He trailed off.
“Sam, trust me when I tell you, there isn’t anything you could say here that I haven’t already heard. I’ve been speaking to a lot of people around town and I’ve heard a lot of pretty out-there things. At this point I’m willing to take all of it at face value. What could you see?”
Sam fidgeted uncomfortably in the folding chair.
“It’s hard to be honest about something like this. Not sure now if what I think I saw is something I’m just remembering wrong. But thinking about it now, it was like… like he was already dead. Like he wasn’t in there any more, and someone else was driving.”
“A zombie.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“He didn’t want brains, either. I mean, if we’re going with zombie.”
“How do you… did he speak?”
“…yes. We didn’t want to tell anyone, it was too weird.”
“What did he say?”
“He said ‘are you’.”
“The letters? R and U?”
“No, like it was part of a question but he couldn’t say the rest of it. I mean, it was flat. He said it flat, but he was asking, I think. It was almost as if he couldn’t figure out how to make more words than that.”
“I wonder what he was trying to say?”
“I don’t know. But I think he was looking for somebody.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It was what Dill noticed. Hank kept going bunk-to-bunk and staring at people. That’s what was happening before Dill called him over.”
“Somebody and not something?”
“That was my take. I don’t think it was Dill he was looking for though.”
“And he responded to his name? When Louboutin called him?”
“He responded to someone looking at him and making a sound. Everyone else was asleep or trying to be, pretty much. Could’ve been like with a bull. Wave a red blanket in front of him, and it’s not that he’s reacting to the color red, he’s reacting to the movement. Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“A lot of the guys are thinking what happened to Hank is… you heard of the space flu, right?”
“You want to know if I think the space flu was what killed Corporal Vogel? Sam, I don’t think the space flu is real. The effect the ship has on people when they get close to it is real enough, but I don’t believe that has a long-term impact, and I don’t believe it harms at a distance. What’s happening now is the same thing that can happen in any situation like this. For every malady or accident, someone’s going to wonder if the big unexplained phenomenon at the bottom of the hill is the culprit. But at the same time, I’m here to piece together that phenomena, because at the end of the day there actually is a spaceship down there, and we still really don’t know what to expect from it.”
“So maybe.”
“Maybe.”
“Which means what happened to him could happen to us.”
“I didn’t say that. Vogel died of an aneurysm. Those are pretty rare in healthy adults under forty.”
“Sure, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? Someone dies of something they shouldn’t have… that’s what gets people worried.”
“Are you worried, Sam?”
“Of course I am. But if you want to know what’s keeping me up nights, other than the memory of Hank’s face, it’s that I don’t know when the aneurysm killed him. Either it was before he got out of bed or after we tried to wake him up, and to be honest, I’m not sure I like either answer.”
HAVING INVOLVED himself in the army’s investigation of Vogel’s death, Ed ended up pulled into a series of meetings with higher-ups that lasted the entire day. He had no say in what was to become of the six men, or what the report Morris was supposed to file on the incident would look like. He had thoughts, though, and if there were people in uniform who wanted to hear them, he was there.
Those thoughts were disjointed, and hardly involved Sam and Dill and the other four. Ed was starting to put pieces together, and now he had a word to use when talking to people. It was a preposterous word, but that was exactly what gave it value.
It wasn’t until Monday that he had a chance to employ it. That was in the Sorrow Falls sheriff’s department.
One of Ed’s first top-secret papers on Sorrow Falls leaned heavily on data from the sheriff. Even then, he was trying to prove something was amiss with the town by pointing out what was missing, and in this case what was missing was criminal behavior.
Crime statistics before the ship landed and after the ship landed remained essentially the same in Sorrow Falls, which was just not possible. For one thing, the number of people inside the town line doubled. A concomitant doubling of criminal acts would have been too much to expect, but an increase was appropriate, and it hadn’t happened. For another thing, reported criminal acts in every town outside Sorrow Falls had gone up, and not just in Massachusetts. It was a nationwide phenomenon.
Those numbers alone were enough to convince Ed something subtle was happening in the town, but they didn’t convince anyone else. The army’s presence is discouraging criminal behavior, he was told. When he pointed out that even when he added the reports of local peacekeeping actions to the sheriff’s statistics, the totals were still too low, he was told that the existence of a military force was a natural deterrent.
Ed had mountains of evidence from every police action and war zone in history that said this wasn’t the way the world worked, but nobody would believe him.
All that research meant he was very familiar with the sheriff’s department, even if they didn’t know him at all. He knew they remained in the same spot as always, just a half block from City Hall on the northern end of Main, in a small set of offices with a parking lot roughly the same size as the building beside it. They had only two cells, ten desks and two offices. The total number of deputies was the same. They worked in rotating day/night twelve-hour shifts, and for the most part they handled minor area complaints like vandalism and domestic disputes. A tremendous amount of scholarly legal work had been performed by a number of very smart people to settle the question of who might investigate a murder in Sorrow Falls, but none of that work had been applied because in the three years since the local suspension of Posse Comitatus there hadn’t been a murder in the town.
Yet somehow, Ed was the only one who thought this was weird.
The sheriff’s name was Pete, which was short for Patricia Gallardo. Nobody called her Sheriff Gallardo or even Sheriff Patricia. She was Sheriff Pete.
This began as a joke. Whether it was because the sheriff when the ship landed was a male (he retired only six months later, wealthy from a succession of speaking engagements, a book advance and a movie deal,) or due to some innate sexism which interpreted the title ‘sheriff’ as belonging to the male gender, everyone assumed the sheriff was a man. People coming into town—journalists, typically—kept asking to speak to ‘him’, so the deputies started calling her Pete and telling whoever was asking that “Pete will be right with you”, specifically so they could appreciate the look on their faces when they met her.
Unlike the discovery that there was no Joanne behind Joanne’s Diner, Ed was aware that Pete was a woman. This was undoubtedly one of the reasons he didn’t get the runaround when showing up at the office Monday morning asking for her.
“Mr. Somerville, is it?” She met him at the small waiting area, having only arrived a few minutes earlier with a large coffee from the donut shop up the street. “Come on in.”