Lindsey wasn’t the only media star to come out of the ordeal, only the newest. Dobbs’ reputation just grew, and Oona and Laura now had survivalist credentials that were so unimpeachable—they lived through a government standoff—it seemed everyone was afraid to even consider charging them with a crime.
Nobody quite knew what to think of Annie, although it was highly inconvenient that she didn’t die along with the spaceship.
The good news was that people no longer hated her, or hated her no more than would normally be expected of a public figure, which was a huge improvement.
Unfortunately, the signal the alien entity used to manipulate everyone’s emotions was still out there, embedded in hundreds of pieces of media. Getting rid of it would require powerfully advanced technology of the sort that only existed (so far as everyone knew) on the spaceship Annie blew up.
The signal just didn’t seem to be working any longer. In one sense, that meant there was the equivalent of a live wire buried in the unconscious minds of a significant portion of the population. But since nobody knew how to use that wire, it didn’t matter very much.
The bad news was that Annie no longer had a pet spaceship, which in the minds of a bunch of people was all that had made her interesting.
There didn’t appear to be any impetus to charge her with a crime. Notwithstanding the challenge of proving in a court of law that she fired a space weapon with her mind, there was the fact that a self-defense argument was perfectly viable. In the days immediately following the siege, both Ginger and Duke had—separately—offered up public confessions regarding their actions in the quad. These confessions were broadcast on social media, which was becoming the go-to for all of the pertinent information on the subject.
The confessions explained the first attack from space. Interestingly, the attempt on Annie’s life ended up looking worse for the Secret Service than for Duke or Ginger, since it was assumed that the reason the Service was there at all was so that Annie didn’t need to use lasers to protect herself. Also, the Service was already looking pretty bad, once Oona and Laura leaked the conversation they’d recorded, of the security detail planning Annie’s assassination.
That recording more or less absolved Annie of wrongdoing regarding the second attack.
Six weeks after the army siege, they were still cleaning things up in Sorrow Falls. Ed had to drive around some road repairs on Main and take a few side-street detours before he was able to hook up with Spaceship Road again. It was hard to believe, but in a single day the army managed to do more damage to the town than an alien-run zombie horde.
Fewer deaths, though. Only two civilians died, which was sort of amazing given all the gunplay. Ed knew a lot more than was being released to the public—he knew, for instance, that nearly every soldier was hallucinating for half of the siege, which meant a lot of cadets firing guns wildly.
But, two was still a larger number than zero, and seventeen people were injured, and since the army couldn’t well use the aliens-made-us-see-things excuse, there were probably going to be Senate hearings going on for the next fifty years.
Ed drove past the spaceship memorial—now doubling as a memorial to the victims of the ship and the ship itself—and the dogleg turn that led him to Annie’s front door.
She was sitting on the porch.
“Hey, there, Mr. X,” she said. “How’s it going?”
“Please stop calling me that,” he said.
They stopped for a hug, then sat down. It looked like Annie had spent some time cleaning up the property, which included clearing off the front porch, taking down the screens, and turning it into something decently hospitable, with a table and chairs even.
“How’s the arm?” he asked. She still had it in a sling, but the cast was off, which he assumed was a good thing.
“It aches, but it’s healing.”
As Annie told it, she broke the arm during a rapid re-entry in an escape pod nobody knew existed. It had no maneuverability; she was basically fired like a bullet at her back yard. Ed had since spoken to several physicists, who told him there was literally no way for her to have survived this. It was hardly the only complaint those same physicists had with Annie’s story.
Ed’s answer was the same as it always was: When it comes to the ship, it’s not a matter of what is and isn’t possible according to the physics we know; it’s what is and isn’t possible based on our understanding of technology as it relates to those physics.
Annie didn’t have a better answer, but that was because nobody had asked her the question.
“Are you still mad at me?” Annie asked.
“Of course I am.”
“Dude, I couldn’t tell you the plan. Last time I saw you I hadn’t even worked it out yet, and then I couldn’t risk someone hearing me.”
“You got through to Marcus Devlin okay.”
“Yeah, but I had to call him, and I didn’t tell him all of it either.”
“Everyone was really upset.”
“Enh. They should know better by now. How’s Sam?”
Sam was talking about taking the honorable discharge that was on the table a year or two earlier. The military was unhappy that Sam chose to engage the army in the field of battle, and Sam was just about as unhappy with the military for putting him in that position. A parting of the ways sounded like a happy ending.
“He’s good, I hear,” he said. “You haven’t talked to him?”
“A couple of times. I think he’s been hanging around Laura too much; he’s starting to sound like them.”
“That’s about right. Violet?”
Annie shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Her safe house just became the exact opposite of a secret, and we’re pretty sure her get-out-of-memory-free card is permanently damaged. She’s pretty rattled. Won’t even tell me where she’s staying, which means it’s probably in some cave somewhere. We’re still in touch though. She just needs some time. Oh hey, I heard from Cora. She’s hooked up with a private security firm. I might hire her, just for old time’s sake.”
“Do you still need security?”
“Maybe. I’m thinking about selling my story.”
“After all this time?”
“The story has closure now, right? No more spaceship?”
“Right.”
He smiled. Annie smiled back.
“What?” she asked. “You weird me out when you smile like that, dude.”
“I’ve been talking to some people,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Annie, it’s just me asking. You know it won’t go any further. Why don’t you tell me what really happened?”
“You don’t like the escape pod story?”
“Considering you haven’t produced an escape pod? No.”
Multiple witnesses reported seeing a fiery piece of debris streak across the sky in Sorrow Falls and land behind Annie’s house, so that part was verifiable. It was the only part, though.
“It self-destructed after I climbed out,” Annie said. “I designed it to do that, so there wasn’t any of that tech left.”
“Come on, Annie. There isn’t even an impact crater. You know they looked for it.”
She grinned.
“I have a gift for you,” she said.
She slid a box across the table.
“Aw, I didn’t get you anything,” he said. “What’s the occasion?”
“I just thought you’d need one.”
Inside the box was a pocket compass.
“Okay,” he said. “I wasn’t planning on a hike.”
“Hang onto it; you never know when it might come in handy. Did I ever show you the garden?”
Annie took him through the house to get to the back. He noted, on the way through, how much had been picked up, cleaned, and replaced since the last time he was there. Even the hole in the floor was patched up.
“You’ve been busy.”
“Yeah. School year starts in another eight weeks
, but I’m thinking I don’t want to go back to Wainwright, or even if they’d have me. Not sure what comes next, to be honest. But I figured one thing I could do is make this place livable. I might be here for a while.”
There was a screen door from the kitchen leading out to the back.
“I mostly let the weed Carol was growing back here die off. If there’s such a thing as heirloom marijuana, we probably had it, but whatever.”
“Looks recently dug up,” he said.
“Yeah, I started doing some work. Maybe I’ll grow vegetables or something, I dunno. Next year, I mean. Too late to plant now.”
There was a tarp at the far end of the yard, with a small bump under it. It looked like the kind of thing you did to protect new seeds from birds.
“You planted something,” he said.
“Kinda. So, you’ve been talking to experts, huh? What are they saying?”
“That you couldn’t have survived like you said. That the blast from what destroyed the ship should have had more of an impact on the mesosphere. That there wasn’t enough radiation. Those kinds of things.”
“Huh,” she said. “I don’t know about my landing, but it almost like something up there contained the blast.”
“Almost.”
She grabbed the end of the tarp and lifted it.
“Quick peek is all you get,” she said.
He looked. He blinked a couple of times, then he looked again. Then she put the tarp back down.
“Is that the top of the spaceship?” he asked.
“Sure looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“But how?”
Annie laughed.
“Man, you should see your face.”
“This is impossible. Someone would have seen it. How…”
“Look at your compass, Ed.”
He dug the compass out of his pocket. The needle was spinning.
“You’re hiding it.”
“I am. I was tempted to make the whole house disappear but I figured someone would notice that. Plus, I’d never get pizza delivery again. C’mon, let’s go back in before a satellite notices we walked to the edge of the garden and vanished.”
They went back in and sat at the kitchen table. Annie got him some water. He could have used something stronger.
“Are the aliens still in there?” he asked.
“You mean the evil incarnate alien force that would use the greatest weapon in the world to blow up the planet before they flew off to perform acts of terror across the solar system? Those guys?”
“Yes, them.”
“They never made it to the ship. I took a chance that they’d use me as a bridge to get in, so I set up a relay.”
“A what again?”
“I already had little radar relays circling the planet. Smaller than a football, bigger than an egg. The rest of them are still up there. If anyone from the government acts up, I still have my trump card—or, half of it—they just don’t know it. Hopefully it won’t come to that. I figure if they want to do a biological probe on someone who had an alien in their head, there are plenty of those to go around now.”
This was a reference to the missing astronomers at Algernon, although she could have easily meant the ones in Latvia or Australia. The survivors turned up after the spaceship was destroyed, with no memories of how they’d gotten wherever they were found. The two who’d accompanied General Perlmutter to Sorrow Falls were currently in custody. So was General Perlmutter.
“I didn’t know about the relays.”
“Nobody did, that’s why they work. When I was up there, I spoke to the entity through the relay, so when I invited them up, the relay was where they landed. I think it probably would have only taken them another thirty seconds to figure out they weren’t where they wanted to be, and then hit reverse or something; the timing had to be just right.”
“I understand. So when the missile hit…”
“The ship deflected most of the blast into space and absorbed the rest. Of course, the radar relay was destroyed, but that’s a good thing. Then I dropped Shippie down here.”
“The debris?”
“Dropped some loose change, basically. I blacked out the radar and all that on the way down. I think everyone figured the blast did that.”
“What about the broken arm?”
“Oh, that was legit. I mean, obviously. I’m committed to the lie, but I’m not gonna break my arm on purpose just to sell it. The landing was rockier than I expected. I had to come most of the way down without using the engine. I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off at night.”
“I can’t believe nobody recognized the ship for what it was.”
She shrugged.
“Maybe someone did, just not anyone looking to talk about it. Not a lot of trust between Sorrow Falls and anybody not from Sorrow Falls right now, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“I noticed.”
“Anyway, I think these guys have my back around here.”
He sipped his water and nodded, and wondered how many people he was going to have to lie to in the next few months to protect Annie’s latest secret.
“You have everything you wanted,” he said. “You get access to the information on the ship, and nobody knows you still have it. You’re a normal kid again.”
She laughed.
“Yeah, we’re way past that,” she said.
“I mean, you look like one to the outside world. No more college?”
“I dunno. It’s what I thought I wanted. And maybe it would be different if I went to school without a security detail. But maybe not. It might be time to find my own path, you know?”
“Well, you’ve earned it,” Ed said. “Plus, you have that idea to work through, right? You should get as much work in on that as you can, before the next alien invasion.”
She laughed.
“Ed Somerville, don’t even joke.”
About the Author
Gene Doucette is an award-winning screenwriter, novelist, playwright, humorist, essayist, and owner of a cyclocross bike, which he rides daily. A graduate of Boston College, he lives in Cambridge, MA with his family.
For the latest on Gene Doucette, follow him online
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Also by Gene Doucette
Unfiction
When Oliver Naughton joins the Tenth Avenue Writers Underground, headed by literary wunderkind Wilson Knight, Oliver figures he’ll finally get some of the wild imaginings out of his head and onto paper.
But when Wilson takes an intense interest in Oliver's writing and his genre stories of dragons, aliens, and spies, things get weird. Oliver’s stories don’t just need to be finished: they insist on it.
With the help of Minerva, Wilson’s girlfriend, Oliver has to find the connection between reality, fiction, the mythical Cydonian Kingdom, and the non-mythical nightclub called M Pallas. That is, if he can survive the alien invasion, the ghosts, and the fact that he thinks he might be in love with Minerva.
Unfiction is a wild ride through the collision of science fiction, fantasy, thriller, horror and romance. It's what happens when one writer's fiction interferes with everyone's reality.
The Spaceship Next Door
The world changed on a Tuesday.
When a spaceship landed in an open field in the quiet mill town of Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts, everyone realized humankind was not alone in the universe. With that realization, everyone freaked out for a little while.
Or, almost everyone. The residents of Sorrow Falls took the news pretty well. This could have been due to a certain local quality of unflappability, or it could have been that in three years, the ship did exactly nothing other than sit quietly in that field, and nobody understood the full extent of this nothing the ship was doing better than the people who lived right next door.
Sixteen-year old Annie Collins is one of the ship’s closest neighbors. Once upon a time she took every last theory about the ship seriously, whether it was a
dvanced by an adult ,or by a peer. Surely one of the theories would be proven true eventually—if not several of them—the very minute the ship decided to do something. Annie is starting to think this will never happen.
One late August morning, a little over three years since the ship landed, Edgar Somerville arrived in town. Ed’s a government operative posing as a journalist, which is obvious to Annie—and pretty much everyone else he meets—almost immediately. He has a lot of questions that need answers, because he thinks everyone is wrong: the ship is doing something, and he needs Annie’s help to figure out what that is.
Annie is a good choice for tour guide. She already knows everyone in town and when Ed’s theory is proven correct—something is apocalyptically wrong in Sorrow Falls—she’s a pretty good person to have around.
As a matter of fact, Annie Collins might be the most important person on the planet. She just doesn’t know it.
Fixer
What would you do if you could see into the future?
As a child, he dreamed of being a superhero. Most people never get to realize their childhood dreams, but Corrigan Bain has come close. He is a fixer. His job is to prevent accidents—to see the future and “fix” things before people get hurt. But the ability to see into the future, however limited, isn’t always so simple. Sometimes not everyone can be saved.
“Don’t let them know you can see them.”
Graduate students from a local university are dying, and former lover and FBI agent Maggie Trent is the only person who believes their deaths aren’t as accidental as they appear. But the truth can only be found in something from Corrigan Bain’s past, and he’s not interested in sharing that past, not even with Maggie.
To stop the deaths, Corrigan will have to face up to some old horrors, confront the possibility that he may be going mad, and find a way to stop a killer no one can see.
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