Despite everything, the drug eventually took the upper hand again and she drowsed. A metal scraping much like she’d heard before woke her.
“Fuck! You crazy bitch!”
The accusation in the voice jolted through Lena and she pushed herself up on the bunk just as the door to the cell opened. “I din’ touch’er,” Lena gasped, her voice still slurred from the drug. “She choked.”
The guard’s eyes were condemning. After a moment, he knelt, grasped one of the woman’s feet and dragged the body out, slamming the door again.
Lena had just begun to breathe a sigh of relief when the door opened once more.
Two dark figures seemed almost to fly toward her in the dimness.
Something stabbed into her hip and almost immediately dizziness and blackness swallowed her up.
At first Lena thought the movement she sensed wasn’t actual movement but the effects of the drug in her system. She finally realized, though, that blood pounded against her temples. She roused enough to lift her head. She was hanging face down across a wide back. When the blackness parted a little, she saw floor and, just a little to one side, a wall sprouted from the floor.
She was in the hallway again. She realized almost instantly that they were taking her back to the interrogation room. Fear battled the drug, but the drug had too hard a grip on her to allow apprehension to take dominance.
The man stopped and the sensation of falling washed over her. Instinctively, Lena began flailing her arms and legs in an attempt to catch herself. The guard, either under the impression that she was trying to fight him, or simply annoyed by her attempt to catch her balance, let go of her, leaning down to punch her a few times when she hit the floor in an ignominious heap.
The blows barely registered except to disorient her further. She continued to flail around as she was dragged up, deposited in a chair, and strapped down.
“Feel more like chatting with us today?”
A day had passed?
How many days had she been here, she wondered?
Her mind wandered along that path for a time, trying to put together enough information to give her some idea of the time she’d been incarcerated. A sharp slap on one cheek that made her head fly sideways and her neck crack emphasized the question the man repeated. “Give us names.”
Names? Lena thought blankly. “Wha...?”
A hand grabbed her jaw bruisingly and a face swam into her view. “Don’t play stupid with me!” he growled, spattering her face with flecks of spittle. “Your father was right in the middle of the rebellion.”
“Fauder?” Lena repeated blankly. She could barely even remember her father. It had almost seemed to her that she and Nigel had been alone forever--scrounging for food, sleeping in trashcans--until Morris had found them and took them home.
“Frank Morris,” he growled, obviously frustrated.
Grief descended upon her as suddenly and devastatingly as if it was a thing of substance rather than pure emotion. Her face crumpled. “Morris. Wa’you do t’him?”
He slapped her again. It seemed to rattle her brains in her skull, but when her ears stopped ringing her mind felt a little clearer.
“Keep that up, you idiot, and you’re going to break her neck. Then we won’t get anything out of her! She’s drugged. All you have to do is keep asking her. Eventually, she’ll tell us what we need to know.”
“This fucking drug you’ve concocted is useless,” the heavy set man snarled. “Pain and fear work best, and she doesn’t feel either when she’s flying on this stuff. We’ve tried it your way, doc. Now we’ll try it my way a while.”
Fear flickered through Lena. He was wrong. She could feel it. Her mind simply refused to focus for more than a moment at a time.
Confusion filled her when he began removing the straps that he’d secured her with only moments before.
It seemed it had only been moments. Maybe he had finished the session and was taking her back to the cell?
She didn’t believe that. He’d said ‘pain and fear’, she remembered suddenly. She began to struggle when he released her wrists and ankles, slapping at his hands ineffectually.
Unfortunately, the fight was over before it had barely begun. He slapped her back, stunning her, more because she’d dared to try to fight, she suspected, than because she’d actually managed to cause him any pain. Grabbing her by one arm, he hauled her out of the seat and, when she could only manage a few wobbling steps, began to drag her.
They left the cell and headed down the hallway she remembered and hope surged through her that he was taking her back to her own cell. Instead, she discovered when the tube lift jolted to a stop and they stepped off, that she was on another level of the prison entirely. She wasn’t certain how she knew, but she realized after a moment that her ears were popping and she couldn’t remember noticing that sensation before that told her they’d climbed very high, very rapidly.
She began struggling against the guard’s grip. “Where you tak’ me?” she asked in a slurred voice.
