The Spaceship Next Door

¹⁷ LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHTMARE

“So nobody saw you?” Ed asked.

Her first reaction was that Ed thought she made up the story, but she could tell by the look on his face that wasn’t an issue.

“They never came back. I waited at the edge of the clearing for—I don’t know how long, a little while I guess. But when the ship didn’t do anything new and Rodney didn’t show up I headed to where we left the car. It was gone, though, so I just walked home from there. By the time I made it back it was something like four in the morning. Billy found the ship about an hour later. I think I was probably asleep.”

What she didn’t add was that Rodney couldn’t look her in the eye for nearly a year, and their friendship never entirely recovered. Given their age difference, it had a shelf life anyway, but it fell apart pretty fast. She thought he would probably always feel bad about abandoning her, but they’d never spoken one word about that night so it was hard to tell.

Rick, meanwhile, went from problem child to full-blown disaster inside of a year. He was the real first contact, not her or Rodney or Billy Pederson. She often wondered if what he experienced that night was worse than what happened to anyone else.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I touched the ship, but I obviously don’t know anything more about what’s going on now than you do, so you’re going to have to come up with another idea.”

“No, you’re wrong, this is a big deal. It means the ship tried to communicate. Maybe it’s still trying. We just don’t understand what it’s saying. What can you tell me about the pictures it showed you?”

“Hardly anything. I don’t remember much, it was… it was a lot of information and it came at me too fast.”

“I wonder, if we hypnotized you, maybe we can get more.”

Annie laughed.

“And that is exactly why I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t want somebody poking around in my head looking for the alien. Plus I’m not one of those people who can be hypnotized.”

“That’s really why you didn’t tell anyone?”

“Well, no. Nobody would have believed me, either. Like half the town came forward with stories once Billy went global and it was clear there was money to be had. If you and I had this conversation three years ago you would have been like, sure little girl, whatever you say.”

“You’re probably right. What did it feel like?”

“What did what feel like? The pictures in my head?”

“No, the side of the ship. You wouldn’t believe how much back-and-forth I’ve read debating that one question.”

“Oh. Well I guess it was sorta weird. I had so many other things going on I didn’t give it a lot of thought. It was slick, though, like it was wet only it wasn’t wet. Warm, too, but not, like, frying pan hot, which I’d have expected. It was probably stupid of me to touch it at all, since it was clearly metal and had just been surrounded by fire in the upper atmosphere, but it wasn’t giving off heat like it should have.”

“Some kind of low-friction material with low heat retention.”

“Maybe, yeah. I think it was absorbing the heat. Like in fuel cells or something. Dobbs thinks the whole thing is a big solar power collector. So what difference does it make if it was trying to communicate?”

“I don’t know yet, I have to think about it. But it’s more than we ever knew before about the ship. I wish we’d known this three years ago.”

“Sorry.”

“The zombies, too.”

“I’m not following.”

“Like I said, it could still be trying to communicate. The reports I’ve gotten indicate a few of them have been speaking. Really basic, but maybe we shouldn’t treat the zombies as threats, but as crude efforts at contact.”

“Great. You go look for one to talk to, but leave me out of it.”

Ed’s phone, resting on the edge of the table, thrummed with a new text. He checked the screen.

“It’s from Pete. Looks like they’re going to move Beth to Saint Mary’s.”

“Oh no!”

“I’m sure it’s just a precaution.”

“When are they moving her?”

“She doesn’t say. You want me to ask?”

“Yeah, can we head back, I want to see her before she goes.”

Ed checked his watch, surprised. “Wow, it’s past nine.”

“Crap, I was supposed to call Carol. She’s out by now. She’d want to know about Beth, too.”

“Maybe I should just take you back to Violet’s. We can drive to the hospital to visit her tomorrow, if you want.”

“What, are you worried about my bedtime?”

“I feel like I’m supposed to be. I’m pretty sure I’m violating some sort of labor laws.”

Annie got up. “I’m not on the clock. C’mon, it’ll take the ambulance another hour to get to the clinic, we can beat it there.”

BOBBY AND LU-LU Weld were in the clinic lobby with Sheriff Pete when Annie and Ed came in. The place was otherwise empty, as Sorrow Falls was not known for having a long list of unexpected emergency situations on Tuesday nights. This was just as well as the clinic’s waiting area was too small to provide any privacy. The Welds were having a quiet conversation with Pete that ended as soon as they saw Annie, whom they both hugged extensively and at length.

Annie liked the Welds a lot. They had a habit of adopting everyone who worked for them (even their unofficial under-the-table employees, like Annie) as if they were part of the Weld clan itself.

Bobby shook hands with Ed.

“Pete here says you and Annie here saved Elizabeth from this man. Thank you so much.”

“Thank you, sir, but I think Pete may be giving us more credit than we deserve. Beth did all her own rescuing. We didn’t get there until after she chased him off. You should be proud, she’s got a lot of spirit.”

“That she does. And so does this one.” He rubbed the top of Annie’s head affectionately. The Welds were basically parents straight from the 1950’s.

“How is she doing?” Annie asked.

“They sedated her,” Lu-Lu said. Her real name was Lucy, but Annie didn’t know a single person who called her that. “We wanted to take her home, but the doctor thinks she could use a more monitored overnight, just in case, so we’re just waiting on the ambulance.”

Ed locked eyes with Pete and gave her a little nod, the universal signal for can I talk to you? Annie wasn’t sure who was updating whom, but if she could guess, Ed was about to ask Pete for help in locating a zombie for a “take us to your leader” kind of conversation. Hopefully not involving brain eating.

“Excuse me, for just a minute,” Ed said. “It was a pleasure meeting you both.”

“The pleasure’s ours,” Bobby said. Ed and Pete stepped out the front door.

“Can I go see her?” Annie asked. “Before the ambulance gets here?”

“Sure, sweetie,” Lu-Lu said, “but she is lights-out right now. I’m sure she won’t even know you’re there.”

“Go on in,” Bobby said. “It’s the first door on the left.”

ANNIE HAD BEEN PAST the lobby of the clinic only once, meaning she was actually less familiar with it than she was with the emergency room at Harbridge Memorial, despite the clinic’s relative proximity to her on any given day.

There were three small private rooms with examination tables and cots. The rest of the space was pretty open, with a long counter for a nurse or a local volunteer. The area beyond the desk was an unknown. She imagined there were offices for doctors, X-ray machines, and so on. Down at the far end of the corridor was a set of double-doors. An ambulance dock, probably. When Ed parked behind the clinic she saw one there.

A woman was standing behind the counter, sorting through paperwork in front of a lit computer screen. She looked up at Annie and smiled. They had a silent conversation whereby Annie asked to enter Beth’s room and the nurse/doctor/random woman doing paperwork gave her permission.

Annie’s one trip past the lobby was as a patient, the previous summer. She’d made the mistake of over-stuffing Bart with dishes, and was in too much of a rush to notice exactly what she was doing. The way the Hobart dishwasher worked was that a tray of dishes was slid in on a rack, and a handle was pulled to lower two side panels to seal a chimney-shaped compartment. Once the sides were completely shut, the machine automatically began the thirty-second wash cycle. If the tray was over-full, sometimes a piece of silver or a precariously balanced cup would interfere with the inside hinge of the sliding panel. The correct way to fix this was to pull the tray back out and either rearrange the things on it or remove some of those things and try again. The incorrect way was to reach into the machine and try to shove whatever was getting in the way out of the way.

Annie did it the incorrect way all the time, up until the day the thing that was in the way turned out to be a steak knife.

The cut was deep enough to need stitches, and she still had a tiny scar from it on the palm of her right hand. She could remember almost nothing about that day, other than what it was like to be in the back of the clinic, and that Beth was there with her. Beth was the one who wrapped up her hand at the diner and who walked her over and stayed until she was sure Annie was okay.

It wasn’t even a big deal. Annie certainly would have done the same thing for Beth in that situation. But it suddenly felt like a big deal.

The clinic had made a few improvements in a year. The room was as small as ever, but the bed looked a little more bed-like than the temporary cot she last saw. Beth was asleep—given a mild sedative, as Lu-Lu said—with a fresh bandage on her head and her left arm in a sling. She wasn’t strung up in the way one might expect of a person in a hospital, but this wasn’t a full hospital. She had an IV, but no vital sign monitors. Annie imagined if her friend’s injuries were life threatening, there would be someone in the room until the ambulance got there.

Annie sat in a chair on the right side of the bed and took Beth’s free hand.

“Hi, honey,” Annie said. “You probably can’t hear me, but…”

Oh my god, this is so stupid.

“But anyway. Zombies, huh? I feel kind of bad about that. I mean, I don’t know why I should, but I feel… I dunno, responsible, kinda. Weird, huh? I mean, it’s not my fault. Sure, I didn’t tell anyone about the ship, but, like, I’m not the one making zombies and sending them out to attack people.”

Beth inhaled sharply, which startled Annie. Her friend appeared to be having a nightmare: her eyes were darting around under the eyelids and she kept twitching.

“Hey, it’s okay, I’m here. It’s all right.”

Beth’s fingers started twitching. Annie wondered if she should call someone in or not.

Normal? Not normal?

“Should I call someone?”

Beth, appropriately, didn’t answer. But the twitching stopped and whatever was going on behind her eyelids quelled.

“I’ll take that as a no. Anyway. I don’t even know why I’m here, honey. I mean, if it were me looking at someone else here, right now, talking to an unconscious friend in an almost-hospital room, I’d say that someone else was here because her mom is in Boston in a real hospital right now. I mean, obviously, right? I’m probably feeling guilty about not going, and now zombies equals cancer in my head and wow, I should probably go get some sleep, huh?”

Definitely overtired, she wrote in her imaginary sociology notebook.

“Unnhhhh,” Beth grunted. Then her eyes snapped open.

“Oh, hi!” Annie said. “They said you were sedated, but how are you? I just came in to say hello before I headed home. Your parents are out in the hall, you want me to get them?”

“Are…you?”

“Dude, that’s not even funny. Lemme go and…”

“Are…you?” Beth repeated.

Annie let go of Beth’s hand, but Beth responded by grabbing Annie by the wrist.

“Aaoow, Beth, honey, let go of me! Come on, I’m serious.”

Annie was using her free hand to try and pull apart Beth’s fingers, but it felt like she was going to have to break them to get loose.

“Your grip is too tight, you’re hurting me, Beth. Cut it out!”

What the hell is going on?

“Are… you…”

“I heard you and it isn’t funny!”

“…her?”

“What did you say?”

She looked into Beth’s eyes and realized something terrible: Beth wasn’t in there.

“HELP!” she called. She didn’t know how many staff was in the building or if sound could travel far enough to reach the waiting room and make any kind of difference.

“Are you her?” Beth repeated. She was trying to use her left arm to reach for Annie, apparently not aware it was in a sling.

“Beth, let go of me.” She got two fingers loose. “HELP!”

A doctor she never met before—older man, new to the clinic clearly or she’d have known his face—burst in, quickly assessed the situation, and took Beth by the shoulders. He was trying to push her down into a prone position.

“Beth, you need to calm down,” he said, in slightly accented English.

“Help me get free, she’s hurting me,” Annie said.

The woman from the desk came in next, followed by the Welds, and then Ed and Pete. Ed, seeing what the doctor was doing, went to him first, because nobody, it appeared, cared that Annie was about to lose her damn wrist.

“Do not try and wake her up!” Ed said.

“Excuse me, sir?” the doctor said.

“I’ve seen this, and I’m telling you, if you force her awake it may kill her.”

“Oh my God,” Lu-Lu cried.

“WILL SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME?” Annie shouted.

“Sorry, sorry,” Ed said. He knelt down to work on Beth’s grip. “God, she’s really got you.”

“No kidding!”

“Beth, sweetie, calm down,” Lu-Lu said from the door. The two of them looked afraid to jump in the middle of anything.

“Almost got her loose,” Ed said. “Little help, doctor?”

He was checking Beth’s vitals, though, and not sure about respecting Ed’s advice. Pete knelt down to help instead.

“She’s too strong,” Pete said. She was looking at Ed when she said it. “She was asleep, right?”

“Her heart rate is soaring,” the doctor said, almost to himself.

“You are,” Beth said. “You are. You are.”

“What did she say?” Annie asked. “Ed…”

“YOU ARE.”

All at once, Beth collapsed back in the bed and her grip went slack. Ed pulled Annie away from the bed immediately. Annie felt her feet go out from under her as he scooped her off the ground.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

“She said, ‘are you her’, Ed. ‘Are you her?’ That was their question.”

Annie started to cry, and hated herself for it, while Ed held her.

In the bed behind them, Beth Weld started to convulse.

IN THE AFTERMATH of Corporal Vogel’s death, all the men involved in the incident were pulled from their rotations. This was explained as a temporary thing to give them an opportunity to get your heads right, which was an army tough-love way of saying perhaps you should speak to the base’s psychiatrist before we put a gun in your hand again.

Not one of the guys thought that was the real reason, though. As far as Sam—and by extension the other five—were concerned, they were pulled until everyone was cool with what happened. It was in the army’s best interest to make sure this was a situation where one soldier went nuts, tried to kill another soldier, and then died because something was wrong with his head, rather than what it looked like: six men ganging up to murder a seventh.

The frustrating thing for Sam was that being pulled from his normal rotation made it looked like he had done something wrong. There was no way around it. Everyone knew Vogel was dead, and Sam and his bunkmates were sitting on top of the man when he died. Having them taken out of duty just made it all look worse.

It helped that this was Sorrow Falls. Any other place, Sam’s story sounded a lot more suspect, but in this town, the ever-present specter of the space flu lingered in the back of everyone’s minds and made this sort of thing possible.

Another frustrating thing was, after he declined to speak to Dr. Davidian about his emotional state, and after the inquest exonerated him and the others, someone decided to shuffle the rotation.

Again, he could see the reasoning: let’s make sure these six men aren’t all guarding the spaceship at around the same time, just in case we have this wrong. He would have made the same call.

It didn’t mean he liked the outcome. His new team was A: on a nighttime rotation with the spaceship, and B: filled with men who’d come in with Vogel.

Sam had been in Sorrow Falls for fourteen months, which was longer than most of the men assigned to the base, but not as long as Vogel and his guys. They called themselves ‘lifers’, and they’d been there for a little over two years. There were only ten of them—nine now—five of whom made up Sam’s new team.

Two years didn’t seem like a long time to be at a base that saw no combat, but as far as lifers were concerned they were owed some sort of special respect, which was annoying since they all carried the same rank as Sam and two were younger than he was. It was all very high school, but Sam could learn to deal with it.

Much more disconcerting was the extremely cavalier attitude they all seemed to have about their assignment. They collectively developed a disturbingly nihilistic perspective on the ship and the importance of their duties in regards to it.

Sam could understand this too. It was easy to fall into a late-night security guard sort of mentality around a thing that was supposed to be the most dangerous object on the planet but which continued to refuse to fulfill that responsibility.

On the other hand, nobody wants to hear it won’t matter, we’ll all die anyway from the soldier sharing his foxhole, whether or not it was true.

This was Sam’s second night shift with this team, and the second night they told him to cover the front (street side) of the perimeter and to not worry about checking in unless he saw something important happen or had to take a leak. The first hour of the first night, he thought they were being generous in giving him the gate, because there were fewer bugs out front, and a few more things to look at. The back of the perimeter was nothing but a lot of trees and a squirrel or two, in contrast. But then Sam tried to check in at the hour—they were supposed to have hourly checks—and half the team didn’t answer. He was about to escalate it (which would have meant a backup team driving down the hill from the base) when he was told the three guys in back were napping and to leave them alone.

So that was the first night, which was dry. On this, the second, it had already rained a ton and the ground was muddy, so Sam didn’t see any way for a nap to be feasible without there being immediate and obvious evidence of said nap.

Just the same, when he tried to check in he was told to mind his own business.

He wondered if maybe they had hammocks hidden in the trees.

It was at exactly twenty-two-seventeen that the end of the world began. Sam always expected to have a front-row seat to it, but knew every other soldier at the base felt the same way. Even the lifers felt that way, although their expression of this sentiment was more tied up in concepts relating to fate and inevitability and passiveness, whereas everyone else tended to game-plan the scenario with a mixture of excitement and dread.

Either way, it was Sam who was at the gate at the beginning of the end. And the beginning of the end was startling indeed.

First, there was the heavy thump of a shock wave that traveled along the ground and knocked Sam over. He ended up on his butt. Across the street, the trailers rocked. He heard exclamations of surprise.

Sam scrambled to his feet and reached for his radio—still clipped to his belt—and his rifle, which he’d dropped. He opened a channel.

“SS1 to Base, we have something happening down here. Felt like an earthquake, but I think the ship did it, over.”

Static.

Did they hear me?

The radios were susceptible to atmospheric interference from time to time, and this was the kind of night where such a thing was possible. That was why they kept a field phone attached to a landline near the gate. (This was, if nothing else, ironic, as field phones were designed to be portable communicators in an age before cell phones. Now, it was a hardwired alternative to wireless.) Sam oriented himself, located the phone and started running for it.

“Hey!” someone shouted from the trailer. “Something’s happening, huh?”

Sam knew the guy—it was the weird nerdy guy Annie knew. Dobie or something. It wasn’t a great time for a chat, so Sam just waved and continued for the phone.

Then he saw the light, out of the corner of his eye, and he stopped moving to stare at it.

The light was Bunsen burner blue, and it was being emitted from a part of the spaceship most people likened to an antenna array. It was only glowing faintly, but glowing nonetheless, which was more life than the ship had shown at any point in the past three years, excluding thirty seconds ago.

“Holy crap!” the guy on the trailer shouted.

Go back inside, Sam was supposed to be saying. Protect yourself, drive for the hills, get behind me. You want me on that wall.

He didn’t say any of that; he didn’t have time. The light brightened and then there was… something like an explosion.

The sound it made was a lot more like an implosion, or maybe just the noise an explosion would make if played backwards. It happened in time with a tremendous wave of melancholy. When it passed through Sam his knees buckled and he gasped and nearly began to cry. It was weaponized depression; there was no other way to describe it. Mercifully, it lasted less than a second, or he might have put a gun in his mouth.

The light on the top of the ship glowed brighter still, and then a thin beam shot out of the top, visible only because of the mist still in the air from the earlier precipitation. It went straight up into the lower atmosphere until reaching something like a wall or an upper bound, at which point it spread out in in all directions, like the cascade at the top of a geyser.

Sam fingered the channel on his radio again and only heard more static. Behind him, the trailers nutsos were collectively springing to life. Doors were opening and people were coming out. If any of them tried to rush the gate, Sam was going to have a tough decision to make.

But first, the phone. He reached the field phone and clicked open the line, which was all that was required to dial up the base as the phone had no other purpose and wasn’t tied to any public lines. It ran along the same underground cable as the instruments surrounding the ship.

“SS1 to Base, this is Corning, over.”

Silence. Sam thought about those instruments on the ground inside the fence. They were calibrated to detect the tiniest of changes, so what just happened probably caused every sensor to wet itself. There was undoubtedly a packet of exciting information being uploaded to the science team at this very moment, which meant even if Sam didn’t get through there were people in the world—far away from Sorrow Falls—who were aware that this was happening. Whatever it was.

Not getting through to the base wasn’t an expected outcome, yet nobody was responding. He didn’t know where the phone terminated, but assumed a human being was in charge of anticipating a call. Perhaps that human was sleeping, like the men sharing his perimeter detail.

Then someone picked up the phone.

“Who’s this?”

“This is Corning, at the ship. We’ve got something going on down here, I need…”

“Hold position, soldier, we’re locking down.”

“Yes… yes sir, it’s just…”

“Conserve ammo, shoot to wound if possible, and hold position!”

The line went dead.

Sam stared at the phone for a few seconds, not sure if he was ready to believe what he’d just heard. There were the orders, which were alarming enough, but that wasn’t all.

On the other end of the line, in the background, he could swear he heard screaming.

DILL FELT the earthquake and knew.

His new duty assignment was base perimeter, a job that had him guarding a bunch of men with guns in a town of hick farmers, which was about the dumbest job on the base next to latrine duty, which thank God they hired someone to do because no thanks.

Anyway it was a plebe job, and he hated everyone sharing it with him and thought everyone probably blamed him for Vogel for some reason even though he was the one getting choked to death in all that mess.

Unlike SS1 duty, perimeter guard at the base meant standing inside the fence and making sure nobody came at it from outside. This was—again—a base in a town in America and not the Green Zone in Iraq. He had to worry about the kid staring back at him from the farmhouse porch on one side, and that was it. There wasn’t anybody else nearby. And again, he was guarding a bunch of guys who had their own guns.

Then the ground thumped.

Dill was from a part of the country that didn’t do that. They had to worry about hurricanes every year, but you could see a hurricane coming. Earthquakes didn’t creep across the ocean, they just struck without warning, and that was a kind of uncertainty that made him deeply uncomfortable.

It felt unnatural, which was why he was ready to attribute it to the ship instead, and also why Corporal Wen laughed at him for doing it. Wen was from San Francisco.

“You never been through a quake before? Calm yourself.”

“That felt bad.”

“The bad ones last long enough so you think they’re not going to stop. That was a little thing.”

“Can you even get earthquakes in Massachusetts?”

“Sure can. You can get them anywhere. Now we do what everyone does after a quake: we wait for someone to tell us the Richter and brag about having felt it.”

Wen—who hadn’t fallen over—helped Dill to his feet.

“You can call home tomorrow,” he said, “and tell the family all about it. Come on, we should keep walking.”

“We have to make sure the fence is intact,” Dill said.

Wen laughed. “It wasn’t that bad! Oh my.”

They started walking, when Dill was hit with a wave of nausea and the odd notion that it would have been better for everyone if Hank Vogel had crushed his throat.

“Oh,” Wen said quietly. “Did you feel that?”

“That’s not normal for earthquakes, huh?”

Wen shot him a dirty look. “I think I want to call home now, not wait for morning.”

“Yeah, I feel the same way.”

He saw movement outside the fence.

“Hey, look,” Wen said.

It looked like someone was walking toward them from across the field. It was hard to tell for sure because the perimeter lighting didn’t extend more than a few yards on the other side and it was a dark, rainy night.

Dill stepped closer to the fence and squinted.

“There’s definitely someone out there. You got a light?”

“What’s over there?” he asked. “Where are they coming from?”

“They?”

“Your eyes are bad, I make at least three people.” He stepped to the edge of the fence. “HELLO?”

No response. Dill could see them now. At least three leading the way, and maybe five or six more trailing behind.

“No flashlight?” Dill asked.

“Never needed one. What’s over there? Do you know?”

Dill had been at the base for only two months longer than Wen, but he reviewed the layout only the day before, at around the same time he got his new orders. But in the map in his head, there was just a void in that direction. A field, and then… what is over there?

The group was closing in. When they got to the edge of the spotlights they would reach a point where Dill and Wen had the authority to shoot.

“Army property, y’all,” he said, his Cajun leaking out in times of stress. “Please disperse.”

He took his rifle off his shoulder.

“What are you doing?” Wen asked.

“Just for show.”

Wen followed suit. He looked about as nervous as Dill felt.

It wasn’t an earthquake, he thought. It was the first thing that came to mind when it happened, but he’d allowed himself to get talked out of it by his San Franciscan partner. Then there was that wave of emotion that followed. What the hell could that be, if they felt it at the same time?

It had to be the ship.

The trio leading the pack of what was clearly now a group of at least a dozen started to come into focus. They were… dirty, which was weird. A light cloud of dirt came into the light ahead of them, falling from their clothes.

“Oh no,” Dill said.

“What is it?”

“I just remembered what’s on the other side of the field.”

The first one to reach the light was in a dark suit and a tie, and half of his face was missing. His jaw swung left and right as he lumbered along in the muddy grass, connected to the rest of his face by visible tendons. The skin over his skull looked loose.

“What?”

“The cemetery.”

Wen saw.

“Pickles, is that a zombie?”

“Yeah. You wanna start shooting?”

“I think maybe, yes.”

That was when the shouting behind them got loud enough to notice. There were men and women running around the base for reasons that went beyond the very real concern that the base was under attack from the deceased population of Sorrow Falls.

Wen readied his rifle. “Now?” he asked.

Dill looked over his shoulder and saw the large, familiar figure of Hank Vogel walking slowly across the basketball court.

The sirens started going off.

“Yes,” he said. “Now.”

WHEN BETH STARTED SEIZING, Annie decided it was time to completely freak the hell out.

She was way overdue. Between the ship, the any-day-now-ness of her mother’s cancer, and the possibility of actual zombies, she already had way too much to cope with. Watching Beth, her de facto big sister, possibly dying right in front of her, was quite enough.

She wanted her mother, and she wanted her dad, and she wanted to go home and rewind to the day before the spaceship landed, when the most important question in her life was whether she’d hit puberty in time for Rodney to think of her as something more than a kid.

If she couldn’t have that, she wanted a fast-forward button instead, so she could skip ahead to the part where she was grown up and didn’t have to worry about an adult giving her permission to be alone. She could leave Sorrow Falls and go to college somewhere. Home-schooled Violet could come with her. They would live in Paris, and date men with accents, and never talk about this town again.

With no fast-forward or rewind or even a pause, she couldn’t do a whole lot for a while except cry on Ed’s shoulder in the lobby.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right,” he said over and over. “Just take a breath, Beth is going to be okay.”

“The zombies,” Annie said. They were the first words she’d been able to put together between the sobs.

“Don’t worry about that either.”

He sat her down on one of the chairs and pulled back, as it was clear she no longer absolutely required his shoulder. “Look, Beth is going to be okay. We don’t know what happened yet. We also don’t know if any of this zombie stuff… you know what? Let’s stop calling them that. Zombies are made up, right? Until we see one, let’s just… we’ll skip it. Until we know what we’re really dealing with, we’ll skip it.”

“Beth was a zombie.”

“No, Beth was sedated and zombies are reanimated dead people.”

Well okay.” Annie wiped her eyes and her nose, and decided she must look a mess. “Something that wasn’t Beth looked at me through Beth’s eyes and said are you her? and then you are. So basically, if you don’t want to call them zombies that’s fine. Call them dinglehoppers or something. Either way, I’m pretty sure I just started the dinglehopper apocalypse.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“I’m allowed.”

“Yes, you are. But I think we should go. The doctor is dealing with Beth. We can check on her in the morning. I don’t think we should be in the way.”

“I don’t want to leave her.”

“I insist. At least step outside for some air. I need to call the base.”

“What for?”

“Did you feel the ground shake?”

“No. Did we have an earthquake?”

Annie remembered a quake when she was nine. It felt like a truck drove past, and that was what she thought it was until everyone was talking about it like it was a big deal and then she decided it was a big deal too, except it really wasn’t.

“Must have been. Plus, there was... something else kind of weird. You were already upset, you probably didn’t notice.”

“What?”

Ed stopped and stared at her strangely for a couple of seconds.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing, I just realized something. Hey, let’s go outside.”

It was approaching 10:30 PM, which was just about the upper limit for Annie as far as being on Main was concerned. She was usually at least in the vicinity of her house by that time most nights, especially since the mall closed at 10.

The street seemed pretty deserted. It was still just as much of a Tuesday as it began the day as, so that was unsurprising.

Ed took out his cell phone and tried a call.

“Huh,” he said, after three tries. “I can’t get through.”

“We can try mine.”

He took her phone and punched in the number.

“Nope, that’s no good either.”

“Something wrong with the base? Try another number.”

They were standing on the front steps of the clinic, which was on the northern half of Main, on the side of the street that looked down at the river valley. On the far left was the city hall and on the far right the library. On the near right, across the street, was the diner. All the storefront lights were out. Main was lit by streetlamps—they were quaint-looking lights designed to look like 19^th century gas lamps, even though the town never had such things—which gave it a sort of spooky feel in the late night mist.

Hang on.

It wasn’t as deserted as she thought. For starters, the army had begun manning all their checkpoints a couple of weeks earlier, and that appeared to be a twenty-four hour mandate, so there were men at the checkpoint booth two blocks past the diner on the right. The soldiers appeared to be in a state of agitation, which was to say even from a few blocks away Annie could tell they had their guns out.

For another, there were pedestrians.

They weren’t acting like pedestrians, which made it difficult to spot them at first. Pedestrians understood what sidewalks and streets were. These people were wandering in and out of the streetlight arcs in a way that implied they were unsure as to their destination.

Ed had a business card in his hand and was dialing the number from it.

“I’m trying Hollis,” he explained.

“Yes, he’ll want to know about the dinglehopper apocalypse too.”

“Stop that. And I can’t get through to him either. Here.” He handed back her phone. “Try your mother.”

“It’s a little late, I don’t want to wake her.”

“Then call someone else outside of Sorrow Falls. I’m going to call my apartment in Washington.”

Annie tried her dad’s number. He was either in Canada or on the road between there and Massachusetts, both of which qualified as being outside of the town.

The phone didn’t ring. It paused for a while and then told her it couldn’t make the connection.

“I have full bars,” she said.

“Me too, and I can’t get anyone.”

She opened up the phone’s web browser and hit a page cannot load message.

“No Internet either.”

“Hey.”

Ed wasn’t looking at his phone any more; he was looking at the street.

“Yeah, lot of people out tonight,” Annie said, but on looking at the road she appreciated immediately how inadequate that description was. There were a lot of people out, coming up the hill from the row houses and reaching Main in groups of five and six at every intersection in both directions. They were all walking in that same disorganized way, but they were beginning to develop a sort of general directionality. One or two might drift left for a while or right for a time, but if the entire slow-developing mob were to be reviewed as a unit, it might be said that they were collectively converging upon the clinic.

“Does it seem like they’re all coming this way?”

“A little bit, yes.”

Then sirens began going off.

“Okay,” Ed said. “Now we can start calling it a zombie apocalypse.”