Homicidal Ideation

a Carcerem Island backstory

The patient in room 205 of Bayton City's least prestigious psychiatric facility, St. Maria's, impressed everyone with his soft, cultured voice, and spent most of his walking in the grounds with the patients most avoided by their fellows, or engaging in long conversations with the cooking staff. Already he'd so devoted himself to two of the less 'coherent' patients that they followed him around, stuck like barnacles, always anxious to please him with a cup of coffee or a saved seat. Both young girls, they had taken to wearing scarfs tied around their wrists like some kind of team symbol, and went into hysterical fits if any of the staff asked to remove them for washing.

The staff, for their part, were delighted with his easy conversation, and the stories he told of the university he'd been attending; of pompous professors waiting out their tenure, of prodigy students laying the foundations of internet empires, or of the debate club's verbal parries and ripostes as they reasoned their way to a national title.

His manners were so at once disarming and familiar, so calming, that both staff and patients often sought him out simply to talk, so long as he was in his right mind. And if he wasn't, he was swiftly locked in his room to wait out the bizarre episodes that transformed him, in the blink of an eye, to a snarling, savage creature that clawed for the nearest throat, teeth bared. It was these times only that everyone remembered he was a patient, and not visiting of his own will.

He was locked in his room now after such an episode, panting for breath, shaking as he squatted in the corner behind the bars of sunlight slanting into room 205. The air swirled with bright dust motes, recently disturbed by his chaotic entrance as the techs wrestled him through the door.

He continued to breath raggedly and unevenly until the footsteps in the hall faded away. In a few minutes, his assigned psychiatrist, Dr. Lowen, would arrive to observe and question him, her pen scratching noisily over her clipboard. For now, the patient held his breath, testing the silence for evidence of anyone keeping guard outside his locked door. He could distantly hear Vinera and Maya, the girls who wore the wrist scarfs, kicking up a fuss in the cafeteria.

But from the hallway, no sound; no one was out there. Pushing off the wall, the patient darted to the glowing white sheets of his bed, flinching under the sun's strong beams. He inserted a hand quickly through a rip in the mattress, fumbling through the cottony stuffing, until his fingers grazed plastic. He wrenched out the small plastic container from its hiding place, the contents flashing brilliant crimson as they swilled about, and darted back into the cool of the shadows.

It had happened three months ago. Everything he now suffered, the fits, the loss of coherent thought, the sickness – it all began when he was attacked. While on a cruise with several schoolmates across the strait that separated Bayton City from the island districts, he had been bitten in the neck by a woman shorter than him by six inches, but impossibly strong. He still remembered her iron grip, her claws puncturing his skin. He remembered her face leering a him, her gaping mouth unnaturally widened by metal teeth set into the skin of her cheeks, clearly intended as a facial decoration, and reminiscent of a face partly rotted away.

Earlier that day, he and selected schoolmates left Bayton Port by yacht. He'd picked them by virtue of their parents; all were the sons and daughters of prominent Bayton City businessmen. They viewed the small yacht and its crew with a sense of entitlement bordering on carelessness, but that day on the water was a golden moment for him. Born and raised in a highway pull-off town of 1200 people, he had never participated in such excess before, though he'd dreamt of it constantly until he was old enough to leave. It wasn't that his home life compelled him to go – his mother and father cared for him passably well – it was simply that in order to grow accomplished, he needed the company of people he could esteem, or no company at all.