The Spaceship Next Door

¹⁵ THE CONVERSATION

The deluge stopped by the time Sheriff Pete and two of her deputies arrived at the scene, which was to say that the rain didn’t last long at all given the station was only a few blocks away. It actually took them longer than Annie would have guessed, only because it never seemed like there was an actual emergency in this town so they had nowhere else to be.

The ambulance came a minute later, and then Annie was in the back of the ambulance with Beth while Ed tried to explain what they knew to Pete, and Pete’s men began to scour the area for a man who had been blinded by pepper spray and stabbed in the thigh by a pair of keys, and who might also have been a zombie.

“I had the late shift today, you saw,” Beth said. She was lying on a gurney while a paramedic Annie didn’t recognize wound a bandage around her head.

“I did. Last one out?”

“Last one out, check the lights and lock the doors, that’s the drill.”

“I know it.”

“I got out here, and it was about to rain so I was hurrying, and then this… guy comes up like from out of nowhere. He was, I think he was behind my car, like, waiting for me maybe.”

“He jumped you?”

“Not really. Not at first. He just like, stood there, and looked at me, and it was sort of murky out, right, so I couldn’t see his face, I was just like, ‘can I help you?’ And he took a step forward and said… what did he say? He asked me a question. I can’t remember what. By then I had my mace in my hand, and I didn’t know really what to do because he was between me and the car, but I was like, I don’t know what you want but… oh, I remember! ‘Are you?’ That was his question.”

“’Are you?’ That doesn’t make sense.”

“Right? But I was like, I do not know what you’re talking about, but back off. That was when he grabbed my wrist.”

Beth looked up and away from Annie, because she was welling up. Her shoulder was in already in a temporary sling, and as soon as her head was taken care of and she was strapped in, they’d be moving her to the clinic up the street to see if she needed to continue on to one of the hospitals for an overnight. Annie was about to perform the unenviable task of calling Beth’s parents to let them know where to find their daughter.

“He grabbed your wrist, and then what?” Annie asked.

“He asked me the same question, only, I don’t know, more aggressively. Then I sprayed him with the mace and it didn’t do anything. He just, like, blinked, and tilted his head like, like a curious bird, you know? It was… anyway that was when I recognized him.”

“Beth.”

“I know what you’re thinking. It was dark, the rain was about to start, I was scared, but I waited on Mr. Blake for four years. Over easy, crispy bacon, side of hash, wheat toast, strawberry jam. I know my regulars.”

“But…” Annie shot a glance at the paramedic. She was clearly listening, even if she was pretending not to. Annie leaned forward and whispered. “But he’s dead.”

“I don’t care. That’s who it was.”

The paramedic coughed. It wasn’t a real cough; it was one of those I am interrupting politely coughs.

“I’m sorry,” she said. The woman was in her forties, and if Annie didn’t know her that likely meant she was a stringer with the ambulance company and from one of the nearby towns. “I’m just about done here, but… I wanted to say, regarding what you two are discussing? It would not be he first story I’ve heard like this, not lately.”

“Mr. Blake attacking other people?” Beth asked.

“No, honey. People being attacked by people who aren’t exactly people any more.”

Oh, I do not have time for zombies in my life right now, Annie thought.

“All right, so maybe we have a zombie George Blake running around. He grabs you, barks an incomplete sentence, and then what?”

“I screamed a lot. You probably heard me.”

“Yeah, that’s what got us running. Then what?”

“I balled up the keys in my fist, remember how they taught us that trick in gym?”

Annie remembered. It was a basic self-defense mini-course that was mandatory for the girls in the school. They all called it anti-rape class because that was what it was. Annoyingly, while the girls were in that course, nobody was teaching a boys’ course called don’t be a rapist.

The trick was to put your keys in a closed fist so the sharp parts stick out between the knuckles. Then you punch an attacker’s fleshy part.

“You stabbed him?”

“Yeah, like I told them…” them being the sheriff, “…I got him in the thigh. But that didn’t get him to let go either. I don’t think he felt it any more than the mace.”

“But then why’d he run off?”

“Honest, I think the screaming bugged him more than anything. I wouldn’t say he let me go, though. He threw me against the car. I went down pretty hard. I’m gonna have a hell of a bump, I bet.”

“You are indeed,” the paramedic said. “But good for you for fighting him off.”

Ed walked up. It looked like someone dropped him in the Connecticut River a few times. He was soaked through, and pulling his wet clothes tight to ward off the breeze, which had a tendency to cut through anything damp. Annie was just as wet, but wrapped in a blanket from the ambulance.

“How are you doing, Beth?” he asked.

“Super, Mr. reporter.” She gave him a thumbs-up.

“It’s Ed.”

“Thanks for coming to my rescue, Ed.”

“Sure.” He looked at Annie. “You want to go with her, or come back with me? Sheriff has some questions for us, but we can do that any time.”

“Do we get to ride in one of the cruisers, or will we have to walk to the station?”

“We can ride.”

“Cool, let’s do it.”

THE NEXT HOUR was notable for the fact that all of the adults Annie spoke to appeared have lost their minds.

First she sat down with Pete to talk about what she and Ed heard, saw and did, up to and following the attack. That went pretty well. Then Annie offered up what Beth told her, in as much detail as she could recall, omitting the identity of the attacker but nothing else. She even included the part about the mace not having an impact and the equal lack of response to the key stabbing. None of this caused so much as a skeptical grunt.

“Did she recognize her attacker?” Pete asked, looking up from her notes. She took notes longhand and didn’t appear to have an interest in recording equipment. The sheriff’s office was a small affair though, with only two holding cells and nothing in the way of an interrogation room. They were talking in Pete’s office.

“I don’t know,” Annie lied. Pete seemed to know it, too.

“I spoke to your… boss? Is that how this is?”

“You mean Ed? Coworker, how about?”

“Sure. He said she gave a name.”

“She did. But she was mistaken.”

“Annie, babe, give me the name and let me decide that.”

She sighed. “Won’t it, like, invalidate her testimony somehow? Like, when you catch the guy, if she named someone else…”

“The name, Annie.”

“George Blake.”

Pete nodded and slowly wrote George’s name down on her pad of paper.

“And which direction did you say he ran?”

“I’m… sorry, what?”

Ed had his zombie theory, and it was a crazy theory. Sure, it appeared to be coming true right in front of Annie, but that didn’t mean it was in any way a respectable theory.

“Direction?” Pete repeated.

“North. But, George Blake.”

“Right, George Blake. I have that.”

“He’s been dead for five months.”

“Almost six. I know that, too. Went to his funeral. Really pretty ceremony.”

“Is this a prank?”

“Annie, I don’t really believe it either, but until I can figure out which local is wearing the rubber Scooby Doo villain masks, I’m taking these reports as they come.”

“So maybe it is a prank.”

“Sure, but I’m not in on it. Either someone’s going through a lot of trouble, or zombies walk the Earth.”

“How much trouble?”

“Enough to dig up bodies in the cemetery. So, a lot. Unless they’re digging themselves out. Can’t rule that out.”

“Sorry, Pete, but I’d really like to rule that out if it’s okay by you.”

“Whatever rocks your canoe. Did she say anything else you think might be pertinent?”

“Yeah, he said, ‘are you’.”

Pete nodded, and wrote it down.

“All right,” she said. “I’m gonna talk to Ed for a few, why don’t you help yourself to something hot before a chill sets in. That rain soaked everything, didn’t it?”

THE BREAK ROOM for the sheriff’s department was just the office next to Pete’s. The wall between them was glass, and the shutters that would ensure privacy were open, so while Annie couldn’t hear any part of the conversation between Pete and Ed, she could see them, and it was clear this wasn’t the first time they’d met.

“Well, that’s perfect,” she said.

She was cold, and tired, and more upset about Beth being attacked than she was prepared to acknowledge, so everything was annoying her, but of particularly special annoyance was the thought that Ed had continued his research without her around. That research obviously included befriending Pete and sharing notes on the local undead population.

It felt like the whole town was spinning out of control. Annie thought she knew everything about Sorrow Falls, and all of what she knew made perfect sense. But ever since Ed arrived, with his top secret files he still hadn’t shared, and his leading questions, and the sense she got that he had something really awful on his mind, it felt like her idea of the town was simply wrong. There was some dark consequence Edgar Somerville was afraid of, and he wouldn’t share what that was, and zombies wasn’t even that thing.

Or maybe she had to stop reading Lovecraft before bed.

“Is this little Annie Collins before me?”

Rick Horton was standing at the entrance to the room. Her instinct—as always when it came to Rick—was to put some distance between them, which was a challenge as he stood in front of the only way out. Then she remembered they were in the sheriff’s office and she was probably okay.

Annie had known Rick most of her life, and had not, in that time, been able to pin down what it was about him that made her uncomfortable. It was just always so.

“Hello, Rick. You look sober today.”

“Nice.”

He shuffled out of the doorway to the coffee machine. On busy days at the diner, Annie brewed the coffee, so even though she didn’t drink it herself, she knew what fresh coffee smelled like, and the stuff in the urn in the break room was pretty far away from fresh.

Rick threw some in a Styrofoam cup anyway. Annie sat down at the table and tried to look indifferent.

“You’re with him, aren’t you?” Rick said, nodding at Ed. “The man from the government.”

“He’s just a reporter.”

“Sure. And you’re just a cute little sixteen year old girl.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean you’re more than that. And so’s he. Everybody knows.”

“Why are you here, Rick?”

“I am a charter member of the sheriff’s youth rehabilitation outreach program. I am, point-a-fact, the only member. It’s a good deal. I empty out their trash every afternoon for the summer and avoid going to juvie for it. I also get to feel super rehabilitated. Have you told him?”

Annie sighed. “Have I told him what?”

He smiled. She always hated his smile. It was his most menacing expression.

“I never told anybody,” he said. “Even when I thought… well.”

“Look, Rick, it’s been awesome catching up, but I have to get going.”

“Your friend is still in the office.”

“He knows where he can find me.”

She got up to walk out, but Rick stepped in the way.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I say stuff like that. You don’t gotta tell anyone. I haven’t. Nobody’d believe me anyway.”

“Please get out of my way.”

“Just… listen, please. Did you see what I saw?”

She was taken aback by the question. “Well I don’t know. What did you see?”

“No, you didn’t. You couldn’t have, because if you had you’d be terrified. You’d be banging on the sheriff’s door and telling your friend and he’d listen to you, because he would, because you’re Annie Collins, and people listen to Annie Collins.”

“Rick. What did you see?”

“Everything. And it’s all coming true.”

He looked like he wanted to say more. There was a hollow, terrified look in his eyes she’d never seen before—or maybe she was never looking before. Maybe this was the Rick Horton that Rodney was always trying to talk to her about.

“What is?” she asked. “What’s going to happen?”

Rick took a deep, trembling breath, sipped his burnt coffee, and calmed down a little.

“Forget it. I thought maybe you knew. This is probably all just in my head, you know, that’s what they tell me. It’s all in my head. I should go.”

“Rick…”

“No, I have to go, really. It was good seeing you.”

He shuffled out. And while she was always glad when Rick left, this time she nearly went after him.

Instead, she sat back down at the table and pulled out her cell phone.

She called Carol three times on Monday, and hadn’t even tried once since, but after Beth’s attack she thought this was a good time to hear her mother’s voice.

Dear mom, there are zombies, stay in Boston, she thought. Everyone says hi.

There was a notification on the open screen that took her by surprise.

Like just about everyone her age—and perhaps just about everyone in general—Annie had a habit of trying to do more things with her smartphone than the phone’s memory was entirely comfortable with. In her case, that weakness had to do with photographs. It wasn’t that she took a lot of them; it was that she never wanted to delete what she had. To deal with what had become—after three years of owning a smartphone—a large collection of images she didn’t want to lose access to, she opened a cloud drive account. The space didn’t cost anything, it had plenty of memory to deal with the pictures, and she could access them any time without chewing up all the available memory on her phone.

The app on her phone also uploaded new pictures automatically, whenever her phone entered a recognized Wi-Fi with a strong enough signal. This was actually sort of a problem because dependable Wi-Fi in Sorrow Falls wasn’t exactly commonplace. Her house didn’t have it. Violet’s did, but she never got on. Ed’s car did, supposedly, but she hadn’t tried to use it.

Typically, she relied on the library, the school during the year, or the diner. Joanne’s Diner added Wi-Fi less than a year earlier in response to the Denny’s up the street doing the same. It was probably their Wi-Fi that was responsible for the notification on her phone that a new picture had been uploaded to the cloud drive. The problem was, she couldn’t remember taking any photos recently.

She tapped into the cloud server to access the photos and scrolled down to the most recent. It took a couple of seconds to realize what she was looking at.

Have you told him?

Rick’s question still hung in the air. It was suddenly an incredibly important question.

“Hey, was that a friend of yours?”

Ed walked in and headed straight for the burnt coffee.

“Who?”

“Guy I saw you talking to. Looked about your age, right?”

“That was, um… sorry, I’m a little distracted, that was Rick Horton. I forgot to ask your zombie timing question, but you can probably still catch him.”

“Oh.” Ed looked like he was considering it. “No, it’s okay. I should get you home.”

“Actually… I think we should go someplace and talk. Maybe eat, but also talk.”

“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“This, for starters.” She held up her phone so he could see.

He went a little pale. This was kind of amazing as he was pretty pale to start with.

“How did you get that?”

“Like I said. I think we should talk.”

THERE WERE many places to tie one on at night in Sorrow Falls. Annie wasn’t terribly familiar with any of them, being a minor, but she’d been inside one or two on certain occasions, such as when her dad was back in town and wanted to take the family out for a meal.

The family dinner establishments were mostly outside the town, in places like Oakdale, Mount Hermon and—in the other direction and somewhat further—Brattleboro. But there were a few quasi-family places, i.e., a place that served dinner and also alcohol, catering to adults but without anyone carding at the door or, if they were asking for ID, not before 10 PM.

One such place was Jock & Jill’s, a sports bar with a name that made it sound a tiny bit like an all-inclusive strip club. To get to it meant going from the diner parking lot (to which they were given a ride by one of the deputies) to the northern conclusion of Main and a dogleg left turn, up the hill on a road called Acorn, toward Durgin. Jock & Jill’s rested atop a small hill at the corner of Durgin and Acorn.

Ed looked about as uncomfortable as he could when he realized the kind of place Annie directed him to.

“This is a bar,” he said, pointing specifically to the onslaught of flashing neon.

“They have great appetizers here. And burgers. I hear good things about their drinks, too. The Martian Margarita’s supposed to be top notch.”

“You can’t go in here, can you? You don’t have a… I mean…”

“What good would a fake I.D. do me, Ed? Practically everyone knows me. Don’t worry, I can go in. The important thing is, the place is dark and loud.”

They took up a booth in a corner in the back of the place, with the waitress—Annie didn’t know her, but thought she looked familiar enough to be an older sibling of someone she did know—giving them the kind of uncomfortable glances people give when they think maybe, perhaps, possibly this older man is on a date with this young girl.

As soon as the waitress set them up with a couple of sodas—she was probably glad nobody at the table was drinking—Annie called up the photo on her phone and slid it to Ed.

“So tell me what I’m looking at here.”

“It’s a copy of a high resolution photo that happens to be incredibly classified. How did it end up on your phone?”

“You didn’t fully answer the question.”

“You’re right, I didn’t.”

“Ed, is this a handprint on the side of the spaceship?”

“It is. Keep your voice down.”

They were being bombarded on one side by white people classic rock, and on the other by the drone-speak of baseball announcers narrating two different games.

“I promise, nobody can hear us. I can barely hear us.”

“How did you get this?”

“I took it. This is a little embarrassing, but do you remember the day…”

“When you got the text from your mother,” he said, gasping. “I went to get my coat.”

“The folder was open on your desk. I didn’t even register what I was looking at. I just… I saw, and I… my phone was already in my hand. I didn’t even remember this until an hour ago.”

“Annie, you have to delete that immediately.”

“Now, hold on. I think you owe me some answers.”

“My answer’s the same as it always was. It doesn’t change just because you took a picture of something you shouldn’t have.”

“You do realize I’m a teenage girl with multiple social media profiles.”

“Annie…”

“It would seriously take me about ten seconds to post the image, and it’s no secret I live in Sorrow Falls. It’d probably go viral in a day, maybe two.”

“Seriously, you can’t.”

“Do you think you’d get arrested as soon as I posted it, or would they wait a week or two?”

“I can’t believe you’d do that to me.”

“Dammit, Ed, just tell me. I can make it so it looks like you already did, so you may as well.”

She was bluffing, and was about 80% sure he knew she was, but she also knew he was dying for an excuse to give up everything he had.

“All right, fine.”

He took a long sip of his soda, which was amusing only because he clearly preferred for it to be something much stronger.

“Do you know what Cherenkov radiation is?”

“Sure. It’s blue, right? It’s when something travels through a medium at a speed faster than light through that medium.”

Ed stared at her. “That’s almost exactly right, how did you know that?”

She shrugged. “I just do. So go on.”

“All right. A few weeks back, for less than a second, one of the sensors picked up Cherenkov radiation emanating from the ship.”

“That’s… interesting, but not really possible, is it? What was the medium? Air?”

“Air.”

“Something was transmitted that reached the ship at a speed greater the speed of light through the atmosphere. That would be a technology… ohhhh. I understand. That’s some alien technology going on.”

“We still don’t know whether the ship transmitted something into space or something out there sent something to the ship. In Washington, they’re pretty split on which possibility is worse.”

“You guys are always fixated on the worst idea imaginable when it comes to these things, aren’t you?”

“I do risk assessments. It’s my job to at least consider the worst case scenarios.”

“That’s kind of a crap job. No offense.”

He laughed. “You may be right.”

“So what happened next?”

“There’s a team of scientists attached to the spaceship project. There are twelve of them, and they’re very smart, reasonable people who didn’t deal well with this news. For a lot of reasons, I guess, one being that if it was Cherenkov radiation it should have killed some people around here and it didn’t.”

“How’d they detect it, then? If not radiation.”

“Spectroscope, I guess. I don’t really understand how they could tell the difference between a blue light and this, but they could. The upside was, they ordered a full rescan of the ship. That was conducted as quickly and as quietly as possible. An unmanned drone conducting an infrared scan of the hull picked up the handprint. By then I was already preparing to come here, so I missed the full-throated panic it had to have triggered.

“When I got here, my first job was to figure out if there was any observable change as a consequence of the… the message, or whatever was transmitted. The sensors are all pointed at the ship, basically, but nothing is pointed at the town. We needed to know if anyone here discovered something we were missing. But as soon as it was clear somebody actually touched the ship, the job got more complicated. That was how you ended up getting hired.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“We’re pretty sure the handprint happened long before the Cherenkov effect, and we don’t think they’re connected. It’s just that the print was missed before. But what it means is, someone in Sorrow Falls knows more than they’re saying. I needed to find out who that person was. I still do, because right now the ship is creating zombies. I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, but I think whoever made that print does.”

Annie sat back and considered that point.

“All right. So how do you know the ship is making zombies?”

“Who else? You think it’s really likely the one place the dead are rising is the one place with a spaceship?”

“I agree; that’s unlikely. How do you know there aren’t other towns with a zombie problem?”

He smiled. “That’s a really good point. First thing tomorrow, I’ll call Washington and ask them for an update on zombies in other regions. Maybe something will come up.”

“No you won’t.”

“No I won’t, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good point.”

The waitress arrived with their plates of greasy food. Discussions about the undead did nothing to dampen Annie’s appetite, so she dug in.

“All right, assuming it’s Shippie’s fault.”

“Shippie?”

“Sorry, that’s what Violet and I always called it. Assuming the spaceship is doing it, how is it doing it? Shouldn’t one of those government gadgets be catching this?”

“Sure, or your friends at the trailers. Although they didn’t notice the drones, it sounds like, and nobody caught the Cherenkov radiation burst.”

“They noticed the ship is breathing, that’s something.”

“Right.” Ed rolled his eyes. He didn’t consider the ship breathing a particularly respectable discovery. “But all of our gadgets are only good for things we know to test for. The ship was built by beings that mastered interstellar travel. They’re bound to have a way to do something we can’t detect.”

“Magic, then.”

“I definitely didn’t say that.”

“So why’s it doing this? What possible use could a spaceship have for a bunch of zombies?”

“I have no idea. But I’m guessing the person who touched the ship knows something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, Annie, I have to find them first. But I’m pretty sure they’re the key to all of this. The sooner I figure out who they are the better off we’re all going to be.”

Annie threw a French fry at Ed’s face. It glanced off the side of his head, causing no long-term damage.

“What was that for?”

“You still aren’t telling me everything, Edgar. Why is all of this so very important right now? Stop dropping ominous hints all over the place, it’s annoying.”

“I don’t have any particulars to share, but let’s just say the government has a few plans for what to do with this town and that ship if the report I turn in makes them unhappy.”

“Well that’s super. Then turn in a report that makes them happy.”

“I can’t really fabricate something here. There’s too much at stake. Look, all I need to do is find out who made that handprint.”

“Right, but you better have a backup plan is all I’m saying.”

“I’m sure that person is still in this town somewhere, and somebody knows who it is.”

“Yes, you’re right about all of that, but I’m saying don’t expect much from them.”

“You know who it is.”

She sighed grandly.

“I know they don’t have the answers you’re looking for, let’s say.”

“How can you know that? Let me talk to them and find out.”

“You’re talking to them now, Ed. I’m the one who touched the ship. Three years ago. And I have no answers for you.”