“All right. I’ll send coordinates. Try not to kill any more locals on the way.”
The fact that their position wasn’t immediately overrun by a horde of rifle-toting soldiers was the first thing to go right that afternoon. The second was that they drove on the right side of the road in Latvia, so the SUV that was still parked out front had a driver’s seat on the left. Sam could drive it without immediately plunging them into a ravine.
The third was that the general left the keys in the ignition.
“All right, I have the destination coordinates, and I have our current coordinates,” Ed said. “What we could really use now is a maps program to get us from here to there.”
“You have a cell phone, don’t you? Just plug them in.”
Sam took the car past the front gates at a speed in which he felt comfortable. That it was also a speed which made Ed extremely nervous was of lesser concern.
“The cell can’t pick up a tower out here, I’ve tried already. Where did you see that road?”
“Along the back, skirting the hillside. We don’t have a direct route, unless you want to take this off a cliff. Have to go down here and around.”
“And you know where to turn.”
“I have no clue where to turn, that was why I was hoping for some step-by-step directions. Keep your eyes open for either an access road branching off of this one, or a convenient helicopter.”
They continued toward the town, which was maybe bad, since that was the one place they last saw people with guns, but it couldn’t be helped. They were flanked on both sides by forest; sometimes Ed couldn’t even see the road.
“I wish I’d paid more attention,” Ed said. “It’s hard to believe this is the only path up and down.”
“Yeah, me too. I think the town is around the next bend, are you ready?”
“I don’t know, what should I be ready for?”
“Beats me. Werewolves? More zombies? What’s on the list?”
They emerged at the edge of the ghost town. The two soldiers they’d dropped off were straight ahead, a hundred yards away, at the same crossroad in which they’d been left. It was as if they hadn’t moved since then. This was perhaps exactly right.
Sam came to a stop.
“Well? There’s our right turn. We catch that, I think it has to go down toward the water. If might even be the right road, if we’re really lucky.”
“Sounds great,” Ed said. “Except for those guys in the way.”
“Yep, all except for those guys.”
Sam put the car in drive and started rolling.
“You think this glass is bulletproof?” Sam asked.
“No, probably not.”
“I don’t think so either. When do you figure they’ll realize something’s wrong and the guy driving isn’t the guy they’re expecting?”
“Maybe they never will and we can just keep going.”
“They’re still in our way.”
“People get out of the way of moving cars, don’t they?” Ed asked. “I mean when they aren’t zombies.”
“Whoops.”
The two solders looked at one another, and wordlessly came to the same conclusion at the same time. Then they were taking their guns off their shoulders.
Sam’s reaction was to speed up.
“I did say this probably isn’t bulletproof, right?” Ed asked.
“I told you, they don’t know what they’re doing with those rifles.”
He nudged the speed up a little more, as one of the soldiers managed to get the Kalashnikov leveled and pointed in the right direction.
As far as Ed could tell, he and Sam were about to die in a hail of bullets. The guy with the gun sure looked like he knew exactly how to use the weapon in his hands.
Then he started firing, and it was like watching someone trying to hold an active firehose.
“Told’ja,” Sam said.
“I think he hit everything except us.”
“It’s not as easy as it looks in the movies. Are you belted in?”
Ed was. He’d double-checked three times since they started moving.
“You think the belt will help stop a bullet?”
“No, but it’ll help for this.”
Sam popped the emergency brake and turned the wheel hard to the right. The effect was to skid the driver’s side of the car into the soldiers, the second of whom still hadn’t figured out how to make his gun go boom.
The soldiers were knocked backwards a few feet.
“Did we just kill more Latvians?” Ed asked. He couldn’t see them; they were on Sam’s side.
“Probably not, but they’re not getting up. You think we need one of those guns?”
“Just keep driving.”
“Roger that.”
Sam released the brake and headed down the road, which took them past more boarded up and half-shattered windows. As they picked up speed, Ed could have sworn he saw movement on the other side of one of the un-boarded-up windows.
“I see them too,” Ed said.
“See what?”
“The ghosts. Someone’s definitely living here.”
“You should learn to trust me more, Ed,” Sam said.
The only resistance they encountered after that came from whoever designed the road they were navigating. In several places it was purely hypothetical, for while it was paved, it was also in the middle of a healthy forest region. The road that led from the ghost town to the telescope was a three-lane highway by comparison.
It was slow going. They had to stop a few times to get debris out of the way before continuing, and there was the problem of not being fully certain the path they were on was even going to where they needed to be. On top of that, the sun set.
They ended up abandoning the car a quarter of a mile from the evacuation point. The road didn’t appear to be getting them any closer, especially since aside from being a relatively flat shoreline area fronting the Baltic, there wasn’t anything there for a road to visit. There were docks farther south along the coast, but the whole point of a secret naval evacuation was that it took place where there wasn’t anybody else.
After a short, steep downhill walk that took a lot longer for the lack of proper illumination, they reached the rocky shore.
“Is there a boat waiting for us out there?” Sam asked.
“Kind of,” Ed said.
He dialed a number on his satellite phone, waited through the clicks, and then heard the line open.
“We’re in position,” he said, and then hung up.
“Now what?” Sam asked.
“Now we wait. Oh, hey, this is a bad time to ask, but do you get claustrophobic?”
Sam laughed.
“A submarine, then.”
“Yeah, but it’s a secret. We’re not supposed to have one in the Baltic.”
“Got it. I’ll try not to tell anyone while we’re waiting.”
Ed found a decent rock to sit on and settled his gaze on the water. He wasn’t sure what sort of conveyance to expect, but it probably wasn’t going to be a sub. The water was too shallow near the shore for one.
“So, what do you think, Sam?” he asked. “What do you think they want?”
“Something to do with Annie, that’s all I got from it.”
“Yeah. But what about Annie? They want her to listen, but what does that mean? Are they trying to communicate with her?”
Sam took a seat of his own. The rocky shoreline wasn’t really made for sitting, so neither of them were likely to be getting comfortable.
“I think you’re asking the wrong questions,” Sam said. “Not what they want but who in the hell are they?”
“You’re right, that’s a better question.”
“I’m thinking something alien. Like this Violet person. Or, whatever she is. Maybe they’re like her.”
“Could be.”
“They were poking around the same space in my head, right?”
“Yeah. Not sure it works exactly like that, but yeah.”
/> “Exactly like what?”
“I’m just not sure. I don’t like to speculate with this little information. We didn’t find out there was a they until a few hours ago, it’s a little early to come up with a clear definition of their nature and motivation. Let’s collect more data.”
“Like those books you found.”
“Hopefully.”
Sam nodded, and fell silent for a few more seconds. Ed thought he could see something heading toward them from the water.
“Maybe we can get word to her,” Sam said.
“I don’t know what we could say. Let’s figure out what we’re dealing with first. Besides, like I said, between the Secret Service and the spaceship, she’s one of the most secure people on the planet.”
“Plus, she has finals.”
“Right. Don’t worry, she’ll be fine.”
Sam didn’t look like he was planning to stop worrying until he was in the same room as Annie again. Ed couldn’t really blame him. He sort of felt the same. But he didn’t have a way to contact her directly, and wouldn’t until he was back on US soil.
“Something’s coming,” Sam said.
“That’d be our ride.”
“You sure? I hear music.”
Music was not the sort of thing one expected from a naval vessel operating in secret on the Baltic, but this wasn’t a naval vessel; it was a fisherman’s schooner.
“It’s fine,” Ed said. “Local resources. Hopefully he speaks English.”
“English or not, I was hoping for better taste in music.”
13
The Ghost and Ms. Collins
…These objects appear to encircle the planet. Given it is beyond our current technologies to place something this small in geosynchronous orbit without deterioration, it is the opinion of this team that the devices are alien in origin, likely associated with the SFS. Their function is not known…
…We must underline, however, that we cannot definitively prove the existence of the objects at this time…
excerpted from internal NASA report, “Anomalies Associated with Sorrow Falls Ship”
Annie wasn’t sure what insanity might look like for someone like her.
If she went to a medical professional and explained that there was an alien idea that lived in her head and occasionally spoke, the medical professional would undoubtedly prescribe a carton of medication and bed rest. And it wouldn’t improve things when she further explained that she could also move at least one object with her mind.
All of that was verifiably true—although technically she wasn’t moving the ship with her mind, she was pushing ideas to it and it was acting on those ideas, but that was the kind of hair-splitting that would have had the aforementioned medical professional scribbling even more furiously on the notepad Annie imagined her having.
Aside from Violet, nobody knew these things. Certainly not the government, or the Secret Service, or the actual medical professionals with actual notepads who’d sat with her after The Incident. (Those professionals were there to determine how much of a threat Annie represented, not to help her through any issues she might be having, which only meant she definitely wasn’t confiding in them on the level they wanted her to.)
She didn’t even tell Ed.
It was a problem. If (for instance) Cora understood how loud Annie’s head was normally, it might be easier to then turn to Cora and ask if she thought Annie was perhaps losing her mind.
The only person Annie could ask was Rick Horton, and that just added to the problem, because he was the reason she was questioning her sanity in the first place.
Rick was apparently not real. Annie couldn’t entirely confirm that, because so far he’d only shown up under two circumstances: in crowds, when he was too far away for her to point him out; or when she was alone. In private, he spoke, but didn’t have anything interesting to say aside from vague warnings of threats unseen and circumstances not-yet-transpired. In public, he just smiled and waved and walked away.
Since all available information had it that Rick Horton was dead, this could have meant she was being haunted by the not-particularly-vengeful, mostly-annoying spirit of him, and that would have been just fine if ghosts were real. Since Annie was pretty positive they were not, the alternative was that she was going insane.
The good news was that Rick had gone from being a horror movie jump-scare ghost to someone a little more seriocomic. Yes, he turned up when she was alone, and that was disturbing, but once she grew accustomed to his occasional appearances she stopped viewing him as a threat and more like a curiosity. Also, he’d been nice enough not to show up on really awkward occasions, like when she was in the shower or something. Considering how he was when he was alive, that sort of self-awareness from his ghost was a welcome surprise.
Also surprising, Annie’s apparent departure from the realm of the entirely sane made final exams a lot less stressful. There were still late nights, too much coffee, and far more information than her normal human brain was prepared to absorb, but all of it seemed less critical, somehow. Questions about her sanity put the stress of finals into perspective: Nothing made a possible B-minus in Intro to Film Study seem less important than the thought that it won’t matter when Annie goes nuts and blows up the planet.
Needless to say, she didn’t share this line of thinking with anybody either.
The mood in the Corcoran cafeteria was somewhere between a funeral and a sleepover pillow fight. Everyone was overtired and punchy, half the students looked like they were wearing pajamas, and there was a cloud of doom—impending and realized—hanging over everyone’s heads. Kids that Annie had previously identified as highly sociable looked as if they should be on a suicide watch. Conversations were hushed, if they were happening at all. Most everyone ate their food alone, in silence, with a textbook or ebook reader in front of them. Some just stared at a spot on the table a foot past their lunch tray. Two or three were asleep.
And it was only Wednesday. The last day of finals wasn’t until the following Tuesday.
“Hey,” Cora said. Annie was engaging in her own bit of staring-off-into-the-middle-distance. It appeared that sort of thing was contagious.
“Hey,” Annie said back.
They were the only ones at the table. Annie’s lunchtime friends had become far less dependable as the semester had progressed, largely due to schedule conflicts that made it tough for them to all have food at the same time. Also, it was probably normal to have some falling-out over time. Annie’s sense was that freshman friendships were less likely to be of the long-term kind. Half the reason they were friends at all was that they were all in their first year, and that wasn’t a lot to build on.
There were two or three occasions in which she ran into one of her lunchtime buddies in the hall, where they either didn’t see her or were actively pretending they hadn’t. Annie was trying not to take that sort of behavior personally, because again, she just didn’t know any of them all that well. She also thought it was probably true that being seen as a friend of Annie Collins had its own stresses that Annie couldn’t fully understand, especially after what happened at the Eye-of-God festival.
Even her own roommates seemed to have a problem with her lately. Both had been actively ducking her when possible, and speaking in monosyllables when not possible.
Annie thought everyone just wanted to get home at this point. She sure did.
“The van wants to know how you’re doing,” Cora said.
“The van does?”
“Well, I do too, but I don’t need to ask.”
The van wasn’t really asking her how she was doing; someone in Washington was asking her, through the van. This had been happening a lot, and it was sort of Annie’s fault.
“I’m doing super-fantastic.”
“I’ll tell them you’re fine,” Cora said.
“I think you should use super-fantastic.”
“I’m not so sure everyone else will appreciate the unique balance of sincerity a
nd sarcasm you bring to it.”
“Fair. You know what I’m thinking?”
“What’s that?”
“I’m thinking it’s weird, but I can’t wait to get back home.”
Cora took a second to speak in hushed tones to the microphone in her sleeve, before returning her focus to Annie. Annie was so used to this by now that when she spoke to people who weren’t Secret Service, she was a little surprised that they neglected to take a moment now and then to have a private aside with a flap of clothing.
“Why is that weird?” Cora asked.
“Because of how much I wanted to get away? I haven’t been back since the start of the school year.”
Annie stayed on campus even during Christmas. There were a lot of good, solid logistical reasons for this that would have made even more sense if it had been an off-campus apartment and she were living in the city, but the real reason was that it was the first year she would be celebrating Christmas without her mother. There was no way that wasn’t going to stink, but it would have stunk more if she’d had to do it in the house. At least in the dorm room, every single aspect of the experience was new and different.
Her Christmas morning ended up being a series of video conferences with a few people, a remote shared-viewing of The Wizard of Oz with Violet, and Chinese food. It was sort of awful, but she figured that was her own fault, since it was how she’d orchestrated the day. She thought of herself as someone who didn’t mind being alone, but it turned out that was true only so long as she was alone with her mom.
But she wouldn’t be staying—at the dorm or locally—over the summer. She’d only made that decision recently, and only under duress, as the Secret Service needed the time to plan these things. Also, if she wasn’t going home she needed to arrange a place to live. And maybe get a job or something.
Everyone was pretty happy with her decision to go home, then.
“That’s not weird. You’ll be sick of Sorrow Falls by the middle of the summer. By August, you’ll wonder if it’s weird you can’t wait to get back to school.”
“Getting old sucks.”
The Frequency of Aliens Page 18
