“I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
Violet wasn’t the most expressive of people, but it was obvious that she was relieved to hear this.
“But that explains a lot,” Lindsey added.
“Hold that thought,” Annie said. She looked at Rick.
“Did you call the ship down?” she asked.
He laughed.
“Nah, I can’t do that, stupid. You did it.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yeah, your mind wasn’t all there. Be glad you didn’t ask for anything else.”
“What’s going on?” Oona muttered to Cora. “Is she talking to the ghost again?”
“Yes, but it isn’t a ghost. The zombie girl can see it too. You missed a lot.”
Annie gasped.
“At the party! I asked you for help!”
“And then hellfire came down from the sky, yessir. How’d you not figure this out sooner?”
“I’m under a lot of stress, Rick… why, why am I even talking to him? Even when you’re not real you still piss me off.”
He laughed.
Ed cleared his throat.
“If we could, um, get past the spirit talking, I’d like to know what Violet learned. You said Annie was attacked, and you said there was something malevolent living in this… membrane or whatever. I think it’s probably the same thing that I’ve been tracking, and the same thing sending the signal that was detected by Dobbs and Lindsey. What is it? Is it a new idea? One of your… people? I guess? Species?”
“No, it’s something else. Someone else. The word malevolent is appropriate, because that’s what they are. They’ve been trapped for eons, and they want Annie so they can escape.”
The front door opened again. It was Sam and Laura this time. Sam sounded out of breath.
“Hey!” he shouted. “We have zombies!”
Oona laughed.
“Well hell, of course we do. This is Sorrow Falls.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Violet said. “Those are mine.”
22
Surrender Dorothy
“I really hate this town,” Melissa said.
This was after they lost contact with the two-man scout team, following a report of gunfire coming from down the road leading to the farmhouse that only just recently popped into existence.
She couldn’t even tell how anyone heard gunshots from that particular direction, frankly, given this whole part of the town rang out with the sound of gunfire semi-regularly. Since the farmland portion of Sorrow Falls was a bowl valley, sound carried really well, which made it both easy to hear (or so she assumed) most of the active engagements going on, and hard to tell how many different places it was coming from.
Captain Braver was supposed to be gathering the troops and focusing their efforts entirely on the lone farmhouse, which she’d been assured was definitely the right place. She didn’t know how anyone knew this, but maybe the spaceship landed there or something.
That would help, she thought. Then she reconsidered that point, since it meant introducing the world’s most dangerous weapon to a battlefield she was currently a part of.
The problem with gathering the troops was that everyone in this part of Sorrow Falls appeared to no longer be human.
She was trying really hard to talk herself out of this conclusion, because it just wasn’t reasonable. The problem was that she saw it with her own eyes, and she trusted those eyes to be essentially honest with her about certain matters. Is that a human being or not was one of those matters.
Still, even if they were surrounded by nightmare creatures, the army was not there to actively engage them if not attacked, and technically, these monsters were only defending themselves.
No, their mandate was to find, isolate, and possibly eliminate Annie Collins.
So far, she only had a third of the force, most of that coming from Main. The good news was, they came with armored trucks. The bad news was, there was only one road, so they really needed men on foot in order to commit to the surround-and-contain part of all this.
“Ma’am?” the driver asked.
“I said I hate this town.”
“Yes, ma’am, I think I agree with you. What’s your call here?”
They were in a Jeep, nose-first facing the dirt path.
“How long ago did we lose contact with the advance team?” she asked.
“Ten minutes, give or take.”
“All right.”
She checked her sidearm. Already, she’d fired it twice more in the field than she ever had before.
“Let’s go have a look,” she said.
The corporal took the road slowly. It was early afternoon, and they weren’t going to be losing the sun for another six or seven hours, but the trees along the path were so tall and close-knit that it felt a little like driving into night-time.
Passing through to another world, she thought. It was irrational, so she embraced it, because the irrational fit right in with the town.
I will call this farmhouse Brigadoon, and this land Narnia.
There was an elbow up ahead. The two soldiers were right near the bend, lying on their backs, either dead or unconscious. Standing over them was a man in a suit, holding one of the rifles.
“Well, that’s a sight,” Melissa said, just seconds before he opened fire.
He was holding the gun wrong—at his hip, like a Tommy gun—but it didn’t matter all that much to either of the Jeep’s occupants.
“Back up!” she shouted, which the corporal was already doing. The majority of the bullets missed, but the few that found the windshield were a few too many. It wasn’t bulletproof glass; the army didn’t pay for that kind of thing.
She and the driver ducked down as much as possible and he floored it.
As they passed—backwards, at high speed—down the path, Melissa thought she could see something moving on the other side of the trees.
More monsters.
She reached for her radio.
“We need all forces to converge on the farmhouse immediately. Be warned: there appear to be creatures in the woods.”
“What do you mean, they’re yours?” Annie asked.
“Oh, they aren’t human. Except for Todd. Susan is with the capsule.”
Annie shot a look at Sam, who nodded.
“Scariest squirrels you’ll ever come across,” he confirmed.
“Violet, what the hell,” Annie said. “You’re like Doctor Moreau up here.”
“Is this a large volume of squirrels?” Ed asked.
“I’m not sure how to answer that, Edgar,” Violet said. “In tonnage? Reasonably large. It isn’t only squirrels.”
“Wolves,” Laura said.
“And a bear,” Sam added.
“Vi…”
“I told you, I was experimenting with an alternative power source for these bodies,” Violet said. “I needed test subjects, and I have access to several acres of unsullied woodlands. I’ve been collecting the dead for some time. What my creator did when he was here gave me the idea. They weren’t meant to be an army.”
“All right, I like her,” Oona said. “No wonder I didn’t shoot you the first time around.”
“To return to the point, when I realized something was wrong, I had to disappear for a while to do some research into the matter, but I no longer trusted that the technology hiding this location from view was functioning. Hiding is only a safe defense if it’s a hundred percent effective. Given I was going to be away, I thought it would be better if there was nothing to find if someone came. If someone attacked, I left instructions for the defense of this location.”
“How effective did you imagine this defense would be?” Ed asked.
“I had no idea. I don’t have any historical reference for undead hive-mind woodland creatures attacking armed men in concert, in a forest setting. I believe it’s unprecedented.”
Something Oona was carrying started beeping.
“Oops, time to go,” she said.
Whatever was in her hand had a video feed on it.
“Is that a motion detector?” Laura asked. “The animals will end up making those useless.”
“It’s not from the woods, babe, it’s from the road. Looks like zombie daddy shot up a Jeep. It’s started.”
Oona looked at Cora.
“You know how to fire a gun, Ms. Agent?”
“Of course I do.”
“Great, come on then; we can use all the help.”
“Annie?”
“I’m as safe as I can be, Cora,” Annie said.
Cora checked the room one last time for evidence of a threat, possibly for old time’s sake. One thing that was definitely coming out of this day was that the nature of Annie’s relationship with the Secret Service and the Pentagon would be changing substantially. Until then, Cora still felt like she needed to watch Annie’s back.
“Research,” Ed repeated, as soon as the four had left.
“Yes,” Violet said. “I had to do research. I don’t… I don’t know how to explain how this works to temporally affixed intelligences.”
“You mean, us?”
“Appreciate that in my natural form I don’t experience time. Not in the way you do. I have experiences, and they change who I am, but in a number of ways I’m both the entity that existed before, during, and after those experiences, because my consciousness isn’t contained within those concepts. There is no ‘before’.”
“Hang on,” Ed said, stopping her. “Does that mean you know the future?”
“No. The future hasn’t been created yet. Space-time expands. We stand at the edge of newly forming time. The past version of my consciousness has a memory of the future, but who I am now does not.”
“And yet, you don’t experience these as past and present,” Ed said.
“As I’ve said, it’s confusing.”
“All right, go on.”
“I went through my own experiences as a means of research, and I found the beings I think we’re dealing with now. They started as physical entities, like humans, only advanced enough to conquer death. They digitized their consciousnesses, and from there continued to advance. Beyond that, I don’t know what happened. Creatures this developed shouldn’t be so full of malice.”
“If they made contact with a human being’s brain, what would happen?” Ed asked.
“They’re communicating through the same thought membrane as my species, but they aren’t traveling along it, as I can. That’s why they needed the radio waves to get here. They could develop in a human mind as an idea would, but they aren’t ideas, and wouldn’t present as one. More like a possession. The person would begin to have their thoughts instead of his own. Do you have evidence of this happening?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“What do they want?” Annie asked.
“So far, they’ve only shown interest in you, so I don’t know.”
“Not you,” Ed said. “The ship.”
“That makes sense,” Dobbs said. “First, they try coercing you into giving it up. Make it so everyone’s mad at you, until you just can’t deal with it anymore.”
“Except I didn’t even notice everyone was mad at me. I was dealing with classes. And a ghost.”
“You’re welcome,” Rick said.
“When that doesn’t work, they try and murder you,” Dobbs said.
“You think Ginger was an alien?”
“Ginger?” Violet asked.
“A friend who tried to stab me a couple of days ago.”
“Oh. Well, no, it wouldn’t be like that. This signal, I’ve listened to it as well. It’s crude.”
“Crude how?”
“Nobody was being issued commands through that broadcast,” Violet said, “not in the way my creator employed it here. With enough exposure, it could impact moods, and interfere with sleep cycles. Over time… human minds are really very simple, so it’s possible what happened was that it turned the imagination of the infected on itself.”
“Monsters,” Lindsey said. “Everyone saw monsters and blamed Annie.”
“Yes, then that’s what has happened. Attributing it to Annie must have been difficult, but certainly not impossible, only because Annie already existed as an idea in their minds. They already knew who you were.”
“The price of fame,” Annie said.
“Yes. But the specific attack, by your friend, it wasn’t ordered by anyone. It was only the inevitable outcome. The pot was eventually going to boil over.”
Violet looked closely at Lindsey.
“You have an interesting idea in your head,” Violet said.
“Sorry, what?” Lindsey looked at Annie. “Can she read minds?”
“Not exactly,” Annie said. “Stop being creepy, Vi, it’s been a long day and you look like a horror movie monster right now.”
“I’m sorry. But I think she’s right. The only ones immune to the signal are people who have already had their minds touched by someone like me.” She looked at Annie. “You can only trust people who have met me, or who survived being a zombie.”
“Can we hijack the signal?” Dobbs asked. “We did it before.”
“Since they aren’t being controlled, there’s no control to sever,” Violet said. “We can, at best, overwhelm them with a louder set of good feelings, but how they interpret those feelings would be difficult to say. I need time to analyze exactly what it is they’re doing first. If we can stop these creatures from using the frequency, that would be a start.”
“It’s on full blast right now, according to the detector on the rig,” Dobbs said.
“Yes. I can feel it,” Vi said. “Shutting it off could calm everyone down.”
“How much time do you need?” Ed asked.
“Not much,” Violet said. “A week or two.”
“We don’t have a week or two,” Annie said.
“You could use the ship,” Dobb said.
Annie flashed briefly on the idea of using the spaceship to wipe out the army. It turned into her destroying Sorrow Falls, and moving on from there. Soon, she was in the middle of the nightmare scenario the malevolent alien showed her. She shivered.
“To defend the house?” she asked.
“Well yeah, if it came to that. I was thinking about the barrier. It put one up before, remember? We were trapped inside of it.”
“That would work, except we’re going to run out of food in a couple of days.”
“Then we’d be back where we started, only with less food,” Ed said. “And facing twice as many soldiers.”
The ship had landed in front of the farmhouse, which was something Melissa really wished somebody from Team Babysitter had bothered to tell her before she considered a frontal assault in an open Jeep. At minimum, this information would have prepared her for a possible attack from a zombie with an automatic weapon.
She managed to get her hands on an aerial view of the house, taken by a helicopter that committed to what was probably a harrowing pass-over of the property. Fortunately, the ship didn’t shoot the chopper down.
The bird’s-eye told her enough to figure out they could get to the house without committing to the only road that led there. She didn’t know what to expect in the way of resistance, but she did know not to commit all her resources to a path that looked like a prototypical ambush location in movies where military people made stupid decisions.
So, she sent a portion of the available foot-soldiers into the woods, with the idea to take the land all the way up to the edge of the clearing in front of the target, then send in an armored troop carrier. Or one of the tanks, if the mood struck.
Captain Braver provided the troops with a nebulous warning to be cautious in the woods, trying as hard as she could to imply that there might be monsters in there without actually saying so.
Ten minutes into the insertion, she was feeling sort of stupid, because the reports were coming back that they encountered no human resistance, just some curious local fauna. Melissa had mistaken Bambi for a mo
nster.
Then the fauna attacked.
There was really no rational explanation for what was transpiring in the forest, but since this was Sorrow Falls, nobody needed it to be rational. What was definitely true was that creatures who didn’t ordinarily attack humans—either alone or in concert—were now doing so. They didn’t appear to care much whether they were hurt in the bargain, and actually, hurting them didn’t do a lot of good.
The forest had become a feral Disney movie, and Annie Collins was Snow White.
Then General Perlmutter arrived, which was when the afternoon turned into an actual nightmare for Captain Braver.
“Braver, what’s the situation?” he asked, ignoring her salute. He had just climbed out of an SUV that was still rolling to a stop, which underscored the urgency with which he asked this question,
Melissa briefed him on what was going on, up to and including the inexplicably violent woodland creatures.
Cal Perlmutter might have spent a second or two simply not believing the accounts coming from the field, but at that moment the forest elected to show its hand. Not thirty feet from where they were positioned, at the entrance to the dirt road, a soldier was carried out of the woods on the antlers of an eight-point buck.
“Good Christ!” the general exclaimed, as the buck dropped the soldier into the street, roared in a way deer aren’t known to roar (so far as Melissa was aware) and then scampered back into the woods before anyone thought to do something constructive, like shoot it.
“We’re still not sure what we’re dealing with here, sir,” Melissa said.
Two men she didn’t recognize climbed out of the SUV behind Perlmutter. They were both thin and bearded, wearing ill-fitted suits. She didn’t recognize them.
“They are reanimated things,” the first one said.
“Yes, very clever,” the other one said.
“Captain, these men are consultants. This is Mr. Davis, and Mr. Williams. I want you to treat orders from them the same as you would orders from me. Is that understood?”
“All right,” Ed said, “we can’t hold off the army forever, obviously. We also can’t make everyone change their minds about this, at least not overnight. What are our other options?”
The Frequency of Aliens Page 33
