November 1, 2006.
The Former California Department of Corrections.
Juvenile Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Needles, CA
9:37pm
Shadows dance back and forth from one wall to the next, the effect coming from a swinging pendulum light overhead. Standing in the center of the room behind a small table is a young boy of about fourteen years old. His hands, covered in fresh blood, are behind his back.
In the distance, a sound is blaring… a klaxon alarm.
The formerly pristine white walls are smeared with fresh blood. The boy is calm as he stares at the door. He presumes he will soon have company.
On the floor, offset to the right of the small table is a woman lying prone on the floor, with a slight turn to one side. Her face is caked with blood, making her features difficult to make out.
Her eyes are gouged out.
A pool of blood surrounds the woman’s head on the floor, expanding slowly as each second passes.
Finally, the one and only door to the room becomes a flurry of activity, as a wave of guards peers through the glass, eyes wide at the scene inside, each one fumbling for the door-locking mechanism.
After some struggle to overcome the wave of horror turning their hands to putty, one of them is able to get the door opened. He pushes it open slowly, surveying the entire room, then turns his eyes to Jeffrey. Another man, a Japanese man in all black, pushes his way through. He adjusts gloves on his hands and looks around, then at the preteen boy standing in front of him.
The man smiles.
Jeffrey smiles.
“Hello, gentlemen. It’s very nice to see you again.”
“The only order in the universe is just a cycle of calm and chaos.” - Toba Beta
Alongside a dried-up river on the outskirts of Needles, California, is a site full of storage containers. A small white metal building set up on cinder blocks works as an office for the site.
A chain link fence surrounds what appears to be several hundred shipping containers, each around forty feet long and fifteen to twenty feet wide. There is nothing else as far as the eye can see, just the dried-out husk of land that used to be a bustling city.
A buzzer sounds, and a wide gate near the office building slides open. An 18-wheeler drives through, waving at the guard as he does.
The truck drives around a small dirty gravel pathway, just big enough for it to get through, and follows it into the sea of metal containers. He makes several turns until he reaches a small round hitching area. He turns and backs up against one of the trailers. This one is slightly bigger than the others, with reinforced steel bars around the structure, and a barricaded door embedded into one side.
On the side of the container are three words in large block letters, faded by age and neglect.
NEVADA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
The truck driver hops out of the 18-wheeler and goes to the back, then attaches his truck to the hitching mechanism on the container.
Satisfied, he hops back into the cab of the truck and pulls away slowly, the crackling of the gravel leaving a large empty space where the trailer once sat.
A little over ninety minutes down a dilapidated highway, a small airstrip appears over the horizon, on the edge of Las Vegas. The driver checks his watch and muffles a curse over his lateness. An old Boeing 747 - 400 ERF is parked at the end of a long runway. It seems in pristine condition, a contrast to the decay of seemingly everything else around. Three Kanji are across the primary tail rudder. The truck pulls up alongside it where a large door is open fully to receive cargo.
Inside the shipping container on the back of the truck, a wall of reinforced steel contains another wall of reinforced polymer, and within it, a third wall of plexiglass, a nesting doll prison designed to keep absolutely anything out… or anything in.
Within these three walls, sitting cross-legged in the center of the floor, staring at faux stone walls, Jeffrey James Roberts feels the familiar hum and vibrations of the truck stopping, then the hitching mechanism releasing, and finally the slow climb of the container as it is pulled up into the hollowed out cargo hold of the plane.
He smiles slightly, then closes his eyes…
…and sways.
"Actually, the problem is that I can't lose my mind. It is inescapable." - John Green
November 1, 2006.
The Former California Department of Corrections.
Juvenile Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Needles, CA.
8:30pm
A single pendulum light hangs overhead, shining light enough to illuminate the entire room, save for some lingering shadows in the upper corners. The room is standard bedroom-sized, large enough for one person. There is a small mat near the back wall. The walls are solid white.
Sitting on one side of a small table is Tabitha McCarron, a woman in her mid-thirties. She has a business smart suit on and a small briefcase which she sets on the floor. She’s smiling at the boy across the table from her.
Jeffrey is a lean pre-adolescent. His light brown hair hangs slightly over his blue eyes. He looks up at her with a mix of sadness and pain in those eyes, and she feels a deep sense of sympathy.
“It’s very nice to see you again, Miss.”
She smiles back at him.
“It’s nice to see you, too, Jeffrey. You look well.”
He smiles, too.
“I feel well.”
“Good,” she says nodding. “I thought we might talk for a little while. Would that be alright?”
His face softens. “Certainly. That would be nice.”
She places her hands on the table in front of her.
“I’ve been reading through your files and some of the recent reports. It sounds like you’ve been responding to treatment.”
“Yes, Miss. I have.”
She listens to him and takes a long look into his eyes. They seem warm and comforting, and she can’t help but smile slightly.
“That’s good. I’m glad you’re doing so well, and I look forward to further progress, although I do have some concerns.”
Jeffrey stares back at her with no expression.
“These drawings…”
She reaches down and pulls some papers out of her briefcase and places them on the table. On them are drawings of prison staff, lying in a sea of red, their eyes with a large scribbled “X” over them.
She looks at him, waiting for a reaction.
Nothing happens. Jeffrey stares back at her, not moving, not smiling, not… anything.
“And this one,” she says, reaching down again. “...is particularly troubling.”
She places another paper on the table. On it is a drawing of the very room they are in. There is a table, there is Jeffrey, but the walls are covered in blood, and where ‘she’ should be sitting is instead a dark bloated mass, misshapen, with bright red eyes that have the letter “X” over each of them.
She only looks down for a second, but when she looks back up, Jeffrey’s warm demeanor is completely gone. He stares back at her now with cold, lifeless eyes, a window to somewhere uniquely sinister, empty, calculating. Slowly, he starts to rise from his chair.
“What are you doing…?” she says, startled.
Jeffrey slowly reaches up and places a hand on the pendulum light hanging above, then gives it a shove, and it starts to swing back and forth, creating moving shadows all over the room…