Lone Wolves

by Chesbro, George C. ;

  The boy with the shaved head, who continued to stare into the mirror, asked in a small voice, “You don’t believe in Satanic possession?”

  Furie felt a whisper of cold at the base of his spine. He could tell Jack Kellerman a thing or two about the consequences of belief in Satanic possession, he thought, but he simply said, “No.” He paused, smiled grimly, continued, “The doctors who did this to you and your family and dozens of other victims will have to take responsibility for their own actions. It wasn’t the Devil who made them do it. It was an elaborate insurance scam; all of the victims targeted by those crackpot therapists had very rich health insurance benefit plans. Your mother’s insurance company paid out more than three million dollars for the so-called ‘treatment’ of your mother and the two of you.”

  “So you’re trying to nail those bastards?”

  “No. Your parents are suing them, so maybe some good will come of that. In the meantime, the therapists are still trying to drum up business by appearing on talk shows. There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of willing victims.”

  “If you’re not after them, then why do you want to talk to me and Robby?”

  “I work for a private foundation funded by a few wealthy men and women who have some interesting notions of their own. We’re approaching the Millennium. Historically, susceptible people around the world get even more antsy than usual around this time. There’s a general rise in the level of anxiety, and numerology, astrology, and all sorts of other superstitions become growth industries. Large numbers of people become infected, if you will, by some very strange belief systems, and they’re willing to act on their beliefs. Some of these belief systems are lethal. You get lots of people killing each other because God has told them to. In this country you have groups like your own that are absolutely convinced that United Nations troops in black helicopters are coming to take away your guns. There’s an increase in the level of violence; you have more incidents like the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Waco, Ruby Ridge; you have a guy wandering around carrying a cigar box full of enough Ricin, the deadliest poison on earth, to kill upwards of a million people.

  “Belief in Satanic possession is potentially lethal because it allows people to shed responsibility for their own actions, and it strangles the intellect and spirit. The difference between this Millennium and the last is that now we have nuclear warheads, nerve gas and biological weapons to sling around instead of rocks and arrows. The people I work for are concerned about this. They believe that this kind of anxiety and random violence could reach a kind of critical mass where civilization explodes into chaos, wars, mass murders and disease on an unprecedented scale. They want to try to stop it. To do this they’re attempting to develop statistical proof that such a global flashpoint could be reached, and then they will try to develop a kind of education program that could be used by governments and world health organizations. At this time they’re trying to understand the process of what might be called socially acceptable insanity, and that’s where I come in. I’ve been hired to research the bizarre. The FBI profiles serial killers; I try to profile serial victims. Your family is the victim of nonsense, Jack. I’ve already interviewed your mother and father, and now I’d like to talk to you and Robby. I’d like to tape record your recollections of how those doctors trashed your family, and then I’d like you to fill out a questionnaire. Some of the questions are highly personal, but I’d like you to answer all of them. I guarantee your anonymity. You’ll be assigned a code number when the data is compiled, and your name will not appear in any final report or literature. I need about two hours of your time, and I can pay you two hundred dollars for your cooperation.”

  Now Jack Kellerman finally turned back from the mirror, and Furie could see that he had been crying; tears still welled in his pale green eyes, slid down his cheeks, dripped off his chin. “Hell, why not?” he said in a voice that cracked. “It’ll be the first and probably only time in my life I’ll ever be paid a hundred bucks an hour.”

  The boy spoke into Furie’s tape recorder for almost ninety minutes, ending with the account of his release from the therapists’ institute and his aimless wandering with his brother until they both found a home with Floyd Kuhns and the Patriot Militia.

  When Jack Kellerman had finished speaking, Furie handed him a five-page questionnaire, a ballpoint pen, and four fifty-dollar bills. The boy, sitting next to Furie on one of the cots, had just completed the first page of the questionnaire when the door slammed open and a huge man stepped into the room. The man, whom Furie immediately recognized from news reports as the obese and bellicose leader of the Patriot Militia, stood well over six feet, with a belly that hung like a flooded awning over the buckle of the belt he wore with his camouflage fatigues. His khaki shirt was open, and the T-shirt he wore beneath it was stained with sweat and spaghetti sauce. His huge hand, which he raised to point a finger at Furie, was shaking, and the muddy eyes in his bearded, doughy face glittered with rage and suspicion.

  “Jack, who the hell is this guy?!” Kuhns bellowed.

  Furie rose, said, “My name is Brendan Furie, and—”

  “Shut up! I didn’t ask you! Jack, what’s this guy doing in my house?!”

  The young man, thoroughly intimidated, put the clipboard with the questionnaire aside, stood up, then stepped away from Furie. His voice quavered slightly when he spoke. “He ain’t nobody who wants to hurt us, Floyd. He’s just a guy come to talk to me about what the doctors did to me and my family.”

  Kuhns, face flushed, slammed the door shut behind him, and then abruptly began to pace back and forth across the opposite side of the cramped space, slapping the palm of his hand against the side of the stained porcelain washbasin each time he passed it. Finally he stopped and shouted at the boy, “How could you have been so stupid?! You think anybody is really interested in how your mother swallowed all that Satan crap, Jack? You really think this guy wants to know about you and that bunch of weirdo doctors? I thought you’d put that behind you and could think straight now. The only devil around here is this guy you let into the house! He’s a fed, you idiot! I can smell ’em a mile away! He’s here to spy on us!”

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” Furie said evenly, “I—”

  “It’s General to you, fed!”

  “What Jack has told you is true, General. I’m involved in a private research project. I don’t work for the government.”

  The big man suddenly stopped pacing and walked over to Furie, coming so close that the ex-priest could smell his sweat and the beer on his breath. “The reason you and your people are going down is because you underestimate people like me,” Kuhns said in a low, rasping voice that issued from him against a background of wheezing that sounded like static. “You think we’re stupid. You think we don’t know what you and your pud-pounding, kike paymasters are up to. You think we don’t know how you’re letting the UN bring in niggers from Africa to help American niggers take away our guns and kill us? You think I’m blind? You think I haven’t seen your black helicopters?”

  “I’m sure you’ve seen fleets of black helicopters,” Furie replied quietly, meeting the other man’s gaze. “But I wasn’t flying in any one of them, and neither were the people I work for. Your political beliefs, and what you do with your friends and followers, doesn’t interest me at the moment; I’ve already interviewed a dozen people like you, and you all sound the same. It’s not the fault of government, blacks or Jews that life has disappointed you.”

  “You’re a wise guy,” Kuhns rasped, his murky eyes narrowing. Suddenly he reached around Furie and snatched the clipboard and questionnaire off the bed. “Let’s see what you’ve got this other idiot writing about. Jack Kellerman flushed in embarrassment and shifted his feet slightly. “Floyd, please …”

  “Hey, kiddo! You let a fed spy into the house, and then you start whining to me because I want to know what he’s been asking you?!”

  “He didn’t ask me any questions about the g
roup, Floyd, and I didn’t talk about it.”

  Kuhns grunted as he scanned the questionnaire. After a few moments he tore the papers in half, dropped them and the clipboard on the floor. “Gee, I’m really glad you’re not a bed wetter, Jack,” the big man said sarcastically, and then abruptly shoved Furie aside and reached for the tape recorder laying on the cot. “I want to hear for myself what you’ve been talking about.”

  Furie stepped back between Kuhns and the cot, placed his right hand on the man’s barrel chest, blocking his way. “I think not,” he said softly.

  Floyd Kuhns seemed genuinely bewildered to find Furie’s hand on him. He stared down at it for a few moments in disbelief, his mouth opening and closing to reveal rotting teeth, and then suddenly slapped the hand away. “You think not?!” He shouted in Furie’s face. “Why not?!”

  “Because it’s confidential. If you want to hear what’s on this tape, you have to get Jack’s permission, in writing. Or you can simply ask him what we talked about.”

  A scarlet cloud spread across the pasty flesh of Kuhns’ cheekbones. “Ask his permission?! I’m going to bust your ass, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  “I have resources, General.”

  Kuhns swung a wide, roundhouse right toward Furie’s head. Furie ducked, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet as the fist sailed harmlessly over his head, then came up fast, driving his weight with his legs and using the stiffened fingers of his right hand to jab Kuhns just above his enormous gut and below the sternum directly into the man’s solar plexus. Kuhns’ breath burst from his wheezing lungs in an explosive gasp. His eyes widened and his face turned purple as first he doubled over, and then dropped onto the cot and bounced off it to the floor. Furie waited a few moments while the other man made desperate, sucking sounds, and then knelt on the floor beside him, intending to loosen the man’s belt in an effort to help him breath. Then he straightened up and jumped back as Kuhns slashed at him with a huge combat knife that had suddenly appeared in his hand.

  “You sucker-punched me,” the big man wheezed. He was still gasping for breath, but he managed to get to his feet. “We’ll see how good … you fight … when I cut off your fingers.”

  Furie crouched slightly and backed away, keeping his gaze focused on the other man’s chest as Kuhns waved the knife in the air and lurched toward him. Then the militia leader stopped and spun around as the basement door crashed open. The sharp, clean sound of a hammer being cocked was amplified in the small, enclosed space. What Kuhn saw was a stunningly beautiful woman, six feet tall, with short-cut blond hair, finely chiseled features, and velvety brown eyes that displayed no emotion whatsoever. The woman was dressed in white tennis sneakers and a loose-fitting, blue nylon running suit. Her right arm was fully extended, and in her hand was a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver that was aimed directly at the startled man’s head.

  “What the-?!”

  “The resources I mentioned, General,” Furie said in a flat tone. “My employers insist that she tag along with me because they think I might run into dangerous people from time to time. I can’t imagine where they got that idea. I assure you that Marla is as deadly as she is attractive. If I were you, I’d drop the knife and back off.”

  Floyd Kuhns’ response was to raise the knife even higher and move toward the woman. The report of the gun was thunderous in the small room. Kuhns grunted as he stopped and put a hand to his left ear. There was a look of almost childlike amazement on his face as he took his hand away from his ear and stared at the blood on it. “She shot me,” he said in a high-pitched nasal tone. “My God, that woman shot me.”

  “It looks to me like she just nicked your ear. Be thankful your ear’s still there, not to mention your head to keep it hanging on. Your brain may be not much larger than a peanut, but she could still have put a bullet in it. Now drop your knife and back off. My business here is finished.”

  This time Kuhns did as he was told, but as soon as Marla put her gun in the pocket of her nylon jacket he spread out his arms and rushed at her, spittle flying from his mouth as he bellowed with rage. Marla barely moved—a small step to her left as she turned slightly and arched her back like a matador preparing to meet the charge of a bull. There was a blur of movement as Kuhns reached the spot where she had been standing only a moment before. Then, like the judo master Furie knew her to be, Marla assisted Kuhns in using the combined forces of his weight and charge to drive the big man into the concrete wall directly behind her. Furie winced at the sound, which he imagined was not unlike the crunch a sack of potatoes would make if it were dropped to the sidewalk from the roof of a tall building.

  Furie shook his head as he walked over to the heap of smelly flesh sprawled unconscious on the floor. He felt for a pulse, and when he was satisfied that the militia leader was still alive he straightened up to find that Marla had already retrieved the pieces of the questionnaire and tape recorder, and she was holding the door open for him. Jack Kellerman was still standing where he had been, his hands clasped tightly in front of him. He looked astonished and very lost.

  “We’ll be going now, Jack,” Furie continued. “Thank you for your cooperation. The information you gave me may help save others from the kind of abuse suffered by you and your family. I’m sorry if I’ve caused you any trouble. Good luck.”

  “Mr. Furie…?”

  Furie was already halfway out the door, but now he turned back. “What is it, Jack?”

  “I’d like to go with you,” the boy said in a small voice.

  Furie frowned slightly. “Have these people been holding you prisoner?”

  Kellerman shook his head.

  “Then I think it’s best we travel our separate ways. We don’t have time to wait for you to pack.”

  “I don’t have anything to pack. I’ve got the two hundred dollars you gave me, and I’d be grateful if you’d just give me a lift to the next town where I can catch a bus or maybe hitch a ride.” He paused, and then added, “The fact of the matter is, I’d like to talk to you some more.”

  Furie felt Marla’s hand on his shoulder. He turned to look into her deep brown eyes and she slowly shook her head.

  Normally Furie would defer to Marla’s judgment, for he had learned to trust her instincts, but as he looked back at the forlorn figure standing in the room he felt the powerful pull of his past. He’d found the social work he’d done as a priest extremely satisfying, and he’d been happy with his life before he had been forced by his Cardinal, for political reasons, to perform an exorcism he hadn’t been trained for and in which he didn’t believe on a young girl who had been clearly possessed by nothing more than a well-founded terror of one of her wealthy father’s business associates who had been sleeping with her mother as well as occasionally raping her. Death had followed in the wake of that lapse in his judgment and moral courage, the truth had come out, and he had been made the scapegoat for an extremely embarrassed and embattled church hierarchy. In fact, he no longer missed the priesthood; he was no longer sure he even believed in God, and he had found new satisfaction and purpose in a second career as a private investigator specializing in searching for young people who were lost, physically or emotionally. Then he had reluctantly signed on to work exclusively for this band of dreamers who believed it possible to somehow educate away evil, poke a finger in the massive, cracked dike of human irrationality and stupidity, save a world perhaps beyond saving by saving from themselves people who had no interest in being saved. It was at times like these, after encounters with men like Floyd Kuhns or after hearing reports on the almost unbelievably cruel and greedy actions of the predator psychiatrists, that Furie felt dangerously close to being overwhelmed by bitterness and a sense that he was wasting his time trying to help paint a big picture when what he should be doing was tending to the needs of the dark little splotches of people spattered across the canvas.

  “Come on,” Furie said, motioning for the boy to follow them. “We’ll drop you off at a train or bus station.


  As they left the basement room, Marla walked backward, gun in hand, guarding their rear. When they reached the car she got behind the wheel, as she always did. Furie slid into the back seat next to Jack Kellerman.

  They rode in silence down dusty roads and through orchards for almost five minutes before the young man spoke again. “Talking to you made me feel better,” he said to Furie.

  Furie nodded. “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “The people you work for are really serious about their thinking that the world is in really big trouble?”

  “Not the world, Jack. Just humans. And yes, they are very serious.”

  “Is it some kind of religious thing?”

  “No. What they believe in is a mathematical model.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Kellerman stiffened. “You’re saying I’m too stupid to understand?”

  Furie sighed, shook his head. “I don’t understand the math; but I believe their projections may be accurate, which is why I agreed to work for them. They’ve come up with a mathematical model, which they call the Triage Parabola. You might compare it to the computer programs meteorologists use to predict the weather, except that this program predicts human behavior and its consequences. There are a series of very complex equations. Historical data is transformed into numbers, and the numbers are plugged into the equations to get predictions of future events. The news isn’t good.”

  “The world is going to end?”

  “Not the world, Jack. Just our species.”

  “Nuclear war?”

  “The model can’t predict things that precisely. What it does predict is a sharp increase in mass paranoia, anxiety and hysteria in the decade ahead. A kind of psychological critical mass is reached, and then things start to fall apart. You have the rise of Messianic movements all over the planet. A lot of these competing groups start throwing things at each other—nerve gas, biological weapons, and nuclear weapons when they can get hold of them. There are no rules of engagement because each group believes it is acting on God’s will. Whole governments begin to break down, and with them go hospitals and medical research facilities. In the American Civil War, two thirds of the casualties died from disease, not combat wounds. That could happen again—will happen again, if the model is accurate. The computer program takes into account not only manmade viruses and bacteria, but also new, natural diseases that are released as the rain forests are destroyed. The model predicts that a new Black Plague—actually, a whole series of them—is coming, and this time up to ninety percent of the human population on earth could die. The survivors would be too few and too scattered to form a viable gene pool. The Triage Parabola predicts that we could be extinct as early as the year 2035.”