“Do these really work?” Sam asked. He was holding an improvised explosive device. It looked like a small thermos with a digital watch duct-taped to the lid.
“They really do,” Laura said. “Oona is kind of a genius about these things.”
Laura was attaching a small digital camera to a tree. Given sufficient time, they could have the farmhouse ringed by cameras and motion detectors, which would report activity back to whoever was manning the security station in the camper. That person would have the discretionary authority to blow up whoever showed up on the camera.
Oona reportedly preferred something that went boom as soon as motion was detected, but was overruled by Laura, who wanted to be able to decide whom to kill with some degree of prudence. Sam’s impression was that this was a disagreement that began at least two years ago, and wasn’t entirely settled.
He was glad Laura won this round, though. The men they expected were a part of the army he also happened to be a part of. He didn’t mind establishing the threat of a ring of mines, but the execution of that threat made him uneasy.
“This is some high-tech equipment you have here,” Sam noted.
“The cameras? They’re not as pricey if you buy in bulk. But yeah, they aren’t cheap, either. I guess this Violet person paid us a lot of money for our old rig. Don’t know where she got the money from.”
“Maybe she just has a lot of money. She’s been around long enough.”
Laura’s response was interrupted by the sound of distant gunfire.
“Is that coming from the house?” Laura asked.
“No, wrong direction,” Sam said. “That’s coming from the town.”
“I’m completely turned around, are you sure?”
“Yeah, positive.”
“We should head back,” she said. “Tell the others.”
“They probably already know. Come on.”
He was on the move before she had a chance to suggest that this was perhaps not a wise course of action. Her instinct was to head away from gunfire, which he had to agree was probably a solid instinct.
It was slow-going, until they reconnected with the dirt road. This had the advantage of being much faster and the disadvantage of leaving them almost fully exposed.
“Sam!” Laura shouted, as he was getting pretty far ahead of her. “If they’re coming, we should head the other way.”
He stopped to give her a chance to catch up.
“Just a peek. Those are army boys. If they’re shooting up the town, I want to know. This is supposed to be my team. We’re probably too far away to see anything.”
“All right but…”
“Shh.”
Something was moving in the underbrush to the left of the path. Sam wondered if it was already too late. Had they been spotted? Were the soldiers already here?
They had been spotted, but not by anybody in the military. Instead, a man in a suit stepped onto the road.
He stopped, and looked back at them, and it was bona fide creepy.
“Oh, hi,” Sam said. He gave a little wave.
The man didn’t wave back. He tilted his head and stared at them for about two seconds too long, and then turned away, and started walking up the road.
“That was Todd, wasn’t it?” Laura asked. “We saw him when we came here before.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “He’s Violet’s father.”
“But I thought Violet wasn’t a… God, this is all so weird. Violet doesn’t have a father, does she?”
“You don’t remember,” Sam said. “That’s right. He’s a zombie. Kind of. Not really. He’s on our side though. We should stick with him.”
“He’s heading toward town.”
“Yeah, I know. But if Violet moved her alien pill thing out of the farmhouse herself, she used Todd and Susan to do it. Todd might be able to lead us to Violet.”
“Susan?”
“Her zombie mom.”
“Right.”
Todd was a good deal less concerned with staying hidden than either of them were. He walked right out into the middle of the road.
“Did he hear the gunshots too?” Laura asked.
“I don’t know, maybe. Come on.”
They kept a distance from Todd, who appeared to not care.
“If I remember right, he has a sort of default program when Violet isn’t driving him,” Sam said.
“Uh-huh. Please don’t explain. I’m having flashbacks.”
“Sorry.”
After a few minutes of walking, they reached a point where they could see the last bend in the road, which meant they were nearing the edge of the property, and the start of the properly mapped portion of the town.
Sam decided this was a good place to get off the road. They could continue after Todd from the shelter of the trees.
“Careful,” Sam muttered, as he helped Laura back into the underbrush. The forest floor was thicker here than it was near the house. Lots of dead wood and moss. They were able to get around the bend while sheltered by the trees, but it took a while.
“Sam, I don’t think we’re alone,” she said, a minute or two in.
She didn’t mean Todd. Sam stopped to listen, and heard what she was hearing: there were things moving in the forest.
Laura grabbed his arm, and pointed.
A squirrel had popped up on a log a few yards ahead of them. Sam almost laughed out loud.
“It’s just…”
“No, wait.”
A second squirrel popped up, and then a third.
Then there were ten of them.
Sam looked up, and saw the trees full of more squirrels. They were adorably surrounded.
“Hi,” Laura said, quietly. “We come in peace?”
The squirrels just stared at them, not showing any fear, which was unexpected behavior from squirrels. It felt a lot like how it felt a minute earlier, when Todd did the same thing.
Then they collectively decided to leave Sam and Laura alone, scampering off in all directions.
“That was interesting,” he said.
“Sure, we can use that word. Can we go back now?”
“Not yet.”
Sam pushed forward a little farther, until they got a clear view of the road again.
They saw what got Todd’s attention. It wasn’t the gunfire. Two armed soldiers were walking down the path, slowly. One had a radio in his hand, reporting their progress to who-knows. The sound of distant gunfire was slightly less distant from this position; there was no longer any question it was coming from the valley on the other side of the soldiers.
Sam wondered what anybody in town could possibly be shooting at. He nearly voiced this question, before deciding the survivalist next to him would probably just say that the day of the government takeover was finally here. Laura and Oona had been living lives in anticipation of this exact moment.
The soldiers saw Todd ambling toward them. From a distance, the undead man didn’t look all that undead. His gait was normal and pretty fast-paced. It suggested Todd’s ‘default program’ was more advanced than that of the ones they’d fought a few years earlier. The suit he had on was a little out of place, but that was all that stuck out.
The soldier without the radio held up his hand and asked Todd to stop where he was, an order that Todd ignored.
“Sir,” the soldier repeated. “Stop right there. We need to ask you some questions.”
Todd elected at that moment to start running toward the men.
“Sir!” the first soldier said. He leveled his gun. “Stop right now!”
That didn’t happen. The man with the radio clipped it to his belt and readied his own gun, and then they were both barking orders at Todd, whose only reaction was to run harder.
The first one opened fire. The sound echoed through the trees.
It was a clean hit: good clustering, with both bullets striking the zombie in the chest.
Good marksmanship, soldier, Sam thought.
Todd fell over, apparently
dead. Or, re-dead, or something.
The men looked a little shaken. They approached Todd with some trepidation and a lot of confusion.
“He wouldn’t stop coming,” the one who fired said, now standing over Todd’s body.
“I saw. Not much we could do.”
“Call it in. Should we keep going?”
“Probably. They’re saying this is the place.”
Sam muttered, “This is a scout team.”
“Command, we’ve engaged a civilian,” the one with the radio reported.
The other one was poking Todd with the barrel of his gun.
“Weirdo. Why didn’t you listen?”
Then Todd sat up.
Everybody was startled by this, including Laura and Sam, who should really have been expecting it to happen. Todd was about the only one unsurprised, which was why he had time to pull the gun out of the first soldier’s hands.
“Jesus …” the second guy swore. He tried to get his own gun around, but Todd already had the M16 righted. He shot them both down.
“Whoa,” Laura said. “Never saw a zombie do that before.”
Sam agreed, albeit silently. Just about the only thing that would have made the night of The Incident worse was if the zombies attacking them learned how to use tools. He was glad this one was on his side.
“We should get back now, right?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“For God’s sake, Sam!”
“Just a second. Stay here.”
Sam jumped out onto the road. Todd, who was still climbing to his feet, noticed him, but still didn’t see him as a threat, which was great because now Todd had a gun.
Holding his hands up, Sam walked slowly toward the scene, until he got to the dead man with the radio.
“I’ll be out of your way in a second, buddy,” Sam said.
He picked up the radio and backed away.
Todd ignored Sam, and turned back toward the road. It looked like his intention was to remain there until the next group of soldiers arrived.
Sam ran back to Laura, who climbed out to the road.
“Might come in handy,” he said, holding up the radio.
“Sure.”
There was a rustle in the woods from around the same area they just left.
“What’s that?” Laura asked.
“Maybe Susan. We’re still short a zombie.”
Then they both heard more noises coming from the trees, only on both sides this time.
“How many Susans are there?” she asked.
“Just one. The squirrels again, maybe?”
“Not just them. Is that a wolf?”
“It’s a lot of wolves.”
There was also deer, a couple of them standing right next to the wolves, which was just not possible if these were real deer and wolves.
“These aren’t living creatures,” Sam said.
They heard a roar, as something much larger than the animals crowding the roadside began its approach.
“Bear,” Laura said. “I think that’s a bear.”
“Yeah. Back to the farmhouse. We should run.”
Cora ended up carrying Violet into the kitchen. Annie was a little shaky, but able to get out of the bed and down the stairs without assistance. She arrived in time to watch Vi engorge herself, which was pretty gross.
First, she went after the grains in the pantry. A lifetime ago, Annie and her mom had made an effort to develop healthier eating habits, which meant figuring out how to consume portions of dried grains. The minimum preparatory requirement was to immerse a serving in boiling water for a few minutes, until it turned into a supposedly edible gruel of some kind. When this failed to transform the grains into something palatable, they added butter, and salt, and then some sugar, and honey, and soon they had something that not only remained largely inedible, it was probably also no longer healthy.
Violet wasn’t even bothering with boiling water. She just started swallowing handfuls, followed by several gallons of water. Then she moved on to fats and proteins, in the form of a stick of butter and some strips of uncooked bacon.
“I’m sorry,” she said, between bites. “I came up too fast. This body is in distress.”
“That’s all right, I think I’m going to swear off food for the rest of my life,” Annie said. “Won’t all of that make you sick?”
Violet sat down at the table and touched her belly, which was swelling.
“It likely will, yes. But the body will live.”
“Why were you in the garden?” Ed asked.
“I went to ground,” Violet said. “Something was wrong in the… I’m sorry, I don’t have words for it. I haven’t had to use words in a while, Edgar. Your friend, Beth. She retained a memory of me. I already sensed something amiss, but that was new. I have seen so few new things.”
“You sensed something wrong,” Annie repeated.
“Something was wrong.”
“Before you saw Beth.”
“Yes. An undercurrent.”
“In the membrane,” Annie said.
“Is that a word for it? All right. The membrane, yes. I didn’t know what, but it felt wrong in a way that’s difficult to contain in language. If it was connected to Beth’s sudden ability to recall me, I didn’t see how, but… I may have panicked. I don’t like being seen, you know this.”
There was good reason for it. Violet was an alien entity trying to exist peacefully in a world that didn’t know what to do with such a thing. If her name and true nature had come out after The Incident, she probably would have just left the planet entirely rather than deal with the fallout.
“You were hibernating,” Ed said.
“After a fashion. This body doesn’t have true hibernation as a function, but I’ve been able to approximate something like that. It still required oxygen, so I had a tube running to the surface, but food and water it could do without for an extended time. Alternative energy sources are available below the surface in this soil, using a device I’m afraid is beyond the local technology.”
“It’s powering the house,” Cora said.
“Yes. The problem was, I knew I was going to have to do a deep dive into the… Annie?”
“Membrane.”
“Can either of you explain it better than that?” Ed asked.
“Not really, no,” Annie said.
“The issue is that time is not easy to keep track of in an environment where time isn’t a dimensional constraint. If I were to disappear into the membrane, I might lose track of temporal concerns, such as inhabiting a body that needed food and water and air. And since my encounter with Beth proved that one of my defenses had failed, I didn’t trust the other ones either. Before I buried myself I had Todd and Susan move the craft from the basement to its original resting place under the hill.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all of this?” Annie asked.
“I didn’t have enough information, and no reason to think it related to you. I knew if there was trouble, you would turn up here, and you did. I underestimated how long it would take to return to the surface, however. My earlier experiments in this method of preservation didn’t factor in the energy needed for higher cognition. I’ve been digging since you arrived, but I had to rest. But then you were attacked.”
“Is that what that was? An attack?”
“You were screaming like a girl,” Rick said.
“I am a girl, Rick,” Annie said.
“That is very rude, isn’t it?” Violet said. It was directed to Annie, but she was staring at Rick.
“Um, can you see him?” Ed asked.
Violet looked at Ed, and then at Cora, and then at Annie.
“You can,” she said to Annie. “They can’t?”
“No, it’s just me. And you, I guess. Are you telling me Rick’s ghost is real?”
Violet looked at Rick for a few seconds.
“Who is it you see?” she asked Annie.
“Rick Horton.”
“I died,” R
ick said.
“Ah, I understand,” Violet said.
“Cool, please explain,” Annie said.
“It’s the ship!” Ed exclaimed.
“Yes,” Vi said. “Annie, you’re connected somewhat intimately to a technology that responds to ideas. If it senses something wrong, it’s going to alert you using the language it knows.”
“It produced a version of someone it knew, and it knew I knew. Great. Did it really have to be Rick, though?”
“Hey!” Rick said.
“I don’t like you, Rick, I thought that was obvious.”
“I know that.”
“That was the point,” Vi said. “He makes you uneasy. The ship wanted you to be uneasy because it surfs in the same… I am sorry, I have no gift for analogy any longer. It recognized that emotions are a form of communication. Your visceral response to this man colored your view of the world, which would have made you warier, and more alert. Then, perhaps, you would have seen what the ship had detected. It likely couldn’t say outright what was amiss, because it knew no more than I did, and you hadn’t ordered it to dig deeper. It should also have been able to keep you from doing what you just did.”
“I couldn’t stop her, she’s stubborn,” he said.
The front door to the farmhouse opened.
“Hey, kids, funny story,” Oona shouted. “There’s a spaceship on the lawn.”
“In here,” Cora said.
Oona made it to the door, got a look at Violet, and cursed two or three times.
“Hello, Oona,” Violet said.
“Is that her?”
Oona looked ready to assault Violet physically. Cora, ever the bodyguard, put herself between them.
“She’s still weak,” Cora said. “She was buried in the yard.”
“Yeah, well she and I need to have a talk.”
“Hello, Dobbs,” Violet greeted, looking past Oona. “And, it’s Lindsey, isn’t it? I didn’t know you knew everyone.”
Lindsey looked a little pale. Whether that was because someone who looked a lot like a corpse with a swollen stomach was talking to her, or for some other reason, wasn’t clear.
“Have we met?”
“Yes, I think we have. You used to work at the hardware store in Brattleboro. I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I recall you being a fan of Annie’s. We had a nice conversation one time.”
The Frequency of Aliens Page 32
