AEZg82
Maria Moreno has been a patient at the IBF for about a year. Or, she was sort of a patient in the beginning but her official status has changed. Now Maria is an employee of the IBF, specifically assigned to the basement level to assist Dr. Eakran in the absence of his assistant doctors who mysteriously disappeared.
Maria is very dedicated to her new employer; the man known as Dr. Thomas Eakran, not the IBF. She loves her new job and she is learning a lot from him. He has taught her a lot about science and the human mind and she has even assisted him in the management of the patients at the IBF.
The hardest thing about her new job, is the reality of what happened to her predecessors. One had been murdered by Dr. Eakran, and the other, Dr. Frederick Cousins, is essentially being held as a prisoner in the basement. When Maria does her daily rounds to check the status of the patients in the basement, she comes face to face with the man who had helped her expose Eakran’s secret that he is actually an alien from the planet Druont.
Today, Maria starts her rounds early. She lives with Eakran at his home that is a short distance from the IBF, though the home is practically invisible to anyone passing by thanks to cloaking technology. Eakran has many wondrous things in his home that he would prefer to keep secret, and as his only real confidant, Maria has enjoyed the privilege of marveling at all the things from his home planet.
When she arrives at the IBF this morning, she waves to the receptionist, the woman named Wendy, and then she takes the elevator down. Wendy hadn’t really spoken to Maria since she disappeared into the basement, and her sudden reemergence around the time that the doctors disappeared. Wendy doesn’t have the security clearance to know what happens in the basement and Maria reminded her of that when she first saw her. The two are friendly, but Wendy is extremely suspicious of the woman who showed up at the IBF out of nowhere and now had higher security clearance than she does. She’s not jealous, just curious who the woman really is.
In the basement, Maria saves her encounter with Cousins for last, and when she makes it to the solid white door of the room where Cousins is kept, she takes a deep breath. Then she let’s herself inside. The room is sparse; there is a single, twin sized bed and the walls are bare. Cousins sits on the edge of the bed facing away from the door and looking up at the flat screen hanging from the back wall. The TV is not on.
“Dr. Cousins,” Maria starts.
He turns his head, not his body. His hair is unkempt and bushy on his head and he has a full beard. His eyes are sharp and angry.
“You came to do the right thing?” This is always his first question to her.
Maria takes another step into the room and Cousins’ anger obviously pains her.
“I can’t let you out,” she says and Cousins stares back up at the TV screen. “Do you need anything?”
“To go home,” he says, never turning. “Just go.”
Maria doesn’t protest and she leaves quickly.
By the time Maria is done, Eakran has arrived. He smiles when he sees her.
“I have a special assignment for you,” he says. “You’ll have to go to NC, to Chapel Hill. I would go myself, but I have a meeting with the CIA later. I need you to meet with an old friend and bring something back for me. Apparently he has something very sensitive that he doesn’t feel comfortable to send by mail.”
“When do I leave?” Maria asks dutifully.
She takes one of Eakran’s cars to Chapel Hill. The two are not romantically involved, even if they both find the other attractive. Intimacy is not a natural thing to Eakran, and even if Maria is attracted to the doctor, she still has nightmares about seeing him slice open the throat of Dr. Moss in the basement. She doesn’t completely trust the doctor, but he believes the story of her abduction. He is proof of it. Though Eakran swears that he has no affiliation with the aliens who abducted her and he even wonders if those Druintes, as the beings from his home planet are known, were official representatives of the planet or just random travelers. He had vowed to get to the bottom of it for her. They had changed Maria, whether intentionally or not, and now she has the ability to control the minds and actions of most other people when she makes eye contact. It even works on Eakran, which helps her to feel that she has some semblance of control and safety around him.
She appreciates the chance to drive through NC. She hadn’t lived in the state since she lived with her mother as a teenager and it is good to see it. She had been born in the mountains and her mother had raised her by herself, and she took advantage of the road trip to see the home where she had lived in her youth. No one lives there when she arrives and she stands in the yard looking at the cabin-like house. She remembers it being bigger, the house and the yard, but that maybe true for all childhood memories, much bigger than the reality. She wandered the backwoods where her abduction took place and she sees a tall tree among a clearing in the otherwise dense woods. One of the big knots in the bark has a streak of silver that reflects the sunlight. Maria touches it and it feels like the silver section of the tree is metallic. She puzzles at it, and then at the clearing around the tree. There had been other trees there, she could tell from the downed trees that seemed to lean out away from the tree with the silver. Like they were running from it.
She gets back on the road and reaches Chapel Hill at night. She arrives at a fancy gate at the address that Eakran had given her. Just behind the gate, she sees a long driveway that leads up to what she believes is some sort of medical facility. She finds a black intercom box next to the gate and pushes a button.
“Yes, who is there?” the intercom asks.
“My name is Maria, Dr. Eakran sent me.”
There is silence from the box and when it seems that she has been waiting for minutes, she calls, “Hello?”
Just then, the gate opens and Maria gets back into her car and drives up to the main building. She stops in front if the substantial stairway that leads up to the front door. There is a man waiting for her and he smiles at her when Maria gets out.
“Welcome, Ms. Moreno, we have been waiting for you. I trust that Dr. Eakran is well.”
“He is. It is nice to meet you…”
The two shake hands.
“Dr. Worthington. Roy Worthington. Come in.”
Maria follows him inside.
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