The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  As it turned out, the spaceship disagreed with the planetary consensus regarding the laws of physics as they pertained to explosive blasts and shock waves.

  The bombs never reached the surface. It was the considered opinion of all who watched this happen that the devices did in fact explode, but the devastation that should have followed an airborne detonation failed to happen as well.

  There was a bright flash, but that was all. What should have followed—even with an airborne detonation—was a concussive wave, and that wave should have taken out the bomber and both fighter jets, everyone in Sorrow Falls, and a whole lot of the people in the surrounding towns.

  None of that happened. Instead, something above the town swallowed all the energy from the bombs.

  It was, in its own way, the most terrifying show of force anyone had ever seen. It led to possibly a much more important question: if that was the ship’s defense, what did its offense look like?

  * * *

  There were only about five or six legitimately famous people left in Sorrow Falls. For the most part, the people lucky enough to be involved in some verifiable way with the events surrounding the arrival of the spaceship had cashed out and moved to a wealthier zip code. Billy Pederson was one of the few who hadn’t.

  From everything Ed knew about Billy, he considered staying put something to be boastful about, and mentioned it in all interviews. A cynic or a professional analyst (Ed was both) would say Billy wanted to remain in the public eye and knew enough about his own brand to appreciate that without a constant, direct association with the ship and the town, he was distinctively un-famous.

  In a way, this approach worked, because people still put him on television now and then. He had a handsome face and an easy-going style in front of the camera that made him perfect for anything from a fifteen second spot to a two-minute piece. Any longer than that and his appeal ran aground, which was why his efforts to turn himself into—in order—an actor, a television commentator and a reality TV star all failed.

  Still, most everybody knew who Billy Pederson was and could identify him easily. Ed was able to do this even when encountering Billy in the dark behind the Yarn Palace while hitting him in the head with a baseball bat.

  Ed actually planned to speak to Billy while in Sorrow Falls. It was going to be for appearances, mainly, because Ed was thinking it would be easy to fool people into thinking he was a journalist, and a real journalist would of course speak to Billy Pederson. But their free times never quite lined up, and once it was clear nobody really believed Ed was writing a magazine article, he stopped trying so hard to make the appointment. None of that factored into the moment when he clubbed Billy with a stick, but it did lead to Ed feeling a little bit worse for having done it, for reasons he couldn’t fully explain.

  This was perhaps forty-five minutes after Ed and Annie fled the scene at Charlie’s Pocket. They’d run down the line behind the Main Street businesses for a block, until the area behind the shops widened into the row house neighborhoods. This, at first, seemed like a good thing, because the bigger the territory, the more places there were to hide. A lot of people lived in those blocks, though, so there were a whole lot of zombies wandering around. It was quickly apparent that they could make up for their slowness afoot with high volumes and coordinated movement.

  Ed and Annie barely made it back up the hill to the shops again. On three occasions one of the townspeople got close enough to grab and hold down Annie, so Ed had to learn very quickly what was involved in getting them to let go. It seemed to be a combination of her screaming and him whacking them in the head with whatever was available. A shriek at the right pitch appeared to confuse them somehow—something Beth commented on earlier in the day—and the blow to the cranium stunned the zombies enough for Annie to wriggle loose.

  By the time Billy grabbed a hold of her behind the Yarn Palace, they’d gotten pretty good at it, and Ed stopped thinking of the people whose skulls he was damaging as people at all. Then he recognized whom he’d just clubbed and felt terrible about it.

  It was another fifteen minutes of hiding and sprinting and hiding before they made it to the back of the diner.

  Annie had a key.

  “Not that I know who to call, but the landlines are down too, in case you were wondering,” Annie said, emerging from the kitchen. She had a first aid kit and a look of concern. The latter probably had to do with the lump above Ed’s left eye.

  He was sitting at one of the counter stools, which was probably a mistake. The chair had no back to it, and without the constant fear of death his adrenaline was dropping.

  This is when people faint.

  “Okay, let me have a look at that,” Annie said. She opened the kit on the counter. Ed took off his glasses and let her have a look.

  “Gonna leave a mark?” he asked.

  “Probably. It’s just a lump though, no cut. Don’t know what I was thinking with this kit, you need some ice.”

  She disappeared in back again.

  “You could have called the president,” Ed said. He reached into the first aid kit and pulled out a couple of bandages, which he decided he probably needed too. His body was starting to notify him of a variety of trouble areas on his person that may in fact be bleeding. Scratches, mostly. He was glad zombie-ism wasn’t contagious in Sorrow Falls like it was in the movies.

  Annie re-emerged with a dishtowel wrapped around ice cubes.

  “I don’t know his number.”

  He took the ice, removed his glasses and pressed the towel to the lump. He was a little alarmed by how large the bump felt.

  “I do.”

  “Ooh. So what would we even say? ‘Mr. President, Sorrow Falls is overrun by zombies?’ He’d think we were pranking him.”

  “Prank calls don’t make it to the oval office. But I think I’d tell him not to bomb us.”

  “Not to… why would they do that?”

  “It’s one of the contingency plans.”

  “That’s a really crummy plan.”

  “That’s the nature of contingency plans. They tend to be awful, but they exist to stop something even more awful from happening.”

  “What kind of bomb, Ed?”

  Ed didn’t answer, which was an answer unto itself.

  “Jesus Christ, how is that a better option?”

  Ed laughed.

  “You don’t really realize what you’ve been next to all this time. I don’t think anyone in this town does. You know, we tried to move it once? The plan was hatched after the first year. We became convinced that thing was just a large piece of abandoned tech. So we got the idea to just scoop up the entire field and roll it out of town. Heavy earth-moving equipment was requisitioned and everything.”

  “I don’t believe you. I would have seen the diggers.”

  “They never made it into town. Things kept happening en route. Trucks would stall, engines would blow, and steering columns would lock up. Nothing made it all the way. And that’s the problem. That ship is plugged into our communications in a way we can’t even understand, and it can affect mechanical equipment at a distance that extends far beyond the immediate area.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes, wow. And it gets worse. The next plan after that was to install failsafe explosives around the ship. That way, if things went wonky someone would just push a button and blow up half of Sorrow Falls. Remember that munitions explosion last year?”

  “Yeah, that was a terrorist thing.”

  “That was the story, certainly.”

  “But that was in Delaware or something.”

  “Yes. It was. The devices that failed were the exact ones scheduled for installation in Sorrow Falls, down to the last serial number. The message wasn’t subtle.”

  “Message?”

  “It can hurt us anywhere, any time, and more importantly, it doesn’t want to move. Most people assume it landed in Sorrow Falls at random, but that’s not the case at all. It wants to be right here, in this town. And af
ter three years, we still don’t know why. We do know how to destroy an entire town, though, if we have to. We’re pretty good at that.”

  Annie stepped away from the counter, to the front window. The curtains were closed, or they’d have zombies trying to break in already. By his estimation, they had maybe ten minutes before the group collectively figured out exactly where he and Annie were, and then it would be over, because as much as it was to their benefit short-term to find a place to hole up and rest, in the long-term, they were cornered.

  Annie peeked around one of the curtains.

  “We know it wants me,” she said.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “All right, it thinks it wants me. What’s the difference?”

  “We don’t know what it wants you for. Maybe it’s just mad you screwed up the paint job on the hull.”

  “Funny.”

  “I’m serious, what’s happening out there doesn’t even make sense. If the goal was to get you to the ship, the zombies would be giving us free access to the southern half of Main, but they aren’t.”

  “You mean they would be herding us there.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Well what we’re doing isn’t working, is it?”

  “We’re on the wrong side of the town is all. We just need to get to get across Main somehow.”

  “They’re lined up out front. I don’t think we’d make it.”

  She closed the curtain.

  “What if I went alone?” she asked. “Like, what if they aren’t herding us to the ship because you’re with me and I’m supposed to go by myself.”

  “And what if they want to find you so they can tear you apart? I can’t let you do that.”

  “Like you could stop me?”

  “Annie…”

  “Well what other choices to we have? Surrender’s the only thing we haven’t tried, and maybe if I do it you’ll make it out alive.”

  None of us are making it out alive tonight, he thought.

  “I’m not about to let a sixteen-year old sacrifice herself for me.”

  “Not just for you. The whole town.”

  “Well that’s very noble of you, but we need a better option.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, but… Annie, they don’t want you to bring you back to their planet and make you a princess. This isn’t a movie. This is a malevolent force fixated on you, and we have to assume the worst because we’ve been given no indication to think otherwise.”

  “And yet no better options are forthcoming. Like you said about contingency plans, if all we have left are bad options, isn’t this the least bad option?”

  “I’m not ready to—”

  “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Shh. Do you hear that?”

  “Do I hear what?”

  Annie opened the curtain and looked down the southern end of Main.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. Then she was out the front door before Ed could even ask what was happening.

  He stumbled to his feet, a whole lot more dizzy than he probably should have been prior to facing off a zombie horde. He grabbed the baseball bat that had only recently brained a local celebrity and staggered to the front, wishing he had time to grab a butcher’s knife or something. Not that he knew what to do with one in a combat situation.

  He was at the door when he heard what sounded like a woman screaming. It wasn’t Annie. It sounded a little like Beth, but it wasn’t her either.

  He stepped outside. Joanne’s Diner had one of those old-fashioned front porches, with wood benches for people to sit at and watch the town drive by. It was a quaint touch that almost demanded the road in front of it be composed of dirt and only used by horse-drawn carriages.

  Annie was standing at the edge of the steps leading to the sidewalk that ran along Main. A modest horde of zombies was amassed along the curb in neat double-rows, ready for her to make a move.

  She was ignoring them, because up the road a camper was creeping toward them. The screaming sound was coming from the camper.

  “Who is that?” Ed asked.

  “Not sure, but look.”

  She was pointing to the townspeople closest to the camper. They were stumbling about like drunken zombies, no longer fully in control of their limbs.

  “That’s brilliant,” Ed said. “They found a frequency that disrupts the zombies somehow. This could give us an opening.”

  “An opening? How about a ride?”

  She took her first step off the porch. The zombies in line ahead of them took a counteraction, meaning to surround her. But then their synchrony came apart like a loose string pulled out of a sweater, as the trailer reached the front of the diner.

  Ed was about to say all sorts of things about how they didn’t even know who was driving or whether they were friendly, when Annie spotted someone she recognized on the roof.

  “HEY CORPORAL!” she shouted. “CAN A GIRL GET A LIFT?”

  * * *

  It was no longer possible to tell who was a zombie and who wasn’t.

  At first, it was pretty easy. There were the zombies on the other side of the fence, who were clearly undead creatures who recently unburied themselves from the cemetery over the hill. They responded well to head shots, and stayed down without a fuss. Dill could have dealt with their kind all night.

  The soldier-zombies were an entirely different matter, but even then—at first—it wasn’t too hard to draw the line. The ‘dead’ was made up of soldiers who had recently been sleeping in the barracks, just like Vogel was. And also like Vogel, they carried themselves with a singular determination to kill.

  Dill ended up reflecting on this particular point during a quiet moment. Hank only went murder-happy after being interrupted in his task—whatever the hell that was—while on this night everyone hopped out of bed and went bonkers immediately. No weird are you? questions from these guys.

  The implication was obvious. The ship’s coming after us, he thought.

  The best way to tell the men under the control of the ship apart from the ones who weren’t was to see who had a gun and who didn’t, because it turned out weapons training wasn’t a part of the zombie combat manual. This should have made it a whole lot easier to resolve the attack as quickly as Dill and Wen had at the fence. But no matter how well you train a person, for the most part they’re not going to be ready to shoot down half of everyone they know, whether those people are technically already dead or not.

  This was another thing Dill spent a lot of time wondering during the free moments when it made more sense to hide and be quiet and hold his breath. Were they dead or not? If there was a way to make the ship stop doing whatever it was doing to them—and there wasn’t even a second when anybody reviewing this situation considered it the fault of anything other than the spaceship—would the men just…wake up and be okay?

  It was both a compelling and a terrible question, because every armed soldier, at one point or another, shot a zombie in self-defense. It was nice to think the blame for the death rested squarely with the aliens (or whatever was in the ship) but it was still the bullet that did the damage.

  Soldiers weren’t supposed to think like that. But when the enemy was the same guy you just played poker with the day before, or ate with that evening, or shot hoops with last week… there wasn’t any kind of training to prep you for that. A guy would have to be psycho to be ready to dive into that kind of situation feet-first, and the army was supposed to keep an eye out for that kind of crazy.

  This was how things got out of hand so fast. The guys with the guns hesitated in using them too often, and ended up overrun. That was only the second-worst thing about it. The worst was, unless they were torn apart completely, they ended up as the more-traditionally-deceased kind of zombie, just adding to the army of the enemy.

  By the time Dill found a corner near the motor pool in which to hide, it was literally impossible to tell who was who. Everyone ha
d on fatigues, and the guy you were standing next to a minute earlier might be the dead version of that same guy, and you wouldn’t know until he came at you.

  He could still hear the occasional gunshot, shouted command, and cry for help. There were small pockets of living soldiers out there in the night—the base’s lights had been out for an hour—but Dill was about as likely to hook up with one of those pockets, as he was to learn how to fly.

  It made a lot more sense to grab one of the armored Humvees and drive out.

  He’d been watching mini-hordes of zombies stumble through the motor yard for twenty minutes. They didn’t seem to distinguish the vehicle from the buildings, or the buildings for trees. Their ability to identify a moving person as a threat was about the best they could do, and the upshot was that none of them appeared to care that there was a car just sitting there and waiting for someone to take it.

  Swallowing every bit of courage he had left, Dill slipped his rifle under the jacket beneath his left arm, and stood.

  Running to the Humvee would have been a mistake. It was only twenty yards, but the zombies reacted to running. Instead, he walked, slowly, his arm dangling to conceal the gun, his breathing as slow as he could make it without blacking out.

  There were at least a dozen of them in the open space. He assumed they were communicating with each other silently somehow—their attacks were coordinated yet they never spoke—so if one got close he would probably recognize Dill as not being One Of Them. He tried to meander in such a way as to prevent that from happening.

  It was just about the most terrifying thing he’d done on a night full of pretty terrifying things. Probably the worst part was when he realized he was looking at Corporal Wen from twenty feet away. Wen was clearly deceased because living people didn’t tend to walk like that with a broken collarbone. Just as clearly, the dead didn’t retain any memories the living held, because Wen looked right past him.

  When he got to the door of the Humvee he stood motionless for about fifteen seconds before slowly… slowly… trying the door latch. It was unlocked. This was, in truth, only a minor bit of good fortune because the window was down. More important was the question of where the ignition key was.