The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  Annie did it the incorrect way all the time, up until the day the thing that was in the way turned out to be a steak knife.

  The cut was deep enough to need stitches, and she still had a tiny scar from it on the palm of her right hand. She could remember almost nothing about that day, other than what it was like to be in the back of the clinic, and that Beth was there with her. Beth was the one who wrapped up her hand at the diner and who walked her over and stayed until she was sure Annie was okay.

  It wasn’t even a big deal. Annie certainly would have done the same thing for Beth in that situation. But it suddenly felt like a big deal.

  The clinic had made a few improvements in a year. The room was as small as ever, but the bed looked a little more bed-like than the temporary cot she last saw. Beth was asleep—given a mild sedative, as Lu-Lu said—with a fresh bandage on her head and her left arm in a sling. She wasn’t strung up in the way one might expect of a person in a hospital, but this wasn’t a full hospital. She had an IV, but no vital sign monitors. Annie imagined if her friend’s injuries were life threatening, there would be someone in the room until the ambulance got there.

  Annie sat in a chair on the right side of the bed and took Beth’s free hand.

  “Hi, honey,” Annie said. “You probably can’t hear me, but…”

  Oh my god, this is so stupid.

  “But anyway. Zombies, huh? I feel kind of bad about that. I mean, I don’t know why I should, but I feel… I dunno, responsible, kinda. Weird, huh? I mean, it’s not my fault. Sure, I didn’t tell anyone about the ship, but, like, I’m not the one making zombies and sending them out to attack people.”

  Beth inhaled sharply, which startled Annie. Her friend appeared to be having a nightmare: her eyes were darting around under the eyelids and she kept twitching.

  “Hey, it’s okay, I’m here. It’s all right.”

  Beth’s fingers started twitching. Annie wondered if she should call someone in or not.

  Normal? Not normal?

  “Should I call someone?”

  Beth, appropriately, didn’t answer. But the twitching stopped and whatever was going on behind her eyelids quelled.

  “I’ll take that as a no. Anyway. I don’t even know why I’m here, honey. I mean, if it were me looking at someone else here, right now, talking to an unconscious friend in an almost-hospital room, I’d say that someone else was here because her mom is in Boston in a real hospital right now. I mean, obviously, right? I’m probably feeling guilty about not going, and now zombies equals cancer in my head and wow, I should probably go get some sleep, huh?”

  Definitely overtired, she wrote in her imaginary sociology notebook.

  “Unnhhhh,” Beth grunted. Then her eyes snapped open.

  “Oh, hi!” Annie said. “They said you were sedated, but how are you? I just came in to say hello before I headed home. Your parents are out in the hall, you want me to get them?”

  “Are…you?”

  “Dude, that’s not even funny. Lemme go and…”

  “Are…you?” Beth repeated.

  Annie let go of Beth’s hand, but Beth responded by grabbing Annie by the wrist.

  “Aaoow, Beth, honey, let go of me! Come on, I’m serious.”

  Annie was using her free hand to try and pull apart Beth’s fingers, but it felt like she was going to have to break them to get loose.

  “Your grip is too tight, you’re hurting me, Beth. Cut it out!”

  What the hell is going on?

  “Are…you…”

  “I heard you and it isn’t funny!”

  “…her?”

  “What did you say?”

  She looked into Beth’s eyes and realized something terrible: Beth wasn’t in there.

  “HELP!” she called. She didn’t know how many staff was in the building or if sound could travel far enough to reach the waiting room and make any kind of difference.

  “Are you her?” Beth repeated. She was trying to use her left arm to reach for Annie, apparently not aware it was in a sling.

  “Beth, let go of me.” She got two fingers loose. “HELP!”

  A doctor she never met before—older man, new to the clinic clearly or she’d have known his face—burst in, quickly assessed the situation, and took Beth by the shoulders. He was trying to push her down into a prone position.

  “Beth, you need to calm down,” he said, in slightly accented English.

  “Help me get free, she’s hurting me,” Annie said.

  The woman from the desk came in next, followed by the Welds, and then Ed and Pete. Ed, seeing what the doctor was doing, went to him first, because nobody, it appeared, cared that Annie was about to lose her damn wrist.

  “Do not try and wake her up!” Ed said.

  “Excuse me, sir?” the doctor said.

  “I’ve seen this, and I’m telling you, if you force her awake it may kill her.”

  “Oh my God,” Lu-Lu cried.

  “WILL SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME?” Annie shouted.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Ed said. He knelt down to work on Beth’s grip. “God, she’s really got you.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Beth, sweetie, calm down,” Lu-Lu said from the door. The two of them looked afraid to jump in the middle of anything.

  “Almost got her loose,” Ed said. “Little help, doctor?”

  He was checking Beth’s vitals, though, and not sure about respecting Ed’s advice. Pete knelt down to help instead.

  “She’s too strong,” Pete said. She was looking at Ed when she said it. “She was asleep, right?”

  “Her heart rate is soaring,” the doctor said, almost to himself.

  “You are,” Beth said. “You are. You are.”

  “What did she say?” Annie asked. “Ed…”

  “YOU ARE.”

  All at once, Beth collapsed back in the bed and her grip went slack. Ed pulled Annie away from the bed immediately. Annie felt her feet go out from under her as he scooped her off the ground.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

  “She said, ‘are you her’, Ed. ‘Are you her?’ That was their question.”

  Annie started to cry, and hated herself for it, while Ed held her.

  In the bed behind them, Beth Weld started to convulse.

  * * *

  In the aftermath of Corporal Vogel’s death, all the men involved in the incident were pulled from their rotations. This was explained as a temporary thing to give them an opportunity to get your heads right, which was an army tough-love way of saying perhaps you should speak to the base’s psychiatrist before we put a gun in your hand again.

  Not one of the guys thought that was the real reason, though. As far as Sam—and by extension the other five—were concerned, they were pulled until everyone was cool with what happened. It was in the army’s best interest to make sure this was a situation where one soldier went nuts, tried to kill another soldier, and then died because something was wrong with his head, rather than what it looked like: six men ganging up to murder a seventh.

  The frustrating thing for Sam was that being pulled from his normal rotation made it looked like he had done something wrong. There was no way around it. Everyone knew Vogel was dead, and Sam and his bunkmates were sitting on top of the man when he died. Having them taken out of duty just made it all look worse.

  It helped that this was Sorrow Falls. Any other place, Sam’s story sounded a lot more suspect, but in this town, the ever-present specter of the space flu lingered in the back of everyone’s minds and made this sort of thing possible.

  Another frustrating thing was, after he declined to speak to Dr. Davidian about his emotional state, and after the inquest exonerated him and the others, someone decided to shuffle the rotation.

  Again, he could see the reasoning: let’s make sure these six men aren’t all guarding the spaceship at around the same time, just in case we have this wrong. He would have made the same call.

  It didn’t mea
n he liked the outcome. His new team was A: on a nighttime rotation with the spaceship, and B: filled with men who’d come in with Vogel.

  Sam had been in Sorrow Falls for fourteen months, which was longer than most of the men assigned to the base, but not as long as Vogel and his guys. They called themselves ‘lifers’, and they’d been there for a little over two years. There were only ten of them—nine now—five of whom made up Sam’s new team.

  Two years didn’t seem like a long time to be at a base that saw no combat, but as far as lifers were concerned they were owed some sort of special respect, which was annoying since they all carried the same rank as Sam and two were younger than he was. It was all very high school, but Sam could learn to deal with it.

  Much more disconcerting was the extremely cavalier attitude they all seemed to have about their assignment. They collectively developed a disturbingly nihilistic perspective on the ship and the importance of their duties in regards to it.

  Sam could understand this too. It was easy to fall into a late-night security guard sort of mentality around a thing that was supposed to be the most dangerous object on the planet but which continued to refuse to fulfill that responsibility.

  On the other hand, nobody wants to hear it won’t matter, we’ll all die anyway from the soldier sharing his foxhole, whether or not it was true.

  This was Sam’s second night shift with this team, and the second night they told him to cover the front (street side) of the perimeter and to not worry about checking in unless he saw something important happen or had to take a leak. The first hour of the first night, he thought they were being generous in giving him the gate, because there were fewer bugs out front, and a few more things to look at. The back of the perimeter was nothing but a lot of trees and a squirrel or two, in contrast. But then Sam tried to check in at the hour—they were supposed to have hourly checks—and half the team didn’t answer. He was about to escalate it (which would have meant a backup team driving down the hill from the base) when he was told the three guys in back were napping and to leave them alone.

  So that was the first night, which was dry. On this, the second, it had already rained a ton and the ground was muddy, so Sam didn’t see any way for a nap to be feasible without there being immediate and obvious evidence of said nap.

  Just the same, when he tried to check in he was told to mind his own business.

  He wondered if maybe they had hammocks hidden in the trees.

  It was at exactly twenty-two-seventeen that the end of the world began. Sam always expected to have a front-row seat to it, but knew every other soldier at the base felt the same way. Even the lifers felt that way, although their expression of this sentiment was more tied up in concepts relating to fate and inevitability and passiveness, whereas everyone else tended to game-plan the scenario with a mixture of excitement and dread.

  Either way, it was Sam who was at the gate at the beginning of the end. And the beginning of the end was startling indeed.

  First, there was the heavy thump of a shock wave that traveled along the ground and knocked Sam over. He ended up on his butt. Across the street, the trailers rocked. He heard exclamations of surprise.

  Sam scrambled to his feet and reached for his radio—still clipped to his belt—and his rifle, which he’d dropped. He opened a channel.

  “SS1 to Base, we have something happening down here. Felt like an earthquake, but I think the ship did it, over.”

  Static.

  Did they hear me?

  The radios were susceptible to atmospheric interference from time to time, and this was the kind of night where such a thing was possible. That was why they kept a field phone attached to a landline near the gate. (This was, if nothing else, ironic, as field phones were designed to be portable communicators in an age before cell phones. Now, it was a hardwired alternative to wireless.) Sam oriented himself, located the phone and started running for it.

  “Hey!” someone shouted from the trailer. “Something’s happening, huh?”

  Sam knew the guy—it was the weird nerdy guy Annie knew. Dobie or something. It wasn’t a great time for a chat, so Sam just waved and continued for the phone.

  Then he saw the light, out of the corner of his eye, and he stopped moving to stare at it.

  The light was Bunsen burner blue, and it was being emitted from a part of the spaceship most people likened to an antenna array. It was only glowing faintly, but glowing nonetheless, which was more life than the ship had shown at any point in the past three years, excluding thirty seconds ago.

  “Holy crap!” the guy on the trailer shouted.

  Go back inside, Sam was supposed to be saying. Protect yourself, drive for the hills, get behind me. You want me on that wall.

  He didn’t say any of that; he didn’t have time. The light brightened and then there was… something like an explosion.

  The sound it made was a lot more like an implosion, or maybe just the noise an explosion would make if played backwards. It happened in time with a tremendous wave of melancholy. When it passed through Sam his knees buckled and he gasped and nearly began to cry. It was weaponized depression; there was no other way to describe it. Mercifully, it lasted less than a second, or he might have put a gun in his mouth.

  The light on the top of the ship glowed brighter still, and then a thin beam shot out of the top, visible only because of the mist still in the air from the earlier precipitation. It went straight up into the lower atmosphere until reaching something like a wall or an upper bound, at which point it spread out in in all directions, like the cascade at the top of a geyser.

  Sam fingered the channel on his radio again and only heard more static. Behind him, the trailers nutsos were collectively springing to life. Doors were opening and people were coming out. If any of them tried to rush the gate, Sam was going to have a tough decision to make.

  But first, the phone. He reached the field phone and clicked open the line, which was all that was required to dial up the base as the phone had no other purpose and wasn’t tied to any public lines. It ran along the same underground cable as the instruments surrounding the ship.

  “SS1 to Base, this is Corning, over.”

  Silence. Sam thought about those instruments on the ground inside the fence. They were calibrated to detect the tiniest of changes, so what just happened probably caused every sensor to wet itself. There was undoubtedly a packet of exciting information being uploaded to the science team at this very moment, which meant even if Sam didn’t get through there were people in the world—far away from Sorrow Falls—who were aware that this was happening. Whatever it was.

  Not getting through to the base wasn’t an expected outcome, yet nobody was responding. He didn’t know where the phone terminated, but assumed a human being was in charge of anticipating a call. Perhaps that human was sleeping, like the men sharing his perimeter detail.

  Then someone picked up the phone.

  “Who’s this?”

  “This is Corning, at the ship. We’ve got something going on down here, I need…”

  “Hold position, soldier, we’re locking down.”

  “Yes… yes sir, it’s just…”

  “Conserve ammo, shoot to wound if possible, and hold position!”

  The line went dead.

  Sam stared at the phone for a few seconds, not sure if he was ready to believe what he’d just heard. There were the orders, which were alarming enough, but that wasn’t all.

  On the other end of the line, in the background, he could swear he heard screaming.

  * * *

  Dill felt the earthquake and knew.

  His new duty assignment was base perimeter, a job that had him guarding a bunch of men with guns in a town of hick farmers, which was about the dumbest job on the base next to latrine duty, which thank God they hired someone to do because no thanks.

  Anyway it was a plebe job, and he hated everyone sharing it with him and thought everyone probably blamed him for Vogel for some reason even
though he was the one getting choked to death in all that mess.

  Unlike SS1 duty, perimeter guard at the base meant standing inside the fence and making sure nobody came at it from outside. This was—again—a base in a town in America and not the Green Zone in Iraq. He had to worry about the kid staring back at him from the farmhouse porch on one side, and that was it. There wasn’t anybody else nearby. And again, he was guarding a bunch of guys who had their own guns.

  Then the ground thumped.

  Dill was from a part of the country that didn’t do that. They had to worry about hurricanes every year, but you could see a hurricane coming. Earthquakes didn’t creep across the ocean, they just struck without warning, and that was a kind of uncertainty that made him deeply uncomfortable.

  It felt unnatural, which was why he was ready to attribute it to the ship instead, and also why Corporal Wen laughed at him for doing it. Wen was from San Francisco.

  “You never been through a quake before? Calm yourself.”

  “That felt bad.”

  “The bad ones last long enough so you think they’re not going to stop. That was a little thing.”

  “Can you even get earthquakes in Massachusetts?”

  “Sure can. You can get them anywhere. Now we do what everyone does after a quake: we wait for someone to tell us the Richter and brag about having felt it.”

  Wen—who hadn’t fallen over—helped Dill to his feet.

  “You can call home tomorrow,” he said, “and tell the family all about it. Come on, we should keep walking.”

  “We have to make sure the fence is intact,” Dill said.

  Wen laughed. “It wasn’t that bad! Oh my.”

  They started walking, when Dill was hit with a wave of nausea and the odd notion that it would have been better for everyone if Hank Vogel had crushed his throat.