A looming figure cut into the bright headlights that filled a side mirror that was barely hanging on by a strand of wire. The driver? Police? EMT? His vision blurred.
He squinted, looking at a face twisting and morphing, a blurred mess as his mind tried to make sense of it. For a brief second it snapped into view. “Impossible,” he muttered. “You’re dead.”
Jack squeezed his eyelids tight and snapped them open. The face of the stranger once again blurred. Was it a dream? A nightmare he couldn’t escape?
Rage overwhelmed Jack as he struggled to free himself from the steel tomb, to get a grip on reality. Warm blood streamed into his eyes, making his vision worse. Hot searing pain shot through his body as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to his head, and shot him in both kneecaps. His limbs screamed; his lungs threatened to collapse.
One final attempt to move, then he blacked out.
1
Four months later
The cuffs bit into his skin as the shuttle bus jerked to a standstill outside the secure gates of Holbrook, a huge state forensic facility in upstate New York.
Located on NY 86, set back inside a sprawling forest of white pines between Saranac Lake and Lake Placid, the secure treatment area of high-risk units was hidden from view. They didn’t want the public seeing this, although a well-known Federal Correctional Institution was only a few miles away. No, Holbrook was an eyesore, a blotch on the face of society, a place for the discarded and dangerous. Dedicated to the care of the chronically insane, it had earned a reputation for being violent after the facility underwent a renovation in the early ’90s and began taking in mentally ill patients from the criminal justice system.
Jack glanced out the window at the four-story gray building guarded by a twenty-foot high safety fence topped with three feet of coiled razor-sharp wire. It looked more like a tired college campus than a psychiatric hospital. Beyond the heavy mesh, the crowded lot had police patrolling. Off to his left through the opposite window, a stream of workers entering a sally port were handed security badges before being wanded down and allowed to proceed.
A loud buzzing erupted, then the tall gates before them eased open. The bus rolled in and the gates sealed shut. The sound tore at his soul. As the driver stepped out to speak with uniformed security, Jack’s thoughts drifted. Today would mark the first day of his court-ordered sentence as an NGRI (not guilty by reason of insanity). A judge had deemed him unable to distinguish right from wrong at the time of his offense due to what they were calling mental illness. Whether it was true or not was hard to tell. His memory of that fateful night in Apalachin four months ago was as hazy as the arrest, hospitalization and temporary incarceration that followed. Upon his wounds healing he was brought before a judge and had his day in court. The accusation of massacring a family of six didn’t make any sense. Women, children, there was no way he would have done that. Still, because his memory was foggy, his fate was sealed in less than an hour by doctors who’d evaluated his mental status and police who’d performed an investigation.
The assigned attorneys and doctors didn’t appear to have his best interests at heart so he didn’t stand a chance. No one listened to him. He had no memory of the so-called murders. Jack remembered seeing flashing lights, police shouting at him to put a knife down, and seeing bodies, and blood.
What was real?
The door hissed open, snapping him back into the present.
The driver boarded and was given the all-clear to head on in. It was a short stretch to the administration building where they’d been instructed on the process. “You’ll be handed off to hospital staff for a brief medical examination before being given scrubs and directed to your unit,” he remembered them saying. A garage door rolled up and the bus entered an opening on the east side. Almost immediately several brash cops at the front jumped up and began bellowing out orders to make sure no one got out of line.
Once the preliminary details were cleared away and he was out of cuffs, Jack was given an armful of clothing and told to go change. The shirt and sweatpants were khaki, with white Velcro shoes. After, Jack was guided by two muscle-bound psychiatric technicians dressed in navy blue uniforms, he entered a maze of beige cinderblock hallways. He passed through multiple reinforced steel doors. Each one had a small double-pane window. They were taking him and five others to Unit C, one of fifteen high-security units. A guy on the bus had said that every unit was different. One was for sex offenders, another was co-ed, one was for those about to be discharged and the rest outside the fence were for conservatorship. Through a window he noticed that security was outside, traversing the expansive space between the two fences in golf carts.
Continuing on, they passed a nurses station with thick, smoky plexiglass, and offices for the unit manager, psychologist and therapists. Something that struck Jack was the lack of uniformed guards. There were none inside. Even though it appeared that everything was locked and secure, the facility was nothing like Rikers or any prison for that matter. Only nurses and psych techs were on hand inside to deal with trouble and none of them were armed. How did they protect themselves? His answer came fast. No sooner had they entered the next long corridor than an ear-splitting siren blared and strobe lights began flashing.
A slew of staff emerged from doorways and hurried towards a day room.
“Stay here,” one of the psych techs ordered, glancing at a white electronic device on his hip that was flashing and letting off an audible tone. He hurried away to join his colleagues. Several patients cheered, others
