of strange, hostile, alien species wholly different from everyone else. They weren’t different from us, not anymore they weren’t – because we killed them if they were.
It was all thanks to Doctor Greenfeld. Before my time, before there were Shepherds, everyone had their own idea about how to save the world. Those ideas were all immature, or hopelessly reactionary, or naively idealistic, or simply hand-me-down ideas from sources that weren’t trustworthy in the first place. There were seven billion ideas on how to save the world, but the world was still falling apart. Third-world countries were warzones or poverty-stricken sweatshops for first-world countries that had more than they needed, but the citizens of the best countries died from stress-related diseases and they couldn’t sleep at night without triple-locking their doors for fear of criminals. People without power dreamed of having the power to save the world, but people with power swore up and down that they were doing everything they could as they went to play golf. Consensus opinion was that power corrupted because we were a broken species. If I ever get sick of the blood on my hands and think about calling it quits, all I have to do is watch a video about how you people lived in the early twenty-first century.
But Doctor Greenfeld, he gave us a solution. The answer had already been staring us in the face for a long time, but he showed us what we needed to do to get there – and showed us the consequences for all of us if we didn’t.
In your time, you already knew about psychopaths, I think. You even knew that one person in a hundred was a psychopath. You also knew that psychopaths came in different forms: Sometimes charismatic, sometimes brilliant, sometimes mindlessly violent, sometimes consummate liars, sometimes thrill-seeking, sometimes hopelessly stuck to routine and angry when their routines were broken. But behind those variations, they were all the same: Sadistic, unable to empathize with their fellow man, and greedy with a bottomless hunger that could not be sated even if the world was handed to them cooked and carved on a silver platter. Within the human species, Doctor Greenfeld showed us that there was a shadow-species, a powerful minority that the rest of us obeyed or defended or covered up for because we believed that they were ultimately just like us.
We were wrong, he said. They were born different from us, born missing something innately human. There was no cure for their condition, and because they had quietly taken over the world, the world would not last much longer. They were not only our dictators and serial killers and rapists, they were also our presidents and celebrities and corporate managers.
The world had to be taken back from them, but the system could not adequately deal with them. The truly dangerous psychopaths tended to be wealthy, and they already owned all the judges and lawmakers. They feared nothing… except death.
Kill them, said Doctor Greenfeld. They are rabid. You must kill them. It is the only way.
So we did.
As a kid, I watched the news as our media outlets developed a schizophrenic split. One channel would show the first Shepherds fighting and dying, hunting down men in suits and firing at lackeys in riot gear, while another news channel talked about Greenfeld’s crazies being rounded up before their terrorist plots could bear fruit. Over and again I saw the Shepherds firing and falling and continuing on. They did not seem to care when one of their own was killed. Apparently they had gone to the place where no psychopath could go. They did not fear death.
It was funny, but the psychopaths in your day always talked about “the next big thing”. They showed graphs with the declining amounts of time between the Stone Age and the Iron Age, then the Industrial Revolution, then the Machine Age with the Information Age following hot on its heels. Man’s glorious arrival at an era of omniscience and luxury and ease was only just around the corner, and every new gadget was touted as a harbinger of that coming age. As far as I know, they really ate that stuff up in your era. Products marketed as techno-religious iconography with down payments given and interest accrued on a coming Singularity. It was all hogwash, of course. Whether they were high priests overseeing human sacrifices or marketing geniuses packaging shiny garbage, they’ve all secretly hated humankind, and they’ve only ever wanted to do one thing: Turn you into castrated versions of them. They wanted to turn human beings into robots repeating slogans they gave them, or into vampires without teeth desperate for the next product to consume.
Doctor Greenfeld didn’t just show us the enemy. He showed us our heroes, too. He showed us how some men and women had both the conscience of a normal human combined with the ruthlessness of a psychopath. The Shepherds were far outnumbered by the wolves, but we have an advantage in that we won’t immediately turn against our own kind when things don’t go our way. As intimidating as he is, a psychopath is a coward. Once the Shepherds stepped in and things started getting better, a lot of lower-level psychopaths with grudges to bear started working for us, turning in their own kind for pay. I may worry about money all the time, but I’ve never once considered taking a bribe from some shifty-eyed termite.
We owe our new world to Doctor Greenfeld. He gave birth to us and made it possible for normal humans to live decent lives. When the first Shepherds got curious about how the good doctor could afford to arm and equip his revolutionary army and found out that he had a history of taking money from large pharmaceutical companies, and had hatched an elaborate plot to use us to get back at some other white-collar psychopaths who had insulted him, the Shepherds killed Doctor Greenfeld as they would any other psychopath. But his legacy endures.
“You’re a total nut-job yourself,” Ferris said, waking me from my daydream. “You would have shot me on the freaking playground if I hadn’t played along. You wouldn’t have cared.”
I didn’t feel like responding. I’d heard that line before, too, and there was actually something to it. When I was a kid, I stabbed another boy with a pencil. This put my name under the watchful eyes of the Shepherds. There was another incident where some of my neighbors were looking at a snake, and without a word I picked up a garden hoe and killed it. By this time, most of the high-profile psychopaths had already gone underground, so the Shepherds had time to investigate a kid like me. I didn’t know it, but they watched me for years. Once they were satisfied that I had normal human relations with normal human friends, they decided that I had only stabbed the boy because he was a bully and killed the snake because I didn’t want it to bite anyone. Once I was old enough, I was told what I was and taught the means for hunting down monsters who had nothing in common with humanity save physical appearance. I was turned into a Shepherd.
Sophie pointed out her house. I stopped and said, “Your parents can come talk to me if they want. Ferris can’t leave the car, though. Tell them they don’t have to say anything to me if they don’t want to.”
Sophie nodded and left without another word. The neighbors watched as we sat in silence. Fifteen minutes passed and the parents never came. This was not as surprising as you might think. I wasn’t a cop who was going to guilt them into giving a stern talking-to to their kid. He’s being charged with mishandling a mammal over an aquatic environment – that sort of thing. No, I was a killer, a final solution, and while nothing had been proven about genetic inheritability of psychopathic tendencies, most parents who raised wolves tended to leave well enough alone when it came to arguing with Shepherds. They must have suspected that their son was a wolf. They were probably putting on a show of anger but breathing a sigh of relief that he was out of their hands. Ferris began to cry and muttered something about his mother. I ignored him and drove on.
We arrived at the nondescript brick building that was the headquarters for this chapter of the Shepherds. I saw a van in the lot that belonged to some of our brothers south of the border. They called themselves Cleaners rather than Shepherds, and I sometimes referred to wolves as termites because I grew up near the Mexican border. We worked with them often, and I looked forward to seeing them and hearing their stories.
We entered the dimly-lit headquarters and I saw others of my kind,
some in plain clothes like me, some heavily armored and carrying assault rifles and automatic shotguns.
“What’s going on?” I asked no one in particular. “What’s with all the heavy gear?”
“Got a whole nest of termites southwest of Houston,” said Stacey, a friend of mine. “Lots of big-paying heads in a bunker. A bunker, you believe that? We’re leaving in an hour. You want in?”
“I’ll have to think about it. I was going to pick up some easy heads tomorrow morning.”
“They can wait.”
“Yeah, but I was going to sleep, I mean.”
“It’ll take hours to get there. Sleep on the ride if you want.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I repeated. I left Stacey and dragged the kid behind me.
I ignored Ferris as he began to complain again, then I stopped dead in my tracks as I drew near the lounge. A handful of Shepherds, most of them already armed for the ride south, were sitting around our big television set watching Psycho Island. I couldn’t believe it; tonight was the season premiere and I had completely forgotten. I was numb with shock.
I watched as one well-known character, Grieves, subtly bullied a character I had