The Spaceship Next Door (24 page)

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

“No, I mean it.”

As anticipated, the end of the traffic jam was the army checkpoint. The gates were down, and four men with M16A2’s just like the one Sam carried stood at the ready on the other side of those gates.

“Do you know any of them?” Ed asked.

“We’re not close enough yet. Think it’ll make a difference?”

“No idea. I’m pretty sure I don’t, though, and I was sort of hoping I’d have more than just my ID to stand on.”

They were still four cars away from the front when the driver of the first vehicle decided he had enough. Him Annie recognized: it was Lew Stempel. He was one of Hollis’s foremen. She went to school with his daughter, Winnie.

Lew had apparently been sitting at the gates for a while, no doubt leaning on his horn the entire time—as she remembered it, he wasn’t known as a patient guy—before jumping out and walking right up to the first soldier at the barricade. Annie wasn’t close enough to hear what he was saying over the intermittent honking and the wind on the bridge, which was perpetual and considerable. His gestures were pretty easy to read though.

He threw his hands in the air, and pointed at the crowd behind his car, and banged on his chest. All the while he was walking closer to the army’s perimeter.

Two of the soldiers had their barrels trained on him, but he kept walking.

I dare you to shoot me
, he was saying. It didn’t look like they were going to.

Like Ed said, the army had orders, and if those orders meant to shoot an American citizen on U.S. soil, they were supposed to do it. This was one of those questions that came up from time to time in polite media conversations about Sorrow Falls: could a soldier really do that, if they had to?

So far, it looked like the answer was no.

Lew stepped around the gate and began arguing with the first of the guards face-to-face. This got more and more heated, and looked like a volatile enough situation for Ed to stop when still a couple of cars away, and put his hand across Annie’s shoulders in that protective sort of way adults did sometimes.

“This might get bad,” he said.

Lew abruptly pushed past the corporal and sprinted down the Mount Hermon side of the bridge.

The second soldier, who had neither been shoved nor directly confronted, took aim and fired a warning shot above the head of the fleeing man, a clear indication that this time, they would not hold their fire, and the next shot would not miss its mark.

It was the closest Annie had ever been to gunfire. She ducked instinctively, and let out a little scream she was immediately embarrassed about.

Lew was surprised too, and stopped in his tracks, but not entirely because of the gunshot. He stopped because of what happened to the bullet that missed him.

They all heard it, even over the horns. It was the sound described by the sheriff of Sorrow Falls three years earlier, when he fired a handgun at the spaceship: a deep THUD that resonated with the bottom of the stomach and caused knees to buckle.

“The ship’s barrier expanded,” Ed said. “That was what that feeling was.”

“You’re saying the only thing between us and getting out of Sorrow Falls is a few feet of depressing thoughts?” Annie asked.

“Maybe?”

Lew Stempel decided to continue running, perhaps reasonably concluding that at a certain point the army’s bullets wouldn’t be able to reach him.

Unfortunately for him, the nature of the defensive barrier changed. Instead of slowing down, becoming sad, and reversing course, Mr. Stempel reached a point where he could no longer move. It was like he was stuck in an invisible membrane, as perhaps he was. That membrane was flexible, like an elastic band, and also like an elastic band it didn’t store energy for long.

Lew shot backwards. He was airborne for the first ten feet, and then rolled another five or six before bouncing to a stop.

Ed looked at Annie.

“Back to the car,” he said. “Before we’re trapped on this bridge.”

I
t was
to Oona and Laura’s immense credit that the trailer, which hadn’t moved in over a year, started up immediately. There was gas in the tank, the engine was clean and the fluids filled, and the tires were fully inflated. This was as much a part of their monthly maintenance cycle as gun-cleaning, toilet-cleaning, and bullet-making.

At the same time, they’d been parked for so long, the idea of driving away was as odd to them as it would be if this were a real fortress instead of a tricked-out family camper.

“All right, she’s started,” Oona said from the driver’s seat. It took ten minutes just to dig out the seat, which had been storing dirty laundry and unused Mason jars.

“Start driving,” Sam suggested from the passenger seat.

“Where, and how?”

There was a sea of zombies in front of the vehicle. Half of them were ignoring the camper and walking downhill, but that didn’t mean they weren’t in the way.

“We can head to Main, maybe see what they’re so interested in down there. If we don’t like it, it’s just a quick right over the bridge and out of town.”

“Thought you said the soldiers were buttoning up.”

“This thing’s bullet-proof, isn’t it?”

She laughed. “Most of it is. Windshield’s not. Too expensive. We didn’t plan to drive into gunfire, to be honest. Thought you were all about staying at your post.”

“I was. But now I’m thinking it would be best if someone made it out of here to report on what’s going on
in
here. I don’t think signals are making it out.”

“Plus you want to live through the night.”

“I had that thought.”

“So how do you want to get rid of all them?”

“I can start shooting at their feet, I guess. If I need to. They have a self-preservation instinct or they wouldn’t freeze at the sound of a gunshot, so if you start rolling they may get out of your way.”

Once they started moving, the zombies intent on tipping the trailer either lost interest or were engaged in extremely slow pursuit; it was basically impossible to tell the difference. Sam took up a position on the roof, using his own M16 to warn off any zombies about to wander into the path of the trailer, while Oona drove. Laura helped Sam using a rifle of her own. She wasn’t properly trained on its use, exactly, so Sam had to spend a few minutes discussing the finer points of suppression and crowd-control fire.

It was slow going initially, with a lot of bumping to convince people to get out of the way, but it eventually worked well enough to get the trailer out of the dirt and onto the road.

“Hey, did you guys get a chance to analyze any of this?” Dobbs asked. He was inexperienced with guns and showed no interest in learning, so while Sam and Laura patrolled the roof, Dobbs sat down with the electronics to see what was what.

“Oona will shoot you in the face if you touch any of that,” Laura said.

“Nah she won’t. This is pretty cool, what you’ve got going on here. These archives? How come you never shared any of this?”

Laura looked over his shoulder.

“These are under password, how the hell did you get in?”

“She left it open, I swear.”

“I repeat, she’ll shoot you when she finds out.”

“Aw, c’mon, Laura, the world’s already ending, this is no time to be guarding secrets.”

Laura sighed and went back to her position at the edge of the roof.

“You guys captured a new audio signal before we started driving, did you know?” Dobbs asked.

“No. Play it.”

He tapped a few commands, and the audio file played over the speakers.

“That’s someone breathing,” Sam said.

“We’ve been getting that for a month,” Laura said. “It’s too constant to be a person, though.”

“Are you sure?” Sam asked. “Some of the guys were sleeping behind the ship at night. Not me, but some of the guys.”

“Unless one of them was asleep for the entire month, it’s not that.”

The breathing accelerated drastically, and got louder. It sounded like the wind of a man in a sprint.

“Well that’s new,” she said.

“If that was really coming from the ship, I’m sure we would have known about it,” Sam said.

Dobbs laughed. “You think they’d tell you?”

“I think if the spaceship started breathing, yes, someone would tip us off.”

“But it’s not the ship… oh, hah! That’s brilliant.”

“What?” Laura asked.

“You know, I bet the government’s scientists never even heard this. You met with that guy, right? Annie’s friend, the guy
writing an article
?”

He put the last words in air quotes to point out how little he believed this.

“We did, yes.”

“Did you show him this? What did he think?”

“I don’t think he took it seriously.”

“But it was news to him, wasn’t it?”

“I think it was.”

“Betcha the government’s audio sensors had a filter in place. Something that excluded known sources of sound. It’d be the right choice if you want to pick up a small sound hiding beneath the crickets and the traffic and all that. The better the program the worse it would be for them.”

“That makes sense,” Laura said. “The ship listened to the sounds in the field, and then when it needed to do something that made a noise it mimicked the native sounds. The government filtered it out because it thought it was manmade.”

“Why did it need to make a noise?” Sam asked.

“That’s the best part,” Dobbs said. “If this timeline is correct, I’m pretty sure you guys captured the zombie communications channel.”

T
he car was blocked
from behind by the time they reached it, but there was room to conduct a three-point turn using the left lane, which wasn’t yet full of cars driven by people thinking they could escape the presumption of carnage only a zombie apocalypse can deliver.

The road leading off the bridge was about as narrow as the bridge itself, but only went about a two hundred feet before connecting with Main. Annie wasn’t sure where Ed intended to take her next. There were plenty of other ways out of Sorrow Falls that didn’t involve bridges, and more than a few that also didn’t involve army checkpoints, but if what they just saw held true in all direction, they were stuck within a containment field being maintained by the spaceship itself. If that were the case, there wasn’t going to be any place he could take Annie safely. Half the town was zombies (the
sleepwalker
thing just wasn’t going to stick) and she saw no reason to expect them to stop until they had what they wanted.

Or, in this case,
who
they wanted.

The zombies, last seen amassing at the clinic, had adjusted their route and were heading down the street toward the bridge, and there was no real explanation for why they were doing that other than that Annie had moved from the clinic to the bridge, and they wanted Annie. Or Ed, theoretically, since he was with her at both locations. It seemed unlikely, but the possibility existed.

“How did they find us so quickly?” she asked.

“Don’t know, but I’m not happy about it.”

They were closing off the end of the road.

“You may have to plow through a few zombies if you want to get us out of here,” Annie said.

“Maybe not.”

He gunned the engine right up to the edge of the horde, and then slowed abruptly, nearly to a complete stop. The people in front of him showed no predilection for getting out of his way when it looked like he was going to barrel through them, and were no less willing to step aside when he slowed.

“Duck down,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Just do it!”

She slid down until her head wasn’t visible through the window.

Ed started rolling the car forward at a pace no faster than five miles an hour. She could hear the front of the car brushing up against people. It sounded like they were going through a dry car wash.

“If I can just… nudge them…”

The car kept rolling. Every now and then it would slow until he surged the engine to get a little more power behind it, and then the stubborn obstacle before him either gave way or fell over.

“Is it working?”

“I think so. We’re almost to Main… uh-oh.”

He was looking in the rearview mirror.

“What is it?”

“They stopped walking to the bridge. They’re circling back.”

“Back to where?”

The rear windshield shattered from a heavy blow. It didn’t explode in pieces, because car glass was good like that. Instead, it fell down into the back seat as a single sheet.

Annie screamed.

“Dammit,” Ed muttered. Then he punched it.

The engine screamed, and the car lurched forward, then up, then forward again. Annie was practically on the floor of the car, and could feel every bump and thud through the undercarriage. Without question, they were running over people.

Meanwhile, someone was trying to crawl into the car through the space left by the shattered rear window. It was a woman Annie didn’t recognize, clinging onto the side of the opening and bleeding from the pieces of glass stuck in the frame. She was probably on the lower side of her forties, this woman. Maybe she was a mother of one of the younger kids in town. She could be someone who liked antiquing, and ice cream, and Sunday choir. Now she was running the risk of losing a finger as her vacant eyes searched the car for Annie.

Ed hit a rough patch in the road and started to fishtail. Annie could feel them losing control.

“Slow down before we end up in the river,” Annie shouted.

“You are…” the woman in the window said.

“If I slow down we’re stuck. I’m… dragging at least three people. Hold on tight.”

“To what?”

“Um, okay, sit up, get your seat belt on.”

She pulled herself back up into the bucket seat and strapped in. The woman clinging to the rear appreciated this, clearly, as she started saying “you are” even louder.

The hood of the car had a passenger too, a confused looking young man Annie recognized as a customer of the diner. His expression seemed to indicate that he had no more idea than anyone else why he was riding the outside of a moving car.