JACK KILBORN ~ TRAPPED (64 page)

“
The reason stem cells are so important in research is that they are, in layman’s terms,
blank
. A stem cell can develop into any sort of cell at all, if properly coerced. Skin cells. Bone cells. Nerve cells.
Brain cells.
” Plincer shrugged. “Alas, the only continuous and plentiful source for stem cells is unborn babies. Hence the banning and the controversy. But I have an arrangement with a doctor on the mainland, one who specializes in terminating pregnancies. He supplies me with all the stem cells I require.”

Georgia willed herself to move. She had to get away from the maniac. Just a little while ago, she’d been flush with power. Master of all she surveyed. To go from total control to absolute helplessness, especially at the mercy of some crackpot doctor, was infuriating. But no matter how hard she tried, how much she concentrated, her muscles refused to obey her commands.

“
Lester is right. This is going to hurt. The only way I can inject my experimental serum to the correct area of your brain is through your tear ducts. My colleagues, the fools, didn’t think it could be done. But it can. I’m going to enhance certain portions of your brain. Make them grow larger. With a little bit of luck, you may soon join my other successes. You may become a
Level 6.
”

Doctor Plincer held something in front of Georgia’s line of vision. A syringe. A big fucking syringe, with the longest needle Georgia had ever seen.

He can’t plunge that into my eye. Dear god sweet jesus oh no he can’t…

“
From what I’ve been told, the first injection is the worst.” The doctor smacked his lips. “The five after that aren’t as bad.”

He raised the needle above her eye, leaning in even closer, the point coming down slowly, methodically, until it rested on her tear duct. It was a minor sting, like a piece of grit caught in her eye. But Georgia couldn’t rub it away. She couldn’t even blink.

Then Doctor Plincer shoved.

The pain was preternatural. Blinding. Explosive. Like her eyeball had burst and her was brain was boiling and it went on and on and ON…

Plincer extracted the needle, sighed, and used his dirty coat sleeve to wipe away some sweat that had beaded up on his bald head. Georgia’s head still throbbed. Somehow, each thought, each sense, had taken on an almost physical manifestation. Words that she cognated felt like stab wounds, each syllable a twist of a knife. Doctor Plincer’s BO smelled like Georgia’s nose was on fire. His hand on her face was a jumper cable attached to her nerves, roasting her alive. Every single sensation, every single thought, brought agony she couldn’t escape from.

Then her vision turned red.

“
Good girl. I’ll give you a lollipop later. Let me suction off some of this blood.”

Dr. Plincer held a tube to her tear duct. It hurt worse than a hornet stinging her eyeball, and the sound made her ache like her teeth were being drilled.

“
What you’re feeling now is called synesthesia. It’s when each of our senses mixes up its signals on the way to the brain. It’s how someone taking LSD thinks he can smell the color red, or taste a Led Zepplin song. But in your case, every sense you have is activating your pain receptors. And because of that, I’m ashamed to admit I’ve lied to you.”

Doctor Plincer raised another syringe. “These next five injections are going to hurt quite a bit more.”

Tom’s stomach was really making noise now, loud enough for it to be heard above his stomping and crashing through the forest. The smell of cooked meat was intoxicating. The faster he got there, the faster he could stuff his face. Then he could take his meds, go to sleep, and try to enjoy the rest of this mini-vacation before his dumb-ass father sent him to that dumb-ass military academy.

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.”

“
Was he right?” Tyrone asked.

“
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.”