“Dean Sing, you’re looking ravishing today. Did you do something with your hair? I can really dig that bouncy ponytail style. Very chic.”
Allek did not know the meaning of the word ‘chic’, but assumed it was a good thing. It was always on the cover of those teenage girl magazines, after all. He spun his office chair around and placed his arms on the arm rests, trying to look as laid back as possible so the dean would think he was cool. The rest of the faculty had already clocked out and gone home, so he and dean Sing were the only two left in the entire office space. Unfortunately, Allek’s hopes that this would make the atmosphere more personal and romantic were dashed; dean Sing was now staring at him over her cubicle wall with an utmost judgmental look in her eyes.
“Does it hurt being as dumb as you are?” she asked, barely moving a muscle in her face. Her gaze returned to her stack of paperwork. She had several legal documents to sort through, all pertaining to the most recent drop-offs in the IOTH nursery. The last few women to sell their own flesh and blood to IOTH didn’t so much as name their babies before collecting their cash and splitting. She removed her thick-framed glasses and rubbed her aching forehead. “People can be so fucking stupid.”
Dean of students Dr. Liu Sing was the only child of IOTH’s co-owner, Dr. Shi Sing. Liu was a child prodigy and had earned her master’s degree in education as a teenager, and double majored in law and child development at some prestigious school the likes of Allek couldn’t possibly recall with all that fluff filling his brain. Liu was only twenty-six and already running a major research laboratory on a private island. She was tall, slender, pale, and had dark, fierce eyes and the silkiest black hair. Or at least Allek assumed it was silky when he was lost in his daydreams.
Allek was painfully average—an underling to dean Sing. He was a math dork, getting close to forty, widowed, and not the most fit man in the business. He did his darnedest to get dean Sing’s attention, though. “Do you need any help?” he asked, noticing that her stack of paperwork was quite large, and that she was much too important and pretty to be doing it all by herself.
“Go home, Mr. Branch. Your company is the last thing I need.”
Allek’s heart sank, but as he stood up to leave, he smiled at dean Sing. His never-ending supply of optimism was his most favored quality about himself. He would get her next week. He knew it.
Through the office windows, Allek could see that it was getting pretty overcast out, and that meant a tropical storm was probably on its way. Hydroplaning was not on his bucket list, so he knew he needed to get home as quickly as possible. He took the elevator down, exited the building, jumped into his car, which was older than he was, started it up and skidded out of the IOTH parking lot through sloshy brown puddles.
It was around six in the evening and a Friday, which meant he was off work for the next 48 hours. He was going to spend every one of those hours sleeping, dreaming of his future with his boss, once his butt hit the sack.
***
Allek lived in a small, cozy gray one-person trailer with no company but his necessities and belongings. The trailer sat on the shore below the IOTH Laboratories, nestled in a clot of dead vegetation against a black lignite cliff side, which protected it from most weather. There was only one road down to the shore and it circled around the black mountain, so, going once around, Allek’s drive home from his office usually took a half hour.
Though Allek tried to beat the storm, the rain started before he made it off the IOTH property. With the rain beating down on his poor old car, he had to drive down the mountain slower and with greater caution. He was also losing count of the amount of consecutive brake-slams. The raindrops were so large and heavy that with each passing second, his windshield wipers were proving to be more useless. All he could see in the wet blue storm ahead of himself were greatly blurred streetlight orbs.
A blue fork of lightning split the sky, and the thunderclap that sounded with it startled Allek so badly he pulled over to the side of the road and parked. He was going to wait until the storm passed; the children needed their math teacher on Monday and he was not going to let a bout of nasty weather take him away from them. He pressed the cd button on his dash to check what music he could listen to while he waited for the storm to subside. Since he had no phone and the island received barely more than a news broadcast, it was the only thing he could do, anyway.
The sound of the player reading the cd commenced, and Allek waited for an instrumental or vocal part to begin, but none came. He turned the volume up. At first it sounded like he was turning the volume of the storm outside up, then he realized that the cd in the player was the peaceful sounds of rain.
Allek sighed and leaned back. The cd was a gift from his late wife, to help him unwind after long days of grading Calculus III homework.
It was going to be a long night.
***
THUD.
Allek awoke with a flail and a snort. There was a sound outside his car like a water balloon hitting the pavement, except louder. The sound shook Allek’s car. Allek straightened the gray and white paisleyed bandanna he always wore around his head, which had come loose while he was sleeping, and peered through the water-streaked windshield.
The storm had finally passed and the stars were twinkling through patches in the clouds. Blue moonlight reflected off of the road. Allek scoped the area from the railed edge of the road to the black rocky mountain on his right side for any sign of movement. Then he saw it: the source of the noise.
There, in the middle of the road fifty or sixty feet ahead, was a moving, breathing pile of something. It was too muddy to tell. Allek fumbled to get his door open, eyes still locked on the thing in the road. He finally managed to push the door open and stepped out, not daring to approach the thing. It was still slightly breezy and crisp out, so he rolled down his white lab coat sleeves and tucked his hands beneath each opposite arm to conserve warmth. He breathed out a thin stream of foggy air as he waited for the thing to show any other signs of life.
“Hello?!” Allek called out to it, after five minutes and no movement besides a staggered breathing motion. “Are you okay?”
It budged. Allek stepped back. “Stay where you are!” he threatened, trying not to show that he was downright terrified.
A whine came from the moving lump that sounded vaguely human. It pushed itself up and turned to face Allek.
It was an angel child. “Shit. Oh my god,” Allek gasped. The kids weren’t supposed to descend this far down the mountain. It was detrimental to their health! Allek ran over to the child and examined it.
“Daddy...” it weakly moaned, slack-mouthed and eyes drooping. Its damp bright pink hair hung into its face and it shook and sniveled in the cold. It was naked. The majority of its left side was scraped up from what Allek could only assume was impact with the asphalt. Tiny beads of blood trickled down its left arm and leg.
“No, no, I’m not your daddy,” Allek told it. He removed his lab coat and scooped up the child, wrapping it up. “How’d you get out here, pumpkin?”
But the child went limp.
***
“I don’t know how it got out there, seriously!” Allek insisted, arms out and voice raised. “It was just there in the street, naked! I didn’t even know they had the capacity to take themselves that far. They freak out when they have to come down to the first floor!”
“You’re sure,” dean Sing said, standing outside of the nurse’s office. She seemed highly skeptical of Allek’s explanation of how and where he found the child. “This could cost you your job, Mr. Branch. That poor child could have died.”
“You know I would never let that happen!” Allek shouted. He began to pace up and down the hall, biting down his fingernails further with every step. “I hope she’s okay. She passed out on the way back. I’ve never seen one of the kids like that. It scared the hell outta me.” He stopped in front of the nurse’s office and looked in the window.
The little girl was asleep on a hospital bed, looking scrawny and twitching every couple of seconds. Her descent down the mountain had caused her not only to bleed like a human being, but also to require human medicine. Not often had this ever happened to another of her species. It would take a while for her invincibility to all human pain to kick in now that she was safe and sound at a decent altitude.
“I’ve never seen one with hair that color,” dean Sing mentioned, disturbing Allek’s moment. “Have you?”
Allek thought of the many classes he had taught since his father invited him to join the educational staff at IOTH. He remembered each and every face, and none of the faces were framed with bright pink hair. “No...” The only face that came to mind was that of his child who died two days after it came into the world, but he had to push that to the back of his mind so to focus on the situation. “Do you think she’s one of the natives?”
“It’s possible, but we won’t know for sure until we can interrogate her.”
Allek scratched his head. “She thought I was her dad. It was weird.”
“Maybe she belongs to us, and her descent changed her hair color. We haven’t done many studies on the altitude phenomenon, my dad thinks it would put the children at too much risk. She could possibly be one of the children traded to us, simply...seeking out her parents. It’s completely normal for a child to want to be around her mother and father, and the children born here do have that sort of human predisposition to act up.”
“Yeah, that’s probably it.”
The hospital room door swung open and a young male nurse stepped out. “Dean Sing, professor Branch,” he greeted the staff. Dean Sing nodded and Allek looked anxious for the nurse to go on. There was a short pause in which the nurse glanced down nervously at his clipboard, then said, “the patient insists you’re her father, professor.”
Allek’s face contorted into a confused and offended frown. The very idea of his fatherhood was making him incredibly uncomfortable.
“And that’s not the strangest part; she keeps trying to scare me. I’ve never dealt with an angel child that could construct a story like the one she told me. She keeps saying absurd stuff like how she had to go to heaven to prepare for her return to Earth so that she could fulfill her destiny.” The nurse seemed obviously moved in all the wrong ways by what the angel child was telling him.
“I knew it, the kids are aliens.” Doctor Mark Chariot strolled around the hallway corner into the wing in which the nurse stood with the two staff members. Dr. Chariot was a sturdy, box-shaped Italian man in his late twenties who taught the angel children basic science. He was Allek’s only friend at IOTH. “Why else can’t we understand how they got here? They’re from Pluto.” He adjusted his orange-lensed prescription sunglasses smartly. “Did she say anything else?”
“Dr. Chariot, does anybody else know of the child’s escape?” dean Sing asked, raising an eyebrow at her smug colleague. “This is not to be gossiped about. We can’t let it be known that we can’t take proper care of our subjects.” She shot a callous glare at Allek, then huffed impatiently at Dr. Chariot.
“Calm down, Li, nobody knows you screwed up.”
“Nobody screwed up,” Allek interrupted. “Nurse,” he continued, “did she say anything else? She seemed pretty determined to find her dad when I picked her up.”
“Well,” the nurse inhaled and tapped his foot twice, eyes to the ceiling. “She says her name is Trudy. We have no record of anybody with that name ever entering or leaving the island, period...besides your late wife, sir...”
Allek shoved the nurse out of the way, and stomped into the hospital room.
“Allek—” started Dr. Chariot, following him in. “Calm down, man, she’s just a kid. She doesn’t know any better.”
“Shut up, Mark. She could be a hundred years old for all we know. I’m gonna make her tell me the truth. They have to do as they’re told. It’s their nature.” There was rage in Allek’s eyes as he barked at his colleague. “There’s no record of this kid on the island. She could be sneaking around in our personal records, and she probably dug up some information on me. Well,” he flipped around to face the little angel girl, index finger out, “it’s not funny, you little brat. Tell me who you really are.”
The child was sitting upright on the bed now, dressed in a light teal patient’s gown. She looked somewhat dizzy, probably an effect of the morphine she was on. It was as if she couldn't pick up on the electricity in the air at all. She reached out and placed her hand on Allek’s. “Daddy...” she whispered, staring up at him under heavily lidded cerulean eyes. Her eyes were just like his. “Missed you...”
Allek backed away, a sick horror twisting in his gut. The child yawned and pulled its blankets up over its shoulders, then turned over and drifted to sleep.
Suddenly a hand landed on his shoulder and Allek let out an audible gasp. He began to sweat, unable to control his anxiety. It couldn’t be.
“Are you okay, man?” asked Dr. Chariot. “Do you need a chair or something?”
The nurse brought in a leather rolling office chair and Allek sat down in it. His eyes were wide with terror and excitement. The children couldn't lie without it showing. With each lie, as well as other naughty acts, the physical divine features features of the children would deteriorate into regular human features. And the child on the bed looked just as angelic as any other angel child. But she had to be lying...
“We will have her interrogated in the morning,” dean Sing informed Allek. He nodded. “For now, I highly suggest you return home and get your rest.”
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