The Spaceship Next Door

²⁰ A SUPER-INTELLIGENT SHADE OF THE COLOR BLUE

Ed’s head hurt.

The wound above his eye was still swollen, though not as bad as it had been about an hour earlier, before Annie applied ice, and he had three other cuts on his arms that required disinfectant and bandages, and they were all throbbing in time with his heart.

Over the course of the evening, he’d managed to: throw himself out of a car moving downhill backwards—that the door didn’t kill him was a miracle unto itself—onto a pile of rocks; club a woman over the head with a piece of rebar he found lying in a ditch behind the gas station; break the arm of a man who had been dead for at least twelve months; get nearly brained by a fence post when a zombie executed a surprisingly nimble maneuver and drove his face into it; and hit a celebrity with a bat.

Annie, thankfully, was mostly untouched and either unaware of how many times they’d almost gotten through Ed to get to her, or deliberately ignorant of it. If they survived this—his opinion on this possibility had only improved slightly in the past hour—she would be reliving a few things in therapy that she was currently pretending never happened.

He expected he would be doing the same.

“Ed, don’t be weird,” Annie said with a laugh at his somewhat unusual greeting. “Hi, I’m glad you’re all up, it’s been a crazy night.”

She didn’t understand yet.

Violet stepped off the porch. Her parents didn’t move, they just smiled a little.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Violet said.

“Are we safe here?” Ed asked.

“Yes.”

Violet looked at Ed for a solid three or four seconds, in a creepy-mature sort of way even Annie could sense: she inhaled sharply, and he felt her body tense up through the hand he had on her shoulder. Violet knew exactly what Ed figured out, and didn’t see any point in denying it.

“They can’t find me here,” Violet said. “They won’t come to the house. It’s safe.”

“But it isn’t you they’re looking for.”

Violet looked at Annie, and back at Ed again. “No.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You should all come inside. We have a lot to discuss.”

“Ed,” Annie muttered, as Violet and her family turned around and headed back into the house, “what the hell is going on?”

“I’m pretty sure your friend is an alien and her parents are zombies,” he said. “Sorry to break it to you like this.”

“Right. Well, I’m pretty sure now the day can’t get any weirder.”

THE FIRST INDICATION Ed had that something was amiss with Violet and her family probably should have been when he met Susan for the first time, but it wasn’t. He was able to look back on that conversation and see the signs, but she didn’t sound off any alarms in his head during the conversation itself. Instead, it came from the most mundane of tasks: property research.

After he dropped off Annie, he went back to the base to continue his research, when it occurred to him he should probably record the name and address of the people she was staying with in the documents he’d been given by the court. He was her legal guardian, after all; he didn’t want anyone asking where is she and have to cough up such an incomplete answer as she’s staying with her friend Violet up the road. He didn’t know their address, and Jones was a pretty common surname.

He thought about calling Annie and asking—he’d also neglected to ask Susan for her phone number—but decided not to bother her with something he could just look up.

That was when it started to get strange. An Internet search gave no indication that there was an address associated with the dirt road leading to the house, and the road itself wasn’t even identified on the maps. When he pulled up a satellite image of the area, the house wasn’t visible from above.

On Monday, after meting with Pete he went to city hall and pulled up property records to match the approximate GPS location of Violet’s home with historical ownership of the land in that area, and hit two problems. First, every electronic search for the coordinates he was inputting—a guess in the first place—ended up with a point on the map that was either too far north or too far west. Second, nobody claimed property ownership of those points either, for the past seventy years.

Records older than seventy years were archived in the library, so he went there next. The property archives of Sorrow Falls were perhaps more thorough and extensive than any he’d ever seen, but there was no private ownership of the land, and no maps which even recognized the space as existing, even though it clearly had to exist.

All it meant was the town owned it, and that was fine, except when he approached it from that angle, he also came up empty. There were no forestry records, hunting licenses, reports of fires, gypsy moth infestation summaries, soil sample surveys, leaf-peeping expeditions, bobcat spottings, wildlife conservation projects, or any other kind of indication, official or unofficial, that this part of town existed.

It was even possible to chart the missing territory mathematically. The total acreage of Sorrow Falls could be calculated as a whole, from border-to-border, or it could be calculated by adding up the total of the privately owned property with the total of the town-owned and state-owned property. The two sets of numbers should have been roughly equal. Instead, nearly twenty acres were missing from the second set.

It was deeply weird. He was still trying to put it together when he stopped by the diner for a late lunch. Beth waited on him, so he took the opportunity to ask her—in the most casual way he could—what she thought of Annie’s friend Violet.

Beth never heard of Violet. Ed thought that was a little surprising given how often Annie described them as best of friends, and how Beth was like a big sister. It made him want to ask more of Annie’s peers about Violet, but he didn’t know any of Annie’s peers.

Only then did he start to rethink his conversation with Susan, which was strange yet at the same time strangely familiar.

Susan answered questions with questions, offered generic sympathy, and repeated things said to her, and this went on right up until her daughter left the room. Ed had experienced that kind of interaction before, on a computer, with a computer.

Violet’s mother was a living, breathing, Turing test. She wasn’t a person; she was someone pretending to be a person.

THERE WERE no versions of the conversation that needed to happen next that played out well in Ed’s mind if it also involved notifying anyone from the camper about the aliens in their midst. Oona was angry and paranoid, Laura mostly followed her lead, Dobbs was terrified and paranoid, and Sam… Sam might have been okay, but he was over-protective of Annie, and Annie was going to be having a difficult time.

He explained to the others that they were safe for the moment and they were welcome to relax and stay in the camper or on the porch. Susan (or, whatever she should have been called) offered to bring out coffee, and apologized for being unprepared for guests at one in the morning.

It was in their nature to assume Ed was wrong, and they were not safe at all, which was fine. It would keep them busy with their gadgets, looking for ways in which they were still in danger. It would keep them looking toward the woods at the zombies that were surely on their way instead of toward the house and the alien inside of it.

It freed up Ed and Annie for perhaps the most important conversation in human history. As was perhaps true for most important conversations, this one took place at the kitchen table.

“I don’t know exactly where to begin,” Violet said.

“You can begin by telling Ed he’s crazy,” Annie said, “and you’re not some kind of freaky alien zombie lord.”

Violet laughed.

“Zombie lord is a stretch. But I can’t do that, because he’s right. I’m sorry, I… I wanted to tell you so many times, especially after the ship landed.”

“Tell me what? Come on, this is crazy.”

Ed put his hand on Annie’s arm to try and calm her.

“Why don’t you start with explaining what you are,” Ed said. “As long as we’ve dispensed with the idea that you’re a sixteen-year old girl.”

“The body I’m wearing is biologically indistinguishable from that of a sixteen-year old. I think she was seven when she died, about eighty years back. A respiratory ailment of some kind. The lungs are still imperfect.”

“You’ve gotten older with me,” Annie said. “We’ve been friends for six years, don’t you think I would have noticed?”

“That’s true. But before you and I met, she—I—was a ten-year old girl for a very long time. Figuring out how to stop and restart the aging process was one of the first things I had to learn if I wanted to stay here.”

“Here like on this planet? I’m losing my mind. Ed, help me, I’m losing my mind.”

“Before this I was Susan for a long while,” Violet continued. “She started out much younger. So did Todd. I’m sorry, Annie.”

“How long have you been here?” Annie asked. “You’ve only been in Sorrow Falls for six years, but how long have you been on the planet?”

“That isn’t really correct. The first memory I allowed you to have of me was six years ago, but I’ve been here for much longer.”

“Allowed? Wait. Wait. How long? You were here before Sorrow, weren’t you? You were there when Oliver Hollis banged the drum.”

“…Yes. I was.”

“Ed, I saw that happen, in my mind, when we were looking at the drum. I was there. Violet, what did you do to me?”

“I’ll explain.”

“Is this why they’re after me?”

“Annie, calm down,” Ed said. “C’mon, we’re finally in the right place to get answers, so let’s get them, huh?”

“Right,” she nodded. “Right, sorry, it’s just my best friend the undying alien set me up as zombie bait and I’m a little freaked out about that, my bad.”

“It wasn’t intentional!” Violet said. She reached across the table to take Annie’s hand. Annie pulled back like there was a cobra at the end of the arm.

“I mean it,” Violet said. “Until this minute it never occurred to me that I was putting you at risk. The ship should have gone away by now, I don’t know why it didn’t. It couldn’t sense me. I don’t know why this is happening at all.”

“Let’s go back to the first question,” Ed said. “Tell us what you are.”

“All right.”

Violet leaned back in her chair and spoke only to Ed. Looking at Annie upset her, which Ed thought was interesting.

“I don’t think there’s an easy way to explain it, though, not to… not to a human.”

“Do you have a body of your own?”

“Not in any sense you would recognize. I would say we’re energy-based, but that’s also reductive. More like… an idea. A self-aware idea.”

“We. There are more?”

“Yes.”

“Are you the only one of your kind here?”

“Not any more, no. But for a long time, yes.”

“The meteor in the painting,” Annie said. “The one distracting Josiah. That was when you came here.”

“That’s not historically accurate. I put that there as a gag, although I was the only one who ever appreciated it properly.”

“You did the painting?”

“Yes, as Susan. I was going through an artistic phase. It didn’t last. I never met Josiah, so I made up the details of that day on the river. But you’re right, I did meet Oliver. I also bore him children. That was in a different body, of course.”

“You’re saying the Hollis family is a half-alien race,” Annie said levelly, as if with everything else she’d already heard, this one particular detail was straight-up ridiculous.

“Maybe in temperament. Biologically, no. I have no genetic material to pass along. But the entire drum ceremony has been depicted incorrectly. The land the Sorrowers found wasn’t considered cursed. It was holy. The natives kept away out of respect, and yes, fear. When they came to the tree stump and used the drum, it was to call the other tribes together, but it was also to summon my attention. I resolved many of their disputes by fiat. By the time Oliver came upon the drum, I’d already grown weary of the arrangement, and was interested in a more immersive experience with humankind. But to answer the rest of the question, the ship that fell to earth in this region many centuries ago came down before Josiah Sorrow was even born. And I wasn’t aboard that ship.”

“Who was?” Ed asked.

“Nobody. It was an unmanned pod. It’s beneath the house, if you’d like to examine it. I suspect we don’t have a great deal of free time, though.”

“You’re going to have to explain that.”

“It’s really simple. As an intelligence without a physical form I can travel the universe at the speed of light—faster, if you’d like to discuss extra-dimensional travel, although I imagine we have no time for that either. But I need a place to go. If you think of me as a piece of information, I need to be transmitted and received, just like any other piece of information. Likewise, I can only interact with the physical world through physical things. If I want to see something, I need to find eyes, or reside in something with an optical interface.”

“So the ship beneath us is a giant antenna array and memory bank.”

“Essentially.”

“Is it the same as the one up the road?”

“No. Same technology, different model. I have the equivalent of a roadside motel. Shippie is more like a tank or a battleship.”

“Don’t call it Shippie,” Annie said.

“Why not?”

“That’s something Violet and I called it, and I don’t know who you are.”

“Annie, I’m still Violet.”

“Whatever, go on. Ed, go on, ask her something.”

“Where did the technology come from?” Ed asked.

“Who built it, since we are beings without hands?”

“That’s a good way to put it, yes.”

“A very, very long time ago, one of my kind infected an advanced species of interstellar travelers with a new idea. That idea was the basis of a technology used to build a large number of probes and send them all over the galaxy, looking for planets that could support life. So far as the species was concerned, the probes were a long-term exploration plan employing inventive new ideas and bending space-time in ways nobody had ever thought of before. In truth, it was to create landing spots for us, so we could visit places that didn’t have sufficient technology to suit our existential needs.”

“Infect?”

“It’s the best word choice out of a number of bad word choices. It would be just as fair to say that one of our sentient ideas took seed in the minds of technologically advanced beings in order to advance them further, so as to accommodate the goals of the sentient idea. They thought of the idea as theirs, when it was the other way around.”

“I’m afraid to ask,” Ed said, “but what happened to that species?”

“They destroyed themselves. Technology was introduced to them at a time when they were unprepared for it. An equivalent would be handing a nuclear weapon to a caveman.”

“You destroyed a whole species to get those ships?” Annie asked.

“The death of a species was a consequence of the actions of one of my kind, yes. But entire species die all the time, often because of the poorly executed use of an idea. I find it hard to blame this entirely on the idea itself.” She turned back to Ed. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Why do you think they’re after Annie?”

“Honestly, we were really hoping you could answer that for us,” Annie said.

“She touched the ship,” he said.

“She… Annie, why didn’t you tell me?”

Annie laughed. “Vi, in the game of things we should have told each other, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna lose. I didn’t tell anybody.”

“The night it landed. The same night… oh, of course. I understand.”

“Cool, explain it to us.”

“The probes are designed to land on alien worlds and collect data, but the designers understood that some of those places may contain hostile lower life forms, so there are security countermeasures that have, what you would call an AI package.”

“Something that learns,” Ed said.

“Exactly. That package will analyze anything it considers a threat and look for ways to repel it with minimum environmental impact. The reason for this should be obvious: it can’t get a clean understanding of a place if its existence manifestly alters that place.”

“Well that didn’t work well, did it?” Annie said.

“Not in this instance, but in a world where the most advanced life form was a squirrel or a stegosaurus it would have been sufficient. You know this defensive program exists because you’ve seen it in use.”

“It convinced me to call my mother,” Ed said. “It was very persuasive.”

“Exactly. But a few hours after landing it would have only begun to calibrate to the environment. It would have defaulted to a generic blast of negative ideas. I’m surprised it didn’t destroy your mind completely, Annie.”

“Maybe it lowered the volume after wrecking Rick Horton.”

“He was there?”

“Yes. I was the only one to touch the ship, though.”

“That was the night your mother… that was the same night, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

“I think the reason you made it past the countermeasures was that the thoughts it gave you were ones you’d already had independently, that same evening. It was showing you the worst thing you could imagine, but you were already coping with that actually happening. If you’d been there a day later, you would never have made it that far.”

“Yay me.”

“What happened when you touched the ship?”

“It put a bunch of pictures in my head? I didn’t understand what I was… well, seeing isn’t the right word, but…”

“I understand. You reached the hull. The next logical conclusion would have been that you were a member of a higher life form, so it tried to communicate.”

“Then it shrieked at me.”

“Yes. I’m sorry, both of you, there’s no polite way to put this. Humans aren’t nearly advanced enough. It recognized this and concluded you’d breached the defense due to a programming error. Once again, I’m surprised you were able to walk away.”

“More like run, but okay. So we’re the squirrel and the stegosaurus in your eyes.”

“Not in my eyes, no. To the ship, yes.”

“Now it thinks she’s you,” Ed said. “Isn’t that right?”

“That isn’t exactly right. It’s confused.”

“Hold it, you need to back waaaay up, both of you,” Annie said. “Why is it looking for you, why does it think I’m you, and what is up with the zombies? Also, the ship has been here for three years. Why is this happening now?”

Violet sighed. “A lot of things went wrong here. I thought I planned for all of it, but…”

“Start with why it’s looking for you,” Ed suggested.

“I’m sort of a runaway. In the parlance of the times.”

“Oh my god, you’re hiding from your dad,” Annie said. “The abusive crazy one you told me about.”

“Yes. We don’t really have genders, and don’t require two parents. He’s the one who thought of me originally.”

Ed laughed. “That’s your reproductive cycle?”

“It is. If one of us has an idea of a new version of ourselves, we can think that new idea into being. There’s a complexity to it that I’m failing to account for, but that’s the essence of the process. He thought of me, but as I matured I came into my own, as a fully formed being or, if we’re sticking with this wording, I became my own idea. He responded poorly, so I ran. I used the probe outpost network to explore the universe until I found this place. I sent a pulse through the network to disable all the probes in this star cluster to cover my tracks. I knew that wouldn’t dissuade him forever, because unlike humans when we say forever we mean forever. He’s a stubborn idea as old as eternity with no reason to stop looking.

“I knew he’d send the warships, and that someday one would land here. I just had to make sure I was prepared when that day came. You were my only mistake, Annie.”

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“Have you ever wondered why none of your friends seem to remember me?”

“Well yeah, it’s because you’re you. Socially awkward you.”

“I couldn’t let anyone retain an idea of me. It’s literally a piece of who I am. So when I was out of their sight, I was out of their minds too. If a ship landed and looked for me in the minds of other people, it wouldn’t find it. All except for you. I’ve allowed you to carry me in your head for the past six years. We’re in this mess because, as it happens, the one person in Sorrow Falls who absolutely should not have interacted directly with the spaceship is the one person who did.”

“But… why?” Annie asked.

“Because I like you? I wanted a friend. It’s why I’ve been growing old with you. I’m only here in the first place because this is the sort of thing I’ve learned to value: real connection with life. It’s not something that’s easy to come across, trust me. I’m older than your sun. It’s rare.”

“Oh. Well that’s sweet, Vi.”

“I mean it. I didn’t intend to get you into trouble. I’ve connected with others in the past and it was fine. Oliver, for instance. You aren’t the only human who’s retained an idea of me.”

“Super, but the ship landed on my watch. And now the world’s coming to an end because I seemed like a cool kid to hang out with. That’s a weird responsibility.”

“The world’s not coming to an end,” Ed said.

“I’m not sure that’s up to you.”

“It sounds to me like Violet has a say in it,” he said. “She isn’t interested in seeing the world end either.”

Annie looked at her friend. “I don’t know, she’s let everything else happen, hasn’t she?”

“I swear I didn’t mean to,” Violet said.

“You mentioned AI,” Ed said. “In the ship. How advanced is it?”

“More advanced than anything mankind could develop.”

“I appreciate that, but… is it advanced enough to, say, blow up a munitions depot in Delaware?”

“From the moment it landed it started burrowing into every communications network on the planet. By now I doubt there’s anywhere outside of this kitchen that isn’t being recorded somewhere inside the ship. But to answer your question, no. It’s collecting information passively, for use as necessary. And it’s looking for evidence of me. But that’s all.”

“And you know this because you have the same access to the same networks, only you aren’t passive at all about it.”

Violet looked away.

“I had to do it,” she said, technically addressing the refrigerator. “If those bombs reached Sorrow Falls the ship would have simply detonated them as soon as it recognized the threat. That would have killed half the town, and it wouldn’t have been harmed in the slightest. I did the same with the machines you planned to use to remove the ship from town. I knew it wouldn’t have allowed that. Obviously, there were more consequences attached to the problem with the explosives.”

“Jesus Christ,” Annie said. “Violet, five people died.”

“I realize that. A thousand times that many would have died otherwise.”

“I appreciate that it must have been a difficult decision.” Ed said.

“I was trying to keep everything as much the same as possible so the probe would be recalled without incident. It’s why so little has changed here, Mr. Somerville.”

Annie stood. “You know what? I need a minute. You guys keep on going, I think I’ve heard enough for a while.”

Ed’s instinct was to tell her she should stay put, because zombies. But he believed Violet when she said they couldn’t find Annie as long as she stayed near the house, for the same reason no GPS signal could find the house and people had been mis-drawing maps of the area for two hundred years.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I just need some air. This is… sorry, I mean, it’s cool, she’s an alien terrorist and her whole family is reanimated dead people, and I just need a minute with all of that. Before the next crazy thing comes up.”

“Yeah, of course. Just don’t go far.”

“Nope.”

Annie left without even looking at Violet.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right, she’s… I feel terrible, she is literally the last person on this planet I meant to harm.”

He decided to take that in the spirit in which it was intended, but his first thought was she didn’t give a damn about him or anyone else, zombies or otherwise.

“I didn’t forget about you,” he realized. “That was intentional, I take it.”

“It was. You dropped Annie off; I had to make sure you remembered where and with whom. I can’t say I was surprised you figured this out. You came to Sorrow Falls looking for me at the outset, whether you realized it at first or not.”

“Why did it take three years?” he asked. “For the ship to kick all this in?”

“The ship should have taken off shortly after arriving and failing to detect my presence in or around where the first probe landed. It didn’t leave, I now know, because of Annie’s interaction. That initiated a secondary program. As I said, it’s been collecting information, and learning, and performing a risk assessment.”

“Funny, that’s why I’m here.”

“That was the easy part. It probably finished within a few weeks. It wasn’t that which took so long.”

“What did?”

Violet looked over her shoulder at Todd. Then she raised her left arm. Todd raised his left arm as well. She lowered hers, he lowered his. Her right arm went up, and so did his. It was like a puppet routine.

“The ship had to learn how to make zombies?”

“It’s only a matter of electrical systems and frequencies. It took me a couple of years to make a basic version that’s like the ones wandering around town now. It was a century before they were advanced enough to fool a person, and even with that I’ve been relying on some of the equipment in the capsule in the basement. These guys wouldn’t fool anyone outside of its signal reach. Finding people to use is also a challenge. For me, I mean. You have to find someone whose nervous system is still intact and with no missing body parts.”

“But who’s already dead, right? That appears to be a distinction lost on the spaceship.”

“Yes, I never tried this on a living person, but I have a lot more respect for humans than any of the programming in Shippie would. You’re all lower life forms, and it’s using you to perform a search.”

“Three years to learn how to make a zombie, then.”

“No, even then, it probably had that figured out in less than three years. After that it was merely on standby.”

“I’m going to hate myself for asking, but standby for what?”

“For his arrival.”

“Your father.”

“My creator. When I said I wasn’t the only one of my kind here any more, this is what I meant. The probe would have finished its review of the life forms on the planet and sent its report. I doubt that report stated anything so unsubtle as ‘your daughter is here’, but it would have included enough interesting things to warrant a visit. I suspect it was only after his arrival that the data from Annie’s mind was analyzed in enough detail to identify me within it.”

“All right. Now we’re caught up and I need to know how we can fix this. Do you have any idea how we can break this connection the ship has with the people without also killing them? The last time anyone tried to wake up a sleepwalking zombie, the man died of a brain aneurysm, so I’m looking for a better solution than that.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Somerville. I’m afraid even if I gave myself over to him, he’d see no reason to spare anyone. And I don’t mean anyone in Sorrow Falls, I mean anyone at all. Old ideas can be vengeful and unforgiving. With him… you have to appreciate that the longer an idea is isolated, the more inflexible it becomes.”

“Isolated how?”

“Ideas are meant to live inside minds. More than that, we’re meant to interact with those minds. It’s how we evolve, and grow, and adapt to whatever present we’re engaging. I was a very different kind of idea when I came here than I am now, because of that interaction. If he does find me, he will barely recognize me. I’m not so certain he’ll be happy with whom I’ve become. And inside that ship, he has the capability of destroying the world. He may do exactly that, just out of spite.”

“Well then, we need to come up with a plan to nullify that ship.”

ED AND VIOLET emerged from the kitchen about twenty minutes later, having formulated something—if not a plan, at least a way to get to one.

The others hadn’t drifted far from the camper.

“Hey, government,” Oona said from the roof. “I’m not saying you’re right or wrong about being safe here, but all our instruments are going nuts. Where the hell are we?”

“Nuts how?” Ed asked.

Dobbs popped up. He and Oona were evidently working together on her electronics array, which was an improvement over any other time in the evening, from what Ed had been told.

“Like we’re on a slab of magnetized iron, or a ley line,” Dobbs said.

“Ley lines aren’t real, you idiot,” Oona said.

“That’s under dispute.”

“No it’s not. You gonna read auras next? C’mon.”

“Any zombies, though?” Ed asked.

Sam stood up. He had binoculars in his hands. “No sign that I can see. I was going to do a recon.”

“Don’t bother, Sam,” Violet said. “There aren’t any out there.”

“I’d like to be sure…”

“Violet.”

“Violet, right. Have we met?”

“A couple of times. I’m a friend of Annie’s.”

“The compass just spins,” Dobbs said. He held one up to illustrate his point.

“I’m sorry,” Violet said. “That’s my fault. It’s the capsule.”

“What capsule? And who are you again?”

“I’m Violet, Dobbs. This is my house. We’ve met.”

“Sorry, don’t remember.”

“It’s okay.”

“What capsule are you talking about?”

“The one under the house. It’s protecting us right now. It’s why you, Oona, needed Ed to tell you where to turn off the road, and why the zombies can’t find us, and why all of your equipment thinks it’s half a mile west of where it actually is, and why the compass thinks true north is down.”

“Jesus,” Oona said. She pulled her pistol and aimed it at Violet. “She’s an alien, isn’t she, Edgar?”

“Hold it, hold it. Calm down.” Ed stepped in front of Violet, which was just a bad idea, but he didn’t have any good ones. “Look, we have a lot to do and not a lot of time. Dobbs, you found the frequency the zombies were communicating on, right?”

“Yeah, but… dude, is she really an alien?”

“Focus, Dobbs.”

“I did, but I can’t translate it.”

“I may be able to,” Violet said.

“Right now, everyone out there is looking for someone,” Ed said, “and the only way to make this end is to convince them they’re looking in the wrong place.”

“So, you want to send the zombies to where, Oakdale?” Dobbs asked.

“I mean wrong planet, not wrong town.”

“I think you should get out of the way,” Oona said.

“Oona, you’re not going to shoot a little girl. We need her help.”

The barrel quavered. “Aaahhh,” she said, disgusted either with Ed or herself. She holstered the gun.

“The tech we need to leverage is in the root cellar,” Violet said. “You’re all welcome to come down and have a look.”

Laura came from inside the camper.

“That doesn’t sound at all inviting,” she said. “But sure, I’ll go.”

“You’re serious, there’s an alien ship in the basement?” Dobbs said. “Can we touch it?”

“Yes, I’ll disable the defenses.”

“Hot damn, I’m in.”

“Laura, can you get Annie?” Ed said. “I think she should see this too.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s inside, right?”

“No? No, she was in the house with you.”

“She went out the back,” Ed said. “I just figured she came around here.”

“She must still be back there,” Violet said. “Hang on.”

“Sam, can you see her from up there?”

“No, but it’s dark. But where could she have gone? I mean, this is the only place she’s safe.”

Violet stiffened. “Oh no.”

“What is it?”

“I just sent Todd in back to check. Annie’s bike is gone.”