The Spaceship Next Door (30 page)

The others hadn’t drifted far from the camper.

“Hey, government,” Oona said from the roof. “I’m not saying you’re right or wrong about being safe here, but all our instruments are going nuts. Where the hell are we?”

“Nuts how?” Ed asked.

Dobbs popped up. He and Oona were evidently working together on her electronics array, which was an improvement over any other time in the evening, from what Ed had been told.

“Like we’re on a slab of magnetized iron, or a ley line,” Dobbs said.

“Ley lines aren’t real, you idiot,” Oona said.

“That’s under dispute.”

“No it’s
not
. You gonna read auras next? C’mon.”

“Any zombies, though?” Ed asked.

Sam stood up. He had binoculars in his hands. “No sign that I can see. I was going to do a recon.”

“Don’t bother, Sam,” Violet said. “There aren’t any out there.”

“I’d like to be sure…”

“Violet.”

“Violet, right. Have we met?”

“A couple of times. I’m a friend of Annie’s.”

“The compass just spins,” Dobbs said. He held one up to illustrate his point.

“I’m sorry,” Violet said. “That’s my fault. It’s the capsule.”

“What capsule? And who are you again?”

“I’m Violet, Dobbs. This is my house. We’ve met.”

“Sorry, don’t remember.”

“It’s okay.”

“What capsule are you talking about?”

“The one under the house. It’s protecting us right now. It’s why you, Oona, needed Ed to tell you where to turn off the road, and why the zombies can’t find us, and why all of your equipment thinks it’s half a mile west of where it actually is, and why the compass thinks true north is down.”

“Jesus,” Oona said. She pulled her pistol and aimed it at Violet. “She’s an alien, isn’t she, Edgar?”

“Hold it, hold it. Calm down.” Ed stepped in front of Violet, which was just a bad idea, but he didn’t have any good ones. “Look, we have a lot to do and not a lot of time. Dobbs, you found the frequency the zombies were communicating on, right?”

“Yeah, but… dude, is she really an alien?”

“Focus, Dobbs.”

“I did, but I can’t translate it.”

“I may be able to,” Violet said.

“Right now, everyone out there is looking for someone,” Ed said, “and the only way to make this end is to convince them they’re looking in the wrong place.”

“So, you want to send the zombies to where, Oakdale?” Dobbs asked.

“I mean wrong planet, not wrong town.”

“I think you should get out of the way,” Oona said.

“Oona, you’re not going to shoot a little girl. We need her help.”

The barrel quavered. “Aaahhh,” she said, disgusted either with Ed or herself. She holstered the gun.

“The tech we need to leverage is in the root cellar,” Violet said. “You’re all welcome to come down and have a look.”

Laura came from inside the camper.

“That doesn’t sound at all inviting,” she said. “But sure, I’ll go.”

“You’re serious, there’s an alien ship in the basement?” Dobbs said. “Can we touch it?”

“Yes, I’ll disable the defenses.”

“Hot damn, I’m in.”

“Laura, can you get Annie?” Ed said. “I think she should see this too.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s inside, right?”

“No? No, she was in the house with you.”

“She went out the back,” Ed said. “I just figured she came around here.”

“She must still be back there,” Violet said. “Hang on.”

“Sam, can you see her from up there?”

“No, but it’s dark. But where could she have gone? I mean, this is the only place she’s safe.”

Violet stiffened. “Oh no.”

“What is it?”

“I just sent Todd in back to check. Annie’s bike is gone.”

A
nnie was flying
.

That was the thing nobody seemed to understand when asking about the bike. Under certain conditions, it was the closest she would ever get to actually taking flight. This was true even though she could feel every bump in the road, and even when she had to keep pedaling to maintain the takeoff speed.

It was dark, and Violet’s road was made of packed dirt that was still damp from the rainfall, on top of which there were potholes from natural erosion, so riding down it at twenty miles an hour on a bike, without a helmet, was pretty reckless. Annie didn’t particularly care, though. She had a headlight to help identify the dips—she knew where a lot of them were already, as this was hardly her first trip along the road—and she was a nimble and experienced cyclist. And as long as she was on the bike and riding as fast as she could, all the zombies and aliens and everything else that had taken up residence in her head were gone.

She just didn’t know where she was going.

After exiting Violet’s kitchen, she wandered out the back of the house and saw her bike sitting there, and without really thinking she began checking the tires and the gears the way she would if she were preparing for a trip. Then she just decided that was what was happening: she was going on a trip.
Where
was still up to debate.

Any trip would require getting past the camper undetected, though, because surely nobody there would understand, so she committed to a long loop around the front of the house, through the woods she caught Todd wandering around in. By the time that loop was completed she was at the elbow in the dirt road and out of Sam’s rooftop view, and there was nothing between her and the rest of the world but open road. So she turned her light on and started pedaling.

It was glorious. The entire day just vanished into the humid late August nighttime air, and for about five minutes Annie was a sixteen-year old girl with regular old sixteen-year old girl problems that didn’t include extra-dimensional thought monsters.

Then she reached Liberty Road.

There were zombies all over Liberty, because of course there were. Violet’s alien mojo reached the end of the dirt road, so that was where the trail went cold. A whole bunch of sleepwalking townspeople were meandering aimlessly while whatever was controlling them tried to understand information that suggested Annie was assumed directly into heaven at around that spot.

The smart thing to do, as soon as she realized what she was heading into, was to turn around and escape back into Vi’s protective bubble. But for that moment, Annie liked less what was behind her than what was in front. Plus, the zombies were kind of well-spaced—much better than the shoulder-to-shoulder maneuvers she’s seen on Main Street—which made it seem like just another entertaining challenge for Annie and her cyclocross bike.

They’re just slow-moving pedestrians,
she thought.

She hit Liberty at speed, and committed to a tight right turn that pointed her uphill and in the direction of her house. This made a lot of sense, because she knew the zombie population only got denser the further downhill (toward Main) she traveled, but that didn’t mean it was a logic-driven decision, or even a decision at all. She just started heading that way.

She wasn’t heading home, but that was also not an actively made decision, it was just what she knew she was doing.

T
he bike was
a gift for her fourteenth birthday, and was the only expensive thing she owned. At first it was just a thing she used now and then, but once it was clear her mother wasn’t going to be up to driving her down the hill
all
the time, it became indispensible.

Even in winter. It was only five miles to the school from Annie’s front door, but it was a ferocious five miles when there was snow on the ground, regardless of the vehicle. However, it turned out there were only a handful of occasions in which there was A: snow on the roads, and B: not-canceled classes. Generally speaking, the roads were cleaned up pretty fast, partly because the army insisted on the state prioritizing the roads in Sorrow Falls when it came time to plow.

Annie fell in love with the cyclocross bike as soon as she saw it. Her father had to take her all the way to Brattleboro to find a decent shop, and the place was full of light carbon three speed bikes designed specifically for short-travel commuting and priced to encourage people to get them. Annie wasn’t interested. Whether because she’d already been riding the streets on the out-of-a-box Schwinn she was now too big for and understood the kind of conditions she had to deal with, or she was instinctively drawn to the sturdy one-of-a-kind machine in the corner, she knew right away that this one was for her.

The bike was pale yellow, aluminum but with a carbon fork. Heavier than the full carbons, it
felt
like something solid and dependable. Not quite a dirt bike and not exactly a touring bike either, it was designed for a sport where competitors threw themselves down hills on their bike and ran up other hills with the bike on their back.

People tended to look twice when they saw her on it. The A-frame design was flattened and stretched, so riding on it meant always being in a forward position. This lowered the center of gravity, kept her out of the wind and made it easier to corner and maneuver in tight spots, but also made climbing hills a lot more difficult. It also probably looked a little odd.

A
t first
, Annie tore past the zombies like they were standing still, because they almost were. It was a little harder than with regular pedestrians because normal people moved with intent in one direction and these guys were kind of drifting, but they were far enough apart for this to not be an impossible problem. It was just a new challenge. She enjoyed it perhaps more than was appropriate under the circumstances.

It only became clear how foolhardy she was being after about a mile of travel. That was when the zombies ahead of her started organizing, and focusing less on trying to grab her as she went by than on closing off her available routes of travel. It stopped being so much fun then, especially after she nearly ran over a seven-year old girl.

Annie knew the child, sort of. She didn’t know the girl’s name, but she’d spotted her in the library a couple of times. Seeing her out at two in the morning, in her pajamas, stumbling around with the others and trying to catch Annie—or whatever their intentions were—was like a punch in the stomach. It was enough to remind Annie that her two A.M. bike ride wasn’t putting just her at risk.

She decided to go over the shoulderless left side of the road. If the bike was meant to be thrown down hills, perhaps it was time to try it out on one.

Liberty, Patience, and Spaceship Road—and Annie’s own street, a small spit of connective tissue between Liberty and Patience called Calabash Way—encircled a large land area consisting of private roads and farmlands. The properties belonged to six different families. From her bedroom window, which was on the top floor of a house already at the top of a hill, she could see the checkerboard effect of their vegetable crops, smell the fertilizer, and hear the cows lowing on warm afternoons.

From a distance, the farmland looked flat. Annie didn’t realize exactly how incorrect this was until she hit the first field off the roadside. The downhill wasn’t all that bad. She nearly went over the handlebars thanks to a couple of ditches, but neither was deep enough to completely eat her front wheel, so she made it out. But once the area flattened into what should have been easy travel, it became much worse.

The soil was loose and muddy, and either terribly uneven or full of rows that stuck up like train tracks. Travel felt like one of those dreams where she was trying to run but couldn’t move her legs fast enough to get anywhere, unless she was getting thrown from the bike in which case it felt like one of those dreams where she was falling off a cliff.

She got thrown three times, thankfully to a soft landing each time. This was hardly guaranteed, as the fields had their share of sharp protrusions just waiting for someone to get impaled.

The good news was, the terrain slowed the zombies down too. She was going ten miles an hour or less depending on the size of the plants in her way, but the uneven surface was causing a lot of comic stumbling and falling behind her.

The bad news was, this detour was only a temporary solution. Since there were roads on all sides of the fields, and the zombies were all along those roads, she’d basically put herself in a position to be closed in on from all sides. Her hope was to punch through to the other side while there was still a gap to hit.

That was a solid plan right up until she hit Mac Tunney’s cornfield.

It wasn’t the field itself that was the problem. Actually, it was the smoothest ride she’d experienced up to that point. The rows were neat and wide and the ground between them was level and a lot more solid than she had a reason to expect. But the rows didn’t head in the direction she wanted to go, and it was impossible to ride against the grain in a cornfield in August. The stalks were too high.

She had to stop five or six times to push diagonally through the rows before continuing the ride. This was a little terrifying, because off the bike she couldn’t see over the stalks, and she knew there were people out there closing in on her. She could hear them.

Then she got the flat.

It wasn’t easy to poke a hole through one of her tires. There was a thick layer of Kevlar between the tread and the inner tube that could redirect everything short of a nail driven dead straight through the middle. For that to happen, she either had to run over a nail positioned on the ground just so, or someone had to go after her tire with a hammer and a nail.

For whatever reason, there was a stray nail in farmer Tunney’s field. Maybe it fell from one of the combines or out of a hardware kit, or maybe the universe hated her personally. Somehow, in a two-acre field of corn, her rear tire found that nail.

She felt it right away, and knew exactly what it was, and kept riding anyway. One of the things about hitting a nail was that you could keep going for a little while so long as you didn’t pull the nail out. It plugged the hole it made.

The seal was weak, though, so air escaped around it pretty quickly. She made it probably an extra quarter-mile on her dying tire, and then another forty feet on the flat before giving up. It just wasn’t possible to continue; the rear wheel couldn’t give her any traction at all, and her maneuverability was gone.

It was better at that point to continue on foot. Although
better
was a relative term. It was faster than the bike in its current state, but not much faster. And she was taller on the bike. She could see Calabash, and her bedroom window, on her right, and used that to help maintain the correct orientation, but there was no avoiding the zombies any longer. If they came up from the left or right, she wouldn’t know until they had her.

Maybe that’s okay
, she thought.
Maybe I should just let them catch me.

A
fter only ten
minutes of running, Annie was too winded to continue. She felt like this was something she should have been embarrassed about, until she remembered how late it was and how much of the past twelve hours she’d spent fleeing. Perhaps simply running was easier on her head, because it kept her mind from dwelling on all horrors great and small, but it was hell on her legs and lungs. She had scratches all over those legs—she was in shorts—and her lungs didn’t seem to know how to get enough oxygen any more. Her heart was racing at an alarming pace; she could feel it thumping all the way up her shoulder and along her left arm.

So she stopped, and listened. And determined two things.

First, they were all around her. She could hear corn stalks rustling in every direction. There was hardly any wind so it couldn’t have been anything else.

Second, something big was coming. Something with an engine.

It wasn’t on the road; that was obvious from the bumping and crunching sounds. Somebody was driving something through the corn stalks. Since as far as she knew, zombies didn’t drive cars, she headed toward that noise.

She got close enough to see the headlights bouncing in her approximate direction (as opposed to tail lights heading away from her) when a hand grabbed her ankle.

The dirt came up fast, swatting her in the side of her face and knocking her a little loopy. It was a second before she understood that the ground was where it had always been, she’d just fallen onto it. Her head was next to a big rock that would have probably cracked her skull if she’d fallen a little to the right.

She picked the rock up in her fist and rolled onto her back.

An old woman had her ankle. She kicked loose, then threw the rock at the woman’s face before she had to hear another iteration of
arrre yooooou
. As the lady fell backwards, Annie climbed to her knees and then her feet, and then stopped, because a much larger person was now blocking her route.

She’d never seen him before, but he was enormous. He looked like the kind of zombie a rock to the face would only slightly inconvenience.

Then she heard the car again.

“I’M OVER HERE!” she shouted. “HELP ME!”

There was shuffling in the row behind her, and rusting to her left and right.

Nowhere to go
.

The engine’s roar was the first indication that all was not lost. The headlights were the second. Then the army Humvee exploded onto the scene with the kind of cinematic drama one just didn’t see all that often around Sorrow Falls. The front fender connected with the huge zombie barring her path and sent him flying, and then skidded to a stop with the back door aligned with the cornrow. The door flew open. Annie half expected to hear an orchestral swell.

“Get in, girl,” the driver said. It was an army guy; she thought she knew him. “Hurry up!”