It was failing to arrange, however.
Nothing connected. He had the event of eight weeks past sitting next to the notes from the interview with Laura and Oona, even though Ed put almost no weight on the latter and a great deal on the former. Everything else sat in an unassociated pile, an archipelago of independent territories associated only by virtue of existing on the same desktop. There was the folder holding photographs of the handprint on the outside of the ship, alone on the corner of the desk. It should have been associated in some way with at least one of the resident interviews he’d conducted, but it wasn’t.
There were all the rooftop trailer people, but none of their theories crossed, or went anywhere near anything else. They also contradicted one another and sometimes contradicted themselves. He had little post-it notes attached to each file, summarizing the contents: zombie, hybridization, Matrix, David Bowie, and so on. In cases where there was no theory, he wrote the specialty of the interviewee. When that didn’t work, he just wrote their first name and ‘???’ and left it at that.
He picked up the folder marked ‘zombie’. This was the interview with the man everyone called Loony Larry. Larry wasn’t even his name—he was born Vincent Allen—but everyone called him Larry, and that was how he introduced himself. He didn’t mind being called Loony, either. He seemed to think it was a compliment.
Larry had a theory that incorporated a flute, the migratory pattern of Monarch butterflies, and something about Sauron from Lord of the Rings. There was no sense to be made of any of it—even after Larry showed them the flute as if that would help—but the conclusion was an actual zombie apocalypse.
When Ed asked him when this was going to be happening, in his considered opinion, Larry said, “soon,” and then strongly indicated that it might already be happening.
Larry was actually the most cogent of the crazies in the crowd. A woman named Margo theorized that the reason nobody could touch the ship was that it wasn’t there at all. It was actually a piece of negative space in the shape of a ship, and to get too close was to fall through to another universe, “like into a cup of coffee,” she explained not-at-all-helpfully. A man named Zeno spoke for an hour about spiders and never explained how they had anything to do with the spaceship. He didn’t seem to know why he was there.
Ed came into this worried that one of them had managed to detect the same thing the scientists had. Two weeks later he would have been overjoyed to hear just one mention of Cherenkov radiation. It would have been bad news, but it also would have meant at least one of those people had found something real.
He glanced back out the window to see how the basketball game was going.
Annie was enthusiastic about coming back to the base and letting him hide with his documents while she visited with the soldiers. He was probably doing something wrong by leaving her unsupervised. That was provided the definition of unsupervised included leaving her in the charge of a corporal named Corning, who was currently at the basketball court shirtless. Ed wasn’t the best reader of people in the world, but he understood just fine that Annie wanted Ed gone once she saw Sam Corning without his shirt.
It was just as well. Better she see Corporal Corning without his shirt than any of the confidential stuff on his desk. Annoyingly, he had a feeling if she could see it, she’d have an insight or two that would be helpful. She had a talent for that.
And, she was gone. He was looking at the soldiers playing their game and not at the bleachers. She wasn’t there.
He jumped to his feet and ran to the door, jerked it open, and nearly ran her over.
She stumbled into the room.
“Jesus, Ed, where are you going?”
“To look for you.”
“I’m right here.”
“I see that now. I’m—”
“Forget it. We have to go.” She was holding her cell phone in her hand. She looked terrified, and—for perhaps the first time since they met—like a young girl.
“Is something wrong?”
“My mom. Please.”
THE CLOSEST THING to a hospital in Sorrow Falls was a walk-in clinic on Main. The clinic didn’t have overnight services, or anything like an ambulance bay, and was really established primarily to deal with accidents happening to or caused by tourists.
When someone needed a real hospital, they ended up at one of two such facilities, both located within thirty miles. Which one a person ended up at depended upon where they were picked up by the ambulance, based on an invisible demarcation line running through the middle of the town, southwest-to-northeast. People who found themselves in unexpected emergencies while in the southeast half of the town usually ended up at Saint Mary’s in Carrel, which was two towns over. The northwest half—which had the army base, an alien spaceship, Annie’s house and a lot of farms—was supported by Harbridge Memorial, which was one or two wrong turns away from the Vermont border.
Ambulance services were more diverse, and closer, but not in all cases 100% devoted to emergency support. Annie knew this, but Ed was a little alarmed to find a hearse in front of the house when they got there.
They were already inside, and the door was open. Annie jumped out of the car before Ed even parked it, and ran up the steps.
“Oh hello, dear!” her mother greeted as soon as Annie breached the living room.
She was in her chair with an oxygen tube in her nose. A paramedic—his name was Lee, Annie knew his younger sister Zoe from school—was checking her blood pressure. His partner, a woman Annie didn’t know, was sorting through her mother’s pharmacopeia with a blue-gloved hand.
“What happened?” Annie asked. It wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, just whoever felt like they could provide the best answer.
“It’s nothing!” her mother said.
“It wasn’t nothing, Carol, you sent a 9-1-1.”
Getting the full attention Mrs. Carol Collins was often a challenge, whether one was a paramedic trying to assess her stability or her daughter trying to get a straight answer. Her daughter had one trick that almost always worked, and that was calling her by her first name.
“All right, I had a thing, but I’m okay now.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Nothing, I panicked is all. I’m actually fine. I’m sorry I worried you.”
Annie turned to the female paramedic.
“What kind of thing?”
“Difficulty breathing was the call,” the paramedic said.
“Is she out of danger?” Annie asked.
“Oh, I’m fine now.”
Annie ignored her mother, the woman paramedic silently deferred to Lee, and nobody said anything else for a few seconds because he had a stethoscope plugged into his ears and was busy jotting down notes.
“Not sure,” he said, on realizing he was expected to answer. “But we’re going to need to bring her in. You know how this goes.”
Annie did. So did her mother.
“It’s nothing!” she said.
“Shut up, Carol, they’re taking you to Harbridge and you’re going to be nice about it,” Annie said.
“But—”
“Be nice!”
“Fine.”
Carol threw her hands in the air in mock surrender.
Ed was standing at the door, looking unsure about whether or not he should even be in the room for this.
“Hey, I could use a lift to the hospital, if you’re not doing anything,” Annie said. “I hate to ask, but I have a thing about riding in ambulances and—”
“Of course.”
“DOES THIS HAPPEN A LOT?” Ed asked, en route. The flashers from the ambulance lit up the evening, which reminded Annie a little bit of the spaceship, even though the ship glowed white on entry, while the dome lights were red.