When she moved to Ellerson, NC after her second retirement from the Knoxville Tennessee Police Department, Sandra was hesitant. She had history with the town, though she’d never spent substantial time there. She had followed the news of the town’s development over decades and like most people around the world, she was curious to see the first extraterrestrial embassy on Earth. The attention on Ellerson, and its massive population that boomed to become not only the largest in the US, but in North America following the incorporation of neighboring towns, made Sandra wary.
“Don’t worry about all that commotion in the center of town,” Lucille told her. “You don’t have to ever even see that. Not out here.”
Sandra met Lucille when she first came to Ellerson. Her son, Kevin had already disappeared, and Sandra, along with her late partner Paul Young, had searched for him for a year before all evidence they uncovered suggested he was no longer on Earth.
“You sure you want to live with somebody after all this time?” Sandra asked as the two sat in the living room of Lucille’s home.
“My daughter grateful you here,” Lucille explained. “You sure you wanna move here? My door is open to you, and my home is yours if you want it, but them aliens put you through as much as they did my family so I get it if this to close to them.”
Sandra laughed. “I don’t blame the aliens for that. That was humans flooded my neighborhood with drugs and killed my son, even if the drugs they was selling was alien drugs. It was the people that pumped them into my community, and my my so called friend that killedy son. I like it out here, it’s quiet, beautiful view of that Ellerson skyline, but being this close to everything. It’s gone be hard not to fall into old habits.”
“You dusty off your detective uniform?” Lucille asked. “What you still investigating.”
“All them people lost they minds taking them aliens drugs. It was a strange case, and so many people just wasn’t the same after that one batch of them drugs we traced back to Smoke working outta this town. I always had a feeling there was more to it than people just going crazy. Paul said he knows what really happened to them. He said that Dr. Eakran told him their brains, their consciousness, was stolen and repurposed to make that memorial to social Drunites they got in downtown and on Druont. That’s why you can interact with the dead Druintes like they real people, supposedly somebody used the minds of the drug addicts to reconstruct the mind of the social Druintes in that memorial.”
Sandra chuckled as Lucille shook her head.
“I can’t wrap my head around none of that,” Lucille said.
“It’s complicated, and I don’t need to be thinking about it. Young did all he could before he died to investigate what happened with that bad batch, and he followed the clues all the way to a dead end. Seem like it was just an accident in the drug manufacture and ain’t no evidence of that consciousness stealing stuff. Wouldn’t even know how to prove that. But just being in Ellerson make me wanna question some people.”
“We old enough that we ain’t gotta work no more,” Lucille said. “You been working your whole life, now it’s time to rest. You earned that.”
Sandra agreed, and she moved into Lucille’s house shortly after that conversation.
One day, she strolled the property behind the house. The entire yard had been recently mowed by a young kid who also lived in the outskirts of Ellerson, and to Sandra, it looked like she was on a golf course. The land rolled with subtle hills and was carpeted with picaresque grasses until it met the line of trees.
Sandra wandered over to the tree line, and just as she was about to step into the woods, two young men stepped out. One was white, the other black.
“You’re living with Lucy now?” the black man asked as he and the white man approached Sandra.
Sandra pulled a gun instinctively. It was larger than seemed possible to conceal as well as it had been.
“Whoa,” the black man said and his hands shot up to show he was unarmed. The white man seemed to chuckle next to him. “Lucy didn’t tell you about us?”
“Y’all Fo and Mog?” She asked, her gun out and me er wavering.
“Yes ma’am,” Fo said. He sighed as Sandra lowered her gun. Mog, the white man, just smiled proudly at her like he knew her. “Lucy said you was moving in today. We was hoping to talk to you about that consciousness thing you told Lucy about. The Druinte drugs that made people crazy.”
“What y’all know about that?” Sandra asked.
“We know it happened just like you said it did,” Mog said, speaking for the first time. His voice was much deeper than Fo’s.
“And how y’all know that?”
“Cause,” Fo said, “we stopped it from happening with all the other drugs Smoke made out of Ellerson. We just missed that batch.”
Sandra was skeptical of the information.
“Y’all Drunites? Don’t look like much to me,” Sandra said, then nodded her head at Mog. “Ain’t he too pasty to be Druinte?”
“Don’t let the Caucasian appearance fool you,” Fo said. “we were both bioengineered to survive on Earth. That’s why we look more human than Druinte. And why we don’t have to wear prosthetics.” Fo lifted a hand to show that his five fingers were real, though long talons grew from his nails as he smiled at Sandra, who had a look of wonder on her face. “We still got these but they’re easy to hide,” he said as the talons retracted.
“So y’all gone tell me what really happened with those drugs and the people that took them?”
“If we can,” Mog said. “If you don’t mind doing some detective work.”
“I told Lucille I was moving here to avoid that.”
“So forget we said anything,” Fo said. “Is Lucy cooking tonight?”
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