The Silent Room continued... Part 3

From a writing prompt with Copper taken from the website writing prompts,  The Silent Room prompt series continues. (see the writing prompts page on the side or click the tag for the silent room if you would like to read earlier prompts in this story; and no, no idea where I'm going with this...)

Bailey

When he stepped through the doors Bailey found that The Silent Room was not in fact silent..  It had a thrum to it, a faint unstable hum that began to rattle his teeth the longer he paid attention to it.  While he was noticing this, his escorts- two guards dressed all in black protective gear- stepped back, leaving him standing frozen on a small hexagon plate set flush with the surrounding tile floor.  Frozen, because he had been immobilized by an unseen force field. Behind him he heard the doors swish shut, closing at the last with a sharp clang that then seemed to run on and on round the walls of the dimly lit white dome.

Round and round it went, as though slowly rising upward in a giant reverse marble roller of sound, until it at last ended in small series of tiny wobbly loops of dying sound at the very top of the dome.  Then it rose up and out, and left in its wake only a hollow empty space and the dull teeth rattling thrum.   A moment later a giant arm came rushing out of the wall directly in front of him and clapped a helmet on his head.

"This is it," he thought. "Goodbye, world."  And he remembered no more.


Across the country, several communities woke to find themselves stretched out on the hard lumpy ground of the open fields outside town. Along with all their neighbors.  Upon rubbing their eyes and fighting the adrenaline rush from waking up with a shocked start, they found that, no, they were not dreaming, and yes, they were actually still in a field. Dressed only in the light weight of their night shirts and patterned cotton pants, their sleep caps and eye masks. One woman noticed she was missing her eyeglasses; another noticed there were grass clippings mixed in with his hair; and they all noticed before too long that their feet were bare and cold in the early morning chill.  As though they had wondered here and then laid down to sleep some hours before. Hopping from foot to foot, confused, and facing a rather long trudge back home, they were not happy.