The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  She did. There were more zombies, but on the other side was an empty space for about ten feet, beyond which was Main.

  “No, no, no, don’t do that.”

  “Why not, it’s clear.”

  “It’s clear because the grass is hiding a crevasse.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “I’m dead serious. There’s a crease right there.”

  “A crease? I can jump a crease.”

  “Ed…”

  There was no more discussion, because then Ed jerked the wheel to the left and floored the gas, and committed to the move.

  The space he was aiming for actually had a name, and that name was Charlie’s Pocket. It was well established long before the early demise of one Charles Dane Fincus that it was possible, if not paying attention, to miss the turn for the bridge, but Charlie performed the feat so spectacularly that he was the one everyone talked about when they talked about the pocket at all.

  Building the bridge meant extending the land from the level of Main Street to the edge of the river. The process left a little lip of space at the corner, on both sides, where Main dropped off but before the land build-up for the bridge commenced. Most parts of the year, the void was invisible, either due to the naturally growing long grasses that came up from the riverfront, or snowdrifts.

  One night some years prior, Charlie Fincus took the turn for the bridge at a speed estimated after the fact to be somewhere in the range of seventy miles per hour. He missed the road, and hit the pocket instead. At that speed, the pocket turned into a slalom course that carried his car straight down on its side until it rammed into the edge of the river, flipped up and landed upside-down in the water.

  Charlie wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, so he didn’t make it all the way to the river in the car. Instead, he was flung like a rock from a sling when his Chevy went hood over tailpipe. He landed on the riverbank, but what made the story so memorable was that the bank he landed on was on the other side of the river. He died on impact, thankfully.

  Annie knew the legend of Charlie’s Pocket, but didn’t think she had enough time to convey it to Ed, who wasn’t working with a ton of options anyway. She was just glad the town hadn’t gotten around to putting up the necessary guardrails yet, a rare instance of bureaucracy working in someone’s favor.

  The car hit the curb at an angle, the left tire bouncing up before the right, turning them a little bit too even with the edge of the bridge. Their momentum corrected for it in time, though---barely—so they hit the pocket with a little speed.

  The good news was, when they went airborne they lost the people (or parts of them) that were being dragged. The bad news was they weren’t airborne nearly long enough to clear the jump. The weight of the engine block pulled the nose right down to the ground, and far too soon. Ed hit the gas as soon as the front tires were down, but by then the car was already facing a twenty-degree angle. In other words, while the car’s nose was pointed at Main, it wasn’t heading in that direction. It was sliding into the pocket.

  “Annie, you’re going to have to jump from the car,” Ed said, way more calmly than such a statement warranted.

  “What?”

  “I mean it, right now. Unbuckle, open the door and jump as far as you can.”

  “What about you?”

  “I have to hold my foot on the gas so you can get free. Soon as you’re out, I’ll join you.”

  “C’mon, that’s what people say right before they die in a ball of—”

  “Annie, please!”

  “Right, but I better see you in a minute.”

  “You will, I promise.”

  She unbuckled, pushed open the door, and jumped clear, into tall grass that hid an unanticipated steepness.

  As soon as she was out, the car gave in to gravity. It slid past her and caught the deep part of Charlie’s Pocket. It didn’t stop until it reached the river.

  She didn’t see Ed get clear.

  “Dammit, Ed, now what am I supposed to do?”

  It seemed unreasonably quiet, lying there in the tall grass. She could hear her own breathing, and the car grinding to a stop at the riverbank, but she was beneath the bridge and the road, and so insulated from the sound coming from those places. It was oddly peaceful, and staying right there was tempting. Maybe the zombies wouldn’t find her there, and if they did, it was possible every one of them would slide into the pocket and never get near her.

  It wasn’t a terrible plan, and she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

  “You are…”

  The woman from the back of the car made it out okay, it looked like. She was halfway down the hill and climbing in Annie’s direction. It made for a compelling reason not to stay where she was.

  Violet’s. I could go there.

  She would need to find a car, or find someone with a car.

  Just break into a house and find the car key, that’s all.

  It wouldn’t have been all that difficult, not with everyone in town on the streets. Zombies weren’t driving, and there was twelve blocks of row house residences less than a mile to her left. Sure, driving the car anywhere was going to end up being a serious challenge, but one thing at a time. Annie couldn’t stay where she was, so even if stealing a car wasn’t really a viable long-term plan, it was at least a plan.

  She got up and started climbing. Main was pretty close, and she was a fast runner, and none of these people were moving all that quickly. She could do it.

  When she reached the edge of the ravine and got to her feet, she realized with some measure of horror how mistaken she’d been.

  Every single zombie from the edge of bridge road to the corner of Main was looking right at her.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hello everyone.”

  Someone came up behind and grabbed her arm. She screamed.

  “It’s me, it’s me,” Ed said.

  “Jesus Christ!” She slapped him in the chest. “I thought you were dead, don’t do that to me!”

  “I’m sorry, I thought you saw me! I landed on the other side of the ravine. I waved.”

  “You waved?”

  “I didn’t want to shout.”

  Annie pointed at the crowd. “Like that would have mattered.”

  “Well I know that now. So, um… what’s our plan?”

  “Learn to fly.”

  “Any other ideas?”

  “Why aren’t they moving?” she asked.

  “I think they’re waiting for you to move. They have you cornered.”

  “Not really.”

  She nodded to their left.

  The last building on the eastern side of Main was a gas station. South of the station, the land between the river and the road opened up to allow for the row house neighborhoods, but on the back side of the gas station itself was nothing but open space leading to the river. Directly behind the garage was a flat area wide enough for a person but not a car. There weren’t any zombies standing on that ground.

  “Run behind the station, cut right to Main, steal a car, win the game. What do you think?” she asked.

  “Sounds good to me. Except I’ve never stolen a car.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “I mean I don’t know how to hot wire one.”

  “Ed… one thing at a time. We run on three. Ready?”

  19

  Where the Sidewalk Ends

  Things got worse the closer they got to Main. The zombies—both kinds—were more common, creating a real jam on the road. This was not at all helped by the people who were awake and still in full possession of their faculties. Those folks were basically freaking out all over the place.

  Aside from their catchphrase, the zombies were mostly silent, and once they concluded the person in front of them wasn’t the person or thing they were looking for, they were content to leave them alone. The problem was with the living/awake, because they were seeing friends and family stumble around and act collectively weird, and that was a little terrifying. The impulse w
as to do the same thing Dobbs did when Art Shoeman first stumbled down the road: stop, grab, confront.

  This was perceived as a threat. As lumbering and seemingly mindless and aimless as the horde was, when there was a threat, they acted in concert as well as any army Sam had ever seen or heard of. They were a formidable opponent, or would be if they mastered tools and moved a little faster.

  Every minute or two Sam heard someone scream, shout, or beg for help, and knew he was hearing a citizen discover the consequence of threatening a zombie.

  He also knew he couldn’t do anything about it.

  “This is terrible,” Sam said, as the latest piercing cry turned into a strangled gurgle.

  “End of the world, soldier,” Laura said.

  They were still at their post at the head of the camper roof, looking for targets, but it had been a while since a shot was required. They’d reached some sort of unspoken mutual understanding with the zombies: the camper wouldn’t run them over if they didn’t get in the way. It meant they were essentially traveling at the same speed as a tired jogger, but at least they were moving.

  “Where’s the rest of your boys?” Laura asked. “I thought the military was here for just this situation.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know. My last communication with the base… it sounded like they were under attack. I have to wonder if anyone even made it out.”

  “Under attack from whom?”

  “Well, themselves. The ones who were sleeping. If I were the spaceship controlling these guys, I’d give the soldier zombies a different agenda, wouldn’t you? At least the ones on the base.”

  “Take out the biggest threat in the area.”

  “Exactly. But, you know, I’m just guessing. All radio communication is down. The sirens and the landlines are the only things working.”

  “Internet’s down,” Dobbs said. “I think the ship is cutting us off from the rest of the world too, not just each other.” He looked up. “Like a dome over the town.”

  “That happened early, I saw it,” Laura said. “Are you having any luck with the signal?”

  Dobbs had been typing furiously for a while, to the eternal annoyance of Oona, who kept shouting expletives through the floor regarding ‘nerd-boy’ ruining her data.

  “No. I think there’s a signal embedded in the audio you picked up, but the equipment may not have captured up all of it.”

  “It’s pretty precise equipment.”

  “Sure, but this signal was designed to be picked up by a different kind of receiver, and if you had recorded all of it I’m not sure I’d want to listen.”

  “What kind of receiver?” Sam asked.

  “A human brain.”

  “Oh.”

  “I do have an idea, though. We know the ship is using some kind of subsonic radio frequency to deliver instructions. Maybe it’s enough to know the brains of these people are susceptible to that kind of information packet.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sam said.

  “I do,” Laura said. “You want to go up the scale, see if anything resonates?”

  “Worth a shot.”

  Laura turned to Sam. “He’s going to try using sound as a weapon.”

  “Because their brains are… never mind,” Sam said. “If it makes sense to you guys, go for it. Maybe you can use that, to make it louder.”

  He pointed to the microphone array above the electronics table.

  “That’s for receiving,” Dobbs said. “This isn’t like thrusters in Star Trek, we can’t just reverse them and turn a microphone into an amplifier.”

  “I know that. But those microphones are embedded in a parabolic shell. You can use the shell to amplify the sound from those external speakers on the computer.”

  “…Oh. Yes, good idea. We can do that.”

  * * *

  The seismic event recorded at 10:17 P.M. EST was captured by most of the sensors sharing the field with the Sorrow Falls spaceship, and also by the usual USGS systems some distance from Massachusetts.

  Given the epicenter was quickly identified as being Sorrow Falls itself, it was of no particular surprise to anyone when the USGS reported that this was not a true earthquake. The cause was not a tectonic plate shift, but a source of tremendous energy on the surface. It was likened to the effect of a large object striking the Earth’s crust from space, only without applying brakes first.

  When the sensors in the field captured data relating to the quake, that data was conveyed along the ground cable leading from the field up to the base, where it was dumped to an extremely well guarded cloud drive. There was a tremendous amount of data in that drive, but very little information. In essence, if one of the sensors measured something about the ship, that measurement could be taken a million times, creating a million data points, but if it was the same measurement—if the numbers never changed—no new information was being obtained. The best that could be said about most of this data was that it could be proven, microscopically, that the ship wasn’t different in any appreciable way than it had been three years earlier.

  This wasn’t true of every sensor, but it was pretty close to true.

  The cloud drive capturing the input data was built with certain alarms. If any one of those millions of data points happened to diverge significantly, a program established to monitor the input would blast a text to a discrete number of people around the world. (That discrete number, at 10:17 P.M. EST, was twelve. No other people on the planet had access to the cloud drive data.)

  Twenty-two such text blasts were sent in a span of two seconds, which was enough to get all of those twelve scientists logged into the drive by 10:20 P.M. EST.

  Exactly one minute later, all contact with Sorrow Falls was severed.

  There were really only two pinch points in the communications channel: either the cable to the base was severed—which would have required an explosive, or an axe and a good deal of dedication—or the wireless tether between the army base and the drive was interrupted.

  Dr. Louisa Sark, the first of the twelve, administrator of the cloud drive and one of only three members on the team who did not have a Nobel Prize, followed protocol. First, she reached out to the tech room at the Sorrow Falls base. The phone rang, but nobody picked up. Second—and this wasn’t strictly protocol—she called the cell phone of one of the base’s technicians with whom she was friendly. The call couldn’t be completed. This, she decided, was a strong indication that the connection between the base and the drive was the problem. It also convinced her something serious was happening in Sorrow Falls.

  The third call was to the Pentagon.

  Dr. Sark had misgivings about this part, but in addition to being an astrophysicist, she was an employee of the government, and one of her responsibilities was to report information regarding their extraterrestrial visitor to the military. Most of the time, the reports she filed were unspectacular, but she was perfectly aware of the consequences of a spectacular report, because she knew exactly what the Pentagon’s contingency plans looked like. She’d consulted on them.

  She knew that by making the third phone call, there was a very good chance she was sentencing the entire town of Sorrow Falls to death.

  At 11:03 P.M. EST, two fighter jets and a bomber were scrambled from Hanscom Air Force Base. At the same time, a contingent of army soldiers were dispatched from Fort Devens, and the police departments of Oakdale, Mount Hermon, Harbridge and Brattleboro, plus the Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire state police, were all put on alert. Everyone had the same orders: find out what the hell was happening in Sorrow Falls.

  At 11:17 P.M. EST, a Massachusetts state trooper named Gellman tried to approach the town from the south, across the bridge connecting the bottom of Main with Oakdale. He failed to get his car more than halfway across the bridge before it stalled, and refused to restart.

  Trooper Gellman encountered a Sorrow Falls resident named Rodney Delindo, who claimed to have been trying to get home across the same bridge for the past fifteen
minutes, unsuccessfully. Mr. Delindo reported that there was a force preventing him from crossing on foot, and that same force appeared to be disabling autos.

  Gellman could see cars attempting to cross from Sorrow Falls into Oakdale. Army men stood at their sentry point post and appeared to be barking orders at the cars, and then firing shots above their heads, but he could hear neither the orders nor the gunshots. Mr. Delindo reported that in the few minutes he’d been standing on the bridge he had seen persons wandering on the Main Street side in a manner he described as ‘zombie-like’.

  At 11:22 P.M. EST, the report submitted orally by Gellman became the first confirmation that Sorrow Falls had been compromised in some unknown way. It was also the first report of zombies, but most considered that portion little more than poetic hyperbole.

  Similar reports came in from other parts of the surrounding area.

  The points at which the inbound roads became impassible were not perfectly in sync with the town property lines: some points were well outside the town line, and a few were over a hundred feet inside of it. At roughly 11:45 P.M. EST, an intrepid individual in the war room at the Pentagon—for this was where the next decision logically had to be made—mapped the points and connected them. The line he drew formed a circle.

  At the center of that circle was the spaceship.

  The president was awoken at 11:56 P.M. EST, briefed from 11:59 until 12:17, and then presented with the considered opinion of his Army Chief of Staff.

  At 12:23 A.M. EST, for the first time in history, the President of the United States ordered the military bombing of a domestic target.

  There was already a bomber in the sky above Sorrow Falls. At 12:27, the order came through, the crew of four said a quiet prayer for the population beneath them, and then they released two thermobaric bombs.

  Thermobaric explosives were the obvious choice, for being by far the most destructive non-nuclear option available. According to everyone’s understanding of physics, one of these bombs would destroy the spaceship and everything else in a three-mile radius. Two such devices were frankly considered overkill.