Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot
By Erik John Bertel
Copyright 2005, 2012
Publisher
Millennium Writing
64 Bellewood Avenue
Centereach, NY 11720
Published 2008
ISBN: 0-9822576-0-0, 78-0-9822576-0-9
Copyright 2005, 2012 by Erik John Bertel
Edited by Katrina Robinson, Calliope Writing Services, LLC
No part of this novel shall be copied, broadcast, or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author Erik John Bertel or Millennium Publishing.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is purely a work for entertainment, and any similarity to any real or fictional person or event is purely coincidental.
Version 1.c
Corporate Citizen
The large laboratory facility occupied several full city blocks and was oddly situated in the middle of a vast virgin farmland. On the sprawling campus, there were several large, new buildings that dominated the rural horizon while gleaming brightly in the scorching afternoon sun. This was the new home of GendMeds, a promising biotech company that was enjoying a somewhat chaotic ride on the stock exchange. Their pharmaceutical offering, which relied heavily on touting new treatments based on stem cell research, was both controversial and extremely profitable.
To handle their meteoritic growth, the GendMeds board had decided to buy an entire town for their own private development. Their target was a small, quiet backwater town in the Midwest with few employment prospects and with an even dimmer future, one that was located far from inquisitive government eyes. Peter Foster, GendMeds' CEO, figured he could buy a town on the cheap with the right persuasion of the local politicians, and besides, owning your own town was a source of considerable corporate pride for the company. "Collect the right politicos, and you'll find getting the zoning variances for a high-tech construction site becomes a mere paperwork formality," Foster liked to say to his staff.
So GendMeds secured, with their shareholders' dollars of course, a small town call Centreville, and bought permission to rename the entire town GendMeds City. Several thousand associates\/employees were instructed to uproot from their existing homes or face the daunting prospect of finding work with another employer. The vast majority decided to make the move, and they found themselves cut off from their families and friends, while in turn, they were embraced by an entirely new community, one that had been completely subjugated and controlled by GendMeds itself.
Reginald Frey, Reggie to his acquaintances, oversaw the operations at the facility, supervising every facet of GendMeds production from research to the final manufacture of their medications. He was the right-hand man of the CEO, and he was, for all intents and purposes, the acting COO. He was just under six feet tall, with thinning brown hair and non-descript facial features that were not necessarily masculine in their overall nature. Taken as a whole, he was somewhat innocuous-looking-that is, if you were able to avoid looking at his eyes. If you did look, you'd see that Reggie possessed a pair of brown eyes that were practiced at looking right through people, friend and foe alike. They weren't cold and dark like a shark's eyes; rather, they burned brightly like the eyes of a playful big cat, announcing to all the world their joy at entertaining a possible kill. A glance from his eyes told the wary that he was an accomplished predator and that what he lacked in physical size, he more than made up for in sheer intimidation.
