Ambulance services were more diverse, and closer, but not in all cases 100% devoted to emergency support. Annie knew this, but Ed was a little alarmed to find a hearse in front of the house when they got there.
They were already inside, and the door was open. Annie jumped out of the car before Ed even parked it, and ran up the steps.
“Oh hello, dear!” her mother greeted as soon as Annie breached the living room.
She was in her chair with an oxygen tube in her nose. A paramedic—his name was Lee, Annie knew his younger sister Zoe from school—was checking her blood pressure. His partner, a woman Annie didn’t know, was sorting through her mother’s pharmacopeia with a blue-gloved hand.
“What happened?” Annie asked. It wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, just whoever felt like they could provide the best answer.
“It’s nothing!” her mother said.
“It wasn’t nothing, Carol, you sent a 9-1-1.”
Getting the full attention Mrs. Carol Collins was often a challenge, whether one was a paramedic trying to assess her stability or her daughter trying to get a straight answer. Her daughter had one trick that almost always worked, and that was calling her by her first name.
“All right, I had a thing, but I’m okay now.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Nothing, I panicked is all. I’m actually fine. I’m sorry I worried you.”
Annie turned to the female paramedic.
“What kind of thing?”
“Difficulty breathing was the call,” the paramedic said.
“Is she out of danger?” Annie asked.
“Oh, I’m fine now.”
Annie ignored her mother, the woman paramedic silently deferred to Lee, and nobody said anything else for a few seconds because he had a stethoscope plugged into his ears and was busy jotting down notes.
“Not sure,” he said, on realizing he was expected to answer. “But we’re going to need to bring her in. You know how this goes.”
Annie did. So did her mother.
“It’s nothing!” she said.
“Shut up, Carol, they’re taking you to Harbridge and you’re going to be nice about it,” Annie said.
“But—”
“Be nice!”
“Fine.”
Carol threw her hands in the air in mock surrender.
Ed was standing at the door, looking unsure about whether or not he should even be in the room for this.
“Hey, I could use a lift to the hospital, if you’re not doing anything,” Annie said. “I hate to ask, but I have a thing about riding in ambulances and—”
“Of course.”
* * *
“Does this happen a lot?” Ed asked, en route. The flashers from the ambulance lit up the evening, which reminded Annie a little bit of the spaceship, even though the ship glowed white on entry, while the dome lights were red.
“No,” Annie said. “Well, once or twice. Maybe four times. Not a lot. Last time was in winter. That sucked. Took the ambulance forever to get to us, even. I was home for that one.”
“But she was okay?”
“On top of everything else she has going on, she’s prone to panic attacks. I guess that’s what they are. Not like she doesn’t have a reason to panic. I think the weed’s in part to keep her from freaking out. She says it’s for pain, and that’s true, but it keeps her moods stable too. So, but last time, they sent her home with the number for a psychiatrist she never called, and she didn’t tell me what the diagnosis was, but I’m guessing it was something more in her head than her body.”
“Well, that’s good. Not good. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. They’ll take her in and make sure someone with malpractice insurance looks at her before deciding it was nothing. The paramedics sure aren’t going to make that call. But they know. Look, they aren’t even speeding.”
Annie remembered when old Rooney Kazmarek passed. He had an apartment above Kazmarek Hardware, right up Main from the Diner. She saw them loading him in the back, then heading down the road. They drove slowly then, too, but that was because Rooney was already dead of a heart attack. There wasn’t any rush.
Annie shivered, and shook the memory free. Her mother was fine. They were driving the speed limit because Carol was in the back telling them to.
“Is there… anyone else you need to call?” Ed asked. He was asking a different question.
“I’ll call dad if I have to. You know, if it’s anything. It’s not. Same thing happened last time; she just freaked out and couldn’t breathe. It was scary.”
“Your father lives around here?”
Annie laughed.
“Sure, when he’s in town. That’s just not all that often. It’s his job. He works for Hollis.”
“The paper mill?”
“Yes, that Hollis. They used to use trees from New Hampshire and Maine to make the paper. Someone up there would cut down the trees and then roll them into the river and float them down. On this end there’d be guys whose whole day was spent on the riverbanks, catching logs before they hit the falls. Cool job.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“Oh, wildly dangerous. They have these giant hooks on the wall down at the mill. I’ll show them to you, you’ll want to talk to the people there anyway, right?”
“I’ve been trying to get a meeting with Desmond Hollis since I got into town, actually.”
“Seriously? You should have asked, I can get you in.”
Ed laughed.
“Right, I should have figured you’d have a way into a room with the richest man in town.”
“I think he’s actually third-richest now, but yeah, I can get you in with Desmond. What was I talking about?”
“The hooks on the wall.”
“Right. They’re mounted right above one of those ‘it’s been X days since the last accident’ safety signs, because someone down there has a sense of humor. Anyway, my dad’s the one fetching the logs now, but not from the river. The lumber comes in from Canada, and on trucks. Safer, not as good for the environment, probably.”
“So he drives a rig.”
“Kind of. He supervises the driving of rigs. Trucks come through all the time, but he’s not behind the wheel more than once every six months or so. He’ll come down for vacations and whatnot… anyway. He’s around, just not very around.”
Annie didn’t feel a need for further clarification. It should have been obvious that her parents were separated. Dad effectively lived in Canada. He kept an apartment there, and the last she heard he had a girlfriend staying with him in that apartment. He and Carol weren’t divorced in part to keep her on his health insurance, a decision reached shortly after her cancer diagnosis and about six months before they formalized their separation by notifying their only child.
He still kept a room in their house, and stayed in that room when he was in town, but that was about all.
Ed seemed to get all this without it being explained, and he looked like he wanted to share a story about his life or something, which is what adults did when they talked to kids about serious things. She’d been getting a range of things will get better life lessons stories from adults since Carol was diagnosed, and Annie hated every one of them because they always ended up being a lot more self-serving than helpful. Yes, she knew things would get better, and yes, she was coping. She coped by keeping incredibly busy, and being positive, and getting so involved in the town the military warned its soldiers about her. She didn’t need to know someone else’s tragic backstory to figure out how to do that.
Annie was glad, then, that Ed opted not to go that route. Perhaps it was the confused not-divorced status of her family. Or maybe he just realized that drawing a comparison to his upbringing in whatever-land U.S.A. wasn’t going to match up well with the girl who was raising herself with a UFO for a neighbor.
“Hey, thanks for doing this,” Annie said. “I could have followed in the family car, probably, but I haven’t had a lot
of practice and this didn’t seem like the best time to work on it.”
“No, I imagine it isn’t. Don’t worry about it.”
The ambulance eventually pulled up to a dock at a building that looked only nominally hospital-like. Annie was mostly used to it, but the first time she’d been to Harbridge Memorial she asked the paramedic (she’d ridden in the ambulance that time) why they were stopping at a warehouse.
“Looks like we’re here,” Ed said. He rolled the car past the dock and into one of the ‘Emergency Room Only’ spots. “I can stick around, if you need me to.”
Annie hadn’t thought past getting to the hospital, but now that she had and he was asking, she realized she should have given the family car a more thorough consideration.
“It may be a couple of hours.”
“That’s okay. Do they have coffee in there?”
“It’s something that looks like coffee. I can’t attest to the taste.”
They were taking her mother out of the back of the ambulance/hearse. Carol was sitting up and her mouth was going, so she was probably complaining about having to leave home. That was a good sign, Annie decided. The day Carol stopped fighting was going to be a rough day for everyone.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Ed said. Probably referencing the coffee and not Carol, though both worked. “Doesn’t seem right to leave.”
* * *
The emergency room of Harbridge Memorial was unreasonably small for a hospital servicing such a large geographic area. There were only about fifteen temporary beds, separated by curtains on rollers attached to the drop ceiling. It wasn’t a great place to spend a lot of time when one was healthy, and especially not when one was a healthy sixteen years. Consequently, while waiting for the barrage of preliminary tests to begin producing results, Annie did a lot of walking around, drifting between the beds and the waiting area where Ed was taste-testing the coffee and reading magazines about the latest Christmas movies from last season.
Carol mostly slept, which was another good sign. When she was really worried about something, she didn’t sleep; she talked, and when she didn’t talk she watched old movies.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Annie asked Ed. They were alone in the waiting room, it was approaching Midnight, and there wasn’t anyone else there. Annie had counted all the ceiling tiles, twice, and discovered every pattern irregularity in the tile floor. There was nothing left to do but sleep, and she didn’t want to do that.
“Right now? No.” He closed the magazine he was pretending to read.
“Of course right now. I’m assuming you’ve had one or two in your life.”
“Yes, that too. But not at the moment.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess I haven’t been looking all that hard. Not since the ship landed. Nothing serious. How about you?”
“Oh, I have prospects. Looking for a guy who can keep up with me. Haven’t found him yet, but the list of suitors is long, let me tell you.”
“I bet it is.”
* * *
The doctor finally returned, after another hour of waiting. Annie was pretty annoyed by then, because this was going to end up being the same news as always: nothing appeared to be newly wrong with her mother, they see no reason for her not to be released, call if something changes in the next twenty-four hours, and so on. Keeping her waiting for three plus hours to hear that was just silly.
The doctor was working from a different script, though, which ended up explaining the delay.
“I’d like to admit her overnight,” the doctor said. This was outside the curtained area where Carol was sleeping.
The doctor’s name was Chao, and she had such a pleasant way of saying not-pleasant things that it took Annie a second or two to absorb the information, then another second or two for her to deal with the lump that fell out of the back of her throat and into her stomach.
“I’m… sorry, what?”
“Oh, it’s just a precaution.” She was holding a thin folder that had, at minimum, the outcome of a blood test. “Her white blood cell count is elevated, and I’d like to hold her over until at least tomorrow, and get her going on an antibiotic.”
“So it’s just an infection.”
“It may be, certainly. I’d like oncology to have a look. To rule out some things. Do you have a guardian?”
“A guardian?” She was picturing a guy in armor, following her around. That would be sort of cool.
“Is someone waiting for you? You have a place to go?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I have a friend… my boss is here. He’ll take me home.”
“All right, good. Let’s go have a conversation with your mother.”
10
Choking Hazard
Corporal Sam Corning checked into the barracks at twenty-two-hundred hours, after a briefing on the latest info regarding the ship. Said briefing lasted a solid hour, and at the end of it he felt no more enlightened than he was before it started. He did walk out a little more worried—in a non-specific sort of way—than when he walked in, and that was certainly a change.
Part of the issue was just that he had no classification level to speak of, so any information being delivered to him had all the interesting stuff removed ahead of time. Most briefings it was seamless, but there were days when very specific information suddenly became very general information, and any efforts to get greater detail were met with the classic need-to-know line.
All of which was pretty amazing, since the way Sam saw it, if that thing jumped up and started mowing people down with a ray gun, he would be one of the first to go. That was something he thought he probably needed to know.
There were other times in briefings when it became abundantly clear the real information had been removed and replaced with fake information. Sam and the other men of his squad called these tofu briefings, where the meat was substituted with something that only looked like meat. The briefing in which they were informed of the impending arrival of Edgar Somerville was a tofu briefing, because nobody really believed he was a journalist doing a story. Even Sergeant Phineas rolled his eyes when he read it.
That particular tofu briefing was especially annoying, because inside of a week Annie Collins had more accurate intel than Sam did, which was just insulting.
The briefing that ended at twenty-one-forty-five was not a tofu briefing. It wasn’t really even a briefing, since no new information was imparted. It was a lecture on the importance of drilling, maintaining order, holding position, keeping equipment at the ready, and staying “awake and focused.” It followed a terse reminder that Sorrow Falls was a de facto war zone and they had to remember that, even if the war was not apparent and the enemy unresponsive.
It was a little terrifying.
By twenty-two-fifteen, Sam and the others had talked it over, and after a few valid points on the subject of getting a little lazy about perimeters, focused on two or three details from the meeting that could be made fun of safely. For instance, Phineas was unreasonably fond of the word perambulate and used it—incorrectly, they were sure—so often it became their own little drinking game. (Not that they drank on the base during a briefing in front of a superior. They mimed each drink when the occasion arose.) So they went through every instance of the word, and that seemed to calm everyone down. Then it was time to bed down, as some of them—although not Sam—had sentry duty down the hill at oh-six-hundred.
For a couple of soldiers, that only meant talking in whispers, rather than sleeping.
“What do you think, Sammie?” asked Dill Louboutin in that bayou drawl of his. Dill was two years younger and five inches shorter than Sam, and seemed to think those two years and five inches made Sam someone to look up to, metaphorically. Dill was new to the base and to anywhere this far north. His first three weeks were spent talking almost non-stop about the hilly terrain. Sam didn’t appreciate just how flat Louisiana and Texas were—he was a West Virginia boy, and knew from hills—until Dill came along to explai
n it to him.
Dill had a lot of theories about the ship. Probably everyone did, but Dill had a mouth that kept going when his brain had long stopped, so he extemporized on the subject at length. And since he was newer to the base than Sam was, every time there was a briefing, Dill wanted to know if it was unusual.
This was the first time the brief actually was unusual.
“What do I think about what?” Sam asked.
Dill was on the top bunk, looking down. He could rain words on Sam for hours, and had.
“You know what.”
“I think we’ve gotten sloppy of late is all. Hard to stay focused when nothing’s happening. Sarge isn’t wrong, there are soldiers on war games more alert than we are.”
“Yeah, but what did it mean.”
“It didn’t mean anything, Dill.”
“I think it means something’s coming.”
“Like what? Aliens? We already have that.”
Dill shook his head, which shook the whole bunk.
“I’m telling you. Something’s in the air. I can smell it, like ozone.”
“Ozone? You don’t even know what that is. Go to sleep, Pickles.”
Dill didn’t like the nickname, which was a little strange because his full first name was Dillard. He could have gone by that instead and skipped the obvious pickle reference.
“Ahhh,” he grumbled, and disappeared over his bunk.
There was quiet for about two minutes, but then he was back again.
“Hey!”
“Dill, I swear to God...”
“No, look! Who is that?”
Sam rolled up onto an elbow and looked along the row of bunks. Someone was walking down the row, which was not in itself unusual. The latrine was at the other end of the tent. He was only in his boxers, and that was a little odd, but just a little. It was a warm night.
“Think that’s Vogel. What of it? Man’s gotta go, man’s gotta go.”
“Don’t think that’s where he’s going. Watch what he’s doing, brother.”
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