The Spaceship Next Door

²¹ SO THE ABYSS GAZES ALSO

Annie was flying.

That was the thing nobody seemed to understand when asking about the bike. Under certain conditions, it was the closest she would ever get to actually taking flight. This was true even though she could feel every bump in the road, and even when she had to keep pedaling to maintain the takeoff speed.

It was dark, and Violet’s road was made of packed dirt that was still damp from the rainfall, on top of which there were potholes from natural erosion, so riding down it at twenty miles an hour on a bike, without a helmet, was pretty reckless. Annie didn’t particularly care, though. She had a headlight to help identify the dips—she knew where a lot of them were already, as this was hardly her first trip along the road—and she was a nimble and experienced cyclist. And as long as she was on the bike and riding as fast as she could, all the zombies and aliens and everything else that had taken up residence in her head were gone.

She just didn’t know where she was going.

After exiting Violet’s kitchen, she wandered out the back of the house and saw her bike sitting there, and without really thinking she began checking the tires and the gears the way she would if she were preparing for a trip. Then she just decided that was what was happening: she was going on a trip. Where was still up to debate.

Any trip would require getting past the camper undetected, though, because surely nobody there would understand, so she committed to a long loop around the front of the house, through the woods she caught Todd wandering around in. By the time that loop was completed she was at the elbow in the dirt road and out of Sam’s rooftop view, and there was nothing between her and the rest of the world but open road. So she turned her light on and started pedaling.

It was glorious. The entire day just vanished into the humid late August nighttime air, and for about five minutes Annie was a sixteen-year old girl with regular old sixteen-year old girl problems that didn’t include extra-dimensional thought monsters.

Then she reached Liberty Road.

There were zombies all over Liberty, because of course there were. Violet’s alien mojo reached the end of the dirt road, so that was where the trail went cold. A whole bunch of sleepwalking townspeople were meandering aimlessly while whatever was controlling them tried to understand information that suggested Annie was assumed directly into heaven at around that spot.

The smart thing to do, as soon as she realized what she was heading into, was to turn around and escape back into Vi’s protective bubble. But for that moment, Annie liked less what was behind her than what was in front. Plus, the zombies were kind of well-spaced—much better than the shoulder-to-shoulder maneuvers she’s seen on Main Street—which made it seem like just another entertaining challenge for Annie and her cyclocross bike.

They’re just slow-moving pedestrians, she thought.

She hit Liberty at speed, and committed to a tight right turn that pointed her uphill and in the direction of her house. This made a lot of sense, because she knew the zombie population only got denser the further downhill (toward Main) she traveled, but that didn’t mean it was a logic-driven decision, or even a decision at all. She just started heading that way.

She wasn’t heading home, but that was also not an actively made decision, it was just what she knew she was doing.

THE BIKE WAS a gift for her fourteenth birthday, and was the only expensive thing she owned. At first it was just a thing she used now and then, but once it was clear her mother wasn’t going to be up to driving her down the hill all the time, it became indispensible.

Even in winter. It was only five miles to the school from Annie’s front door, but it was a ferocious five miles when there was snow on the ground, regardless of the vehicle. However, it turned out there were only a handful of occasions in which there was A: snow on the roads, and B: not-canceled classes. Generally speaking, the roads were cleaned up pretty fast, partly because the army insisted on the state prioritizing the roads in Sorrow Falls when it came time to plow.

Annie fell in love with the cyclocross bike as soon as she saw it. Her father had to take her all the way to Brattleboro to find a decent shop, and the place was full of light carbon three speed bikes designed specifically for short-travel commuting and priced to encourage people to get them. Annie wasn’t interested. Whether because she’d already been riding the streets on the out-of-a-box Schwinn she was now too big for and understood the kind of conditions she had to deal with, or she was instinctively drawn to the sturdy one-of-a-kind machine in the corner, she knew right away that this one was for her.

The bike was pale yellow, aluminum but with a carbon fork. Heavier than the full carbons, it felt like something solid and dependable. Not quite a dirt bike and not exactly a touring bike either, it was designed for a sport where competitors threw themselves down hills on their bike and ran up other hills with the bike on their back.

People tended to look twice when they saw her on it. The A-frame design was flattened and stretched, so riding on it meant always being in a forward position. This lowered the center of gravity, kept her out of the wind and made it easier to corner and maneuver in tight spots, but also made climbing hills a lot more difficult. It also probably looked a little odd.

AT FIRST, Annie tore past the zombies like they were standing still, because they almost were. It was a little harder than with regular pedestrians because normal people moved with intent in one direction and these guys were kind of drifting, but they were far enough apart for this to not be an impossible problem. It was just a new challenge. She enjoyed it perhaps more than was appropriate under the circumstances.

It only became clear how foolhardy she was being after about a mile of travel. That was when the zombies ahead of her started organizing, and focusing less on trying to grab her as she went by than on closing off her available routes of travel. It stopped being so much fun then, especially after she nearly ran over a seven-year old girl.

Annie knew the child, sort of. She didn’t know the girl’s name, but she’d spotted her in the library a couple of times. Seeing her out at two in the morning, in her pajamas, stumbling around with the others and trying to catch Annie—or whatever their intentions were—was like a punch in the stomach. It was enough to remind Annie that her two A.M. bike ride wasn’t putting just her at risk.

She decided to go over the shoulderless left side of the road. If the bike was meant to be thrown down hills, perhaps it was time to try it out on one.

Liberty, Patience, and Spaceship Road—and Annie’s own street, a small spit of connective tissue between Liberty and Patience called Calabash Way—encircled a large land area consisting of private roads and farmlands. The properties belonged to six different families. From her bedroom window, which was on the top floor of a house already at the top of a hill, she could see the checkerboard effect of their vegetable crops, smell the fertilizer, and hear the cows lowing on warm afternoons.

From a distance, the farmland looked flat. Annie didn’t realize exactly how incorrect this was until she hit the first field off the roadside. The downhill wasn’t all that bad. She nearly went over the handlebars thanks to a couple of ditches, but neither was deep enough to completely eat her front wheel, so she made it out. But once the area flattened into what should have been easy travel, it became much worse.

The soil was loose and muddy, and either terribly uneven or full of rows that stuck up like train tracks. Travel felt like one of those dreams where she was trying to run but couldn’t move her legs fast enough to get anywhere, unless she was getting thrown from the bike in which case it felt like one of those dreams where she was falling off a cliff.

She got thrown three times, thankfully to a soft landing each time. This was hardly guaranteed, as the fields had their share of sharp protrusions just waiting for someone to get impaled.

The good news was, the terrain slowed the zombies down too. She was going ten miles an hour or less depending on the size of the plants in her way, but the uneven surface was causing a lot of comic stumbling and falling behind her.

The bad news was, this detour was only a temporary solution. Since there were roads on all sides of the fields, and the zombies were all along those roads, she’d basically put herself in a position to be closed in on from all sides. Her hope was to punch through to the other side while there was still a gap to hit.

That was a solid plan right up until she hit Mac Tunney’s cornfield.

It wasn’t the field itself that was the problem. Actually, it was the smoothest ride she’d experienced up to that point. The rows were neat and wide and the ground between them was level and a lot more solid than she had a reason to expect. But the rows didn’t head in the direction she wanted to go, and it was impossible to ride against the grain in a cornfield in August. The stalks were too high.

She had to stop five or six times to push diagonally through the rows before continuing the ride. This was a little terrifying, because off the bike she couldn’t see over the stalks, and she knew there were people out there closing in on her. She could hear them.

Then she got the flat.

It wasn’t easy to poke a hole through one of her tires. There was a thick layer of Kevlar between the tread and the inner tube that could redirect everything short of a nail driven dead straight through the middle. For that to happen, she either had to run over a nail positioned on the ground just so, or someone had to go after her tire with a hammer and a nail.

For whatever reason, there was a stray nail in farmer Tunney’s field. Maybe it fell from one of the combines or out of a hardware kit, or maybe the universe hated her personally. Somehow, in a two-acre field of corn, her rear tire found that nail.

She felt it right away, and knew exactly what it was, and kept riding anyway. One of the things about hitting a nail was that you could keep going for a little while so long as you didn’t pull the nail out. It plugged the hole it made.

The seal was weak, though, so air escaped around it pretty quickly. She made it probably an extra quarter-mile on her dying tire, and then another forty feet on the flat before giving up. It just wasn’t possible to continue; the rear wheel couldn’t give her any traction at all, and her maneuverability was gone.

It was better at that point to continue on foot. Although better was a relative term. It was faster than the bike in its current state, but not much faster. And she was taller on the bike. She could see Calabash, and her bedroom window, on her right, and used that to help maintain the correct orientation, but there was no avoiding the zombies any longer. If they came up from the left or right, she wouldn’t know until they had her.

Maybe that’s okay, she thought. Maybe I should just let them catch me.

AFTER ONLY TEN minutes of running, Annie was too winded to continue. She felt like this was something she should have been embarrassed about, until she remembered how late it was and how much of the past twelve hours she’d spent fleeing. Perhaps simply running was easier on her head, because it kept her mind from dwelling on all horrors great and small, but it was hell on her legs and lungs. She had scratches all over those legs—she was in shorts—and her lungs didn’t seem to know how to get enough oxygen any more. Her heart was racing at an alarming pace; she could feel it thumping all the way up her shoulder and along her left arm.

So she stopped, and listened. And determined two things.

First, they were all around her. She could hear corn stalks rustling in every direction. There was hardly any wind so it couldn’t have been anything else.

Second, something big was coming. Something with an engine.

It wasn’t on the road; that was obvious from the bumping and crunching sounds. Somebody was driving something through the corn stalks. Since as far as she knew, zombies didn’t drive cars, she headed toward that noise.

She got close enough to see the headlights bouncing in her approximate direction (as opposed to tail lights heading away from her) when a hand grabbed her ankle.

The dirt came up fast, swatting her in the side of her face and knocking her a little loopy. It was a second before she understood that the ground was where it had always been, she’d just fallen onto it. Her head was next to a big rock that would have probably cracked her skull if she’d fallen a little to the right.

She picked the rock up in her fist and rolled onto her back.

An old woman had her ankle. She kicked loose, then threw the rock at the woman’s face before she had to hear another iteration of arrre yooooou. As the lady fell backwards, Annie climbed to her knees and then her feet, and then stopped, because a much larger person was now blocking her route.

She’d never seen him before, but he was enormous. He looked like the kind of zombie a rock to the face would only slightly inconvenience.

Then she heard the car again.

“I’M OVER HERE!” she shouted. “HELP ME!”

There was shuffling in the row behind her, and rusting to her left and right.

Nowhere to go.

The engine’s roar was the first indication that all was not lost. The headlights were the second. Then the army Humvee exploded onto the scene with the kind of cinematic drama one just didn’t see all that often around Sorrow Falls. The front fender connected with the huge zombie barring her path and sent him flying, and then skidded to a stop with the back door aligned with the cornrow. The door flew open. Annie half expected to hear an orchestral swell.

“Get in, girl,” the driver said. It was an army guy; she thought she knew him. “Hurry up!”

She ran. It was only twenty feet but she could hear them closing in on her so it was a terrifying twenty feet. She dove into the back seat and landed squarely on top of Doug Kozinsky.

“Dougie??”

“Hey Annie,” he said.

She pushed off him and reached back to close the door as the driver floored it.

“Pickles, right?” she said.

“Corporal Dill Louboutin at your service.”

“How’d you guys even find me?”

The Humvee fishtailed a little, trying to execute a turn to get back up onto the road, so Dill had to concentrate for a few seconds. Annie peeked behind them. The field was crawling with zombies. It was a wonder they hadn’t gotten her.

“You can thank your boyfriend there,” Dill said.

“I’m not… Sorry, I’ve been telling him…” Even in the dark, she knew Dougie was blushing.

“I broke out of the base with a gun to my head,” Dill said, “so this young man could ride off to your rescue instead of just getting the hell out of town like any sane person. We drove to your house, but nobody was home. Looked like you’re missing some floor in that place, too. Dunno if the zombies did that or what, but… well, then we spotted the bike light from the porch. It seemed clear there were a number of zombie folks interested in converging on a moving target in the middle of the field. Mr. Kozinsky imputed that this moving target was you, and we’re both a little surprised he was right.”

“I recognized your bike,” Dougie said.

“From up the hill?” Dill asked. “It wasn’t anything more than a light.”

“Yeah but I knew.”

“Well thank you, both of you,” she said. “They almost had me.”

The Humvee made it out of the corn. Rather than crest the road—it was steep from that angle—Dill kept to a route on the space between the lip of the street and the edge of the field.

“So what did they want you for?” Dill asked.

“I think they want to take me to the ship.”

“Oh. How come?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Okay. Well I’m gonna hook up with the road up here and do everything I can to get you two kids out of town, all right?”

“There is no out of town,” Annie said.

“What’s that mean?”

“Nobody can get in or out. We’re all trapped here.”

He laughed. It had a tinge of hysteria in it, like that was the piece of news that finally sent him over the edge.

“Well, all right, where do you want to go?”

“Can you take me to the spaceship?”

“I thought that’s what the zombies wanted to do.”

“It is.”

“But you’re going anyway.”

“Yes. I’d just rather do it under my own power. Less bruising that way.”

“Well, all right. I was on my way there after as it was. Plus these villager zombies ain’t trying to kill me like the army ones are. Should be fun.”

IT WASN’T FUN.

Dill seemed to enjoy it all right. He’d reached a sort of dissonance over what he was doing, which was running over people. He was good at it. In a video game he’d be leveling up. In the real world, he was having a psychotic episode.

There were sick thuds and crunches, and the Humvee kept lifting off the ground unevenly, and she knew what each one of those sounds meant. She kept her eyes closed and tried to resist telling him to slow down and go around, because that was the wrong advice.

“It’s going to be okay, Annie,” Dougie said. He’d been clutching her hand since she landed on top of him, thinking perhaps that this was comforting. She didn’t find it comforting, but he probably did. Plus, he rescued her. That was worth at least a little handholding.

“There’s a lot going on you don’t understand, Doug. But thanks. I appreciate you thinking of me.”

“Of course.”

“So Dill, why were you going to the ship?” she asked.

“Seemed like the place to go,” he said. “Spaceship makes zombies, go to the ship to stop the zombies, right? Plus, my boy’s there.”

“Sam?”

“You know it. Woo, look out!”

He swerved into a guy in a polo shirt and knocked him sideways off the street.

“Ten points.”

“Sam’s not there,” Annie said. “I left him a little while ago.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“There are a lot of long stories, Pickles, I don’t have time to tell you any of them.”

“Yeah okay, but don’t call me that. So he’s all right?”

“He was when I left him.”

“That’s one thing I don’t have to worry about, then, girl, thanks. I didn’t want to run down my buddy. Glad he’s not one of these dead-eyes.”

“The soldier zombies are bad,” Dougie said. “We had to go through a lot of them to get off the base.”

“What were you even doing on the base?”

“Mom and dad are out here somewhere, so… Once I figured out what was going on I found dad’s revolver and snuck on. I do it all the time; they don’t even check the fences below the field grass. I saw something was up with the soldiers and thought, you know. I know you were there before.”

Annie realized he’d risked his life looking for her, and added it to the list of things she was already feeling bad about. It wasn’t as consequential as possibly triggering a zombie apocalypse that was slowly killing the town, but it was right up there.

“Comin’ up,” Dill said.

Annie took a look through the windshield. The grounds around the ship remained lit up by spotlights, but there wasn’t a lot to see. The campers looked abandoned, and there were hardly any zombies.

“Do you have a key to the gate?” Annie asked.

“No, but I can just… uh-oh.”

“What?”

The answer was coming up the hill. Army soldiers zombie-walking in something like a coordinated fashion, at a slightly faster clip than the civilian ones had exhibited. They were headed for the gates as well.

“Behind us too,” Dougie said, looking out the back window.

“They’re converging on the ship,” Dill said.

“To keep us out?” Dougie said. “Cuz we’re gonna beat them there.”

“Keep us out or keep us in,” Annie said. “Look, I don’t want you two to get hurt. If you want to drop me off, I can get in there on my own.”

“How are you going to get in?” Dill asked. “There’s barbed wire over the top, you know that. Why do you even want to get in?”

“To put a stop to all this, same as you.”

“Well that’s heroic, but you’re just a little girl. Now sit back and belt yourself in, I’m gonna get us through those gates.”

She leaned back, and buckled in, and hoped the car didn’t end up damaged enough so it couldn’t drive back out again, because they were going to be cornered otherwise.

With a loud yahoo that made Dill sound entirely too cliché, he reached the edge of the dirt in front of the gates and stomped on the gas. The Humvee reared up like a horse about to execute a monstrous leap, then rocketed forward.

The fence was never all that imposing. From the time it went up, it was clear the functional intent was to formalize the line behind which someone in an army uniform would shoot. It was never meant to repel an assault from a motorized vehicle. Conversely, the low-to-the-ground military Humvee was built to do exactly what it did to the fence.

They blew right through the gates. It did a little damage to the Humvee, but it was the kind of damage that only seemed important in a world without zombies. By the time they ground to a halt, they were fifteen feet inside the circumference.

“Now what?” Dill asked. “Have to admit, I didn’t think this far ahead. Should we shoot it or something?”

“I’ve thought this far ahead. You and Doug should turn around and get out of here.”

“I already said…”

“Then stay here. But the whole army base is on its way so you won’t have a lot of time to escape.”

She hopped out of the car and started toward the ship. She could hear lovesick Dougie shouting from the back seat, and Dill shouting from the front. Undead and unconscious men in fatigues were amassing at the hole they just made in the fence, and behind them an entire town was being driven in the same direction.

Enough was enough.

“HEY,” she shouted. “ANYBODY INSIDE? I AM HER.”

One of the ‘eyeball’ holes in the ship lit up—a half a million people on the Internet who had been arguing over the function of this particular recess for the past three years would have been thrilled to see it serve a function—and directed a light at her face.

She squinted, and waved, which seemed like the polite thing to do. Then came a hiss: beneath the eyeball the side of the ship was opening. It wasn’t a welcoming sort of opening, not in the way a ladder or a staircase might be considered an offer to enter: the side of the hull split, and two pieces flapped apart like a set of double-doors. A faint bluish light shone from inside.

It was impossible to tell what was inside the ship with all the light, but what was clear already was that nobody was going to be emerging from inside. There was no E.T. casting a shadow.

Annie looked back. The army soldiers had all stopped moving. Dougie was shouting something at her, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. It didn’t matter, anyway. There was only one direction to go.

She walked toward the light, and climbed inside the spaceship.