Tartarus.
The drug settled around Freya like a layer of thick gray rubber. Lynn Harris arrived and broke down almost immediately, sitting on a concrete wheel stop with her face buried in the arm of her Canada Goose parka.
When she raised her head, Freya stared at the glistening patch of tears and snot on her sleeve. It was the kind of thing that would have burned into her memory before, but the impression popped right back out. Nothing could penetrate.
They tried to talk, but the conversation kept shunting sideways, like the two of them magnetized to the same polarity. At last, they admitted defeat. Lynn promised something about tomorrow, but it just didn’t matter.
Soon, the handcuffs closed around Freya’s wrists, and she was in the back of a police SUV, on the drive to Long Creek Youth Development Center while the radio babbled on the dashboard. The final kindness of the state troopers, they’d assigned Deputy Banks to the task. He barely said a word.
Long Creek was a series of red brick buildings that looked more like a school than a prison. As the Police SUV drew closer, she saw the muntins were too thick. The door looked like it could withstand an atomic blast. Even the intake area had that jail smell, confinement funk not quite kept at bay by continual half-assed cleaning.
Bleached despair.
Everything here was a procedure, and there was paperwork at every step. She had to answer questions before she could be admitted. The woman doing the interview rushed through a checklist, clearly irate she had to do an intake so late at night.
“Any allergies? Current medications? Injuries? Relevant family history? Substance abuse? Mental health treatment? Past or present thoughts of suicide?”
“No,” Freya replied to everything. The woman’s stare focused for a second on the last question. Reading upside down, Freya saw her check a box marked “WITHDRAWN.” She signed the form, and Freya left the custody of the Maine State Police and entered the retinue of the Department of Corrections.
They fingerprinted Freya and strip-searched her and took her clothes away, giving her a temporary set of coarse blues two sizes too big. She felt nothing and offered no resistance. Her disassociation was well-suited to jail. Everything here was choreographed.
As the intake dragged on, Freya noticed the two corrections officers running her through the process were growing increasingly uncomfortable. She was doing something wrong, but she didn’t know what. She couldn’t be the first murderer they’d seen, or the first girl doped to the gills. But they were unnerved just the same.
She thought she should try to figure it out. She needed to play their game until she could find a way to end this. But the rubber was too thick. Nothing could get in, and nothing could escape.
At the end, they made her change clothes again into a thin, paper smock. She was given a blanket with a tag that said “BobBarker LifeLine” and taken into a room with white raised padding covering all the surfaces except for a drain in the floor. The light stayed on all night and, every hour, a guard’s face appeared behind the Plexiglas window, and then she was gone.
There was only one relief, that Freya had been right all along. When she told Garbuglio everyone would be taken from her, that everything would fall apart, and she would be the cause, he’d dripped platitudes from his smug grin and told her to try to be positive.
She was positive now. Positive she had ruined everything, that she should have been the one Malcolm shot. She should have sunk the day Randall died. Instead, she had dragged them all down with her. Nothing remained but waiting for the end.
When she slept, it was indistinguishable from being awake.
* * *
Everything was worse than she feared.
The Lorazepam had worn off when they came to pull her out of the padded room. Inside Freya was a scream that rolled on and on that she could not release. Her eyes ached from staring at nothing, but she kept them open. There were terrible things waiting for her in the half-dark. The COs spoke to her, but she couldn’t understand them. It was like they were shouting at her across a canyon and all she was getting were the echoes.
Without warning, she bawled. Their words became jabbing thorns. She understood they were angry but not what they wanted. Freya stared at their mouths as they opened and made sound, wondering why they weren’t throwing her on the ground and kicking her to pieces.
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They took her by the arms and hoisted her down the hall to an office, where a man with a clipboard tried to talk with Freya. She couldn’t stop crying. He slashed checks into boxes on a form, and she was led to a door where she was given a green pill in a little paper ketchup-cup.
The COs watched Freya swallow the pill, and then looked in her mouth to make sure she wasn’t hiding it under her tongue. She was walked to another room and put in a bed. A deep, unpleasant vibration hummed behind everything. Her legs kept cramping up, but when she tried to reach down to massage them, she couldn’t. Later, she realized she had been restrained to the bed.
It hadn’t even begun. Dan was all she could think about. His absence throbbed all the time behind every thought. She kept gauging it against losing Randall, expecting she would feel a certain way at a certain time, and it never failed to make her feel guilty. How awful of her to care more about a boy she’d loved for a month than the father she’d known all her life.
This is it. This must be the bottom, she thought every morning as she woke up in the psychiatric wing. Then she would spend the whole day sinking deeper. Whatever pill they gave her at night to keep her down wasn’t strong enough. She kept waking up screaming, thrashing against the restraints. They moved her to a bed in her own room to keep her from disturbing the other inmates and, after three days, they increased the dose. It still wasn’t enough.
It all kept raining down, and the nightmares spilled over the levee and polluted the day. Freya couldn’t sleep, and she couldn’t stay awake, and she lost time, stretches of hours where there was just nothing.
Lying in bed, she would try to reassemble the day. Had there really been three helicopters circling the prison? Had Lynn Harris finally showed up, only to find Freya couldn’t even nod at her? Why did her side feel all bruised? What had happened to her?
For a long stretch, she churned in the surf, people came and spoke without significance, and she could not tell them apart. Drugs were administered, some filling the room with hissing static fog, some buzzing beneath her skin like burrowing flies.
The long shadow people grinned their white smiles at her. She would wake in the middle of the night and feel a crushing weight on her chest. Their oil black eyes peered down at her, taunting. They knew she wanted to go, but they would not finish the job.
Worst was the walk down the hall to the psychiatrist every day. They were repairing a section of the wall in that corridor. Beyond a curtain of milky polyurethane, the beams were seething and alive, glistening with bile. Freya stared until one of the workmen glared at her and drew the curtain shut, and the CO dragged her roughly forward. She wasn’t supposed to see that, wasn’t supposed to realize the walls of this place were just the intestinal lining of the organ slowly digesting them.
Freya tried to explain this to the psychiatrist, tired of the charade. She told him she understood this was Hell, and that she accepted she belonged here. She was a murderer after all. Instead of commending her for figuring it out, he prescribed a pill that sucked her into a void so deep and black she didn’t emerge for days. It was a while after that before she became coherent enough to use the bathroom on her own.
When Freya could think again, she worried about the Starball.
No matter what they gave her or how fragmented she became, she never spoke about The Starball. She clung to the poison shard embedded in her brain while the hurricane raged around her. The Starball could not be allowed to win, not after what it had done. Lassa had been right about it all along.
It had infected Malcolm at the river and slowly drove him mad. Dan had somehow broken its conditioning, so it had used Malcolm to kill him so he couldn’t let the secret out and jeopardize its plot to exterminate humankind. It was the only answer that made any sort of sense.
Freya would just stare at the walls and hate, feeling coronal loops of anger lashing out. She pictured plasma roaring from her hands and burning through the walls, annihilating everything in her path. She had been used and betrayed. They had taken everything from her, but she would have her revenge.
The worry Freya couldn’t escape was a nagging whisper that maybe the police had searched the room and found the meteorite wrapped in the towel. It had cracked the shell once, maybe it could do it again, perhaps it could get a signal to Lassa. Maybe Santonelli would figure it out. Even if none of them did, they would eventually demolish the hotel, and someone would find it. The Starball could wait forever. It might have been alive for millions of years on the trip here.
Freya realized she could not exit until she was certain the Starball would be sealed away forever. She would wrap it in lead sheeting, seal it in a cement coffin like Chernobyl. She pictured it screaming inside of its nickel shell for hundreds of millions of years. The continents would grind together into a new Pangea, and it would still be trapped as they broke apart again, cycle after cycle until Sol bloomed into a red giant and incinerated it. Five billion years of suffering. But only if she could get out of here.
She needed to try. Freya needed to gather her strength, to pretend long enough to get out of here. Even with something to cling to, it was so difficult. There was very little of her left.
Days flickered by, and she wept less, though strange things would still set her off. They made her have meals with the other inmates, and she could tell they didn’t like her much. Even here, she was apart, an outsider.
She tried hard to tell the psychiatrist what she thought he wanted to hear, but he wasn’t buying it. She asked when she could talk to her lawyer, and the answer was always, “Not yet.” More drugs were given, but they seemed to be getting weaker. One day, there was a new psychiatrist, a woman with frizzy hair graying at the roots. Freya hoped the other psychiatrist had been fired.
“When can I talk with my lawyer?” Freya asked her.
“Tomorrow, if you like,” the psychiatrist said.
“Why not today?”
“It’s Christmas today.”
That night, there was a Little Debbie cake shaped like a Christmas tree with dinner. There were little red and green stars in the frosting. Freya traced the outline of the cake through the wrapper with her fingertip, and then offered it to one of the other girls, who took it gladly.