The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

“Good way to get lost.”

  “Or eaten,” Rick said.

  “Shut up, Rick.”

  * * *

  They decided on a plan that kept them ten feet away apart, as a means to cover more ground while not being eaten by predatory aliens.

  Every few feet they’d do a call-and-response (“Marco!” “Polo!”) to keep from getting too spread out. They walked through the woods like this for about twenty minutes.

  Then they found it.

  Rick was the first to the scene. He was on the left-most flank of their search perimeter, and the ship had come down in a field to his left.

  “Guys…” was all he said at first. It was the most subdued thing to come out of his mouth all evening, so Rodney and Annie knew right away something was different.

  They reached the clearing in a couple of minutes. Rick hardly moved in that time.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I was kidding around, but it’s here.”

  The squat black ship was sitting in a ring of crisped grass. The ground was still smoking a little. There was no impact crater.

  “I kind of can’t believe it either,” Rodney said. “What should we do now?”

  Annie was equally dumbfounded. It was one thing to actively pursue something like this, but another entirely to actually discover it. She hadn’t been thinking about the consequences of their quest because she was too caught up in its execution.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t think this far.”

  Rick cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hello?” he said.

  “Hey, c’mon,” Rodney said.

  “What? It’s what we’re here for, right? We come this far.”

  Rodney looked at Annie, who shrugged.

  “Hello?” Rick said again. “Maybe they’re in cryo-sleep or something. We should just go up and knock.”

  “It’ll be hot,” Annie said. “From re-entry.”

  “Doesn’t feel hot to me,” Rick said, holding his hands out. He was about twenty feet away.

  “Hot to the touch, dumb-ass,” Rodney said.

  “No, he has a point,” Annie said. “He should be able to feel it from there. We all should.”

  “See? Come on, let’s go knock. Maybe we can open it up.”

  “That seems like a super bad idea,” Rodney said. “Someone more qualified and, like, with a Geiger counter should do that.”

  “Rod, there’s nobody else here. We’re the first, so man up and let’s do this.”

  Rodney looked dubious, but Annie had to agree with Rick. There was really no turning back at this point. If it was radioactive, they’d already been exposed.

  “I’m with him, Rodney,” she said.

  He sighed.

  “All right, together. We do it together. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Annie said.

  “Agreed,” Rick said. “C’mon.”

  He waved them forward, and then they walked, slowly, in a matching pace, in the same order they’d walked through the woods: Rick, Rodney, Annie, left-to-right.

  “Should we hold hands?” Rick asked. “Red rover, red rover, send E.T. on over.”

  “Cut it out,” Rodney said.

  They were ten feet out and standing on smoking earth, when Rick lost it.

  It was subtle at first. Annie was preoccupied, because at around that same point she began thinking about her mother again, and she’d been trying very hard to bury those thoughts. The ship was probably the best distraction the universe could have shunted her way, and yet, ten feet from it, she was dwelling on the cancer again.

  There was no telling what was going through Rick’s mind.

  “Hey, guys?”

  “What is it?” Rodney asked. His expression made it clear he was wrestling with his own issues in that moment.

  “I just… I… are you seeing…?”

  “You all right?” Annie asked.

  “No. No.” Rick was trembling. “I gotta go. I gotta…”

  Then he turned around and ran off into the woods as fast as he could.

  Rodney looked at Annie and shrugged.

  “Bathroom?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Leave him be. He’s probably not our best ambassador anyway.”

  They continued forward another three paces.

  Rodney made a sound somewhere between a gasp and a choke.

  “Hey, you good?” Annie asked him.

  “I think I have to check on something.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now. It’s really important.”

  “My mother’s dying.”

  “What? What?”

  “I said my mother is dying. Of cancer.”

  “That’s terrible, Annie, that’s… I’m sorry, I have to go. I’ll wait for you at the car or I’ll come back or… I have to go.”

  There were tears streaming down his face. Something awful had just happened to him, or he was remembering something awful, or something awful was about to happen and he had to go prevent it. Awful was definitely a part of what was upsetting him, one way or another.

  “Okay, but…”

  She didn’t get to finish the sentence. He spun around and ran hard for the tree line. In only a second, she was alone.

  Annie looked at the ship.

  “Well then. Just you and me now. So, hi, I’m Annie? If there’s anyone inside, come on out, let’s talk or something.”

  She was maybe five paces away.

  Clearly, the others encountered some sort of defense mechanism. That was the only thing that could possibly explain Rodney acting so strangely, because he would never have left her alone, here, in this moment, for any reason other than that he was compelled to somehow. (Rick, on the other hand, was behaving like Rick always behaved, and this was no surprise. She would never understand why anyone liked hanging out with him.)

  “Okay, so I’m next, what do you have for me?” she asked the ship.

  The ship didn’t answer in any direct way.

  Maybe it targets the most likely threats first, she thought.

  Another two steps forward, and she was thinking about her mother again. It was the same thoughts she’d been working through an hour earlier, only so very much worse.

  I killed her, she thought. It was me. She’s dying because she’d rather do that than stay, because of me.

  It was an absurd notion. She was positive it was completely true. It was followed by the idea that she still had time to fix it. She could go back, right now, and hug Carol and tell her she loved her and it was okay, and she didn’t have to have cancer.

  She just had to deal with this spaceship first.

  Two more steps.

  Mom’s going to die tonight.

  “I won’t even get to say goodbye,” she said aloud. She emitted something like a sob when she spoke, and realized she’d been crying this whole time, which was how she was before she saw the ship in the first place. She didn’t want to be back in that place, where cancer was taking away her idea of what the future was supposed to be. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want to cry.

  It was the ship that was doing this to her.

  “STOP IT!”

  She took another step forward, now in reach of the hull, and just like that the grief went away.

  “That wasn’t nice, Shippie,” she said, naming it on the spot. “I’m just a little girl. I shouldn’t have to deal with this.”

  Silence.

  She reached out and put her hand on the side of the ship.

  It was warm, but not hot to the touch. Her understanding of physics, while somewhat entry-level, was sufficient to convince her there was no way this should have been possible, not for something that was in the upper atmosphere less than an hour ago.

  “You absorbed the heat, didn’t you? That’s clever.” She took her hand back. “Is there anyone in there?”

  Then the ship did respond. It wasn’t verbal, it was visual. More exactly, a series of images appeared in Annie’s head. Images fro
m space—nebulae and neutron stars and patterns of light and gas she had no names for.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t speak this language.”

  The images stopped.

  It was waiting for her to respond in kind, but she didn’t know how.

  “Use words.”

  New images popped in her head: bolts of electricity, and rips in space, and impossible geometric patterns.

  “No, I don’t understand.”

  The images stopped again.

  More silence. She could hear her own breathing, a few cicadas, and that was all.

  Then the ship started to scream.

  It was a high-pitched squeal, barely noticeable at first, but rapidly growing in volume, until Annie had to cover her ears.

  “NO STOP IT HURTS!” she shouted, but this time the ship wasn’t listening to her. She told it to use words, and this was the word it was choosing: EEEEEEEEEEEE!

  Annie didn’t remember running away from the ship. The sound was so painful it wasn’t likely a decision she made consciously at all. Her feet decided it on their own, more or less. And the sound stopped once she made it to the trees, so it was probably the right call.

  Then she was alone in the woods with the greatest discovery in human history, uncertain as to how to proceed.

  Call the sheriff, she thought. Call him and wait here.

  But when she pulled out her phone she saw it was dead. Either the battery ran out or the ship killed it (it would turn out to be the latter, as the cell phone never worked again). She couldn’t tell anyone, and her ride was gone.

  She decided to push through the woods in the direction of the car. Rodney would be waiting. Of course he would be.

  17

  Long Day’s Journey into Nightmare

  “So nobody saw you?” Ed asked.

  Her first reaction was that Ed thought she made up the story, but she could tell by the look on his face that wasn’t an issue.

  “They never came back. I waited at the edge of the clearing for—I don’t know how long, a little while I guess. But when the ship didn’t do anything new and Rodney didn’t show up I headed to where we left the car. It was gone, though, so I just walked home from there. By the time I made it back it was something like four in the morning. Billy found the ship about an hour later. I think I was probably asleep.”

  What she didn’t add was that Rodney couldn’t look her in the eye for nearly a year, and their friendship never entirely recovered. Given their age difference, it had a shelf life anyway, but it fell apart pretty fast. She thought he would probably always feel bad about abandoning her, but they’d never spoken one word about that night so it was hard to tell.

  Rick, meanwhile, went from problem child to full-blown disaster inside of a year. He was the real first contact, not her or Rodney or Billy Pederson. She often wondered if what he experienced that night was worse than what happened to anyone else.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “I touched the ship, but I obviously don’t know anything more about what’s going on now than you do, so you’re going to have to come up with another idea.”

  “No, you’re wrong, this is a big deal. It means the ship tried to communicate. Maybe it’s still trying. We just don’t understand what it’s saying. What can you tell me about the pictures it showed you?”

  “Hardly anything. I don’t remember much, it was… it was a lot of information and it came at me too fast.”

  “I wonder, if we hypnotized you, maybe we can get more.”

  Annie laughed.

  “And that is exactly why I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t want somebody poking around in my head looking for the alien. Plus I’m not one of those people who can be hypnotized.”

  “That’s really why you didn’t tell anyone?”

  “Well, no. Nobody would have believed me, either. Like half the town came forward with stories once Billy went global and it was clear there was money to be had. If you and I had this conversation three years ago you would have been like, sure little girl, whatever you say.”

  “You’re probably right. What did it feel like?”

  “What did what feel like? The pictures in my head?”

  “No, the side of the ship. You wouldn’t believe how much back-and-forth I’ve read debating that one question.”

  “Oh. Well I guess it was sorta weird. I had so many other things going on I didn’t give it a lot of thought. It was slick, though, like it was wet only it wasn’t wet. Warm, too, but not, like, frying pan hot, which I’d have expected. It was probably stupid of me to touch it at all, since it was clearly metal and had just been surrounded by fire in the upper atmosphere, but it wasn’t giving off heat like it should have.”

  “Some kind of low-friction material with low heat retention.”

  “Maybe, yeah. I think it was absorbing the heat. Like in fuel cells or something. Dobbs thinks the whole thing is a big solar power collector. So what difference does it make if it was trying to communicate?”

  “I don’t know yet, I have to think about it. But it’s more than we ever knew before about the ship. I wish we’d known this three years ago.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The zombies, too.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Like I said, it could still be trying to communicate. The reports I’ve gotten indicate a few of them have been speaking. Really basic, but maybe we shouldn’t treat the zombies as threats, but as crude efforts at contact.”

  “Great. You go look for one to talk to, but leave me out of it.”

  Ed’s phone, resting on the edge of the table, thrummed with a new text. He checked the screen.

  “It’s from Pete. Looks like they’re going to move Beth to Saint Mary’s.”

  “Oh no!”

  “I’m sure it’s just a precaution.”

  “When are they moving her?”

  “She doesn’t say. You want me to ask?”

  “Yeah, can we head back, I want to see her before she goes.”

  Ed checked his watch, surprised. “Wow, it’s past nine.”

  “Crap, I was supposed to call Carol. She’s out by now. She’d want to know about Beth, too.”

  “Maybe I should just take you back to Violet’s. We can drive to the hospital to visit her tomorrow, if you want.”

  “What, are you worried about my bedtime?”

  “I feel like I’m supposed to be. I’m pretty sure I’m violating some sort of labor laws.”

  Annie got up. “I’m not on the clock. C’mon, it’ll take the ambulance another hour to get to the clinic, we can beat it there.”

  * * *

  Bobby and Lu-Lu Weld were in the clinic lobby with Sheriff Pete when Annie and Ed came in. The place was otherwise empty, as Sorrow Falls was not known for having a long list of unexpected emergency situations on Tuesday nights. This was just as well as the clinic’s waiting area was too small to provide any privacy. The Welds were having a quiet conversation with Pete that ended as soon as they saw Annie, whom they both hugged extensively and at length.

  Annie liked the Welds a lot. They had a habit of adopting everyone who worked for them (even their unofficial under-the-table employees, like Annie) as if they were part of the Weld clan itself.

  Bobby shook hands with Ed.

  “Pete here says you and Annie here saved Elizabeth from this man. Thank you so much.”

  “Thank you, sir, but I think Pete may be giving us more credit than we deserve. Beth did all her own rescuing. We didn’t get there until after she chased him off. You should be proud, she’s got a lot of spirit.”

  “That she does. And so does this one.” He rubbed the top of Annie’s head affectionately. The Welds were basically parents straight from the 1950’s.

  “How is she doing?” Annie asked.

  “They sedated her,” Lu-Lu said. Her real name was Lucy, but Annie didn’t know a single person who called her that. “We wanted to take her home, but the doctor thinks she could use a more
monitored overnight, just in case, so we’re just waiting on the ambulance.”

  Ed locked eyes with Pete and gave her a little nod, the universal signal for can I talk to you? Annie wasn’t sure who was updating whom, but if she could guess, Ed was about to ask Pete for help in locating a zombie for a “take us to your leader” kind of conversation. Hopefully not involving brain eating.

  “Excuse me, for just a minute,” Ed said. “It was a pleasure meeting you both.”

  “The pleasure’s ours,” Bobby said. Ed and Pete stepped out the front door.

  “Can I go see her?” Annie asked. “Before the ambulance gets here?”

  “Sure, sweetie,” Lu-Lu said, “but she is lights-out right now. I’m sure she won’t even know you’re there.”

  “Go on in,” Bobby said. “It’s the first door on the left.”

  * * *

  Annie had been past the lobby of the clinic only once, meaning she was actually less familiar with it than she was with the emergency room at Harbridge Memorial, despite the clinic’s relative proximity to her on any given day.

  There were three small private rooms with examination tables and cots. The rest of the space was pretty open, with a long counter for a nurse or a local volunteer. The area beyond the desk was an unknown. She imagined there were offices for doctors, X-ray machines, and so on. Down at the far end of the corridor was a set of double-doors. An ambulance dock, probably. When Ed parked behind the clinic she saw one there.

  A woman was standing behind the counter, sorting through paperwork in front of a lit computer screen. She looked up at Annie and smiled. They had a silent conversation whereby Annie asked to enter Beth’s room and the nurse/doctor/random woman doing paperwork gave her permission.

  Annie’s one trip past the lobby was as a patient, the previous summer. She’d made the mistake of over-stuffing Bart with dishes, and was in too much of a rush to notice exactly what she was doing. The way the Hobart dishwasher worked was that a tray of dishes was slid in on a rack, and a handle was pulled to lower two side panels to seal a chimney-shaped compartment. Once the sides were completely shut, the machine automatically began the thirty-second wash cycle. If the tray was over-full, sometimes a piece of silver or a precariously balanced cup would interfere with the inside hinge of the sliding panel. The correct way to fix this was to pull the tray back out and either rearrange the things on it or remove some of those things and try again. The incorrect way was to reach into the machine and try to shove whatever was getting in the way out of the way.