“Right, George Blake. I have that.”
“He’s been dead for five months.”
“Almost six. I know that, too. Went to his funeral. Really pretty ceremony.”
“Is this a prank?”
“Annie, I don’t really believe it either, but until I can figure out which local is wearing the rubber Scooby Doo villain masks, I’m taking these reports as they come.”
“So maybe it is a prank.”
“Sure, but I’m not in on it. Either someone’s going through a lot of trouble, or zombies walk the Earth.”
“How much trouble?”
“Enough to dig up bodies in the cemetery. So, a lot. Unless they’re digging themselves out. Can’t rule that out.”
“Sorry, Pete, but I’d really like to rule that out if it’s okay by you.”
“Whatever rocks your canoe. Did she say anything else you think might be pertinent?”
“Yeah, he said, ‘are you’.”
Pete nodded, and wrote it down.
“All right,” she said. “I’m gonna talk to Ed for a few, why don’t you help yourself to something hot before a chill sets in. That rain soaked everything, didn’t it?”
THE BREAK ROOM for the sheriff’s department was just the office next to Pete’s. The wall between them was glass, and the shutters that would ensure privacy were open, so while Annie couldn’t hear any part of the conversation between Pete and Ed, she could see them, and it was clear this wasn’t the first time they’d met.
“Well, that’s perfect,” she said.
She was cold, and tired, and more upset about Beth being attacked than she was prepared to acknowledge, so everything was annoying her, but of particularly special annoyance was the thought that Ed had continued his research without her around. That research obviously included befriending Pete and sharing notes on the local undead population.
It felt like the whole town was spinning out of control. Annie thought she knew everything about Sorrow Falls, and all of what she knew made perfect sense. But ever since Ed arrived, with his top secret files he still hadn’t shared, and his leading questions, and the sense she got that he had something really awful on his mind, it felt like her idea of the town was simply wrong. There was some dark consequence Edgar Somerville was afraid of, and he wouldn’t share what that was, and zombies wasn’t even that thing.
Or maybe she had to stop reading Lovecraft before bed.
“Is this little Annie Collins before me?”
Rick Horton was standing at the entrance to the room. Her instinct—as always when it came to Rick—was to put some distance between them, which was a challenge as he stood in front of the only way out. Then she remembered they were in the sheriff’s office and she was probably okay.
Annie had known Rick most of her life, and had not, in that time, been able to pin down what it was about him that made her uncomfortable. It was just always so.
“Hello, Rick. You look sober today.”
“Nice.”
He shuffled out of the doorway to the coffee machine. On busy days at the diner, Annie brewed the coffee, so even though she didn’t drink it herself, she knew what fresh coffee smelled like, and the stuff in the urn in the break room was pretty far away from fresh.
Rick threw some in a Styrofoam cup anyway. Annie sat down at the table and tried to look indifferent.
“You’re with him, aren’t you?” Rick said, nodding at Ed. “The man from the government.”
“He’s just a reporter.”
“Sure. And you’re just a cute little sixteen year old girl.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean you’re more than that. And so’s he. Everybody knows.”
“Why are you here, Rick?”
“I am a charter member of the sheriff’s youth rehabilitation outreach program. I am, point-a-fact, the only member. It’s a good deal. I empty out their trash every afternoon for the summer and avoid going to juvie for it. I also get to feel super rehabilitated. Have you told him?”
Annie sighed. “Have I told him what?”
He smiled. She always hated his smile. It was his most menacing expression.
“I never told anybody,” he said. “Even when I thought… well.”
“Look, Rick, it’s been awesome catching up, but I have to get going.”
“Your friend is still in the office.”
“He knows where he can find me.”
She got up to walk out, but Rick stepped in the way.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I say stuff like that. You don’t gotta tell anyone. I haven’t. Nobody’d believe me anyway.”
“Please get out of my way.”
“Just… listen, please. Did you see what I saw?”
She was taken aback by the question. “Well I don’t know. What did you see?”
“No, you didn’t. You couldn’t have, because if you had you’d be terrified. You’d be banging on the sheriff’s door and telling your friend and he’d listen to you, because he would, because you’re Annie Collins, and people listen to Annie Collins.”
“Rick. What did you see?”
“Everything. And it’s all coming true.”
He looked like he wanted to say more. There was a hollow, terrified look in his eyes she’d never seen before—or maybe she was never looking before. Maybe this was the Rick Horton that Rodney was always trying to talk to her about.
“What is?” she asked. “What’s going to happen?”
Rick took a deep, trembling breath, sipped his burnt coffee, and calmed down a little.
“Forget it. I thought maybe you knew. This is probably all just in my head, you know, that’s what they tell me. It’s all in my head. I should go.”
“Rick…”
“No, I have to go, really. It was good seeing you.”
He shuffled out. And while she was always glad when Rick left, this time she nearly went after him.
Instead, she sat back down at the table and pulled out her cell phone.
She called Carol three times on Monday, and hadn’t even tried once since, but after Beth’s attack she thought this was a good time to hear her mother’s voice.
Dear mom, there are zombies, stay in Boston, she thought. Everyone says hi.
There was a notification on the open screen that took her by surprise.
Like just about everyone her age—and perhaps just about everyone in general—Annie had a habit of trying to do more things with her smartphone than the phone’s memory was entirely comfortable with. In her case, that weakness had to do with photographs. It wasn’t that she took a lot of them; it was that she never wanted to delete what she had. To deal with what had become—after three years of owning a smartphone—a large collection of images she didn’t want to lose access to, she opened a cloud drive account. The space didn’t cost anything, it had plenty of memory to deal with the pictures, and she could access them any time without chewing up all the available memory on her phone.
The app on her phone also uploaded new pictures automatically, whenever her phone entered a recognized Wi-Fi with a strong enough signal. This was actually sort of a problem because dependable Wi-Fi in Sorrow Falls wasn’t exactly commonplace. Her house didn’t have it. Violet’s did, but she never got on. Ed’s car did, supposedly, but she hadn’t tried to use it.
Typically, she relied on the library, the school during the year, or the diner. Joanne’s Diner added Wi-Fi less than a year earlier in response to the Denny’s up the street doing the same. It was probably their Wi-Fi that was responsible for the notification on her phone that a new picture had been uploaded to the cloud drive. The problem was, she couldn’t remember taking any photos recently.
She tapped into the cloud server to access the photos and scrolled down to the most recent. It took a couple of seconds to realize what she was looking at.