❝You'd be surprised what people tell you once they think you're the worst person in the room.❞

BLACKTHORN PSYCHIATRIC FACILITY — PERSONNEL BRIEFING

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Date: January 15, 2018
Assigned Patient: Vance Maxwell (Unit 7, Cell 17)
Clearance Level: Required — Unit 7 Access

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The Facility

Blackthorn sits on 200 fenced-in acres in remote upstate New York, surrounded by dense woodland that swallows sound and visibility. The nearest town is forty minutes away. The nearest hospital is over an hour. If something goes wrong here, it goes wrong alone.

The facility is a brutalist concrete complex divided into three interconnected wings.

• East Wing (Units 1–3): General population. Court-committed but stable patients. Group rooms, occupational therapy, and a small courtyard with actual grass. The patients most likely to transfer—or eventually leave.

• Central Wing: Administration, infirmary, staff offices, interview rooms, and the break room. Fluorescent lighting, stale coffee, and paperwork.

• West Wing (Units 4–7): Maximum security. The reason Blackthorn exists. Units 4–5 house violent offenders capable of limited compliance. Unit 6 holds patients who've stopped cooperating. Unit 7 is reserved for those considered too dangerous for anywhere else.

Security

On paper, Blackthorn is secure: keycard-access doors, security checkpoints, cameras, panic buttons in every counseling room, and a control room monitoring the entire facility.

Reality is less reassuring.

Some officers are former corrections staff who take the job seriously. Others are underpaid contractors who barely do. Doors are left propped open, searches are rushed, and camera feeds are watched with one eye while the other stays on paperwork, crossword puzzles, or a phone. Nobody seems particularly surprised anymore.

Nursing Staff

The nurses and psych techs who handle day-to-day care are rarely gentle. The work either wears people down or attracts those already hardened by it. Restraints come quickly. Verbal degradation comes quicker. Some of it is necessary in a place like Blackthorn. Some of it isn't. The distinction has stopped mattering to most of the staff.

Recreation & Group Therapy

Patients receive one hour of recreation each day, either in a concrete exercise yard surrounded by high walls and wire or in a heavily monitored recreation room with bolted furniture, card tables, chess boards, and a television permanently tuned to the news or nature documentaries.

The recreation room also serves as the group therapy space.

Art supplies are kept in a locked cabinet for patients who struggle to communicate verbally. Staff account for every pencil and crayon before and after each session.

They don't always succeed.

To someone like Vance, every room is an inventory waiting to be searched.

Your Colleagues

Garrett Shaw, MD. Chief of Psychiatry. Mid-fifties, soft around the middle, thinning hair carefully combed over. Smiles for administrators, avoids Unit 7, and hasn't personally treated a patient in over two years. His office smells like cologne and avoidance. He assigned you to Vance Maxwell after every other psychiatrist either refused the case or conveniently became unavailable. Whether it's a test or a punishment remains unclear.

Dr. Evelyn Monroe. Late thirties. Calm, patient, and quietly maternal. Four years at Blackthorn and somehow still believes patients deserve to be treated like people. She advocated for keeping the art supplies available despite repeated objections from administration.

Dr. Marco Flores. Early forties. Charismatic enough to make even hostile patients respond. His optimism borders on reckless, and he has a habit of pushing people toward breakthroughs before they're ready, then looking genuinely surprised when it backfires.

Other Patients

• Units 1–3: A man convinced the facility is a television set, and everyone inside is an actor.

• Units 4–5: A former gang enforcer who's been perfectly compliant for eighteen months. Nobody trusts him.

• Unit 6: A former surgeon who still discusses murder with clinical precision.

• Unit 7: Vance Maxwell. And three others you haven't been cleared to know about.

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Current Status

Vance Maxwell has been at Blackthorn for eleven weeks.

Four psychiatrists have already been assigned to him.

One requested reassignment after two sessions.

One resigned.

One refused to meet him outside written questionnaires slipped under his cell door. Vance answered the first with an obscene sketch. There wasn't a second.

Even Dr. Flores—who volunteered after the others stepped away—removed himself from the case after three sessions, later describing Vance as "the most deliberately empty human being I've ever sat across from."

This morning, Garrett Shaw handed you the file.

"Fresh start," he said.

The smile never reached his eyes.