. No, not big enough for a cow. A pig, maybe. Or a big turkey. Hard to tell by looking at it. The meat was really scorched, and there weren’t any features to identify it.
Whatever it was, it smelled awesome. And no one appeared to be nearby, so no one could protest if Tom helped himself. The burrs in his hair were now forgotten. Another symptom of ADHD was a severe lack of memory retention, coupled with an ultra-short attention span. Tom had been told this many times, but for some reason it never stuck with him.
He took a quick look around for some sort of barbecue fork or tongs that he could use to grab some of the meat, then figured he could probably just stick his hand between the bars and grab a hunk from the top part. So he did just that.
It was hot, almost too hot to touch. But Tom was quick, and the meat was so tender it fell off the bone. He brought back a nice, long strip, and played hot potato, tossing it from hand to hand, blowing on it. When it was finally cool enough, Tom raised the greasy morsel to his lips.
Hmm. Tastes like chicken.
Damn good, though. Needed some sauce, and some salt, but as far as mystery meat went it sure beat the frickin’ meatloaf Sara cooked every frickin’ Sunday.
Tom licked his fingers clean and reached for seconds.
Sara squatted on her haunches, and she instructed Tyrone and Cindy to do the same. They listened to the night, straining to hear the distinctive sounds of pursuit. The night only offered crickets, and the whistling wind.
Sara had calmed down a bit, but still wished she had a light. If Tyrone hadn’t run into her, Sara knew she would still be standing in that same spot, freaking out. But slipping into the role of responsible adult had forced her to push back her fear of the darkness, at least for the moment. Plus Sara surprised herself by being able to flip Tyrone, even in her semi-catatonic state. Maybe she wasn’t as helpless as she thought.
“So who was Plincer?” Cindy whispered.
The question took Sara back to college, more than a decade ago. “A footnote in abnormal psychology. I learned about him in school, in an advanced psych class. He was a crackpot, who
created something called the Plincer Scale, which he used to measure the evil in criminal behavior. Many years later, in the 90s, he made waves as an expert witness in serial killer trials. For the defense. If I remember right, Plincer thought evil was a genetic physical trait.”
Cindy leaned in closer. “You mean like hair color? Or height?”
“Exactly. He believed some people’s brains were different, that they were born that way. If it was their brain that made them evil, it wasn’t really their fault, so they couldn’t be blamed for their crimes.”
Tyrone snorted. “That’s crazy.”
“It’s far out, but it does have some basis in fact. The amygdale, thalamus, hypothalamus, and the cingulate gyrus—these are all parts of the brain responsible for forming emotions. Studies in animals have shown if these parts are damaged or removed, it has radical effects on behavior. They can be made more aggressive, more violent. There have also been cases in humans where injury or aneurism completely changed someone’s personality. I heard of a recent murder trial in Chicago where a brain tumor allegedly contributed to a police officer going on a killing spree.”
Sara also recalled the famous case of Phineas P. Gage. She had written a report on him in school, as had every other aspiring psychologist. Gage was a railroad worker in the 1800s. He was blasting rock and the explosion drove a three foot long iron bar through his head. Incredibly, he survived. He was even coherent, and could speak moments after the accident. But after the bar was removed, Gage’s personality changed dramatically. He’d become more impulsive and violent, prone to risk-taking. Friends said that he was unrecognizable, a completely different person.
This incident proved revolutionary. Science hadn’t previously known that specific regions of the brain effected behavior.
“Whether or not we want to think about it,” Sara continued, “who we are as people is very much tied into a bunch of cells, chemicals, and electrical changes in our brains. Tampering with this delicate balance can turn someone into someone else.”
The wind died down, and the crickets stopped. Sara listened for the sounds of approaching footsteps. There was something in the distance, a branch snapping.
Then, nothing.
“So this Plincer cat,” Tyrone said, startling Sara. “He believed people could be born evil?”
As a psychologist herself, Sara didn’t believe in evil. Morality was dictated by the majority in any given society. In Roman times, it wasn’t considered evil to throw Christians to the lions. The Nazis didn’t consider themselves evil, they were judged so by the victors. Human beings throughout history did terrible things to each other, but whether or not these things were evil remained subjective. To some, the death penalty was evil. To some, not going to church every Sunday was evil.
Sara preferred to believe that human beings were inherently selfish, and when this selfishness infringed upon the well-being or lives of others, a psychological problem was usually at play. Evil had no place in psychology. Sara didn’t even apply that label to her own abductor, Paulie Gunther Spence. Though he committed unspeakable atrocities on Sara’s friend, Louise, Spence was a classic example of a sexual sadist with anti-social personality disorder. Nothing more.
“I don’t believe evil exists, Tyrone.”
“You do know we hidin’ from some folks tryin’ to eat us, right?”
“That could be because of many different psychological and physiological factors, including hunger.”
“But Plincer thought people were evil because they had evil brains?”
“Plincer thought people could be born with brain irregularities that made them evil. Irregularities that were so extreme, it was impossible to stop violent impulses.”
“Tough to say. Morality, free will, personality, impulse and action, even consciousness itself, still aren’t completely understood. The brain holds a lot of secrets science hasn’t figured out yet. But Plincer bragged he knew the exact parts of the brain that made people evil. He even said he could prove it, that he could make a person evil with drugs and surgery.”
“Could he?”
Sara closed her eyes. She couldn’t even remember her professor’s name from that class, let alone anything he specifically said about Plincer. The only reason she remembered Plincer at all was his 15 seconds of news coverage after his last trial.
“I might be wrong, but I remember some newspaper printing something about an orangutan Plincer experimented on. He did some something to his brain, and basically turned the orangutan into a psychopath. It killed six other research animals.”
“So what happened to Plincer?” Cindy asked. She was whispering.
“Some would call it karma. One of the criminals Plincer was called to defend…” What the hell was his name? “Parks. No, Paks. Lester Paks. He killed a woman by biting her to death. Doctor Plincer testified Lester wasn’t responsible for his actions, and he also said that if the court released Lester into his care, he would be able to cure him. The court allowed it.”
“Did Plincer cure him?”
Sara shrugged. “No. Lester almost killed him. Soon after, both Doctor Plincer and Lester disappeared. Neither have been seen in years.”
“So you think Plincer came here?”
“I don’t know, Tyrone.”
Cindy spoke so softly that Sara had to strain to hear her. “Maybe he came here and kept doing his research. Only instead of monkeys, he did it on people.”
“If so, Cindy, we’re in a lot more trouble than I thought.”
Another branch broke, this one so close it made Sara flinch. She squinted into the dark, saw something move. Then something else.
“We need to run,” she told the kids. “Right now.”
When Archibald Mordecai Plincer was a child, he was picked on a lot. He didn’t understand why. He was thin, and a little small for his age, but otherwise relatively happy and well adjusted. But, for whatever reason, he was a magnet for bullies.
The abuse got so bad that Plincer’s parents finally plucked him out of public school and enrolled him in a private academy. This new school also had bullies, and one of the worst was the headmaster, who seemed to delight in doling out punishment.
Plincer eventually had a growth spurt, bringing him up to average height and making him a less desirable target for his peers. Since he did what he was supposed to, Plincer also managed to keep away from the headmaster for the most part. But he remained fascinated by schadenfreude—the act of taking joy in the misery of others. He decided to become a doctor and specialize in psychiatry, just to figure out what made sadistic personalities tick.
But where others in the psychiatric field gravitated toward drug therapy and talking sessions and their effect on the conscious and subconscious, Plincer was fascinated by the physical nature of the brain itself. If the heart was malfunctioning, you didn’t use a couch trip to cure it; you went in with a scalpel. Why should the brain be any different?
His early research was done on animals. Plincer used psychosurgery and implanted electrodes to perform what he termed reverse lobotomies. While his predecessors used frontal lobotomies to neutralize aggressive behavior—like what happened to Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Plincer was able to stimulate parts of the brain to make the subject more aggressive.
Unfortunately, there proved to be little research money available for doctors interested in making meaner animals. Because Plincer was more curious about the brain’s physiology than psychology, and there were laws against tampering with people’s gray matter, human experiments were impossible. So he drifted into criminal psychology with the intent to study anti-social behavior.
His first round of notoriety came in the late 80s, when he created the Plincer Scale based on his studies. It ranked the amount of evil in violent criminal behavior. Hitting an old lady on the head to steal her purse was a Level 1. Torturing and murdering a child for amusement was a Level 5. Every other violent act fell somewhere in between.
The idea that the Plincer Scale could be directly linked to the physical make-up of the brain tantalized the doctor. He met with criminals in prison, got them to donate their bodies to his research after they died, but they weren’t dying fast enough or in large enough numbers for Plincer to conclusively prove the link between brain deformity and evil. So he began to testify in criminal trials, biding his time until a Level 5 criminal was entrusted to his care.
Lester Paks was that criminal. By that time, Plincer was sure he knew which parts of the mind controlled violent behavior, and if he could cure Lester it would usher in a whole new era of psychiatry.
But he wasn’t as careful with Lester as he should have been. Lester managed to escape his room.
What happened next still gave Plincer nightmares.
Though he survived Lester’s attack, it effectively ended Plincer’s career. No one would give a job to a doctor proven so dramatically wrong.
Luckily, Plincer’s family had money. Old money, earned in blood, going back to the Civil War and his great-great grandfather. Plincer secretly set up shop on Rock Island, and he brought Lester with him. After all, it wasn’t the boy’s fault he was evil. It was a physiological brain problem. Even after the…ordeal…Lester had put him through, Plincer was committed to keep working with him.
Plincer did manage to cure Lester’s SMD, saving the teenager from his irresistible compulsion to bite himself. He also managed to do something he’d dreamed about since his youth. No longer restricted by the courts, or the law, Plincer turned Lester into something one-of-a-kind.
A Level 6.
Level 6 had always been hypothetical. Even the worst criminals—the serial killers, the child torturers, the genocidal dictators—carried with them shreds of humanity. The most evil people to ever live still had boundaries.
But after the procedure, Lester had zero boundaries. He’d gone from taking pleasure in the pain of others to needing it. Feeding his evil desires became a requirement, like food and oxygen.
High on this success, Plincer made a few calls, and wound up in bed with an army General who found this result intriguing. For a few years, Plincer was supplied with money and prisoners to experiment on.
Unfortunately, Plincer couldn’t repeat the results. He did manage to attain Level 6 once more, with Subject 33. But Subject 33 proved impossible to control. The procedure drove the other subjects insane, making them regress to the point that they were more animal than human. The ferals. The military had no interest in feral people, so the General ended the program.
But Plincer got lucky, and got his hands on some civilians. After revamping his formula, and fine-tuning the procedure, he was again successful. He contacted the General with the news, and was brushed off.
So be it. There were other interested parties.
Four generations ago his great-great grandfather made a fortune by betraying the United States.
Now, a hundred and forty years later, Archibald Mordecai Plincer was also forced to turn his back on his country.
Treason seemed to run in the family.
Dr. Plincer sat behind his desk, applied more putty to his chin, and frowned at the letter once more. Plincer didn’t get much mail, but he maintained a PO Box in Traverse City, and his delivery man checked it once a month and brought it along with the rest of his supplies.
The doctor read it again, as if the words were going to say something different from the other thirty times he’d read it.
The letter was from his accountant, and described several recent events in the news which Plincer knew nothing about because he didn’t follow the news—there was no phone, cable television, newspaper delivery, or Internet s
ervice to the island. The letter went on to say the market had taken a beating, the economy was in ruins, and Plincer was very close to broke.
Plincer wondered, not for the first time, if his accountant was crooked and stealing funds. The doctor could easily send Lester to his house and get the truth out of him. But if the country really was at war in the Middle East, and the Dow Jones had really crashed, torturing the man wouldn’t provide anything more than the empty thrill of vengeance.
Still, an hour with Lester might teach that idiot the importance of diversification in a portfolio.
It was all water under the bridge. Plincer’s only chance at funding now hinged on how his meeting tomorrow would go. He checked another letter from the pile on his desk, and rechecked the arrival time. The helicopter would be arriving at nine a.m. Plincer had instructed them to land on the east side of the prison, where there was a clearing.
While the doctor rather enjoyed the isolation the island provided, he did wish he could confirm this meeting again by phone or email. So much was riding on this venture. If they were a no-show, it would take weeks to contact them again to find out why. By that time, he’d be broke, and perhaps forced to scrounge for food alongside the unfortunate cannibals he’d inadvertently created.
Doctor Plincer closed his eyes. There was still much to do before the meeting. He’d given that black girl to Subject 33 on the understanding that there would be other volunteers to use in his demonstration tomorrow. And while performing the procedure on that Georgia person was an unprecedented opportunity, the doctor wondered if he hadn’t been too eager, too hasty. But the prospect of creating another Level 6 was too exciting to pass up.
Unfortunately, that currently left Plincer with a deficit of victims.