Why did God so often rub salt in our wounds?

Kurt swore. His eyes were transfixed by the words on the screen.

The doors of the entryway opened, letting in screams, a gust of wind, and raucous threats.

“We need crowd control,” someone yelled, “Pronto!”

“It’s him!” A woman shouted, pointing with jackhammer thrusts of her finger.

Rising from his seat, Kurt trundled over to the hallway like a stone giant of legend. There was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

Actually, that wasn’t true. There was something I could do, I just didn’t want to do it; not twice in one day.

Merritt…

Shaking myself from my thoughts, I followed after Kurt.

Reporters and their cameramen flanked either side of the entrance at the far end of the hallway in layered palisades, barbed with microphones. Walls of police officers with armor and riot shields pressed up against the public’s tide. Behind the police protection, nurses and transporters pushed a bed with a man on it, matted in blood and guts that weren’t his.

The shooter.

The murderer’s hair came up to the back half of the top of his skull, dead-ending in stark, male-patterned baldness. A stubby goatee and thin, lazy sideburns bristled on his squat face. Rage flushed his skin beet red.

“You—you monster!!” Kurt yelled. He lunged toward the man, disregarding the healthcare workers standing between them.

Before anyone could respond, Kurt had already reached his strong, supple limbs through the gap in the police barricade. He smeared his hands over the shooter’s neck and chest, fumbling to grab the spot where he could rip the fiend’s heart out.

The predictability of the police reaction only made it that much harder for me to watch.

An officer scooped his hand onto Kurt’s chest and thrust him against a wall. In response, Kurt thrashed his arms and the officer brandished his gun.

“Somebody shoot this guy up with quiet-juice already!” the officer yelled.

“Officer, please,” I begged, “This man has been through a traumatic experience, don’t—”

—But the policeman pushed me away, not caring for what I had to say. The shove sent me toppling down on my behind as people around me scattered me and the shooter’s bed rolled by. By the time I got to my feet, Kurt had already been given a sedative. He stared at me as his body shut down against his will, as if the sight of me was all he had left to hold on to.

A booming, thunderclap voice scattered squabbling bystanders. Even the officers froze stiff. Everyone turned to the officer who’d broken through the crowd: Commissioner Holbrook of the Elpeck PD. His badge was like a cross of gold-framed solar panels. Sparkling chevrons abutted every corner.

“Everyone needs to take a step back, now,” Commissioner Holbrook said. “The city is in agony over this. The guy tore through civilians like paper, not to mention half a precinct’s worth of good men. Please, people,” he urged, “breathe. The shooter has hurt enough people; don’t add anyone else to the list of casualties.”

The Commissioner’s pensive words cast a spell on the scene. Footsteps clacked like stones against the backdrop of ECGs chirruping like the proverbial crickets.

A feral bark from behind me made me shudder. Turning, I saw the shooter howling like a madman. His limbs flailed against their tough plastic restraints as everyone stared.

“We’re going to take care of it,” Commissioner Holbrook said. “And, mark my words, the whole fucking government, from the city all the way up to Hegemony, is going to take the steps to keep something like this from ever happening again.” The Commissioner glared at the assembled members of the press. “And God help you if you try to bleep me on the broadcast.”

And they believed him—and not just about the threat. I wanted to believe the Commissioner too, but politics was easier said than done, unless you were a corporation, in which case it was first come first serve.

Still, it was good to hope. At least it hurt less than fatalism.

As I walked over to Kurt to get the orderlies under my control, a hand pressed against my shoulder.

“Here, Commissioner. Here he is.”

I recognized the nurse as the one from before, who’d needed my help black-tagging a victim she still thought had been in the orange.

“You’re a psychologist?” Holbrook said.

“Neuropsychiatrist,” I replied.

“Good enough,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “Come with me.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Uh, Sir?” I asked, breathlessly, “They’re—they’re not the same thing.”

Holbrook stared at me dryly. “Even better.”

“Commissioner?”

“I saw what happened back there,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I wish I didn’t have to scrape them up out of the bottom of the barrel, but it’s damn tough to find people who’ll deal rationally with life and death. Half the police force wants this Aicken fuck—that’s the shooter—summarily executed. The other half doesn’t want to be within fifty feet of him.”

“What…? Why?” I asked.

“They think he’s possessed.” The Commissioner sighed. “I’m hoping you’ll be able to put in a couple of words for common sense’s sake.”

I nodded. “No… I understand perfectly.”

Commissioner Holbrook raised an eyebrow.

I chuckled. “Let’s just say I had a really weird patient this morning.”

He nodded.

The two of us walked down the hall toward the shooter’s room.

The problem with demonic possession wasn’t that it was real, but that a sufficient mass of the populace believed it was real. Reality was kind of funny (scary) that way: he (or she) with the biggest, widest-reaching stick got to make the rules. A mere seventy-three years ago, my country was still stuck in the tail end of over a century spent squished under the iron thumb of the theocratic junta otherwise known as the Trentonian Prelatory. Perpetual martial law; public execution of heretic, non-believers, and most of the people who were good at math; very “cringey” pop culture, as kids these days might say—the whole nine yards. But even with two generations’ separation between now and then, the wounds were still there, and no one knew how to talk about them without stirring one- to three-fourths of the population into a frothy-mouthed rage.

History was a serpentine curve traced through sand by the swings of a fractious pendulum. The late-stage republic, with its high gas prices, its low wage growth; its useless university degrees and idiot appointees; ’culture war’ and corruption—handing out cheques on Parliament floor… it had lost the faith of its people. All it had taken was a critical mass of enough Jon Smiths and Jane Roes to decide that, for all their insanity, the revanchist LumiNATIONers were worth trusting, if only to save their hegemony from the other guy, and all that his puffed-up coalition stood for. Angelicals had gotten quite a bit of a free rein in the Republic. The Prelatory changed all that.The LumiNATION (a.k.a. Nater) party gathered up lovers of strong-men from every corner of the country. The likes of Prelate Zoster and Prelate Sheen sussed out skeptics of Church authority wherever they hid. It didn’t matter how conservative their theology was; they would be made to bow before the Lassedite and the government that served him.

It took a long time for a people to change for the better; change for the worse, though, could happen in the blink of an eye. Honest to God, there were good people who really did believe in demons—bat wings, cloven hooves, spaded tails, horns and all. My wife, for instance—bless her heart—didn’t feel comfortable making big decisions without first getting a positive reading from her augur. The same was true of my mother in law, although, in fairness, Margaret was a terrible person.

Two officers stood guard on either side of the door to the Dressfeldt Shooter’s hospital room. Commissioner Holbrook made them part with just a nod.

I wondered what Margaret would blame this shooting on. The decline in Church-produced video games? Too many hover-cars? Non-denominational prayer in public schools? The gays?

I made a mental note to check with Jules on the current status of Margaret’s Bigot Bingo card once I got home.

As I stepped into the patient’s room, I was struck by the sound of the raspy, wheezing breaths rushing out from his slack jaws. The shooter’s sick chameleon of a face blurred between disgust and sweet self-satisfaction. It was hard to tell his expression from one moment to the next. Despite his heaving chest, his eyes narrowed as he saw us, like he was a germaphobe and we were filthy, filthy flies.

Acts of violence, especially heinous ones, tended to stem from either pain or fear, or both. The former wore their pain on every inch of their being. Sometimes they went cold from the shock and stayed that way; other times, they would thaw, and then the pain came back a thousand times worse than before. It was the fearful ones that drank deep from the exhilaration, and that was exactly what I saw before me.

The man—Aicken—coughed. “A person dumb enough to drink fluoridated water has no business callin’ anyone a psychopath,” he said. “You don’t know me. You don’t fucking know me! You can’t! The vaccines poisoned your mind! Water fluoride shrunk your balls!”

I shivered. The moment brought some of my worst memories to surface.

They put robots in our pills to make us kill God, my sister had said. That’s how they did it. That’s how. Now now.

“Hey! Hey!”

Aicken’s yelling brought me back to the present. “Don’t you ignore me!”

You didn’t need a psychiatric license to tell that this was a man to be avoided.

I turned back to the Commissioner. “There are no demons here, Mr. Holbrook,” I sighed, “just a sociopathic psychopath.” I shrugged. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I don’t like wasting my time with monsters.”

“I’m not a monster,” Aicken roared. “I’m a man. I’m a real man—I’ve got the blood of the Hallowed Beast running through my veins! And them… they’re not people. They’re wolves in sheep’s clothing. Wolves of ignorance; wolves of pride. They hate God. They hate children. They hate the Angel. They don’t care that He died for us, that He broke through the Wall of Night. They’ll sell our grandchildren’s futures to DAISHU’s yellow devils! They’ll vote us into slavery. They don’t care about God’s Law.”

Against my better instincts, I turned back to face him.

Even worse: I walked up to him.

Maybe it was just my imagination, but the man almost seemed to be twitching in front of me, though it might just have been the rage writhing through him.

“Right and wrong come from our hearts and our pain,” I said. “And pain doesn’t stop existing just because it isn’t yours.”

Aicken wriggled against the bedsheets. “You’re like them,” he said. He let out a harsh, guttural cough. “You’re the problem. You’re weak! Bleeding heart, bleeding mind! They need to learn the Truth, and to fear it, for it is mighty. We are fools of dust—and we don’t care. You’re going to die; we’re going to die. We’re all going to die.”

He hawked a loogie, pelting me right in the eye.

Fudge!

“I spit on you!” he shrieked. “I spit on all of you!”

I flicked the glop off my face.

Ugh!

Just as I was turning away, a coughing fit seized Aicken. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but then I saw his eyes bulge and roll back into his head, his body twisting. For a split second, I thought I spotted dark streaks on his eyeballs, like mildew on his corneas, though what was really shocking were the bruises on his arms and neck.

At least, I thought they were bruises. There was no trace of red or blue beneath his white skin, just thick, black splotches.

He probably deserved worse.

Then the ECG screeched. Aicken’s heartbeat fluttered like a leaf in the wind.

Running over to the console by the wall, I scanned the chip in my hand and pushed the large burnt-orange icon on the bottom of the screen.

“The patient is seizing and in tachycardia,” I said. “Send in a team now!”