“You’re saying something in the signal knew when it became an idea in someone’s mind, and then… well it couldn’t send new information, right? It had to already be there in the signal. Like you said, the original transmission was a long time ago.”
“It had to be living in the signal.”
“Interesting word choice,” Sam said.
“Yeah. And I hope I’m wrong, and after a good night’s sleep, or just a long talk with Annie and Violet this will all make a different kind of sense… but right now, I’m pretty sure I’m right about this.”
Sam nodded again, then shook his head.
“Nope, you lost me at living in the signal.”
“I meant it literally, Sam. I think we’re in the middle of an alien invasion.”
Part IV
Summer Break
19
Occupation Hazard
The world wakes up today to news of another alien attack. Only this one, we did to ourselves.
We should never have allowed it to get to this point. Annie Collins is dangerous. I’ve said this before. (See: ‘Annie Collins Is a Devil in Blue Jeans,’ ‘Just Call Her Lolita,’ ‘Did Annie Collins Destroy Peace in Our Time?’ and others.) I will say it again, and again, until the day she decides to silence me, and don’t think that won’t happen.
Annie Collins is a threat to all life. She’s the Satan of Sorrow Falls. And you were all fools to think otherwise.
Court Bainbridge, NYT editorial
As had been underlined on a number of occasions—most often by her husband—Sheriff Pete didn’t actually have to work the night shift. She was the boss, she had a newborn at home, and also, in case she wasn’t paying attention the first time it came around, she was the boss.
He probably said this because Charlie Jr. wasn’t sleeping through the night, and he didn’t feel like dealing with that on the regular, but neither did she, which was why she continued to work the night shift when her turn came up in the rotation.
Chuck felt this way about her continuing to serve as the town’s sheriff, too. The way Sheriff Pete saw it, as long as they kept electing her, she would keep fulfilling the duties, even though there had been an opportunity to cash out shortly after The Incident. It seemed whenever something patently insane took place in Sorrow Falls (which history indicated happened every two to three years) the sheriff ended up being someone the media spent a lot of time talking to, and that could—so she’d been told—lead to ‘opportunities.’
Pete didn’t know what those opportunities were, but at the time she was mostly just glad that she survived the evening and that Chuck was away that night on business. Any get-rich ideas aside from that weren’t even in consideration. These days, she just appreciated the opportunity to still be alive, raise a family, and not worry so much about zombies or extraterrestrial invasions.
Plus, this was the reward she spent all that time waiting on.
After that night, the whole town was overrun by representatives from the state police and the army, none of them local. They needed somebody to identify bodies as they came up, which meant Sheriff Patricia Gallardo ended up being (more often than not) the first person in town to know who the dead were. That stunk, but she wasn’t going to wish the task on anybody else; so, no ‘opportunities’ for her, no matter how photogenic some P.R. flack thought she was.
Besides, she could probably name only one other person as familiar with the entire town as Pete was: Annie Collins. And Annie was busy. She was also only sixteen.
So it was that Sheriff Pete still held the office some two plus years after the zombie invasion, and still worked the night shift when her turn came, which was why she was on duty when the army rolled back into town.
“What was that, Lou?” Pete asked. Lou was a deputy, one of only two to have done this job as long as Pete. He was standing at the front window.
“I said the army’s come back.”
She had her coat on and her car keys in her hands, because she was supposed to be off-duty in another ten minutes. She joined him at the window.
“Well, look at that,” she said.
It appeared as if an entire mobile military operation was driving past the sheriff’s office, right on down Main: big guns on the back of big flatbeds; a tank; a few dozen soldiers double-timing right in the middle; and so on.
“Think they’re just passing through?” Lou asked.
“I don’t think we’re that lucky, no.”
Pete stepped out. The sheriff’s office had a front awning that marked it as the kind of building that used to be something else, with a few steps leading to a sidewalk before the curb. A Jeep was already on the wrong side of that curb, and doing damage to the little strip of grass that defined the edge of the sidewalk. It came to a stop right in front of Pete.
The passenger in the Jeep looked like someone who thought she was important. Shortish, black hair, Aviator glasses, and the kind of resting sour expression of a person who was stuck in a place she didn’t want to be.
“Are you Gallardo?” the woman asked.
“Sheriff Gallardo, yes ma’am.”
“Captain Braver, US Army.” Braver hopped out and came over for a quick handshake. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to take over for a while.”
Pete looked up and down the street, as if to say yes, that’s obvious, thank you.
“Not that I have the manpower to say no, captain, but what exactly do you mean by taking over? Did another ship land overnight? We didn’t get any calls, and trust me, the town is full of folks who know what to look for.”
“We have reason to believe Annie Collins is here somewhere.”
“Uh-huh, well that just makes sense. You know she lives here, right? Didn’t realize the semester was already over, but…”
“Listen,” Braver said, “I appreciate the small-town gosh-shucks charm and all, but as you can see I’m not alone, and this is a serious situation, and we don’t have a lot of free time for small talk. Can you tell me if anyone would have reason to hide Annie?”
Now, I know you didn’t just talk to me like that, Pete thought.
“I’m coming off a ten-hour overnight,” Pete said, “and I don’t need the entire damn army mucking up traffic in my town. Maybe you want to tell me where you think you got the authority to plant a flag here, and then we can talk about Annie Collins until you turn blue, how’s that?”
“We never lost the authority, sheriff. Took an act of Congress to suspend posse comitatus in Sorrow Falls back when the ship landed. Guess what they never got around to doing? Now, you can go check if you want; I think they might be in session this morning.”
“All right.” Pete made a note to check on that, but maybe after the invading force rolling past her door was finished invading. “What’s up with Annie? More than that, what makes you think anybody here is going to help you, coming in like this?”
“We have guns.”
“I know you didn’t just threaten a law enforcement officer on US soil.”
Braver sighed.
“All right. I’m sorry. It’s been a long night. Can we go inside and talk?”
“We can talk out here just fine.”
The captain nodded, and stared down the street for a few seconds. All Pete could think of was that she wasn’t dealing with a person accustomed to conducting informal interviews. She would have known you start out polite and work your way up. You can’t go in rude and then dial it down and expect that to fly.
“You get the news around here?”
“It’s just six. Does the news even come on this early?”
“Special reports do. There was an incident overnight. I trust you didn’t hear anything about that?”
“Nope. Sleepy mill town and all that. We only get up for extraterrestrial visits. Why, did Annie blow up the school or something?”
“That’s exactly what she did.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish I were.”
It was too hard t
o tell how serious Captain Braver was, with the sunglasses on and the fact that Pete just met her, but the troops rolling past was a strong indication that this was, in fact, not a species of joke.
“All right,” the sheriff said, “come on inside. No guarantees I believe anything you have to say, but I’ll listen.”
“I appreciate that.”
The phones were already ringing on every desk in the sheriff’s office. Lou was about all she had on-hand to field local calls until the others came in for the day shift. The overwhelming show of force taking place out front was going to make their commute a challenge.
“What’s the buzz, Lou,” Pete asked, as she walked Captain Braver into her office.
“Lotta people trying to get to work, mostly.”
Pete looked at Braver.
“You could have called ahead.”
Braver sat down in Pete’s office and tossed a folder on to the desk.
“You can have a look at these, but to be honest it’d go faster if you just turned on the TV.”
“We don’t have one in here. What did you mean, she blew up the school?”
“Not the whole school.”
Pete opened the folder to an overhead image of an intersection with a bunch of emergency vehicles. It had a time-stamp that put it at about six hours earlier.
“That hunk of metal on the left side of the image used to be a mobile high-tech communications and surveillance station until Collins blew it up with a pulse weapon of some kind. On the right, do you see that hole in the ground?”
“In the middle of the green?”
“Yeah, that’s where the other shot landed. Didn’t used to be much there other than a fire pit or something, but a lot of people were standing around it at the time.”
“And Annie did this?”
“The shots were fired from the spaceship, so yes.”
Pete took a look at a couple more photos, which were ground shots of basic panic and chaos. They looked like they were pulled from local newsfeeds.
“How many dead?” she asked.
“So far, no fatalities. I’m told one or two are touch-and-go. Our team took the worst of it.”
“Your team?”
“Not the army’s team. The Secret Service. She fired on her own protection. One of them was shot.”
“With… I’m sorry, you’ve lost me, captain. Shot? With bullets?”
“She had some help escaping.”
Braver reached across the desk and into the file, pulling the last photo up to the top.
“Here, see that? That’s what she escaped in.”
The image was blurry, apparently taken from an orbiting satellite, at night.
“Looks like a wet cotton ball.”
“Well, it’s not. It’s a camper, like what Laura Lane and Oona Kozlowsky used to drive. We spotted it a few miles south of here.”
“Could be anybody’s camper at this altitude.”
“Yes, it could. But it’s not. When they fled the scene at Wainwright, they came to Sorrow Falls. They’re somewhere in this town, and they have been since the middle of the night. A rig that size isn’t going to be hard to find, but that doesn’t mean Annie’s still going to be inside it, which is why I’ll need your help and the help of everyone else in town to locate her, so we can secure her safely.”
“Right. Okay. What was she escaping from?”
“Pardon?”
“You said it twice: Annie escaped and she had help. What was she escaping from?”
“She fired unprovoked into a crowd at a party. After that happened, our team attempted to secure her, and when they did that she attacked the team, with the help of her friends in an armored camper. They escaped from there. Seems like an appropriate word to use in this context.”
“How do you know it was unprovoked?”
“I don’t. I wasn’t at the party, and we haven’t gotten a report yet from anyone that was, because all of our people are in the hospital right now, except for the one she might have taken hostage.”
“Oh, hostages now.”
Captain Braver took a deep, calming breath.
“As I was saying, we don’t have all the details yet, but I think we can agree that using tank-buster force because some boy was getting handsy is an untenable overreaction.”
“I don’t think we can agree on that at all,” Pete said. “You just finished saying you didn’t know, and now it was over a boy? Maybe something happened at that party that warranted exactly that kind of response. And none of it lines up with people firing guns.”
“We don’t have the whole story, as I think I mentioned. But we have to find Collins.”
“For what reason? To keep her safe? Or for some other agenda? I’ve got one side of a war rolling past my front window, so don’t tell me you’re here just to take her into custody.”
“We brought force in response to force. We didn’t start this, sheriff, but we’re trying to finish it before the casualty count goes any higher.”
“Right. Okay. I’ll tell you what, captain. There’s a guy I trust, named Ed Somerville. Do you know him?”
Braver looked like she just swallowed a live fish.
“I’ve heard the name.”
“Great. If he tells me to help, I’ll help. And I’ll do what I can to convince everyone else here, too. Otherwise, I wish you the best, and you have a nice day.”
Captain Braver stared at Pete silently for a few seconds, maybe hoping for some kind of intimidation factor to kick in. It didn’t, so she got up and retrieved her folder.
“You know, it’s for everyone’s protection,” she said, on the way out. “We’re not asking the town to do anything but help us find her.”
“Yeah, that’s funny,” Pete said. “I don’t know how familiar you are with Sorrow Falls, but the last authority figure to tell everybody to find Annie Collins was a mind-controlling alien zombie-maker. Nobody appreciated it then, and I guarantee you won’t find us any more motivated to do the same thing for the army. But as I said, you have a nice day.”
The farmhouse was empty.
They reached Sorrow Falls at around two in the morning to find the town nice and quiet, which was a departure from the last time the group piloted Main in a camper at that time of night.
They would have made better time if they’d stuck to Route 2, but without Annie checking to see how the search was going, the decision was made to take a considerably less direct route. That route took advantage of the hundreds of side roads and tributaries that marked the entire region. Basically, there were a thousand ways to get to Sorrow Falls without sticking to the highways, and they took five hundred of them.
Following this approach also meant everyone had decided to accept the warning of the ghost of Rick Horton, despite the consensus opinion that he probably wasn’t technically real.
After crossing into town over the bridge connecting to the southern part of Main, Oona took them uphill and past the memorial, then by Annie’s house and around to the road leading to Violet’s. Annie, in the passenger seat at the time, was a little alarmed that Oona knew the way.
“I told you,” Oona said, “we came here first. Nobody was home except for some creep in a suit.”
“That was Todd. And if everything was working properly, you’d need to be directed here every time,” Annie said. “Because you wouldn’t remember having been here.”
“Do you believe us now? About your girl relocating? Dobbs said she bought our old rig, which in my thinking means she could be anywhere in the country by now. Hell, Canada’s not more than a day or two away.”
“Violet wouldn’t leave without telling me.”
Yet when they got to the house, Vi wasn’t waiting on the porch like she usually was. When Annie knocked on the door, nobody answered, and when she let herself in, the only person waiting to greet her was Rick.
“I don’t think she’s here,” he said, as Annie screamed.
“You scared me,” she said, turning on the light.
“I’m a ghost, right? Kind of my thing.”
“You’re a jerk. Did you search the whole house?”
“Yeah, nobody’s home.”
They ended up performing a thorough search anyway, and once it was confirmed that the alien capsule that was supposed to be in the root cellar was also missing, they took steps to hide the camper before the sun came up. Fortunately, there was a parking spot that was just the right size, to the left of the house, among a set of trees with a thick canopy. They brought down some limbs to cover the top, just to be safe. It wasn’t the guaranteed protection that came with alien technology preventing the location from existing on maps, but it was pretty good.
Once the camper was hidden, Oona and Laura started working out the details of a plan to protect themselves in a siege nobody else thought was actually going to happen. These plans included setting up mines, which they fortunately hadn’t put into place yet by sunrise, because that was when Ed and Sam arrived.
“Boy are you guys late,” Annie said, from the porch. She’d been awakened ten minutes earlier by a warning shot from the roof of the hidden camper. Nobody was hit, but the arrival would have gone more smoothly had Annie bothered to tell anyone to expect Ed and Sam. She didn’t tell anyone, because she wasn’t sure the plan would work.
“We had to do some recon,” Sam said, with a big smile. They met up in one of those hugs where Annie ended up picked off the ground and swung around. The sixteen-year old inside of her swooned a tiny bit.
“It’s good to see you okay,” he said. “I was worried.”
He put her down so Ed could have a turn, with a much more civil embrace.
“What do you mean, recon?” Annie asked.
“The army’s here,” Ed said. “We caught sight of them on our way.”
“Wouldn’t have gotten past them, if we weren’t driving one of their cars,” Sam added.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 28
