Rainier Psychiatric Hospital sat on the far outskirts of Seattle.
The severe isolation ward on the third floor consisted of a row of pure white, padded cells designed specifically for patients with extreme self-harm tendencies. There were no bed frames, no chairs; even the toilet was hidden beneath a soft silicone mat. The walls and floor were lined with four inches of high-density polyurethane foam, encased in untearable industrial leather.
In this room, physical self-harm was a physical impossibility.
David wore a heavy canvas straitjacket, his arms bound tightly across his chest.
Just a month ago, as a veteran astrophotography enthusiast, David had set up his expensive refractor telescope on his balcony, aiming the lens at the night sky, just as he always did. Shortly after, he suffered a severe bout of "acute schizophrenia with violent tendencies." He was forced to the ground by patrol officers and paramedics, pumped full of sedatives, and dragged here.
For an entire month, he had lived in a medicated haze. But tonight, the sedatives were burned away by madness.
"It's real! It's all real!!"
David was huddled in the dead center of the room. His voice was shot, his over-strained vocal cords coughing up blood-flecked spit, yet he continued to howl hysterically.
"It's eating! We're being devoured! The moon is just a cyst! We're all going to die!!"
He thrashed on the padded floor like a dying fish. The canvas of his straitjacket rubbed against the leather flooring, emitting a harsh shhh-shhh sound.
He tried to bash his head against the wall. Using every ounce of his strength, he slammed his skull into the white paneling.
Thud. The high-density foam instantly absorbed the impact. His head sank in a few inches before the foam's rebound gently pushed him back. It didn't even leave a bruise.
He tried to bite his own tongue. But out of sheer terror, his jaw muscles seized up. His upper and lower teeth were locked together so tightly they ground against each other with a sickening scrape. He couldn't open his mouth a single millimeter.
His wild eyes darted around the room.
Suddenly, his gaze stopped.
He locked onto the corner of the room—the ninety-degree blind spot where the floor met the two walls. Even though it was padded, the dead angle of its geometry meant it offered the greatest physical resistance in the entire cell.
A flash of madness and liberation crossed his eyes.
Slithering on the floor like a maggot, using only his knees and toes, he inched himself toward that corner.
Out in the hallway, the night-shift orderly was walking past the monitoring station with a cup of coffee. On the screen, the patient who had been raving non-stop suddenly went fell silent and crawled into the room's blind spot. Sensing something wrong, the orderly slammed his coffee down, drew his electronic keycard and master keys, and sprinted toward the isolation ward.
Inside the cell, David was already in position.
Kneeling on the foam floor, he leaned his torso forward, burying the crown of his skull directly into the apex of the three converging planes.
He dug his bare toes into the leather seams.
He took a deep breath. His legs fired.
Under the immense force, his cervical spine began to bow.
His chin was driven hard against his collarbone.
But the forward thrust didn't stop. A human neck cannot compress vertically like an accordion. Under the crushing pressure, David's head began to slide uncontrollably sideways along the corner padding.
His body kept pushing forward, but his head was forced flat against the corner, twisting degree by degree to the right.
The frantic sounds of the orderly fumbling with keys and the beep of the keycard echoed from outside the door.
A guttural groan tore from David's throat. The muscles in his legs snapped under the extreme exertion; you could hear the faint sound of muscle fibers tearing.
His head was cranked ninety degrees into the corner... then a hundred and twenty degrees... The tendons and ligaments in his neck stretched past their physical limits. That surging thrust finally forced his spine past its breaking point.
CRACK. A brutal snap—like a thick tree branch being splintered in half—rang out in the soundproofed cell.
The heavy security door was thrown open.
"David! What the hell are you do—"
The orderly's voice caught in his throat. His flashlight dropped to the floor.
In the corner, David lay in a posture that defied human anatomy. His body was still frozen in that forward-pushing kneel, but his neck was pulverized. His entire head collapsed onto his right shoulder at a sharp angle, like a boneless lump of rotting meat. His bloodshot eyes stared dead at the orderly in the doorway.
In this inescapably safe room, using nothing but primal force, he had snapped his own neck.
...
Seattle's rain kept falling.
Inside the box van by the industrial pier, the clock read 1:01 AM.
Exactly one hour had passed since midnight.
Arthur was slumped in the driver's seat. His stomach was empty, leaving him with nothing but heaving spasms. Trembling, he yanked a coarse brown napkin from the passenger compartment and scrubbed at the blood on his face.
A stubborn red haze still clouded his vision. The blood from his nose had crusted over his lips and chin. The coppery taste of rust lingered in his mouth, but after marinating in it for a full hour, his taste buds had almost grown numb to the metallic tang.
"I must have fallen asleep... Yeah, 'micro-sleep'. I was dozing with my eyes open."
Arthur stared rigidly at the Ford logo on the steering wheel, his chest heaving. His mind was desperately scrambling for an excuse for what he had just endured.
"Three all-nighters in a row. When you're this exhausted, the brain tries to pacify the body by simulating a realistic hallucination of you still working. It even amplifies subconscious fears into waking nightmares... Everything just now, it was all just a lucid dream cobbled together while my brain crashed. That's it."
He muttered it over and over, as if saying it enough times would make that colossal shadow behind the moon nothing more than a sleep-deprived delusion. He refused to recall the agonizing pain of a steel spike driving through his brain; he refused to consider why a dream would make him bleed from his eyes and ears.
Fumbling, Arthur turned the ignition. The engine coughed to life with a dull rumble, and the weak dashboard lights flickered back on.
He just wanted to drive back to his Capitol Hill rental, pop two sleeping pills, and pass out.
With a slightly shaking hand, he tapped the bottom right of the dispatch terminal screen: "End Shift & Delay Deliveries".
He'd just dump the remaining packages back at the hub tomorrow morning. To hell with it.
A gray warning box immediately popped up. Through Arthur's crimson vision, the pale glow looked like an irritating dark red: