Empathy Test: A Henning Jenkins Novel

by Richard DeGrandpre

It's just after dawn. The air is damp and cool under an overcast sky. She's freezing, hands in pockets, shivering in her threadbare t-shirt and worn denim pants. She's no more than sixteen or seventeen; probably fifteen. And she has no idea she has a mere sixty seconds to live… The year is 2018. Three years after terrorist attacks contaminated three US cities and paralyzed the nation, America is psychologically and politically transformed. Two-party politics has imploded into a political singularity known as the America First Party. A new nationalist utopia is in the making. Or is it? Below the sheepish uniformity and the sanitized civil society lies a growing nihilism and a pervasive nervousness. Things are not what they seem… Which is especially the case for Henning Jenkins, an agent of Citizen Branch, Department of Homeland Security. Jenkins is the team leader of four agents who, as part of a nationwide measure to crack-down bullying, conduct random ‘good citizen’ tests on teens in New York City. Then it happens, innocently a chance encounter between Jenkins and the fifteen year-old Billy Michaels, a kid who knows something he shouldn’t and wants to trade his illicit knowledge for a free pass on the empathy test he just blew. Before he can say no, the unwitting Jenkins is faced with bringing down two rogue detectives and uncovering an international network that traffics in ‘blessed organs’ – organs that are sanctified in both blood and spirit.

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First published March 5, 2011