Bad At Introductions

Sometimes things go wrong. Everyone is in a hurry. Some vital details get overlooked. The wrong person assumes that they’re in charge. These are all just things that can happen on a daily basis without it being the end of the world. There are very few times when a little mistake gets made and somebody pays for it with their life.
As fate would have it, this was one of those times.
The rules for the safe transportation of Marvin Gayle Gray were very specific because they needed to be. To be allowed out of solitary confinement at all, he had to be wearing handcuffs, leg shackles, and a belly chain connecting them. This was not meant to stop him; it was just meant to slow him down enough that the guards might have an opportunity to react if he did choose to break free. If he were to leave the prison grounds, it was only to be in the care of the Department of Corrections, which had a detailed manual of procedures for handling him. Procedures that had been written specifically for Marvin. When placed in a van to be transported, it was only to be with a full complement of guards, he was to be secured to his seat by chains, and transportation was never to be shared with any other prisoner. In addition, a second vehicle was to be deployed which would follow the first car. This ‘chase vehicle’ would hold as many guards as possible, all armed with rifles and all issued with a shoot-to-kill order if there was any possibility of Marvin escaping. Marvin was to be made aware of this vehicle, its contents, and most especially of the authorisation for the use of deadly force in the hope it would serve as a potent deterrent to him killing every guard in his van. Any cell that was meant to hold him would have to be carefully examined by staff for any sign of structural weakness and could not allow him any access whatsoever to another living human being. Only once these things were confirmed would his shackles and cuffs be removed, and even then, he had to be held at gunpoint for the duration of their removal and until the guards had exited the room and the cell door was securely locked.
Those procedures seemed almost cartoonish on paper. The sort of restrictions that would have been placed on a horror movie monster, or a supervillain. Yet they had proven themselves to be necessary time and time again when it came to Marvin. They were the only thing keeping everyone around him alive at any given moment.
Unfortunately, in October of the year 2000, someone made a catastrophic slip-up with disastrous results. Marvin was required to attend court up in Denver for a reconsideration of his sentence, and instead of the DOC handling his transport, the Denver Sheriff’s department sent down some deputies of their own to handle matters. Those deputies knew of Marvin in the abstract, but they didn’t have access to the carefully considered transfer protocol, and they certainly didn’t understand the reality of what they were facing.
Picking up Marvin in a patrol car, they drove him the full distance to Denver without encountering any trouble with the man, beyond some damage to the car’s rear suspension from his weight. Once he arrived at the city jail, one of the Sheriff’s department Sergeants recognised the man and implemented a hastily improvised version of the transport plan. He moved other prisoners around so that Marvin wouldn’t be sharing a cell with anyone and ensured that all adjacent cells were unoccupied. Everyone remained outside of arm’s reach more by absolute luck than by deliberate planning, and everyone made it through the night alive.
The next morning, Marvin was moved again. He was transferred from the jail where some sensible precautions had been taken, to the courthouse where he was placed in a holding cell alongside a man by the name of James Gilbertson. While a jail cell might reasonably have been expected to securely house a prisoner overnight, the holding cells at the courthouse were merely temporary detention areas. They were meant to contain prisoners only while the usual pomp and ceremony of court were carried out prior to one or more of the accused being marched out to face their accusers or a disinterested judge.
Up until now, a series of errors had occurred, but because Marvin had no reason to exploit them, he did not. He could have attempted to escape at any point during his transfer to Denver. He could have broken his restraints and killed the officers charged with transporting him. He could have forced his way out of his jail cell, which was woefully lacking in the hardy reinforcements of the solitary confinement cell he usually occupied. He could have done any number of terrible things at any moment, but he had not, because in those moments, he felt no need to. As much as he was often painted by others as some sort of mindless, violent, killing machine, the truth was that he usually had a good reason to do most of the things that he did. Anger wasn’t something that overtook him and drove him into action, it was something that he cultivated and honed so that he could unleash it when he needed it the most. When he needed to shut off all his other emotions and commit the acts that would make him famous, anger was the tool he used.
The series of errors up until this point could have continued harmlessly. The sheriff’s department didn’t fully appreciate who they were dealing with. So far, Marvin had been in a generally good mood, given that he was in Denver to discuss his sentence possibly being reduced. That was why he had not exploited any of the errors up until this moment. Up until the moment that James Gilbertson made the mistake of starting a conversation.
Once again, it would be easy to jump to conclusions. To think that just talking to Marvin was enough to set off some sort of berserker rage in him, but that was patently untrue. He was quite capable of participating in a normal conversation, and so far as can be ascertained, he did converse with Gilbertson in a perfectly civil manner.
They had a completely affable conversation about the weather, their respective journeys to the courthouse, and finally broached the subject of why they were there. Marvin happily explained that they were taking another look at his sentencing, trying to work out if he might get his time in prison reduced, and Gilbertson unabashedly explained that he was being charged with the sexual assault of a minor.
That was the final mistake that led to things going explosively wrong. If Gilbertson had been a more seasoned criminal, he would have known better than to admit to having committed a sex crime with a child. If he were locked in a cell with a man who hadn’t been traumatised at a young age by witnessing a young boy being gang raped, he might have gotten away with his mistake too. But it seemed that luck was quite firmly aligned against James Gilbertson that day.
In the baggy sweatshirt he was wearing, while he was hunkered down on the bench in the cell, it probably hadn’t been apparent exactly what Marvin looked like. If anything, he probably just looked like an overweight, middle-aged man. It was only as he rose to his feet that it became apparent that he was 6’3’  of solid muscle. Not built like a showy bodybuilder, but like the kind of man you’d see in a strong-man competition, capable of dragging a lorry using his bare hands, capable of bending a steel bar with just his grip. Strength means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and as such, it is generally not something that can be readily assessed with certain accuracy, but Marvin Gray was close to being a world record holder for powerlifting. He was the strongest man that James Gilbertson had ever met and was most likely the strongest man that anyone he encountered had ever met. When he found out that his cellmate was a child molester, he didn’t punch him or choke him the way that other prisoners might have. Those were means of focusing strength down into a single point, to overcome the fundamental weakness of a human body, and Marvin had absolutely no need of them.
He picked Gilbertson up and slammed him to the ground as if he were nothing but a rag doll. From there he threw him up into the ceiling, into the bars, into the walls, before getting a grip on his leg and swinging him like a sledgehammer to crack his skull on the concrete floor.
The noise did not escape the notice of the officers of the court. Though nobody could tell what the horrific slamming noises echoing through the building, rattling all the lights, might be. Following the sound to the source, they found Marvin, slick with blood, with his massive hands locked around Gilbertson’s skull, slowly crushing it. The guards drew their weapons, they ordered Marvin to stand down, and after a momentary hesitation as he got his rage back under control, he did as they ordered. He climbed off Gilbertson’s body, dripping with the other man’s blood, and laced his fingers over the top of his head to show he was unarmed and compliant. Once again, Marvin’s actions were proving that this was not some berserk rage that he had been driven into. In his mind, everything Marvin did, every choice he made, was perfectly rational.. He had looked at the other man and decided that the world would be a better place if Gilbertson weren’t alive anymore, then he had gone through with the course of action that would ensure that to be the future that he’d live in.
Terrified and confused, the guards rushed the cell trying to tackle Marvin to the ground and bind him, but the impact of their bodies against Marvin’s had absolutely no effect. He carefully lowered his arms and positioned them in front of him, to receive his handcuffs, and was led out of the cell so that when the ambulance arrived, it would be safe for Gilbertson to be attended to. One of the braver sheriff’s deputies had come running back, and it fell to him to check on Gilbertson’s pulse. Somehow, despite the horrendous damage that had been done to him, he was still alive. The deputy announced that to the room, somewhat foolishly, and Marvin came to a halt. There was a moment of calculation when he had to decide whether it was worth the risk to go back into the cell and finish the job, or if it was better to let this particular victim walk away, albeit after considerable amounts of physical therapy. The guards, who thought they’d been forcibly pulling Marvin out of the cell, were stunned to realise that every step they’d hauled this giant of a man had only been achieved because he was coming with them willingly. The truth was, if he wanted to walk back into that cell and finish Gilbertson off, there wasn’t a damned thing any one of them could have done to stop him, short of killing him. The thought seemed to pass, and then Marvin lumbered on forward, letting his expression go blank once more, and taking care to ensure that nobody could mistake him for a threat. It was like he was a completely different person from the man he’d been only moments before in that cell. Something that might have been a little more believable if his clothes weren’t sodden with someone else’s blood.