“It only looks like that from this angle,” she said.
Duke arched an eyebrow. He had a thin face with heavy eyebrows that seemed to have a separate operating mechanism. The eyebrow qualified as an entire sentence.
“What angle do you mean? Do you know how far it is?”
“Seven hundred light years, give or take, yeah. I’m just saying from the side it looks less like an eye.”
Duke looked ready to engage her on this point, but stopped when he—and then Annie, by extension—realized Tammy had stopped talking, and everyone was looking at them.
“Sorry,” Duke said.
“I was just telling him the nebulae don’t look like that from every angle,” Annie said. Because if you’re going to go down this road, you may as well commit fully.
Tammy nodded. “Well obviously we can’t know that, because we only have one vantage point available to us, but certainly, that’s probably so. These are vast clouds in three-dimensional space. We happen to be at an angle where they look like something familiar. And of course, they aren’t really eyeballs.”
“Do you know what they look like from other angles?”
The question came from a girl halfway across the room, and it was addressed to Annie.
“Kinda,” Annie said.
Everyone basically knew Annie was still connected in some way to the ship, although nobody had ever come up with a description of the connection that was really accurate. (The inaccuracy was largely Annie’s fault, since she refused to explain how it worked.) At first, the government tried to keep this information quiet, but that proved impossible almost immediately, because whenever Annie moved, the ship did too. That movement wasn’t noticeable so long as she stayed in the Northeast, but her first cross-country trip to Hollywood caused an international panic because to most of the country it looked like the Sorrow Falls spaceship was going to attack California.
“From the… um… from the spaceship?” Tammy asked.
“Yeah. Big archive up there. Lots of astronomical information. Pretty cool stuff.”
“Does it know where the eye of God is?” one of the boys in the front row asked. “Because that would save us a ton of time.”
This got a lot of laughter, which dissolved the tension Annie hadn’t even been aware she was creating.
Tammy went on with her presentation, which mostly involved showing things on the video monitor that were originally photographed using much more powerful telescopes than the one they shared a room with.
“Sorry,” Annie muttered.
“It’s okay,” Duke said. “That was fun.”
“I forget sometimes how weird this is to everyone else.”
“You’re the only girl on the block with a pet interstellar warship. That’s bound to make the other ladies jealous.”
“Yeah thanks. It’s just that being normal is exhausting. Sometimes I take my foot off the brake.”
“Being normal is exhausting for everyone, not just you. Probably not worth the effort. Plus, you sound like a freshman right now.”
“I am a freshman, but please elaborate on your condescension.”
“Nah, probably better not.”
Tammy was winding down her presentation with a question-and-answer session. The first couple of questions involved the logistics of the evening and especially whether there would be alcohol and when there would be pizza. Then the girl who asked Annie about the nebula raised her hand.
“Hey, can we see the spaceship with that?” she asked. Deciding this might come off as rude, she turned to Annie next. “Sorry, Ms. Collins, I would have asked that if you were here or not. Really cool that you are, though.”
Annie laughed. “Call me Annie, and go for it.”
Tammy sighed as if this was something nobody had ever asked before, yet when it came time to locate the spaceship in the night sky it took only a few seconds. She knew exactly where to look. Annie thought this was probably something the astronomy club did a little more often than they were prepared to admit.
Once the source of the feed for the televisions was adjusted, Shippie filled up all the flat screens in the room. This generated a lot more excitement than Annie thought was really warranted for something just about anyone could have gotten within a few hundred feet of, not at all long ago.
She appreciated that this was probably a jaded perspective.
What Annie did next was probably Duke’s fault, for suggesting she was in some way just another ordinary freshman. It was a gentle ribbing, but it bugged her anyway. This in itself was weird, because her stated goal for the longest time was to just be like everyone else, so the accusation that in this moment, she had succeeded should have been a cause for celebration, not showboating.
She showboated nonetheless, and decided it wasn’t worth exploring the reasons why.
Once the ship came into focus and everyone had a good ooh-ahh session, the most powerful weapon in history performed a barrel roll.
This was followed by a deeply satisfying collection of gasps and mild applause.
“Did you do that?” the girl who wanted to look at the ship in the first place asked.
“Yeah. Cool, huh?”
“Oh my god I have so many questions. Do you take questions and stuff?”
“Show-off,” Duke whispered.
“Annie,” Tammy said, “did you want to… I mean, it’s not why anyone’s here, but…”
Annie’s phone rang. It was Cora.
“I’d be happy to talk about the ship with you guys, but I should probably take this first. Pretty sure I just caused an international incident.”
What was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek examination of the visible universe for proof of a higher power—which was, in turn, supposed to be a sneaky way to get students interested in the astronomy club—ended up being a long recap of everything Annie could tell them about Sorrow Falls and the spaceship. She answered all the questions she thought it was safe to answer, and either deflected (Nita taught her how to do this on her press tour) or said she couldn’t answer and/or didn’t know the answer to everything else.
It was a surprisingly unburdening experience, because as many times as Annie had dealt with answering these kinds of questions over the past couple of years, almost nobody at Wainwright asked.
This was probably the part about being a celebrity that Annie most disliked. She remembered when she was a kid in Sorrow Falls, where for three years she was likely to encounter someone famous just about daily, because the town wasn’t all that big and gossip there traveled at the speed of light. Back then, she wanted to be the kind of person who was ‘cool’ around a celebrity, meaning she didn’t want to do the oh my god it’s YOU thing that she was sure most famous people who were just trying to go about their day had to cope with constantly.
She didn’t want to invade their privacy, basically. And she still thought that was probably the right call in most cases.
On the other hand, being a famous person and knowing everyone around you was consciously and really, really obviously trying to be ‘cool’ around you was nearly as annoying. She didn’t want people breaking into her house to ask her questions (according to Cora, this had been attempted on five separate occasions) or try to get her picture while she had a mouthful of food (this happened all the time) or hold her up at airports (she missed a flight once) or any of those other situations where she did not want to be addressed. But, there were plenty of times when she was just desperate for someone to engage, if only so everyone else could stop holding their breath around her.
For some reason, Annie couldn’t be the one to break that ice. She’d tried; it freaked people out.
Waggling the spaceship was probably the safest conversation-starter she ever attempted.
Well, not safe. Easiest, but definitely not safe. Apparently, she’d woken up the entire Pentagon. She told Cora to apologize for her. Cora was in all likelihood going to do that, and then add that Annie was trying to impress a boy.
This
was probably accurate, as Annie could hardly claim impressing Duke wasn’t a secondary motive. It wouldn’t make any of the people on Team Babysitter who just lost a night’s sleep feel any better, though.
“Being famous sucks, huh?” Duke said, much later. Once past the wonder that was Annie Collins, they all had pizza and soda, suffered through a number of loud lamentations regarding the lack of both alcohol and a host of other absent amenities—the bathrooms were too small, the floor was too hard—and fiddled with the astronomical equipment to look at things other than the ship. Then people started curling up to sleep on the extremely uncomfortable floor, or in one of the extremely small chairs.
Annie didn’t feel like doing either of those things, which was why at one in the morning she was sitting on the floor on top of her sleeping bag, her back against a railing, talking to Duke in the quietest voice she could muster.
“Yeah, it’s pretty terrible,” she said.
“That sounds like a rich-person complaint,” he said. “No offense intended.”
“I’m not offended, only because I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, you know. The money doesn’t buy happiness people. I mean, it’s true, but it’s still better than being poor.”
He was sitting similarly, atop his own bag, a chaste distance from her. If this were a movie, they’d talk all night, and then watch the sunrise, hold hands and maybe kiss or something. Then would come the second act conflict, the third act resolution, and the happily-ever-after.
Annie was pretty sure none of that was going to happen.
“I get you, but I’m not famous for being rich, and I’m not rich as a consequence of my fame. It was just a right-place-right-time sort of thing.”
“It was a little more than that.”
“Yeah, all right, a little more.”
They’d already gone through Duke’s personal family history, which didn’t have anything in it that warranted lengthy discussion. His parents were still married and he got along with both of them just fine. He was from Rhode Island, he had two younger sisters, and that was more or less that. At no time did he encounter an alien presence while growing up, and exactly no countries considered him a threat to national security… although that could change if someone decided it was his fault Annie put the ship through maneuvers.
In other words, Duke was the kind of ordinary Annie almost forgot made up most of the population. And while she hated herself for feeling this way, it also made him a little less interesting.
Their conversation veered away from Sorrow Falls and onto the subject of what films they had both seen, and soon another hour had gone by. Annie came to realize three things: first, she was probably not as into Duke as she thought she was going to end up being; second, her butt was asleep and it was perhaps a good idea if the rest of her was asleep as well at this point; and third, she had to pee.
“Do you need an escort?” Duke asked. “I did swear to protect you against any and all foam ninjas.”
“I think we’re okay,” she said, laughing.
“All right, but if that scary Secret Service lady asks, I never left your side.”
“Pretty sure Cora wouldn’t take that the way you think she would.”
The main observatory room was fundamentally the same from all angles, so when Annie left through the nearest door she wasn’t sure right away where she was located in relation to the bathrooms. This wasn’t too terrible since the outer hall was a big circle and there were nicely lit exit signs along the way, but it was also two in the morning and creepily quiet.
Annie was almost positive she didn’t scare easily. It was one of those things she thought most people considered true about themselves, but in her case, she had the résumé to back up the claim. But there was something about this hallway, with its modest illumination and long shadows, that made her irrationally nervous.
All at once, she became convinced she wasn’t alone. There was no reason for this either. It wasn’t as if she’d heard anything. The floor was stone, but there were area rugs in the middle, which muffled footfalls so effectively she couldn’t hear her own feet. And it was quiet enough that any door opened in the building would have been easy to hear. Since the last door she heard was the one she used to get to the hallway, and since everyone else was inside the auditorium, she was therefore alone.
It just didn’t feel that way.
“Hello?” she said. She was almost whispering, but her voice sounded super loud. “Duke, is that you?”
Annie directed her attention to one of the doorway recesses ahead, on the right. It led to the auditorium, and it was just past the bathrooms. Again, she had no reason to think this was so, yet it felt like someone was there.
And then there was someone. He stepped out of the shadows cast by the exit sign ten feet further down the hall. She couldn’t see his face, but he was too short to be Duke.
“Is that little Annie Collins I see before me?”
Her whole body went cold.
“Rick?”
He stepped out a little more, and now she could see his face.
“How… how did you get in here?” she asked. Her mind was running through all the things she could do at this moment to defend herself against an attack that hadn’t actually manifested, from running back into the auditorium to vaporizing the entire hillside.
“It wasn’t that hard,” he said, grinning. “Security here is crap.”
She held up her cell phone as if it were a weapon.
“Great. Look, I would love to catch up, but maybe don’t come any closer, or you’ll find out how fast my security can correct that problem.”
Rick laughed, but stopped moving. He put his hands up to indicate an intent to do no harm, something she didn’t really believe.
“You always got this way around me, Annie, I never knew why.”
“Cuz you’re a creep, Rick. Maybe I’m just the only one who knows.”
“Oh, come on, I wasn’t so bad as that. And hey, look at you, you’ve got the whole world by the short ones now, don’t you? Your oyster or something, I forget what the saying is.”
“Rick, please leave.”
“I will, but lemme say what I’m here to say.”
“I mean it.”
“You never had to be afraid of me, Annie,” he said. “I was never gonna do anything to you. I held your secret, didn’t I?”
“What secret was that?”
She kept expecting to wake up, or for something else to happen to turn this into something that wasn’t really occurring, for which a rational explanation became readily available. But Rick Horton was standing only about twenty feet away, and that was that. He wasn’t going to stop being Rick Horton, no matter how much she squinted and shook her head.
“I knew you touched the ship,” he said.
“You did not. You ran off.”
“Not that far. I saw you do it. I saw a lot of other things too.”
“What do you want, some kind of award?”
“No… look, you’re missing something, all right? Something’s happening and it’s all around you and you’re missing it. And it’s bad.”
“Rick, can you please just go?”
“You have to listen to me!”
“No, I really don’t. I don’t know how you managed to convince everyone that you were dead, or how you got all the way to Wainwright, or how you made it in here. What I know is, you picked the one time I was going to be alone to pop up out of the shadows in the middle of the night and yeah, if the idea was to scare the piss out of me, you did it, all right? But enough with the vague warnings. I don’t believe you. You’re just trying to spook me, and I’m not a kid any more so it won’t work.”
“I’m not trying to spook you. I’m trying to help. They’re coming.”
“They.”
“Someone, Annie. I can’t be more specific because I don’t know. But it’s a multitude. You have to look behind you.”
The suggestion made the hair on her neck
stand up, even as Rick’s curious word choice—multitude—gave her pause. She fought the urge to turn around, because while one part of her demanded she check, another part remembered Rick as being exactly the sort of person who would either turn this into a made you look! joke, or much worse: use the opportunity in which her attention was drawn elsewhere to get closer.
“I’m not going to do that. Why don’t you get the hell out of here?”
He held his hands up again.
“All right, I’ll go. But remember what I said.”
He started to walk away. Annie realized that as much as she needed him to do just that, she also needed to be able to locate him again in the morning, preferably with Cora by her side.
“How’d you do it?” Annie asked.
He turned back.
“Do what?”
“How’d you fake your own death? And why?”
He laughed.
“Annie Collins, you always think you’re two steps ahead, don’t you? You’re not. Who says I faked anything?”
He went back to laughing, and that was all she could take. She sprinted to the Ladies room, got in, and locked the door behind her. Then she held her breath for what seemed to be about an hour as she waited for Rick to either start banging on the door or materialize in the room with her, because why not?
It was another minute or two, in which nothing happened, before she realized the trembling in her hands wasn’t being caused by nerves: her phone was vibrating.
9
Paranoid Enough
Police in Akron, Ohio, are tonight issuing a statement that there remain no vampires in the city. This comes on the heels of what experts are calling one of the worst cases of mass hysteria in a generation. More than ten thousand residents have reported what was referred to as a ‘gang’ of blood-sucking vampires, roaming the streets after midnight. These reports have been going on for more than ten days, according to a spokesman for the mayor’s office. The spokesman also reiterated that the reports have no basis in fact.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 13