Abduction

I was sitting in my room, or cell, if you really want my opinion, writing in my journal. It was hard to write with the rubber ink pens the ward provided. Equally as hard, was writing anything involving any length. They are, after all, only four-inch pens so handwriting the Dead Sea Scrolls or telling my memoirs was an impossible goal to achieve. I could, however, I could write to myself or in the journal the ward provided all of the patients. This was my morning routine. Well, it would be my routine, after I do it for a while. I started working on this plan to fill my days while I suffered through the boredom of the weekend, anxiously awaiting my Monday session.

My least favorite meathead, stands at my door, telling me that it's seven-thirty in the morning. I swear, he stands there gawking at me like I'm in some sideshow or a carnival attraction. This happens so often and with such repetition that I can feel it when he is there, my arm hairs stand on end and my senses tell me I'm being watched. Of course, we are all being watched in the ward. There is a difference between being watched by a human and being watched by video surveillance. Meathead finally calls my name. It's time to go to the common room for breakfast and our morning medications. So, I left the table in my room and muddled toward the door.

Over the weekend I decided I was going to take a much more submissive approach to dealing with the staff members in the ward. I knew that I needed to gain some level of trust from the men and women charged with watching me daily. The plan was still in the beginning stages. One way or another, I was going to escape from the ward and work my way back home. It may have been five years since I saw my family but they were out there somewhere and deserved to know the truth. Acting like I was tired, or as droopy as the rest of the patients, I could lull the staff into a sense of security and they would eventually underestimate me. As much as the meatheads spent their time flirting with the nursing staff, if I was successfully able to pull off my deception, I could use the opportunity to find my way out of the place.

After we were done eating, meathead number one brought a kitchen worker over to the tables and watched while they picked up our trays. I wanted to offer to help the poor thing. She looked exhausted. I had seen the woman before, a pretty little thing of Hispanic descent, always smiling and happy to be there as she worked around the patients. The meatheads never lifted a finger to help her when she came to pick up the trays. They always stood off to the side. Real manly jocks, let me tell you.

Edward invited me to play chess with him over the weekend and when he saw me today he asked, “Fancy a game?” It was something to do to keep my mind occupied, to control my thoughts as I worked my way through the planning phase of my intended escape. So I agreed to challenge the old man. I learned a lot from playing with Edward on Sunday. Edward was as sane as I was, for what that's worth. When I asked him what he was in for, he replied ambiguously at first. It was not until I won our first match that he finally started to open up about his story. Perhaps it was that I beat him soundly in our first match, seeing a cardinal mistake he made moving his queens' knight. Perhaps Edward trusted me because I told him I was kidnapped by space aliens. For whatever reason, Edward told me that he'd been in the ward since his return from the twenty-twenty-four moon landing because of something that he saw.

“I saw them,” he told me, as we played our second game that beautiful Sunday morning. “They're really out there, you know.”

Unlike most people he spoke to I believed Edward. I knew the aliens were really out there. Hell, I had been “out there” with them, apparently for a five-year visit. It was funny to me when he called me Gilligan. I had not drawn the comparison between my walk home and the five years I spent away to the failed trip of the famed castaways. If I was like Gilligan, then Alexa was certainly the Marianne of the story. For the first time since my detention in the shit-hole mental facility, I laughed. It wasn't a quiet chuckle as much as an uproarious belly laugh turning into a thigh slapper. That was when I made my final move and Edward was officially in checkmate. Now, we were playing again and Edward was dominating the board in convincing fashion. He was six steps ahead of me today and no matter which defensive strategy I utilized, the old man was winning. As fast as I beat him the day before, he crushed me slowly, playing with me a bit as he enjoyed himself. It was rather frustrating to be truthful and I wondered if I could remain calm enough to pull off my submissive appearance without biting through my lip.

“Mr. Hunter,” Connor, the other meathead yelled, “It's time for your session.”

“Don't tell Dr. Brenda what I told you,” Edward said, looking at me as he pleads for me to keep his secrets.

“It'll stay between the two of us,” I whispered, showing him a thumbs up as I held my hands at my waist.

The meatheads cuffed me and took me to see Dr. Ackman. We were in a different office today. I wondered why but was certain that I had a better chance of getting the truth from her casually than asking in front of the two oafs that escorted me. Meathead number one really stunk. It was more of a stench than usual. I wanted to ask him if he crapped his pants or had his water turned off. He smelled like a mix of old sweat, feet, and human excrement mixed into a blender and then poured over him before he was going to spend an hour laying in the sun allowing it to almost bake into his skin. I was never so glad to get away from those two than I was on this particular morning. Besides, as soon as they were gone, Dr. Brenda would come around the desk and the all too pleasing smell of her perfume would waft over me, giving me the pleasure of not smelling meathead anymore.

“So, Stephen,” she asked, “How was your weekend? Any incidents that you'd like to discuss?”

I shake my head no as I sat there in the new office, looking around with my eyes as Dr. Brenda begins making notes in her little notepad. The office looked newly redecorated and the furnishings were all new. Even the chair that I was thrust into by the goon squad was far more comfortable than the one in which I spent my last few sessions. On the wall above Brenda, I notice several certificates of completion. One of them is from the University of Colorado. Brenda Ackman the collegiate received her doctoral diploma from the University of Colorado? Could it be that Brenda is from my home state? It was an intriguing coincidence, to say the least, presenting a level of familiarity that I did not know existed before my fourth session with the good doctor.

In the past days, I came to learn more of the details from my abduction, amazing details to say the least. I wondered, was any of it real? The earth was still here and nobody ever talked about Andorria or the Andorians attacking the planet. Sure, they might not intentionally bring it up, but someone would mention it in general discussion or there would be mention of it on television at some point. An alien invasion of earth would have big news, the kind of news that didn't go away. Sure, as we were going through our sessions in the beginning, I had my doubts. Growing up I was well-grounded in reality and what I remembered all seemed unbelievable.

“So, Stephen, tell me more about your experience while you were gone,” Brenda said, sitting down.

“What do you want to know?” I was being coy when I asked. I knew what she wanted to hear.

“Stephen...”

Dr. Brenda's impatient voice sounded like the warnings my mother used to give whenever I would get a little mouthy or disrespectful, like kids sometimes do.

“Alright,” I sighed, leaning back in my seat.

I tell Dr. Brenda about our eventual landing and them herding us together like cattle on a farm. Now, I've never heard an eyebrow raise before, but hers raised so high that I swear it made a sound. She found it as hard to believe as I imagined she would.

“Continue, please?” she asked, prodding me into going on.

On the second day, we started our orientation and training. Alexa and I were paired together as they placed us all in the center of an arena. We were surrounded by rocky formations that extended well above us into the air. The recruits were all expected to climb over and to the outside of the rocks, retrieve a weapon and move on to the next day's challenges. Sure, it sounded like no big deal. Day one was an easy day, right? No, wrong. We moved from physical training onto the simulation training modules. We were both shocked by the realism of the simulations, a little horrified even, and Alexa struggled with the truth of the simulators after we discovered we were facing off against those that were in the work camps. The fights may look fake but the results were definitely real.

Alexa was my wingman in the simulations and we started the day off learning how to fly the grays' gliders. The gliders were capable of orbital flight. Phobos's trainers started us all off flying them over the surface of the planet. Zahec observed our training, a constant voice in our ears as we shot over the digitized landscape of the Martian moon. Alexa, as it turned out, was a natural behind the stick of the gliders. I honestly handled my own but she was maneuvering at a rate that surpassed the entire group. Alexa felt comfortable flying close to the ground, whipping in and out of chasms and valleys, flying close to the sides of the canyons as she maneuvered the glider like she had been flying for years.

It was later in the day that we started flying “simulated” fight scenarios. Each time we launched from the bay of one of Phobos's cruisers. Passing from the bay into an already ongoing attack, Alex screamed as one of the gliders exploded and she flew through the flaming ball of fire and debris. The mission was to survive the fight, a fight that was being flown from our gliders and the gliders of the opposing force. We didn't know it but they were all fellow abductees that were drug there from the corners of the universe. There were fifty of us at the beginning and just forty survived the first day. Of course, our numbers fared better than the opposition forces. There were so many of them that it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Alexa took a brutal hit from one of the enemy gliders and kept her glider in the air. She turned her glider toward the enemy and pursued it. Firing two shots at the enemy glider, she sent it crashing into the ground. Later, Alexa told me how she felt the bite on her stick as she was electrocuted. We didn't know it at that time, but on the other side of the settlement, the trainers were pulling the bodies of captives out of gliders. The simulation included an intense electric shock to the pilots. Sure, we weren't in the air, but crashing or getting shot down was just as deadly in the simulators as it was in real-life combat situations.

When they took our neighbor out of his simulator his partner, a young African girl, broke down in tears. It was then that Alex realized she had killed one of the pilots, shooting him down. She turned to me, pushing her head against my chest as she started to sob hysterically.

“What did you say?” asked Dr. Brenda.

“I didn't know what to say,” I replied. The reality was I didn't know how I felt about the truth of the simulations. I shot down three of the opposition gliders. If the simulators were all programmed the same way then that was three of our fellow captors I killed. Feeling sick to my stomach I hugged her tightly as Zahec and the other trainers congratulated the survivors of the exercise. It wasn't long before we were all herded back into a line and moved out of the training center. We were moved from the training center to the exterior before being allowed to go back to our quarters for dinner that night.

“Stephen,” Dr. Brenda put her hand on my shoulder. “Do you really believe that you were a trained fighter on a Martian moon during your time away?”

It all seemed impossible to believe, I knew that even though I had lived the experience and somehow was home. I admitted to Brenda that I often question my own memories but there were the scars I still had from the procedures the grays performed on me while we were on their ship. The scar on my abdomen was exactly where I remembered them cutting me open. If I was wrong and the memories weren't real, then where did the scar come from? What really happened to me?

“That's why I'm here, to help you to remember the truth,” Brenda told me, leaning even closer. “Stephen, what happened to Alexa?”

Why was she asking me about Alexa? The sessions were about getting me back to normal, helping me to understand what really happened when I was taken by the grays. So, what was her significance to Brenda or to the powers that be that were holding me in the ward? I shrug my shoulders at Brenda. I don't know why that was my best move. It didn't work. Brenda wouldn't let up on the questions because I was failing to sell my ambivalence, failing miserably.

“Stephen, I need you to be honest. If you're not I can't help you recover,” she insisted.

I got angry at her, “Dammit! I don't know what happened to her! I can not remember most of my time away to begin with, much less Alexa.”

“Try Stephen,” she continued. “Try to remember, what happened to her. She was your best friend, your partner, someone you cared deeply enough about not to escape without. Or did you leave her behind? Is that why you're blocked? You left her behind!” Brenda was getting more forceful with each insinuation.

"Come on Stephen, tell me what happened. Why did you leave her?”

I jumped out of my chair, my hands still cuffed in front of me. I started pacing around the room. Brenda sat there, her tablet in front of her. I knew she could have me pulled out of the session with just the press of a button. She was holding the panic button like life support. I startled her enough she was tense being in the room with me. Calm down, I told myself. Calm down, breathe, control yourself so they don't strap you down again.

“You did, didn't you. You left her behind and managed to escape,” Brenda sighed.

“No,” I said. I didn't know why, but I knew I could never leave her behind. Why wouldn't I leave her? I knew I liked her, but if my life depended on it, why wouldn't I choose self-preservation? Jesus, what was this girl to me?

“Alright,” said Brenda. “That's enough for today. I'll be back in two days and we'll continue from here.”

With that, the two meatheads were there to get me and escort me back to the common area. I asked them to take me to my room.

Brenda sat back behind her desk, taking out a small bottle of whiskey and a small glass. The new office afforded her more opportunities to keep a bottle of her own in the room to calm down after a tense session. Taking a drink, Brenda choked down the harsh brown liquid and took a deep breath. Now that she was calmer, she thought over what just happened. She was close to the truth, closer than she thought she would be at this point. Brenda knew that Stephen was working on finding his memories when she wasn't around. She put the glass and the bottle back into a drawer and pulled out a picture. Staring at it for a moment, Brenda shed a tear.

If you enjoy the Abduction story any love you show is appreciated. I'm actually having a lot of fun telling this story. I'm not a professional writer by any means so if you have any tips, comments, or ideas I could use to make the story better, reach out to me.