The Spaceship Next Door (19 page)

The app on her phone also uploaded new pictures automatically, whenever her phone entered a recognized Wi-Fi with a strong enough signal. This was actually sort of a problem because dependable Wi-Fi in Sorrow Falls wasn’t exactly commonplace. Her house didn’t have it. Violet’s did, but she never got on. Ed’s car did, supposedly, but she hadn’t tried to use it.

Typically, she relied on the library, the school during the year, or the diner. Joanne’s Diner added Wi-Fi less than a year earlier in response to the Denny’s up the street doing the same. It was probably their Wi-Fi that was responsible for the notification on her phone that a new picture had been uploaded to the cloud drive. The problem was, she couldn’t remember taking any photos recently.

She tapped into the cloud server to access the photos and scrolled down to the most recent. It took a couple of seconds to realize what she was looking at.

Have you told him?

Rick’s question still hung in the air. It was suddenly an incredibly important question.

“Hey, was that a friend of yours?”

Ed walked in and headed straight for the burnt coffee.

“Who?”

“Guy I saw you talking to. Looked about your age, right?”

“That was, um… sorry, I’m a little distracted, that was Rick Horton. I forgot to ask your zombie timing question, but you can probably still catch him.”

“Oh.” Ed looked like he was considering it. “No, it’s okay. I should get you home.”

“Actually… I think we should go someplace and talk. Maybe eat, but also talk.”

“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“This, for starters.” She held up her phone so he could see.

He went a little pale. This was kind of amazing as he was pretty pale to start with.

“How did you get that?”

“Like I said. I think we should talk.”

T
here were
many places to tie one on at night in Sorrow Falls. Annie wasn’t terribly familiar with any of them, being a minor, but she’d been inside one or two on certain occasions, such as when her dad was back in town and wanted to take the family out for a meal.

The family dinner establishments were mostly outside the town, in places like Oakdale, Mount Hermon and—in the other direction and somewhat further—Brattleboro. But there were a few quasi-family places, i.e., a place that served dinner and also alcohol, catering to adults but without anyone carding at the door or, if they were asking for ID, not before 10 PM.

One such place was Jock & Jill’s, a sports bar with a name that made it sound a tiny bit like an all-inclusive strip club. To get to it meant going from the diner parking lot (to which they were given a ride by one of the deputies) to the northern conclusion of Main and a dogleg left turn, up the hill on a road called Acorn, toward Durgin. Jock & Jill’s rested atop a small hill at the corner of Durgin and Acorn.

Ed looked about as uncomfortable as he could when he realized the kind of place Annie directed him to.

“This is a bar,” he said, pointing specifically to the onslaught of flashing neon.

“They have great appetizers here. And burgers. I hear good things about their drinks, too. The Martian Margarita’s supposed to be top notch.”

“You can’t go in here, can you? You don’t have a… I mean…”

“What good would a fake I.D. do me, Ed? Practically everyone knows me. Don’t worry, I can go in. The important thing is, the place is dark and loud.”

They took up a booth in a corner in the back of the place, with the waitress—Annie didn’t know her, but thought she looked familiar enough to be an older sibling of someone she did know—giving them the kind of uncomfortable glances people give when they think maybe, perhaps, possibly this older man is on a date with this young girl.

As soon as the waitress set them up with a couple of sodas—she was probably glad nobody at the table was drinking—Annie called up the photo on her phone and slid it to Ed.

“So tell me what I’m looking at here.”

“It’s a copy of a high resolution photo that happens to be incredibly classified. How did it end up on your phone?”

“You didn’t fully answer the question.”

“You’re right, I didn’t.”

“Ed, is this a handprint on the side of the spaceship?”

“It is. Keep your voice down.”

They were being bombarded on one side by white people classic rock, and on the other by the drone-speak of baseball announcers narrating two different games.

“I promise, nobody can hear us. I can barely hear us.”

“How did you get this?”

“I took it. This is a little embarrassing, but do you remember the day…”

“When you got the text from your mother,” he said, gasping. “I went to get my coat.”

“The folder was open on your desk. I didn’t even register what I was looking at. I just… I saw, and I… my phone was already in my hand. I didn’t even remember this until an hour ago.”

“Annie, you have to delete that immediately.”

“Now, hold on. I think you owe me some answers.”

“My answer’s the same as it always was. It doesn’t change just because you took a picture of something you shouldn’t have.”

“You do realize I’m a teenage girl with multiple social media profiles.”

“Annie…”

“It would seriously take me about ten seconds to post the image, and it’s no secret I live in Sorrow Falls. It’d probably go viral in a day, maybe two.”

“Seriously, you can’t.”

“Do you think you’d get arrested as soon as I posted it, or would they wait a week or two?”

“I can’t believe you’d do that to me.”

“Dammit, Ed, just tell me. I can make it so it looks like you already did, so you may as well.”

She was bluffing, and was about 80% sure he knew she was, but she also knew he was dying for an excuse to give up everything he had.

“All right, fine.”

He took a long sip of his soda, which was amusing only because he clearly preferred for it to be something much stronger.

“Do you know what Cherenkov radiation is?”

“Sure. It’s blue, right? It’s when something travels through a medium at a speed faster than light through that medium.”

Ed stared at her. “That’s almost exactly right, how did you know that?”

She shrugged. “I just do. So go on.”

“All right. A few weeks back, for less than a second, one of the sensors picked up Cherenkov radiation emanating from the ship.”

“That’s… interesting, but not really possible, is it? What was the medium? Air?”

“Air.”

“Something was transmitted that reached the ship at a speed greater the speed of light through the atmosphere. That would be a technology… ohhhh. I understand. That’s some alien technology going on.”

“We still don’t know whether the ship transmitted something into space or something out there sent something to the ship. In Washington, they’re pretty split on which possibility is worse.”

“You guys are always fixated on the worst idea imaginable when it comes to these things, aren’t you?”

“I do risk assessments. It’s my job to at least consider the worst case scenarios.”

“That’s kind of a crap job. No offense.”

He laughed. “You may be right.”

“So what happened next?”

“There’s a team of scientists attached to the spaceship project. There are twelve of them, and they’re very smart, reasonable people who didn’t deal well with this news. For a lot of reasons, I guess, one being that if it was Cherenkov radiation it should have killed some people around here and it didn’t.”

“How’d they detect it, then? If not radiation.”

“Spectroscope, I guess. I don’t really understand how they could tell the difference between a blue light and this, but they could. The upside was, they ordered a full rescan of the ship. That was conducted as quickly and as quietly as possible. An unmanned drone conducting an infrared scan of the hull picked up the handprint. By then I was already preparing to come here, so I missed the full-throated panic it had to have triggered.

“When I got here, my first job was to figure out if there was any observable change as a consequence of the… the message, or whatever was transmitted. The sensors are all pointed at the ship, basically, but nothing is pointed at the town. We needed to know if anyone here discovered something we were missing. But as soon as it was clear somebody actually touched the ship, the job got more complicated. That was how you ended up getting hired.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“We’re pretty sure the handprint happened long before the Cherenkov effect, and we don’t think they’re connected. It’s just that the print was missed before. But what it means is, someone in Sorrow Falls knows more than they’re saying. I needed to find out who that person was. I still do, because right now the ship is creating zombies. I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, but I think whoever made that print does.”

Annie sat back and considered that point.

“All right. So how do you know the ship is making zombies?”

“Who else? You think it’s really likely the one place the dead are rising is the one place with a spaceship?”

“I agree; that’s unlikely. How do you know there aren’t other towns with a zombie problem?”

He smiled. “That’s a really good point. First thing tomorrow, I’ll call Washington and ask them for an update on zombies in other regions. Maybe something will come up.”

“No you won’t.”

“No I won’t, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good point.”

The waitress arrived with their plates of greasy food. Discussions about the undead did nothing to dampen Annie’s appetite, so she dug in.

“All right, assuming it’s Shippie’s fault.”

“Shippie?”

“Sorry, that’s what Violet and I always called it. Assuming the spaceship is doing it, how is it doing it? Shouldn’t one of those government gadgets be catching this?”

“Sure, or your friends at the trailers. Although they didn’t notice the drones, it sounds like, and nobody caught the Cherenkov radiation burst.”

“They noticed the ship is breathing, that’s something.”

“Right.” Ed rolled his eyes. He didn’t consider the ship breathing a particularly respectable discovery. “But all of our gadgets are only good for things we know to test for. The ship was built by beings that mastered interstellar travel. They’re bound to have a way to do something we can’t detect.”

“Magic, then.”

“I definitely didn’t say that.”

“So why’s it doing this? What possible use could a spaceship have for a bunch of zombies?”

“I have no idea. But I’m guessing the person who touched the ship knows something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, Annie, I have to find them first. But I’m pretty sure they’re the key to all of this. The sooner I figure out who they are the better off we’re all going to be.”

Annie threw a French fry at Ed’s face. It glanced off the side of his head, causing no long-term damage.

“What was that for?”

“You still aren’t telling me everything, Edgar. Why is all of this so very important right
now
? Stop dropping ominous hints all over the place, it’s annoying.”

“I don’t have any particulars to share, but let’s just say the government has a few plans for what to do with this town and that ship if the report I turn in makes them unhappy.”

“Well that’s super. Then turn in a report that makes them happy.”

“I can’t really fabricate something here. There’s too much at stake. Look, all I need to do is find out who made that handprint.”

“Right, but you better have a backup plan is all I’m saying.”

“I’m
sure
that person is still in this town somewhere, and somebody knows who it is.”

“Yes, you’re right about all of that, but I’m saying don’t expect much from them.”

“You know who it is.”

She sighed grandly.

“I know they don’t have the answers you’re looking for, let’s say.”

“How can you know that? Let me talk to them and find out.”

“You’re talking to them now, Ed. I’m the one who touched the ship. Three years ago. And I have no answers for you.”

A
nnie had been crying
.

Her face was a mess. The eyes were red-rimmed and her cheeks were all puffy, as if swollen after absorbing moisture from her tears. She sort of wondered what would happen if she pinched one of them: would water come out of the pores?

Anyone looking at her would know what she’d been doing, so it was a good thing she was alone in her bedroom, because it wasn’t something she wanted anybody to know about. Not even her parents, not even when her parents knew why she was crying and that she was probably
supposed
to be crying. She refused to do it in front of them, even though it was their fault.

Not fair. Cancer isn’t anyone’s fault
.

That wasn’t always true, though. Some cancers really were the fault of someone. Like the tobacco industry. They could give people cancer. So maybe that was what it was: someone had given her mother cancer and they were the person Annie should be mad at.

Except according to mom, it wasn’t that kind of cancer. It wasn’t because of the way her mom lived her life: not in anything she ate or drank or smoked or wore or breathed. It was just something happening in her mom’s body, and that was who to blame. Not her mom; her mom’s body.

This didn’t work either.

Blaming her father showed a lot of promise, initially. He was away more and more, and if he’d been away less instead, he could have stopped the cancer from getting to mom, like a rancher with a shotgun guarding cattle from poachers. It was an impossible thought, but these were impossible times. Annie just learned she was going to be motherless by the time she turned twenty, and dammit if there weren’t people who should be held responsible for that.

This isn’t your fault, Annie
was one of the things her mother said, so of course Annie had to at least consider blaming herself. She couldn’t imagine how it could be her fault, and the entire line sounded more like something you said to your child after informing her of an impending divorce—which was honestly what she thought the
serious conversation
she’d been sat down for earlier was going to be about. But maybe there was only one playbook parents had for when they delivered bad news to their kids, and the line came from there. Either way, Annie couldn’t imagine how it was her fault, couldn’t conceive of any way in which she either caused cancer in her mother or stood aside as the cancer was allowed in. She could sort of imagine her mother standing bravely in front of Annie and shielding her from it, as if cancer were something fired from a gun, but that notion dissipated quickly.

She could blame God.

Annie left the mirror, which hung on the back of the door to her bedroom, to sit on the bed. The bed was near the window. From it she could see a good portion of the valley and a whole lot of sky, because there weren’t any houses across the street and they lived on the crest of a bowl canyon that bottomed out at the river several miles down the hill. Her room was on the second floor directly above the front door/porch entrance, and the view from the window right over the porch roof was routinely spectacular. On nights in which she hadn’t been notified of her future orphan status, she liked to sit on the roof and look at the stars. Sometimes she was especially lucky, and a clear night and a meteor shower would coincide. That happened the prior year with the Perseids, which were coming up again in a few days. She hoped to have another good view, and also hoped she cared enough to watch.

Annie didn’t think she believed in God, or if she did, the idea she had of what God must be like didn’t correspond with anyone else’s. It was incredibly annoying in a time like this, because He (or She) would be an excellent being to pin the blame for her mother’s cancer on. She could yell at Him for it instead, and then maybe go through the steps of doubting Him, wondering if He existed at all, working out for herself whether it was worth it to even continue using upper case letters when thinking about Him. She had to believe in Him/Her (or him/her) before questioning that belief, though, and that seemed like a lot of effort.

Besides, it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just a thing that was now true. Her mother was dying, where yesterday she wasn’t.

She opened the window and sat on the sill, her feet on the roof.

The text was to Rodney, who probably wasn’t. He’d just begun working at the shake place in the Oakdale Mall, which was weird for her because she didn’t have any other friends who were holding down jobs, part-time or otherwise. He was her oldest friend, though—in terms of his actual age, not how long she’d known him—so it was appropriate he be the first to enter the work force.

He also lived right up the street, had a car of his own, and didn’t have a problem using it to go places in odd hours. She tried to take advantage of that whenever she could: it was only a matter of time before he decided he didn’t want to hang around with the little kid down the road any longer. Once he started dating girls his own age, she’d be a hindrance, surely.

Annie sort of wished she were older, because she sort of wanted to date him herself sometimes. Only sometimes, though. She had reached a peculiar age where about half the time the idea of having a boyfriend was the greatest thing in the world, and the other half of the time it was the most terrifying thing she could imagine considering. She decided that meant she wasn’t ready to start dating anyone for real. Fake-dating, sure. She’d been fake-dating Dougie off and on for eight years, but that was just playing. They kissed once, but that was just playing too. Although he might have offered a contrary assessment of their relationship if pressed.

Neither she nor Rodney knew more than a couple of constellations, and exactly zero star names (she wasn’t counting the sun, because it was the sun and because she couldn’t see it at night anyway), so they made up names. It was another one of those things she expected him to grow tired of, especially on nights when he had an early milkshake shift to get up for.

A meteor came streaking along the horizon. Her first thought was it was an early sign of the Perseid shower, but she knew from the previous year which direction to expect those from, and it wasn’t coming from that direction. (The constellation Perseus was one of the ones she could identify, specifically because of the Perseids.)

I should wish upon a star,
she thought.
Would that work?

Jiminy Cricket was now singing in her head, and that was unfortunate.

Meteors flamed out pretty fast when they hit the upper atmosphere. This one wasn’t, which made it a compelling surprise for about ten seconds, until it occurred to Annie that a meteor that made it all the way to the surface could cause a lot of damage, and this one was headed right for Sorrow Falls.

Or so it seemed. It was hard to judge real distance when looking up in the sky.

Just like every other kid—she assumed—when she reached a certain age she went through a UFO phase. Hers lasted maybe a year, which was long enough to absorb a few ideas on the matter of objects that flew in the night sky but could not be readily identified by the observer. One idea was that it was incredibly hard to distinguish between small and nearby, versus large and far away. Something a few hundred feet in the air and tiny, if misapprehended as something a mile in the air and large, could look like a vessel moving faster than a commercial airliner instead of, say, a firefly caught in a breeze.

She was pretty positive the thing in the sky at this moment was actually falling from outer space, but the illusion of it bearing down on Sorrow Falls specifically was probably just that: an illusion.

It was hard to shake, though. From her angle it hadn’t moved left or right, but it had gone from high in the sky to lower in the sky, and it had gotten brighter. That really did give the impression it was coming her way.

It held position for another three-count, then zigged to Annie’s left, which was to say its descent angle clarified itself by heading northward. It was now traversing the sky from her two o’clock to her ten o’clock.

It wasn’t going to come near Sorrow Falls. It was headed for Vermont or Canada.

It was still coming down fast, though, which she was calculating based on how bright it was.

It was at this moment Annie realized she was looking at something other than a meteor. First, there was the thought:

I shouldn’t still be able to see this
.

If it was a meteor, it should have flamed out or slowed down enough by friction to stop causing the air around it to catch fire, which was what made them glow in the first place. This one was still glowing, somehow.

Second, and far more importantly, it turned.

She nearly fell out of the window when this happened. It was on its right-to-left trajectory, going down at about a fifteen-degree angle, when it
maneuvered
into a descent that was straight down. It did that for five seconds.

Her phone rang.

“Did you see that?” Rodney asked. “Holy crap, what is it?”

“I saw. And… I think it stopped moving?”

It looked like it stopped, but it was still getting brighter somehow.

“It didn’t stop, it’s heading straight for us.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Annie, that’s a spaceship. It has to be.”

She didn’t know what to say. Rodney was right, but he couldn’t be right.

For about five seconds, Annie thought the ship had plans to land right on her house, which would have been something of a capper for the way the evening had gone so far. It did come close, but once it was about two hundred feet up (probably?) the trajectory clarified again.

It was looking for a place to land. It was an alien spaceship and it was looking for a place to land.

The ship reached a spot down the road to her right, stopped dead in the air, and disappeared from view.

“Rodney, how soon can you be here?”

“We should call the sheriff.”

“We should get in your car and go meet the aliens. Then we can call the sheriff.”

“I’ll be outside in ten.”

A
nnie snuck
out of her house on a semi-regular basis, either to go on a walk by herself or to drive somewhere with Rodney and whoever else he had tagging along. Getting out was easy enough, because the drop from the porch roof was only about ten feet.

Getting back in was a little harder. If she wanted to use the bedroom window she had to climb onto the roof, either by using the trellis on the side of the house or the tiny tree growing beside the porch. Neither of those things was built to support her, nor were they very good at it. More than once she ended up dangling from the edge of the roof and wishing she had sufficient upper body strength to pull herself up from that position. Twice, she succeeded in swinging her legs around and up, but it wasn’t a super pleasant experience because the roof tiles were like sandpaper.

Most times, she just snuck in the front door.

She hopped down from the roof and walked up the street to the standard meeting point, a large tree with a big enough trunk to hide a thirteen-year old girl behind. This was so Rodney wasn’t picking her up right in front of the house. Her parents probably knew she snuck out and were implicitly okay with it, but there was no point in treating them like idiots.

It was twenty minutes before Rodney pulled up; headlights off and rolling slow to keep the noise down.

She jumped in on the passenger side.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

Rodney pointed his thumb to the back seat.

“Hey, Annie,” Rick Horton said.

“Jesus… hi Rick.”

Annie shot Rodney a look he chose to ignore.

“He called as soon as we hung up, for the same reason. He was on the way.”

Rick was, in Annie’s estimation, a creep, but he was a creep Rodney called friend, and she couldn’t do much about that. He was also only
on the way
to Annie’s house if Rodney took a roundabout way to get to her, which was contrary to the urgency she felt was required when it came to first contact with aliens, and she didn’t like
at all
the idea that Rick would be one of the humans they would meet, either initially or at any subsequent point in their stay on Earth.

But, it was Rodney’s car.

“What do you guys think it was?” Rick asked. He was unbelted, leaning forward and talking through the gap in the front bucket seats. It was a totally creeper move because his face was next to Annie’s left shoulder and his eyes could look right down her shirt. There wasn’t much to look at down there, so far, but there wasn’t nothing. Rick’s understanding of personal space was discomfiting. Also, he had alcohol on his breath.

“I think it was an alien ship,” Annie said. “I watched it park.”

“Me too! This is the balls!”

“Sit your ass back,” Rodney said. “I don’t want to brake and send you through the windshield. I like this windshield.”

Rick sat back, and Rodney looked to Annie. “Where you thinking?”

“The Dewey farm, pretty sure.”

The Dewey family farm was a couple of miles away, set back off Tunney Road a few hundred feet. Bob Dewey had ten acres across three fields. Pastureland was as good a place as any to set down a starship and the angle seemed about right from her perspective.

“Just look for the lights, yo,” Rick said.

“It turned its lights off before touching down,” Annie said. “I saw it happen.”

“They gotta put out a porch light or something to see where they’re walking. Imagine, you come from planet whatever, land here, and step in a cow chip right away. They’ll probably blow the whole planet up for that.”