The Spaceship Next Door

⁹ PLEASE STATE YOUR EMERGENCY

Two weeks passed, during which the most exciting thing to happen was that Annie got her first paycheck. It was a decent enough sum to leave her wondering how long she could prolong things. To that end, she did not have a willing partner in Edgar Somerville.

It was hard to tell sometimes if they were even on the same side. She spent most of her days facilitating his introduction to various individuals, and then listening for clues as to what he was really after. So far, he hadn’t given her enough to assemble anything like a complete picture. She had tantalizing bits, but that was all. It gave each day a modestly adversarial angle, like they were playing a bad game of chess with one another.

In a lot of ways, she was learning more as a consequence of whom he was asking to speak with than she was by what he was saying to the people she lined up. They spent the first week at the campers, but the second week was with a subset of the Sorrow Falls population that consisted of all persons who lived in the town when the ship landed and hadn’t left it since.

The questions he had for the trailer park collective centered mostly around tell me your crazy and how you arrived at it, but the stuff he had for the other group suggested he was after a completely different thing. For the camper denizens it was all about what happened in the past six weeks. For everyone else—tacitly not the people in the campers, who arrived well after the ship landed—it was questions about what had changed in the town, overall, in three years.

Annie knew he had his theory that the ship was manipulating people at a distance, but these weren’t just that kind of question. He was after something specific.

It would have been nice if he could just tell her everything, and it was obvious it bothered him that he couldn’t. But apparently granting top-secret clearance to a sixteen year old was a hassle.

The second-most exciting thing to happen in the two weeks was that Annie got a chance on more than one occasion to hang out at the military base.

THE BASE WAS ESTABLISHED in a field originally owned by the Tarver family. Annie knew a couple of the Tarvers back before they sold the field and moved away. All she remembered about them was that they weren’t all that good at farming—they’d been at it for five generations by then—and didn’t much enjoy it. The spaceship was basically the best thing that could have happened for them. Last she heard they’d opened a string of boutique coffee shops in San Diego.

The Tarvers were pretty lucky, not only for owning land the government wanted, but for being happy to sell it. More than a couple of Sorrow Falls families were considerably less fortunate. Ed’s theory that the town was entirely too idyllic under the circumstances ignored the many times locals were briefed on eminent domain laws and the terms of the martial law agreement between the state and federal governments. Admittedly, it would have looked a whole lot worse if they’d actually evacuated the area like Edgar wanted to, but that didn’t mean everything in town was puppies and rainbows from day one.

Unlike where the ship came down—on hard, rocky ground that wasn’t being used for anything—the base was built on top of fallow farmland. The ground took in moisture well, grew things (weeds) with great aplomb, and didn’t offer the sort of bedrock support needed for large, temporary buildings on wheels. Those were the only kinds of structures at the base for the first year, lasting until someone decided everybody could exhale and expect the ship to spend a while not doing anything. Then they started putting up permanent buildings, with solid foundations. They also put up a taller and more imposing perimeter fence, and paved their auto yard. Most importantly, as far as Annie was concerned, they built a basketball court.

Annie was not, under all but a few circumstances, particularly girlish. This sort of hinged on her personal definition of the word, which relied heavily on how Beth behaved whenever someone attractive and theoretically age-appropriate was in the diner. It was only theoretically because Beth was both playing in a higher age bracket than Annie and because Beth liked men in a higher age bracket than she herself was. It was also higher than Annie was comfortable with. Beth would probably think Ed was too young for her.

Beth’s girlishness consisted of swooning, flirting, blushing, and gasping, and being just in general very Marilyn Monroe about everything. Annie wasn’t like that. She tended to adopt a sort of Katherine Hepburn-ishness on a day-to-day basis, and was straight-up Rosalind Russell when flirting, which was almost never.

(Beth wouldn’t have understood any of these references, except possibly the Marilyn one, which she probably would have liked. Annie didn’t have any friends who would have gotten them, actually, aside from Violet. Interestingly, Annie never watched movies with Violet aside from Vi’s favorite film, The Wizard of Oz, which they watched at least once a month together. Violet never explained why she found the movie so appealing, but since Annie never seemed to get bored of watching it with her, maybe there was no reason to explain.)

Annie made one exception to the girlishness rule, and that was the army compound’s basketball court in the summertime.

The court wasn’t exactly a secret, but it was right in the middle of the compound, which made it hard to see. What was known about it was that on certain days, men from the base would play basketball on the court, wearing camo pants and combat boots and hardly anything else. (Unstated and unknown was whether any of the women on the base partook as well. This may have been because there were hardly any women on the base, period. Annie wasn’t sure why this was so, but it was clearly so.)

For the population of teenage girls in Sorrow Falls—already surrounded by attractive, polite young men in uniform—the basketball court had obtained a kind of mythic status. And as Annie sat at a courtside bleacher in the late-August sun watching those polite young men lumber around under the hoop, she had to say that the mythos was entirely earned.

“So that’s all you’ve been doing?” Sam asked. He was sitting next to her, an appropriately chaste distance apart, while the game was going on. Like half the court, he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and seemed to think this wasn’t mind-numbingly distracting.

“Pretty much, yeah. Just going around town and asking the same questions to different people. What are they saying about him around here?”

“Ah, we don’t trade in rumors so much on the base.”

Annie laughed. “No, seriously.”

“Nobody knows who he really works for, but his credentials… Someone said his credentials gives him the authority to do some things to the general that would be illegal in most states, let’s just say. I’m cleaning that up for you.”

“I appreciate that. He told me he writes classified reports.”

“Yeah, and he probably does. Wonder what he’s going to write about us?”

“I don’t know.”

What she did know was Ed had a propensity for saying ominous things about running out of time, then refusing to say what would happen when they ran out of time. She didn’t share this with Sam because she didn’t want to talk about it. Hopefully, Ed was just worried about the start of the school year, because if he were counting down to the evacuation of Sorrow Falls, she’d rather not know it.

Plus, there was a basketball game to watch.

There was no apparent score-keeping going on. The game was three-on-three and it was only half-court, and nobody was trying all too hard, but that didn’t make it any less compelling.

“Why do they keep yelling pickles?” Annie asked. She’d heard it four times now, and kept trying to tie the word to a particular play being run or something, but it didn’t appear related to one.

“That’s his name,” Sam said.

“Someone out there is named Pickles?”

“Nickname. Hey, Pickles, come here and introduce yourself.”

The shortest guy on the court stepped away from the game and came over. He was replaced immediately by another soldier, just so the rest of them could keep playing.

“What’re you talkin’ about me for? Is it because I’m so pretty?”

“You know it is, soldier,” Sam said. “Corporal Dill Louboutin, this is Annie Collins.”

Louboutin gasped and clutched his heart.

“Not the Annie Collins! Why I do believe I have been instructed not to converse with you, young lady.”

Dill Louboutin had a drawl that reminded her of the villain from a half-dozen B-films in her mother’s collection. Oddly, this made the soldier before her seem a little more charming.

“Have you really?”

“Yes ma’am, we were notified that on occasion, you might find yourself among our company, and that we are to compost… did he say compost?”

“Comport,” Sam said. “Compost is something else.”

“That we are to comport ourselves as gentlemen at all times on account of your delicate age and temperament.”

Annie raised an eyebrow at Sam.

“He’s making this up,” she said. “Right?”

“Tell her the rest,” Sam said.

“Oh yes, and also to not engage you in conversation.”

“And why is that?”

“Something about devil or, seductress or… you know, along those general lines.”

“Because you know things and you find things out,” Sam said. “They don’t want anyone telling you something they shouldn’t.”

“You mean, like you do?”

“I’m hurt. That hurts me.”

“I’m guessing they don’t have a problem with all the dirt I get out of you. Or maybe you just don’t know any of the good stuff, like Pickles here does.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Dill said.

“You’re digging around the wrong shrub, he knows even less than I do,” Sam said.

“That is true, young lady. I in fact know just about nothing. Why are you here, anyway? See, I don’t even know that.”

“Ed’s in his top secret batcave. He’d rather I hang out here because I guess he’s just bathing in confidential files or something.”

Ed’s batcave was actually one of the few remaining temporary structures from the initial move-in. It was a steel-paneled eyesore that was towed in on a flatbed, now sinking slowly into the mud. The window faced the court, possibly so he could keep an eye on her while working with his decoder ring and invisible ink.

“Yes, but why you, exactly?”

“My girlish good looks, corporal. Of course. Also, because I know everyone and everything in town. I thought you’d been briefed already.”

“All right, I feel a test is in order.”

“Dill…” Sam said.

“No, go ahead, this should be fun,” Annie said. “Give me your best, Pickles.”

Dill looked over her shoulder.

“Right now I am looking past the fence at some little twerp who stands on his porch every damn day watching us. What’s his name?”

She laughed. “I don’t even need to turn around. That’s Dougie. I’ve known him most of my life. You guys must be bored if you care that much about him, he just wants to grow up and join the army like any red-blooded American boy.”

“Aww, come on, I don’t even have a way to check if you’re right.”

“Should have thought of that sooner,” Annie said.

Her cell phone vibrated with a new message. She snuck a peek at it.

“Hey, guys, I gotta go.”

ED SPENT a lot of time on a lot of army bases, and for some reason had it in his head that the Sorrow Falls base would be different in some way from the others. That it felt exactly the same despite a fundamentally different mandate just made his head hurt.

The army didn’t know exactly what to do with the soldiers. They had daily drills, and an obstacle course, and important duties both public and private. (Publicly, for instance, they guarded the ship and manned the checkpoints on the roads. Privately, they had ten lightly manned outposts ringing the town, which hardly anyone knew about.) What they didn’t have—or know how to provide—was training for the thing that brought them there.

It was true nobody had any idea what to expect on the day the spaceship finally executed whatever directive it was there to complete, so having drills along the lines of “how to reload a laser gun” or “what to do if there’s an alien attached to your face” didn’t make a lot of sense. At the same time, Ed could think of no better example of the axiom: generals are always fighting the last war.

One of the things Ed hoped to accomplish in his visit was to give everyone an idea of what to expect, and then maybe the base outside his window would be full of people knowing what to do with their time aside from pickup games of basketball.

He turned back to the desk, which was large—thankfully—and overfull of documentation. Between the two weeks of notes from the interviews, the documents provided when he arrived, and everything he brought with him, there was a decent amount of material. Granted, if he wished he could stack all of it together and form only a very small pile, but that was somewhat contrary to his method.

The material was arranged in something approximating a collage. It was the only effective method he’d ever found when collecting disparate bits of information that had to be arranged in a comprehensive whole.

It was failing to arrange, however.

Nothing connected. He had the event of eight weeks past sitting next to the notes from the interview with Laura and Oona, even though Ed put almost no weight on the latter and a great deal on the former. Everything else sat in an unassociated pile, an archipelago of independent territories associated only by virtue of existing on the same desktop. There was the folder holding photographs of the handprint on the outside of the ship, alone on the corner of the desk. It should have been associated in some way with at least one of the resident interviews he’d conducted, but it wasn’t.

There were all the rooftop trailer people, but none of their theories crossed, or went anywhere near anything else. They also contradicted one another and sometimes contradicted themselves. He had little post-it notes attached to each file, summarizing the contents: zombie, hybridization, Matrix, David Bowie, and so on. In cases where there was no theory, he wrote the specialty of the interviewee. When that didn’t work, he just wrote their first name and ‘???’ and left it at that.

He picked up the folder marked ‘zombie’. This was the interview with the man everyone called Loony Larry. Larry wasn’t even his name—he was born Vincent Allen—but everyone called him Larry, and that was how he introduced himself. He didn’t mind being called Loony, either. He seemed to think it was a compliment.

Larry had a theory that incorporated a flute, the migratory pattern of Monarch butterflies, and something about Sauron from Lord of the Rings. There was no sense to be made of any of it—even after Larry showed them the flute as if that would help—but the conclusion was an actual zombie apocalypse.

When Ed asked him when this was going to be happening, in his considered opinion, Larry said, “soon,” and then strongly indicated that it might already be happening.

Larry was actually the most cogent of the crazies in the crowd. A woman named Margo theorized that the reason nobody could touch the ship was that it wasn’t there at all. It was actually a piece of negative space in the shape of a ship, and to get too close was to fall through to another universe, “like into a cup of coffee,” she explained not-at-all-helpfully. A man named Zeno spoke for an hour about spiders and never explained how they had anything to do with the spaceship. He didn’t seem to know why he was there.

Ed came into this worried that one of them had managed to detect the same thing the scientists had. Two weeks later he would have been overjoyed to hear just one mention of Cherenkov radiation. It would have been bad news, but it also would have meant at least one of those people had found something real.

He glanced back out the window to see how the basketball game was going.

Annie was enthusiastic about coming back to the base and letting him hide with his documents while she visited with the soldiers. He was probably doing something wrong by leaving her unsupervised. That was provided the definition of unsupervised included leaving her in the charge of a corporal named Corning, who was currently at the basketball court shirtless. Ed wasn’t the best reader of people in the world, but he understood just fine that Annie wanted Ed gone once she saw Sam Corning without his shirt.

It was just as well. Better she see Corporal Corning without his shirt than any of the confidential stuff on his desk. Annoyingly, he had a feeling if she could see it, she’d have an insight or two that would be helpful. She had a talent for that.

And, she was gone. He was looking at the soldiers playing their game and not at the bleachers. She wasn’t there.

He jumped to his feet and ran to the door, jerked it open, and nearly ran her over.

She stumbled into the room.

“Jesus, Ed, where are you going?”

“To look for you.”

“I’m right here.”

“I see that now. I’m—”

“Forget it. We have to go.” She was holding her cell phone in her hand. She looked terrified, and—for perhaps the first time since they met—like a young girl.

“Is something wrong?”

“My mom. Please.”

THE CLOSEST THING to a hospital in Sorrow Falls was a walk-in clinic on Main. The clinic didn’t have overnight services, or anything like an ambulance bay, and was really established primarily to deal with accidents happening to or caused by tourists.

When someone needed a real hospital, they ended up at one of two such facilities, both located within thirty miles. Which one a person ended up at depended upon where they were picked up by the ambulance, based on an invisible demarcation line running through the middle of the town, southwest-to-northeast. People who found themselves in unexpected emergencies while in the southeast half of the town usually ended up at Saint Mary’s in Carrel, which was two towns over. The northwest half—which had the army base, an alien spaceship, Annie’s house and a lot of farms—was supported by Harbridge Memorial, which was one or two wrong turns away from the Vermont border.

Ambulance services were more diverse, and closer, but not in all cases 100% devoted to emergency support. Annie knew this, but Ed was a little alarmed to find a hearse in front of the house when they got there.

They were already inside, and the door was open. Annie jumped out of the car before Ed even parked it, and ran up the steps.

“Oh hello, dear!” her mother greeted as soon as Annie breached the living room.

She was in her chair with an oxygen tube in her nose. A paramedic—his name was Lee, Annie knew his younger sister Zoe from school—was checking her blood pressure. His partner, a woman Annie didn’t know, was sorting through her mother’s pharmacopeia with a blue-gloved hand.

“What happened?” Annie asked. It wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, just whoever felt like they could provide the best answer.

“It’s nothing!” her mother said.

“It wasn’t nothing, Carol, you sent a 9-1-1.”

Getting the full attention Mrs. Carol Collins was often a challenge, whether one was a paramedic trying to assess her stability or her daughter trying to get a straight answer. Her daughter had one trick that almost always worked, and that was calling her by her first name.

“All right, I had a thing, but I’m okay now.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Nothing, I panicked is all. I’m actually fine. I’m sorry I worried you.”

Annie turned to the female paramedic.

“What kind of thing?”

“Difficulty breathing was the call,” the paramedic said.

“Is she out of danger?” Annie asked.

“Oh, I’m fine now.”

Annie ignored her mother, the woman paramedic silently deferred to Lee, and nobody said anything else for a few seconds because he had a stethoscope plugged into his ears and was busy jotting down notes.

“Not sure,” he said, on realizing he was expected to answer. “But we’re going to need to bring her in. You know how this goes.”

Annie did. So did her mother.

“It’s nothing!” she said.

“Shut up, Carol, they’re taking you to Harbridge and you’re going to be nice about it,” Annie said.

“But—”

“Be nice!”

“Fine.”

Carol threw her hands in the air in mock surrender.

Ed was standing at the door, looking unsure about whether or not he should even be in the room for this.

“Hey, I could use a lift to the hospital, if you’re not doing anything,” Annie said. “I hate to ask, but I have a thing about riding in ambulances and—”

“Of course.”

“DOES THIS HAPPEN A LOT?” Ed asked, en route. The flashers from the ambulance lit up the evening, which reminded Annie a little bit of the spaceship, even though the ship glowed white on entry, while the dome lights were red.

“No,” Annie said. “Well, once or twice. Maybe four times. Not a lot. Last time was in winter. That sucked. Took the ambulance forever to get to us, even. I was home for that one.”

“But she was okay?”

“On top of everything else she has going on, she’s prone to panic attacks. I guess that’s what they are. Not like she doesn’t have a reason to panic. I think the weed’s in part to keep her from freaking out. She says it’s for pain, and that’s true, but it keeps her moods stable too. So, but last time, they sent her home with the number for a psychiatrist she never called, and she didn’t tell me what the diagnosis was, but I’m guessing it was something more in her head than her body.”

“Well, that’s good. Not good. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. They’ll take her in and make sure someone with malpractice insurance looks at her before deciding it was nothing. The paramedics sure aren’t going to make that call. But they know. Look, they aren’t even speeding.”

Annie remembered when old Rooney Kazmarek passed. He had an apartment above Kazmarek Hardware, right up Main from the Diner. She saw them loading him in the back, then heading down the road. They drove slowly then, too, but that was because Rooney was already dead of a heart attack. There wasn’t any rush.

Annie shivered, and shook the memory free. Her mother was fine. They were driving the speed limit because Carol was in the back telling them to.

“Is there… anyone else you need to call?” Ed asked. He was asking a different question.

“I’ll call dad if I have to. You know, if it’s anything. It’s not. Same thing happened last time; she just freaked out and couldn’t breathe. It was scary.”

“Your father lives around here?”

Annie laughed.

“Sure, when he’s in town. That’s just not all that often. It’s his job. He works for Hollis.”

“The paper mill?”

“Yes, that Hollis. They used to use trees from New Hampshire and Maine to make the paper. Someone up there would cut down the trees and then roll them into the river and float them down. On this end there’d be guys whose whole day was spent on the riverbanks, catching logs before they hit the falls. Cool job.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“Oh, wildly dangerous. They have these giant hooks on the wall down at the mill. I’ll show them to you, you’ll want to talk to the people there anyway, right?”

“I’ve been trying to get a meeting with Desmond Hollis since I got into town, actually.”

“Seriously? You should have asked, I can get you in.”

Ed laughed.

“Right, I should have figured you’d have a way into a room with the richest man in town.”

“I think he’s actually third-richest now, but yeah, I can get you in with Desmond. What was I talking about?”

“The hooks on the wall.”

“Right. They’re mounted right above one of those ‘it’s been X days since the last accident’ safety signs, because someone down there has a sense of humor. Anyway, my dad’s the one fetching the logs now, but not from the river. The lumber comes in from Canada, and on trucks. Safer, not as good for the environment, probably.”

“So he drives a rig.”

“Kind of. He supervises the driving of rigs. Trucks come through all the time, but he’s not behind the wheel more than once every six months or so. He’ll come down for vacations and whatnot… anyway. He’s around, just not very around.”

Annie didn’t feel a need for further clarification. It should have been obvious that her parents were separated. Dad effectively lived in Canada. He kept an apartment there, and the last she heard he had a girlfriend staying with him in that apartment. He and Carol weren’t divorced in part to keep her on his health insurance, a decision reached shortly after her cancer diagnosis and about six months before they formalized their separation by notifying their only child.

He still kept a room in their house, and stayed in that room when he was in town, but that was about all.

Ed seemed to get all this without it being explained, and he looked like he wanted to share a story about his life or something, which is what adults did when they talked to kids about serious things. She’d been getting a range of things will get better life lessons stories from adults since Carol was diagnosed, and Annie hated every one of them because they always ended up being a lot more self-serving than helpful. Yes, she knew things would get better, and yes, she was coping. She coped by keeping incredibly busy, and being positive, and getting so involved in the town the military warned its soldiers about her. She didn’t need to know someone else’s tragic backstory to figure out how to do that.

Annie was glad, then, that Ed opted not to go that route. Perhaps it was the confused not-divorced status of her family. Or maybe he just realized that drawing a comparison to his upbringing in whatever-land U.S.A. wasn’t going to match up well with the girl who was raising herself with a UFO for a neighbor.

“Hey, thanks for doing this,” Annie said. “I could have followed in the family car, probably, but I haven’t had a lot of practice and this didn’t seem like the best time to work on it.”

“No, I imagine it isn’t. Don’t worry about it.”

The ambulance eventually pulled up to a dock at a building that looked only nominally hospital-like. Annie was mostly used to it, but the first time she’d been to Harbridge Memorial she asked the paramedic (she’d ridden in the ambulance that time) why they were stopping at a warehouse.

“Looks like we’re here,” Ed said. He rolled the car past the dock and into one of the ‘Emergency Room Only’ spots. “I can stick around, if you need me to.”

Annie hadn’t thought past getting to the hospital, but now that she had and he was asking, she realized she should have given the family car a more thorough consideration.

“It may be a couple of hours.”

“That’s okay. Do they have coffee in there?”

“It’s something that looks like coffee. I can’t attest to the taste.”

They were taking her mother out of the back of the ambulance/hearse. Carol was sitting up and her mouth was going, so she was probably complaining about having to leave home. That was a good sign, Annie decided. The day Carol stopped fighting was going to be a rough day for everyone.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Ed said. Probably referencing the coffee and not Carol, though both worked. “Doesn’t seem right to leave.”

THE EMERGENCY ROOM of Harbridge Memorial was unreasonably small for a hospital servicing such a large geographic area. There were only about fifteen temporary beds, separated by curtains on rollers attached to the drop ceiling. It wasn’t a great place to spend a lot of time when one was healthy, and especially not when one was a healthy sixteen years. Consequently, while waiting for the barrage of preliminary tests to begin producing results, Annie did a lot of walking around, drifting between the beds and the waiting area where Ed was taste-testing the coffee and reading magazines about the latest Christmas movies from last season.

Carol mostly slept, which was another good sign. When she was really worried about something, she didn’t sleep; she talked, and when she didn’t talk she watched old movies.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Annie asked Ed. They were alone in the waiting room, it was approaching Midnight, and there wasn’t anyone else there. Annie had counted all the ceiling tiles, twice, and discovered every pattern irregularity in the tile floor. There was nothing left to do but sleep, and she didn’t want to do that.

“Right now? No.” He closed the magazine he was pretending to read.

“Of course right now. I’m assuming you’ve had one or two in your life.”

“Yes, that too. But not at the moment.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess I haven’t been looking all that hard. Not since the ship landed. Nothing serious. How about you?”

“Oh, I have prospects. Looking for a guy who can keep up with me. Haven’t found him yet, but the list of suitors is long, let me tell you.”

“I bet it is.”

THE DOCTOR FINALLY RETURNED, after another hour of waiting. Annie was pretty annoyed by then, because this was going to end up being the same news as always: nothing appeared to be newly wrong with her mother, they see no reason for her not to be released, call if something changes in the next twenty-four hours, and so on. Keeping her waiting for three plus hours to hear that was just silly.

The doctor was working from a different script, though, which ended up explaining the delay.

“I’d like to admit her overnight,” the doctor said. This was outside the curtained area where Carol was sleeping.

The doctor’s name was Chao, and she had such a pleasant way of saying not-pleasant things that it took Annie a second or two to absorb the information, then another second or two for her to deal with the lump that fell out of the back of her throat and into her stomach.

“I’m… sorry, what?”

“Oh, it’s just a precaution.” She was holding a thin folder that had, at minimum, the outcome of a blood test. “Her white blood cell count is elevated, and I’d like to hold her over until at least tomorrow, and get her going on an antibiotic.”

“So it’s just an infection.”

“It may be, certainly. I’d like oncology to have a look. To rule out some things. Do you have a guardian?”

“A guardian?” She was picturing a guy in armor, following her around. That would be sort of cool.

“Is someone waiting for you? You have a place to go?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I have a friend… my boss is here. He’ll take me home.”

“All right, good. Let’s go have a conversation with your mother.”