The Spaceship Next Door (31 page)

She ran. It was only twenty feet but she could hear them closing in on her so it was a terrifying twenty feet. She dove into the back seat and landed squarely on top of Doug Kozinsky.

“Dougie??”

“Hey Annie,” he said.

She pushed off him and reached back to close the door as the driver floored it.

“Pickles, right?” she said.

“Corporal Dill Louboutin at your service.”

“How’d you guys even
find
me?”

The Humvee fishtailed a little, trying to execute a turn to get back up onto the road, so Dill had to concentrate for a few seconds. Annie peeked behind them. The field was crawling with zombies. It was a wonder they hadn’t gotten her.

“You can thank your boyfriend there,” Dill said.

“I’m not… Sorry, I’ve been telling him…” Even in the dark, she knew Dougie was blushing.

“I broke out of the base with a gun to my head,” Dill said, “so this young man could ride off to your rescue instead of just getting the hell out of town like any sane person. We drove to your house, but nobody was home. Looked like you’re missing some floor in that place, too. Dunno if the zombies did that or what, but… well, then we spotted the bike light from the porch. It seemed clear there were a number of zombie folks interested in converging on a moving target in the middle of the field. Mr. Kozinsky imputed that this moving target was you, and we’re both a little surprised he was right.”

“I recognized your bike,” Dougie said.

“From up the hill?” Dill asked. “It wasn’t anything more than a light.”

“Yeah but I
knew
.”

“Well thank you, both of you,” she said. “They almost had me.”

The Humvee made it out of the corn. Rather than crest the road—it was steep from that angle—Dill kept to a route on the space between the lip of the street and the edge of the field.

“So what did they want you for?” Dill asked.

“I think they want to take me to the ship.”

“Oh. How come?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Okay. Well I’m gonna hook up with the road up here and do everything I can to get you two kids out of town, all right?”

“There
is
no out of town,” Annie said.

“What’s that mean?”

“Nobody can get in or out. We’re all trapped here.”

He laughed. It had a tinge of hysteria in it, like that was the piece of news that finally sent him over the edge.

“Well, all right, where do you want to go?”

“Can you take me to the spaceship?”

“I thought that’s what the zombies wanted to do.”

“It is.”

“But you’re going anyway.”

“Yes. I’d just rather do it under my own power. Less bruising that way.”

“Well, all right. I was on my way there after as it was. Plus these villager zombies ain’t trying to kill me like the army ones are. Should be fun.”

I
t wasn’t fun
.

Dill seemed to enjoy it all right. He’d reached a sort of dissonance over what he was doing, which was running over people. He was good at it. In a video game he’d be leveling up. In the real world, he was having a psychotic episode.

There were sick thuds and crunches, and the Humvee kept lifting off the ground unevenly, and she knew what each one of those sounds meant. She kept her eyes closed and tried to resist telling him to slow down and go around, because that was the wrong advice.

“It’s going to be okay, Annie,” Dougie said. He’d been clutching her hand since she landed on top of him, thinking perhaps that this was comforting. She didn’t find it comforting, but he probably did. Plus, he rescued her. That was worth at least a little handholding.

“There’s a lot going on you don’t understand, Doug. But thanks. I appreciate you thinking of me.”

“Of course.”

“So Dill, why were you going to the ship?” she asked.

“Seemed like the place to go,” he said. “Spaceship makes zombies, go to the ship to stop the zombies, right? Plus, my boy’s there.”

“Sam?”

“You know it. Woo, look out!”

He swerved into a guy in a polo shirt and knocked him sideways off the street.

“Ten points.”

“Sam’s not there,” Annie said. “I left him a little while ago.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“There are a lot of long stories, Pickles, I don’t have time to tell you any of them.”

“Yeah okay, but don’t call me that. So he’s all right?”

“He was when I left him.”

“That’s one thing I don’t have to worry about, then, girl, thanks. I didn’t want to run down my buddy. Glad he’s not one of these dead-eyes.”

“The soldier zombies are bad,” Dougie said. “We had to go through a lot of them to get off the base.”

“What were you even doing
on
the base?”

“Mom and dad are out here somewhere, so… Once I figured out what was going on I found dad’s revolver and snuck on. I do it all the time; they don’t even check the fences below the field grass. I saw something was up with the soldiers and thought, you know. I know you were there before.”

Annie realized he’d risked his life looking for her, and added it to the list of things she was already feeling bad about. It wasn’t as consequential as possibly triggering a zombie apocalypse that was slowly killing the town, but it was right up there.

“Comin’ up,” Dill said.

Annie took a look through the windshield. The grounds around the ship remained lit up by spotlights, but there wasn’t a lot to see. The campers looked abandoned, and there were hardly any zombies.

“Do you have a key to the gate?” Annie asked.

“No, but I can just… uh-oh.”

“What?”

The answer was coming up the hill. Army soldiers zombie-walking in something like a coordinated fashion, at a slightly faster clip than the civilian ones had exhibited. They were headed for the gates as well.

“Behind us too,” Dougie said, looking out the back window.

“They’re converging on the ship,” Dill said.

“To keep us out?” Dougie said. “Cuz we’re gonna beat them there.”

“Keep us out or keep us in,” Annie said. “Look, I don’t want you two to get hurt. If you want to drop me off, I can get in there on my own.”

“How are you going to get in?” Dill asked. “There’s barbed wire over the top, you know that. Why do you even want to
get
in?”

“To put a stop to all this, same as you.”

“Well that’s heroic, but you’re just a little girl. Now sit back and belt yourself in, I’m gonna get us through those gates.”

She leaned back, and buckled in, and hoped the car didn’t end up damaged enough so it couldn’t drive back out again, because they were going to be cornered otherwise.

With a loud
yahoo
that made Dill sound entirely too cliché, he reached the edge of the dirt in front of the gates and stomped on the gas. The Humvee reared up like a horse about to execute a monstrous leap, then rocketed forward.

The fence was never all that imposing. From the time it went up, it was clear the functional intent was to formalize the line behind which someone in an army uniform would shoot. It was never meant to repel an assault from a motorized vehicle. Conversely, the low-to-the-ground military Humvee was built to do exactly what it did to the fence.

They blew right through the gates. It did a little damage to the Humvee, but it was the kind of damage that only seemed important in a world without zombies. By the time they ground to a halt, they were fifteen feet inside the circumference.

“Now what?” Dill asked. “Have to admit, I didn’t think this far ahead. Should we shoot it or something?”

“I’ve thought this far ahead. You and Doug should turn around and get out of here.”

“I already said…”

“Then stay here. But the whole army base is on its way so you won’t have a lot of time to escape.”

She hopped out of the car and started toward the ship. She could hear lovesick Dougie shouting from the back seat, and Dill shouting from the front. Undead and unconscious men in fatigues were amassing at the hole they just made in the fence, and behind them an entire town was being driven in the same direction.

Enough was enough.

“HEY,” she shouted. “ANYBODY INSIDE? I AM HER.”

One of the ‘eyeball’ holes in the ship lit up—a half a million people on the Internet who had been arguing over the function of this particular recess for the past three years would have been thrilled to see it serve a function—and directed a light at her face.

She squinted, and waved, which seemed like the polite thing to do. Then came a hiss: beneath the eyeball the side of the ship was opening. It wasn’t a welcoming sort of opening, not in the way a ladder or a staircase might be considered an offer to enter: the side of the hull split, and two pieces flapped apart like a set of double-doors. A faint bluish light shone from inside.

It was impossible to tell what was inside the ship with all the light, but what was clear already was that nobody was going to be emerging from inside. There was no E.T. casting a shadow.

Annie looked back. The army soldiers had all stopped moving. Dougie was shouting something at her, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. It didn’t matter, anyway. There was only one direction to go.

She walked toward the light, and climbed inside the spaceship.

T
he best way to
describe what happened—upon the discovery that Annie had run off—was
coordinated panic
.

Sam had to be restrained, which was a challenge as there was nobody there physically capable of really restraining him. Ed estimated a half an hour passed from when Annie left the kitchen to when he discovered her absence, which was easily enough time to collect her bike, loop around the camper, and pedal down the road to a point beyond where it was safe to be without an adequate zombie defense, such as a large RV. Sam wanted to chase her down on foot, if need be.

Meanwhile, Dobbs had a million questions for Violet, but he was asking them so rapidly she didn’t have time to answer, and didn’t appear to have much of an inclination to either. She was too busy blaming herself for Annie having run off, which in Ed’s opinion was probably a bit justified. Oona, who was struggling with the question of whether or not shooting Violet constituted an intelligent choice, may have also been a distraction.

They were a team of capable individuals, one of whom was an apparently immortal alien being wearing the body of a young girl. They needed to decide what the matter at hand was, and come up with a plan to fix it.

“Violet,” Ed said, “can the technology keeping this house invisible travel?”

She looked at him without speaking, as she ran through the implications of the question. In their conversation, he’d become used to the sense of wrongness she gave off when not actively trying to behave like a sixteen year old. There was maturity in there that was not unlike the sort of imitative adultness Annie exhibited, except in Violet it was more extreme, and decidedly unnatural. It was what Ed felt meeting a vampire would be like.

Provided vampires were real, of course.

“It can,” she said. “But it also can’t. The act of travel would make it visible, like a bubble in water. We would be detected by the absence we would create.”

“My GPS puts me in another spot,” Dobbs said, “so why wouldn’t that keep working if we move?”

“The reason it works is this place hasn’t existed in any physical or electronic survey of the land since the country was born. You’d have driven past if Ed wasn’t navigating, and Ed would never have found it if Annie hadn’t showed him. But everything south of us has existed for some time.” She looked at Ed. “
He
would notice.”

“He who?” Oona asked. She was going between helping Laura keep Sam from bolting down the road and fingering the handle of a revolver tucked into her waistband.

“We can explain later,” Ed said. “Violet, what happens if a zombie wanders down the road?”

“Nothing, because that’s impossible.”

“Fine, pretend it isn’t impossible, what would happen?”

“The commands from the host would stop making sense. It would be similar to receiving driving directions from a GPS that thought you were in a different place, only a zombie wouldn’t have the presence of mind to recognize incorrect instructions. But it would only be temporary. The host would recognize the anomaly and we’d be detected.”

“Good enough. Dobbs, if we get near the ship, can you pick the signal up again?”

“I dunno, probably. I think their equipment can. Oona would know… it’s her stuff.”

“We can do it, but why?” she asked.

“Later. Violet? If it’s mobile, we need it. Oona, Laura does this thing have enough gas left to get us across town?”

“Yeah, barely,” Oona said.

Laura pointed to Violet’s family car. “We can drain that tank, maybe. It’s not a diesel rig.”

“Good idea.”

“So we’re going to get Annie now?” Sam asked.

“We’re going to the ship,” Ed said. “That’s where she’s going.”

“Why they hell would she be going there?”

“There’s no place else to go.”

“And if she’s not there?”

“One thing at a time, Sam.”

T
he light faded
to a soft blue that was just sufficient to allow Annie to differentiate between when her eyes were open and when they were closed. It came from no particular location and illuminated no details on the ship’s interior. There was something that could be construed as a video screen in front of her, except it wasn’t made of glass and had a depth to it that was absent in a standard television set. That she even thought of it as a screen suggested this information was coming from a font of experience that didn’t belong to her.

It felt a little like being on the inside of a chicken egg. And, like a chicken egg, it was fully enclosed.

“Hello?” Her voice came back with a metallic echo. “I’m going to need air.”

There was nothing in the way of a response… and then there was.

Images: vibrant, colorful, frightening images of collapsing stars and nebulae and black hole event horizons. There was light viewed from the perspective of a point in space, and a point in space from the perspective of a beam of light; a thing that looked like an amoeba pulsing in a sea of heavy gas; a hailstorm of aluminum riddling a carbon-dense planet; a civilization of squat humanoids developing tools on a huge planet with tremendous gravitational force; another civilization of light-limbed hermaphrodites dying in a conflagration on a planet that had previously never known fire.

“I don’t understand any of this,” Annie said.

A centipede-like creature the size of a commuter train roared expletives from a circular mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, at an airborne slug with gossamer wings. Annie could smell the ammonia-rich air and feel the rage of the giant centipede, and understand its anger. But she didn’t know what she was supposed to
do
with this understanding.

“Air. I’m going to suffocate.”

She was already running out, but whoever was operating this picture show couldn’t understand what she was saying. So instead, she started
thinking
about suffocation.

The centipede and the airborne slug began to choke, and then the picture changed to the humanoids on the gravitationally intense planet grabbing their throat areas and gasping. Then a human man appeared. He was a white human with light brown hair and a shiny white smile, in a blue polo shirt. The most generic rendition of the species imaginable—provided television was the source—this man appeared to have emerged directly from a toothpaste commercial, as perhaps he had.

Annie hoped he was a construct and not a real person who existed out in the world somewhere, because as she focused on him, he began to choke as well. He gasped and pawed at the generic room he stood inside of, clutching the back of the generic chair and stumbling over a generic cat to the generic floor. He twitched and screamed silently, and continued to do so until he stopped breathing.

“This shell… requires.”

The voice came from all around her, in the same way the faint blue light did. It wasn’t so much that there was no specific source; it was that whatever the source was, she was on the inside of it.

“Air,” she said.

“This shell requires atmosphere.”

“Yes.”

A new hiss sounded, an indication of a valve or pipe opening or unlatching or releasing, and then she could breathe again.

“Intake atmosphere exhaust waste.”

“Thank you, yes.”

Annie realized she’d arrived at this point with a certain number of preset expectations about this experience. The first was that there would be a presence in the spaceship, and the second was that this presence was Violet’s father. (Or, more exactly, “father”.) Given all she’d been told regarding how terrifying he was supposed to be, that she was not at that moment afraid meant either she had become very brave recently, or she was just too exhausted to be frightened.

Another assumption was that the alien she would be speaking to would have a deep, ominous-sounding voice. That expectation was colored by the movies, which were no doubt themselves influenced by humankind’s historic depiction of both authority figures in general and deities more specifically. Zeus on high, making sonorous declarations to cowering mortals at the foot of Mount Olympus, was always expected to speak in a voice as deep as thunder, and so on.

The voice she heard inside the ship was a man’s voice, certainly, but it wasn’t the kind of voice that commanded awe. It was the kind that was trying to sell her something. It was what she would expect the suffocated white man from the toothpaste commercial to sound like if he’d managed to get a word out.

At least he has a voice now
, she thought.

The picture show was interesting, except that it wasn’t really a picture show so much as an immersive experience. The longer it went on the more her other senses kicked in and she began
experiencing
what was happening instead of looking at it through a camera lens. These were memories, and they were being added to her mind. It was a peculiar way to communicate. It was faster, perhaps, than words, but had none of the nuance.

“You are not her,” the alien said, in his peppy sales voice. If it weren’t quite so life-or-death, she might find it funny.
But if you buy this detergent you can
be
her.

“I am her,” she said. “I am the one you were looking for.”

“You are the one and you are not her. She is of you, you are not her.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You have… her smell.”

“Her smell? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Your words are so small. Her scent is in your mind.”

“You can read my mind?”

“I can taste your… yes. Your ideas. I can taste your ideas.”

“I understand. She is not me, but the idea of her is a part of me.”

“Yes.”

She was trying to pinpoint a source of the voice, so she knew which direction to face when talking.

“How are you speaking? Like, do you have a mouth?”

“I do not eat.”

“Mouths in humans are also for speaking. If you have a visual… I mean if you can see me, look, my mouth is moving.”

There was a terrible moment, just after she said this, when the thought came that perhaps her mouth wasn’t moving at all. She could
feel
it moving, but this was uncharted experiential territory, and she couldn’t discount the notion that everything happening to her was internal. She could be projecting a version of herself in her own mind that was speaking and looking, just like the way she thought she could smell the atmospheric ammonia of an alien landscape. Her senses weren’t necessarily trustworthy.

“I see, yes,” the alien said. “The sound of my voice is rendered from the archives collected in this… outpost. Mouth is an inefficient speech requirement. I would not mimic an inefficiency.”

“But so, you can’t read my mind. I’m really here, in the ship, talking out loud right now, and this isn’t just happening in my head.”

“Your ideas leak into this ship, but thoughts are… thoughts are… The words are crude. Thoughts are pieces. Fragments of unconnected… What is this?”

The picture show kicked in again. The alien had plucked an image of a cloth hanging from Annie’s own memory.

“That’s a tapestry. It’s from a medieval castle. I saw it when I was eight, when we went on a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.”

She remembered liking the tapestry for reasons she still couldn’t explain. She spent a half an hour looking closely at it, until Mrs. Parris dragged her away.

The image zoomed in on a corner of the tapestry that was eye-level to an eight year old. It was a frayed edge. The indirect lighting of the room reflected off the glass case protecting the ancient cloth.

“These parts.”

“Threads. Those are threads.”

“Thoughts are this.”

The image jumped back to the full picture. It showed men on horseback in a tournament in the foreground with a castle in the background. Annie remembered liking the horses in particular.

“Ideas are this. Ideas are full things, contained. Endless but bounded, as a sphere. Ideas can
be
. Thoughts cannot. Even simple thoughts in a crude mind are threads.”

“So, no, then.”

“I cannot read your mind. I can exist in your mind but not read it. Only you can know your own mind.”

“But you can exist in my mind,” she repeated. “As an idea. I don’t like how that sounds.”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“Maybe to you.”

“I can exist as an idea in your mind, but not in my entirety, no more than this device in which you sit holds my entirety. I can be shared, and I can exist independently elsewhere. I am endless but bounded. Now you will tell me now where the one I seek is.”

“I don’t know. Who are you looking for?”

“You are attempting evasion. You have her scent.”

He began pulling images from her mind and displaying them, as if to show exactly how easy it was.

“She travels,” he observed. “Tell me where.”

“Please stop pulling those images out of my head.”

“You are a crude life form, you should accept your limitations.”

“Well it’s rude.”

The images continued to play, possibly more so Annie could understand how much the alien was extracting of her idea of Violet. He wasn’t showing her anything she didn’t already know, certainly.

“I have examined the records and cannot find this place,” he said. “It is on no maps.”

Annie laughed.

“Yes, it’s a funny little place.”

“She travels with strange beings… I do not understand. You.”

“Annie. People call me Annie.”

“Annie, I will call you. You will help me find her.”

“I don’t really think I have any incentive to do that.”

“I do not understand.”

“Sure you do. She’s my friend, and I don’t think she wants to go anywhere with you, so I don’t know why I would lead you to her.”

“This warship can eliminate the planet if I choose.”

“Well, that’s a good incentive. Can it really?”

A series of images flooded her mind. It was a much more aggressive sharing of information than before, possibly because she was seeing into the idea of another idea. It was something like a schematic of the spacecraft, but despite using scientific principles nobody on the planet had ever been exposed to, she felt like she understood. This either meant the alien was getting better at communicating with her, or she was getting better at receiving this style of communication. When it was finished, she understood the ship’s workings alarmingly well, as if the schematics had been saved off in her head. It made her want to ask the alien if he could also put Spanish in there so she didn’t have to take it next year.