The Spaceship Next Door

¹⁹ WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS

Things got worse the closer they got to Main. The zombies—both kinds—were more common, creating a real jam on the road. This was not at all helped by the people who were awake and still in full possession of their faculties. Those folks were basically freaking out all over the place.

Aside from their catchphrase, the zombies were mostly silent, and once they concluded the person in front of them wasn’t the person or thing they were looking for, they were content to leave them alone. The problem was with the living/awake, because they were seeing friends and family stumble around and act collectively weird, and that was a little terrifying. The impulse was to do the same thing Dobbs did when Art Shoeman first stumbled down the road: stop, grab, confront.

This was perceived as a threat. As lumbering and seemingly mindless and aimless as the horde was, when there was a threat, they acted in concert as well as any army Sam had ever seen or heard of. They were a formidable opponent, or would be if they mastered tools and moved a little faster.

Every minute or two Sam heard someone scream, shout, or beg for help, and knew he was hearing a citizen discover the consequence of threatening a zombie.

He also knew he couldn’t do anything about it.

“This is terrible,” Sam said, as the latest piercing cry turned into a strangled gurgle.

“End of the world, soldier,” Laura said.

They were still at their post at the head of the camper roof, looking for targets, but it had been a while since a shot was required. They’d reached some sort of unspoken mutual understanding with the zombies: the camper wouldn’t run them over if they didn’t get in the way. It meant they were essentially traveling at the same speed as a tired jogger, but at least they were moving.

“Where’s the rest of your boys?” Laura asked. “I thought the military was here for just this situation.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. My last communication with the base… it sounded like they were under attack. I have to wonder if anyone even made it out.”

“Under attack from whom?”

“Well, themselves. The ones who were sleeping. If I were the spaceship controlling these guys, I’d give the soldier zombies a different agenda, wouldn’t you? At least the ones on the base.”

“Take out the biggest threat in the area.”

“Exactly. But, you know, I’m just guessing. All radio communication is down. The sirens and the landlines are the only things working.”

“Internet’s down,” Dobbs said. “I think the ship is cutting us off from the rest of the world too, not just each other.” He looked up. “Like a dome over the town.”

“That happened early, I saw it,” Laura said. “Are you having any luck with the signal?”

Dobbs had been typing furiously for a while, to the eternal annoyance of Oona, who kept shouting expletives through the floor regarding ‘nerd-boy’ ruining her data.

“No. I think there’s a signal embedded in the audio you picked up, but the equipment may not have captured up all of it.”

“It’s pretty precise equipment.”

“Sure, but this signal was designed to be picked up by a different kind of receiver, and if you had recorded all of it I’m not sure I’d want to listen.”

“What kind of receiver?” Sam asked.

“A human brain.”

“Oh.”

“I do have an idea, though. We know the ship is using some kind of subsonic radio frequency to deliver instructions. Maybe it’s enough to know the brains of these people are susceptible to that kind of information packet.”

“I don’t understand,” Sam said.

“I do,” Laura said. “You want to go up the scale, see if anything resonates?”

“Worth a shot.”

Laura turned to Sam. “He’s going to try using sound as a weapon.”

“Because their brains are… never mind,” Sam said. “If it makes sense to you guys, go for it. Maybe you can use that, to make it louder.”

He pointed to the microphone array above the electronics table.

“That’s for receiving,” Dobbs said. “This isn’t like thrusters in Star Trek, we can’t just reverse them and turn a microphone into an amplifier.”

“I know that. But those microphones are embedded in a parabolic shell. You can use the shell to amplify the sound from those external speakers on the computer.”

“…Oh. Yes, good idea. We can do that.”

THE SEISMIC EVENT recorded at 10:17 P.M. EST was captured by most of the sensors sharing the field with the Sorrow Falls spaceship, and also by the usual USGS systems some distance from Massachusetts.

Given the epicenter was quickly identified as being Sorrow Falls itself, it was of no particular surprise to anyone when the USGS reported that this was not a true earthquake. The cause was not a tectonic plate shift, but a source of tremendous energy on the surface. It was likened to the effect of a large object striking the Earth’s crust from space, only without applying brakes first.

When the sensors in the field captured data relating to the quake, that data was conveyed along the ground cable leading from the field up to the base, where it was dumped to an extremely well guarded cloud drive. There was a tremendous amount of data in that drive, but very little information. In essence, if one of the sensors measured something about the ship, that measurement could be taken a million times, creating a million data points, but if it was the same measurement—if the numbers never changed—no new information was being obtained. The best that could be said about most of this data was that it could be proven, microscopically, that the ship wasn’t different in any appreciable way than it had been three years earlier.

This wasn’t true of every sensor, but it was pretty close to true.

The cloud drive capturing the input data was built with certain alarms. If any one of those millions of data points happened to diverge significantly, a program established to monitor the input would blast a text to a discrete number of people around the world. (That discrete number, at 10:17 P.M. EST, was twelve. No other people on the planet had access to the cloud drive data.)

Twenty-two such text blasts were sent in a span of two seconds, which was enough to get all of those twelve scientists logged into the drive by 10:20 P.M. EST.

Exactly one minute later, all contact with Sorrow Falls was severed.

There were really only two pinch points in the communications channel: either the cable to the base was severed—which would have required an explosive, or an axe and a good deal of dedication—or the wireless tether between the army base and the drive was interrupted.

Dr. Louisa Sark, the first of the twelve, administrator of the cloud drive and one of only three members on the team who did not have a Nobel Prize, followed protocol. First, she reached out to the tech room at the Sorrow Falls base. The phone rang, but nobody picked up. Second—and this wasn’t strictly protocol—she called the cell phone of one of the base’s technicians with whom she was friendly. The call couldn’t be completed. This, she decided, was a strong indication that the connection between the base and the drive was the problem. It also convinced her something serious was happening in Sorrow Falls.

The third call was to the Pentagon.

Dr. Sark had misgivings about this part, but in addition to being an astrophysicist, she was an employee of the government, and one of her responsibilities was to report information regarding their extraterrestrial visitor to the military. Most of the time, the reports she filed were unspectacular, but she was perfectly aware of the consequences of a spectacular report, because she knew exactly what the Pentagon’s contingency plans looked like. She’d consulted on them.

She knew that by making the third phone call, there was a very good chance she was sentencing the entire town of Sorrow Falls to death.

At 11:03 P.M. EST, two fighter jets and a bomber were scrambled from Hanscom Air Force Base. At the same time, a contingent of army soldiers were dispatched from Fort Devens, and the police departments of Oakdale, Mount Hermon, Harbridge and Brattleboro, plus the Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire state police, were all put on alert. Everyone had the same orders: find out what the hell was happening in Sorrow Falls.

At 11:17 P.M. EST, a Massachusetts state trooper named Gellman tried to approach the town from the south, across the bridge connecting the bottom of Main with Oakdale. He failed to get his car more than halfway across the bridge before it stalled, and refused to restart.

Trooper Gellman encountered a Sorrow Falls resident named Rodney Delindo, who claimed to have been trying to get home across the same bridge for the past fifteen minutes, unsuccessfully. Mr. Delindo reported that there was a force preventing him from crossing on foot, and that same force appeared to be disabling autos.

Gellman could see cars attempting to cross from Sorrow Falls into Oakdale. Army men stood at their sentry point post and appeared to be barking orders at the cars, and then firing shots above their heads, but he could hear neither the orders nor the gunshots. Mr. Delindo reported that in the few minutes he’d been standing on the bridge he had seen persons wandering on the Main Street side in a manner he described as ‘zombie-like’.

At 11:22 P.M. EST, the report submitted orally by Gellman became the first confirmation that Sorrow Falls had been compromised in some unknown way. It was also the first report of zombies, but most considered that portion little more than poetic hyperbole.

Similar reports came in from other parts of the surrounding area.

The points at which the inbound roads became impassible were not perfectly in sync with the town property lines: some points were well outside the town line, and a few were over a hundred feet inside of it. At roughly 11:45 P.M. EST, an intrepid individual in the war room at the Pentagon—for this was where the next decision logically had to be made—mapped the points and connected them. The line he drew formed a circle.

At the center of that circle was the spaceship.

The president was awoken at 11:56 P.M. EST, briefed from 11:59 until 12:17, and then presented with the considered opinion of his Army Chief of Staff.

At 12:23 A.M. EST, for the first time in history, the President of the United States ordered the military bombing of a domestic target.

There was already a bomber in the sky above Sorrow Falls. At 12:27, the order came through, the crew of four said a quiet prayer for the population beneath them, and then they released two thermobaric bombs.

Thermobaric explosives were the obvious choice, for being by far the most destructive non-nuclear option available. According to everyone’s understanding of physics, one of these bombs would destroy the spaceship and everything else in a three-mile radius. Two such devices were frankly considered overkill.

As it turned out, the spaceship disagreed with the planetary consensus regarding the laws of physics as they pertained to explosive blasts and shock waves.

The bombs never reached the surface. It was the considered opinion of all who watched this happen that the devices did in fact explode, but the devastation that should have followed an airborne detonation failed to happen as well.

There was a bright flash, but that was all. What should have followed—even with an airborne detonation—was a concussive wave, and that wave should have taken out the bomber and both fighter jets, everyone in Sorrow Falls, and a whole lot of the people in the surrounding towns.

None of that happened. Instead, something above the town swallowed all the energy from the bombs.

It was, in its own way, the most terrifying show of force anyone had ever seen. It led to possibly a much more important question: if that was the ship’s defense, what did its offense look like?

THERE WERE ONLY about five or six legitimately famous people left in Sorrow Falls. For the most part, the people lucky enough to be involved in some verifiable way with the events surrounding the arrival of the spaceship had cashed out and moved to a wealthier zip code. Billy Pederson was one of the few who hadn’t.

From everything Ed knew about Billy, he considered staying put something to be boastful about, and mentioned it in all interviews. A cynic or a professional analyst (Ed was both) would say Billy wanted to remain in the public eye and knew enough about his own brand to appreciate that without a constant, direct association with the ship and the town, he was distinctively un-famous.

In a way, this approach worked, because people still put him on television now and then. He had a handsome face and an easy-going style in front of the camera that made him perfect for anything from a fifteen second spot to a two-minute piece. Any longer than that and his appeal ran aground, which was why his efforts to turn himself into—in order—an actor, a television commentator and a reality TV star all failed.

Still, most everybody knew who Billy Pederson was and could identify him easily. Ed was able to do this even when encountering Billy in the dark behind the Yarn Palace while hitting him in the head with a baseball bat.

Ed actually planned to speak to Billy while in Sorrow Falls. It was going to be for appearances, mainly, because Ed was thinking it would be easy to fool people into thinking he was a journalist, and a real journalist would of course speak to Billy Pederson. But their free times never quite lined up, and once it was clear nobody really believed Ed was writing a magazine article, he stopped trying so hard to make the appointment. None of that factored into the moment when he clubbed Billy with a stick, but it did lead to Ed feeling a little bit worse for having done it, for reasons he couldn’t fully explain.

This was perhaps forty-five minutes after Ed and Annie fled the scene at Charlie’s Pocket. They’d run down the line behind the Main Street businesses for a block, until the area behind the shops widened into the row house neighborhoods. This, at first, seemed like a good thing, because the bigger the territory, the more places there were to hide. A lot of people lived in those blocks, though, so there were a whole lot of zombies wandering around. It was quickly apparent that they could make up for their slowness afoot with high volumes and coordinated movement.

Ed and Annie barely made it back up the hill to the shops again. On three occasions one of the townspeople got close enough to grab and hold down Annie, so Ed had to learn very quickly what was involved in getting them to let go. It seemed to be a combination of her screaming and him whacking them in the head with whatever was available. A shriek at the right pitch appeared to confuse them somehow—something Beth commented on earlier in the day—and the blow to the cranium stunned the zombies enough for Annie to wriggle loose.

By the time Billy grabbed a hold of her behind the Yarn Palace, they’d gotten pretty good at it, and Ed stopped thinking of the people whose skulls he was damaging as people at all. Then he recognized whom he’d just clubbed and felt terrible about it.

It was another fifteen minutes of hiding and sprinting and hiding before they made it to the back of the diner.

Annie had a key.

“Not that I know who to call, but the landlines are down too, in case you were wondering,” Annie said, emerging from the kitchen. She had a first aid kit and a look of concern. The latter probably had to do with the lump above Ed’s left eye.

He was sitting at one of the counter stools, which was probably a mistake. The chair had no back to it, and without the constant fear of death his adrenaline was dropping.

This is when people faint.

“Okay, let me have a look at that,” Annie said. She opened the kit on the counter. Ed took off his glasses and let her have a look.

“Gonna leave a mark?” he asked.

“Probably. It’s just a lump though, no cut. Don’t know what I was thinking with this kit, you need some ice.”

She disappeared in back again.

“You could have called the president,” Ed said. He reached into the first aid kit and pulled out a couple of bandages, which he decided he probably needed too. His body was starting to notify him of a variety of trouble areas on his person that may in fact be bleeding. Scratches, mostly. He was glad zombie-ism wasn’t contagious in Sorrow Falls like it was in the movies.

Annie re-emerged with a dishtowel wrapped around ice cubes.

“I don’t know his number.”

He took the ice, removed his glasses and pressed the towel to the lump. He was a little alarmed by how large the bump felt.

“I do.”

“Ooh. So what would we even say? ‘Mr. President, Sorrow Falls is overrun by zombies?’ He’d think we were pranking him.”

“Prank calls don’t make it to the oval office. But I think I’d tell him not to bomb us.”

“Not to… why would they do that?”

“It’s one of the contingency plans.”

“That’s a really crummy plan.”

“That’s the nature of contingency plans. They tend to be awful, but they exist to stop something even more awful from happening.”

“What kind of bomb, Ed?”

Ed didn’t answer, which was an answer unto itself.

“Jesus Christ, how is that a better option?”

Ed laughed.

“You don’t really realize what you’ve been next to all this time. I don’t think anyone in this town does. You know, we tried to move it once? The plan was hatched after the first year. We became convinced that thing was just a large piece of abandoned tech. So we got the idea to just scoop up the entire field and roll it out of town. Heavy earth-moving equipment was requisitioned and everything.”

“I don’t believe you. I would have seen the diggers.”

“They never made it into town. Things kept happening en route. Trucks would stall, engines would blow, and steering columns would lock up. Nothing made it all the way. And that’s the problem. That ship is plugged into our communications in a way we can’t even understand, and it can affect mechanical equipment at a distance that extends far beyond the immediate area.”

“Wow.”

“Yes, wow. And it gets worse. The next plan after that was to install failsafe explosives around the ship. That way, if things went wonky someone would just push a button and blow up half of Sorrow Falls. Remember that munitions explosion last year?”

“Yeah, that was a terrorist thing.”

“That was the story, certainly.”

“But that was in Delaware or something.”

“Yes. It was. The devices that failed were the exact ones scheduled for installation in Sorrow Falls, down to the last serial number. The message wasn’t subtle.”

“Message?”

“It can hurt us anywhere, any time, and more importantly, it doesn’t want to move. Most people assume it landed in Sorrow Falls at random, but that’s not the case at all. It wants to be right here, in this town. And after three years, we still don’t know why. We do know how to destroy an entire town, though, if we have to. We’re pretty good at that.”

Annie stepped away from the counter, to the front window. The curtains were closed, or they’d have zombies trying to break in already. By his estimation, they had maybe ten minutes before the group collectively figured out exactly where he and Annie were, and then it would be over, because as much as it was to their benefit short-term to find a place to hole up and rest, in the long-term, they were cornered.

Annie peeked around one of the curtains.

“We know it wants me,” she said.

“We don’t know that.”

“All right, it thinks it wants me. What’s the difference?”

“We don’t know what it wants you for. Maybe it’s just mad you screwed up the paint job on the hull.”

“Funny.”

“I’m serious, what’s happening out there doesn’t even make sense. If the goal was to get you to the ship, the zombies would be giving us free access to the southern half of Main, but they aren’t.”

“You mean they would be herding us there.”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Well what we’re doing isn’t working, is it?”

“We’re on the wrong side of the town is all. We just need to get to get across Main somehow.”

“They’re lined up out front. I don’t think we’d make it.”

She closed the curtain.

“What if I went alone?” she asked. “Like, what if they aren’t herding us to the ship because you’re with me and I’m supposed to go by myself.”

“And what if they want to find you so they can tear you apart? I can’t let you do that.”

“Like you could stop me?”

“Annie…”

“Well what other choices to we have? Surrender’s the only thing we haven’t tried, and maybe if I do it you’ll make it out alive.”

None of us are making it out alive tonight, he thought.

“I’m not about to let a sixteen-year old sacrifice herself for me.”

“Not just for you. The whole town.”

“Well that’s very noble of you, but we need a better option.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, but… Annie, they don’t want you to bring you back to their planet and make you a princess. This isn’t a movie. This is a malevolent force fixated on you, and we have to assume the worst because we’ve been given no indication to think otherwise.”

“And yet no better options are forthcoming. Like you said about contingency plans, if all we have left are bad options, isn’t this the least bad option?”

“I’m not ready to—”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Shh. Do you hear that?”

“Do I hear what?”

Annie opened the curtain and looked down the southern end of Main.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. Then she was out the front door before Ed could even ask what was happening.

He stumbled to his feet, a whole lot more dizzy than he probably should have been prior to facing off a zombie horde. He grabbed the baseball bat that had only recently brained a local celebrity and staggered to the front, wishing he had time to grab a butcher’s knife or something. Not that he knew what to do with one in a combat situation.

He was at the door when he heard what sounded like a woman screaming. It wasn’t Annie. It sounded a little like Beth, but it wasn’t her either.

He stepped outside. Joanne’s Diner had one of those old-fashioned front porches, with wood benches for people to sit at and watch the town drive by. It was a quaint touch that almost demanded the road in front of it be composed of dirt and only used by horse-drawn carriages.

Annie was standing at the edge of the steps leading to the sidewalk that ran along Main. A modest horde of zombies was amassed along the curb in neat double-rows, ready for her to make a move.

She was ignoring them, because up the road a camper was creeping toward them. The screaming sound was coming from the camper.

“Who is that?” Ed asked.

“Not sure, but look.”

She was pointing to the townspeople closest to the camper. They were stumbling about like drunken zombies, no longer fully in control of their limbs.

“That’s brilliant,” Ed said. “They found a frequency that disrupts the zombies somehow. This could give us an opening.”

“An opening? How about a ride?”

She took her first step off the porch. The zombies in line ahead of them took a counteraction, meaning to surround her. But then their synchrony came apart like a loose string pulled out of a sweater, as the trailer reached the front of the diner.

Ed was about to say all sorts of things about how they didn’t even know who was driving or whether they were friendly, when Annie spotted someone she recognized on the roof.

“HEY CORPORAL!” she shouted. “CAN A GIRL GET A LIFT?”

IT WAS no longer possible to tell who was a zombie and who wasn’t.

At first, it was pretty easy. There were the zombies on the other side of the fence, who were clearly undead creatures who recently unburied themselves from the cemetery over the hill. They responded well to head shots, and stayed down without a fuss. Dill could have dealt with their kind all night.

The soldier-zombies were an entirely different matter, but even then—at first—it wasn’t too hard to draw the line. The ‘dead’ was made up of soldiers who had recently been sleeping in the barracks, just like Vogel was. And also like Vogel, they carried themselves with a singular determination to kill.

Dill ended up reflecting on this particular point during a quiet moment. Hank only went murder-happy after being interrupted in his task—whatever the hell that was—while on this night everyone hopped out of bed and went bonkers immediately. No weird are you? questions from these guys.

The implication was obvious. The ship’s coming after us, he thought.

The best way to tell the men under the control of the ship apart from the ones who weren’t was to see who had a gun and who didn’t, because it turned out weapons training wasn’t a part of the zombie combat manual. This should have made it a whole lot easier to resolve the attack as quickly as Dill and Wen had at the fence. But no matter how well you train a person, for the most part they’re not going to be ready to shoot down half of everyone they know, whether those people are technically already dead or not.

This was another thing Dill spent a lot of time wondering during the free moments when it made more sense to hide and be quiet and hold his breath. Were they dead or not? If there was a way to make the ship stop doing whatever it was doing to them—and there wasn’t even a second when anybody reviewing this situation considered it the fault of anything other than the spaceship—would the men just…wake up and be okay?

It was both a compelling and a terrible question, because every armed soldier, at one point or another, shot a zombie in self-defense. It was nice to think the blame for the death rested squarely with the aliens (or whatever was in the ship) but it was still the bullet that did the damage.

Soldiers weren’t supposed to think like that. But when the enemy was the same guy you just played poker with the day before, or ate with that evening, or shot hoops with last week… there wasn’t any kind of training to prep you for that. A guy would have to be psycho to be ready to dive into that kind of situation feet-first, and the army was supposed to keep an eye out for that kind of crazy.

This was how things got out of hand so fast. The guys with the guns hesitated in using them too often, and ended up overrun. That was only the second-worst thing about it. The worst was, unless they were torn apart completely, they ended up as the more-traditionally-deceased kind of zombie, just adding to the army of the enemy.

By the time Dill found a corner near the motor pool in which to hide, it was literally impossible to tell who was who. Everyone had on fatigues, and the guy you were standing next to a minute earlier might be the dead version of that same guy, and you wouldn’t know until he came at you.

He could still hear the occasional gunshot, shouted command, and cry for help. There were small pockets of living soldiers out there in the night—the base’s lights had been out for an hour—but Dill was about as likely to hook up with one of those pockets, as he was to learn how to fly.

It made a lot more sense to grab one of the armored Humvees and drive out.

He’d been watching mini-hordes of zombies stumble through the motor yard for twenty minutes. They didn’t seem to distinguish the vehicle from the buildings, or the buildings for trees. Their ability to identify a moving person as a threat was about the best they could do, and the upshot was that none of them appeared to care that there was a car just sitting there and waiting for someone to take it.

Swallowing every bit of courage he had left, Dill slipped his rifle under the jacket beneath his left arm, and stood.

Running to the Humvee would have been a mistake. It was only twenty yards, but the zombies reacted to running. Instead, he walked, slowly, his arm dangling to conceal the gun, his breathing as slow as he could make it without blacking out.

There were at least a dozen of them in the open space. He assumed they were communicating with each other silently somehow—their attacks were coordinated yet they never spoke—so if one got close he would probably recognize Dill as not being One Of Them. He tried to meander in such a way as to prevent that from happening.

It was just about the most terrifying thing he’d done on a night full of pretty terrifying things. Probably the worst part was when he realized he was looking at Corporal Wen from twenty feet away. Wen was clearly deceased because living people didn’t tend to walk like that with a broken collarbone. Just as clearly, the dead didn’t retain any memories the living held, because Wen looked right past him.

When he got to the door of the Humvee he stood motionless for about fifteen seconds before slowly… slowly… trying the door latch. It was unlocked. This was, in truth, only a minor bit of good fortune because the window was down. More important was the question of where the ignition key was.

Normally, keys were left in the vehicles parked in the pool, which was just good practice on a base where any one of them might need to commission a vehicle. But just because that was the practice didn’t mean that in this instance the key was actually there. On a day when the world wasn’t ending, this would’ve meant only a temporary inconvenience, because there were more Humvees at the other end of the yard to choose from. But that was pretty far away in the zombie base world, and once he opened the door he’d be letting everyone around know he wasn’t one of them, so sprinting the yard wasn’t going to end well.

After steeling himself for what was to come, he opened the door, threw his rifle in the passenger seat, and climbed in. The door he pulled closed as slowly as possible, just short of slamming it shut and engaging the lock. First, he had to check for the key…

…it wasn’t there.

“Dammit,” he muttered.

Directly in front of him, about thirty feet, one of the zombies adopted a pose Dill was familiar with. It meant, something’s not right over there.

He was about to grab the rifle and reopen the door for his final death-sprint, when he felt something cold touch his neck.

“Are you one of them?”

It was a voice he didn’t recognize, and it was too high for an adult. He thought maybe it belonged to a kid. The gun barrel against his neck didn’t much care who was holding the other end, though.

“I can talk, and I can drive, so no I ain’t.”

“No telling, maybe they learned how to do those things.”

“Well they didn’t. Or if they did, I’m not one of ‘em anyway. Do you have the keys? ‘Cuz they’re coming, and if you don’t you may as well pull the trigger and then use that on yourself because they’re gonna do worse.”

“I want you to take me to a friend in this, can you do that?”

“I can drive you to Nebraska if you wanna go, but I need the keys.”

“Not Nebraska, just up the road. I want to make sure she’s okay.”

“Sure, fine.”

The kid—it was definitely a kid—held the keys out next to Dill’s face. He snatched them out of the air, slammed the door closed, and started the engine.

This got everyone’s attention.

He raised the windows and flipped on the headlights.

“You better put that gun down and belt yourself in, son, this is gonna be real unpleasant.”

He snuck a peek in the mirror at his hijacker.

“You’re the kid from the farmhouse on the other side of the fence,” Dill said. “What are you even doing here?”

“I sneak on the base all the time,” he said.

“You picked about the worst time to try tonight, didn’t you?”

“Are you gonna drive?”

“Sure am.”

Dill found a gear and stomped on the gas pedal.

The gate leading to the street was straight ahead through a guarded checkpoint with a lowered yellow crossbar, and an unknown number of zombies. The guards were gone and the bar was made of wood, but the people jumping in the way were going to slow them down. Fortunately, a military Humvee was essentially designed to drive over people.

“Tell me again what you’re doing here?” Dill asked.

“I heard the gunshots,” the kid said. “I was worried she might be here.”

“Who’s that?”

“My friend Annie. I saw her here before.”

“Oh sure,” Dill said. He aimed straight for a drill sergeant named Keith and tried not to feel guilty about enjoying the experience of running him over. Then he heard the sound the man made as his body went under the wheels and decided there was nothing about this to enjoy at all.

“Do you know her?”

“My buddy Sam does,” Dill said. “I met her once. She’s a real sweetheart.”

The boy tensed up. “I want to make sure she’s all right is all.”

“Don’t worry, she wasn’t at the base. I’d’a known. She’s probably fine. I bet your parents are worried though, huh?”

“My parents are zombies. I think the whole town is.”

“Right. Well my friend Sam was on duty at the ship. That’s where I was headed.”

And maybe to figure out how to stop the zombies at the source, he thought.

“You promised,” the kid said.

“Yeah, we’ll check on your girlfriend first, just tell me where we’re going. Then we’ll go check on my friend. Okay?”

“Okay. But she isn’t my girlfriend.”

OONA STOPPED the camper long enough to let Annie on, but almost refused to let Ed aboard.

“Uh-uh, nope, that son of a bitch knew this was gonna happen, he can join the zombies.”

“Oona, be serious,” Annie said.

“I’m serious, kiddo.”

“Why would I keep something like this to myself?” he asked.

“Don’t know. You’re the one working for the government; this is probably all one big-ass experiment. I should shoot you is what I should do.”

“Oona, technically I work for the government. Let him on,” Annie said. They were both at the edge of the door, so the handgun the angry lesbian in the driver’s seat was pointing at Ed was also pointed at Annie.

There was stomping on the roof.

“Oona, you let him board!” Laura said through the ceiling.

Oona sighed, looked up, and put the gun away.

“You’re lucky she’s nicer than me. Get in.”

Sam slid down the ladder from above as Oona put the camper in gear and the screaming vehicle got underway.

“Annie!” he said. “You’re okay!”

They hugged. She felt her face go flush and hoped the fact that she was blushing wasn’t too terribly obvious.

“Looks like you hitched with the right crew,” she said as he released her. “How’d this happen?”

“Really long story. How did you end up here?”

“That’s also a long story.”

“Where are you heading?” Ed asked.

“We already tried the south bridge, sir,” Sam said.

Annie almost giggled when she heard him refer to Edgar Somerville as sir.

Laura climbed down the ladder behind Sam.

“So now what?” Ed asked.

“Well, the bridge was all choked up with cars, so we figured we’d head along here and maybe see what the zombies were looking for at the same time.”

“Looking for?”

“They were all headed this way. Can’t figure it out though. They’re just milling about along here.”

“Oh my goodness, look at you,” Laura said, speaking to Ed. “Hey, sit down, let’s take a look at that eye.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“You’re not fine. What happened to you guys?”

“He was protecting me,” Annie said. “I’m who they’re looking for.”

Sam laughed. “They’re going after anyone the think’s a threat, we’ve been seeing it all night.” To Ed, he said, “I think if you hadn’t fought back, they may have just left you alone and gone on looking.”

“No, Sam, I mean it. I’m who they’re looking for. That’s why they’re wandering around right now. It’s because I’m nearby.”

Sam looked at Ed, who was wincing because Laura was applying an antibiotic to an open cut on his arm. Ed gave him a little half-nod.

“Seriously?” Sam asked. “But why?”

There was a stomp on the ceiling.

“Crap, what was that?” Annie asked. “Is someone else here, or…”

“They can’t get on the roof, that’s just Dobbs,” Laura said.

“Dobbs made it? That’s great, what about…” but Annie didn’t finish the sentence. Based on Laura’s expression, she didn’t need to.

“Pretty sure we’re the only ones who got out,” Oona said. “Everyone else is either one of them or… well, or one of them the other way. Coming up on the bridge, we could use some shooters.”

“The bridge is closed,” Ed said from the couch.

“We’ll see about that,” Oona said.

“It was Dobbs that figured out they were sensitive to the sound,” Laura said.

“Way to go, Dobbs!” Annie shouted through the ladder opening in the roof.

“He’s got the headphones on, he can’t hear,” Sam said. “Tell me why they’re after you, specifically.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Hey, how long has he been doing that?” Ed asked. “With the screaming noise.”

“I dunno,” Laura said. “A little while.”

“He should stop.”

“What’s wrong, Ed?” Annie asked.

“This is an intelligent force. If you give them too much exposure for too long, they’ll figure out a patch, and then it won’t work any more. Which is a problem when you’re surrounded by zombies.”

“You have a point, government,” Oona said over her shoulder. “But we’re getting out of town. Soon as we’re in Mount Hermon, we’ll do just that.”

“I told you, the bridge is closed.”

“Unless the bridge is gone, I’m driving over it. I don’t care who’s in my way.”

“She won’t be able to,” Ed said to Laura. “The ship won’t let anyone leave. You have to explain that to her.”

Just then, they all heard something that sounded like thunder. Given it was audible over the high-pitched screech coming out of the equipment on the roof, they were suitably impressed. Also, it probably wasn’t thunder.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Oona said.

“Hey, hey did anyone else see that?” Dobbs shouted from the roof.

“What was it?” Annie asked.

“Well, I don’t know,” Oona said.

Dobbs’ head appeared in the roof opening. “I think they bombed us,” he said.

“They who?” Annie asked, although she knew the answer.

“The military. Just guessing.”

“The whole sky lit up,” Oona said. “But, in a, like a dome, like we were on the inside of a snow globe. Hey, Mr. government. There’s something keeping us in, huh?”

“It comes down to about halfway across the bridge. Annie and I saw it happen earlier. You’ll just bounce off if you can even get to it.”

“It’s true,” she confirmed.

“Well that’s fantastic,” Oona said. “It’s Edgar, isn’t it?”

“Ed. Yes.”

“Edgar, if everything you two are saying is true… we can’t get out of Sorrow Falls, nobody can get in, the sonic attack is gonna stop working any second, and we’re riding around with what all the zombies are looking for, in a camper carrying less than a quarter tank of gas. Is that right?”

“Wait, what do the zombies want?” Dobbs asked.

“Later,” Sam said.

“Yes,” Ed said. “All of that’s correct.”

“Then we’re gonna have to shoot everyone in town to survive this.”

“Not necessarily. Do you have a map?”

A FEW MINUTES LATER, Ed was in the passenger seat of the camper looking at a map of Sorrow Falls, and Annie was sitting in the back. She was feeling a little light-headed, a lot exhausted, and a tiny bit hungry. She also had to fight the urge to start crying, which really pissed her off. As much as she was aware that this was her body’s normal post-stress reaction, and as much as nobody was going to hold it against the sixteen-year old zombie catnip for freaking out a little, she didn’t want to be that kind of sixteen-year old. She wanted to be the kind that people thought was older than sixteen, who everyone knew, who was never out of her element. Annie spent a pretty long time cultivating the girl who was always going to be okay, and she didn’t want a little thing like the world ending to screw with that image.

She also really, really wanted to call her mom. It probably wasn’t a huge secret that something had gone awry in Sorrow Falls. Someone had to tell Carol her daughter was okay. The worry would just make her condition worse.

At the same time, she was glad her mother was in Boston. The thought of her cancer-riddled mom wandering around town in her slippers and bathrobe, trailing multicolored fabric wraps in her wake was both comic and horrifying.

But Annie couldn’t call anyone because of the ship, and since the ship closed off the town specifically to look for Annie, if the stress ended up killing Carol, that would end up being Annie’s fault too.

The whole thing made her want to curl up in the loveseat in the back of the camper and sleep until it all went away.

She couldn’t do that, though, because Sam wouldn’t let her.

“What do you mean, you touched the ship?” he asked. Laura was there too, expressing more or less the same sentiment, but without the tone of betrayal. “When did you do this?”

“Sam…”

“Did you sneak past the guards or something? I know the back of the fence was vulnerable.”

“It was three years ago, the night it landed.”

He looked surprised, but a different kind now. “How could you not tell me?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even tell Ed until earlier tonight, and only after I found out half his gig was to figure out who touched Shippie.”

“Shippie?” Laura asked.

“The… yeah, the spaceship, it’s what I call it sometimes. Look, I just want a nap.”

“You can’t sleep. In fact, here.” He handed her a small tablet. “It’s a caffeine pill. We talked about it, and decided we can’t risk sleeping until this is all over.”

“Yeah that makes sense.”

She took the pill and gulped it down.

“Never had one of these before.”

“They’re fine,” Sam said. “I’ve had three. So why would they be after you for touching the ship?

“I don’t know. I have no idea what’s going on, which is the problem. The ship was cold and smooth, and that’s all, have a nice day.”

There was a thump, and a bump, and the sound of tree branches brushing up against the side of the camper. They were going off-road.

Dobbs came down from the roof. They’d been running silent since leaving Main Street, which was working out okay so far as Annie could tell from the back. According to Sam everyone in the hills had been heading down toward Main and the river all evening. It would take them a while to relocate Annie and follow.

“Looks like we’re going to hide in the forest, or something,” Dobbs said, heading back. “I’ve never seen this part of town.”

“Does he think that’ll make a difference?” Sam asked Annie.

“I don’t know, I guess. He has a plan. I’m too tired to care.”

She did peek out the window, though. She saw nothing but dense woods, and began to wonder for herself what Ed was up to.

Then she thought maybe she recognized where they were.

“Ed, where are we?” she called.

“Come on up here.”

She got up with Sam’s help, partly because the loveseat was particularly cushiony, partly because he was a gentleman.

Getting from end-to-end in a camper bouncing madly due to an unpaved road was a real treat, especially since this particular cabin was a museum of practical post-apocalyptic junk.

She got to the front in time to see Violet’s house just as it was coming into view.

“You sure this is the place, champ?” Oona asked. “It ain’t even on that map.”

“Positive,” Ed said.

Annie was ashamed to realize she’d hardly even thought about her best friend through the entire ordeal. Somehow she imagined Violet and her family would be okay, because it seemed like nothing that happened in the rest of the world had an impact on them.

Ed was perhaps thinking the same way, but for entirely different reasons.

“They’re not going to be up,” Annie said. “Not at this time of night.”

But when the headlights hit the porch, there they were: Violet, Susan and Todd, waiting there like this was the most normal thing in the world.

“Oh well, that’s not creepy at all,” Oona said.

She pulled over behind the family car, and Ed stepped out. Annie climbed over the passenger seat and out the same door.

“Evening,” Ed greeted.

“Hi,” Violet said neutrally.

“So I’m not sure how to put this, but… take me to your leader?”