“A few people.”
“Everyone on the group invite.”
Annie laughed.
“Well, my social standing must be crap, because it sure seems like nobody wants me here.”
“That’s not true. Pretty sure twice as many people turned up to see you.”
“And what, glare resentfully from afar?”
“They’ll be able to tell their kids they attended a party with the famous Annie Collins one time.”
Annie spotted Ginger from across the yard.
“Oh hey, there’s someone I know. Ginger!”
She waved. Ginger waved back and started walking over.
Annie was surprised by how happy she was to see Ginger, possibly in part because Ginger was one of those people Annie thought of as a friend right away. They’d hardly spoken to one another in the past couple of months, though. It was bad enough that if someone told Annie Ginger had dropped out, she would have believed them.
Ginger made it to roughly five feet from Annie, which was close enough for Annie to say, “Ginger, this is…” before someone tackled Ginger to the ground.
This was startling for a whole host of reasons, which was why in the first couple of seconds that followed, Annie couldn’t do much more than just stare at the whole thing, bewildered, as it unfolded.
A knife bounced out from the tangle of bodies. It was a big, shiny kitchen knife, the sort of thing that was primarily intended for vegetables, and only secondarily to harm human beings. The possibility that Annie was the human being to whom harm was intended still hadn’t really sunk in.
Lindsey was the one who was wrestling Ginger. This made about as much sense as the knife.
“She has a knife!” Lindsey shouted. She got up to her knees, still managing to hold down Ginger somehow, until Cora got to the scene, and made what was apparently the wrong decision.
Announcing “code red!” into the microphone in her sleeve, Cora grabbed Lindsey from behind and pulled her around until Lindsey was face first on what was (thankfully) grass and dirt not concrete. Yount raced in from the other side of the green, barking something into his own sleeve and unclipping the gun at his hip.
“No, wait,” Annie said, because she thought they probably had this wrong. It may have seemed obvious to them that the stranger was the one who was the threat, because they thought of Ginger as a fully vetted friend, and who could therefore be trusted alone in the middle of the yard with a knife on the ground next to the person they were supposed to be guarding.
She couldn’t, though. Ginger was getting back to her feet and looking for the knife with the kind of singular focus that was a little terrifying.
Annie tried to take a step forward, either to reach for the knife herself or to get Cora’s attention, but then someone had her hands behind her back.
It was Duke.
“Just hold still,” he said.
“Duke, what are you doing?” Annie shouted. It seemed like the music had gotten louder all of a sudden, and nobody could hear her any more. Cora had her knee in Lindsey’s back and was issuing orders to Yount, and neither of them were looking at Annie. The third agent wasn’t even in view any more.
“It’ll be over soon,” Duke said. “I’m sorry. It’s the only way.”
Ginger spotted the knife.
“Help me, somebody!” Annie shouted. She was trying to fight her way free, but Duke had her pinned pretty firmly.
On the other side of the fire pit, she saw another familiar face: Rick.
“Help me, please,” she cried, as Ginger knelt down for the knife. As ridiculous as it seemed, she was going to kill Annie, and Duke was going to help her, and that was all impossible.
“Please don’t do this,” she said.
Ginger raised the knife, Duke squeezed Annie tighter… and then the fire pit erupted.
That was what it seemed like. What actually happened was that a concussive beam of energy was fired from outer space at the fire pit, but it was so sudden, those close enough to experience the impact were forgiven for having gotten it wrong.
There was a brilliant flash, initially silent and then not at all, like a bolt of lightning, except considerably more precise.
The blast created a concussion wave that knocked everyone back several feet. Annie was blocked from the worst of it by Ginger, who ended up lying face-down some distance away, motionless. Duke ended up on his back, no longer pinning Annie, and also not really moving.
Annie thought maybe she blacked out for a few seconds, because after the flash, the first thing she saw was the ghost of Rick Horton standing over her, telling her to get the hell up.
“You have to get out of here,” Rick said.
She got to her feet, groggily. The only other person in the yard who appeared to be conscious and moving around—and who wasn’t also a figment of Annie’s imagination—was Lindsey. Maybe lying on the ground protected her from the concussion wave. Annie helped her to her feet.
“Come on,” Annie said, pulling Lindsey up.
“What happened?”
“A whole bunch of things. Let’s go.”
“Where?”
Rick was standing at the passage between the houses, on top of a lot of broken glass. All of the windows had been shattered in the quad. Annie hoped nobody inside was hurt too badly by the glass.
“Come this way,” he said. His voice was a lot louder than Lindsey’s, a point that seemed relevant. Lindsey was real, and actually talking, while Rick wasn’t. The real surprising thing was that Annie and Lindsey could even hear one another at all.
Annie followed Rick into the passage, and Lindsey followed Annie.
On the street side, the van was fully mobilized. There were two agents on the roof with rifles, and another on Annie’s side of the street, the nameless one. Wendy Riviera was at the door of the van, waving Annie to her and barking commands Annie couldn’t hear, into a handheld radio.
Annie took two steps into the street, when her progress was halted by the camper from up the street. It screeched to a stop right in front of her.
The side door opened, and the night went from crazy to completely insane, because there was Oona, in a flak jacket, with a gun in her hand and a wild grin on her face.
“Looks like the world might be ending again, girlie,” she shouted. “Come on, let’s move!”
16
A Friend In Need
“Breaking news: we have reports of a possible explosion at or near Wainwright College. Police are responding. We will keep you updated as soon as we have more information.
…Wainwright College, as you know, is where Annie Collins is attending school, but there are a lot of reasons to think this is unrelated… hang on… I’m being told now that the explosion in question was caused by… (unintelligible mumbling)… some kind of lightning bolt or… light beam…
Folks, this is very preliminary information right now…”
Local Boston news
One of the really annoying things about classified information was that it tended to be important, while at the same time it also tended to be difficult to access. This occasionally meant something really critical could be going on, but the person who absolutely needed to know about that critical thing might end up being the last one to hear about it, if he happened to be unable to access his server in a sufficiently secure interface.
The Groton naval base had the necessary security while the naval vessels mostly did not—the military still didn’t entirely trust wifi—so until Ed reached Groton, he was unable to retrieve what ended up being an absurdly massive number of messages.
The messages arrived in multiple ways: emails, voicemails, and text messages. They didn’t necessarily add up to anything individually, but taken as a whole it was clear a lot had gone wrong in the few weeks he’d been out of the country.
“What’s going on?” Sam asked.
They were sitting in an office that had been requisitioned specifically for Ed’s use.
In the thr
ee hours since they’d stepped back on dry land, Sam managed to find a place to shower, shave, and change into fresh clothing. Ed had a feeling his friend wouldn’t look at a boat again for a very long time.
That Sam asked the question meant that Ed was doing a poor job of hiding his distress. But then, Ed never had a really good poker face. He fondly recalled how many times Annie reminded him of this.
“Everything, apparently,” Ed said.
“Zombies?”
“Them too, but everything else along with.”
“Huh. Right now?”
“Well…” he clicked through the dates in his email log. “Off and on.”
“Whereabouts?”
“All over the place.”
Sam leaned forward in his chair, as if this would give him the ability to read the emails through the back of the computer monitor.
“What does ‘everything else’ mean?”
Ed smiled.
“Do you know what I do, Sam?”
“Buddy, nobody knows what you do.”
Ed laughed.
“That’s fair,” he said. “So, these are a bunch of emails asking me to investigate weird things.”
“Define weird.”
“Uhh, let’s see: vampire, vampire, zombie, ghost,” he said, ticking off each instance on his fingers. “And, ghost again, and another ghost, a werewolf… hard to say what this one is for sure, looks like someone thought they saw a velociraptor in Palm Beach. And then there’s aliens. Lots of aliens, all over the place.”
“What kind of aliens?”
“Take your pick. UFOs abducting people, little grey bald men, something that sounds like it came from the movie Predator… here’s a report of someone who tried to cut their own chest open because they thought an alien was living in there.”
“Yikes.”
“Normally, I get a few of these a month. And I’m not worried that we’re currently besieged by a multiracial alien force that uses an army of vampires, ghosts, zombies, and dinosaurs.”
“Good. That sounds dangerous.”
“What does have me worried is that there’s a few hundred of these in my mailbox, and that’s an increase of one or two orders of magnitude.”
“How exactly did you become the clearinghouse for weird central?”
Ed didn’t answer right away, because he’d begun delving into a few of the emails in greater detail. That was when he realized the quantity wasn’t nearly as big of an issue as the tenor.
“Annie,” he said, eventually. “Or rather, Sorrow Falls. I don’t just investigate telescope incidents. And all these emails, these people aren’t just hinting that maybe these things have something to do with the ship. That’s what it used to be. Zombies were real for one night, so now everything is a possible incident. This is different. This is bad.”
“What is?”
“In addition to there being a whole lot more of these, every last one appears to blame Annie, by name. I’m honestly amazed nobody has come out and called her a witch yet.”
Sam stopped finding what he was hearing amusing.
“I told you she was in trouble,” he said. “We should have called her.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right. Not that I think negative sentiments are an actual threat, but maybe so. Hang on.”
One of the voicemails saved off on the server was from a familiar name. Ed hit play, and they were both treated to a message from Dobbs.
“Hi, Ed, we need to talk,” Dobbs said. “I just had a couple of interesting guys in my office, and now I’m kind of worried. I’ll send head shots from the security cams here, maybe you know them. I’m going to look up our friends in comfortable shoes. Oh, and we have to discuss Violet.”
Sam and Ed looked at one another for a few seconds, without speaking.
“Violet,” Ed said.
“Friends in comfortable shoes?” Sam asked.
“I had lunch with him a year or so ago, after he settled in,” Ed said. “Just to see how life was treating him. He told me when he grew up his mother had a phrase she used when talking about lesbians: women in comfortable shoes.”
“Oona and Laura?”
“You have to figure that’s what he meant. But he didn’t want to say that because he was worried about who might be listening. Those two dropped off the map pretty fast, though. I don’t even know where they ended up. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised he did.”
Ed went back to his email folder until he found what Dobbs sent, and opened it.
“Hey,” Ed said. “Take a look at these guys. Are they familiar?”
Ed spun the monitor around so Sam could get a good squint at the rough images Dobbs forwarded.
“Yeahhh,” Sam said. “Yeah, I’ve seen them before.”
“Whereabouts?”
“I think you know. They’re from Algie.”
“I agree. So, these two go missing in Northern California, then turn up a couple of months later looking… well, it’s hard to tell from these shots, but if they were able to walk into a meeting with Dobbs, I imagine they appeared healthy and clean, and not having lived off the land for months. San Diego is a long way from Project Algernon, so they probably didn’t walk.”
“They went off the grid,” Sam said.
“Yeah, but that’s a lot easier to say than it is to do. They would have needed help, unless they made arrangements way in advance. It’s just not that easy to disappear completely for this long. Okay, so these guys show up in San Diego, talk to Dobbs, and now he can remember Violet Jones, he thinks something’s wrong, and he’s running to see everyone’s favorite paranoid survivalists.”
“You mean, he ran, past tense. That was weeks ago, right? Who knows what they’re up to now? But for the paranoid part, you have to admit, those two got a lot of things right.”
There was a knock on the door. Before Ed could respond to that knock, the door was open and three MP’s were in the room, weapons out.
“What the hell?” Sam asked.
“What’s going on, guys?” Ed asked.
“We have orders to secure both of you gentlemen immediately,” the first soldier in the room said. “There’s been an incident.”
“Oona?” Annie said. “What are you doing here?”
“The barbarians are at the gates again, kiddo. C’mon, we’re rescuing you.”
Annie didn’t know exactly what to say. To argue that she didn’t currently need rescuing seemed like a bad point to try to make, given she very much needed it around five minutes earlier. Now that a friend wasn’t trying to stab her—while another friend held her down—things seemed pretty cool. Of course, she wasn’t checking her back, and the ghost of Rick Horton did seem pretty insistent that Annie escape immediately, so maybe there was a horde of stab-happy college students amassed at the edge of the quads.
“Annie, come here,” Wendy said, far less boisterously. “We have to get you to a safe house immediately. Ms. Kozlowsky, I promise, we have this under control.”
“No, she don’t, Annie,” Oona said. “Trust who brung you, girl, now come on.”
“Is that really Oona?” Lindsey whispered. She and Annie were currently holding hands. Despite that, Annie forgot she was there, with all the excitement of the past thirty seconds.
“Ms. Kozlowsky, I promise, you and whoever you have in that vehicle are about to be in a tremendous amount of trouble. Now please stop interfering or we will be forced to act.”
Oona laughed.
“I’ll show you where to shove that pants-suit, government lady,” Oona said. “You think we ain’t been listening? You’re all kinds of wrong.”
“What do you mean, end-of-the-world?” Annie asked Oona.
“Do not engage her,” Wendy said. “Annie, you just fired a weapon from space, and that comes with consequences. I have to take you in. It’s for your own protection.”
“Annie?”
Cora had reached the street. She looked pretty messed up. There was a trickle of blood out of one ear.
<
br /> “Annie, what are you doing, we have to go,” Cora said.
Wendy took a step toward Annie, and then a gunshot rang out. The ground in front of the agent kicked up asphalt.
“Don’t do that, government lady,” Oona said. “My girl’s a good shot, she didn’t miss on accident.”
“Laura’s here?” Annie asked.
Laura popped her head up over the side of the camper roof.
“Hi Annie,” she said pleasantly. Laura always managed to sound pleasant, regardless of the circumstance.
“Who’s driving?” Annie asked. She couldn’t see through the windshield, because of the angle, and because there appeared to be some kind of armor plating across some of it. Whatever else Laura and Oona had been doing with themselves over the past couple of years, reinforcing their trailer was a part of the deal.
“Dobbs. I don’t like him touching my baby, but he’s no good with guns.”
“What are you all doing here?”
“That’s quite enough,” Wendy said. The bullet to the ground froze her where she stood, but now she had a gun out, and pointed at Oona. She held up the thing in her other hand.
“Annie, do you see this radio?” she said “I’m one go-signal away from having your friends taken out, because I don’t know if they appreciate this, but they’ve wandered into a shooting gallery. Now, I don’t want to open fire, but they’re surrounded, and I will do that. Please don’t make me. Get in the van. You can catch up with your friends later. Agent Blankenship, why don’t you help her?”
“Annie, what do you want to do?” Cora asked, quietly. “I’ll have your back either way.”
“I think I want to go with my friends, Wendy,” Annie said. “I’ll be safe enough.”
“That is not an option,” Agent Riviera said. “I have orders.”
“Yeah, but I don’t,” Annie said.
Wendy held the radio up again, as if it was a weapon all by itself.
“Don’t make me do this.”
“Aw, c’mon, lady,” Oona said. “It’s a bluff. Everybody knows it. You got two on your roof, one on your left, and there were three at the party. One of them three is standing next to Annie right now, one’s probably still out cold from the blast, and even if I can’t see the other one from here, I’m betting he doesn’t have the high ground right now. We ain’t surrounded. Also, I think you’re forgetting you’re not the one here with the biggest gun, unless I’m misinterpreting what just happened at that party a minute ago. That was you, wasn’t it, girlie?”
The Frequency of Aliens Page 23
