The Apollo Illusion by Shari Lopatin

Author:Shari Lopatin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction / Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic / Medical
Publisher: Shari Lopatin
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Deceived

ANDREW

It’s nearly midnight when my phone rings and startles me awake, sending my body jetting out of bed. For a moment, I can’t comprehend what’s going on, or what time it is, or why anyone would be calling me in the middle of the night during a workweek.

It could be Flora, but she was supposed to arrive back from her Grand Canyon trip tonight with her parents, and I doubt she’s awake.

Without bothering to look at the number blinking on my cell screen, I grab the phone and answer it, my voice irritated and muffled from sleep. But when I hear Flora’s mother on the other line, I perk up.

“Mrs. Loban?” I ask, and I can’t help but notice the nervous hesitation in her voice when she first says my name. “What’s going on? Is Flora OK?”

She practically snaps back, asking what I mean and saying she’s calling me for that very reason. Now, of course, I’m confused out of my mind and not even sure I heard her correctly. So I ask her to repeat the question, and now I’m positive something is wrong.

“Didn’t you arrive back tonight?” she asks me.

“Arrive back from where?”

There’s a long pause on the other line before she says, “The Grand Canyon.”

The floor swallows me when I hear this. “I was never at the Grand Canyon,” I tell her. “Flora said she went there with you, and would be back tonight.”

Flora’s mother screams on the other end, and I hear scuffling over the phone. Silenced by the commotion, it slowly starts to dawn on me that Flora tricked us—all of us. She never traveled to the Grand Canyon, and wherever she went, she didn’t come home tonight.

Worry grips every nerve and muscle and joint in my body until I’m held hostage in the frigid air. I hear Flora’s dad begin talking through the phone’s tiny ear piece. “Andrew, we’ll have to call you back,” he says.

But before he can hang up, I respond, “I’ll be right over.”

***

When I pull into their driveway, the house is already surrounded by the flashing lights of the authorities. Like roaches, I think. Squinting my eyes, I can barely make out the letters “ABI” printed on the side of a white car parked in their driveway.

That strikes me as odd. Since when does the ABI respond to missing person calls? Don’t the local police handle those cases?

Regardless, I climb out of my car into the night’s blackness and slam my door behind me. What the hell did Flora get herself into? I think of her naiveté at the beginning of summer, when she pranced around the fence of that mysterious building hidden along the cliffs of Oak Creek Canyon. I begin to worry that my deepest fear has come true:

The dogs finally attacked the innocent, white cat.

I enter the house without knocking, and the first thing I hear is the wailing of Mrs. Loban’s voice, pleading with the authorities to find her daughter, telling them how’s she’s fatally ill with cancer and needs medical treatment.

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