The Spaceship Next Door (22 page)

“What are you doing?” Wen asked.

“Just for show.”

Wen followed suit. He looked about as nervous as Dill felt.

It wasn’t an earthquake
, he thought. It was the first thing that came to mind when it happened, but he’d allowed himself to get talked out of it by his San Franciscan partner. Then there was that wave of emotion that followed. What the hell could that be, if they felt it at the same time?

It had to be the ship.

The trio leading the pack of what was clearly now a group of at least a dozen started to come into focus. They were… dirty, which was weird. A light cloud of dirt came into the light ahead of them, falling from their clothes.

“Oh no,” Dill said.

“What is it?”

“I just remembered what’s on the other side of the field.”

The first one to reach the light was in a dark suit and a tie, and half of his face was missing. His jaw swung left and right as he lumbered along in the muddy grass, connected to the rest of his face by visible tendons. The skin over his skull looked loose.

“What?”

“The cemetery.”

Wen saw.

“Pickles, is that a zombie?”

“Yeah. You wanna start shooting?”

“I think maybe, yes.”

That was when the shouting
behind
them got loud enough to notice. There were men and women running around the base for reasons that went beyond the very real concern that the base was under attack from the deceased population of Sorrow Falls.

Wen readied his rifle. “Now?” he asked.

Dill looked over his shoulder and saw the large, familiar figure of Hank Vogel walking slowly across the basketball court.

The sirens started going off.

“Yes,” he said. “Now.”

W
hen Beth started seizing
, Annie decided it was time to completely freak the hell out.

She was way overdue. Between the ship, the any-day-now-ness of her mother’s cancer, and the possibility of actual zombies, she already had way too much to cope with. Watching Beth, her
de facto
big sister, possibly dying right in front of her, was quite enough.

She wanted her mother, and she wanted her dad, and she wanted to go home and rewind to the day before the spaceship landed, when the most important question in her life was whether she’d hit puberty in time for Rodney to think of her as something more than a kid.

If she couldn’t have that, she wanted a fast-forward button instead, so she could skip ahead to the part where she was grown up and didn’t have to worry about an adult giving her permission to be alone. She could leave Sorrow Falls and go to college somewhere. Home-schooled Violet could come with her. They would live in Paris, and date men with accents, and never talk about this town again.

With no fast-forward or rewind or even a pause, she couldn’t do a whole lot for a while except cry on Ed’s shoulder in the lobby.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right,” he said over and over. “Just take a breath, Beth is going to be okay.”

“The zombies,” Annie said. They were the first words she’d been able to put together between the sobs.

“Don’t worry about that either.”

He sat her down on one of the chairs and pulled back, as it was clear she no longer absolutely required his shoulder. “Look, Beth is going to be okay. We don’t know what happened yet. We also don’t know if any of this zombie stuff… you know what? Let’s stop calling them that. Zombies are made up, right? Until we see one, let’s just… we’ll skip it. Until we know what we’re really dealing with, we’ll skip it.”

“Beth was a zombie.”

“No, Beth was sedated and zombies are reanimated dead people.”

Well okay.” Annie wiped her eyes and her nose, and decided she must look a mess. “Something that wasn’t Beth looked at me through Beth’s eyes and said
are you her?
and then
you are.
So basically, if you don’t want to call them zombies that’s fine. Call them dinglehoppers or something. Either way, I’m pretty sure I just started the dinglehopper apocalypse.”

“You’re overreacting.”

“I’m allowed.”

“Yes, you are. But I think we should go. The doctor is dealing with Beth. We can check on her in the morning. I don’t think we should be in the way.”

“I don’t want to leave her.”

“I insist. At least step outside for some air. I need to call the base.”

“What for?”

“Did you feel the ground shake?”

“No. Did we have an earthquake?”

Annie remembered a quake when she was nine. It felt like a truck drove past, and that was what she thought it was until everyone was talking about it like it was a big deal and then she decided it was a big deal too, except it really wasn’t.

“Must have been. Plus, there was... something else kind of weird. You were already upset, you probably didn’t notice.”

“What?”

Ed stopped and stared at her strangely for a couple of seconds.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing, I just realized something. Hey, let’s go outside.”

It was approaching 10:30 PM, which was just about the upper limit for Annie as far as being on Main was concerned. She was usually at least in the vicinity of her house by that time most nights, especially since the mall closed at 10.

The street seemed pretty deserted. It was still just as much of a Tuesday as it began the day as, so that was unsurprising.

Ed took out his cell phone and tried a call.

“Huh,” he said, after three tries. “I can’t get through.”

“We can try mine.”

He took her phone and punched in the number.

“Nope, that’s no good either.”

“Something wrong with the base? Try another number.”

They were standing on the front steps of the clinic, which was on the northern half of Main, on the side of the street that looked down at the river valley. On the far left was the city hall and on the far right the library. On the near right, across the street, was the diner. All the storefront lights were out. Main was lit by streetlamps—they were quaint-looking lights designed to look like 19
^th
century gas lamps, even though the town never had such things—which gave it a sort of spooky feel in the late night mist.

Hang on.

It wasn’t as deserted as she thought. For starters, the army had begun manning all their checkpoints a couple of weeks earlier, and that appeared to be a twenty-four hour mandate, so there were men at the checkpoint booth two blocks past the diner on the right. The soldiers appeared to be in a state of agitation, which was to say even from a few blocks away Annie could tell they had their guns out.

For another, there were pedestrians.

They weren’t acting like pedestrians, which made it difficult to spot them at first. Pedestrians understood what sidewalks and streets were. These people were wandering in and out of the streetlight arcs in a way that implied they were unsure as to their destination.

Ed had a business card in his hand and was dialing the number from it.

“I’m trying Hollis,” he explained.

“Yes, he’ll want to know about the dinglehopper apocalypse too.”

“Stop that. And I can’t get through to him either. Here.” He handed back her phone. “Try your mother.”

“It’s a little late, I don’t want to wake her.”

“Then call someone else outside of Sorrow Falls. I’m going to call my apartment in Washington.”

Annie tried her dad’s number. He was either in Canada or on the road between there and Massachusetts, both of which qualified as being outside of the town.

The phone didn’t ring. It paused for a while and then told her it couldn’t make the connection.

“I have full bars,” she said.

“Me too, and I can’t get anyone.”

She opened up the phone’s web browser and hit a
page cannot load
message.

“No Internet either.”

“Hey.”

Ed wasn’t looking at his phone any more; he was looking at the street.

“Yeah, lot of people out tonight,” Annie said, but on looking at the road she appreciated immediately how inadequate that description was. There were a
lot
of people out, coming up the hill from the row houses and reaching Main in groups of five and six at every intersection in both directions. They were all walking in that same disorganized way, but they were beginning to develop a sort of general directionality. One or two might drift left for a while or right for a time, but if the entire slow-developing mob were to be reviewed as a unit, it might be said that they were collectively converging upon the clinic.

“Does it seem like they’re all coming this way?”

“A little bit, yes.”

Then sirens began going off.

“Okay,” Ed said. “Now we can start calling it a zombie apocalypse.”

I
t was
Oona’s idea to start operating in shifts.

She suggested it right after Annie brought her friend Edgar over to pretend be a journalist and ask pointed questions about something that obviously happened recently. Whether that something was the ‘breathing’ they were picking up or not, self-evidently the government had an idea that the ship was manifesting a new risk. The low-key poke-around of the “government operative posing as reporter” was very nearly polite and respectful, as dishonest as it happened to be at its core, so Laura mostly didn’t mind, and Oona only minded because everything irritated her.

Working in shifts meant hardly spending any time together, because there were only two of them. With three or four, some overlap would have been acceptable, but Oona didn’t want to pair up with any of the other campers because she trusted nobody aside from herself and Laura.

There was still a
little
overlap. Information had to be exchanged and developments discussed and theories hatched. Also, there were certain gun-cleaning rituals, which needed to be maintained. They didn’t want to come out of this discovering they’d both been cleaning the same five guns for a month.

Laura had just begun her shift when the ground shook. It nearly rocked the trailer onto its side. It
did
knock Oona out of bed. Laura heard it from the roof.

“You okay, babe?” Laura asked. She was taken out of her lawn chair, and failed to fall over the side only because of the high wall. Their computer equipment—bolted to tables that were bolted to the roof—fared better.

Oona cursed for fifteen straight seconds, then climbed up the center ladder and poked her head out of the hatch.

“What in the name of baby Jesus was that?”

“Dunno. I think the ship stomped on the ground.”

Laura got to her feet (her left elbow, which broke her fall, was going to have a monster bruise in the morning she could tell already) and looked across the street at their Mount Doom.

“There’s a light,” she said.

“Lemme see.”

Oona scrambled up. She was still dressed for bed, which meant floral flannels that were so far removed from her end-of-the-world leather chic she looked like a different person.

She saw the light, scrambled for binoculars, found them, looked at the light again.

“Definitely the ship.”

“What else would it be?”

“Someone behind it with a blowtorch. Same color.”

“It would only look right from this angle if that were true.”

“Yes, darling, but what I’m telling you is it’s not that, and we can rule that out, and it’s actually the ship. Don’t bust my balls.”

To their right, Dobbs was shouting stuff at soldier boy across the street. Only a couple of the other rooftop residents were even awake, it looked like.

Three years and they’re going to sleep through The Moment
, she thought. What a shame that was.

“You were right,” Laura said. “Keeping shifts was a good idea.”

“’Course it was.” Oona sat in her chair and started fiddling with the equipment. “I only have good ideas. Light me a smoke, would you?”

Right then the depression grenade hit. When it was over—and it was over almost instantly, thank goodness—Laura was lying on the trailer on her back and Oona was actively crying.

“Well that was horrible,” Oona said. “Get up, and light me that smoke.”

“Later.”

Lighting a smoke actually involved rolling a cigarette, because it was cheaper to buy tobacco in bulk and there were fewer government-sanctioned chemicals. It was a process, anyway, and she wanted to pay attention. “What does the equipment say?”

“Says the anthill blew up.” This was a reference to an in-joke, that their equipment was sensitive enough to detect an ant fart from a hundred feet.

Oona tapped out a few things. “Pretty sure that thing is emitting something.”

“I see it.” A laser-narrow light was pointed skyward, reaching a termination point that was probably a mile or two up.

It gave Laura an idea.

“Hey, I think I know what’s happening.”

“Art? Hey, Art!”

Dobbs was yelling from his own roof, because Art Shoeman walking slowly along the side of the road.

She looked at Dobbs. “What’s he doing?” she shouted.

“I don’t know!”

He wasn’t the only one. Mika and Morrie, Zeno and Johnny Nguyen were also out there. And Earl Pleasant. And Joy Chen. They had all exited their campers to begin a slow trek down the street.

“Art!” Laura yelled. “ART SHOEMAN.”

Art stopped, and looked up at her. It was creepily slow and deliberate.

“You are not,” he said. Then he turned and continued walking.

“What the hell.”

“What did he say?” Oona asked.

“He said I’m not.”

“Not what?”

“No idea.”

Dobbs, meanwhile, climbed down from his roof to catch up with Art.

“Hey, hey Art, where are you going? The ship, man, it’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

“Are you?”

“That isn’t funny, man, come on!”

“Dobbs, maybe you should leave him,” Laura called down.

“No, this is bull.”

He grabbed Shoeman’s elbow to try and get the older man to stop walking. Art’s response was dramatic: he pulled back his arm and unleashed a wicked backhand that knocked Dobbs onto his ass in the brambles on the side of the road.

He wasn’t done. As disconnected as Art Shoeman appeared to be to the world, he knew how to respond to a threat, and in a way that seemed impossible for a person of his age and general demeanor.

Art stepped forward and raised his leg to stomp on Dobbs, who was still stunned and largely defenseless.

Then soldier boy showed up. He must have heard the shouting and decided to involve himself, when he probably had more important things to do. He grabbed Art from behind, spun and threw the old man into the street.

This had an undesired effect.

Everyone stumbling down the side of the road stopped, turned, and headed for the threat, which was now both the soldier and Dobbs. This wouldn’t have been all too terrible because these were not people known for their physical well-being—except for the five army guys in their company—but there were a lot of them.

“Oh no,” Laura said.

She spun around and flipped open the hatch.

“Where you going?” Oona asked. “What is it?”

There was no time to explain. Laura slid down the ladder to the main cabin, and out the door.

She got to Dobbs first. He was only twenty feet away, stuck in the brush.

“Get up, Dobbs,” she said, grabbing his arm. “Hurry, get off your fat ass and move.”

“What’s wrong with him?” he asked. “Did you see Art?”

“I saw.”

“What’s going on?”

“The world’s ending. Now c’mon, I’m not going to drag you!”

Dobbs pulled himself up.

He wouldn’t be going back to his own camper because the route was cut off. Suddenly there were people everywhere, most of them weren’t from the trailer community, and only a few had on army fatigues.

“Back to my camper. Hurry.”

“Okay.” He turned and ran.

“Hey, soldier boy!” Laura shouted. “Let’s go!”

The kid already had his handgun out, and looked like he was deciding whom to use it on first.

“Where?” he asked.

“Trailer, straight back to my right.”

“Get yourself there and hold the door, I’ll be right behind you.”

Just then, a siren sounded. It was an air raid siren, the kind people too young for the Second World War only ever heard in old movies. There was essentially no way this was a good sign.

“That’s bad, right?” Laura asked.

“Yep, real bad. Get to that door.”

Dobbs was little and round, and still woozy from the slap in the head, but he could run pretty well when his life appeared to depend on it, so he beat Laura to the door handily, and then waited for her.

“Get in,” she said, “and don’t touch anything.”

She turned around. “We’re clear!”

The soldier, perhaps unwisely, had begun engaging one of the other soldiers in hand-to-hand. Unwisely, because the other soldier didn’t seem to have any pain receptors, and the rest were closing in. The non-zombie soldier—Laura couldn’t think of any better word than ‘zombie’ for what she was seeing—couldn’t get free. Every time he tried to turn around and get away the larger man opposite him grabbed a wrist or a piece of his clothing and pulled him back in.

Suddenly, a shot rang out, and the zombie soldier’s head disappeared in a red cloud.

“Dammit, no!” soldier boy shouted. “Shoot to wound, shoot to wound!”

“You’re welcome,” Oona said from the roof.

The soldier scrambled away from his dead compatriot and reached the door just ahead of the throng. Laura let him in and started applying the deadbolts, of which there were several.

“Don’t… don’t shoot to kill,” the soldier said.

“I’m Laura. Welcome aboard.”

“Sam. Thanks for the assist. Tell your friend up top to be careful.”

“I will, but between you and me she may not care.”

“
W
hat are the sirens for
?” Annie asked.

“It’s a lockdown. Containment strategy. They installed sirens all over the perimeter in the event conventional communications went out.”

“I didn’t know this.”

“It wasn’t public knowledge. A lot of things weren’t.”

“Like what?”

“We have to get to the car.”

“Not until you answer my question.”

“Annie! Look around. We have to get to the car.”

He was right. Main Street was quickly turning into a pedestrian walkway. It was nearly impassible in both directions.

“Inside,” Annie said. “Through the back.”

They retreated into the lobby, and nearly ran over Pete.

“What’s going on out there? Is the Luftwaffe bombing?”

“What?” Ed asked.

“The sirens.”

“You wouldn’t believe us,” Annie said.

“Oh yeah?”

Pete opened the door, looked outside for a half second, and closed it again.

“Okay, I don’t believe you,” she said.

“We never said anything.”

“I don’t believe myself, then. What do we do?”

“You need to stay here,” Ed said. “Lock the doors, keep them out.”

“I don’t think that’s a good long-term solution.”

“It doesn’t have to be. As soon as Annie and I get to the car, nobody out there is going to be interested in coming in.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’re looking for me,” Annie said. “We’re pretty sure.”

“Now hang on, I can’t—”

“Pete,” Ed interrupted, “we really don’t have the time to argue. Hold the doors, keep everyone in here safe, and try not to shoot any of the zombies.”

Ed grabbed Annie’s arm and the two of them sprinted away from a dumbfounded sheriff, past Beth’s room, and down the hall. As she hoped, the doors in the back led to the ambulance bay, and from there the back parking lot.

It was empty. The zombies weren’t smart enough to surround the building.

Ed was unlocking the car when they heard the amplified voice of one of the soldiers at the checkpoint.

“PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR HOMES. MARTIAL LAW IS IN EFFECT.”

“Yeah, that’s not gonna help,” Ed said.

There was a loud pop Annie was pretty sure was a gunshot. She climbed into the car.

“This is going to go badly, isn’t it?” she asked.

“I think probably. If it’s like this down here I can’t imagine what the base is like.”

He pulled out of the space and turned the corner, which was when it became clear the only way out of the lot was to run people over.

“I hate to say this, but can we just go through them?” Annie asked.

“I’m nearly positive these people aren’t actually dead and I don’t think this car can take more than a couple of direct impacts. Town cars aren’t really designed to plow into traffic and keep going.”

“What is?”

“The army has a few war zone vehicles that would do it. Or one of those black SUV’s you talked me out of using.”

“That was solid advice at the time.”

She looked through the rear window and thought about where they were.

“How do you feel about driving through yards?”

“Surprisingly good.”

“Excellent. Turn us around.”

Ed backed up and performed a hairpin in reverse that was actually a little cool. For a half second Annie felt like she was in an action movie.

She pointed to a spot between two trees.

“If you can get through there I think it’s pretty flat right to Mrs. Evanov’s yard. She used to have a wood fence but it’s mostly fallen apart so hopefully we’ll be okay. On the other side is Yucca.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Oh, but you’ll have to gun it. There’s a lip along the edge of the lot.”

What happened next was somewhat less than Hollywood awesome. Ed gunned the engine and aimed for the spot, but the lip of which Annie spoke was eight inches and squared off, so there was no ramping up and over it. There was only a hard bump, which raised the car and its occupants into the air and down again, inelegantly, and awkwardly off-course. Ed was able to wrestle the vehicle sufficiently to maneuver it between the target trees rather than into one of them, but lost enough speed that the wood fence Annie insisted was barely there became a significant obstacle.

The horizontal support post ended up across the hood. Ed had to stop the car and remove fence parts before continuing through Mrs. Evanov’s yard.

“The road’s just there,” Annie said, pointing ahead. Ed steered through the yard.

Halfway around the side of the house, a figure lurched in front of them. Ed swerved, but a soft-but-distinctive thud indicated he failed miss completely.

“Oh God, what was that?” Annie asked.

“Just a guess, but that was probably Mrs. Evanov.”

Past the side of the house, he skidded onto Yucca Way. It wasn’t entirely zombie-free, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as Main.

“Okay, now what?” he asked.

“Depends. Where are we going? If you want to head for the ship you’re facing the wrong way.”