Nightmares and Medication,
Halloway, New York State,
It's two in the morning and Wendy Leveridge is having the same old and nightmare with Alpha chasing her holding a box. He is dressed in his black suit and he can see his neuraliser in his breast pocket, she wants it and she tries to reach out to get it but he won't let her anywhere near it.
"Please, I don't want to remember!" She screams until her throat feels roar, "Please sir it's not fair." She cries hoarsely grabbing at her throat in pain.
"You should have thought about that before," he says removing a big sharp knife from his pocket and reaching out so it slides through her like she's butter. "They will never believe you," he smiles before everything goes black and she wakes up.
She is alone and afraid, she looks at her alarm clock that flashes 02:06 in luminous green. She sits up craving a cigarette so she lifts up her mattress and removes a pretty decorated box, one of those that presents are put in, and takes out her carton of smokes and her old reliable Zippo lighter. In the box are news cut outs from the supermarket tabloids, or the hot sheets as she calls them but not aloud.
The Orderlies don't like her smoking, so she makes sure to do it when they aren't looking, but she knows she shouldn't. Besides she is far too long in the tooth to quit now, hell everyone smoked when she was a kid even Zed…No not Zed but Zachary or Zack! She corrects herself not that she thinks it matters what she calls him in her head.
She opens her old slash window and leans out of it to have her sneaky smoke, the stars look beautiful tonight. She still looks up at them like she did as a kid caught in the middle of a family of seven children, they used to make her feel like she could do anything and she recalls her brother Archie telling her that they were glow-worms that had caught in that big bluey-black thing. It's not too surprising that he's an award winning author.
The stars hold more than childhood memories at the ranch or going camping with her dad, but also of the men in black suits and country boys giving tall willowy aliens flowers. It's not real though as Doc Rodgers keeps reminding her but then why her heart tell her that it is?
The delusions started in the fifties when Zack dragged her to Massachusetts, she remembers being homesick and hating her job with a passion but then she was a Deputy in Fairfield but in Truro she was dropped down to a Lieutenant, a Lieutenant who followed a speedy kid in a cool car to the world's best kept secret.
The country boy had been Kay, and god she misses him so if none of it hadn't happened what did? What was she doing for all those years, did she get married or return home? None of those years events are on the records, so there's thirty years of nothingness only a memory of a man she loved.
Kay, she sighs chucking the cigarette out of the window before closing it. In her box among her articles is an article that has his picture on it, the headline says he was in a coma for forty odd years so how the hell does she know him? Did she see his picture and think he was pretty cute and make up a fall-blown love affair? It also says his name was Kevin Brown and that's how he introduced himself, that's why she called her son Calvin because it's close to Kevin but not.
She goes back to bed allowing her fragile mind to sort it's self out but when she wakes up at seven she feels no more together, or sorted out than when she went to sleep. She gets dressed into sweat pants and a long sleeve t-shirt under a hooded top before she is escorted downstairs to the canteen by an Orderly, but that's what you get when you've tried to escape nearly twelve conceptive times.
She gets some Captain Crunch and milk as well as a plastic cup of orange juice before she is handed her rainbow assortment of mind altering drugs. Some are for the schizophrenia but some are for the depression that the first lot trigger, she is pretty hooked to the anti-depressants and the sedatives they also give her. The drugs make her taste buds go wonky and she hates the way they make her favourite cereal taste like ash. They also make her shaky when she doesn't take them to the extent that she hopes the doctors are right and she's crazy because she wouldn't be much help with a gun otherwise.
"Morning Wend'," smiles Fred a muscle toned African-American with one hell of an afro. She likes him even though she doubts he's as much as an alien as he likes to think he is.
"Mornin' Fred," she half smiles as her body stops to tremble. "Sleep well?"
"Not bad, I'm getting used to the uncomfortable Earth beds that are too hard." He says.
"No the beds here are hard but when I was in Truro I had a bed you could sink in," she says. "That's speciesism!" She smiles before laughing remembering how Zed, no Zack, used to love his soft beds unlike Kay… The laughter stops and she starts to cry, "Fred you're an alien, right?" She sobs.
He nods and she continues, "Have you heard of the MIB?" She asks and he nods again, "Have you heard of a man called Agent Kay?" His eyes flicker closed but not up and down like the regular eyelids humans have but sideways, a voice in her head tells her that they are gills. It could be a trick triggered by the drug cocktail she has just had but then again maybe not. She is desperate for someone to acknowledge her and to tell her that she isn't crazy and he has heard of the MIB and of her Kay but does he know who she is? Who she really is?
He listens to her ask what he has been waiting six months for her to ask and he nods, "You are Agent W, the first female and one of those that made first contact." He answers with conviction.
"You knew, all this time you knew I wasn't crazy but you didn't say anything?" She asks.
"I thought I was crazy," he says true fully.
"So did I," she smiles and they both laugh delighted with their newly found sanity.