For the population of teenage girls in Sorrow Falls—already surrounded by attractive, polite young men in uniform—the basketball court had obtained a kind of mythic status. And as Annie sat at a courtside bleacher in the late-August sun watching those polite young men lumber around under the hoop, she had to say that the mythos was entirely earned.
“So that’s all you’ve been doing?” Sam asked. He was sitting next to her, an appropriately chaste distance apart, while the game was going on. Like half the court, he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and seemed to think this wasn’t mind-numbingly distracting.
“Pretty much, yeah. Just going around town and asking the same questions to different people. What are they saying about him around here?”
“Ah, we don’t trade in rumors so much on the base.”
Annie laughed. “No, seriously.”
“Nobody knows who he really works for, but his credentials… Someone said his credentials gives him the authority to do some things to the general that would be illegal in most states, let’s just say. I’m cleaning that up for you.”
“I appreciate that. He told me he writes classified reports.”
“Yeah, and he probably does. Wonder what he’s going to write about us?”
“I don’t know.”
What she did know was Ed had a propensity for saying ominous things about running out of time, then refusing to say what would happen when they ran out of time. She didn’t share this with Sam because she didn’t want to talk about it. Hopefully, Ed was just worried about the start of the school year, because if he were counting down to the evacuation of Sorrow Falls, she’d rather not know it.
Plus, there was a basketball game to watch.
There was no apparent score-keeping going on. The game was three-on-three and it was only half-court, and nobody was trying all too hard, but that didn’t make it any less compelling.
“Why do they keep yelling pickles?” Annie asked. She’d heard it four times now, and kept trying to tie the word to a particular play being run or something, but it didn’t appear related to one.
“That’s his name,” Sam said.
“Someone out there is named Pickles?”
“Nickname. Hey, Pickles, come here and introduce yourself.”
The shortest guy on the court stepped away from the game and came over. He was replaced immediately by another soldier, just so the rest of them could keep playing.
“What’re you talkin’ about me for? Is it because I’m so pretty?”
“You know it is, soldier,” Sam said. “Corporal Dill Louboutin, this is Annie Collins.”
Louboutin gasped and clutched his heart.
“Not the Annie Collins! Why I do believe I have been instructed not to converse with you, young lady.”
Dill Louboutin had a drawl that reminded her of the villain from a half-dozen B-films in her mother’s collection. Oddly, this made the soldier before her seem a little more charming.
“Have you really?”
“Yes ma’am, we were notified that on occasion, you might find yourself among our company, and that we are to compost… did he say compost?”
“Comport,” Sam said. “Compost is something else.”
“That we are to comport ourselves as gentlemen at all times on account of your delicate age and temperament.”
Annie raised an eyebrow at Sam.
“He’s making this up,” she said. “Right?”
“Tell her the rest,” Sam said.
“Oh yes, and also to not engage you in conversation.”
“And why is that?”
“Something about devil or, seductress or… you know, along those general lines.”
“Because you know things and you find things out,” Sam said. “They don’t want anyone telling you something they shouldn’t.”
“You mean, like you do?”
“I’m hurt. That hurts me.”
“I’m guessing they don’t have a problem with all the dirt I get out of you. Or maybe you just don’t know any of the good stuff, like Pickles here does.”
“Please don’t call me that,” Dill said.
“You’re digging around the wrong shrub, he knows even less than I do,” Sam said.
“That is true, young lady. I in fact know just about nothing. Why are you here, anyway? See, I don’t even know that.”
“Ed’s in his top secret batcave. He’d rather I hang out here because I guess he’s just bathing in confidential files or something.”
Ed’s batcave was actually one of the few remaining temporary structures from the initial move-in. It was a steel-paneled eyesore that was towed in on a flatbed, now sinking slowly into the mud. The window faced the court, possibly so he could keep an eye on her while working with his decoder ring and invisible ink.
“Yes, but why you, exactly?”
“My girlish good looks, corporal. Of course. Also, because I know everyone and everything in town. I thought you’d been briefed already.”
“All right, I feel a test is in order.”
“Dill…” Sam said.
“No, go ahead, this should be fun,” Annie said. “Give me your best, Pickles.”
Dill looked over her shoulder.
“Right now I am looking past the fence at some little twerp who stands on his porch every damn day watching us. What’s his name?”
She laughed. “I don’t even need to turn around. That’s Dougie. I’ve known him most of my life. You guys must be bored if you care that much about him, he just wants to grow up and join the army like any red-blooded American boy.”
“Aww, come on, I don’t even have a way to check if you’re right.”
“Should have thought of that sooner,” Annie said.
Her cell phone vibrated with a new message. She snuck a peek at it.
“Hey, guys, I gotta go.”
ED SPENT a lot of time on a lot of army bases, and for some reason had it in his head that the Sorrow Falls base would be different in some way from the others. That it felt exactly the same despite a fundamentally different mandate just made his head hurt.
The army didn’t know exactly what to do with the soldiers. They had daily drills, and an obstacle course, and important duties both public and private. (Publicly, for instance, they guarded the ship and manned the checkpoints on the roads. Privately, they had ten lightly manned outposts ringing the town, which hardly anyone knew about.) What they didn’t have—or know how to provide—was training for the thing that brought them there.
It was true nobody had any idea what to expect on the day the spaceship finally executed whatever directive it was there to complete, so having drills along the lines of “how to reload a laser gun” or “what to do if there’s an alien attached to your face” didn’t make a lot of sense. At the same time, Ed could think of no better example of the axiom: generals are always fighting the last war.
One of the things Ed hoped to accomplish in his visit was to give everyone an idea of what to expect, and then maybe the base outside his window would be full of people knowing what to do with their time aside from pickup games of basketball.
He turned back to the desk, which was large—thankfully—and overfull of documentation. Between the two weeks of notes from the interviews, the documents provided when he arrived, and everything he brought with him, there was a decent amount of material. Granted, if he wished he could stack all of it together and form only a very small pile, but that was somewhat contrary to his method.
The material was arranged in something approximating a collage. It was the only effective method he’d ever found when collecting disparate bits of information that had to be arranged in a comprehensive whole.