Trapped

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.

“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 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.

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, pushing for the courts to entrust a psychopathic criminal into 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. They turned their back on him, and his research. He became an outcast, unable to publish in the journals, unable to work at even a community college.

Luckily, Plincer’s family had some 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, committed to revealing the true physical nature of evil.

But Plincer did more than reveal it. He discovered he could enhance the part of the brain to make people even more evil.

The scientific community might not care, but Plincer found out that others did. He wound up in bed with some powerful people who found this result intriguing. Since then, Plincer was supplied with money and prisoners to experiment on, along with a guarantee that his island would be left alone.

Unfortunately, Plincer couldn’t repeat the results he had with Lester. He managed to come close with Subject 33. But Subject 33 proved impossible to control. The procedure drove the other subjects insane, making them