Nerd Knight Short Stories

A Nerd Knight to Remember: Part 2

"Hey! What are you doing back there?" the largest of the drunken jocks yelled back at the bar. "We can't hear the game over here."

"Sorry, we'll keep it down, Bruce." Dee smiled back.

"Why the hell aren't you watching the game anyway?" he yelled back at James.

"Oh, I'm not much of a sports fan." James shrugged.

"You'd rather talk to a girl than watch football with the guys?" Bruce stood up and jeered, "What are you gay?"

"I think you might need to look up the definition of the word 'gay'". James replied.

"I think you might need to look up the definition of 'shut your fat mouth or I'll shut it for you'!" Bruce stood up and began to stomp toward them.

"Maybe you need to look up the definition of 'definition'." James ignored the jock's advancement and turned back to Dee holding out the device, "Here, you can do it yourself. Just place this next to your forehead. I promise nothing bad will happen!"

With a sigh, the bartender rolled her eyes and lifted the thing to her head. Immediately memories started flooding over her. Crying at her first day of school, the thrill of her first kiss, terror of losing her parents, meeting a string of foster parents; her entire childhood came flooding back to her. All of the events and people she had forgotten, even the emotions and sensations were clearer than normal long term memory could provide.

Then she remembered the "others"; small grey beings with enormous black eyes that would suddenly appear in her bedroom. At the time she wasn't able to remember everything, but now the events were replayed in their entirety. She could see it all. The grey Oreans would paralyze her and take her to meet their masters, tall blond haired Reticulians. They would perform experiments on her; taking samples and performing procedures that she wished she hadn't remembered. And it happened repeatedly over several of her teenage years.

The nightmares and wild accusations of extraterrestrial rapes forced her foster parents to eventually place her in a mental institution. While most high school girls spent their nights studying for exams and going on dates, Dee was usually in a drugged delirium.

But always in the back of the room, during every abduction, he was there. James. He was one of them. He was a Reticulians, but not exactly like the others. While most of the aliens regarded her with functional objectivity, James would actually look her in the eye, hold her hand and even give her a reassuring smile when he could. Often he would argue with the other Reticulians in order to stop them from performing some invasive procedure or other.

Then came a day when one of the aliens announced that she was ready for "hybrid insemination". She remembered screaming and trying to escape, only to be telepathically subdued. But James stepped forward and fought with the other alien. He physically pulled the Reticulain doctor off of her and forced him to discontinue her operation. He produced something that looked like a weapon and used it to blow up some kind of computer that held the data that they had collected about her over the years.

Eventually, other Reticulians restrained James and agreed that, without the destroyed information, the human teenager was no longer any use to them. They wanted to kill her, but James convinced them to let her go. They agreed, but only if they wiped out all of her memories.

That's when the memory flashbacks ended. She was suddenly back at the bar and the drunken mob of sports fans were returning to their seats laughing hysterically.

From the point that her restored memories left off, her actual memory fit in perfectly. She remembered waking up in the mental ward, with complete amnesia, but perfectly calm. After a couple months of reevaluation, she was pronounced functional and released from the hospital. Then 18 she entered the workforce and got the only job she could at the exploitive Rib Rack restaurant, where she had worked for 5 years.

A few months ago James had stumbled in and had become a regular costumer ever since. At the time he had just seemed like another friendly, but socially inept geek, but now it was obvious that he was following up on her and making sure she was all right.

She looked down at the strange device. It had really worked!

As the realization of James' true identity came to her, she realized that he wasn't there now. She looked around, but there was no sign of him. He wouldn't have left, would he?

But before she could do anything to find him, the door opened again. Why hadn't she locked that yet? Dee stuck the device away and stared in horror at the trio of men who strode in and looked around. They were Reticulians. Most people would easily assume they were humans, but she knew what to look for now.

"Where is the one who came in here?" one of the aliens addressed Dee.

"I... I don't know..." she stammered.

"Were you the one he came here for?" the alien crossed smoothly to the bar, almost floating. "Did he bring you something?" Dee fought to remain calm. These were the beings that did all those terrible things to her. If they found out that she regained all of her memories... what would they do to her this time?

"You look familiar..." the tall blonde man began to lean over the bar.

"For god's sake, what is wrong with you people?" Bruce bellowed from across the room. "There's a football game on!"

"Be silent!" one of the other aliens snapped back at him.

"Did you just tell me to 'be silent'?" Bruce got up and stalked over. "What are you, friends of that other twerp? 'Gay friends' I bet."

"Did you make acquaintance with the one who was here before us?" the lead alien turned his attention away from Dee and toward Bruce.

"Yeah, I gave him the business. Do you want a little taste of that?" Bruce ruffled up his bravado.

"You are the one who had business with the renegade?" the aliens circled him as a group.

"Yeah, and I'm not afraid of giving you a little of the same 'business'." Bruce reared back his fist, ready to show the strangers an authentic bar room brawl. But with a gesture from one of the aliens, he froze.

"Hey!" the rest of Bruce's gang leapt to defend their cohort, but a motion from one of the other aliens froze all of them as well. Dee remained behind the bar, afraid of doing anything that would bring their attention back to her.

"He must be the missing specimen." The lead alien replied as he examined Bruce closely, "We will take him back to the ship and perform a full examination." One of the other Reticulians produced a device that lifted Bruce and rotated him horizontally to float above the floor.

"Make sure no one else has any memories of the last half hour. We need to eliminate any contamination made by the renegade." the leader snapped the order to the remaining alien as he accompanied the one guiding Bruce's unconscious body out the door.

"No wait!" Dee shouted from behind the bar. If she forgot the last half hour, not only would she not be able to warn James when she found him, but she would lose the past that he had helped to restored. And with her past memories still in the process of linking to her current experiences, the effects of altering even recent perceptions might have a disastrous effect.

In a frantic attempt to stop the memory alteration, she dove across the bar and reached for the remaining alien. But it only took a moment for the Reticulian to manipulate the human minds in the room.

Everyone dropped where they were; the sports fans in their chairs and Dee lay across the beer stained bar. Content that everyone was out; the last alien took one more look around, and then turned to follow the others out the door into the rainy night.

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