JACK KILBORN ~ TRAPPED (65 page)

“
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 service 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.

According to his intel, there were still five likely candidates on the island. Though the ferals had surprised the doctor by proving themselves able to work together, he doubted they would be able to grab all of the new arrivals. Some would survive.

Plincer glanced at the clock. He had less than eight hours to get his hands on them. It would make for a much more effective presentation if he were able to grab all five. But all he needed was a single volunteer.

It was time to send Lester back out to find one.

Martin stared below him, through the leaves of the bough he perched upon. His swollen hands had resisted his efforts to climb the tree, and his ruined cheek resting against the rough bark of the oak tree’s branch made his injury light up every time he swallowed. But he felt lucky to have gotten up in time.

A few moments earlier, in a semi-frantic search for Sara, he’d come upon a group of feral people. He fled before they saw him. Or so he thought. Within ten minutes, the ferals were on his trail, closing fast. Martin ran as hard has he could, not daring to use the flashlight, fearing he’d give his position away. Only moments into the chase, something surprising happened; he bumped into another group.

After his third right turn, Martin’s gut burned with realization. They had him trapped. These insane, witless cannibals had somehow managed to surround him.

With no choices left, he picked a large tree and hoped for the best. The ferals closed the circle and converged, twelve of them total, right beneath his perch. More than expected, too many to be able to handle, less than ten feet beneath him.

The largest man in the group, the one with the ax, grunted orders at the others, pointing in various directions. Then he leaned up against the tree and reached into the sack he had hanging over his shoulder.

Martin couldn’t make out any details, but the axman pulled out a dark round object the size of a football. He brought it to his face and took a bite. The scent of cooked pork wafted up to Martin. But Martin knew whatever this guy was eating, it wasn’t pork.

The axman sat down. He began to really gnaw on the thing, shaking his hairy head from side to side like a dog worrying a bone. Martin’s leg began to fall asleep. The pins and needles sensation grew from a minor discomfort to a spreading numbness. He shifted slightly, anxious to stay quiet, twisting his pelvis so the blood flow could return.

Then his adrenalin spiked, flushing his body with heat, causing every muscle to contract as Martin lost his balance and began to fall.

Cindy knew she was hurting Tyrone—clenching his left hand so tight—but she was too frightened to let go. They ran as fast as safety allowed, heads down to keep from getting lashed in the face by wayward twigs and branches, arms swinging like walking sticks for the blind, so no one head-butted a tree. Cindy had no clue how many pursuers there were, or how close they’d gotten, and she was ready to circle the island ten times before she slowed down to find out.

But her lungs and legs and stamina were casualties of meth, and though she’d been off the drug for a while her body still hadn’t fully recovered. After only a few minutes of running, Tyrone practically had to drag her, and Cindy’s panting was becoming increasingly labored and loud.

When Sara finally stopped, Cindy fell to her knees, pressing a hand hard against the stitch in her side and gasping for air.

Sara came over, and whispered, “Shh.”

Cindy’s face pinched as she tried to get her breathing under control. Sara crawled ahead, up to a bush, and stuck her head inside. It was still dark, but Cindy could see pretty well. She moved her head to the side, so Sara’s shadow didn’t block her vision.

Wait… shadow?

On all fours, Cindy crept closer to Sara. All at once she understood where the light was coming from, and the importance of being quiet.

Somehow, they’d gotten back to their campsite.

Their fire was smaller, the few logs left burning slow and steady. The last time Cindy was here there were two cannibals, eating their fallen friend. Only one remained. The one with the knife and fork and salt shaker. His head was resting on the chest of the dead one, using it like a gory pillow.

Cindy turned her head away before viewing any details.

“
He asleep?” Tyrone whispered.

“
Can’t tell.” Sara withdrew her head from the bush. “But he’s right next to the tent. That’s where the radio is.”

“
I’ll go,” Tyrone said. “I’ll be real careful, won’t wake him up.”

Sara shook her head. “No. I’ll go. You both stay here.”