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Abduction

Chapter 3-The Mystery Deepens

By Jason Ray Morton Published 3 years ago 13 min read
1
Abduction
Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash

Only two days have passed as I wander around the common area, seeing the meatheads wasting time with the two nurses at the station. There's an ache in my legs that I am ignoring as I walk my usual path around the common area, only occasionally looking up at the television on the wall. Like everyone, I am in my hospital-style pants and scrub-style shirt. We stick out like sore thumbs, our patient uniforms being such a dim mix of blues and whites. It's almost farcical, how much this place reminds me of the stereotypical television show-styled mental ward. A few of the patients here still wear their robes, never taking them off as far as I can tell. Edward, the chess player, appears to sleep in his and then get directly back to chess after his morning coffee and bagel. None of us notice much about Edward, other than his dingy robe and the odor coming from it. I have long since grown accustomed to not seeing his morning coffee, his bagel or his chess partner. So have the rest of the staff and patients, so I'm not alone.

Meathead number two just picked up the phone. I keep walking in circles. My doubts about getting to talk to my parents have grown since my last session with Dr. Ackman. If it has really been five years since I was abducted, and my parents were never told of my return, then what would make them actually talk to my parents now?

“Hey, Hunter, Dr. Ackman is here to see you again,” meathead number 2 yells from the nurses' station.

That was fast, I think, walking over to the nurses' station with my hands involuntarily already in front of me to be restrained. The two meatheads put the cuffs on me and I start walking toward the doctors' offices in the medical corridor. Surprisingly, I'm not being physically guided by the two oafs. They're letting me walk on my own, without me asking them to do so. Why I am wondering? What is the reason for the change in routine?

We get to the office and I see Dr. Ackman, Brenda as it were, sitting at the computer station in the office. As the door opens up I can smell the aroma of her perfume. It's a heavier dose than in prior days. I walk in and the meatheads secure me to the chair and leave without another word. They must be in a hurry to bench press each other again, or maybe they're splitting one of the nurses in some funky, muscle-bound, threesome. There is another mental image that I fight to keep from forming in my head. As bad as the torturous experiments were during my captivity, the site of those two doing anything sexual, a girl involved or not, makes me want to wretch out my lunch all over the doctor's nice clean office floor. As the door whisks shut, I breathe a sigh of relief.

Brenda gets up from her chair and comes around the desk. She's holding her notepad in front of her as she sits down, pen in hand, and ready to begin our session. Her face is pensive, her jaw tight. She looks at me and points to the back of her notepad, lifting it from her lap. It's a picture of my parents and Brenda. I want to ask why she's in a photo with my parents but I am sensing that the good doctor is out on a limb showing me the image. She opens her notepad and flips the first page over towards me. I now know, that if there's anybody in the ward I can trust, it is Dr. Brenda. There's a note written in black marker, specifically for me.

'Don't react, I spoke to your parents.'

I am biting my tongue. There is something more going on here, something that I'm stuck in the middle of and can't find a way out. Brenda must believe my story for her to reach out to my family, to do anything at my request. Should I just cooperate? Do I have any other options right now?

“So, Stephen, have you had any time to delve further into your memories?” she asks me. “You were telling me about, Alexa.”

As much as I don't want to do it, I lean back in the chair and focus on the dots in the ceiling tiles. I close my eyes, focusing on the image of Alexa, on her voice. In the moment, I am transported back to my cell. It's dark again, dark and cold. I hear the sounds of the grays in the outer corridor and scurry over to the crack beneath my cell door, trying to see what they are doing, to see what they are hiding from us as they keep us locked in these rooms. That's when I see them, dragging Alexa back into her cell. I hear the whisk of the door to the chamber next to mine. It's unmistakable now, that sound before my body hits the floor before I am again surrounded by the darkness. I hear the thud of someone as they land on the ground, a slight whimper echo's before the whisk of the chamber closing. The grays and their peculiar sounds disappear, their sounds getting fainter.

I crawl back to the wall we share, tapping on the metal with my knuckles. Sitting there, I wait, and I hope. One of these sessions they perform on us is going to kill us I fear. Selfishly, I almost want it to be me if they do kill one of us. It's not by any means a feeling of courage or gallantry. I simply don't relish the idea of being alone there. Finding Alexa is keeping me sane under these brutal circumstances. I fear, if not for her, my mind would devolve into madness. I knock again, hoping for an answer.

“Knock, Knock, Knock,”

“Can you hear me,” she asks, sounding as weak as I do after they finished with us.

“I'm here,” I tell her. “Are you...are you alright?”

She's sobbing, sobbing, and fatigued. I can hear it in her voice. The session took it out of her today, her fight waning as they put her through the daily indignities of their “exams”. I try to encourage her to stay awake awhile. It is the only way we can compare notes, the only way we can help each other is to remember everything we possibly can. I'm still looking for an opportunity to escape, an escape that I hope will include her, knowing any guarantee is predicated on my successfully being able to figure a way out. As she sobs uncontrollably I try to think of something I can say, some words of comfort that might prove soothing. I barely soothe myself after the sessions, much less knowing what to say to a young woman going through that horror.

“Was it the same as yesterday?” I ask, hoping that it wasn't and knowing the answer is anything but no.

I hear her struggle to get to a seated position. “Why do they do this every single day? What reason could there be to repeat the same experiments?”

“I don't know,” I say. I really have no idea how to respond. In fact, it was an excellent question. The experiments didn't make any sense, not on a daily basis. They never seemed to change their approach. I'd always imagined what people claiming to be abducted went through, imagining the absolute worst. This was an exercise in monotony, performing the same gross experiments every day. As I sat there, my back against the cool metal, staring into the abysmal darkness of my detention chamber, I began to slowly get the answer. These were fewer experiments and more studying us, like frogs in seventh-grade biology. We spent a week cutting into those little amphibians, cutting up one after another until we knew each part like it was our own. It was a grim thought, so I kept it to myself.

“Tell me about where you came from,” I suggest, hoping it will get her mind off of things. Our talk is interrupted as the small opening in my door is opened up and a tray slid through. I hear them do the same for Alexa. It's feeding time.

“I guess they've got to keep us alive,” I hear her comment.

“So where did you grow up?” I ask, putting a piece of the putrid-smelling ration in my mouth.

Alexa was nineteen, just a year older than I. She grew up in Northern California. From what she described she was never rich but enjoyed the childhood of successful parents nonetheless. She was a cheerleader in high school and had done some modeling gigs while she tried to find herself. Mostly swimsuits and a couple of surfing magazine layouts. Alexa was a surfer. She loved to surf. It was there, on that ship, that I learned about the different beaches in California and most notably, which ones to surf, which ones to avoid the locals, and which ones were most dangerous. Being a California girl she of course surfed every beach she went to, regardless of the locals, particular customs, or the dangers some of them inherently held.

Alexa remembered her last day of freedom. There was a party on the beach that she went to with her kid sister. The girl was sixteen but their parents let Alexa take her along. All-day long the weather had been perfect. When sundown came there was a campfire on the beach and they sat around telling stories, laughing, playing music, and having the best of times. It was a perfect day, as she described it. I asked her what went wrong and her story reminded me of my own. She remembered it far more clearly, but there are definitely similarities there. Alexa had gotten weary of the group, the music, the frivolity of it all at the beach party. So she went for a walk. It was a half-hour after she left the group before she noticed that there was something in the night sky. She remembered looking up at it, being excited and slightly startled by the sight. It came in over the ocean, she explains as she tells me how it happened.

“I couldn't believe it. Living in North Cali, you see things all the time. There are several military installations and flyovers are not uncommon. I had never seen anything like it before so it definitely stood out.”

She described the phenomenon as being long, extremely long. In her words, it was the length of several big passengers jets and three times wider than even the big C-130's she grew up seeing fly in and out from the Air Force Base. At night she couldn't be one hundred percent certain on the size but described it as being at least two football fields long and one-and-a-half football fields wide. There was a crazy bright light that shone down from the craft as it made its' approach. The craft was so bright as it came down that she almost thought it was a meteor until it got within a few miles of the beach. When it did, there was a strange light that hit the beach and she took off running.

Alexa told me she didn't make it far and the clammy feel of an oddly shaped hand jerked her backward, almost slamming her to the ground. She described looking up from the sand-covered beach into the eyes of our captors. Her last memory before waking up inside the cells was of her screaming.

“So what happened to Alexa?” Dr. Ackman asks me.

I struggle to remember the last time I saw Alexa. Had I escaped I would have tried to bring her with me. My mind draws a complete blank, trying to remember the last time we saw each other. There's something else, but what is it? I remember us together, being out of our cells. We are both brought out of the cells at the same time and I realize there are others like us, all human, all in the same odd gray coverings. We're are being lined up in this gray, metallic walled corridor. There is a gray at the front of the line and one on either side. They're dressed in fanciful gowns. I don't know why. My head spins and I keep looking around, side to side, as my eyes adjust to the constant stimulus of being in a lit area. Even, a dimly lit area hurts my eyes. I notice the others are all shielding their eyes as I am, trying to make sense of our surroundings and avoid being thrown back into our cages.

“Wait,” I tell Dr. Ackman.

We were together in that line. Alexa was in front of me as we were all herded together and taken down the corridor to a large bay. Inside the bay, there are three lines of prisoners being herded. Each line appears to have twenty to thirty prisoners being lead toward a large opening leading outside. Where were they taking us?

“Do you remember where you were taken? Where did they take Alexa?”

Why I react with tears I really don't know, but something about the question breaks me like I'm three-years-old. Dr. Brenda calls for the guards and asks them to take me back to my room. I just let them. I wanted to be alone. Why don't I remember what happened to us?

Sitting in the office, typing up her notes from the session with Stephen, Brenda feels a sense of guilt about having to have him removed when she did. The hour was up already and she was only authorized for three one-hour sessions a week. Brenda reported her opinion of Stephens' progress, marking that he had shown marked improvement since their first meeting. She still had to run the report past the director of the ward but in her mind, she hoped that the progress shown today would lead to answers about where Stephen really was and what became of the young lady he keeps mentioning. She notates that it's obvious that the two developed a bond and Stephen's responses indicate someone who shows a genuine affection for the person he's remembering. Why, she questions, does he not know what became of the girl he calls Alexa? Were they separated? Was she finally killed by their captors? Did he escape? If so, why wasn't she with him?

A knock at the door startles the good doctor as she types feverishly away at the keyboard. She looks up, removing her glasses as she utters the words “come in.” Brenda notices immediately that she's being visited by Director Martin Pascall. His battle-scarred face bears a slight smile as he comes in, asking her questions, making pleasantries about how she's doing. She knows why the former Director of Homeland Intelligence is there, because of Stephen. Martin won't tell her why he shows such an interest, only that she's to keep him apprised of any developments in the case.

“Director, how can I help you?” Brenda asks.

Director Pascall takes a seat, propping his cane against the arm of the chair. He folds his fingers together in front of him, staring across as Brenda sits down. There's silent tension between the two and it makes Brenda uncomfortable, almost fidgety in her desk chair.

“The boy, Brenda. How was your session with the boy?” he wants to know.

fiction
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About the Creator

Jason Ray Morton

I have always enjoyed writing and exploring new ideas, new beliefs, and the dreams that rattle around inside my head. I have enjoyed the current state of science, human progress, fantasy and existence and write about them when I can.

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