The Spaceship Next Door (35 page)

A
nnie had never been
to Washington D.C. before.

The only other time the opportunity presented itself was a class trip to the capitol that was canceled last-minute because half the grade came down with the flu at the same time. It was the same year the ship landed anyway, so there was a lot less interest locally in going to see the White House and the Smithsonian when a much more interesting thing was happening on the town’s front lawn.

She remembered that year pretty well, not just because of the ship. That was the year everyone on the planet—it seemed—passed through town, and when she learned that being famous didn’t preclude anybody from being a total nutbar. The cancellation of the annual D.C. class trip seemed like a formality.

So far, she hadn’t had a chance to see anything up close. It was easy enough to spot important landmarks from the back of the SUV—the Washington Monument, Congress’s gold dome, the Lincoln Memorial—but it was all in passing, and largely ignored by everyone else in the car. She wondered what it must be like to live around things other people considered extraordinary. Then she remembered she was from Sorrow Falls.

She could see the tip of the Monument from the window. She was in a corner room on the top floor of an unassuming, square building that looked a lot like several other such buildings in the district. She had no idea what the name of the building was—if it even had one—or which government agency it belonged to.

It was a little alarming. Nobody would tell her precisely where she was going from day to day, only that they would
like it very much
if she came with them. It had been like this since the morning after. That was four days prior, but felt like it was months ago.

Incredibly, since her initial interview, conducted in the field in front of the ship by an army officer and consisting of only five questions—
are you all right
,
are you sure, can you step over here please, can we ask you a few questions
, and
are you Annie Collins
—nobody questioned her. Once she answered the fifth question with an affirmation she was politely escorted to the back of a Jeep and had been on the move ever since. She guessed this was standard protocol for sixteen-year olds who call the president in the war room.

Only one other question was asked since. That was,
can you write down everything that happened to you on the night of the ship, in your own words?
She’d done that. Nothing was sent back with notes or feedback, or even a smiley face sticker like the one Mrs. Winston in English put on the essays she liked.

It probably should have been a little intimidating. She didn’t feel intimidated, though. She’d had no contact with anyone from the media, but they hadn’t taken television away from her—that would probably, at some point, require that they decide to call her a prisoner instead of a guest—so she was well aware that her name came up quite a lot in the national discussion. Her friends from the trailer, plus Dill and Dougie, had clearly already been spoken to and released back into the wild, as they were all over the news. All except for two of them.

The door on the other end of the room opened.

“Ed!” Annie shouted. She stepped around the table and gave him a long hug. Then she punched him in the shoulder. “Where the
hell
have you been?”

“Sorry, I’m sorry, it’s been crazy.” He released her, stepped back and took a good look. “They’re treating you all right? Looks like they took you shopping.”

“Yes! I can’t go to the Smithsonian, but the mall? That they can do for me. I think the girls in the Gap thought I was some head-of-state’s daughter. It was awesome. The hotel, too. But look at you, you look as tired than the last time I saw you.”

“Fewer bruises, though, I hope.”

“Yes.”

“Like I said, it’s been crazy. Look, has anyone talked to you about…”

He stopped himself when the door reopened, admitting an army officer in full dress.

“Ms. Collins? Hello, I’m Major Corcoran.” His introduction came with a firm handshake. He had a cold hand and a dry grip.

He dropped a shoulder bag onto the table and took a seat on one side of it, then extracted a tape recorder and a stack of folders. These he arranged on the table in a way that implied there was an exactly correct place for them. Then he took out a new pad of paper—white, standard size, lined—and a pen. They had places as well. Finally, he looked up at the two other people in the room, as if they only just arrived and he’d been there the whole time.

“Please, sit.”

He turned the tape recorder on as they took his suggestion.

“This is Major Donald Corcoran, in an interview with Ms. Annette Collins. Also in attendance is Mr. Edgar Somerville, who has already provided independent testimony.”

Ed looked at her. “Annette?”

“Literally my first words were, ‘never call me Annette.’ They must have looked at the first draft of my birth certificate.”

“Mr. Somerville, for the record, I have an objection to your presence in this interview.”

“I’m aware of that, major. I’m also Annie’s legal guardian, and she’s a minor. I believe we had this argument already.”

“So we did; I wanted it on record.”

“You guys have been fighting over me?” Annie asked.

“Ms. Collins, in the past four days you have been the subject of very nearly every conversation Mr. Somerville and I have been a part of, as have a significant number of other people.”

Major Corcoran spoke as if his words were as starched and ironed as his shirt.

“Well that’s cool. Every girl’s dream.”

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. She noted a lack of comfort on his part with informality. “I’m going to walk through the events as we understand them, and ask that you fill in details whenever you can.”

“All right.”

He opened the first folder, and examined the top page for several seconds before speaking, as if what was on there was a prepared speech.

“According to statements made by Corporal Louboutin and a Mr. Douglas Kozinsky… private citizen… at some time around two in the morning on the night in question, you approached the anomaly, asked to be admitted, and went inside.”

“Can’t you just call it the spaceship?”

“The spaceship, then. Is that right?”

“Yeah but, you knew that. The major on the scene, in the Jeep…”

“We’ll get to that.”

“Okay.” She rolled her eyes at Ed, who smiled.

“You asked to be admitted,” Corcoran repeated. “Is that accurate?”

“More or less.”

“What did you say?”

“Open sesame. I’m surprised you guys never tried that.”

“Ms. Collins, these are important questions. What exactly did you say?”

“I said, ‘I am her’.”

Corcoran leaned forward and made a lengthy note on one of his clean pads of paper.

“That was in my statement too,” Annie said.

He held up a finger to indicate he was still writing, and evidently couldn’t do more than one thing at a time.

“Yes it was,” he agreed, putting his pen down. “All right. You went inside. According to your own statement it was…” he searched for the right folder, opened it, and read, “…blue.”

“Yep. Very blue.”

“Could you provide any more detail?”

“Um… baby blue, I guess. Not quite a cerulean. Almost a pastel.”

Ed put his hand on her arm.

“One second, major,” he said. He nodded his head, and they turned their chairs around, away from the recorder. A good one would still pick up most of their conversation, but Ed didn’t appear to have the kind of authority necessary to insist it be shut off.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t want to scare you, but if you want to go home again, you need to start taking this seriously.”

“Home again
at all
?”

“Like I said, I don’t want to scare you.”

“Despite which, you’re going to say something terrifying, sure. Ed, you worry too much. I have this covered.”

“Annie…”

“Trust me.”

She turned her chair back around.

“Sorry,” she said to the major. “Ed thinks I need to give you a better answer, so I’ll try. It was blue and fuzzy. There wasn’t any visible technology, and as much as I was sitting in a chair inside a chamber, the spaceship was an unmanned probe that wasn’t built to carry and sustain biological life forms. It created the chamber to accommodate me. So, blue, fuzzy and comfortable, I guess. Especially once the ship added air conditioning.”

“According to your statement, you spoke to an alien, explained to him he was in the wrong place, and suggested he look elsewhere. He was…” He read to quote verbatim again, “…really cool about the whole thing.”

“Yeah, he just needed directions.”

“You were in the ship for over three hours.”

“He needed a
lot
of directions.”

“And those directions required him to enter lower orbit?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do, Ms. Collins. That’s where the ship is now.”

Annie wanted to add that
so much more
happened in those three hours, beyond even the parts she wasn’t telling Major Corcoran. There was the part where Ed and Violet hijacked the zombie network and made everyone go to sleep, and the part where everyone who wasn’t dead already woke up at sunrise fully healed of whatever wounds they’d incurred overnight.

That was easily the coolest trick anyone pulled, but nobody was talking about it because the rest of the story was that over 200 people died over the course of the evening, and when the survivors awoke there was a literal scramble to get everyone protein before they collapsed or began
actually
eating brains or whatever else they could get their hands on.

Annie told the president to send pizza, but on that he didn’t listen. Fortunately, he paid attention to everything else she told him.

“I understand,” Annie said. “You’re a little confused, see, the alien isn’t on the ship any more. The ship is just a probe, he showed up later. Like, what, a month ago?”

“I can pinpoint the date,” Ed said. “If you need it, major.”

“I’m not confused, Ms. Collins. I’m dubious. A non-corporeal super-intelligent electrical space ghost inhabited a weapon with world-destroying capabilities until you knocked on the door and told him to go away, and then he did. This is what I’m dealing with. You can imagine how unhappy that story has people on my side of the table.”

She gasped.

“
Space ghost?
That’s an awesome description! Ed, did you think of that?”

“Annie…”

“I know, take it seriously.”

“It’s
very
serious,” the major said. “All we have to go on is your word that there’s no alien intelligence remaining in the ship. It manifested as a hostile, and now it’s in low orbit.”

“Right, but I don’t know how else to help you, major. I mean, if you want to try nuking it
now
, I guess you can. It won’t do anything, and I have no idea what that would do to the upper atmosphere, but sure. Ed, what would happen if a nuclear blast, like,
bounced
off an object in low orbit? Wouldn’t all that force directed back toward the planet kind of suck for the planet?”

“If there’s a hostile entity in that ship,” Corcoran said, “we need to know.”

“There isn’t. Can I go home now?”

“We need more than your word.”

“I don’t really think you do.”

Major Corcoran was the kind of person who needed glasses, Annie decided. He needed them for moments like this, so he could remove them dramatically and rub the bridge of his nose, or throw them on the pile of papers and sigh deeply. He could even chew one of the earpieces and point across the table with them. The possibilities were endless.

He didn’t have glasses, though, so his expressions of impatient exasperation were so much less than they could have been. He could sigh, and rub his chin, but that was about all. Perhaps the military drummed the more interesting displays out of him already.

“Ms. Collins,” he said, “if this statement and these answers are all you have to offer, it may be a
long
time before you get to go home. I’m speaking now for the people above me, not myself. I would be happy to let you get on with your life, but if you think the government isn’t going to find a way to detain you solely because of your age or your current celebrity status, you’re mistaken. Right now there’s an entire team of scientists waiting to perform medical tests on you, and that’s not even to satisfy a security concern. I’m the only thing standing between you and a long, uncomfortable existence as a
de facto
prisoner of the state. I need you to stop treating me like an enemy and start being more cooperative.”

Annie laughed.

“Oh, come on.”

“Annie, he’s serious,” Ed said. He looked pale and worried. It was cute.

“Look, Ed, he’s either bluffing or he’s an idiot, and I don’t think he’s an idiot.”

“Well, this interview is over,” Corcoran said, addressing Ed. He reached for the tape recorder.

“Hold on, hold on,” Annie said. “Keep that running. Ed, here’s what the major isn’t telling you… unless he doesn’t know either and the people pulling his chain sent him in here without all the information he needed. Doesn’t matter. I’m guessing someone who listens to this tape knows, anyway. Two days ago, a message showed up in a place where a message shouldn’t show up, on a computer nobody is supposed to know about. I’m going to keep on giving the major the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s bluffing and knows about that message.”

At that point, the major did turn off the tape recorder.

“Yes, I know about the message.”

“Go on. For Ed: what did it say?”

“It said…” he cleared his throat, as if these were perhaps the most difficult words ever. “It said ‘Annie Collins was here’.”

“Which is
funny
because I wasn’t
there
when that happened, I was in a hotel a few blocks from here, having all my standard electronic communications monitored. I mean, I’m assuming that’s true, you guys aren’t that stupid.”