The room in question presents a surreal scene to begin with. Semi-circular, with white walls, freshly veined with obsessive black marker drawings roughly four feet tall, spanning a significant portion of the circumference and expanding onto the floor, taking up more than half of the space. Crude illustrations of a fetus, shining with black light as only magic marker can represent. Four-legged beasts with saw-tooth mouths and poorly defined features are encircled with concentric lines and overlayed spirals. A greatly feared entity. Isolated, a pictogram of sewage pipes. The lone television set silently accompanies two pint-sized combatants.
Two boys wrestle in the middle of the room. The eight-year-old named Paxton Fettel with bandages wrapped around his head showing small spots of bright red, pins the second boy to the ground, angrily growling and hissing. The second boy, the pinned boy, nine years old, does not have a name.
The singular door slides open in two parts as a man dressed in brown tweed from head to heel and bespectacled with black-rimmed glasses featuring mature angles enters the room then in the same motion, wraps his arms around the young aggressor, pulling him kicking, screaming, off of the nameless nine-year-old, out of the room. The door smoothly, emotionlessly, slides shut behind the man. The nine-year-old boy, left alone in the room, silently cries, his pajama'd feet holding in the air, his hands loosely encircling his head, almost as if to contain his fear of that very room, the room in which he was so unreasonably victimized, frightened. His body emits small convulsions as tiny tears wet his ear canals.
With Paxton gone, the boy left alone eventually regains his composure and stands once again. As he quietly studies the walls of the room, carefully eyeing the intricacies of Paxton's markings, the entire stage shudders as though from an earthquake. The fluorescent lights flicker, a derivation from their usual sixty-hertz rhythm. A red emergency light set above the door glows, casting a bright, eerie glow upon the room and its contents. The boy's balance is thrown-off center, but he does not fall.
His curiosity quickly gets the better of him as he moves to the door and tries to get a glimpse of the other side through the adult-height window. He cranes his neck and stands on his toes, but it's no use. Remembering an old tactic, he slides the nightstand next to his bed over to the door, the climbs up on it. The sweat on his hands causes a tiny amount of stick, a memorable sensation. He sets his feet underneath him and raises his eyes level with the midpoint of the window and successfully peers out. Sadly, his vision only reaches more sanitized walls and a corporate logo consisting of three squares arranged in a pyramid joined by two lines, forming a chevron, with circular dots circumscribed within the two squares on the side. Fluorescent lights, and not a sign of movement. That is, until the man in tweed appears in the periphery, and the nine-year-old boy, in a minor panic, clambers back down and pushes the nightstand further, to the opposite side of the door as where it originally stood. The boy stands at loose attention, neutrally pretending to have been simply waiting quietly as the door slides open again.
The man dressed in tweed with the scientific-looking glasses holds Paxton in his arms. Paxton is completely limp and almost looks dead, save for the faint movement of his ribs expanding with his young lungs. He sets Paxton down on his bed and cautiously, with a sense of awe, steps backward, not taking his eyes off of the sleeping, unconscious boy. It is then that he backs into the nine-year-old and, lightly startled, quickly takes the standing boy's hand in his own and urgently pulls him out of the room. The boy offers no resistance, and obediently goes, sensing imminent danger. After all, this unconscious boy was, not minutes ago, violently pinning him to the ground. The look of pure hate on Paxton's face flashes across his mind as the door slides shut behind him and the man dressed in tweed. Alone in the room now, Paxton's foot twitches once, and only once.
Through what qualifies as night, the lights shut off and the television set remains on, casting a whiteish glow upon the room.
Several hours later, the room's lights switch back on, and Paxton stirs awake from lying on his belly. Over the next hours, he stands before the door patiently waiting for it to open before him, expecting someone to return and check on him. Finding this to be of no consequence, he moves to the curved glass observation windows and tries to peer out, but sees no sign of life or response. He sits on a cushioned bench adjacent to the television, facing the foot of his bed, pondering his life and reflecting on the floor's suddenly alien markings. Standing before the door again for awhile, waiting for something, anything, he eventually gives up on this wait and surrenders to the beasts of time, setting his back against the unopening door and observing his feet stretched out before him.
Through another simulated night, he sits next to the television, taking solace in its steady glow.
Daytime returns as quickly as it had fled, but Paxton is curled over in a fetal position, resting his head in his hands and quietly snoozing. A catnap of sorts. Sensing another presence, he turns his head to the right and spots a pair of white legs descending from a red dress, scarred with pitch-black hair, unarranged and untidy. The face is familiar and lovely to him.
Mother.
Alma Wade reaches out to him with her left hand, palm faced up and exposed, index finger nonetheless pointed directly at his heart, as the other fingers curl gently. Paxton, unsure of this signal at first and slightly afraid, pulls his own left hand towards his breast. Alma does not flinch, but maintains her composure and maternal stance. Her ivory hand remains outstretched and open. Recognizing his love for his mother, and his yearning for her touch, he slowly reaches his left hand to touch hers. Just as he makes contact, the room is overtaken with a bright flash of light. The beds leap into the air, tossing the pillows above them with the gift of momentum. The television ascends and descends, slamming back onto its table and deactivating. The cushion whereon Paxton previously sat and thought is disturbed from its position flush against the wall to a slightly skewed angle. It is as though the entire room fell six feet, then stopped as suddenly as it started the descent. After this flash, Alma Wade has dissappeared completely. Paxton's mind crawls with emotions unknown to a young boy, but all too familiar to Alma Wade. The sensations of love and hope twisted by the hands of man into those of hate, revenge and eternal rage. She was the original. She gave birth to both of the boys at the ages of fifteen and sixteen, neither time linked to a recognizable father, neither time of her own will, and both times torn from her children before she could even see their eyes. The prototypes, both of them, raised in isolation and strict quarantine, never met their own mother - until today. Until this very instant.
On his back, Paxton clutches his skull as though it is about to burst, his entire body tensing and convulsing with immense pain and intense suffering. Unable to contain the feelings, he lets out a small, efforted scream, unused to the evocations lying within the extremes of human emotion. The furniture begins another shaky ascent from the floor as his cries reverberate against the walls, heard by no one, observed by no human eye, save for a closed-circuit camera mounted at the apex of the room's curvature. He is completely alone as entire histories flood his mind and body. The beds slam against the wall, then begin to move back toward him, as though pulled by an unseen gravity centered within Paxton's brain.
The psychic vibrations cease, and Paxton rises. His body is tensed in rage. His fists are balled tightly. His shoulders carry the curvature of a full-grown man's anger. Loosening his stance, he touches his forehead with his left hand, the hand that touched Alma. His head suddenly feels very heavy, and he begins to stagger backward towards the curved observation window.
The door slides open as a man he does not recognize enters. A second follows him. The first man begins to approach Paxton, his hand outstretched like Alma's was. He edges closer and closer, his body fully tightened in a defensive posture. Paxton continues to stagger backward, but then jolts his head away from the approaching man. The containment guard begins to clutch his own head as he yelps with pain. Just as his hand is about to touch his scalp, both of the men's craniums are severely corroded in instants, bursting completely, much like bottles of wine struck with a rock from a slingshot. Warm blood splashes onto the ceiling with grisly momentum as two headless corpses flop to the ground, gushing like grim fountains. The body of the man who was approaching him kneels at Paxton's feet, the stump of his neck blessing Paxton's onezie.
A third man in security costume enters quickly with a second at his shoulder, but before he can even raise his weapon, his head also explodes, splattering the door frame with his blood. Paxton's mind is screaming with pain, sharp, intense, focused, as though a white-hot needle glowed in his cortex. It is now that he begins to realize his unholy power, gifted to him by an undead psychic aberration, his mother. The fourth man convulses into a completely upright stance as his skull explodes (referred to in Armacham documents later as a "pop" - I am going to pop, he popped, etc), identical to the first three. Before he hits the ground, a fifth man enters the room, but trips over a corpse and falls to all fours like a heifer unprepared for inevitable slaughter.
Paxton is, in this moment, learning to direct his psychic vibrations into a single spatial point. Miniature black holes rip through all the dimensions, coercing matter into trajectories unseen by earthly eyes. He can make them, control them, bring things through.
Just as the prone fifth man, begins to grip the situation (as though it were so easy), his gloved fingers slippery with the blood of his comrades, his skull is blown apart by another psychic projection, his brains smearing across the bed.
A sixth man enters with the seventh at his right shoulder. As the seventh man's boots cross the threshold, the sixth's head ruptures like those previous, blinding the seventh man. As he tries to wipe the blood from his eyes, his vision goes red for an instant before his brains are splattered through the still-open door and into the hallway. The walls of the small, monitored, quarantine room welcome another bright, shining layer of crimson, textured with bone fragments and grey matter. The floor now features an assortment of cadavers, each more explosively altered than the last. The black markings on the floor are now completely covered.
The eighth man has arranged himself outside the door, peeking in and holding cover, carefully, quickly enters the room, locates his target, the only thing in the room still moving, levels a tranquilizer gun with speed and efficiency, and pulls the trigger.
Paxton Fettel goes stiff, woozy and suddenly dazed, then kneels amongst the grisly tableux. His head lolls forward as he passes back into unconsciousness. His body is still too tensed with rage to fall over. The eighth man does not look back as he retreats with a squadmate, the door sliding shut for good.
Seven headless corpses and a sleeping boy in a room full of anger.