Caller: Hi, hello? You have to help us!
Operator: Please state your emergency.
Caller: It’s the army, they’re shooting everybody! I…
Operator: …Hello?
call to 911 emergency line
Sorrow Falls woke up surrounded.
At first, this wasn’t seen as an enormously big deal, even if it constituted a not-minor inconvenience for a majority of the population. The army had been in town before, after all, and that had gone pretty well. Nobody shot anyone, or even behaved imprudently. It had been such a peaceful occupation that there now existed an entire generation of local children who strove to join the armed services when they grew up.
But what was almost immediately clear with the new occupation was that this set of soldiers seemed a whole lot more hostile. For starters, their guns were out, which nobody could remember seeing before, outside of the immediate perimeter of the spaceship. They were also just plain rude, which didn’t go well with the thing about the guns.
In all fairness, the soldiers had a different mandate this time around. The spaceship was the enemy before, and everybody knew where it was. Now, for reasons the army was unwilling to explain, Annie Collins was the enemy, and nobody knew where to find her.
What the army personnel did share with the townspeople was that this had to do with what had happened the night before, at the college. It wasn’t as if nobody in Sorrow Falls was aware of this peculiar event, but it didn’t take a close follow of the news to appreciate that nobody had died. Beyond that, the people of Sorrow Falls were largely content to assume Annie knew what she was doing, and everyone should just calm down and give her time to figure things out.
She’s a good kid, you boys just leave her alone, was the running theme of the morning.
This only made the soldiers angrier, and more rude. Everyone, they would counter, agrees that Annie is a risk. Even the president.
This was technically an overreach. The sitting President of the United States had not been consulted directly in this matter, but that was because he didn’t need to be. The power to act, either in support of or in opposition to Annie Collins and her spaceship, had been signed over to the command center at the Pentagon. This included the nuclear option, provided nothing on the surface was targeted.
In other words, Team Babysitter had the authority to fire nuclear weapons at extra-planetary objects, and the missiles to do so. They also had an authority that trumped the normal military chain of command.
It was an exaggeration, then, to say that the president had weighed in specifically on the imminent danger of Annie Collins and the need to locate and neutralize her immediately, but his signature on the document gave the Pentagon authority to worry for him, which was thought of as the same thing.
Also, he was in Europe all week for a trade summit.
It was barely seven-thirty by the time Melissa Braver could state with any degree of confidence that the town was buttoned up. That would have been a remarkable feat of military legerdemain in just about any other part of the country, but in this case the army knew exactly where all the egress points were, and already had tactical plans in place for sealing them up. The plans were nearly five years old and originally included support from a base within the town, but aside from that base ceasing to exist, nothing was really any different. No new roads had been built in the time since.
By nine-thirty, Braver had a list of the people Annie was most likely to be found in the company of. This was—of course—well after Annie’s own house was searched thoroughly. Other than nearly losing a cadet to a hole in the kitchen floor, it wasn’t a notable excursion.
If it had been any other person, the list Melissa was working from would have been Annie’s closest friends. (That was actually what she asked for.) A problem with that request appeared to be that Annie was friends with almost everyone, to the extent that it would have been easier—and faster—to check a list of anyone in Sorrow Falls who didn’t know Annie personally.
This was something that really puzzled Melissa. Collins was more than a little to blame for some two hundred local dead people, and the place was small enough that it was impossible to find someone not related to at least one or two of the dead. Melissa could appreciate a town that had learned to forgive and moved on and all that, but some of these folks were ready to die for her. Literally. She already had to defuse three situations in which private citizens stood in front of army men who were pointing guns at them.
Someone was going to end up getting shot; it was just a matter of time. Braver would use that as an argument to convince the locals to help—the sheriff, in just about any other town, would like this angle—but it probably wouldn’t work. Individually, without discussing matters amongst themselves ahead of time, Sorrow Falls had reached the conclusion that Annie Collins was right, and the government was wrong.
So, there was the list of likely hideouts. At 10:00, she met with the person most capable of hiding a large RV: Desmond Hollis, whose family owned the paper mill that employed much of the town. The mill had plenty of truck docks, and he had two houses in town, so it was an obvious first guess.
Hollis was unhelpful to the point of belligerence. The army had men with bullhorns going up and down the streets telling people to stay in their homes due to the (unofficial) state of emergency, so even the mill workers who lived within walking distance of their jobs couldn’t show up, which meant Hollis was facing a real economic impact the longer the occupation lasted. Melissa thought this would convince him to help or, if not help, at least not actively inhibit their search.
Not so. They still searched the mill, of course, only without his consent or his keys. He was already calling the governor before she even made it off his front lawn.
The Welds, who owned the diner, and whose daughter Beth was one of the early victims on the night of The Incident, were only a little more polite, and only because they appeared to be constitutionally incapable of being impolite.
Beth Weld was another story.
“Don’t say anything to her,” Beth shouted from the top of the stairs. There was already a cadet up there, checking the rooms for any trace of Annie Collins, so it wasn’t like Beth could impede their progress.
“It’s not a big deal, dear,” a grown woman Melissa was introduced to as Lu-Lu replied. “I’m sure everything will be fine.”
“Not a word. You know what comes next, they’re going to round up me, and Janet, and Davey, and-and Violet and who knows who else. I know a police state action when I see one, I watch the—”
“Now that’s enough,” Bobby Weld said. “The captain said this will only take a minute, and it will, and then we’ll go about our day.”
“They’re gonna lock up Annie. And you’re helping them. Hey! Get out of there!”
Beth stormed away from the top of the staircase, to berate the soldier who’d evidently opened a closet he shouldn’t have, or something.
“She’s upset,” Lu-Lu said. “We all are. Annie’s always been a good friend.”
“Always will be,” Bobby added. “She’s not here, Captain Braver, but I have to side with Beth. If Annie was here, we wouldn’t be telling you.”
“You understand, I’m sure,” his wife said, to soften things. If nothing else, they made the perfect couple to run a diner.
“I do understand,” Melissa said, “you’re being very helpful. But I hope that if you do hear from Ms. Collins, you’ll let us know. We’re only trying to help her.”
“That’s a lie!” Beth shouted.
The cadet finished his search, and he and Melissa Braver left the Welds to have what was bound to be a robust argument amongst themselves.
The list Melissa was working from was pretty long. She took another quick look at it as they walked back to the Jeep.
There was a ‘Virginia’ on it, and a ‘Vinnie’, and a bunch of other names that didn’t have the letter V in them. But there was no Violet.
I wonder who that is.
Annie regrouped with Ed at a little after 11 AM. He was busy looking over Violet’s collection of books, which was an entertaining distraction under most other circumstances. He was also pretending not to notice the blackboards on the other side of the room.
After The Incident, Ed had dropped Annie off with Violet. It was the only place she felt really safe, partly because of the thing about how the farmhouse didn’t exist on any maps, partly because with Carol still in the hospital, Annie didn’t have a better place to go.
Of course, that wasn’t the only reason. Vi was the only one who could help Annie come to terms with a few pretty complicated things.
Some of the work they did was written on the blackboards on the opposite end of Violet’s library. There were sheets draped over the boards, but she was pretty sure they hadn’t been erased, and also pretty sure Ed had already looked underneath.
“How’s things going out there?” he asked.
“Oona, Laura and Sam are prepping for war. Lindsey is trying to re-isolate the signal with Dobbs, but I don’t know what they think they can do about it after that. I’m mostly interested in why it isn’t affecting anyone here.”
“How do you know it isn’t?”
“None of you have been seeing monsters? Or hating me? I admit, I didn’t see it coming from my friends at school, but I think I’d know if one of you was planning to stab me.”
“What do they think they can do?”
“Not sure. I’d say they can’t nullify the signal without alien tech, but whoever’s using the frequency is doing it without alien tech, so who knows?”
“What about Cora?”
“She offered to help Oona plant bombs or whatever, but I don’t think Oona trusts her. She’s searching the grounds to figure out where the power is coming from and where Vi went.”
“I know how Oona feels about the trust thing,” Ed said. “I found a TV upstairs, it sounds like the whole town’s been taken over, and I know who’s running point on the search. She was someone I thought I could trust.”
“Strange times, dude.”
“Yeah. You’re not going to help her look for Violet?”
“She’ll be here,” Annie insisted.
He glanced over at the blackboards, just long enough and obviously enough to make it clear he was ready to discuss them now. He signaled this by taking a seat in one of the overstuffed leather chairs that almost felt cliché.
“I think I want to ask you a question I asked you once before,” he said.
“All right.”
“What happened that night in the ship? You told me—you told everyone—that you convinced this malevolent super-idea to share itself with you.”
“True.”
“True, you said that? Or true, that’s what happened?”
“Both.”
She took the other seat. It felt like one of them should have a pipe.
“Then, you imagined a nicer version of the idea, which somehow made him more reasonable, at which time you were able to convince him that he should leave. How much of that was true?”
“Most of it.”
“You also said you didn’t understand the idea at all.”
She nodded.
“I did say that.”
“That’s the part that always bugged me. I expected we’d have this conversation eventually and I’d get the real story, but I figured it would take place in calmer times. How can you change an idea you don’t understand?”
“Edgar, it’s a ton more complicated than all of that. He shared a bunch of concepts with me first, and about half of those concepts were things that human beings hadn’t discovered yet, so there was that little head trip. Then he shared the idea. And I’m not giving you any more detail than that, not because I don’t want to, but because it’s literally not possible to put into words. It’s like someone invented a new color. I can’t describe it, because the tools I have to describe it don’t even exist yet.”
“So, he didn’t leave. He’s still in your head.”
“No, he left. But he’s also in my head.”
“Explain that?”
“It’s the sentient part that makes it confusing. Once he shared himself with me—and I really wish there was a non-icky way to say that—a version of him became mine to own. Like… ok, like think of a manuscript. There’s a master version, but people can get copies of it. Everyone who gets a copy can make their own changes. Make too many and it becomes a different manuscript.”
“A different idea.”
“Right, exactly. But everyone who makes it their own without changing it into something new, all those changes become a part of the original manuscript. Kinda. The analogy doesn’t work so well when you get to that point.”
“If the manuscript in this is a living thing, it recognizes the changes.”
“Yes! But that isn’t why I was able to convince him to leave. I know that’s where you’re going next.”
“It is, yes.”
“He just hadn’t been shared in a while. He was lonely. And kind of stuck up. He forgot what it felt like to be discovered. I did push a couple of ideas at him about maybe not blowing up the planet on his way out the door, but for the most part he just appreciated the positive feedback.”
“You gave the original manuscript a positive review.”
“Sure. And now I’m writing fan fiction. Go to town with that analogy, Ed. But he did leave. There isn’t a fully sentient alien super-idea living in my head right now. Just his shadow.”
“All the math on the blackboards? And the formula? What are all those?”
“That’s me trying to work out the concepts he showed me before he even got to the idea. I told you, some of it hasn’t been discovered or invented by us yet. I’m trying to discover and/or invent what I can, so maybe someday, before I die, I can dump this idea on somebody else. If I can even figure out how to do that.”
“What I don’t understand is why you haven’t been showing this stuff to mathematicians and physicists… people who might understand.”
“I thought about it, but Vi walked me back. She said it would be like giving a machine gun to a caveman. Or nuclear weapons to Genghis Khan.”
“It’s still a heck of a burden. You should try and offload some of it.”
“Yeah, there are days when he’s really loud. That’s why I had that marker board in the dorm room. Jotting this stuff down is a nervous fidget, almost. Helps me sleep. I guess Cora got a photo of one before I had a chance to erase it.”
“Don’t blame her, I was the one who asked her to do it.”
“Okay, I’ll blame you instead. Why would you give that kind of order?”
“Because I already figured out about three quarters of what you told me and thought it would be a good idea to keep a close eye on your mental state. And it wasn’t an order, it was a request.”
“C’mon, Ed, we both know you secretly run everything. You’re Mr. X.”
He smiled.
“Sam keeps giving me a hard time about ordering generals around,” he said. “But if I were running everything, the army wouldn’t have seized Sorrow Falls this morning.”
His eyes drifted to the bookshelves again. There was an entertaining couple of books on phrenology right where he was looking. Annie had been through a couple of them. Violet had curious tastes.
“I wonder if you can use the ship to find her,” he said.
“If she doesn’t want to be found, Shippie won’t be able to locate her. That was the reason it was here for three years in the first place, remember?”
“But only because she didn’t move her little capsule around. Now she has. Compare an aerial survey from a year ago to one now. This spot should be visible now by satellite. Maybe someplace else is missing.”
“Don’t think it’ll work that way, but I can try. These things don’t appear as voids in the landscape. They’re just… ignored.”
“Right, but you know what acreage wasn’t being ignored a year ago. It’s something I could probably do with a call to the Pentagon, if we were on speaking terms.”
“All right, yeah that makes sense. I mean, I can try it. Give me a minute.”
She sat still and thought about the parameters Ed had given her: Was there space missing from the map between last year and now?
It wouldn’t work. It was worth a try, but it wouldn’t work. She formed the idea anyway, and pushed it to the spaceship.
She got a response immediately, but it wasn’t anything like what she was expecting.
Hello.
The thought popped into her head from… somewhere else. Annie knew it didn’t come from her. It almost had to come from the ship, because there wasn’t anything else capable of dropping a thought into her head like that. The problem was that the ship didn’t speak, per se. It certainly didn’t say hello.
“Hello?” Annie said, out loud. This got Ed’s attention, as it should have. But he didn’t say anything.
Hello.
The voice was dropping into her head from elsewhere. Not the ship. But when she reached out, she must have completed a circuit somehow.
“Don’t talk to them,” Rick said. He was suddenly in the room. Annie considered the possibility that this was what insanity felt like: ghosts in the room and voices in her head.
“Shut up Rick,” she said reflexively.
Ed looked over his shoulder at the spot Rick was currently occupying. He didn’t see anyone, probably.
“Is your ghost here?” he asked.
Hello.
Who is this? Annie thought.
Hello. Annie. Collins.
“Don’t talk to them, dummy,” Rick repeated.
“Annie, what’s going on?” Ed asked.
“I don’t know. Something out there… something’s in my head.”
“Hang up,” Rick said.
“I don’t know how, Rick, this isn’t like a phone call.”
Give it to us.
Give what to you? she thought.
“Look,” she said aloud, “this is really rude, whoever you are.”
You know.
“You have to stop talking to it,” Rick said. He looked really worried, but she didn’t know how to do what he was telling her to do.
“I don’t know,” she said to the entity in her head. “But look, the last guy to talk to me like this was way more intimidating. This is a neat trick and all, but you’re not impressing anyone.”
The room was suddenly bathed in a bright light, from the windows. Something was coming down outside.
It was the spaceship. Shippie was landing, when she hadn’t even told it to do that.
No, that wasn’t right; not landing. It was attacking. The white light was the discharge from the rockets, but the pulse beams coming out of the side were a different thing.
Ed didn’t seem to notice any of this was happening, right up until the window behind him exploded, and pulverized him where he stood.
Annie screamed.
“Whoa, what was that?” Dobbs asked. He was on top of the camper, trying to hook up the equipment to a laptop that was more modern than anything already connected. Most of the stuff on the roof was over five years old, which was an eternity in computer time.
“What was what?” Lindsey asked.
“The signal. It jumped.”
The monitor tracking the signal output showed exactly that: a sudden spike to a new plateau.
“I guess that’s what it looks like when someone’s actively broadcasting.”
“Wonder what’s being broadcast,” Dobbs said.
“Um.”
Lindsey pointed at the sky. It wasn’t all that easy to see blue sky from the roof of the camper because of all the foliage they’d pulled down to disguise it. But it wasn’t impossible. They had a clean enough view, certainly, to recognize that something was streaking toward the farmhouse.
“Is that the spaceship?” she asked.
“I hope so,” he said.
“Good news, or bad news?”
Dobbs didn’t know the answer.
Ed wasn’t a hundred percent certain something was wrong with Annie until she stopped talking to him and started screaming. That was definitely a bad sign. Worse was when she fell out of the chair and onto the floor, stopped screaming, and began convulsing.
“Annie! Annie!”
He was shaking her by the shoulders, which was sort of an unnecessary thing to do when someone was already convulsing, but he didn’t know what else to try.
“Someone help us!” he shouted.
Her eyes were rolled back in her head. He didn’t know what to do.
The windows to the library were lit up by something outside; the ship was landing on the front lawn.
“I really hope you’re the one doing that, Annie,” he said.
Then a zombie staggered into the library.
No, not a zombie, he thought.
“Is this her?” Cora asked. She was helping a dirt-covered skeletally thin girl who looked like Violet if Violet had a severe eating disorder.
“Get out of the way,” Violet muttered, half-falling on top of Annie. “Before she kills us all.”
She was wrong: the flash at the window wasn’t from the ship. She was inside of the ship and she didn’t do it. It was a nuclear bomb. The army decided to nuke Sorrow Falls after all, and now she was the only one left.
Do you see? What we can do?
“Stop it.”
Then she was seeing something new. It wasn’t the ship or the library, or any part of Sorrow Falls. Whoever was on the other side of this exchange was pushing ideas on her, and she couldn’t stop it.
She was in a forest with a group of strangers wearing camo, all screaming and running from something only they could see. They ran so hard and so long that they started hurting themselves. They were being frightened to death.
A pack of werewolves was roaming the streets of a city at night. It wasn’t werewolves, it was dogs, and there were only two of them. No, there were hundreds, and they were definitely werewolves. Someone with a gun was trying to kill them.
There was a dragon in the sky in New York. People ran into traffic to avoid it. Vampires attacked someone in a convenience store parking lot. Every cemetery in the country had zombies.
Do you see?
“How do I make you stop?”
Give us what we want.
“ANNIE.”
The voice was loud and startling and was picked up by her ears and her mind at once. It came through on multiple frequencies.
“Who is that?”
The world will burn.
“ANNIE.”
“Violet?”
And then Annie was awake.
She was in the bed in the guest room, a long way from the library she remembered being in only a few seconds earlier. She was covered in sweat.
Ed, thankfully not pulverized, was there too. He’d been holding down her arms. Cora was at the doorway, looking pretty freaked out. That might have been because of what Annie was just going through, but probably not. Violet was more likely the reason.
Vi sat on the bed, barely skin and bones, and possibly only being held together by dirt and mud. She had her hands on Annie’s shoulders.
Annie couldn’t even choke a proper greeting out. Her throat was too sore, so she just started crying.
“That was a close one, huh?” Rick said. He was in the corner, near the door.
Violet let go of Annie. Ed lifted her up into a hug she really needed.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“I thought you were dead!” she said.
“Not yet,” he said. “Another few minutes, maybe.”
Annie looked at him, confused for a second.
“Oh God, the ship.”
“It’s in the front yard. I think it was about to start shooting.”
“It was,” Violet said.
Vi looked over at the corner where Rick was standing.
“This is your fault,” Violet said. “You were supposed to keep her from doing that.”
“I tried,” he said. “She wouldn’t listen.”