Flores Girl: The Children God Forgot, Part 2
By Erik John Bertel
Copyright 2005, 2009








Publisher
Millennium Writing
PO Box 7
Centereach, NY 11720

Published 2008
ISBN: 0-9822576-0-0, 78-0-9822576-0-9

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 1a







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 and they gleamed brightly in the scorching afternoon sun. It 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 controversial, but was also 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 with few employment prospects and with an even dimmer future, one that was located far from inquisitive government eyes. The 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.
So GendMeds secured, with their shareholders' dollars of course, a small town call Centreville and bought permission to rename the entire town to GendMeds City. Several thousand associates/employees were persuaded to uproot from their existing homes or face the daunting prospect of finding new 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 their employer.
Reginald Frey, or Reggie to his acquaintances, oversaw the operations at the facility, supervising every facet of GendMeds production from research to the final manufacture of their meds. 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 dark 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, Reggie possessed a pair of brown eyes that was practiced at looking right through people, friend, or foe alike. They weren't so much cold and dark like a shark's eyes, but rather they burnt 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 what he lacked in physical size, he more than made up for in sheer intimidation.
With Reggie, anybody could be a potential opponent; or if they were a subordinate, subject to his bountiful wrath. Even to the casual observer, it quickly became apparent that Reggie's attitude and demeanor was more befitting a prison yard rather than a corporate entity dominated by academic types. Moreover, that was the key to Reggie's success at GendMeds: there was a decided lack of Alpha males within the corporate walls to challenge his authority or his will.
Over the past year, GendMeds was having some difficulties with getting viable medicines from their research facilities into the marketplace. Their hype machine had done an excellent job of creating shareholder excitement, but the small number of viable new drugs in the pipeline was becoming a major disappointment to their Wall Street followers. In fact, after the hype had settled down, analysts were becoming dismayed that there were no new significant treatments in the offing. In response, the CEO tapped Reggie on the shoulder, and made it clear that the status quo was no longer to be tolerated. Reggie, in turn, decided to lean heavily on William Donaldsen for a new product launch. Bill was an exemplary research scientist, but he was also a particularly poor power player in the corporate hierarchy. One had to conclude that Bill's ascent to his current position was both a testament to his ability to think differently from the herd, and to having Reginald Frey as his improbable mentor.