Psychos

by Neil Gaiman

  Gordon was easy enough to frame. He certainly didn’t go around telling his friends that he had invited Willow over for a tryst, and there was enough bondage gear in the closet from which Camile had been dragged to satisfy the police that this was just another preppy sex-murder to be covered up for a while, then ruthlessly exploited by the media for some period after.

  “Good one,” the case worker told Willow on the car ride home. “You almost did a good job of it, with the change of clothes and the public freakout. We like audacity, but next time tell us first.”

  “So you put me in contact with rich assholes I’d want to kill on purpose, to see how many I would actually do?” Willow asked plainly.

  “We’re just making sure you fit into our corporate culture,” the case worker said. “Given who you’ll be working with, it’s good to get this sort of thing out of your system.”

  Willow graduated from Princeton with a 3.98 GPA, but did not attend graduation. She was busy already, at her new job in Washington DC. Another slum apartment to keep her on her toes. A bullpen office on the good side of town. Not in the secret sub-basements of the Washington Monument or anything so fanciful, just a decent commercial space with the non-bearing walls torn down and wide desks. In the fourth-floor woman’s restroom, someone had labeled the sanitary napkin dispenser the bottomore memorial maxi-pad box. Willow loved that.

  She also loved that work for her was one extended brainstorming session.

  “Filarial nematodes!” Willow shouted out one bright Monday morning at the general staff meeting. Her team was there, as were the case workers responsible for each genius. Her Danish sat untouched before her. “Let’s weaponize it.” There were murmurs of approval from Willow’s cohort, but the management was confused.

  “English please,” Willow’s case worker reminded her. “We’re not all as smart as you are, so you have to tell us what you mean slowly, carefully, and completely. What do these, uh, nematodes do?” Willow giggled, as did a few others, but the caseworker sat placidly, used to it.

  “What don’t they do! Willow said. “Elephantiasis—” “Elephantitis?” one of the other case workers asked. “Elephantiasis. But yes, it’s what you think. And river blindness.” “Little children blind from drinking river water,” the employee next to Willow interjected. “I like to imagine little worms swimming in the jelly of the eyes, nibbling on the optic nerve.”

  “Arthritis too,” Willow said, but that was anti-climactic. “They cause arthritis.” “All right, blindness and deformity, targeting poor children,” Willow’s case worker said. “What else do we have?”

  The ideas came fast and furious. Drones that will swarm like bees on the horizon and will extrude a napalmlike “royal jelly.” Lung-extraction torture combined with the use of a respirator to keep the target alive for several minutes. Creating a futures market for municipal water supplies, then bundled derivatives based on the futures. “We can literally flood the market,” the man who introduced that idea said, “by wiping out a glacier or two. Whenever we like. Or just turn off the water entirely; make the little fuckers fight for it.” Another wants to create hypertaylorist shipping warehouse labor where the work schedule itself counts as health coverage, what with all the lifting and running. “We can set some up ourselves and charge people to use them. Like a gym,” someone adds to that idea. Then there’s a tangent in the discussion—cultivate aneorexia through nutrition clinics and one-calorie vitamin supplements. That leads the discussion to famines, and how it’s such a shame that there haven’t been any in Western Europe in so long. Maybe tiny Corsica would make for a good show. Or think big, take out Portugal.

  “What fucking tedious shit this all is,” Willow said suddenly. The pastry before her had been torn to shreds. All heads turned to look her way. She pushed her hair out of her face; her eyes were blazing. “Here’s what we should be doing. Let’s leak this meeting, let’s leak all of them. So everyone in the world knows about our department and what we do. That we kill children, wreck economies, set up rape camps, just to have some slaves. People think this stuff is just natural, an emergent property of the free market.” She raised her hands to make quotation marks in the air over those last two words, and got a laugh from her co-workers, but not from their handlers.

  “Let’s tell everyone exactly what we do. From grade school recruitment to the pipeline from the Ivy League into this office. That we’re the ones dousing little Pakistani girls in acid just to have something for the photographers,” Willow said, an edge in her voice. “And then we’ll tell them that this is what they’re going to have to put up with—no, what they’ll have to fucking love with all the Jesus-love in their heart—if they really want to live in the greatest country in the world. There’s a psychopath gap out there, between us and the other countries, and we have to keep up.”

  For a long moment, nobody said anything. Then one of the other members of Willow’s team added, “We can probably start selling test-taking guides, maybe set up some afterschool tutoring for children. In the inner cities, maybe, but definitely for parochial schools and all the best private schools. You know, so the students can have a shot at testing well.”

  Everyone began talking at once. Willow’s enthusiasm was contagious. She smiled and thought of the old motivational poster with a cat clinging to a branch with its claws that had hung in her third-grade classroom. Hang In There, Baby!

  Serenity Now

  BY SIMON McCAFFERY

  Big problems demand big solutions, often delivered by recklessly deliberate visionaries with extremely big balls. These unilateral maneuvers are rarely popular in their time. But the changes they invoke change the map for all to come. For both better and worse.

  Kindly observe, as Simon McCaffery succinctly trash-compacts the Big Picture into the following micro-epic, and weirdly one-ups A Clockwork Orange in the globally transformative process.

  For Isaias

  You must remain calm. If you want to hear the story of the monster named Andrew Keaton Paylor and understand why he did the things he did, it is an absolute necessity.

  You have almost certainly been exposed. Females and preadolescent males were initially immune to ST6, dubbed Serenity666 in the sleazoid tabs and so-called online news sources, but within a year of its outbreak it went airborne. Today it aggressively infects both genders of all ages and races. Only the brotherhood of blank-eyed Wal-Mart greeters and the autistic have nothing to fear. And pure schizoids.

  Yes, in hindsight I should have assumed that ST6 might mutate and spread beyond its target demographic. The essence of life is that it adapts, slipping around the cleverest barricades. My hope is that in sharing my story you can look past the absurdist doomsday rhetoric and appreciate the black-cloaked horrors our race has cast off and the serenity it has embraced, however forcibly.

  There are no diagnostic tests to detect ST6 and no stages; once triggered the retrovirus gives birth to a malignant neoplasm that cascades through the blood and lymph nodes within twenty-four hours. This cancerous flash-fire consumes the organs and marrow in mere days, far too quickly to combat it with chemotherapy, advanced proton treatments or robotic radiosurgery.

  The mortality rate of patients with active symptoms is, all of them. Quarantine is pointless.

  You can flee the depopulated cities, escape to some remote tropical island if you have the resources, but if someone else beat you there, you may be greeted by a Zen master’s bullet, not a garland of orchids and carnations.

  There are no preventative inoculations. My attorney confided that after my arrest my captors considered water-boarding me to coerce the creation of one, but that tactic would only have resulted in my untimely death and the loss of all knowledge of ST6’s genetic architecture. They beseeched me to assist them to reverse-engineer it, as atonement for my crimes against humanity. But I’d had plenty of time to think since my incarceration and prosecution before the International Criminal Court, and I politely declined.

  You and your s
urviving loved ones must simply learn to quell your inner demons, with the help of pharmacology.

  Take your CDC rationed pills as directed, whether you’ve elected Home Sequestered Status, or you signed away all major health coverage to return to work and a simulation of normal life. Make sure your children take theirs. Sleep well knowing that governments on five continents have commandeered Big Pharma—Pfizer, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Hoffmann–La Roche, Takeda, Johnson & Johnson—to ensure stockpiles of mood stabilizers distributed by the World Health Organization never fall below critical levels.

  Alcohol, coffee and cocaine can be consumed—this is still America—but as a medical doctor I strongly advise you against imbibing any substance that heightens the senses or excites. Slip that Netflix documentary about the slaughtering of dolphins right back into the mail, unopened.

  Soft lighting and soothing music helps. Cop-killin’ Rapping and eardrum-shredding Metal are deader than Tupac and Randy Rhoades. Shock jocks have switched brands to elevator Muzak. Yoga and biofeedback are being taught in kindergartens, I hear.

  I’m listening to Gabriel Fauré’s ethereal Requiem Solos as I write this in my impregnable cell, and the soothing angelic harmonies are like limbic coolant.

  Take your pills.

  If you want to keep reading, your life depends on it.

  Terrorism follows a predictable trajectory.

  Political and economic catalysts mix with bitter, centuries-old religious and racial disputes. Extremist leaders arise and the weak-minded and downtrodden are swiftly recruited, brainwashed and prepared. Incendiary violence erupts, with a relatively high legitimacy and support for the insurgents at first.

  Government and invading foreign military forces crack down, and a protracted period of stalemate ensues that devolves into a draining, endless state of martyrdom and paranoid chaos punctuated by acts of soulless violence by all parties. Factions splinter. Soon the drab squares and narrow streets are redecorated with bright abstract expressionist blood and half-incinerated fragments of flesh. The extremists and their combatants endure heavy losses and both lose popular support as collateral damage mounts. No one is converted to the other’s ideology.

  Terror cells spring up in the infidels’ homelands and set off subway bombs. The invading “peace-keeping” forces escalate the conflict and deploy more troops. Embers from the crucible of fanatical hatred are blown and scattered to new lands.

  Politicians spout the same tired speeches about instilling hope and democracy, but breaking the cycle has always been impossible.

  You cannot isolate man’s inherent desire to kill for a cause in the older folds of the brain and excise it with a scalpel. Scholarly dissertations on the “psychology of terrorism” are as useless as neuroscientists viewing 3D scans of a living sociopath’s brain in hopes of mapping his alleged madness. Watch the colorful movie of my brain while I viewed footage of the truckloads of dead and dying being deposited inside stadiums converted into massive domed hospices. Let me know what it reveals.

  Terrorism is as old as Abraham. But three years ago I conceived a perfect, elegant solution.

  Scattered along the Pakistani North-West Frontier and part of the Afghan Kunar province known as “Enemy Central,” the outlying villages of Asadabad are primordial cradles of terrorism. Local Taliban groups are thicker than sand fleas throughout the impenetrable terrain and networks of caves. More than seventy percent of all deadly insurgent incidents in the country occur in the region. The number of American and NATO soldiers maimed or bagged and shipped home in pieces isn’t widely publicized.

  I take a sabbatical from my department head chair at the Cancer Genetics Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine and volunteer to be reactivated and attached to the First Battalion, Seventh Marines. I’m forty-three and in good health, divorced and childless. The 1/7 is deployed to a hellhole village nine klicks from Asadabad where an abnormal number of American and British soldiers have been diagnosed with lethal scalp and neck skin cancers. Metastatic melanomas and the more rare Burkitt lymphomas.

  Despite their Middle Eastern heritage the local populace isn’t immune to basal cell carcinomas and lesions, but this isn’t my core mission. I have to convince the battalion CO to allow me to offer free screenings. I tell him it will help us win the hearts and minds of the oppressed villagers. My fellow jarhead liberators sneer behind my back and call me an Ewok-lover and a camel-fucker. But I scavenge supplies and set up my portable clinic.

  Few people accept my offer; they’re probably concerned they’ll be labeled sympathizers. Taliban informants are everywhere. Many villagers disappear from their simple homes after the sun drops below the sawtoothed mountains. They are spirited into the freezing desert, and none return.

  Patient zero is a twelve-year-old boy named Aamir.

  I find him sitting on the baked ground beside my screening station one blazing morning, accompanied by his surviving guardian, a wizened dust-cloaked grandmother. The boy is a skinny tangle of scabbed limbs with a smile full of crooked yellow teeth. He doesn’t brush away the flies that light at the corners of his large dark-brown eyes.

  I give them both exams. “Do you like chocolate, Aamir?”

  Of course he does. All little boys love chocolate. I give Aamir five bars. “You must tell all of your friends to come see Dr. Paylor for free screenings,” I say as I pat his round head, jumping with lice.

  I offer his grandmother MRE rations and slip her ten dollars, and tell her I am concerned about an irregular mole on the back of her son’s head. She sits there forever, staring at me with her milky eyes, but she finally allows me to give Aamir a vaccination. I think it’s the ten dollars.

  In the coming week I “vaccinate” fifteen of the village’s adolescent boys, and distribute more chocolate and currency to the Dirty-Knee Pajama Mammas.

  In August our battalion is redeployed to Asmãr in the Bar Kunar District, and I inoculate many more Aamirs, Aasifs, Abduls, and Aazars. I inject the alphabet with ST6.

  You see, the terror cells rely on the outlying villages for shelter and food, but mainly they recruit poor orphaned young boys to replenish their ranks.

  If you consulted Wikipedia or watched The Doctor Oz Show segments, you know that a retrovirus is an RNA virus that uses a reverse transcriptase enzyme to produce DNA. Once it invades normal cells, the RNA strands integrate themselves into the host’s genome.

  They become you. It is no longer possible to distinguish the original you from the new you.

  A retrovirus like Serenity666 is contagious by touch and saliva, and detecting its presence is extremely difficult until it presents symptoms in the host.

  You probably also saw Dr. Oz’s guest, the funny Don Knotts endocrinologist with the bobbing Adam’s apple who did a marvelous job of explaining how an engineered retrovirus could theoretically be triggered by heightened amounts of hormones and neuro chemicals released inside a body experiencing sustained anger. Indoctrinated bodies hooked on the white-hot heroin rage of Jihad.

  My solution worked, at first.

  Four months after Aamir went scampering back to his shelled home the RPG ambushes tapered off and the platoons assigned to sweep the same pock-holed roads for IEDs weren’t finding them. The kidnappings dwindled. The Taliban stopped shooting up supply convoys and downing Predator drones. Police stations and electrical substations that had been bombed and rebuilt several times went unmolested. An eerie peace settled across the region and spread into Pakistan, Iraq and Iran. Blackwater’s revenues dipped for the first quarter ever.

  The villagers and shopkeepers of Bar Kunar whispered of the terrible return of Malak al-Maut, come to carry off their husbands, brothers and sons in the night. Azreal, the Islamic archangel of death.

  By then I was back in Texas with my own oncology practice, inspecting freckles and egg-shaped moles. Reports of an alarming unknown carcinogen began appearing on CNN and in The New York Times.The media speculated that the cause was depleted uranium shells or an unreported ca
che of WMDs.

  I wasn’t alarmed. I’d engineered ST6 to infect adolescent and adult males only, and created the perfect vector to deliver it to the isolated bands of Taliban operating in remote camps and mountain caves. They would be exterminated too swiftly to spread it beyond the region. Only sympathizers who came in direct contact were at risk, and undeniably, some of the soldiers sent to root them out. If you consider it calmly, they were already dying in droves.

  Then the first female suicide bomber staggered into a crowded market square and collapsed before she could detonate the vest. Her body underneath the modest burqa was burning up with ST6.

  The table to which I’ve been securely strapped is shaped in a cross.

  I’m called the Beast, Omega Man, the Supreme Sociopath and other colorful epithets. By comparison Hitler is a surly, truant schoolboy in short pants, the fictional Hannibal Lector a harmless, flesh-nibbling pervert.

  The gallery beyond the glass viewing ports is empty except for a single stoic Army guard, and my execution by lethal injection is not being relayed live around the world. No witnesses are present since my father, mother and estranged ex-wife all succumbed to ST6. So did my bigoted battalion CO and platoon mates, and the military investigators who traced the man-made epidemic back to me.

  I’m a carrier, but the “schizoid personality disorder” the criminal psychologists diagnosed me with renders me immune. I’m simply in control, and always have been.