Annie knew almost nothing at all about Cora, or about any of the other agents who did Cora’s job when Agent Blankenship was away. She knew Cora slept somewhere off-campus when Annie was done for the night, but she had no idea where the agent actually lived in her capacity as a fully realized human being.
This wasn’t really Annie’s fault. When she got her first detail—before Cora was assigned—Annie tried to chat up every Secret Service agent she met. Not one of them provided information beyond the most basic of details, like what their names were and where they were raised. Eventually—around the time Annie learned not to take this implacability personally, as it was clearly a component of their training—she stopped asking.
She was pretty sure Cora Blankenship was from the Midwest somewhere. Ohio, maybe. She assumed there was no husband, wife, or child waiting somewhere, because watching Annie wasn’t a job with a weekend break built in. It was more like a military assignment overseas; Cora got a two-week leave here and there, but was all-in for the rest of the time.
Annie thought she should probably do something about getting to know Cora better. Maybe it would help both of them the next time dead people started popping up in crowds.
“You sure you’re okay?” Cora asked.
“Yeah, I’m all right. You know what, though, I don’t think I want to be an adult anymore.”
Cora smiled.
“I could say you’re doing fine, or everyone feels like that sometimes, or I could tell you you’re not an adult yet anyway, but I’m not sure you want to hear any of those things.”
“I was hoping you had an idea for how to go backwards. Things were a lot more fun before.”
“Before what?”
Before Carol died, Annie thought.
“Take your pick,” she said. “Before The Incident, maybe. I just want to be a kid again.”
“Annie, between everything I’ve read about your life and knowing you personally, I’m not so sure you ever had a childhood.”
“Sure I did. I think it probably ended when I climbed into the spaceship, but hey, whose fault was that?”
Cora looked conflicted, ever-so-briefly. This happened whenever Annie brought up a detail about the ship, regardless of who she was talking to. Some people just came right out and asked Annie all the questions they’d always wanted to ask, and depending on how she felt about the questioner, she’d answer them as well as she could. Nobody from the Service asked her anything, though, because they weren’t supposed to.
Self-evidently, Cora was sitting on a pile of her own questions she couldn’t ask. This had a kind of distancing effect on their relationship.
“Well anyway, there’s no getting out of adulthood,” Cora said. “Why, is it all that bad?”
“It’s… yeah, sometimes. It’s lonely. I guess that’s it. I don’t even know if that’s because I’m, you know, Annie Collins, or if everyone gets to this point, but I mean… The world made more sense when it was the size of Sorrow Falls.”
“Nothing’s stopping you from going back there, Annie, you know that.”
“Yeah, but I feel like that would be worse somehow. I want to go back to the Sorrow Falls of three years ago, and that doesn’t exist.”
Cora nodded.
“Hate to say, but this is perfectly normal. And look, never tell anyone I said this, but if you wanted to go live in a town with a spaceship parked next door to you, if my briefings are correct, you can actually make that happen.”
Annie laughed.
“Shippie killed two hundred people, I’m pretty sure parking it in that field again would be sort of insulting, and a little terrifying, and your bosses would probably try and bomb it again.”
“I didn’t say it was a good idea, just that it’s within your capabilities. Besides, it doesn’t have to be Sorrow Falls. Put it here.”
“A tactical team is going to jump from the roof and carry you away in a second or two, you realize this.”
“Nah, we only need the tac team for important things,” Cora said, “like freshman orientation.”
“Right. That was harrowing.”
“But, I actually do have to get going,” she said, standing, “before someone from the van rings my phone to ask why I’m still up here. Look, I know you don’t really share a lot with me, and I understand why. I just want you to know that you can, and that if you need me to keep some things to myself I will.”
“Thanks, Agent Blankenship. That means a lot.”
Cora smiled, and left the balcony.
Annie sat alone for a while longer, wondering when it was that she stopped trusting people, and if this was why she felt so alone. Then she set that aside, put down her phone, and closed her eyes.
Shippie, she thought, let’s see if we can find out what happened to Rick. What do you say?
Eleven hundred miles above her head, the spaceship answered.
4
Remember the Albatross
Tonight, we’re talking about ghosts. Have you seen one? Is there one with you right now? Tell us your stories. Phone lines are open…
…my goodness, we seem to have hit a popular subject. The lines are jammed. If you get a busy signal, keep trying, and we’ll do what we can to get to you. It looks like this is a subject that will require more than one night to discuss…
transcript, the Ruby Rubin Midnight Hour
Nobody really knew what to do with Sam Corning.
This was something Sam realized shortly after the sun rose over Sorrow Falls on a day in which he and his friend Dill Louboutin were essentially the only soldiers left standing, and it remained true more than two years later.
The brass separated him and Pickles almost immediately, as if to keep them from syncing up an alibi on a crime they were supposed to have committed, but that mostly seemed like a rote response to the situation. Certainly, it wouldn’t have mattered all that much if the two of them corroborated one another’s stories, not when the starting point was an alien attack using zombie mind control technology and the ending was a sixteen-year old hijacking a spaceship. Even if one of them explained exactly what happened and the other made something up, there was no way the military high command was going to be able to distinguish between the two.
Sam assumed he and Dill told effectively the same story, with some obvious differences in detail, reflecting their contrasting experiences. The actions of Sam and the others in the camper made for pretty good P.R. and so were publicly lauded, while what happened to Dill was mostly swept under the nearest available rug. That was a shame, because both of them played a part in ending the conflict. It was just that Sam’s team mostly tried to not kill people, while Dill sort of ran a whole bunch of them down. This was also unfair, because the ones Dill ran down were a lot more aggressive; he didn’t have any real choice. Sam would have told them that if they’d asked, but they never did.
Once Sam was thoroughly questioned, and the list of what he could and could not talk about was hashed out, the army freed him to make public appearances.
No, that wasn’t right. They encouraged him, with the kind of insistence that didn’t respond well to the word no. Essentially, Sam became something of a celebrity, for a little while.
This made a lot of sense. Sam knew almost nothing about public relations, but he could grasp the logic immediately. The army needed a happy story to latch onto, to distract people from the unsavory fact that the military failed spectacularly in protecting the town, the state, and the world from an alien attack. Sam was what they had, and while he was hardly what anybody would call well-spoken in front of the camera, he was pleasant to look at, and that was good enough.
Sam didn’t enjoy it. There were a lot of reasons. Fundamentally, nobody looking for fame and fortune joins the army, and it turned out when fame and the potential of fortune became feasible, he still didn’t want it. There was also the downside to the fame, i.e., the rumors. The worst of these was probably the one in a magazine Sam was told was legitimately reputable, which sugge
sted—in a story teased on the cover—that he and Annie Collins had been an item.
Sam Corning was a responsible adult, and Annie Collins was a child, so this was probably the most insulting thing anyone could have impugned. He knew Annie very well, and considered her one of his best friends, but their relationship could best be described as older brother/younger sister. When he went to his handler—the army assigned him a public relations handler, which he didn’t know was a thing until he had one—he was told that any attempt to clarify this would only make matters worse. The reason given was that one branch of Sam’s family was from West Virginia, and apparently that meant stereotypes regarding familial inbreeding. That was when Sam told the military he was done, and they could all go to hell.
He calmed down. It helped that the brass dangled a promotion and something that might have been legally classified as a bribe, along with his choice of assignments. He could have that, or he could have a nice honorable discharge and (probably) a book deal so he could tell his own heavily redacted version of the truth.
He took the promotion. Being a soldier was pretty much all he really wanted to do, and it was also all he knew how to do, once one excluded his zombie apocalypse skillset, so it suited him. And when he was provided with his choice of assignments, the one that made the most sense was in Northern California, in the kind of hills that looked like they might remind him of home.
Ed Somerville looked pretty surprised to see Sam under conditions that could be approximately described as house arrest. Nobody had arrested him, per se, but once he logged his initial report regarding the sudden and inexplicable lack of coworkers, he’d had an escort with him everywhere he went. This included when he was allowed to go back home to the small house he was renting on the edge of Dunsmuir, which was where Ed found him.
“My goodness,” Ed said, as Sam met him on the porch, flanked by two members of the military police, “trouble just seems to follow you around, Sergeant Corning.”
“I could say the same, Mr. Somerville.”
“No sir, trouble doesn’t find me. It finds other people and then they go out and find me.”
They shook hands, and then committed to one of those one-armed embraces men sometimes did, before separating. Sam was really glad to see Ed; it had been a while.
“You call it what you will,” Sam said. “Come on in. Don’t worry about these guys, they’re just here to make sure nobody steals me too.”
Once inside—they left the MP’s on the porch, which was okay because they were terrible in a conversation—Ed introduced his driver, who turned out to be an army captain in civvy clothes.
“I see you’re still ordering ranked officers around,” Sam noted, as everyone sat down in the living room on furniture that came with the place. It was extremely basic stuff, but served the need he had to not be required to sit on the floor.
“I’m not taking orders from him, sergeant,” Captain Braver said, a lot more defensively than Sam would have expected. He saw something like embarrassment cross Ed’s face.
“Sorry, no, of course not ma’am. It’s just I saw him order a general out of his own office one time.”
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me at all,” she said.
“It wasn’t like that,” Ed said. “Anyway. Sam, it’s really good to see you. If you don’t mind my asking, what are those guys outside really here for?”
“Nobody’s said, but my guess is they’re here to make sure I don’t murder another twenty-odd people and hide all the evidence.”
“I can call around,” Braver said. “I’m pretty sure if anyone decided to charge you, I’d have heard about it before now.”
“I’d think I would have too,” Sam said.
She pulled a cell phone from her pocket and stepped outside.
“It’s not that I mind all that much,” Sam said to Ed. “The uncertainty’s a little annoying, but I guess if you’re a higher-up and looking at my track record, it’s probably a good idea to make sure I don’t go anywhere until somebody’s decided this is just a coincidence. I’m guessing that’s why you’re here.”
“I’m here because everyone in Algernon vanished. Nobody told me about your involvement until I asked. But I’m sure Mel will sort it out. What can you tell me?”
“Mel?”
“Melissa. Captain Braver.”
“Right. So, I’m being honest, Ed, I don’t have much to tell you.”
“You weren’t at the base when this happened.”
“Well, yeah. This.” He made quotation marks with his fingers to indicate that ‘this’ was deeply undefined at this time. “I was on two-week leave.”
“Have fun?”
“Went fishing. Met a girl. Looks promising.”
“Girl likes to fish?”
“She likes to wait tables. Well, no, she probably doesn’t like it, but that’s what she does.”
Ed looked pleased, like learning that Sam had prospects was the news he was hoping to get from this interaction. That was probably kind of true. The two of them had been in a foxhole together. Sure, it wasn’t a literal foxhole, but neither had expected to survive the night, so the experience was analogous. In short, Ed was probably about as pleased to hear Sam was dating as Sam was to see that Edgar appeared to have some sort of relationship with the captain who just left the room.
“Well that’s great,” Ed said. “But your two-week pass ended and you headed back up to Algernon. Tell me what happened from there.”
“Have you been to the base yet?” Sam asked.
“We came from there.”
“Then you saw pretty much what I did.”
“Was the fence open?”
“Yeah. Fence was open, but the gate was down. When I got there, nobody was in the booth, so I waited a few minutes for someone to show, then I honked, then I called in. When nobody answered, I lifted the gate myself and drove to the main building. Got as far as the front desk before deciding something was seriously wrong.”
“Then what?”
“Then I called Fort Irwin, told them what I was seeing, and started to go look for bodies.”
“Why bodies?”
“Because it seemed a lot more likely that twenty-three people were dead than that twenty-three people simultaneously abandoned their post. I was thinking some sort of accident. Carbon monoxide or something.”
“Aliens?”
“I admit the thought crossed my mind. Couldn’t quite see the angle, but hey, we didn’t know what was coming down last time either.”
“I’m curious, did you know what Project Algernon did before The Incident?”
“You mean the servers? Yeah. I’m fond of mountains already, so I probably would have put in for the staff sergeant position either way, but… yes, there’s something about being stationed at one end of the information pipeline before going to work at the other end of that same pipeline, you understand?”
“I do. It wasn’t a pipeline, but I do.”
“Well I know it wasn’t. The information flow, then. It began in that field and ended at Algie. I just thought there was some poetry to it, even if the information didn’t still live on those servers.”
“I think it might, actually.”
“You don’t think there’s a connection, do you? Between this and Sorrow Falls?”
“I don’t see how there could be. Nothing that happened that night was recorded, because the ship severed the connection. And if I’m wrong, some of that information lives in other places where nothing like this has happened.”
“So far as you know,” Sam said, smiling.
“Nobody else has gone missing lately, I know that.”
“Well, it’s a big world.”
“That it is.”
Ed looked like he was remembering something, but it wasn’t something he was prepared to share.
“How well did you know the people on the base?” Ed asked.
“Truth? Not all that well. I’ve only been here a couple of months.”
&nbs
p; “Any of the scientists?”
“Not really. We held the perimeter. From inside the fence this time, for the most part. There wasn’t any real policing needed in the buildings, so…the gate, the front desk, the fence and that was all. We’d run errands now and again, but nothing crazy.”
“Sam, when you searched the facility, how long before someone else arrived?”
“It was about ten hours, but I wasn’t inside the whole time. After I cleared the place, I took my car to the gate and waited out there.”
“Did you see anything interesting?”
“At the gate?”
“Any time. Surprise me.”
“There was that conference room, if that’s what you mean. I assume you saw.”
“I did. What did you make of it?”
“Scientists are weird, that’s about it.”
This was an understatement. The first time Sam decided something really messed up had happened at Algernon was when he saw that room. He’d already made his calls, but that was the moment when he concluded he’d rather not be anywhere indoors after the sun went down. He was also underplaying the part where he sat in his car at the edge of the base until troops from Irwin arrived. He’d done just that, but it was a pretty terrifying wait. It made him wish he’d taken up the long-term counseling the army had offered to him after The Incident.
“What makes you say it was a scientist?” Ed asked.
“I know what math looks like. So do you, Ed; don’t pretend that wasn’t your conclusion too.”
Ed smiled.
“I’m reserving my conclusions for now,” he said. “Any thoughts on who it might have been?”
“No, sorry. Like I said, I hardly knew anyone yet, outside of the men under me. How about you?”
“I knew who was here a few years ago, but I don’t recognize any of the names of the missing,” Ed said.
“No, I mean do you have any idea what’s going on here?”
The Frequency of Aliens Page 6
