“Aaand, you are?”
“Are… you?”
The man had a dry, deep voice. It sounded like speaking caused him pain. Dobbs jumped three feet when he spoke and nearly did the thing he was there to do, only in his pants.
“What?” Dobbs asked. “Am I what?”
“Are you?”
The creepy guy in the suit was either asking Dobbs if he was someone, or he was reciting the international country code for the Russian Federation. Dobbs was pretty sure it was the former, but the two words by themselves didn’t make any sense.
“I don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Not,” the man said.
“I am… not?”
“Not.”
“Okay. Okay, so… I’m going to go now?”
The man didn’t move. Dobbs was covered head to toe in goose bumps and had dropped the roll of toilet paper somewhere it wasn’t worth hunting down.
The man could have been one of the trees, or a cardboard cutout. He’d never seen a person so still before.
It was inexplicably terrifying.
“Nice meeting you, goodbye,” Dobbs said.
It took five strides to get out of the trees and back into the open field. They were the most anxious five strides of Dobbs’ life. And when he was back out into the starlight he more or less ran to the middle of the field before looking back over his shoulder.
The man in the suit wasn’t following. Dobbs didn’t know why he expected him to.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll clean the toilet from now on.”
8
ORDINARY PEOPLE
The vehicle Ed showed up in the following morning was a species of luxury town car Annie had never seen the inside of before. She passed them on her bike plenty of times around town, but had yet to come across one without tinted windows. She tended to spend a lot more time than was healthy speculating on the identity of the person inside.
“This is your rental?” she asked. Ed was standing at the passenger door, holding it open for her like a chauffeur who didn’t know the guest was supposed to sit in back.
“Of course. Not like I had time to trade up.”
She slid in. Plush seats, cushy. Computer in the dashboard. Localized air conditioning and heating for each seat. There was a butt warming function. It had Wi-Fi.
Ed hopped in the driver’s side.
“Better than getting driven around in an SUV?” he asked. Behind the wheel, he looked about 90% less geekish than he had at Joanne’s. She began to wonder just how well it paid to be a secret government expert on things.
“I don’t know what the interior of the SUV looked like,” she said, “but I don’t think I ever want to leave this car.”
“It was nicer. Had a bar in it.”
Ed started the car. She was so accustomed to the loud, complaining engine in Violet’s car she at first didn’t notice they were idling.
“I thought we’d start with the people in those campers,” Ed said. “Is that okay?”
“If that’s where you want to start, sure. I mean, what kind of weird are you looking for?”
“Two different kinds.”
“Great.”
He put the car in gear, and it felt more like gliding than driving. Ed saw her expression and laughed.
“It’s just a car. Spaceships are cooler.”
“Yeah, but I can’t get inside of that, and anyway it never moves.”
A right turn from the driveway took them to the junction with Spaceship Road, and all the traffic that came with that road. To the left was the ship. To the right was the army base. The road continued for several miles after that, out of town, until terminating at one of the Old Post Roads that striated the countryside.
Ed merged into the inbound traffic, and then it was stop-and-go for a while.
“When you said something’s not right about Sorrow Falls, what did you mean?” she asked. “Or is that top secret too?”
“It’s not. What I mean is, the town shouldn’t still be here.”
She laughed.
“Like, what, an impact crater?”
“No, I mean, have you ever asked yourself how you could be living within a mile of an alien ship?”
“Not really. I was here first.”
“It’s too dangerous, being this close. The correct reaction to this situation would have been to evacuate the area for as long as it took to ascertain the intentions of the craft.”
“According to whom?”
“Me, mostly. But I wasn’t the only one who said so. Every time someone with enough authority to act on that recommendation agreed with me, though, they were overridden.”
“Because that’s a crazy idea. The ship isn’t doing anything to anybody.”
“So far as we know it isn’t. Except I think it is. I think the ship wants the town to stay put.”
“That is one crazy theory, Ed. Do you get paid for that?”
“I get paid a lot for that. It’s not that crazy. We already know the ship can implant ideas aggressively, in self-defense. I experienced that first-hand yesterday. I knew what I was thinking didn’t really come from my own head, and yet I couldn’t stop. It was jarring. What if the ship has a more passive version of that technology impacting the area at large? I mean, nothing in Sorrow Falls is really right for this circumstance. You all went about your lives, pretty much.”
“I think you’re underestimating the unflappable nature of the New England native mindset. Besides, the people you’re talking about, the ones who would get to decide to evacuate the region, they don’t live here. They’re in Washington. Did the ship call them up or something?”
“Well that’s the thing. My first recommendation made it all the way to the desk of the president. He was ready to sign the order. He told me so.”
He glanced over at Annie to see what kind of impact this had, thinking possibly that the idea he had the president’s ear might be impressive. She knew about ten people who’d spoken to the president personally, and she once bussed his breakfast table, so she wasn’t overly impressed, but thought she probably should have been. To the rest of the world, it was undoubtedly a big deal.
“What changed his mind?” Annie asked.
“Sorrow Falls did. He came here to visit before signing the order, because someone who’d already visited convinced him to do it.”
“Maybe he decided against it after meeting all of us.”
“Maybe. And maybe the ship decided it for him.”
THERE WAS some confusion among the members of the rooftop camper city when Ed and Annie arrived.
Only one day earlier, a big black army SUV went through the gate, and out popped an army general whose name nobody seemed to know—he was new, everyone agreed—and a skinny city guy in faux rugged clothing and glasses.
The second man inspired a daylong debate between the rooftops regarding his possible identity and purpose. The easy, obvious answer was that he was a reporter working on a new story who’d pulled strings to get a close-up. But insofar as this was easy, and obvious, it was rejected unilaterally.
Secret government operative worked for most of them as a convenient catchall. What kind of operative was not agreed-upon, nor was the arm of the government he must have come from, nor even the government, but it fit most theories nicely anyway.
Brenda and Steve, for instance, had strong opinions regarding the United Nations, which was not in itself a government. But an operative working for the U.N. could be from any nation, nation-state, or territory. He could also be one of their nationless operatives, a super-secret police force whose members knew no allegiance to any one government. No such secret police force existed, and anyone who listened to Brenda or Steve for more than a few minutes realized they were really talking about the utterly mundane Interpol, if Interpol was bitten by an evil radioactive spider.